The bright light came in through the dusty window, and splashed a vivid spotlight on the comfortable shade of yellow of your shirt, the cotton worn thin enough to show strain in the knap which mocked the plaid pattern. There are things which are inescapably you: pearl snap buttons, worn cotton plaids, and the sense of a library still having a card catalog.
The man who makes the cards buys them in bulk from a supply store. He feeds them into a typewriter and copies in careful hammers of keys the title, the catalog number, the author. He does this in the dark, with a single lamp above him, surrounded in stacks of files which hold the names and dates issued of every library card in New Yo
"Here," you say, your voice low and shy, and press into my hand a crumpling piece of ruled paper. You are everything which I never admitted to breaking my heart. You are the harshest and most visceral scar left on the world. You are all my secrets, rolled into your torso begging back the litheness of boyhood. You make me want to die.
I open it and find a telephone number written in your archaic hand. Above it is your name, in a flurry of script.
John
"I don't understand," I falter, and meet your eyes just as they're slipping away.
There's a column in the room we're in, which you lean against, over and over, in my memory. You lean on the column, a simple wood beam painted brown, and you make a fist, your thumb extended, and you raise your thumb to your mouth, crossing it backward to chew a cuticle on the outside. Your right hand, and you turn it to point to the right, to bite down on your own skin, and you look almost embarrassed, sun surrounding your head like a halo.
"Well, I want you to call me, I should think," you suppose at me, your expression alternating from unsure, to sure again, to naked, and unafraid.
You want me to call you, which I'll have to do from a payphone, where no one else would be able to hear me. You want me to call you, call you're home, and tell them I'm a friend from school, maybe. You want me to call, and stretch out this terrible secret we've fallen into ever since you played me that song in the woods. You want... me... to fucking... call you.
There are boys inside you I've never seen, but heard tell of, like an urban legend. Boys which might be without mercy, boys which might be full of contempt for those who are unkind, boys which might fill their shoes with blood on the way back from those same woods. One such boy peers from under your hair, toward me. He asks me what I really care what they think, anyway.
"I will," I promise, before my heart breaks, and you walk away. I can tell, distantly, that someone is angry with me. That I will be punished or judged or killed or excommunicated for what I've done with you. But I stay silent, and watch you walk away, out of the door and down a set of narrow stairs.
It's Halloween, I know somehow. And it would be Halloween that you left me, or Halloween when they took you away. What were you for Halloween, Valentine? It's Halloween again, and they've come back for us, Michael.
I have thoughts of never calling you, but instead stuffing the scrap of paper into my mouth, if only to taste how you sign your name.
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