For Brad (4)

The sound of the violin coming from the bayou is distant and sweetly tossed by the wind.  In the trees, as the slim strip of moonlight drifts low, I’m dappled in blue and white by the leaves, and the darkness means I see John and Adam together in the clearing long before they see me.

John is shirtless, his thin body so pale it turns the same color as the bellies of fish.  He sits on a stone at  the edge of the small clearing, his knees thrust high enough to make him look like a pelican, perched on his rock.  His violin sways with his body, playing something sweet and fine.  They both have their eyes closed, John and Adam, and tilted to the side with the pull of the music as John reaches a note both high and heartbreaking. 

Adam is buried in the ground to his neck, his face serene and peaceful, leaning slightly to touch his ear to the dirt.  He looks peaceful, although the shadows under his eyes are dark.  The boys buried him as a part of their weird ritual, and left him only slightly above the ground, like he were drowning in water.

John stops playing when he sees me enter the clearing, and Adam raises his head at the interruption of his lullaby. 

“Oh, Evelyn,” he sighs.  “Hello.” 

The truth is, the sound of his voice raises chills along my arms and neck.  The truth is, over the last five years, Adam’s voice has merged in my imagination to match the voice in my head, which is admittedly a far cry from the one in my mouth.  When he speaks aloud, I’m as shocked by its difference as I am by the difference of my own.  I’m a girl, and he’s a boy, where inside we become something else.  The Story itself, maybe, told in a voice both ageless and genderless. 

Now, when he speaks, his voice is broken down into a near-croak from exhaustion and the wear of the shouting he’d done before as the boys had clapped and danced around him.  His hair is mussed and there’s a livid kiss-mark on his cheek.  He smiles at me, his eyes dreamy.

“I feel quite weightless,” he admits.

“The ground is loose around him,” John says, his voice a soft animal sound.  “They tried to pack him in, but he couldn’t breathe.”

Adam’s head blooms from the center of a circle of stakes, onto which I see the boys have written each of their names, and a flourish, here and there.  Brad’s is sealed with the same shade of lipstick kiss that rests on Adam’s cheek.  The ground around it is marked with scuffs of a struggle, deep markings from the heels of sturdy shoes.  Clyde’s boots, naturally.  Matthew’s stake is scrawled with careful calligraphy, and it looks like Joshua’s has been stuck with holographic stickers.  Nick’s has been filled out with a quote from the Bible; “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons.”

I read it 4 times, thinking about the fact that no one knows when or how these strange creatures might come into being, and John quietly excuses himself from the grove, murmuring his goodnights.

“Thank you, John,” I bid him, although I’m not sure what I’m thanking him for.  He dips his head in the way he does when he’s embarrassed, and shrugs his bony shoulders.

“I couldn’t leave him alone,” he explains, his tone sheepish, before ducking off into the darkness. 

Adam’s face is conspicuously absent of what abuses I expected to see on it; no black eyes or cuts from bottles.  I expected the boys to be more violent in their ritualizing of Adam, stuck into the ground from which he was made.  Instead, he seems basically untouched, except that his skin is sticky with some substance I’m unsure of when I touch his cheek.

“How should we get you out?” I ask him, laying on the loose ground, on my stomach, so I am face-to face with him.  I can tell when I get closer to his eyes that he’s either drunk or high or both. 

“Wellllll…” he thinks at me, his mouth cutting into a lazy and sarcastic smile.  “Who’s to say that’s what you ought to be doing?”

I pretend to be concerned, my head held up on my elbows. 

“Hm.  Maybe you should tell me about this pollination thing.”

Adam looks around furtive and surreptitious, like I’ve just asked him to talk to me about his cock.  He licks the lips of his smile, and his teeth show.

“Here?” he asks me, as if the idea is filthy in an exhibitionist way. 

“Yeah,” I tell him.  “Let’s hear it.” 

He clears his throat before beginning.

“Uh.  Well.  Pollen released from the anther of a male would be spread to the stigma of a female.”

“The question here being who has the anther and who has the stigma,” I conclude, beating him to the apex of the issue. 

“Yes,” he says.  “Right.”

I look around at the clearing, the ring of sleeping infants below the ground waiting to be grown. 

“I’m pretty sure you have the little stigmas,” I remind him, and he gazes into the dark, his eyes glassy with the recent memory.  I can see it scarring it’s way into his psyche, the trauma of it fresh in his mind.

“They… chanted,” he chokes.  “It’s a language I’m not familiar with.  Reminiscent of… Etruscan, maybe.  The kind of music you imagine in church services on other planets.”

“That sounds nice,” I try to reassure him, but tears well up in his eyes regardless, and he struggles for the first time against the earth which encases him. 

“Evelyn,” he pleads with me.  “I looked up at them, from here,” he whispers, his voice hoarse.  “And...“

I imagine what he must’ve seen, in the dark.  There would have been no fire, with him in the center, and I hadn’t considered that for some reason.  They would have brought only some light - maybe one of the flashlights from the treehouse - and passed it between them, shaking and swinging fast over their wild features, and vanishing again under the sliver moon.  The sound of them would have vibrated in the ground around him, and they would have bent close to kiss his face, their breath blowing like the release of steam from a train engine. 

It’s these kinds of experiences that I’m certain only Mark witnesses, really, inside Adam.  These kinds of experiences which shove him from the world of created lexicon and into the world of failed speech.  His threadbare expressions can only relate a purity of what is left when everything else ends in him, and he is looking out over a black chasm of something he has forced himself to believe doesn’t exist.  Surely he’d never be sacrificed in this way, never be witness to the sharks who devour his heart unfeeling, until it  happens.  It happens, and leaves him always alive, and looking for way to go on.

He doesn’t tell me any more of what happened, and I give him a weak smile. 

“Is there any magic left?” I ask him, and he tries to calm himself down. 

“I… probably not,” he laughs.  The smell of his breath is the same as the freshly-turned ground, and I think it’s the one thing we have in common; the minerals that collect on our tongues.  I lean in to kiss him, but he interrupts my approach by forcing out a thought along with his breath.

“You should dance,” he says, and we both stop, inches from one another.

“What?” I ask him, thinking he must be joking. 

“You should dance,” he repeats, the shadows on his face moving to show him breaking into a broader smile.  “That’s what they did.”

“I… no,” I protest, and he tries to persuade me. 

“Evelyn,” he starts, his tone at first admonishing.  “Please, it’s only me.”

The problem with magic is that it is so easily breathed into life.  As soon as he says it, there’s a kind of unfinished feeling to the air; almost like an obligation to God.  If I don’t dance, we’ll always be living in the world where I didn’t, and if I tell him I don’t want to, well, that’s where we’ll live, too. 

The night has swallowed us whole.  We are no longer strangers to the insects which buzz by our ears close, or the frogs which have entered the clearing on their way to other places.  Bats fly around over us, silent and flapping birds, picking their meals out of the air.  In the bayou from the distance, I hear one of the elephants trumpet.  The night folds us into itself until we’re forgotten by a civilized world and it suddenly seems more possible than ever to run into the forest and never see another person as long as we live.