June 29th, 2015
Jack,
I went home when Adam asked me to, and we fucked again.
Is this what life is? Adam asks to come home or I do, and we fuck again. I'm not... I'm not bored with you, Adam, I'm... just... trapped.
I have a wedding ring he gave me that I never wear because it means we're some dragon king and queen. He has a wedding ring I gave him that he never wears because it doesn't fit around his waist, or his throat, or it isn't red, or he can still breathe and what's the point, Evelyn, I'm all of yours, anyway.
I don't understand this man I married. Not in way that means I don't, but one that means I do and never will at the same time. I don't understand how this happened to me, that Adam said come home, and we fucked again.
Dear God, Adam said come home, and we fucked again. Is this what life is? Bonnie asked Clyde that, but maybe there's no difference.
If I was a child and you asked me to show you on the doll where Adam goes, I would point to the soft and anatomically accurate vagina of the neutrally-smiling blonde little girl doll. If you asked me why, I would tell you because. If you asked me what part of Adam goes there, I would hold your brown-haired boy doll and look from one to the other, and finally back at you, confused, and unable to locate his soul, his sleep, his sense of connection to life, or his certainty of death.
Adam's shoulders flex, over me, and his mouth finds mine, and he pushes his cock inside me, and he makes a hot sound in his throat that is a growl that matches my name. Inside, I write with the salience of a teenager how he broke my heart on pages of a diary I won't show another... living... soul.
You broke my heart, Adam Edison Jones. And I hate you for it.
I have learned over the past few years that there is nothing more humiliating than being totally in love with someone. I wonder, the way I do without any revelation, how Bonnie knew, how long Bonnie knew, how long Bonnie was trying to tell me, because Bonnie says...
I love Adam in a way that makes me not matter, and I hissed it to him angry in his ear last night before I sunk my right incisor into the flesh of his left shoulder and he growled low in his chest. You make me not matter.
How Evelyn? How don't you matter? Tell me.
He hissed it back in a voice that glittered with the rasp of his saliva hot in his mouth. Maybe all humans but us treat love like a competition for survival, and between Adam and I there is just a desire, or some programmed need, for ultimate and crushing defeat.
I don't matter without you. I don't matter, I barely exist. You're every word I have in my heart. Do you know how you humiliate me?
His eyes narrow like I challenged him; like he's angry.
Every word, Evelyn?
He fucks me against the floor, and I know it's a solid surface enough that it would never give or give way to allow me the room I need to make his cock stop hurting me. I squirm and push him away, and he locks himself around me with his arms.
Every. Word. Evelyn?
He almost yells it at me, out of spite. Out of a sense of how dare I? Wouldn't he know what that meant, more than anyone? That humiliation of a boy who knows he doesn't matter without Eve, and yet he doesn't know her and has to wait, fucking WAIT, for her to come to him SOMEDAY. I cum hard around him, and he holds himself deep inside me to feel the way I throb and contract. I don't meet his eyes. Don't talk about that boy, Adam. Please, don't talk about him, it's breaking my heart.
I'm so pathetic without you. I'm so pathetic without you, and with you, I know just how pathetic I am, because you... made a spine inside me.
He turns me over, my knees hitting against the wood of the floor. I kiss the plank doused with my sweat and he slides slow inside me, his hands on either hip. Nick is talking, or not talking. Telling him how fast to go. How could you do this to me? A tear slips down my nose, and hangs there, before falling.
But how could you do this to me?
He asks me what, Evelyn? What did I do to you?
You touched everything inside me. Why did you do that? Why would you do that? Why are you the thing that exists when nothing else exists?
He cums inside me, his voice choking on the heat of the tears of his reply.
We don't know how else to be.
I turn over beneath him, and he falls on my chest. I wish you were dead. I wish you died on me. I wish I killed you. I wish you were the air I breathe. I wish there was a way out. I wish there was no way out. Adam, did we do something? Did we do something bad?
The limits of human kindness are often found in the unnoticed act, Evelyn.
I don't know what that means. Tell me what that means, please. You're the only person who can tell me what fucking anything means.
It doesn't matter what we did, Evelyn, we will die unnoticed by the world.
The finality of his tone and what it suggests to me, that we are a circuit that is closed to all of the world but us, that the beating of my heart is heard only by him and vice versa, opens my thoughts like a cloud holding rain. How long did Bonnie know? How long has Bonnie been trying to tell me? How did Bonnie know? Does she know where I am? Why do I feel like the end of the world? I'm full of some kind of certainty. An unfair knowledge that I stole or heard on the radio somewhere. He meant it to be a comfort, but in this moment, it's the sound of dying, dying here under Adam. All you need is love. All you need is love. All you need is love.
-Evelyn
Thursday, December 14, 2017
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
The Shrine 3
Jack,
The way the life comes back. The way you've always known the color of Lucille Ball's hair. Under Adam's jacket is a forest green t-shirt and under that, the pale gold of his skin. The light in the hotel is a rancid kind of yellow that smears the shadows with a tallow grease that reminds me of when the cabin shook with fitful light just after...
Adam used to say we were born running until Bruce Springsteen stole the line. The blush of him brings the color back from the colorless landscape of the snow globe in winter. I move from a black and white and purple thing to this... red... flush... the color of a child's face playing outside. We were born running, me and Adam and the other children of Eden. Born sometime, somewhere, West.
I touch his skin, warm and sticky with the sweat of his nerves. He is as nervous to touch me as he always is, convinced I will vanish like an idea held too closely upon waking. I put my thighs on either side of his and sit in his lap, pressing our bodies together like the equation equals something we both need but which surpasses understanding.
"Pippa," he warns me of the mistake this is, raking his fingers over the film of my skin, a day unshowered.
"I haven't had any dreams yet," I tell him. "Have you?"
Pip,
The dreams began in my early childhood and followed me into my teen years with increasing severity. The woods encroached on my daily strolls through the scaffolding umbrellas near Times Square, in the rain. The backings of news stands gave way to the densely tangled gorse, my senses decaying due to all my late nights. The worms came wangled, from open manholes, the seamlessly psychotic oscillation of the shadow figures ducked behind the diffident crowds.
At home, where we still slept in bunked beds, I dreamed I bought a ticket to what I believed was to be a freak show. I learned I was mistaken, when I was shuffled into a room built of airtight glass walls. The floor of the 4x4 display case was populated by mounds of the severed limbs, and sex organs, of easily a hundred, rather attractive, blonde girls. In my dismay, I lifted them, and examined them to seams. You see, I knew I kept a sewing kit in my pocket. I was confident I could... fix them, if I tried.
"Yes," he admits, his eyes ringed in pink and red beds displaying his insomnia.
How I fit against Adam's body is something I've spent a long time memorizing. His hands span over mine easily and delicate, his fingers graceful and his nails clean and kempt until he bites them ragged in a certain mood. His skin is olive next to mine, a pale pink he thinks is oceanic and foreign. His hair is coarse and it takes 17 hours for his clean shave to give me razor burn. The width of his shoulders once gave me hope that I could wear his shirts, but I was robbed by the fullness of my breasts that refuse the center button. We were born at the same time, or near enough. Our Genesis is the same.
He is short-torsoed and long-necked, curling over my head when we roll toward one another in our shared bed. Dark hairs creep over the second knuckle of his fingers. His lips are a feminine pink but thin to a skeletal and almost prissy disapproval when he no longer wants to be teased. His limbs are easy and relaxed, missing all my tense embellishments of the air. He lets me hold onto him. He lets me find his chest and lay there. He stills when I move over him, like this. He stills as the earth stills to be moved over, by that which lives on it.
I heard laughter, and used my hand to wipe the glass, only smearing it further with the darker blood which fills entrails, specially, in an attempt to see my audience. A sea of wildly entertained guests threw their heads back and blotted their humorous tears on handkerchiefs watching me. What did they want from me? Why didn't they believe I could make this right? Had I been responsible for their deaths, myself? And most importantly, had I honestly bought a ticket to this most ghoulish parade? Through the beads of brain matter dripping from the walls, I saw bushy furs and the satin sheens of top hats shake upon their gleeful forms.
It was no one's fault, is what he told me, between clenched teeth which held back the spite which meant the fault was mine. My fault we had to run, to hide this way, my fault I would die. My fault this happens over and over again, and has since we made our way East on the night of the First Storm. And it was my fault for one simple reason.
I was awoken by my own screaming and Clyde's fists, might though they were small, seizing my shoulders. When my screaming stuttered, when I my breathing strained, when I could scream no more, his sobbing crept out from beneath it. He cried in my arms while I insisted he tell me what happened to him. He evaded his exposures by hoveling inmost, clapping my hand around the shivering child he never failed to convince me he was. Of course, he must've known. In fact, he must've dreamed the same things I had.
Adam's jaw opens to meet mine, and he kisses me hard enough I feel the rough texture of his teeth through his lips like pearls. The section of his chest which is marked with the tattoo of my name might as well be a prisoner number for how he looks at me then, when I break away.
"Put me inside you," he hisses, as if obliging him will finally kill us both. His arms rest slack on either side of the chair, the resignation on his face clear.
As we placidly regrained our comfort and began falling asleep, he whispered in my ear.
"Adam, will you kill me?"
"Sh. Let's sleep on it," I humored him.
"No, I mean it. Please."
It's my fault because this keeps happening between us, for time out of memory. I keep climbing into his lap, a girl suddenly where he knew me once only as an animal. A girl in need of him to save me or kiss me awake or fuck me or finally kill me himself, he's never had much of an idea. But we fall together this way, as I pull open the fly of his jeans and guide his cock inside me, to a place where I look down at him from above and tell him, "I need you Adam, I belong to you, I was born for you."
And so maybe it's always been me who starts this cycle again, each year. Maybe its this action which leads us down so many dark paths of the woods, at the end of which is the Wolf.
Hindsight being 20/20, perhaps I should have killed my brother the night he begged me to do so.
My hands shake, full of fistfuls of his hair, as I ride him slow and hard to and orgasm which forces my name from his mouth in a shattered cacophony of syllables.
"Pip, Piphany, oh, Christ, Eve."
The ache in my legs is the same ache achieved from running all this time. He breathes hard against my chest, smearing my skin with his sweat and saliva and he grits his teeth, the same way he does to say I am not to blame, and clutches my hips to hold me still around his cock.
The morning subsequent was the first in which I found an ax in the backseat of my car. It wasn't mine, I know mine. It would do in a pinch, it would do just fine. But this ax was lighter, newer, so hopeful was this tool. On whatever level it may have been, I understood the hand having placed it there and how filled with irony it's salute. It may have been a mercy, or a submission, or a taunt. This, from a mad person, a knowing nod, it could have been a flirt. But one thing was certain, I was a marked man. Yes, this was an omen, if ultimately nothing more.
Love,
Adam
The way the life comes back. The way you've always known the color of Lucille Ball's hair. Under Adam's jacket is a forest green t-shirt and under that, the pale gold of his skin. The light in the hotel is a rancid kind of yellow that smears the shadows with a tallow grease that reminds me of when the cabin shook with fitful light just after...
Adam used to say we were born running until Bruce Springsteen stole the line. The blush of him brings the color back from the colorless landscape of the snow globe in winter. I move from a black and white and purple thing to this... red... flush... the color of a child's face playing outside. We were born running, me and Adam and the other children of Eden. Born sometime, somewhere, West.
I touch his skin, warm and sticky with the sweat of his nerves. He is as nervous to touch me as he always is, convinced I will vanish like an idea held too closely upon waking. I put my thighs on either side of his and sit in his lap, pressing our bodies together like the equation equals something we both need but which surpasses understanding.
"Pippa," he warns me of the mistake this is, raking his fingers over the film of my skin, a day unshowered.
"I haven't had any dreams yet," I tell him. "Have you?"
Pip,
The dreams began in my early childhood and followed me into my teen years with increasing severity. The woods encroached on my daily strolls through the scaffolding umbrellas near Times Square, in the rain. The backings of news stands gave way to the densely tangled gorse, my senses decaying due to all my late nights. The worms came wangled, from open manholes, the seamlessly psychotic oscillation of the shadow figures ducked behind the diffident crowds.
At home, where we still slept in bunked beds, I dreamed I bought a ticket to what I believed was to be a freak show. I learned I was mistaken, when I was shuffled into a room built of airtight glass walls. The floor of the 4x4 display case was populated by mounds of the severed limbs, and sex organs, of easily a hundred, rather attractive, blonde girls. In my dismay, I lifted them, and examined them to seams. You see, I knew I kept a sewing kit in my pocket. I was confident I could... fix them, if I tried.
"Yes," he admits, his eyes ringed in pink and red beds displaying his insomnia.
How I fit against Adam's body is something I've spent a long time memorizing. His hands span over mine easily and delicate, his fingers graceful and his nails clean and kempt until he bites them ragged in a certain mood. His skin is olive next to mine, a pale pink he thinks is oceanic and foreign. His hair is coarse and it takes 17 hours for his clean shave to give me razor burn. The width of his shoulders once gave me hope that I could wear his shirts, but I was robbed by the fullness of my breasts that refuse the center button. We were born at the same time, or near enough. Our Genesis is the same.
He is short-torsoed and long-necked, curling over my head when we roll toward one another in our shared bed. Dark hairs creep over the second knuckle of his fingers. His lips are a feminine pink but thin to a skeletal and almost prissy disapproval when he no longer wants to be teased. His limbs are easy and relaxed, missing all my tense embellishments of the air. He lets me hold onto him. He lets me find his chest and lay there. He stills when I move over him, like this. He stills as the earth stills to be moved over, by that which lives on it.
I heard laughter, and used my hand to wipe the glass, only smearing it further with the darker blood which fills entrails, specially, in an attempt to see my audience. A sea of wildly entertained guests threw their heads back and blotted their humorous tears on handkerchiefs watching me. What did they want from me? Why didn't they believe I could make this right? Had I been responsible for their deaths, myself? And most importantly, had I honestly bought a ticket to this most ghoulish parade? Through the beads of brain matter dripping from the walls, I saw bushy furs and the satin sheens of top hats shake upon their gleeful forms.
It was no one's fault, is what he told me, between clenched teeth which held back the spite which meant the fault was mine. My fault we had to run, to hide this way, my fault I would die. My fault this happens over and over again, and has since we made our way East on the night of the First Storm. And it was my fault for one simple reason.
I was awoken by my own screaming and Clyde's fists, might though they were small, seizing my shoulders. When my screaming stuttered, when I my breathing strained, when I could scream no more, his sobbing crept out from beneath it. He cried in my arms while I insisted he tell me what happened to him. He evaded his exposures by hoveling inmost, clapping my hand around the shivering child he never failed to convince me he was. Of course, he must've known. In fact, he must've dreamed the same things I had.
Adam's jaw opens to meet mine, and he kisses me hard enough I feel the rough texture of his teeth through his lips like pearls. The section of his chest which is marked with the tattoo of my name might as well be a prisoner number for how he looks at me then, when I break away.
"Put me inside you," he hisses, as if obliging him will finally kill us both. His arms rest slack on either side of the chair, the resignation on his face clear.
As we placidly regrained our comfort and began falling asleep, he whispered in my ear.
"Adam, will you kill me?"
"Sh. Let's sleep on it," I humored him.
"No, I mean it. Please."
It's my fault because this keeps happening between us, for time out of memory. I keep climbing into his lap, a girl suddenly where he knew me once only as an animal. A girl in need of him to save me or kiss me awake or fuck me or finally kill me himself, he's never had much of an idea. But we fall together this way, as I pull open the fly of his jeans and guide his cock inside me, to a place where I look down at him from above and tell him, "I need you Adam, I belong to you, I was born for you."
And so maybe it's always been me who starts this cycle again, each year. Maybe its this action which leads us down so many dark paths of the woods, at the end of which is the Wolf.
Hindsight being 20/20, perhaps I should have killed my brother the night he begged me to do so.
My hands shake, full of fistfuls of his hair, as I ride him slow and hard to and orgasm which forces my name from his mouth in a shattered cacophony of syllables.
"Pip, Piphany, oh, Christ, Eve."
The ache in my legs is the same ache achieved from running all this time. He breathes hard against my chest, smearing my skin with his sweat and saliva and he grits his teeth, the same way he does to say I am not to blame, and clutches my hips to hold me still around his cock.
The morning subsequent was the first in which I found an ax in the backseat of my car. It wasn't mine, I know mine. It would do in a pinch, it would do just fine. But this ax was lighter, newer, so hopeful was this tool. On whatever level it may have been, I understood the hand having placed it there and how filled with irony it's salute. It may have been a mercy, or a submission, or a taunt. This, from a mad person, a knowing nod, it could have been a flirt. But one thing was certain, I was a marked man. Yes, this was an omen, if ultimately nothing more.
Love,
Adam
Sunday, December 10, 2017
The Shrine 2
Jack,
I fell asleep, and I missed the timed jump to avoid spattering into bonemeal at the bottom of this elevator. I missed the turn of the kaleidoscope. I missed the moment we were all waiting for, and missing it is what makes this fucking place a meat-grinder and not a home.
You and Rosie saved Ian. Instead of The Idiot, you played Leslie Gore and he ran from the house yelling her name, knowing it was you. The house, which for the moment was 77 Barton street, was lifted, and in the chaos of it's lifting into the merry old land of Oz, Adam put Benadryl in my coffee and took me to this hotel. It might be sunshine and lollipops and rainbows out there, Jack, but I don't have a window. And Oz isn't such a wonderful place, from what I remember. It's the stuff of dreams mechanized and brought to life.
The insides of this hotel room groan and collapse under the weight of all the rooms which preceded it. The walls vacillate from rough stone to the wide logs of the first cabin he built which couldn't contain me, to the plaster of the Riverdale apartment he meant to mock home. My blood thickens in this place, and slows to something which pounds sluggish in my chest, exhausting my heart. The molasses adrenaline of confinement which I remember from every fever delirium I've suffered in my past.
The door opens, and Adam comes in, switching the padlock to the inside of the room, the cold air a frozen breath from another world. He fumbles with the key he wears on a chain around his neck, vanishing it beneath the fleece collar of his jacket. The smell of the street follows him; car exhaust, sweat soaked into denim, discarded cooking oil, and frost.
The door has opened for centuries, and it has been Adam coming through it, on the breath of the winter. The broken silence of birdsong beyond the cabin door gave way to the smell of industry and smoke - the occasional train whistle - and sturdy beams placed across the threshold of the house faded in time to metal locks and keys. The animals he brought for the fire transformed into baskets from the village and now he tucks takeout Chinese in a paper bag under his arm.
I wait uncertain by the bed, watching him. He doesn't look up to meet my eyes, his heavy brow down-turned with the business of locking us both back in this room. It's the jacket which catches my attention first.
Pip,
The armor of modern man is modest and shields only the gentlest blows of nature, for hardly the hands of another man, and certainly never the razored maws of wolves.
In the bedroom of the men who raised me were hung flannel jackets with lamb's wool linings for their stiff plaid patterns. One blue, one red, and one green. Though worn by extensively different personages, they each hung from similar hooks, in similarly unassuming corners, and that all smelled of the same pinecone and rust.
I own one of these, as well. It's, particular, plaid is yellow and black, in color, and was a Christmas presesnt, from my mother. The gift, it seemed to me at the time, was ill-conceived for its failure to match the sleek style of dressing I'd adopted years prior. Odd, of course, given the close attention her other gifts had paid to my personality. But, considering what I knew of the items I'd known like it, this fact taught me she was passing down to me a tradition of warmth and protection; a legacy.
I imagined the corner of my own house, where I would need to hang it, the legacy, and what it meant for me, and all men unto whom their mothers had bestowed a rite, of sorts, a rite backed by the truth of the conditions out lives would see. The smell of what woods my father figures had traveled that I must, now. What travel through what woods, what path I would dull my blade by carving. The excruciating cold of what time into which I would be made to prove my convictions. What love I would relent in the warmth of your blood. What snow I would lose from my heart by melting.
My house had no such corner, that winter, or the next. It wasn't until...
We must weather, I thought. We're to weather and we may not hang our jackets, until...
Until we possess as humble a corner as one flanked by the cluttered vanities of our long-time wives and an unmade bed of our safest dreams. Until we can give ourselves to the women, the homes they make with us, which we have weathered to do just so. We may we hang these flimsy shields, having saved us for these lives, when we are permitted, so finally, and so very gratefully, to come home.
Love,
Adam
The jacket is how I have come to know him in the last century or so. His shoulders slump against the weight of all that which he carries; the food, yes, but also certainly his ax, carried at his hip, under the jacket. Adam, I see, has peeled the usual skin of his tailored suits off and comes in through the door of the hotel in his brown boots and the jacket which I will know him by.
We ignore one another, here again, in this room again, with the same smells and for the same reasons. His cologne and my hair, his uncertainty and my fear. I press my back against the wall and wait for him to look up at me, already knowing his expression will be wistful, crestfallen, and possibly apologetic. He sets the food down on the table and produces each folding box one at a time, unwraps chopsticks, portions out food, before he lifts his eyes at all.
When he finally straightens the line of his back and looks at me, his dark eyes are proud, and almost cold. He sets his arm on the table and considers me with a cruel smile.
"No threats this winter, Epiphany?" he asks me. "You don't hate me? No um... no china to throw, I see."
I touch the wood paneling behind me with the pads of my fingers.
"You said the wolf was loose in Manchester. No, I'm not angry with you."
"Glad to see me, then?" he dares me, raising his eyebrows, which cast shadows down over his eyes in the overhead light.
The questions he has are all about times past, and the differences of time and space which allow for us to vary this ritual in the confines of it's steps in order to bury ourselves inside one another, as if we were hibernating each winter. Yes, I've thrown things at him. We've fought, and not fought. Each winter, and even each encounter with Adam is an opportunity to don another aspect of ourselves in order to push against the other in our expression of what it means to be counterparts. And now he has come into our room (despite the cosmetic changes, it is the same room), and he is cold and cruel and daring.
The softness of Annik that I've lived in for months is what has driven him to all these hard edges, which we need now to use to define ourselves. I've become a soul without form, and left him skeletal and sharp enough to razor off the excess I've collected of myself and can no longer distinguish from Matthew.
I begin first by taking his armor. He lets it fall to the floor, proud against the sickly carpet. A relic trampled in the true fashion of Gray House; Adam and I in time will abdicate all idols but one another.
He chokes on a growl when I climb in his lap, some frustrated sound from the back of his throat, and I see his eyes are glassy when I pull away from kissing him.
"Your hair is too dark, and your writing is breaking everyone's hearts," he hisses, as if I've committed another mortal sin. "Say that you love me."
It's possible that he missed me, or that he's jealous of Matthew and where I've been for the last year. It's possible that this is simply a play to get my attentions back. It's possible that there was no wolf that night in Manchester.
"I love you, Adam," I tell him, and everything changes.
I fell asleep, and I missed the timed jump to avoid spattering into bonemeal at the bottom of this elevator. I missed the turn of the kaleidoscope. I missed the moment we were all waiting for, and missing it is what makes this fucking place a meat-grinder and not a home.
You and Rosie saved Ian. Instead of The Idiot, you played Leslie Gore and he ran from the house yelling her name, knowing it was you. The house, which for the moment was 77 Barton street, was lifted, and in the chaos of it's lifting into the merry old land of Oz, Adam put Benadryl in my coffee and took me to this hotel. It might be sunshine and lollipops and rainbows out there, Jack, but I don't have a window. And Oz isn't such a wonderful place, from what I remember. It's the stuff of dreams mechanized and brought to life.
The insides of this hotel room groan and collapse under the weight of all the rooms which preceded it. The walls vacillate from rough stone to the wide logs of the first cabin he built which couldn't contain me, to the plaster of the Riverdale apartment he meant to mock home. My blood thickens in this place, and slows to something which pounds sluggish in my chest, exhausting my heart. The molasses adrenaline of confinement which I remember from every fever delirium I've suffered in my past.
The door opens, and Adam comes in, switching the padlock to the inside of the room, the cold air a frozen breath from another world. He fumbles with the key he wears on a chain around his neck, vanishing it beneath the fleece collar of his jacket. The smell of the street follows him; car exhaust, sweat soaked into denim, discarded cooking oil, and frost.
The door has opened for centuries, and it has been Adam coming through it, on the breath of the winter. The broken silence of birdsong beyond the cabin door gave way to the smell of industry and smoke - the occasional train whistle - and sturdy beams placed across the threshold of the house faded in time to metal locks and keys. The animals he brought for the fire transformed into baskets from the village and now he tucks takeout Chinese in a paper bag under his arm.
I wait uncertain by the bed, watching him. He doesn't look up to meet my eyes, his heavy brow down-turned with the business of locking us both back in this room. It's the jacket which catches my attention first.
Pip,
The armor of modern man is modest and shields only the gentlest blows of nature, for hardly the hands of another man, and certainly never the razored maws of wolves.
In the bedroom of the men who raised me were hung flannel jackets with lamb's wool linings for their stiff plaid patterns. One blue, one red, and one green. Though worn by extensively different personages, they each hung from similar hooks, in similarly unassuming corners, and that all smelled of the same pinecone and rust.
I own one of these, as well. It's, particular, plaid is yellow and black, in color, and was a Christmas presesnt, from my mother. The gift, it seemed to me at the time, was ill-conceived for its failure to match the sleek style of dressing I'd adopted years prior. Odd, of course, given the close attention her other gifts had paid to my personality. But, considering what I knew of the items I'd known like it, this fact taught me she was passing down to me a tradition of warmth and protection; a legacy.
I imagined the corner of my own house, where I would need to hang it, the legacy, and what it meant for me, and all men unto whom their mothers had bestowed a rite, of sorts, a rite backed by the truth of the conditions out lives would see. The smell of what woods my father figures had traveled that I must, now. What travel through what woods, what path I would dull my blade by carving. The excruciating cold of what time into which I would be made to prove my convictions. What love I would relent in the warmth of your blood. What snow I would lose from my heart by melting.
My house had no such corner, that winter, or the next. It wasn't until...
We must weather, I thought. We're to weather and we may not hang our jackets, until...
Until we possess as humble a corner as one flanked by the cluttered vanities of our long-time wives and an unmade bed of our safest dreams. Until we can give ourselves to the women, the homes they make with us, which we have weathered to do just so. We may we hang these flimsy shields, having saved us for these lives, when we are permitted, so finally, and so very gratefully, to come home.
Love,
Adam
The jacket is how I have come to know him in the last century or so. His shoulders slump against the weight of all that which he carries; the food, yes, but also certainly his ax, carried at his hip, under the jacket. Adam, I see, has peeled the usual skin of his tailored suits off and comes in through the door of the hotel in his brown boots and the jacket which I will know him by.
We ignore one another, here again, in this room again, with the same smells and for the same reasons. His cologne and my hair, his uncertainty and my fear. I press my back against the wall and wait for him to look up at me, already knowing his expression will be wistful, crestfallen, and possibly apologetic. He sets the food down on the table and produces each folding box one at a time, unwraps chopsticks, portions out food, before he lifts his eyes at all.
When he finally straightens the line of his back and looks at me, his dark eyes are proud, and almost cold. He sets his arm on the table and considers me with a cruel smile.
"No threats this winter, Epiphany?" he asks me. "You don't hate me? No um... no china to throw, I see."
I touch the wood paneling behind me with the pads of my fingers.
"You said the wolf was loose in Manchester. No, I'm not angry with you."
"Glad to see me, then?" he dares me, raising his eyebrows, which cast shadows down over his eyes in the overhead light.
The questions he has are all about times past, and the differences of time and space which allow for us to vary this ritual in the confines of it's steps in order to bury ourselves inside one another, as if we were hibernating each winter. Yes, I've thrown things at him. We've fought, and not fought. Each winter, and even each encounter with Adam is an opportunity to don another aspect of ourselves in order to push against the other in our expression of what it means to be counterparts. And now he has come into our room (despite the cosmetic changes, it is the same room), and he is cold and cruel and daring.
The softness of Annik that I've lived in for months is what has driven him to all these hard edges, which we need now to use to define ourselves. I've become a soul without form, and left him skeletal and sharp enough to razor off the excess I've collected of myself and can no longer distinguish from Matthew.
I begin first by taking his armor. He lets it fall to the floor, proud against the sickly carpet. A relic trampled in the true fashion of Gray House; Adam and I in time will abdicate all idols but one another.
He chokes on a growl when I climb in his lap, some frustrated sound from the back of his throat, and I see his eyes are glassy when I pull away from kissing him.
"Your hair is too dark, and your writing is breaking everyone's hearts," he hisses, as if I've committed another mortal sin. "Say that you love me."
It's possible that he missed me, or that he's jealous of Matthew and where I've been for the last year. It's possible that this is simply a play to get my attentions back. It's possible that there was no wolf that night in Manchester.
"I love you, Adam," I tell him, and everything changes.
Thursday, December 7, 2017
The Shrine 1
Jack,
The four walls of this hotel room are windowless and panel-brown. The carpet is that shade of gold that might as well be green. There is no bedspread. The painting over the single queen is a yellowing mountain landscape, cut with a river (items 2 and 3).
The bathroom is by the door. There is a small yellow-enameled bathtub and yellow-enameled toilet and yellow-enameled sink. It probably once looked sunny, before the grout turned black. There is a light over the sink shaped like a bread loaf, and a bare hole in the wall where Adam has torn out the medicine cabinet. There are miniature bottles of soap and shampoo, all turquoise, behind the shower door which is cloud-colored and marked with streaks (items 5-7).
The front door of the hotel room has a conspicuous metal bar, which I know wraps around to the outside where it's padlocked shut. The turning mechanism for the deadbolt has been removed.
In the spare skeleton of the room, I search drawers and find a change of clothes, fresh panties, and a makeup bag stuffed with tampons (items 8-25). No TV, no alarm clock, but an analog on the wall. I count the items in the room including furniture, that fill up the empty space. Twenty-nine. Thirty, counting myself.
The livid red poppy (item 31) Adam's left on the card table that is bolted to the floor is a calling-card, I guess. It's sagging for how long it's been laying there without water, the petals become weak like the skin of the elderly. The petal flop when I lift it up to smell it, knowing full well poppies have no real scent to speak of.
The center of the flower has a black heart and a cool yellow eye. It smells heavily green and sharp, the stalk furred lightly like an animal. That, the missing mirror, and the acrid smell of his cologne, are the only clues I have that he was ever here before I woke up. But there are ways those are plain symbols of Adam and the soul he embodies - the hole in the wall punched there in his rage, the waft of his bourbon and cigarettes and cologne reeking of regret, and the apology flowers left on the table. Because to be a romantic the way he is a romantic, is to also be a deeply flawed and vicious man.
The story of why I am here has been told many times by Adam, and with more eloquence than I've ever been able to find in myself. Yes, the brute of him has occasion to be eloquent, and it's his eloquence which lends him so readily to viciousness.
I'm here because...
Despite the availability of certain massive and universe-spanning destinies, I'm often still a girl. Although I can hardly breathe a word of that sentence without having to inhale, somewhat forcibly, the return argument of a girl being the specific embodiment of those destinies. I want to be allowed to throw all my divinity away, but I can't without having to choke on every piece of it on the way out, until I'm a microcosm of the kind of reasoning that explains how we are what we are, no matter how you might want to change things.
The explanation of why I'm here is provided, on the table next to the poppy, on cream-colored paper, in his graceful handwriting (item 32):
Pip,
I imagine you'd find some humor in the fact that I knew you first, by your red hood. Of course, I mean your Clairol hair color. I mean the lipstick you wore two Halloweens in a row, and never between. I mean the bra you keep, in the bottom drawer. I mean your blood exposed by jaggedly burst capillaries, under your skin white as the snow upon which I dream it spatters. I mean your tongue, revealing itself when you laugh. I mean the anger constricting my view of you, walking unguarded and alone at night. Of course, Epiphany, I mean the sting of your scent in my nose.
There is only one thing that has hunted you more ardently than your wolf, and that thing is me.
4 rounded paws, posterior 2.6 inches in length, 2.2 width, anterior 2.1 inches in length, 1.8 in width. 4 toes, none opposable, with small nail markings. Staggered step patter, with alternating direct register. Paws keep the same pressure of impact: The animal is a healthy, red fox.
Tail swish impressions after long (400ft.) stretches of travel.
Love,
Adam
The four walls of this hotel room are windowless and panel-brown. The carpet is that shade of gold that might as well be green. There is no bedspread. The painting over the single queen is a yellowing mountain landscape, cut with a river (items 2 and 3).
The bathroom is by the door. There is a small yellow-enameled bathtub and yellow-enameled toilet and yellow-enameled sink. It probably once looked sunny, before the grout turned black. There is a light over the sink shaped like a bread loaf, and a bare hole in the wall where Adam has torn out the medicine cabinet. There are miniature bottles of soap and shampoo, all turquoise, behind the shower door which is cloud-colored and marked with streaks (items 5-7).
The front door of the hotel room has a conspicuous metal bar, which I know wraps around to the outside where it's padlocked shut. The turning mechanism for the deadbolt has been removed.
In the spare skeleton of the room, I search drawers and find a change of clothes, fresh panties, and a makeup bag stuffed with tampons (items 8-25). No TV, no alarm clock, but an analog on the wall. I count the items in the room including furniture, that fill up the empty space. Twenty-nine. Thirty, counting myself.
The livid red poppy (item 31) Adam's left on the card table that is bolted to the floor is a calling-card, I guess. It's sagging for how long it's been laying there without water, the petals become weak like the skin of the elderly. The petal flop when I lift it up to smell it, knowing full well poppies have no real scent to speak of.
The center of the flower has a black heart and a cool yellow eye. It smells heavily green and sharp, the stalk furred lightly like an animal. That, the missing mirror, and the acrid smell of his cologne, are the only clues I have that he was ever here before I woke up. But there are ways those are plain symbols of Adam and the soul he embodies - the hole in the wall punched there in his rage, the waft of his bourbon and cigarettes and cologne reeking of regret, and the apology flowers left on the table. Because to be a romantic the way he is a romantic, is to also be a deeply flawed and vicious man.
The story of why I am here has been told many times by Adam, and with more eloquence than I've ever been able to find in myself. Yes, the brute of him has occasion to be eloquent, and it's his eloquence which lends him so readily to viciousness.
I'm here because...
Despite the availability of certain massive and universe-spanning destinies, I'm often still a girl. Although I can hardly breathe a word of that sentence without having to inhale, somewhat forcibly, the return argument of a girl being the specific embodiment of those destinies. I want to be allowed to throw all my divinity away, but I can't without having to choke on every piece of it on the way out, until I'm a microcosm of the kind of reasoning that explains how we are what we are, no matter how you might want to change things.
The explanation of why I'm here is provided, on the table next to the poppy, on cream-colored paper, in his graceful handwriting (item 32):
Pip,
I imagine you'd find some humor in the fact that I knew you first, by your red hood. Of course, I mean your Clairol hair color. I mean the lipstick you wore two Halloweens in a row, and never between. I mean the bra you keep, in the bottom drawer. I mean your blood exposed by jaggedly burst capillaries, under your skin white as the snow upon which I dream it spatters. I mean your tongue, revealing itself when you laugh. I mean the anger constricting my view of you, walking unguarded and alone at night. Of course, Epiphany, I mean the sting of your scent in my nose.
There is only one thing that has hunted you more ardently than your wolf, and that thing is me.
4 rounded paws, posterior 2.6 inches in length, 2.2 width, anterior 2.1 inches in length, 1.8 in width. 4 toes, none opposable, with small nail markings. Staggered step patter, with alternating direct register. Paws keep the same pressure of impact: The animal is a healthy, red fox.
Tail swish impressions after long (400ft.) stretches of travel.
Love,
Adam
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Shadowplay 15
Jack,
I woke in the night with a start. I do that sometimes, just like the movies, from a nightmare that I can't remember. I woke with a line replaying over and over in my head: the rest is history.
The house was silent. The house is never, ever silent. It quiets at night, but always through the walls plays Brad's television on low, or Grady's record player softly crying out over the small hours.
The house was dark. The house is never, ever dark. In the recesses of Clyde's room, and Matthew's, it gets pitch black, but light spills under the doors from the courtyard, and the windows in rooms three and nine. Christmas lights, lightning bugs, televisions, and the yellow displays on old radios all contribute to the low glow of the house at night, but this time it was dark.
The bed beside me was empty, and I could see on the floor of my bedroom wet footprints belonging to someone I suspect was Clyde, having used my bathtub. I knew immediately that Matthew's absence meant he was going to kill himself. That the night of the great train collision had finally come, and I'd... fucking... slept... through it.
But if it was late, there was still time to stop him. And so I stood up to get dressed in my foxing clothes, which forever litter the floor of room nine.
I was putting on my shoes when Adam came to the door. I saw his outline in the window, and he knocked softly with a single knuckle.
He knocked. The first time since I'd known him to do that.
"What?" I asked the door, and he pushed it open, to find me dressed. The darkness of the late hour had a smell, and a tangible quality in the air. Heavy, as if speaking loudly were no longer allowed in the low ceiling of the night.
"Evelyn," he said softly. "Please, you can't go."
He stood in the doorway, the light from my bedside lamp touching his bare skin. He was naked, although his eyes told me plainly he had not been sleeping. I only looked at him, disbelieving that he would tell me this, when it was the one place I wanted to be. I could see a familiar pain in his eyes, dark and distant, his eyebrows knitted but still innocent.
Whatever horrors Adam or any other man might become, he still casts the shadow of a boy across my doorway, eyes a-large and questioning their fathers.
"Why not?" I asked him, and his hands reached toward me, slight, palms out almost in apology.
"I..." he began, but hesitated, and glanced at the bedroom door next to mine. He shuffled his way into the room, to close the door behind him. Adam's smell is stinging and almost chemical. Pine needles and moss, in a cold rain. I could smell it when he crossed to sit beside me on the bed, his shoulders low and defeated. He began to cry silent tears which fell ignored onto his thighs.
"The... the wolf is loose in Manchester," he explained. "I have tracked it there. If you go to him... Evelyn, please."
"Clyde's asleep," I reminded him, pressing against his shoulder with my weight. It had been almost a month since he'd been in my room at night, and almost 2 years since we had a place we might call ours together. There was something platonic between us, and maybe even strange.
"Clyde is asleep," he agreed with me. "Yes. But the wolf. Is loose in Manchester. If you go to him, he will kill you."
When I protested, he interrupted, and placed the pads of his fingers on my arm.
"Roseanne and Jack are taking care of it. They've promised to stop him."
"What do I do?" I asked him, and he looked up at the dark ceiling, as if praying for strength.
"He'll call you, I think," he said at length. "He will no doubt call you."
"I want to be alone," I told him, feeling the sphere of things I can control shrinking to a size no bigger than all my collected snow globes. As he left, I tried to fight off the panic that something is now going to happen that I can not shepherd into my own understanding. That Matthew's life was now in your hands. I laid back in bed, fully clothed, and looked at my telephone, used only once, to call Matthew, on the 3rd of February of last year.
I had said to him, "Forgive the unbearable lateness of the hour," and it hadn't sounded like something I would normally say. I knew then that it was Ian's salutation on this night. I said it to him because he said it to me, the night he killed himself.
My telephone is a turquoise-green princess phone that I keep trying to make pink, but isn't. I laid still and waited for it to ring, and felt a mixture of many strange things at once.
The world was shifting. I could feel the kaleidoscope moving, and I felt angry we hadn't yet determined why we were stuck in Dead Poet's Society. That you hadn't really boarded a train with us. That we didn't know for certain if this was the cyclone to Oz. That things had been happening so fast, I couldn't hold onto them, and now...
Now there was a finality in this moment. Winter had come, and when winter comes, I am only one thing, and I am only in one place, and all this would come undone because I will move away from Ian, and the snow globe will disappear forever. I could feel Adam's panic all around me, and Clyde's insidious grin.
Of course, Adam would say or do anything to keep me in the house when the wolf is out. So I wondered if Matthew would really call, or if he simply said that to...
Of course, I also knew that Ian begs for Deborah to take him back before his death, and so the overwhelming feeling I'd have of being the other woman under you intensified in the late night.
So he'd go back to the one of us who'd actually read The Idiot. Sure, I get it. What god creates, man destroys.
I ran through the details in my head, that I knew. I tried to focus on seeing him alone in the kitchen, but I couldn't distinguish him from what I simply wanted to be there. A tea set. A broken clock. A safe arrival of you with a schnauzer under your arm.
Ian rifles through the content of the fridge in 77 Barton. It's spare inside, as Deb has not yet done the weekly shopping. He tugs the tuck of his shirt against his ribs. There is a determined look in his eyes that I recognize in Matthew's, on the day we met in this life. On the day we met in this life, when he'd decided to die.
He wrote me a letter, in which he'd said, "Sincerely, I came to see you knowing you're the only one who wouldn't talk me out of what I wanted."
No, I guess I wouldn't have.
In the deep green shirt, I watch him, or think I do, kneel onto the tile the color of fatigue. It happens always; it happens forever. He is wearing his shoes, as if he believes he will need them for his departure. He kneels, and he lets the weight of his body go against the clothesline, and he waits. He is patient. He is...
When I was a girl, I knew a boy who killed himself in what seems to be an accidental parody of Ian.
Am I still a girl? Life moves always in these cycles that mean we can't escape anything or anyone.
In some world, this happens forever. In some places, I wait, low against the rocks of the moon, and watch the other half of my heart die on a floor in Macclesfield. Outside the windows of the front room, the trees wave in the darkness from the park. While he leans low over the tiles, I feel him sink into me. He sinks into me, the words which flow along the pathways of his blood and the unheard notions he failed to communicate. The way he had God inside him, as Rosie would say, sinks into me like a stain in our sheets.
I didn't mean to love him like this. I would have greatly preferred not to, if we're being honest. I didn't mean to fall in love with him in this way that now bubbles up through the cracks in me, to find places where what I wish were true is forced to touch fact and ruin it. I might've ruined us with wishes, Jack, you and me.
My hand shakes as I pick up the phone and dial any number at all. If you dial any number, Grady will be on the other end of the line. Does that just work in Gray House? I've never tried it elsewhere.
"Si."
"Did they make it?" I ask the silence that follows his short greeting. I hear potato chips crunching in his mouth, all business tonight at the Roads and out of favors to do for me.
"It's being taken care of," he tells me, before the line goes dead.
I woke in the night with a start. I do that sometimes, just like the movies, from a nightmare that I can't remember. I woke with a line replaying over and over in my head: the rest is history.
The house was silent. The house is never, ever silent. It quiets at night, but always through the walls plays Brad's television on low, or Grady's record player softly crying out over the small hours.
The house was dark. The house is never, ever dark. In the recesses of Clyde's room, and Matthew's, it gets pitch black, but light spills under the doors from the courtyard, and the windows in rooms three and nine. Christmas lights, lightning bugs, televisions, and the yellow displays on old radios all contribute to the low glow of the house at night, but this time it was dark.
The bed beside me was empty, and I could see on the floor of my bedroom wet footprints belonging to someone I suspect was Clyde, having used my bathtub. I knew immediately that Matthew's absence meant he was going to kill himself. That the night of the great train collision had finally come, and I'd... fucking... slept... through it.
But if it was late, there was still time to stop him. And so I stood up to get dressed in my foxing clothes, which forever litter the floor of room nine.
I was putting on my shoes when Adam came to the door. I saw his outline in the window, and he knocked softly with a single knuckle.
He knocked. The first time since I'd known him to do that.
"What?" I asked the door, and he pushed it open, to find me dressed. The darkness of the late hour had a smell, and a tangible quality in the air. Heavy, as if speaking loudly were no longer allowed in the low ceiling of the night.
"Evelyn," he said softly. "Please, you can't go."
He stood in the doorway, the light from my bedside lamp touching his bare skin. He was naked, although his eyes told me plainly he had not been sleeping. I only looked at him, disbelieving that he would tell me this, when it was the one place I wanted to be. I could see a familiar pain in his eyes, dark and distant, his eyebrows knitted but still innocent.
Whatever horrors Adam or any other man might become, he still casts the shadow of a boy across my doorway, eyes a-large and questioning their fathers.
"Why not?" I asked him, and his hands reached toward me, slight, palms out almost in apology.
"I..." he began, but hesitated, and glanced at the bedroom door next to mine. He shuffled his way into the room, to close the door behind him. Adam's smell is stinging and almost chemical. Pine needles and moss, in a cold rain. I could smell it when he crossed to sit beside me on the bed, his shoulders low and defeated. He began to cry silent tears which fell ignored onto his thighs.
"The... the wolf is loose in Manchester," he explained. "I have tracked it there. If you go to him... Evelyn, please."
"Clyde's asleep," I reminded him, pressing against his shoulder with my weight. It had been almost a month since he'd been in my room at night, and almost 2 years since we had a place we might call ours together. There was something platonic between us, and maybe even strange.
"Clyde is asleep," he agreed with me. "Yes. But the wolf. Is loose in Manchester. If you go to him, he will kill you."
When I protested, he interrupted, and placed the pads of his fingers on my arm.
"Roseanne and Jack are taking care of it. They've promised to stop him."
"What do I do?" I asked him, and he looked up at the dark ceiling, as if praying for strength.
"He'll call you, I think," he said at length. "He will no doubt call you."
"I want to be alone," I told him, feeling the sphere of things I can control shrinking to a size no bigger than all my collected snow globes. As he left, I tried to fight off the panic that something is now going to happen that I can not shepherd into my own understanding. That Matthew's life was now in your hands. I laid back in bed, fully clothed, and looked at my telephone, used only once, to call Matthew, on the 3rd of February of last year.
I had said to him, "Forgive the unbearable lateness of the hour," and it hadn't sounded like something I would normally say. I knew then that it was Ian's salutation on this night. I said it to him because he said it to me, the night he killed himself.
My telephone is a turquoise-green princess phone that I keep trying to make pink, but isn't. I laid still and waited for it to ring, and felt a mixture of many strange things at once.
The world was shifting. I could feel the kaleidoscope moving, and I felt angry we hadn't yet determined why we were stuck in Dead Poet's Society. That you hadn't really boarded a train with us. That we didn't know for certain if this was the cyclone to Oz. That things had been happening so fast, I couldn't hold onto them, and now...
Now there was a finality in this moment. Winter had come, and when winter comes, I am only one thing, and I am only in one place, and all this would come undone because I will move away from Ian, and the snow globe will disappear forever. I could feel Adam's panic all around me, and Clyde's insidious grin.
Of course, Adam would say or do anything to keep me in the house when the wolf is out. So I wondered if Matthew would really call, or if he simply said that to...
Of course, I also knew that Ian begs for Deborah to take him back before his death, and so the overwhelming feeling I'd have of being the other woman under you intensified in the late night.
So he'd go back to the one of us who'd actually read The Idiot. Sure, I get it. What god creates, man destroys.
I ran through the details in my head, that I knew. I tried to focus on seeing him alone in the kitchen, but I couldn't distinguish him from what I simply wanted to be there. A tea set. A broken clock. A safe arrival of you with a schnauzer under your arm.
Ian rifles through the content of the fridge in 77 Barton. It's spare inside, as Deb has not yet done the weekly shopping. He tugs the tuck of his shirt against his ribs. There is a determined look in his eyes that I recognize in Matthew's, on the day we met in this life. On the day we met in this life, when he'd decided to die.
He wrote me a letter, in which he'd said, "Sincerely, I came to see you knowing you're the only one who wouldn't talk me out of what I wanted."
No, I guess I wouldn't have.
In the deep green shirt, I watch him, or think I do, kneel onto the tile the color of fatigue. It happens always; it happens forever. He is wearing his shoes, as if he believes he will need them for his departure. He kneels, and he lets the weight of his body go against the clothesline, and he waits. He is patient. He is...
When I was a girl, I knew a boy who killed himself in what seems to be an accidental parody of Ian.
Am I still a girl? Life moves always in these cycles that mean we can't escape anything or anyone.
In some world, this happens forever. In some places, I wait, low against the rocks of the moon, and watch the other half of my heart die on a floor in Macclesfield. Outside the windows of the front room, the trees wave in the darkness from the park. While he leans low over the tiles, I feel him sink into me. He sinks into me, the words which flow along the pathways of his blood and the unheard notions he failed to communicate. The way he had God inside him, as Rosie would say, sinks into me like a stain in our sheets.
I didn't mean to love him like this. I would have greatly preferred not to, if we're being honest. I didn't mean to fall in love with him in this way that now bubbles up through the cracks in me, to find places where what I wish were true is forced to touch fact and ruin it. I might've ruined us with wishes, Jack, you and me.
My hand shakes as I pick up the phone and dial any number at all. If you dial any number, Grady will be on the other end of the line. Does that just work in Gray House? I've never tried it elsewhere.
"Si."
"Did they make it?" I ask the silence that follows his short greeting. I hear potato chips crunching in his mouth, all business tonight at the Roads and out of favors to do for me.
"It's being taken care of," he tells me, before the line goes dead.
Friday, December 1, 2017
Shadowplay 14
Jack,
The isolation of Angels is absolute.
The fact of the matter is, you'll never know about them. Not given enough time, or patience, or prying. Not with blackmail or violence. Not with watchful stillness. You simply will never know because they exist in places where the narrative consciousness does not. They exist outside of the stage built to hold this world. They can actually be alone, where a Dragon cannot. A Dragon can only tread the planks of this world where the narrative follows them. A Dragon is a whore that way, an applause junkie. They want to tell all their secrets because to tell a secret, even under the guise of not telling it, allows it to exist.
Angels don't exist. They die unsung, deeds unknown. They might exist, in a margin world we almost never tread. They might get close to existing, but the bitch of it is that once there, none of us exist anymore, either. Narrative consciousness vanishes, in that place.
Narrative consciousness being the certainty that someone is always watching you, of course. That you are the main character of a story being told, and that nothing that terrible will happen to you. Narrative consciousness is the lie we all buy into that tells us we will get the girl, we will not die in the plagues, and in our darkest moments, a miracle will arrive.
The miracle, of course, is an angel. And they arrive in moments of great need, sure. But from where do they arrive? I bet most of us have never given it one single thought. If God (existent here for the sake of argument) is always watching us, then he isn't exactly watching them, now is he? And if there is no God, and all we have is one another, then the supernatural planes which we claim to inhabit and then abandon through dreams and intuition is a pretty lonely and transient place. Whatever you believe, it still leaves them alone and outside the frame of this world.
None of that matters, however, since most people live and die without ever meeting one. But here in Gray House, there are five, and so the consequences of nonexistence are something we deal with everyday. How it means they need nothing, voice nothing, have nothing, want nothing, and lose... nothing are all snags in the idea we try to create daily of family.
They do not commodify the things Dragons have learned to commodify, like pain or sorrow or secrecy. If I have a secret, I can make that secret exist. If I have pain, I can make that pain exist by actively and with artistry not telling you about it. Angels simply hold it, silent, in their endlessly waiting jaws, until they no longer have it. Angels don't know how to not tell someone something. They don't tell, and therein lies the subtle differences of existing. I expect someone someday to find me out. They resign themselves to the isolation of forever.
When we think to ourselves (Dragons, that is), "No one will hear me scream," we mean to say, "No one will hear me scream for a very long time."
But listen, Jack. Listen carefully.
No, no, come here. Turn the light off and come around this corner.
The isolation of Angels is absolute.
The fact of the matter is, you'll never know about them. Not given enough time, or patience, or prying. Not with blackmail or violence. Not with watchful stillness. You simply will never know because they exist in places where the narrative consciousness does not. They exist outside of the stage built to hold this world. They can actually be alone, where a Dragon cannot. A Dragon can only tread the planks of this world where the narrative follows them. A Dragon is a whore that way, an applause junkie. They want to tell all their secrets because to tell a secret, even under the guise of not telling it, allows it to exist.
Angels don't exist. They die unsung, deeds unknown. They might exist, in a margin world we almost never tread. They might get close to existing, but the bitch of it is that once there, none of us exist anymore, either. Narrative consciousness vanishes, in that place.
Narrative consciousness being the certainty that someone is always watching you, of course. That you are the main character of a story being told, and that nothing that terrible will happen to you. Narrative consciousness is the lie we all buy into that tells us we will get the girl, we will not die in the plagues, and in our darkest moments, a miracle will arrive.
The miracle, of course, is an angel. And they arrive in moments of great need, sure. But from where do they arrive? I bet most of us have never given it one single thought. If God (existent here for the sake of argument) is always watching us, then he isn't exactly watching them, now is he? And if there is no God, and all we have is one another, then the supernatural planes which we claim to inhabit and then abandon through dreams and intuition is a pretty lonely and transient place. Whatever you believe, it still leaves them alone and outside the frame of this world.
None of that matters, however, since most people live and die without ever meeting one. But here in Gray House, there are five, and so the consequences of nonexistence are something we deal with everyday. How it means they need nothing, voice nothing, have nothing, want nothing, and lose... nothing are all snags in the idea we try to create daily of family.
They do not commodify the things Dragons have learned to commodify, like pain or sorrow or secrecy. If I have a secret, I can make that secret exist. If I have pain, I can make that pain exist by actively and with artistry not telling you about it. Angels simply hold it, silent, in their endlessly waiting jaws, until they no longer have it. Angels don't know how to not tell someone something. They don't tell, and therein lies the subtle differences of existing. I expect someone someday to find me out. They resign themselves to the isolation of forever.
When we think to ourselves (Dragons, that is), "No one will hear me scream," we mean to say, "No one will hear me scream for a very long time."
But listen, Jack. Listen carefully.
No, no, come here. Turn the light off and come around this corner.
Here.
Here, no one will hear you scream.
Do you hear the Angels, Jack?
No. Of course not. They're all silent.
When no one is listening...
The night Drama raged at you, he did it knowing full well it would never matter to you, what he'd said. He knew you would take it to mean a hundred things he didn't mean, and none of the meanings he meant. He knew it was all for nothing, and he is buried alive forever under the weight of non-existence, and you and he would never touch the way you and I can, and yet refuse to. He got up on the stage in Gray House we have hidden from you, mostly, and he... well, he told his tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Nothing, Jack.
Absolutely nothing.
Rosie and I laid in bed together afterward, and we sobbed, alone with him in the bright violet stage lights of his despair, because we heard him. It was a monologue delivered to convince you of your own existence, which you have never seen or understood. He lamented his own non-existence. He wished he could be you. He wished he could be anyone besides the empty vessel of desires that comprise an Angel.
His words floated out over us listening to him that night, the members of Gray House who have come to understand, even minutely, what an Angel is (or isn't) and we shifted, however imperceptibly, away from this world and toward the one none of us exist. Because we all found ourselves in his words, and have almost never found ourselves in yours.
In 2013, five of the six members of Gray House that were home at the time met in the bayou to pledge themselves to an idea of home where we might be able to find family. We wore white, and we met at the edge of the yard of the Old House, recently left to us, to encircle a yew tree with our hands and make a promise that we would protect one another. The person missing that night, who in fact opted out of that ceremony altogether, was you, Jack.
The next morning, I burned the pattern of a yew tree onto the inside of the back door (the front door of the Old House was barely used). When we moved to Gray House, the door couldn't come with us, but the Gray Children burned the design onto the inside of the two front doors, and painted it blood red with some kind of enamel that bleeds through any subsequent coat we give it.
It was a sign that we could never go back, that it was on the inside of the door and not the outside. That you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And I think I knew that on some fundamental level when I came home; that I could never really be alone in a room again. Sometimes, when things like Drama's speech to you happen, I imagine the wood of that door swelling microscopically, and adding pressure to the place it joins the two halves in the center, until one day, they will fuse entirely and be unusable. It happens slowly, in small applications, over eons of time, that God closes doors.
Drama killed himself on the radio, at the end of a show, on the 7th of October. We listened to his farewell songs to all of us. He took pills, and vomited onto himself as he typed. I wasn't with him when he died, and I did not follow him to the river. In the snow globe, he arrived in silence like a ghost. He wore a patterned shirt tucked loosely into his khakis, and dirty tennis shoes. The wind was strong enough to move his hair off of his forehead, and show the paleness of his skin in the shine of the starlight.
"You didn't do this for me," I reminded him, as he watched the earth rise over the cold atmosphere on the moon. He didn't turn to look at me, but slid his hands in his pockets like he was waiting for the train to come for him. When he answered me, he sounded almost sad, the way the Angels do when caught at an unguarded moment.
"Evelyn, I do everything for you."
His words floated out over us listening to him that night, the members of Gray House who have come to understand, even minutely, what an Angel is (or isn't) and we shifted, however imperceptibly, away from this world and toward the one none of us exist. Because we all found ourselves in his words, and have almost never found ourselves in yours.
In 2013, five of the six members of Gray House that were home at the time met in the bayou to pledge themselves to an idea of home where we might be able to find family. We wore white, and we met at the edge of the yard of the Old House, recently left to us, to encircle a yew tree with our hands and make a promise that we would protect one another. The person missing that night, who in fact opted out of that ceremony altogether, was you, Jack.
The next morning, I burned the pattern of a yew tree onto the inside of the back door (the front door of the Old House was barely used). When we moved to Gray House, the door couldn't come with us, but the Gray Children burned the design onto the inside of the two front doors, and painted it blood red with some kind of enamel that bleeds through any subsequent coat we give it.
It was a sign that we could never go back, that it was on the inside of the door and not the outside. That you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And I think I knew that on some fundamental level when I came home; that I could never really be alone in a room again. Sometimes, when things like Drama's speech to you happen, I imagine the wood of that door swelling microscopically, and adding pressure to the place it joins the two halves in the center, until one day, they will fuse entirely and be unusable. It happens slowly, in small applications, over eons of time, that God closes doors.
Drama killed himself on the radio, at the end of a show, on the 7th of October. We listened to his farewell songs to all of us. He took pills, and vomited onto himself as he typed. I wasn't with him when he died, and I did not follow him to the river. In the snow globe, he arrived in silence like a ghost. He wore a patterned shirt tucked loosely into his khakis, and dirty tennis shoes. The wind was strong enough to move his hair off of his forehead, and show the paleness of his skin in the shine of the starlight.
"You didn't do this for me," I reminded him, as he watched the earth rise over the cold atmosphere on the moon. He didn't turn to look at me, but slid his hands in his pockets like he was waiting for the train to come for him. When he answered me, he sounded almost sad, the way the Angels do when caught at an unguarded moment.
"Evelyn, I do everything for you."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)