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