Adam,

My body moves roughshod over John's in summer darkness; the absolute stillness of night we wait for to break the heat. With mute and terrified abandon, I knot my fingers around the frayed hem of his shirt and ball the worn cotton into my fists. His eyes shift dim and close again as he sweeps the corners of the room like someone will see. We crash-land in the Greenhouse with dust in our hair, plywood boards clattering the brickwork, like we'd come through the ceiling. Whatever happens now is known only to the wide and glossy leaves which shadow us from the eyes of others.

My body has forgotten the words, and you return them to me in small, unnoticed applications of pressure. Every hanging note of you in the air travels to a tiny chamber in my cells and grows to a venomous longing, and the venom holds the words, which are leached from me when we touch.

I watch you sing to the bees in the morning, your hair loose from sleep and freed from it's styled summer prison. I watch through the pane of turquoise glass that turns the color of your skin weak green, the back of your neck flashing above your collar like moss growing from fresh soil. 

Against the same soil in the dark, you lose a fight for balance, not with gravity, but in yourself.  You pull me down to meet you so the dry black crumbles warm my shins in your lap when you lift my nightgown away and ponder with careful fingers this hole inside me.

As much as we were Cartwrights, adopted by our parents at an early age, we were also feral children, perhaps left behind at the Hathaway House. I am as much a fox as I am a girl when you find me at night, and I follow you across the lawn, and the shine of the moon on your shoes.

So I wanted to tell you, I know this man you are now taught me to read and write.

Adam in the Greenhouse

Last night, Brad was busy and so I went to the greenhouse because Adam told me he'd been decorating and wanted to show me something.

Wanted to show me something.  It took everything in me not to roll my eyes when he said it to me, because we both knew I'd be looking around the greenhouse for maybe 20 collective seconds before he'd ask me if I wanted to take a shower, and then... well, the last time he'd invited me to see his new pink cactus, we'd ended up fucking on one of the metal and wire tables that run along the walls, and had knocked down one of his priceless orchids.

The smell of wet terra cotta is something I love enough to have requested Adam build me a shower in my bedroom with clay tile.  He'd compromised with me and put it in the greenhouse, if only for the reason he had better occasion to watch me there, while he was working.  The brick ground is always warm from the sun, and the green garden hose he leaves unwound always leaking like a runny nose when you step on it.

The white doors at the far end of the library all shuttered closed shine yellow through their pink-frosted glass windows.  I pass Brad on the way to the greenhouse, waiting for the seance to take place.  I pass Jack, too, but I just give them a wave because I'm mad Brad wants to have a seance and not tell me about the fucking hotel room I've been trapped in for a day and a half.

I pull open one of the 4 french doors that lead to the greenhouse.  Damp and warm air greets me that is the same temperature and humidity as my bedroom.  It's green and bright inside, but the glass walls lead out into the dark swamp lit with a sliver of a moon.

I see he has indeed redecorated.

What used to be a relatively normal greenhouse with labels on herbs and an apothecary cabinet for dried samples and seeds is now crammed with old table lamps, and antiques.  At the entrance of the French doors, there is a kneeling greyhound statue with a sign around it's neck which says WELCOME.

He is crouched over a sample of green leaves, his shirt rolled to the sleeve and unbuttoned enough to expose the necessity of his throat beyond the idiosyncrasy of his tie, loosened to a weak knot, swinging brown before him in shadows.

"Evelyn," he mutters to the leaves.

"Adam," I mention to the greyhound.

A low-placed antique Tiffany lamp sits next to the shower.  He doesn't look up when I undress or climb inside it, to turn on the faucet.  I see he's installed shelves along the wall, where he's placed some plants that need less sun and more water.

I wash my hair with the things he's left in the shower; all bottles with hand-made labels warped and smeared by the water to an illegible purple stain over the white paper on the brown glass.  I can hear him outside the shower stall, humming to himself.

We fall into this slow place easily, as if the shorthand of it were embedded in our DNA, and maybe it is.  The simple truth is, maybe this is our bedroom, and always was to some degree.

When I turn off the water and open the door, he is absently holding out a towel to me, parts of it snagged to long strings of loose terrycloth.  It's rust-brown.  I dry off in the heat, and put my dress back on before he acknowledges me at all beyond my name, when I sit down on a low shelf.

"Hello," he says, his voice soft as he removes the black horn-rimmed glasses he wears when he's studying.  The stool he sits on creaks soft the wear of the leather.

"Hey," I tell him, and he smiles.  Adam's smiles are so few and fleeting, I forget to do it back when I'm taken by surprise at one's arrival.

"Do you like it?" he asks me, gesturing to the room around us, and I nod.

"It's very pretty."

He looks around, something on his face almost like pride or accomplishment.

"I thought you would like it, when I was doing it.  I thought... well, I thought about how we would make love, here."

His brown eyes settle on my legs under my dress.

"Do you think it's romantic?" he asks me.

"Yes, very," I tell him.

The smile is back, although now tinged with something darker, and he sets his glasses aside before swiveling the stool back to face me.

"Would you like to make love, Evelyn?" he asks me, and I nod again.

We lay on the warm brick without speaking.  I feel when he kisses me that this is something married people do; they build one another surprise rooms to make love inside.  Some of the water from the hose leaks into the back of my hair.  Adam scrapes his knee on the brick.  He shudders when I pull his hair.

We fall asleep on the ground, there, using my dress for a blanket.  I dream of him tattooing me with a heart on my arm, anatomically perfect and labeled.

Ian 60

Ian,

In the fallow trees there is a silence of the thin air, through which there is silk idly waving and I pull it back from my face.

In the black heart of the woods which have been destroyed, embers keep the trunks warm and they pale and crumble backward from my touch.

The world unmade, and the bomb detonated, I am in two worlds which create duplicity and confusion.

I am a new spring.  I am touching the tender greens with pale fingers.  I feel the birds moving fast and empty eyes.  I remember Adam's names.

I am... decimated.  I am destroyed.  I am in Hell.  I have stitched the desert to the cells which created it and erased all I am inside by fire and refused to return it again to whatever beauty anyone ever saw in it.  I'm not a ruin, and would never be a ruin, and I have made myself simply not exist but for a scar along the edge of the desert sand.  I have unmade Eve and denied myself the rebirth.  I'm a waste.

But I had no reason to, and I'm happy here, and I am carefully trying to...

Trying to find the smallest reasons in the shallows of the river, rounded like fish eyes, to hold close to me and tell me the things we're meant to be doing.  It all could've been swimming there, in the river, forever, and I stopped watching because I was distracted and my quiet days of watching became lonely days of having nothing to watch.

I want to swallow the heart of this unmitigated rage.  I want to murder myself the way a stranger would, because it isn't enough to just die.  I want to be erased completely and washed away.  I don't want my bones to live on, but I want to stop existing.

You drew up from inside me some girl I no longer feel I'm capable of being - your twin.  But I am her, even right now, and why I feel I'm not her is because I don't understand who I should continue to be.  I don't understand the limitations of her, and if they're mine.  I just don't know who I am, and haven't for months.

I don't know... what the fuck... I'm even capable of.  And it's this idea that makes me feel both alive and dead at the same time.  That maybe I've surpassed myself, or failed us all, and I can't find my way back to my self-righteousness which would allow me to prove that I'm not a waste of time.

And Annik's reasons are that if I have to work so hard to prove I'm not, then to leave her alone and let her just be one.  Because there is too much at stake for her which she can't lose; my voice of all things.  Of all the fucking things, isn't she the one who is worth it to stop this need to change into the long-awaited butterfly we doubt so much the existence of?

To just stop trying to be and be.  To just stop trying to be and be.  I want to cut out my heart.  I don't know who I am.  You would only ever give me one answer.

I can't reach for anything inside myself to make anything I am feeling or saying make sense, except for you.  There's a lamp in the warehouse.  Did I push it over, or did I change the bulb?  Is it cold or hot?  Did I leave or did we stay?  Is there anything here but nonsense?

Torn in half,

Annik

Thoughts About John

John-

Valentine

Sophia

Augustina

Elsie

Georgia

Alice

Shiloh

Juniper

Hesperus

Coney Island 5

Brad left a Valentine's Day gift for me under the bumper cars.  A red music box, filled with a necklace and other things he'd probably found at the bottom of his pockets.  The necklace had 3 lockets attached to the chain, with room for six photos.  I wore it into the tunnel, where he'd tried to wrap it around his fingers while we kissed.

Outside the Tunnel of Love, Clyde was waiting for me as the storm came in off the Atlantic.  The night sky purpled to an unnatural color and the clouds flashed with occasional high lightning.  I knew he was meeting Rosie for their own secret rituals tonight, which is why he was wearing black.  Clyde might let a green or blue t-shirt into his rotation now and then, but when he's going to see Rosie, he wears the plain and faded black of their misspent youth.  His hair blew around in the cool air, like it always does, hiding his black eyes.

I can never decide if I've had the fewest conversations with Clyde, or the most, out of anyone else alive.  But it's the same as trying to decide that about myself.  Have I really spoken back to the voice I call my conscience, or have I never done so?  Thoughts don't narrate themselves any more than they are formed by language, but instead something more primitive like a collection of the senses.  The same goes for Clyde, as the boy who knows all and sees all.  Is he that way because I told him everything, or showed him?  Or did it just happen like a thought happens, to both of us at once?

Clyde stood on the beach, a black shape against the eerie purple storm and the gray berm of sand.  He didn't say he was waiting for me, but I knew that he was.  I didn't tell him I would come down the to the sand, but he knew I would.  The dim light reflected down on all of Coney Island casting it in shades of black and gray and violet, and the wind filled the atmosphere with an expectation of something terrible approaching.  The park was empty, but for us.

"I'll be right back," I told Brad, and he crossed his arms and leaned against the metal railing outside the ride, clad in his white thermal shirt and red baseball cap.  He squinted at me in jealousy, every inch the good ole boy we all know he can become.

"Alright, but don't take too long because we gotta get goin' an' we got stuff to do."

Behind him, emerging from the Tunnel with Nick wilting delicate under his arm, Adam threw me black glower.  His tie was undone and his fly was down, so I had a hard time feeling that sorry for him. 

"I need to speak with you, Evelyn," he accused me, the tone is his voice plainly implying I was avoiding him.

"I'm just going to say hi to Clyde," I shrugged, as if both of them were overreacting and there was nothing dangerous at all about Clyde; no dimensions we could vanish into, no memory spells he could cast to erase both Brad and Adam from existence entirely, no sexual prowess he possessed which they did not.

"Well, we'll wait here," Adam grunted, his heavy brows meeting over his eyes as he leaned against the same railing Brad had his weight against, Brad taller by an inch and a half, Adam stiffer by 10 degrees.  Nick stole away, judiciously silent and sparing me his sarcasm.

I met Clyde on the beach, and I've written what we discussed a few times now, at first descriptive passages explaining all the things his double-speak meant, and then a version which explained none of it, and I finally distilled it down to just our dialogue.  It would have made a good blog entry and provided a nice natural break in events.

But the words he said don't matter.  Or anyway, they wouldn't now, or in their translation.  Like anything Clyde says, they'll matter little by little, over time, a second too late.

We talked about love.  That's all he ever talks about.  At the end of the conversation, he smiled at me.  Clyde's smile is really more of a humorless grin on a skeleton where only his eyes get soft.  I knew when he smiled, something terrible was about to happen, and the beach disappeared, and I was lost in the desert without warning, and alone.

"It's supposed to remind people of a pussy," Joshua explains to me, and I roll my eyes.

"It is not."

Joshua takes every available inch of the benches along the beach at Coney.  The canvas of his jeans always looks tortured to it's limit as he stretches his wide legs apart to make room for his stomach on his lap.  His wide face is unshaven, and his hair is long enough and tangled with wild curls enough he's tied it back like a pirate.  The buttons of his flannel strain, and the sunlight is pulled thin through the clouds, and the entire moment is drawn long to contain his size.

Joshua is really big, and he laughs really loud at my embarrassment.

"It's called the Tunnel of Love," he reiterates to me, like I'll suddenly believe his point or even want to acknowledge it.  "It's all dark and there's water and it's really warm and damp cuz I put in those fog machines."

"But I mean... that's not like why they were invented," I argue, and his laugh echoes along the beach.

"Yes it is!"

I try and fail to squish beside him against the armrest of the bench and end up leaning against his shoulder and sitting halfway on his knee.  Sometimes I think Joshua's main accomplishment with his size was taking up available space so girls would have to sit on his lap.

"You're too fat to fit here," he teases me, and gently pinches me along the ribs.

"Okay, but is it like X-rated?" I ask him, and I feel him breathe deep and sigh with disappointment.

"No.  I thought about it, though.  Just making the inside a lot of porn."

"Why didn't you?"

He considers before answering me, touching his lips again.

"I thought it would be weird to pose all those animatronics like that.  What if I like it?  Does that make me a pervert?"

"Yes," I tell him, and poke him back in the gut.

"It's called Love Through the Ages.  You'll like it," he promises me.  "And the mauve is nice.  It's like a really classy mauve."

"It's pussy-mauve," I remind him.

Coney Island 4

The morning of Valentine's Day in Coney Island was tense with plans.  Valentine's Day is Joshua's favorite holiday, and so when we woke up, it was to a cotton-candy sky the color of pink champagne, and while he denied it, we all knew it was on purpose.

He bounded around from person to person, casting his huge shadow and letting us all know, "I re-did the Tunnel of Love!  You have to bring your Valentine!"

To which the members of the House all began to eye one another suspiciously.  While no one would mind any random pairings, really, there was a certain urgency to not be the last two picked.  Glances were made sidelong, assumptions made, and arrangements quietly finalized.

While Valentine is maybe synonymous most days with sweetheart, to John and Brad and me, it has a different meaning which takes on a more sinister pall.  It's the same as murderer or mercenary, and it's a secret name we call each other.  I first whispered it into Brad's ear just after Joshua left for the last time.

Everything was dark and painful and hopeless, and Brad's eyes were cold and distant, and he kept smiling at me as if we were stranded in the most romantic place he could think of.  He started wearing black that winter, and he stole a red leather jacket from a women's Macy's.  The winter we divorced.  I whispered "Valentine," into his ear while we fucked on frozen ground in the literal middle of Nowhere.

"Because he steals hearts," Rosie agreed with me, her hands folded patient in her lap.

But Clyde's always called me Valentine.  And because it's Clyde, he's never explained why, except to give me a poetic impression that it's because I'm every wolf's favorite food.

Everyone knows about Clyde and me, and everyone knows that Adam and I were married on Valentine's Day, and everyone knows that the killer in Brad is named Valentine, and everyone knows the killer in John is named Valentine, and everyone knew that this Valentine's Day, Brad had asked me to be his.  So it wasn't any surprise when Joshua announced to us all to choose our Valentines, and everyone broke eye contact with me like they were afraid I was going to call on them.

"You're gonna go to the Tunnel with me, right Evie?" Brad muttered, unromantic and uncertain at seven in the morning.

"Yeah," I agreed with him, as brightly as I could, while I Adam rolled his eyes into his morning coffee at the picnic tables near the boardwalk.

"Yes, just pencil our wedding in anywhere," he growled, and stalked off to make his own date.

Not all the glances made sidelong at the other members of Gray House were romantic.  Some were friendly and some were murderous and some were curious.  Joshua encouraged us all morning to express whatever kind of love we wanted to, and everyone saw Matthew's smile get more and more twisted the more he considered the idea.

He managed to catch Dean's eye and Dean blushed to a deep reddish-purple.

Drama lined his mouth heavy with red lipstick into a cupid's bow to kiss Joshua's cheek.

Rosie and I decided to gift everyone a Valentine's Day music box with a special song inside.

Nick made shy advances toward everyone, part of a kind of Yom Kippur he engages in yearly, turning valentines into apologies.

Drama started saving love songs on his computer for a comeback Radio Nowhere.

The morning unwound, slowly and as we expected it to.

Wave after wave.

Under the pink clouds.

Until Grady began to cry.

It started quietly at first.  I'm sure only John heard, tying his boots at the foot of the cot he and Grady had slept in, having fallen asleep over whiskey and an olive green model Indian.  I'm sure John felt the same chill the rest of us feel when a child dies and they meet the Nowhere Man at the Crossroads.

"There, now," I"m sure John whispered in the dim light of Grady's store front.  "There, there, now, it's all right now."

And I'm sure Grady, both present in Coney Island and at the dirt crossing of the dead, would've responded to John in Spanish, calling him the word for Gravedigger, and told him students were dying.

"It's at his home," Clyde told me, approaching from the ski-ball arcade.  He looked dirty enough to be homeless, and thoughtfully drew a clean streak on his cheek with a finger wet in his mouth; the universal symbol for tears.

"What is?" I asked him.  "Whose home?"

"Ladybird, Ladybird," he whispered, sitting down next to me on the picnic bench.

"Fly away home?" I asked him, and he nodded, his dark hair hanging like a curtain between us.

Your house is on fire, your children are gone, I finished the rest of the rhyme in my thoughts.

"Heh," Clyde chuffed from behind his hair.  He smelled like salt ground into filthy clothes, and the slow fade of mildew from somewhere now exposed to the air.  He turned his head to look at me through mats of hair, tangled and coarse with seawater.  I could see through gaps in the strings his two black eyes.

"Hey.  Fox.  Can you dig it?"

The first reports of the Parkland shooting came through a few minutes later the way anything comes in from the "real" world.  Like my mom yelling at me to do the dishes in the middle of a hard level.  Like the morning alarm going off.  Like the jolt in my veins of adrenaline reminding me that I'm alive and that is a terribly temporary state.

I should take this moment to say that despite appearances, the politics of Gray House differ wildly, and we make room for all kinds of contradictions of circumstance and spirit.  No one has to be any one thing, and so we aren't ever really one thing.  What happened that morning has been editorialized and commented on and disputed and even wholly refuted, by us and the world at large.  But in the moment that it happened, we all shared the same opinion, which was that we prefer living children to dead ones.

Grady and Clyde know the most about the dead, and so it's them who conspire over school bus accidents, church shootings, casualties of war, and victims of abuse.  It's them who get tired the fastest and collude about how to best change the world, because they shake hands with them all, passing through the Wasteland into one of the other worlds.  Grady takes their hands, and shakes from them their alternate destines, to put back into the hearts of the little unborn babies.

It's romantic, I suppose, but Grady is a peace-loving man, and is sometimes confused about these very human acts of war.  Clyde seems to weather it better, but on some days I think he prefers war anyway.

A reason to put his boots on in the morning, Lucky reminds me in the back of my head.  Right, a mission, sure.  Grady's got the will and the time and the words for all the diplomacy he wants to enact.  Clyde is an inelegant creature made for vengeance.  More than one of our arguments has led to him kicking down a door.  But the mission for Clyde is getting the door down.  The mission for Grady is getting you to open it yourself.

Grady went down the beach to watch the ocean that morning, and mourn the dead.  And yes, he does the same for children who starve in drought and famine, and children who are never reported missing but get drowned in rivers for disabilities and every other terrible thing.  Some days he can stand it, and some days he can't, and maybe it's because it was Valentine's Day that he needed to watch the waves awhile, but I watched him watch the waves, and I talked to Lucky about all our fights.

In Gray House, I've fought the most with Grady.  They were all vicious in their honesty, and unrelenting.  He's stubborn and refuses to stop the course of his argument once it's begun.  I told all this to Lucky, who never witnessed them.

"He's got a temper," I told him as we strolled along the beach together.  Lucky's hair was greasy enough the wind barely lifted it.  "It's a quick one but I don't think he was ever cruel."

"He's got anger enough in his heart now," Lucky mused.  "That's what turns a man to cruelty, often enough."

"Well, Grady's not a man," I reminded him.  "So maybe he's not even angry in his heart."

"Sure but he is," Lucky disputed me, and turned me to look at him, and put both his hands on my shoulders.  "Listen close and you can hear it."

While I looked at Grady, Lucky whispered in my ear all the things Grady's heart was saying to us.  That he never understood hate and now he might just accept it instead of question it.  That to confront another person was always his path to understanding, but what good was that path when no one was willing to take it.  That he'd hurt Jack by this and was never given the chance to explain.  That the hardest thing about love and peace was all the work it took.  That he understood sometimes the violence which compelled people to do something harmful to make someone else look or see.  That he wanted an army of soldiers for love.  That his heart was broken and could only be mended with some kind of action.

"What kind of action?" I asked Lucky, and he lit a cigarette while considering his answer.

"Well," he thought, and picked tobacco off his tongue.  "Maybe he wants to be War Chief."

Coney Island 3

Dear Jack,

Because a man needs a mission, Lucky tells me.

The Warriors are born of the necessity of that mission.  There's no need for the Warriors to be in Coney Island until we feel like it's our land, and we want to protect it from outsiders.  Until we know in ourselves that there's something special about Joshua worth defending.

I'm sorry about what happened with Joshua.  Maybe you would've been able to stay if things went differently first with me, and then with Joshua, and then with Rosie.  Maybe everything would've been different.  We really couldn't know what we were getting ourselves into, but there was no way to tell you that back then and have you believe in it.  There was no reason to believe in us.

In a way, it's good you left.  Joshua is home now, and safe, but he's a scar on my heart a mile long, like where the wing of Buddy Holly's plane tore the frozen ground of Clear Lake.  You don't want a scar like that.  After you left, me and Rosie probably both had them, but we kept accidentally opening them up again, over and over.

When she said she was going to die if we kept at it, I shut up all my love for him and my hope for him into a little box, and I buried it inside me.  I remember she screamed it at me one night: "Joshua is never coming back."  So I chose to believe that, and move on, so we could both survive.  I guess you decided that, too, but on your own out there.

I'm glad you weren't home when my brother died because I think I would've gotten pretty arrogant with you and driven you away anyway.  I'm glad you weren't home when Joshua left those other times because we would've let you destroy anything you wanted to.

Hey, you want to hear something funny I just realized?  I always drive you away and Rosie always lets you leave.  Ain't we got fun?

I never had the right idea about you, Jack, but at least I was man enough to admit it.  You've never had the right idea about me, and you walk around with your head up your ass thinking the whole world is wrong and you're the only right one.  The whole world is out to get you and you're the only sane one.  The whole world is going to kill you and you've got to fight me to exist.

Maybe you do.  I was the one who shot Joshua, after all.  But who cares, right?  Who cares because this is the house where dead boys don't stay dead and with the right combination of words, maybe you could make Matthew love his way out of hell and back to you?

Yeah, maybe.  But I don't know.  It feels like we didn't account for... death being fine for the dead and ultimately damaging for the living.  We couldn't live here with Joshua, and just knowing that about myself makes that hole appear in me, not anything I did because of it.  I just couldn't love him enough to believe it was going to all work out.

But on the other hand, you never knew what I knew.  You never heard what Clyde said to me that night on the cliffs, when he confessed to me the truth of Gray House and all it's occupants.  Do you want to know what he said?  I've read it over and over and over again, just so I'll never forget.  On the cold cliff-side, he blinked back tears and he said:

Got a secret. Theeeeeese walls, theeeeeese bones, theeeeese cracks, theeeeeese skies, if they're empty they're full with let's do a little regret. Too hard to climb so tie it to a chair n beat the shitoutofit. We think we're men but we're children, fox. Okay?

You and I always wanted to believe that Clyde was the grown-up, but he never was.  And I guess it kind of makes it worse to think about Joshua's innocence at the same time I think about how he had to stop existing.  It kind of makes me wonder what happened to my own innocence.  We're children, aren't we Jack?  We get so stupid and careless with people's hearts.  Everything you did to Clyde - it makes it worse you did it to someone innocent.

But you couldn't face it, and I did.  I don't know if that makes me braver.  I think it makes me more masochistic, and maybe that's the same thing.  What I do know is that I came out on the other side of it knowing Joshua - maybe all of them - are worth defending.  Sometimes I feel I know it best because while it was me who pulled the trigger so many times, I cleaned up the blood afterward.  I buried the bodies.  I tried to bargain with God.  And that's how I became a Warrior.

-Evelyn

Coney Island 2

The streets of Coney Island at night buzzed with low whispers and insect movement.  In intervals, the train clattered through.  I went to sleep there at night with Brad under the bumper cars in the park, and the neighborhoods beyond it shimmered in the streetlights with something less innocent, bordering on the sinister.  Joshua's own unrest, maybe, and all the ways he's a derelict tow truck driver, a street magician, and an unscrupulous porn star.

The fact that things turned on us outside of the park did not go unnoticed by the Gray Family.  The seaside resort town could be as glittering of a gem as the sapphire set in a high school ring on the finger of a virgin, and embody just as much romantic and wholesome fun.  But it was still the drain for the cesspools of Brooklyn, the train bringing out knot after knot of listless teens and bored junkies.  After all, fun comes in all shapes and kinds, and Joshua is its master.

But maybe I said all that already, in the mention of the Rough Rider.  Invoking the name alone takes us down the rabbit hole of terrifying youtube videos and prickling sense of dread that is someone's idea of fun, and not mine.

It's in this way that angels are terrifying - the way I might call their amorality.  Rides are Fun, sex is Fun, games are Fun, candy is Fun, drugs are Fun, pranks are Fun, and Joshua's innocence will never distinguish a difference between them.  So there are syringes in the dumpsters on Neptune Street.

It didn't take long for something to overtake the mood of the Gray boys.

Gray House is a family, but Rosie and I are outnumbered two against ten, and it's easy to forget that while they're brothers, the Gray boys are also wild dogs.

They run through the bayou this way, yapping and biting one another's necks, their social strata unsure and undefined.  Is Clyde in charge?  Is Grady?  Is Brad, today?  Is Adam?  Jack comes home and always tries to make a guess, but what he doesn't account for is this - is Coney.  Jack thinks the social order of dogs is about power.  The Gray boys know it's about Fun.

Slowly, as the nights fell over the carnival lights and the midway games, they each started to chase their own Fun, the way a pack of dogs would, crawling out of the wet alleyways and smelling the air and running fast and deft on silent feet.  Rosie and I watched what they did, from the safety of the second tower loop of the Cyclone, our feet swinging out into black air.

Adam strolled the boardwalk half as casual and his ironclad adulthood would normally allow, itching the insides of his arms and lolling like the sun into the sea.  Brad bit his nails to nothing watching the girls on the beach and one by one, they began to disappear.  Clyde ventured to the far points of the beaches and slept close enough to the water to be drowned by the tide.  Drama vanished into the mechanical heart of the carousel and the songs on the wind.  Grady's hands got caked in layers of paint and engine grease, and his eyes hollowed from lack of sleep as he nightly rode the M train.  John watched the tourists with the ravenous glassy eyes of an unseen voyeur, and they, too, began to disappear.  Joshua made the mood dangerously summerish keeping the air warm and the rides running all night.  Matthew stalked the dark warehouses and store fronts for things to steal.  Nicholas glutted himself on food and beer and sex in the park bathrooms with strangers.

And something happened to Dean.  I've been trying to say what happened to him, exactly, for three weeks now.

Dean is the most mysterious and vexing person in Gray House.  At the drop of a hat, he is one thing and then another, one person and then another, and beneath all the people he can become is a shining white marble statue of blank-eyed perfection without personality.  Dean dresses himself in people, but the "real" part of him is as of yet unknown beyond the cool and self-contained emojis of his vapid text messaging.

Only Rosie will ever really know or understand what's inside all that marble.  But of course, she's still trying to get there, like the rest of us.

I feel like I know him.  I've watched him a long time, in order to know him at all, and I think I've seen the real him before, but it's his place to say who he is.  I think I also understand the dance he does, and who he adorns himself in, and when.  I think I understand the reasons he has for hiding himself.  I think I know him best of all, but I guess mothers are like that.  And how I know him - through mostly observation - means that I'll never love him beyond this place where I've become his caretaker.

The one part of Dean I could always count on to explain himself to me is Lucky.  Lucky is the most human and charming part of Dean.  In many ways, he's the simplest and most communicative part.  The trouble with Lucky is that he is either mistaken for the "real" Dean, which he emphatically is not, or he's seen as existing for the purpose of being charming and communicative, over the cold ice of Dean's real heart, and that makes him seem wicked.  It makes him a lie to mask an obvious truth.

The truth is...

The truth is that Lucky exists for a very special reason, that is also not my business to tell.

I had seen Lucky here and there in the park, usually at night.  Lucky looks just like Dean, but doesn't dress like him.  Lucky is the nickname earned because of his heavy accent and Irish charm, as well as the way things seem to turn out right when he's around.  When you see Dean, you'll know it's Lucky by the sound of his heavy, war-torn black boots and the smell of his sweat.  While Dean's hair is clean and highlighted and trimmed, Lucky's is long and dirty and hangs in his eyes.  Dean's movements are rigidly executed with a dancer's precision.  Lucky's shoulders are lax and usually dropped in a laugh.  Dean's eyes are warm, always, and forgiving.  Lucky's eyes turn both cold and angry.

See, he's a person, seemingly designed to shrug off all that which is familiar in the angelic sharp corners of Dean.  The antithesis of the Dean we know, I might even go so far to say.

What makes him Lucky here is evident by his red leather vest, sewn with the familiar insignia of a winged skull, declaring him a Warrior.

I want to be a Warrior, too.  Maybe we all do.  So somehow, Lucky became this voice in my head, explaining the story of us to me while I watched it unfold.

"Look there," I heard him whisper, and I saw four of the Gray boys, ignoring one another as they went about their business of Fun.  Clyde, Grady, Joshua, and Brad.

"D'ye see what I see, just over there?" he asked me, and I looked.

"What?"

And he whispered on, his hand light on my shoulder.

"Ah, so you want me to just tell you.  Alright, alright.  See, there's four men waiting for the word of God to fall on them like lightning."

Clyde watched the ocean.  Grady painted a message onto a wall.  Joshua threw old hot dog buns to a stray dog.  Brad carved his name into a telephone pole.

"How do you know?" I asked him, unable to resist throwing my own voice into the same lilt as his, and become Irish myself.  I felt him laugh from where he stood just behind me.

"Well, miss, I know because I know.  Can you not smell the fire in them?"

"I only smell the water."

"Oh my, that's what's got them restless," he told me.  "They need a purpose.  A mission.  A man needs a mission, I'll have you know."

"I didn't know."

He squeezed my shoulder with his dirty hand, and I felt him smile.

"Yes, he does.  Something is about to happen, you'll see."

That was on February 13th.

I Forget Where We Were Going

The open air around John's scout is warm and wet, and Matthew does not object to slipping into the backseat among the rat's nest of blankets now stuck with twigs from the last windstorm. John quietly slides his trumpet case beside him, and climbs in.

We follow the taillights of Brad's Fiero, which swerves across 2 lanes of the freeway, prompted I'm sure by Grady's nimble hands or hot breath. John swears under his breath.

"Christ."

Matthew ignores the toss of his hair in the wind, gazing over the night like he's been cast in a melancholy music video. His heavy brows furrow over his pale green eyes, striking in their contrast. He curls a damp sweatshirt of John's around his bare forearms, the missing finger on his left hand making a gap in the shadows my brain recognizes immediately as one of the hundred ways he's been maimed that I have yet to get used to.

His shadow against the headlights of every car behind us is gracefully punctuated by his nose, an Athenian bust of frowning disinterest at Brad's entire childhood of antics.

Adam catches up to us on Grady's bike, flipping up the visor to yell.

"Evelyn!" he shouts, as if he were apologizing to me like Marlon Brando. He's hugged tight in Grady's black jacket, and I see a smile in his eyes I don't return and blush around instead.

"Uh. Your chariot is here, Eve," Matthew snorts, and John glances at me, concerned. It's the concern of an older brother who doesn't approve of my date; obviously shown up drunk to our parents house.

"You're gonna get yourself killed!" I shriek at him, and the twinkle in his eyes becomes malevolent.

"What?" he asks, and the front of the motorcycle waivers as he turns his head to me and back again to the road.

"GO AWAY!" I scream at him, and he gestures to the seat behind him.

"GET ON!" he laughs, and Matthew groans in complete disgust.

"Fuuuuuck."

I hit the dashboard with my arm, and John's trumpet is thrown against the back of his seat as he slams the brakes, and Adam flies past us, veering a course around the Fiero.

"What the fuck?" Matthew yells, and I look at John, whose mouth is pressed into a line that is as white as his skin.

"Brake check," he nods at the Fiero, and from the driver's side there is a clearly-seen middle finger hovering out of the window.

John accelerates enough to put us on the bumper of the Fiero, and repeats calmly twice that he is going to run it off the road over Matthew's cackles before I convince him to slow down again.

The rest of the trip to Lafayette was uneventful.

For Jack

Jack,

The night we got the closest we've ever gotten to having sex, you told me you'd asked a woman in a bar, "What are you, inside?"

It was one of the few ways, you assured me, that I'd ruined you for anyone else.  What fun is a woman if she doesn't really know the answer to that question, after all?  What fun is a woman who doesn't take the time to consider a great many other questions about herself, for that matter?  I think you liked about me that I always took the time to have an answer for you, whether the question was, "Do you ever feel like a ghost?" or "Do you like to feel afraid?"

Of course, the problem with that is I always took the time to have an answer for you, and those were not always answers that you liked.

Do you remember when we took that drive...

You've insisted to me that you're a number of things, inside.  That the chemical makeup of your soul is 5 or 6 different places, depending on your mood, your gender, your like or dislike of me personally.  Sometimes, I can feel you crawling away from me, trying to differentiate yourself from me.  Others, I feel you making yourself an extension of me, accepting that we've always been brothers.

The other day, Rosie broke her Vitus chain.  It was hanging on a Glade plug-in by the bathroom, and she pulled it out to use her curling iron, and things lined up, and the chain popped when it touched the live metal, and melted.  Every time you break a piece of jewelry, I know the superstition that creeps along like a crack in your heart to mean all things are lost and nothing is sacred.  Her face looked the same.  I forget why I wanted to tell you that.

The difference between you and me is that I know we can't choose who we are.  John didn't choose the scars on his face, Brad didn't choose the cruelty in his heart, and I didn't choose to be what I am inside, which is the ruin of Eden.

Last night, I dreamed you were trying to convince me Eden was my name.  I woke up too early, and Brad was fighting the sleeping bag to wrestle it off his chest as he overheated.

We sleep in the low cavern under the stage set for the bumper cars.  There's a hollow place beneath the platform, snaked with cords and punctuated with support beams.  It makes me feel like we're sleeping under the porch of a house he and I never lived in, where he teaches me how to hide from the other boy soldiers and not be afraid of spiders.  Light spills in from the painted garden lattice shielding us from the rest of the park.

We picked Coney Island because it's the inside of Joshua; the chemical composition of his soul.  It's his moods which make it summer or off-season.  His appetite which forces us all to subsist on Paul's Daughter's hot dogs.  Joshua is a carnival inside, but he's all the wiring and hidden compartments and graffiti underneath the veneer of the carnival, too.  He's the Rough Rider roller coaster, sure, but he's also the 6 people it killed.

We came here to write our second book, part of it taking place inside Joshua, here in the dream of Coney Island.  After this, who knows where we'll go?

I liked best when you told me you were an airport inside.  I liked it because it made the most sense, but like usual with you, all things you told me about yourself were done in defense to obstruct the real you.  Every nice and beautiful thing, you turned against me somehow.  No, Jack, it's not really an airport.  It's just a Polaroid of all the things you wish you had, and watched me take from you, right?  The beautiful friendly stewardess in you I once thought was my best friend is really the painted Stepford denial of your humanity.  Her smile is gritted with self-loathing, and loathing of me.

You let Rosie fall in love with pilot after pilot, each one slapping her ass as she exited your cockpit, vowing never to call her again.  Handsome pilots, who know all her favorite songs and use them to seem more compassionate than you ever are in practice.

I've never seen you care.  Not about anything.  Not really.

So it stands to reason you've never been able to find yourself inside.  You'd have to care first, or really want to inhabit yourself.  You'd have to know you were magic, and stop relying on all your lovers to tell you that you are.

-E

P.S. I still haven't forgiven you for last time.

Coney Island 1

Brad and I spent almost two weeks in Denton before change came to Gray House.  We spent mostly quiet nights together before Rosie and I got tired of our long days and went looking for our newest suicide pact.

I don't exactly fear change, but I do fear consequence, and sometimes I wonder if there's a difference.  I don't think there's anything wrong with change, but I think it should be reasoned, and measured, and weighed against the probable outcomes of various alternatives.  Rosie takes a decidedly different approach: she doesn't decide change, God does.  So there's nothing we can do and if it's time to move on, it's time.

I felt the beads inside the great kaleidoscope of the House moving in small and incremental clicks with Rosie's sharp eyes on the horizon, and I thought about Jack.

Jack had once said to me that Rosie would always allow everything to change, and often for the worse.  Stirring the pot, and creating drama.  The obvious fact always seemed to escape Jack that when living in Gray House with those beings who make and unmake worlds, knitting would never be the nightly ritual, and Jack so wanted to knit.  I think what Jack always wanted was for his story to end, and maybe that's what I wanted with Brad, in Denton.  To parcel up all our loose ends into some immovable thing I was allowed to study and understand for the rest of time.

I think that's called a happy ending, but I almost don't remember anymore.  I remember watching Jack struggle with the idea of being an endless creature of will.  So... you get married and then... you like, have a baby... and then... the baby grows up...

More often than not, Jack conflated change with conflict and I think that's how and why he broke so many of our hearts.  He would knit himself into the definitions of a relationship under glass, unchanging, and then the only way forward was out.

Well, Brad and I had gotten married, and we'd even had a baby.  That baby had grown up.  When Rosie said she wanted to make a change at home, I wanted to throw my arms skyward and ask, "Well, what NOW, JACK?" as if he could stand in the place of God and tell me from the outside what to do next.

Rosie and I had decided we needed to start the second Gray book, and we decided what it would be.  But growing the bones of a book has always been easy for us.  The meat and the magic is a little harder to agree on, in terms of how our artistic vision varies.  We decided to hold the house hostage until the book was complete, as incentive to write it.  Where we were held would change as the book was written, but the first location, decided by secret ballot, was Coney Island.

One by one, we all submitted to the pact.  We were allowed to go to the House proper and the surrounding few acres, and Coney Island, and no other place.  When we vowed to uphold the pact, I crossed my fingers behind my back.

"It's okay, Evie," Brad assured me.  "We're gonna have a lot of fun here, you and me."

I took steady breaths.  Brad and I exist outside of the flash of the bomb of us.  Brad and I exist in Denton, but we can exist anywhere.  We can exist, if we try.

Coney Island is a 4-by-1/2 mile stretch of New York residue persisting just above the surface of the gray Atlantic.  Each season there smears into the next with filthy clouds and low fog breathing reminders of the days the land was covered in reeds, and not filigreed park benches.

The weight of Manhattan has always terrified me, and the listless way in which the skyscrapers sweep nonchalant into the harbor and just end, there.  Life as we know it might end there, with the industry of civilization trailing off into the sea like an unfinished thought.  Manhattan holds its cityscape like an overflowing handful of jewels.  Brooklyn makes more visual sense, all its structures shrugging off responsibility as they creep toward the water.

The park itself is suspended in a timeless place, where all your childhood memories of vacations take place, over and over again, on a sun-bleached reel-to-reel.  I stood in the low morning mist of the overcast dawn with Brad, looking at the slow and endless turn of the Wonder Wheel, knowing the mist would lift to expose a perfect sunlit afternoon, and felt the loneliness of the cold off-season all at once.  Every day, like Sunday.

When we passed the Wonder Wheel, it felt more creature than machine; maybe the seaweed twisted gears and cogs that keep a dream like summer alive to begin with.  As long as it's turning, deep under the earth new dreams are being made of first kisses.

Brad's dress shoes hit the boardwalk with a certain sound I know only from movies.  He keeps his eyes on distant horizons when we walk, dropping his head and skewing his shoulders for a single step, and then pushing all his hair back when he's righted himself.  He puts his hands in his pockets.  He feels easy and unafraid.

"Most of us are picking some place in the park to go to sleep," he tells me.

"But we're going to stay together, right?" I ask him, right out loud, because fuck all these politics we've been chaining ourselves to.

"Yeah," he says, his voice softening as he takes his dip in his stride, and pushes back his hair.  "Yeah, I want you to."

I breathe a little easier and I feel the Family moving around to the places I know they'll go.  Rosie vanishes under the boardwalk; Grady becomes little more than his can of spray-paint, blasting the walls with pointed but bewildering questions like, "HAVE YOU DRIVEN A FORD LATELY?"; John sighs and slips between buildings and alleys, to Disappear Completely.

I sometimes wonder how much a certain place can alter who I am on a fundamental level.  Do I change completely, from room to room?  If it were possible anywhere, it would be possible in Gray House.  We feel it intrinsically, and instinctively.  Who I am in Coney Island - who we all become - would be influenced by the summer on the air and the anonymous promises of any theme park or carnival.  As I walk with Brad, I can feel a change in our shoulders from the tight vigilance of Denton to something easier, and younger.  Something as lean as the jot of land it stands on; a type of hunger born into someone who never leaves the same 4 mile stretch he's inherited.

While we walk along the boardwalk, the steel frames of Luna Park shift in the rising sun to the wooden beams of the Steeplechase, and back again.  Hotels shiver through the heat like mirages, and graffiti marks painted and sun-bleached concrete tables outside of the ice cream shop.  The corrugated metal protecting all the store-fronts and midway games begins to roll up, a little at a time, and the music stuck in my head all night is made substantial on the breeze.

"It's the happiest prison on Earth," I tell Brad, and he laughs.

Mixtery

Ready Able Jones cracks his knuckles in the cold, and remains undaunted.  He holds the stare of others for too long, and is wondering when he does if he is falling in love.  While he is tall, he is soft-spoken and thinks his ears are too big for his head.  When asked, he tells people he's shy, but this is because he's easily embarrassed.  He has a long and accurate memory, making him impossibly frustrating to argue with.  He's blunt but charismatic.  He apologizes too much.  His legs are too long for his pants.

Mission District Majors has hair that hangs in her eyes.  She loves to dance, spinning like a top outside with her arms out, looking upward at the sun.  She spins fast enough to convince anyone around her she is creating gravity, her filthy shoes not missing a single step.  She becomes an abstract fan shape - three wide circles of hair and arms and skirt that come to dangerous points.  When she falls down, she's spun too hard and hits the ground with a thud, and throws up, and cries.  She smokes too much pot.  Everyone is in love with her.

All Sparks Barrow is sarcastic when she isn't stoic.  She touches all things carefully, as if they were birds or kittens.  She walks with careful feet and remains quiet when other people are taking.  She has nightmares which cause her terrible moods and bouts of distrust.  She bites her fingernails.  Her humor is sweet when she feels safe, and she loves to make people laugh.  She loves the ocean.

Suburban War Fitzpatrick has a straight spine and haunted eyes.  He acts older than he is.  He gets... filled up with something which forces him to cry, and it seems like it could be anything - sweaters in a store, ants, a sunset.  When he talks, there's an urgency to his tone that means he doesn't have a lot of time here, and he needs to make you understand something before he leaves.  He's the oldest and feels the least amount of connection to this time and place.  He knows they're Themysciran.

Leif Erikson Room is a small and dark-haired boy with nervous hands.  The sound of his voice in his head is a lonesome echo over empty space.  He is a slight, tightly wound instrument oriented to exactness.  He crawls his small body into the gaps of soil underground to find somewhere warm and damp.  He crawls between appliances, to reconnect their wires.  He wants to become a tattoo artist.  His skin is plaster white.  He has terrible tantrums, usually completely warranted.

Stella Blue Babet is the color reflected off a wet street, in which one finally finds their keys.  Stella Blue is a fox.  She ties what she's foxed into her hair.  She makes her own clothes, and wears sweaters for pants and loves to dance.  She has a slow and quiet smile.  She is not as beautiful as some of her siblings - her jaw a little square, her eyes darkly circled - but she never wears makeup and her eyes are kind and sleepy.  She is very very short and wears ridiculously tall shoes to compensate.

Jefferson Torch Flynn has the most contagious laugh.  He is freckled and looks like an affable boy, an overalls kind of boy, but his heart has mischief in it.  He believes in God devoutly, but has some flexible interpretations of sin.

Free Translator Corduroy

Pinball Wizard Kettering

April Come She Will Smith

Denton, midnight

There are some things we can't know until the universe or God or Fate puts us in a position to see it for ourselves.  Rosie calls those moments the Truth, and she talks about it like it's coming for us all, looming huge and inevitable on the horizon.  If I don't believe in something - and I usually don't - she'll just shrug it off and tell me the Truth will come out someday.  So I don't think Brad loves me?  I will eventually, because at some point in my future, the columns of my life will collapse one by one to reveal the single moment when I'm stranded with that love and the certainty of it's endurance.

She tells me all the time that's the reason she's not worried when Jack lies.  Those lies will either come true or they won't.  It's not for us to say, and it's between God and Jack.

Living in Gray House, those moments come for me all the time, usually in a sudden realization of what someone has been talking about all along.  My cursory understanding and ability to empathize can take me all the way to the front door of some idea, but it's something supernatural which shoves me inside.  For me, it's far less likely that I would be bathed in the wondrous blah blah blah of Brad's love, and more likely that I would feel it from the inside out; the twisting rattlesnakes of his affections for me with all their strikes and dangerous rattles, infecting every other woman he meets with a specific poison.

I explain all this to Adam as we drive Bev to the house in Denton.  He's reapplied his layer of suit over bare skin, donning only the essential pants and shirt and jacket, leaving the underwear and tie in his bedroom.  He rolls a coin between his fingers as I drive, his arm lazing out of the window.  Rosie and I quit smoking over a year ago, and the chain-smoking Gray Boys had done their best to cut back to a more respectable amount.  Adam's crutch had become fidgeting with a silver dollar he'd been given by his uncle Jim when he was fourteen or so, who swore under drunken oath it had been forcibly projected from the pussy of a showgirl, thereby making it good luck.

Adam refers me back to the summer before last, when I had learned to be a boy by becoming one, and he had been a voice in my head telling me all it meant to be a man.  The secrets of masculinity had been passed on to me by the First Man himself, then.

"Yeah," I agree with him, turning down the long drive to Denton.  "I understood it intellectually until it was time to live it."

He stays quiet until I pull up to the front of the house.  The dust of the road settles down around Beverly, and I turn off the engine and the headlights die against the front door.  We sit in the close silence of the car for a moment.

"So, what will I be living inside here?" he asks me.  "Or rather, what will you?"

I think for a moment before answering.

"The fear of an amnesiac," I tell him, and he scratches his eyebrow with his thumb.

"A difficult, but stunning, album," he considers.  He rolls up the window and the smell of his cologne takes over the scent of Beverly's new leather seats Clyde installed for me last Christmas.  Adam smells, on most days, like the pine woods men have spent their whole evolution trying to escape.  He's quiet, and I know he's thinking about whatever secret he has about Amnesiac that no one will talk about.  Some haunting of 2001 that he and Rosie and Brad refuse to acknowledge.

The exterior of the Denton house is brick and siding, angular designs in the garage door which betray the decade it was built.  The windows in the front are large, but covered with drapes.

"It's scary when you remember something you forgot," I tell him, and the coin vanishes in favor of a second cigarette.

"Sometimes," he agrees with me.

"Half-remembering is even worse," I tell him, staring at the aluminum screen door covering the red front door.  "It's like... if you went back to a summer house.  If you hadn't seen it for years."

Adam picks tobacco off of his tongue and nods slowly.

"Yes.  As if it had been abandoned, by you, although you've since forgotten."

"Yeah."

We stare for a minute more in silence.  I look for the sign of movement in the windows, and see none.

"The house in Black Diamond felt like that," he reminds me.  "To most of us."

A different house, and a distant memory.  A time before me, or maybe it wasn't.  No one can remember what they remember anymore, and so maybe everywhere we go will begin to feel like this; like we were run out of this castle so young, we can't remember anything but the way light falls onto a river.  I remove the keys from the ignition, and we get out of the car.  Bev's driver side door creaks a little when I push it open.  It's a sound I like.  It means she's old enough to know better.

On the front stoop, I reach under the old black rubber welcome mat and extract a key.  The screen has an aluminum knob on it, and it rattles when it opens.  When I push the front door open, the dark of the house yawns back, and a smell comes with it which makes Adam clear his throat.

"Ahem, yes," he says.  "I uh.  I believe I've been here, before."

I reach inside, to the light switch on the wall.  It illuminates a single hanging lamp in the corner, brown glass suspended over an easy chair.  The remnants of Brad and I litter the room, from when we were here before.

When we were here before...

The sleeping bag Brad found in the closet is still tossed on the carpet of the living room.  A coloring book is half-colored, a puzzle is half-done on the coffee table.  This room is a time capsule of some life I don't remember.

The kitchen chairs are brown and spindly-legged.  The linoleum is yellowing in the corners.  If I tore it up, I think I would find my name written underneath.

Adam stands in the center of the open living room and dining room, looking around with his critical eyes.  I sit in the dim light on a green couch.  I wait for him to say the words I know he's going to say.

"Evelyn," he mutters, his cigarette shortening in his teeth.  "This is... well."

I know he's cycling through names to call it.  The Dragon's house, my house, the house I grew up in, the house Brad had installed here once and I'd torn it down immediately because I didn't want to live in it anymore.  The place we started when I'd come home in the first place.  He slips his hands back into his pockets to consider the wood paneling on the walls.

"And the piano," he gestures, and I nod.  Adam had played that piano the winter we'd been snowed in together, in 2000.

"But it's changed some," he observes.

"Yeah, I'm not sure why," I tell him.

The world is so depressingly short on places I recognize.  The things I grew to see as familiar have all been torn down and replaced with things maybe my children will grow up feeling comforted by.  But sometimes it's made me feel like my life could be entirely erased because there's no evidence of my experiences anymore.  Every surface I touched has been painted over or torn down, and it has always made me feel lost in a certain way.  In this way.  In the way that made Brad build it and me destroy it again.

But here it is, and maybe that means we can also endure long past the fear we won't.  I wanted to wear a hole in the world, in the places I walked over it enough times to disintegrate carpets to ruin, but when I couldn't, I think I got scared, and pushed every familiar thing away.  The Dragon, and the house I grew up in, and even Brad.

Adam picks his way through the living room and remembers how we moved the couch in front of the fireplace.  Another time, and another place, but connecting now.  He asks me questions about where and when we might be, based on history I know.

"Is this the Cartwright home? he asks me, referring to a world where Brad and John and I are triplets and live across the street from Rosie and Drama.

"No."

"And... well, no, this couldn't be the Garage."

"No."

"It smells of you," he admits to me, putting his cigarette out in the amber ashtray on the table.  "Things only I would recognize."

At first I think he's telling me this to brag, but I can see his expression as he glances around, and I know it's because it also smells like Brad and how we're a common denominator in his life.

And yes, it smells like me, but it also smells like Brad and it also smells like the dust left over all our things we forgot...

Just the way the air in Eden was thick with possibility, so the air of Gray House has become similarly thick and full of the passing of moments out of the order and thought of time.  Ever since Drama came home, it's been like this, and so it begs the question, did Drama take us back to Eden?

Or maybe we never left, and like everything else in life, losing it is a simple act of believing yourself to no longer have it.  Could the world really change so drastically by just believing it was different one morning?

Adam removes his jacket, and rolls the sleeves of his shirt deliberately to the elbow.

That's what had happened with us, wasn't it?  I'd gone to sleep one night with Adam and woken up to a different world.  The night everything changed.  I remember I'd even tried to go back to my old life after that - to resume the every day as if it was all the same as before - and I'd been unable to.  So I have evidence that it is that simple, and it's wholly dependent on who or what you happen to be falling in love with.

It shocks me as I'm considering our history to see Adam's tall and brusque outline doesn't fit in this room.  He looks out-of-place here, like a lost traveling salesman.  I see he's taken off his jacket in reaction to this intrusion, in an effort to be what he would call "more comfortable."

It's a small and maybe petty thing, that I notice Brad belongs here and Adam doesn't.  But this might be the only place it's true, and so I feel like protecting it.  I feel like holding still and waiting for him to pass me by, as if he were a prison guard of this reality, and I have to make sure he doesn't see the hole I've dug to the beach.  I curl up on the couch, hugging my own knees and Adam gestures to the sleeping bag on the floor.

"You made love," he observes, his voice quiet.  He can feel my tension rising, and I can tell he's trying to make himself soft-voiced and slow-moving.  He summons all the tricks of men to get animals to eat from their hands.

"Yeah."

"What was it like?" he asks, trying to keep his tone casual, light.  Flowers bloom in my chest and wilt and bloom again in a fast procession, tickling adrenaline and closing up my throat.  I don't answer him, but he can see me blush.

He kneels carefully and puts his hand on the now cold fabric of the sleeping bag.  Yes, we made love, but it could've been decades ago.  It could have been just a dream.  It could've meant everything or nothing.  I could be Evelyn, or the span of the planet she came from.  It's up to me to tell him what I believe.

"This is where I came from," I tell him.  "Me and Brad found it together."

Blue Suit 2: January 12th

Adam scoffs at my late arrival to his room.

"Oh," he chuffs, rising from his brown leather reading chair and setting down his drink.  "Oh, I see.  Are we taking numbers?  Am I next?"

Gray laces his hair like frost settling over an otherwise brown lawn.  His heavy brow is raised in mock concern for me in the slow light of his room; a treasure trove of all that which might make a man into a man.

His expectant face makes him look like Gary Oldman, but Adam tends to, whether he's just standing here, or melting into deaf musicians, fat prime ministers, Carpathian princes, crude pimps, or violent lovers.  His suit is pale and steely blue, and there's a sheen to the fabric tonight.  He's starched and ironed himself into right angles and sarcastic amusement.

I wilt at his line, which he intended me to do.

"I..."

I hesitate in the doorway.  Adam's room is a foreign place full of pools of delicate gold light, strange artifacts, broken machines, and the quiet whispers of his cruelty and his rage.  He's grown all these sharp edges and hard thorns for me to soften, now, and he's done it just so.  Just because.  Just in case.

He moves his jaw to explore his teeth with his tongue, and I by the way the shadows fall, I can see he's skipped a day of shaving.  So he's meant to burn me, as well.

Adam's bed is dark and imposing, tall and impossible to climb into without standing on one of the dozens of stacks of books he keeps around it.  The items within are crammed into cabinets, and the cabinets make the room feel cave-like.  Currently, the bed is tossed with a blanket made of tawny red fur I gifted him once - fox fur.

"Evelyn," he recites my name to me, sliding his hands into his pockets.  "Just who the fuck do you take me for?"

"Adam," I tell him, shutting the door quietly behind me, shrugging my way around it with guilty shoulders.  "You're mad at me."

"I am, that, Doll," he snorts.  "I am, that, indeed."

His tie is navy.  The suit is slim-cut, notch lapels, single breasted, two button.  The cuffs of his shirt beneath are two button mitered cuffs.  I learned the names of everything for him, and he spits out his favorite word at me now in total disdain.

"Evelyn."

"Adam."

"This is our night."

"I know."

I look up at him, my expression blank.  Adam's moods are better weathered before response, because he so often talks himself out of his rages.  Glasses have shattered in the fireplace and holes have been smashed into the drywall before he looks up sheepish and admits his own fears, and so I say nothing, and I do nothing, while he clips his words short and terse to me in irritation of my blasphemy.

"You see, I had thought," he steps toward me, trying to get a read on my emotions, and I interrupt him.

"I know."

He presses me against the door.

"You know everything, is that right?  You know what this all means to me?  I see, so there's no need to discuss it further."

"Adam-"

"Evelyn."

"I just-"

"He took you home," he fumes at me, and turns his back on me.

"What?" I ask him, suddenly nervous.  "What do you mean?"

Adam stands with his back to me, and I watch his shoulders move and adjust as he unfastens the buttons at his wrist, and on his coat.  He shrugs the jacket off without looking at me, and it occurs to me what's happening.

He deposits the jacket on the back of his reading chair and begins to loosen his tie, and I feel panic setting in.

Since I came home to Gray House, there were two things treated as ritual: that Adam and I were Home to one another, and when that was compromised by disagreement, we fought naked.  I think subconsciously or even consciously, Adam thought that being naked meant we would be more respectful to our true natures.  I can see now that because I hadn't respected the first ritual, I am going to be made to choke on the second.

Of course, I hadn't thought that talking to Brad about Denton, or listening to the mix, or even going there would constitute this level of infidelity he was acting like I'd committed.  Sure, I had drawn Brad from some other time and place to sit inside the house we built within each other in order to see how we'd always been together, but that's, like, not a crime.  It didn't make that place home any more than it had been when I'd come to Gray House, which was not at all.  I mean.  Right?

The edges of my nonchalance begin to rankle.

It had been different, and it had meant something this time which it hadn't meant before.  Downplaying it now to keep Adam's feelings safe meant undercutting in some way what had happened between Brad and I, and maybe that's how things got this way.  Maybe, since I first set foot in Gray House, I've been so scared of losing something I've never really had anything.  I take a deep breath and kick off my ballet shoes.

Adam's slacks hit the hardwood floor with the jangle of his belt-buckle.  His wristwatch and our wedding ring clink onto his nightstand.  He peels off his undershirt and his underwear and adjusts his weight to one foot, crossing his arms over his now bare chest.

I slink my way guilty from my white sundress, and I let it fall to the floor.  Adam doesn't bat an eye at my red bra and panties.  I add them to the puddle of my dress at my feet.  He waits for me to take off my jewelry, also, and I hesitate before depositing my necklace and ring onto the bookcase next to me.

The psychological impulse to crawl into his bed and cover up with the blankets is so strong, I start to move toward the bed surreptitiously, avoiding his eye-contact.

"I've been telling myself there must be some explanation.  Some need for this," Adam muses, looking at me like I've stolen his Corvette when he told me explicity not to drive it.  I circle my arms and lace my fingers together just under my belly.  I touch the relatively new scar on the right side of my stomach.

"There is," I tell him, and his expression shifts from disbelieving back to expectant.  Underneath, I can see his concern and fear.  "I'm not sure I can explain it," I add.

"This isn't a god-damned obligation, Evelyn, and I won't have it treated as such," he cautions me.

"No, I know, I wanted to come."

He relents to letting me climb into the bed, and the air shifts to one of his need to understand.  The fox fur is rough under my legs and I look out over the strange vistas of Adam's bedroom.  He has a watch taken to pieces on his writing desk, and a row of vials beside it filled with greenish liquids.

I came to Gray House for Brad, and Brad alone.  It was an innocent encounter between two like animals that had drawn me Home, and Adam and I had so catastrophically interfered with everything.  Like a car crash, Adam had just happened to me, and we crashed into one another and we kept crashing, loud and heavy enough to drown out the sound of all other things.

In the cramped kitchen of the Old House, we'd collided that night in January, when we were finally alone, and everything Brad and I had been building together, inside, was razed and replaced with a single white tree onto which I had carved the name "Adam."  We had tried to pick our way through the landmines of human interaction that is Gray House, but it hadn't really worked, and the River came crashing down the sides of the granite mountains west of Eden, and carried everything else away; even Brad, even Clyde.

"Did you want it that way?" I ask him, and he climbs into the bed beside me.  We'd shared this same bed for almost two years, and this bed nearly exclusively.  He looks straight ahead, at the wall.

"Well, yes, of course," he admits.  "I told you as much, the day I gave you permission to sleep with Clyde.  I have no more intentions of being gentlemanly."

"You also told me that you'd never do anything to interfere in my relationship with Brad."

"I lied," he answers me quickly.  "And it was an innocent lie, but it was a lie.  Any interfering I did, I did in a playful kind of rivalry.  I've never done anything to harm you, or him."

He examines his fingernails, neatly scrubbed of engine grease and trimmed to thin white crescents at the ends of his fingers.

"Yet," he adds, his voice light and airy.

It's true he might, someday, abdicating any promise he's made me so far.  Adam is by nature treacherous and disloyal, even to me, because he feels infected by me as much as he feels obsessive of me.  We both know, sitting in the gold silence, that he might interfere in any one of my other relationships in the future, but that I would also remain chained to this dreadful and politic faithfulness, no matter what he did.

We put first who we put first.  The reason we do it probably doesn't matter, because it would dissect the love we have for everyone else, and measure it, and compare it in depth and passion and constancy, and what a fucking distasteful thing to do.

But maybe that's what Adam wants, really, and maybe he wants to be naked when I do.  I cringe, and pull the fur over my legs.  Whatever slight Adam feels tonight is one tenth of the poison I know is in Matthew's heart, waiting for me far beneath Gray House, in the warmer parts of Hell.  Adam has the capacity to play this game, and to walk steady along this high-wire.  Matthew does not.  Being a ghost, for Adam, meant learning to experience the love between others, in order to possess it for himself.  Being one for Matthew meant disappearing from love forever.

Adam rips off the skin of his cuticle with a toothy sneer, and it begins to bleed.

"I can't abide you keeping things from me," he mutters into his lap.  Of course, Adam wouldn't have cared if I never came to him tonight, if I'd let him watch me from a dark corner somewhere.  If I'd let him possess the actions I'd taken with Brad for himself, to study and interpret.  I glance over at him, knowing this is the moment his rage turns to the aforementioned self-pity.

"We're very good together," I remark at him, taking his torn finger and stuffing it into my mouth.  He squints his dark eyes at me in disgust, as if I've purposely given him a disease, and maybe I have.  I suck the blood from the tear, copper and salt.

"Hardly," he cuts.  "You're a... a menace," he argues, taking his hand back.

"I didn't think," I tell him.  "I should've told you, I'm sorry.  I was with Brad, and I wanted him to... I wanted to show him..."

I hesitate and struggle for words before I begin to cry.  It happens to me usually so fast someone not looking directly at me would think I'd begun to laugh.  Adam, knowing better, just pushes the fur over me and moves closer to me in the bed.

"You two have always struggled," he sighs.  "Living proof, of course, that you don't really love yourself.  You're so much better off with someone... well, much less like you, Evelyn.  And so is he."

"Maybe we don't really work, but we love each other," I plead to him, like he hasn't been listening to me.

"Well, yes, naturally," he relents as he pulls me to his chest.  "Such is it with Nicholas, and I."

Invoking his own twin brother quiets me enough to begin to think about them.  Adam and Nick have always had a deep and unrelenting hatred which runs almost as deep as their deep and unrelenting love.  You can't know someone, maybe, how we end up knowing each other and not hating them as much as you love them.  Or loving them for the truth of who they are, which might actually be the same thing.  Maybe we never worked as a couple because I'd spent so much time and energy trying to make us into one, and we just aren't.

In the breadth of human history, we've only ever found three or four relationships to have with someone.  Beyond those parameters, only few have dared to tread, and usually have done so famously and disastrously.  It leads me to think there are certain inevitable ways a heart breaks, which we can count on.  But here Brad broke my heart by removing himself from it, slowly over years, like removing a railroad spike and giving me time to heal.

"When I came to Gray House, Brad and I were already breaking up," I tell Adam.  "We broke up and found out we could never ever ever get back together.  And then we moved backwards."

"Mm," Adam murmurs, and I feel the sound vibrate in his chest.

"We went backwards, and after we broke up, we were in a relationship with a lot of problems.  We had lost our house, but then it grew back.  And then we were in a relationship that was kind of good, but we could tell it was going to end.  And then we were in a new relationship."

"So.  Now.  Having gotten to that place, what happens next?" he asks me.

"I don't know," I admit to him.  "I've never felt like this about anyone else.  I've never gone back in time before.  Or even through it all mixed up, like it has been."

"But you took him to the house," Adam protests.  "The house which now stands, untouched by your destructions.  Isn't that right?"

I nod.  Adam lights one of his cigarettes from the case on his nightstand.

"Well, I'd very much like you to show it to me," he decides.

Denton, 10000 BC

Evelyn to Brad - Denton

We wake when the Dragon wakes, warm under the pale wallow of his belly.  The three of us stretch in the morning sun of spring and slither out into the Garden, to run to the River in our sneakers.

Eden is the gestation of the Earth; things like Time and Space and Dreams are crowded together into this womb to wait to be born.  Running to the River might take an hour, but we travel through the heavy air to get there, thick with ideas and fate.

Of course, we don't know that, John and Joel and I.  We won't know that until the Storm comes, and Time spills out of the gate of Eden like afterbirth, spreading out flat and useless and thin.  For now, we tear off our thin t-shirts, my own a pale yellow, and we wade into the cold water, sucking our breath in hard and laughing.  The Dragon stretches, and the trees groan distant as he presses them with his wings.  He blots out the coming daylight with a single unfurl before launching himself into the pearl sky, turning high to show us his gray back ridged with hard scales.

The current of the River is clear and untouched, is polluted by a paper mill, is reddened with blood from a battle, is low and then high again with the rains that haven't come.

"I want a Slurpee," Joel confesses, and we agree, tasting the cherry flavor melting over the morning that is the way the invention of the Slurpee tastes, and the medicinal soda-fountain history of it's origin.  It tastes good, and it feels like freedom and industry, and so we agree.

John shakes the water from his brassy hair, and it slaps the sides of his pale cheeks, and sticks there.  There's no way to get clean in the River because the River is made of all things, and in all things one gets only... wet.  Leaves stick to his white chest, skinny and only beginning to form the muscles he'll need to one day lift Joel from the same water and save his life, which we can feel rush by us in the current, making us all shiver.

I remain quiet because I don't know what life is anymore than I know what death is, and it makes me certain of things like taxes and suitcases and the car I know Joel will one day buy when he calls himself Bradley.

"What's the matter, Zech?" he asks me, and I throw a rock into the water, and watch it sink.

On the shore, John is putting his shirt back on, which is red and says Coca-Cola, but I can't read yet.  The cotton knocks the leaves from his body, and they fall to the mud.

Joel crosses his arms over his stomach.  He looks at me, and the air around me, which I might be turning back into night with my thoughts.

The River changes around us to a flat black street, the sun setting instead of rising, Joel and I glaring at one another with 20 more years shared between us.  He's wearing a red leather jacket, and I've finally gotten taller than him.

"To a small man, every inch counts, Zechariah," he smirks at me, and I think about pulling my knife on him, and the invention of knives, and the evolution of murder, and I stop feeling good in my stomach, so I get out of the river.

Beside me on the riverbank, Joel plops his wet jeans with a thunk into the mud. 

"Aw, I was just kidding," he apologizes, wearing the same smirk he wore moments before.  The place he cut off his jeans is frayed, and I pick at the strings that hang along the bone of his kneecap. 

The air smells like frankincense and rose oil.  There are elephants in the woods behind us, bowing low to one another, and I can feel their feet strike the ground when they rise again.  I push my hair back behind my ears, and it lengthens as I do, and turns white-blonde.  Joel puts his shirt back on - forest green and bearing a logo - and it sticks to his wet skin.

"I don't feel good," I whisper to him, and I trace on his arm the map I see of the two of us unwinding forever, through the tall grass browned by a tired world ready to give in.  He feels the same thing I do when I trace it; the fear of failing to reach an important destination. 

Like matryoshka dolls, we wait inside ourselves, the same people we become today, and the day before.  The same nihilistic punk boys and ostracized royalty which feels the oppressive sense of our utter failure creep through the ribs of he and I as children on the banks of the Mnemosyne. 

"We could get married," he suggests, and I think about what that really means at all.

Behind us, I can hear Denton being built, with the hammers and nails of the army men intent on destroying it, and I'm one of them, and so is Joel.  I can feel the cool cast of it's shadow over me that means people are going to take this very simple idea of marriage and make it into an institution of control and justification of power.  I can feel the cold parts of the River which mean some will be happy and some will be unhappy. 

"I don't want to get married," I tell him, afraid of the cold history getting born around us, and the army men we someday become detonate the bomb that destroys Dummy Town, and levels our home.

 Joel pulls a bug off my shoulder and lets it loose on the muddy bank. 

"Well," he thinks, and I watch him cast around for the right time, and the right feeling, his ears still too big for his head at eleven or however old we are.

Behind us, the elephants have gone.  Now, the woods are dark and warm with a change of the season.  The light is gold coming through the trees, and Joel has started to call himself Bradley.  His eyes turn from warm blue to cold blue, and I feel the terror grow inside him from the inside which makes him cold.  He is suddenly 16, suddenly a trapped animal, suddenly full of a scream inside his heart.  The sweat collects at his temples when he asks me.

"Hey, why don't you be my Valentine?"

My lockets have room for 3 people.

6, really.

Well, what 6?

I imagine any six will do.

I'm not sure what to do.

Can't help you.

You're only a prophet when it suits you.

I got as close to this day as I care to.

I was thinking of doing the night twice.

Well, you'll be up a lot later than me.  That's past my bed time.

From The Sherwood Motel

There are times I don't feel connected at all to this life, or this body.  Other times, it's the only thing that really matters.  This life, this existence.  I find myself trying to hold onto it, and keep myself here instead of drifting off into what I know is out there - the darkness, and all the unanswered questions.

Denton, Intermission

For five years, the family has left the sanctuary of Gray House every impending winter on what we call vacation, and for five years, Adam has brought me home again after the holidays to commemorate our anniversary - the night we had sex the first time.

I think I've written about that night so many times, I could recite the prose from memory.  I could also recite things Adam has written about it, in his journals, with more romance and greater dexterity than I ever could muster.  Was it the most romantic, most pivotal, most important event of my life?  It's possible it was, because after that night, everything changed.

It was the dead of winter, and the first time I approached Gray House.  The Old House as we call it now was a fraction as grand, decimated by the damp, and missing more than two thirds of the rooms we now possess.  Some of us like to admit, and some of us don't, that there was life before we found Gray House, when we lived in a small farmhouse inherited from our parents.  Adam and I had exchanged four letters and two telephone calls, but hadn't yet met face-to-face.  I had come to see him on a night I knew he was alone in the house, the then-meager numbers of us off elsewhere for the night.

Our such meager beginnings.  The Genesis of Gray House.

It was the house Adam had grown up in, and I came in through the back door, into the kitchen, which was dark and nicotine-stained.  What struck me first was the gold resin that clings to everything in a kitchen where too much frying goes on.  What struck me second is how certain I was that he had grown up here; how well this place helped to define him as a man and a human being.  The smell of cooking oil hung in the air and most of the lights were off, but for the hood light on the stove, and Adam was listening to the radio softly, his back to me where he sat.  The surface of the table was worn smooth at the edges, and browned with the gum of human touch.  The chair creaked as he adjusted, and the amber ashtray into which he flicked his cigarettes was overflowing with butts of other brands.  The cups on the counter were all mismatched, aluminium foil showing plainly he had eaten re-heated leftovers for his dinner.  I felt grit under my feet as I walked into the room, the screen door closing loud behind me with a squeal, and then a bang.

And Adam had stood up, and turned around, and said, "Hello."

In the half-light of the kitchen he was cautious, he was overdressed in a gray suit, he was nervous that I'd come, he had tried hastily to clean, he was sweet, and he was hopeless.

"Hello," is what I had said back.

We had sex in the kitchen, as if the rest of the world beyond the room had long ago gone to sleep, and we were awake and frozen like moths in the light over the stove.  I had kissed him because we were already pinned under the thumb of the fate of us, and because I knew he wouldn't.

Every year since, when the time returns, we turn to one another and say, "Do you remember?" in reference to this moment when everything changed.  And every year, he tells me he can bring me home again, by returning to the now-abandoned kitchen of the Old House, to wait for me to arrive, wearing white.

It's beautiful, I think, and tragic to the point of heartbreak.  And it's something that has the power to draw me from anywhere else in the Universe, to feel at home.  To feel Home, there with Adam, in the chaos of all things.

But I was busy this year, so.

"I made you a mix," I told Brad, and I had seen him get anxious and suspicious.

"Isn't it your anniversary?" was his first question, and I could tell by his expression changing from confusion to regret that he didn't really want me to say what I did.

"Yeah, it is."

But then he had to respond, and something fragile between us was forced to become steel, or die trying.

"Aren't you going home with Adam tonight?"

But maybe that's where Brad lives, at the intersection where things become steel or die.  If he had been more polite or delicate, I wouldn't have been made to choose between them this way, or vocalize my attempt to be diplomatic and see both, or explain why that was okay and not inherently disingenuous in my heart, but Brad is neither delicate nor polite.

I could see in that moment how his bluntness often mistaken for emotional stupidity was really a manipulation styled as ignorance, to get people to explain things to him in the black-and-white of their truest and most despicable motivations.  See, well, Brad, I was thinking we could hang and then when it got late, I would hit up Adam and maybe we could just keep it between us...

I immediately opted for a reversal of the burden of explanation.

"So?"

So, what could possibly be wrong with that, Brad, do tell.

His skin was blotchy and dark, how it gets when he's upset, especially low on his cheeks, by the jaw.  He stared at me long and cold, and then out into the distance.

"So, are you still gonna see him?"

I shrugged, and refused to answer.

"I don't know."

The blotches got darker as he chewed on the insides of his mouth and thought. But of course the question betrayed that he wanted me to choose; to choose him over Adam, because of all that it might mean.  He wasn't asking me if I was still going to see Adam, he was asking me if this was on purpose, this timing of this mix on this night.  Could he mean that much to me?  And he wanted me to say yes.

"What's the mix about?" he asked, and I could feel myself blushing in the same place, along my jawbone, as my heartbeat picked up.

"Well.  Denton.  It's about our house."

"You made me a mix about our house," he repeated, his eyes flat and erased of all emotion as carefully as he'd erased his voice.

"Yeah."

"You want to listen to it tonight," he repeated, his tone still cold.

"Yeah."

When I'm confronted with the same situation between me and anyone else, I'm usually in Brad's role, thinking through their words and underlying motivations.  My repetition is the same, my consideration the same.  I see how we're alike in this moment, but where I understand what he's asking me to do, and why he is asking me with a valueless blank chill, others mistake it in me for derision.  Mhm, okay sure, we can do that.  Idiot.

He clenched his jaw and unclenched it for almost ten seconds, and I could see the two dark freckles on his cheek moving as he did.  He hadn't gotten me to say anything either way, hadn't been able to push me anywhere but the suggestion of what I wanted.

Finally, he tugged with both hands on the ends of the scarf he was wearing, and agreed.

"Alright."

Is it the choosing which is wrong, or the not choosing?  Is it a lie by omission, or have I told the truth?

Would I sell Adam for Brad, if given half the chance, and would I ever really be given that choice?

To me, the answer is obvious.  Because of Adam, I'm a waste.  I will always and forever owe the rest of the world half my soul because it's tied up in Adam, physically, and I can never get it back.  The choice is a luxury Adam and I are only pretending exists in the first place; to put anyone before him.

And if it's only symbolic, and we know it is, the color drains away from the action itself.  Why do anything that is only symbolic?  Why would I choose at all?  Why have I done all these things, mouthed apologies to my brothers, stood and put my hand over my heart to pledge allegiance?  The world is full of symbols kept alive by the CPR of their repetition, insisting there's something they all mean.

Making the choice would mean I wish it were true.  Not making it means that I know it's not even possible, but moot.

As long as Adam exists, maybe I'm just a lie to everyone else we pretend is real.  Maybe I'm the shadow of Evelyn and we all carry on pretending that I'm actually real and actually married to them and actually have a life and a love and reason to keep moving forward.  Maybe it's me that's the symbol, repeated over and over again by all the other men who love me, performing some ritual of CPR on the cardboard cut-out of myself I trot out to say, "I choose you first, before Adam.  I hate Adam, I fucking want away from him, God please help me."

But what could they do, anyway?  Who would I be if I wasn't Eve?

Maybe this whole thing is just for nothing.