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?"