Adam,
Over the amber flame of your eyes, we join hands for this seance where you will explain for the first time, and possibly the last time, this dormancy. As things born without names, inside the other, we began life nebulous and strangely-defined, like shadows. When did you know me and when did I know you? It really wouldn't ever matter, until this moment, when I'm asking you with a certain fierceness to tell me so I can let this run through me, finally.
We would do well to make this a collection of our letters, I know, and have always known. But what I want is
Evelyn,
I can remember as a child, watching the television which was running a nature program narrated by a voice I know you sometimes hear in your head, a man's voice, with infinite patience, iterating to my prepubescent self that it is both natural, and mammalian, for mothers to let the weakest offspring die. If I was aware of you then, it was as a dark force beyond my comprehension; a cabal to which only the most dubious of my acquaintances belonged.
I have a memory of which I've never spoken, of the first instance I watched my mother shield me from the fists of my father. He had been aiming no necessarily for me, but I had been in the way, heedless as any toddler, not understanding that his jibes had become malicious and whatever game we'd been playing had become an entrapment. My mother moved her slight body with a swift motion to stand between us, and if she'd had a fire-poker on hand, I know I would've grown up an only child.
In the ensuing years, I would watch him, or something only hear him, elicit from her throat the meek whimper of her submission, but on this day, she growled low and animal, and I feared - reptilian, possibly, from primordial sections of my developing mind - that if I fell behind, I would be devoured by her, as surely as he would.
Adam,
There could have only ever been the pain. Confusion, humiliation. I can't face what I've done, any more than I can face what I am. I'm methodical in this rage, and always was. Was this surviving? No, you don't understand that the mother leaves her offspring to die, yes, but most especially, when trapped, she will devour her own limbs to escape.
Evelyn,
Terrariums are an interesting concept, much like ant farms: a habitat designed to sustain itself, in an isolated microcosm. I believe the knowledge it can work in science is partially the reason I tried to enact it in life.
Art, it is wondered, can imitate life and vice versa, but I wonder if the same could be said for science. Does science (the pure experiment) somehow capture the pure experience?
Adam,
I want to be taken away, is the problem. You don't understand, or couldn't, that I want to be taken on the wave of something which matters and makes the rest of the world dim. I want there to be a diminishment of sound, to a dark place where the mechanics of things are understood in a simplistic way.
All this might be attributable to a desire I have to get back to the garden.
Eve,
I've begun to arrange my thoughts, by color. Softest is where I find you, hiding beneath a green both secret and muted. Let me find it for you.
#5F956E
Adam,
Every time I feel like I'm onto something, a stray wind comes to shatter the cobwebs and I wonder if perhaps nothing is gentle enough, or soft enough, to contribute to the perfect den in which I can touch old parts of me which have retreated far below the surface. I was going to ask you to do it, but the song changed, and
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Monday, August 19, 2019
There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 4
The night after Rosie and Drama blinded Grady, we decided to go for a ride.
Grady accepted the blinding with grace; something not all men can do. When he came to without his sight, he laid in bed for a period of time just listening to the house around him. We decided to go for a ride because he had planned one, regardless, and being now blind wouldn't stop him from it.
He invited Rosie because she was the one who'd taken his sight, and because he loved her, and because she wanted to go. Brad and Clyde and I invited ourselves because it was the first time anything had happened to us, our small and inconsequential biker gang, which facilitated our riding together in a way that fit the character we'd chosen for ourselves as a gang. If we ever went before, there would be insincere carousing, wheelies popped in posing jest of ourselves and none of us could stand it, really, so we just didn't go.
Grady accepted the blinding with grace; something not all men can do. When he came to without his sight, he laid in bed for a period of time just listening to the house around him. We decided to go for a ride because he had planned one, regardless, and being now blind wouldn't stop him from it.
He invited Rosie because she was the one who'd taken his sight, and because he loved her, and because she wanted to go. Brad and Clyde and I invited ourselves because it was the first time anything had happened to us, our small and inconsequential biker gang, which facilitated our riding together in a way that fit the character we'd chosen for ourselves as a gang. If we ever went before, there would be insincere carousing, wheelies popped in posing jest of ourselves and none of us could stand it, really, so we just didn't go.
Monday, August 12, 2019
Friday, August 9, 2019
There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 3
If I could choose Adam's name all over again, I would name him Blunt Force Trauma. In the middle of everything, he interrupts me. He does it repeatedly and viscerally, like he can remind me of where I came from by beating me to death with the bricks of the house we grew up in, caving into smeared tissue the places in my brain which forgot him.
"I'm not a careful man, Evelyn," he reminds me, removing his glasses and folding them into the breast pocket of his shirt with fingers so many people seem to forget are roughly calloused, even me. He plays a professor very well, it's true. He dons without effort the mantle of soft collegiate intellectual, but when it comes to any of the Gray boys, all their efforts at civilizing stop at the hands, each pair battered and scarred like teenage warlords. I've written too much about each of their hands, and the secrets they betray of how these boys have grown consequently into men who fight, who vandalize, who commit murder, break down doors, and crash cars.
And so he crashes one into me, when he interrupts me to say, "Come home, Evelyn."
I can never remember what I was doing before. So all statements of will turn into magic spells.
The lights in Adam's room are low, his door partially ajar. I close it when I enter. His curio cabinets glow with exhibition lighting cast over deformed animal bones and antique tattoo guns. I resist his interruptions like I resist anything else I think will affect me inside, and I enter his room a nonchalant boy, immune to charms and dense to nuance.
"I forgot I was going to bring you another penis cage I found," I tell him, diminishing his deep reverence to the history of human sexuality with a fast kick to his sandcastle.
"Goody," he dismisses, because he knows both the mood I'm in and the boy it engenders.
Adam has been clean-shaven and crew-cut since Brad has abandoned the notion of grooming over a year ago. While Brad wilted, Adam starched. Because if he can't give me what I want, he can provide for me it's contrast, and does so with adept innuendo and crisp accuracy.
"Your new deodorant has an almost mildew scent," he adds, "which I enjoy quite a bit."
"That's disgusting," I snap as I cross to the wardrobe where he's relegated my clothes.
"No, it's very pleasant. Like all the leaves of you, have fallen for the year."
Inside the wardrobe, there are t-shirts and jeans on one side, dresses on the other, sweaters in the middle. Adam's arranged my clothes by gender and preference, with items of safety in between. The gesture dissolves my resentment toward him in an instant - the manner in which he understands.
The first night we had sex, I wore my favorite white dress to see him, which ended the night discarded on the floor. Since then, I've seen it haunting the corners of his closets; a secret I've been determined to let him keep. It was a year ago or so when I found it in the lab, a 6-inch square excised from it near the hem. The straps of it peer out from the back of the wardrobe, shrugging their wooden hanger.
I put on a shirt I found on the boy side, faded black and waving the flag of torn pocket over the breast, and we went to bed together. He was gone when I woke up, but I resolved to repay him with the trespass of rearranging his closet similarly, in a way he'd like but never consider himself: by the texture of the clothing.
"I'm not a careful man, Evelyn," he reminds me, removing his glasses and folding them into the breast pocket of his shirt with fingers so many people seem to forget are roughly calloused, even me. He plays a professor very well, it's true. He dons without effort the mantle of soft collegiate intellectual, but when it comes to any of the Gray boys, all their efforts at civilizing stop at the hands, each pair battered and scarred like teenage warlords. I've written too much about each of their hands, and the secrets they betray of how these boys have grown consequently into men who fight, who vandalize, who commit murder, break down doors, and crash cars.
And so he crashes one into me, when he interrupts me to say, "Come home, Evelyn."
I can never remember what I was doing before. So all statements of will turn into magic spells.
The lights in Adam's room are low, his door partially ajar. I close it when I enter. His curio cabinets glow with exhibition lighting cast over deformed animal bones and antique tattoo guns. I resist his interruptions like I resist anything else I think will affect me inside, and I enter his room a nonchalant boy, immune to charms and dense to nuance.
"I forgot I was going to bring you another penis cage I found," I tell him, diminishing his deep reverence to the history of human sexuality with a fast kick to his sandcastle.
"Goody," he dismisses, because he knows both the mood I'm in and the boy it engenders.
Adam has been clean-shaven and crew-cut since Brad has abandoned the notion of grooming over a year ago. While Brad wilted, Adam starched. Because if he can't give me what I want, he can provide for me it's contrast, and does so with adept innuendo and crisp accuracy.
"Your new deodorant has an almost mildew scent," he adds, "which I enjoy quite a bit."
"That's disgusting," I snap as I cross to the wardrobe where he's relegated my clothes.
"No, it's very pleasant. Like all the leaves of you, have fallen for the year."
Inside the wardrobe, there are t-shirts and jeans on one side, dresses on the other, sweaters in the middle. Adam's arranged my clothes by gender and preference, with items of safety in between. The gesture dissolves my resentment toward him in an instant - the manner in which he understands.
The first night we had sex, I wore my favorite white dress to see him, which ended the night discarded on the floor. Since then, I've seen it haunting the corners of his closets; a secret I've been determined to let him keep. It was a year ago or so when I found it in the lab, a 6-inch square excised from it near the hem. The straps of it peer out from the back of the wardrobe, shrugging their wooden hanger.
I put on a shirt I found on the boy side, faded black and waving the flag of torn pocket over the breast, and we went to bed together. He was gone when I woke up, but I resolved to repay him with the trespass of rearranging his closet similarly, in a way he'd like but never consider himself: by the texture of the clothing.
Thursday, August 8, 2019
For Tigerlily
Tigerlily,
Across the bathroom tiles, I've spread this memory, liquefied. You told me once you were taught to shave, and even if you never were, you were. We were. We were taught how to give voice to this color-secret, the liquid truth, in long equations of additions and subtractions.
I cut. My hair.
And it was a tragedy.
The scissors were my mother's, engraved with her name, and so it was in her name that I did it. I parceled it into long offerings which poured bleak onto the tiled floor. Subtraction, in these many hateful inches.
I wished I could have remained a Lost Boy, but Peter promised. He promised to love us all through the hardships of first living as a hatchet-limbed boy of little speech, then changing in these grotesque inches into the wicked banishment of girlhood.
I cried, I remember. I hyperventilated in the bathroom while he picked over his collection of Hustler and Playboy and drew the ubiquitous florals sufficiently labian. I took the scissors, and cut my hair, squealing I don't want to die I don't want to die, and Peter was calm. He was so calm, like he knew. He let the inches fall, and we watched the pile for a long time without saying anything, like it was a pit of living snakes.
"It'll only hurt a little, Tig," he said to me, and his shadow nodded.
Peter always keeps his promises, through the broken ankle-straps and haphazard nail polish. He loved us through each blunt scissor-stroke and rage of lace and ribbon. We learned to shave, and then we stopped because he took us to the hotel together, and left us there without anything we could use to hurt ourselves. The blossom expands, and then curls into itself. Like detox.
He left us there, he said, until we could figure how to fly again.
-Tigerlily
Across the bathroom tiles, I've spread this memory, liquefied. You told me once you were taught to shave, and even if you never were, you were. We were. We were taught how to give voice to this color-secret, the liquid truth, in long equations of additions and subtractions.
I cut. My hair.
And it was a tragedy.
The scissors were my mother's, engraved with her name, and so it was in her name that I did it. I parceled it into long offerings which poured bleak onto the tiled floor. Subtraction, in these many hateful inches.
I wished I could have remained a Lost Boy, but Peter promised. He promised to love us all through the hardships of first living as a hatchet-limbed boy of little speech, then changing in these grotesque inches into the wicked banishment of girlhood.
I cried, I remember. I hyperventilated in the bathroom while he picked over his collection of Hustler and Playboy and drew the ubiquitous florals sufficiently labian. I took the scissors, and cut my hair, squealing I don't want to die I don't want to die, and Peter was calm. He was so calm, like he knew. He let the inches fall, and we watched the pile for a long time without saying anything, like it was a pit of living snakes.
"It'll only hurt a little, Tig," he said to me, and his shadow nodded.
Peter always keeps his promises, through the broken ankle-straps and haphazard nail polish. He loved us through each blunt scissor-stroke and rage of lace and ribbon. We learned to shave, and then we stopped because he took us to the hotel together, and left us there without anything we could use to hurt ourselves. The blossom expands, and then curls into itself. Like detox.
He left us there, he said, until we could figure how to fly again.
-Tigerlily
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)