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.

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

There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 2

Matthew unfolded, tricks up his sleeves which he emptied as he walked over the water-soaked floors.  He unfolded like a creature of many legs, his green eyes blank and sane as cicadas.  This torment, the torment of the flood and our subsequent apathy toward all it's related chaos, was the circumstance which called him to action; the way we all struggled in his invisible web.

Matthew crept, spreading over doorknobs and into cracks in the tile in the bathroom the paranoia of purpose.  We are dark creatures when provoked to dark places, and in idleness Matthew itches us to look inward, find patterns in nothingness, blame each other, and form alliances with forces we'd never bother with on normal nights.  Where he walked after the flood, he spread a thick and dangerous magic that we all needed, as much as we all hated it.

Maybe he saved us all, who really knows?  Maybe it was only me.

I pride myself on being some kind of hero, though after the last 5 years, I'd struggle to come up with anything I've done which was heroic at the time and not totally in my own self-interest (if the two are even mutually exclusive, which I can't say anymore).  My old belief is that I'm the hero, and Matthew is the villain, for all the ways he walks around moral absolutes and maintains his innocence of heart.  Wouldn't it be strange if he'd done something to save us all?  Would it have been an accident, or would he have had the intention to do it?

It was simple, or it began simply.  He wrote me a letter, and so peeling off one of his thousand tattoos and laying it flat and loving onto paper, he was coy and apologetic for that which had come before.  It was a clever and incisive "good morning," but villains are like that.  They have the ability to make idle chit-chat into weaponry and drive it straight into the heart of all things. 

Eve,

The fountain is a kiddie pool. You had already known that. Everyone had known though no one had returned any rubber duckies to it. Well, I dove in. The water we said we would never touch. I found Jamaica.

There's no more half-assed evil spirits in here, only prefabricated ones and the last bit of patience you could stuff into your pockets. I said I wanted your eyes. This, this, this, over again, but never round like the button holes you had me put my tongue through to kiss you. 

Meager though we are, meager though we can't. Her palms blister, and then I accuse her of becoming you. Daughters are like water. 

This was the rain, dripping down the boots of some who had not known rain before. There were bells in the river. An ocean could not rise to match the fire or be brave enough to put it out. Though it was like something out of one of those darker teen movies such as that which all the actors were former models anyways. I hate when it has gotten dark when leaving the theater when it had been day when we went inside.

Turn when you can hear me speaking to you, will you? I hate when you cannot look into my eyes. Circle, circle follow circle, circle. I never got to show you my hand, and you never believed it was a winner. 

Though you were confused by me and hurt by me, you let me make you laugh, and you made me laugh. Why do you let yourself do that? How can you let yourself? I want you to teach me how to do it, but also I want to kill you for knowing how to do that as well. Fuck that.

I got a new job, I am going to be a crash test dummy. I had thought of asking you not to laugh at me for this. Is there a point? You have a new job as a gas giant which admits noxious, destructive chemicals which kill. I am going to dry off. I am going to paint with all colors which are edging to pink though they aren't pink. It is the colors of Venus, appearing pink though they are altogether not. If I had not rushed off to become a fighter as early in my life, I would have become better with colors and made my own paint to sell and called them Pink Planette. But now I am to resort to test dummying. Goodbye forever.

I love you, Eve.

MBK