Ian 22

Ian,

Since I gave him initial consent this summer, Adam drugs me periodically and without warning.  Generally, my coffee in the morning, only slightly more bitter than normal.  

In the half hour or so that follows, I can feel myself get drowsy, and I submit to what he's given me, some drug I've never determined the origin of, and fall into something close to sleep.  

The process, he assures me, is important in disassociating from the information we're trying to lose, at a rapid rate, and complying with the alterations he's making to time and space.  They are strong, and quickly metabolized to nothing under the rate of flooding endorphins we force on ourselves.  

I come to myself in our bed, which is a shifting haze between one room and another, like attempting to delineate one color from it's gradients in a rainbow.  I move my limbs heavy-feeling, watching Adam's mischief slip into something haunted and not amused.   

In the afternoon light, which becomes quickly dusk, I smile at him something lazy, laying somehow at once in the back of a pickup truck, and a bed of a motel.

"Hey, hey," I sing soft to him, to tell him I'm awake.  

"My, my," he answers, rasping.  "Rock and roll can never die."

"Are we gonna die, Adam?" I ask him, the color of me warming rapidly to the expression I have of a girl inside me, and throbbing from the lightest color of the clouds out our window to the darkest and most starved shade of blood that exists.  He lifts with the claw of his hand the front of his hair and he looks at the floor.  

"Not tonight, Evie," he says, as he undresses from his suit of himself to become the boy he named Frances but cried once and admitted was named Ian.  "I don't think tonight."

"I have to be home early," I remind him, feeling the girl I'm stepping into and the delicacy of her fears.  

"I hear," he drawls slow.  "I gotta have the pickup back soon anyhow."

He crawls across the hot metal toward me, the sun beating down, and the uncertainty of his mouth reaches mine.  The weight of him between my legs means some promise that I'll never die alone how my mother will, and I cringe at the thought he might find out about her feeding all those cats out back.  

"I love you," he admits, his eyes low.  He doesn't meet mine, some ghastly black eye blooming on his face.  

"I love you," I choke back, tears sticking in my throat.  I touch the place I'm sure his father hit him and I feel his fingers tug at the waist of my panties.  

"Adam?" I ask him, and he answers.

"Evelyn."

Through the floor of the truck, I am pulled or dropped into the experience of the next girl, Argentinian, behind her house, on a pile of wood that Adam's thrown his coat over.  The feel of him pushing inside me is as foreign as it was 20 minutes ago, as it will be again in 45.  He says something in Spanish, his eyes confused and frantic, and touches my face with his thumb, which he withdraws and sticks in his mouth as if he can taste my skin.

An older man than usual, he's self-conscious, the leather of his car squeaking under my knees as I climb into his lap.  

"You.  You.  Evelyn, you don't have to do this," he says embarrassed.  

"I want to," I convince him.  My nylons tear on a piece of plastic broken on his gear shift.  

"Oh," he fusses.  "Oh, I'm sorry," and we laugh before he slides inside me, the shock on his face telling me that...

"Shit," he almost yelps, while I breathe out, slow my panic, work through the pain of penetration to try to accept him despite the vise it feels he's trying to pry open with his will alone.  He wipes his dark hair off his face, and pulls his t-shirt from his back, stuck with the sweat of the summer night.  

He paints onto us each passing offered virginity, with a persistence I've come to expect from him, when some unknown conclusion is at stake.  With each passing entrance of him, into a place I previously had no knowledge, I become aware in parts and torn pieces, that he has effected me in a fundamental way; where I touch a dark place inside me is now different.  But rather than recoiling from that change, he presses my fingers into it, to hold it up to some light, to show it to me, and caress it with careful fingers.

I soften in some place inside, where I become that which he can affect.  The lowest girl of me, the one eager for his affection and murder at his hands, softens to some animal gleam in my eyes.  Enduring him and the things I feel had been altered or affected becomes something I show him, the same as I hold the lips of my pussy open for him to see where to fuck me.  

Into the third or fourth day, according to us, he begins the same.  His eyes are startled, showing me things without words.  

"Evelyn, look..." Frances pleads.  Things I shouldn't know about being a boy and being a virgin, and the arms into which you fall, and how you can easily forget the difference between your woman and her pussy and the place of your birth, and the last man you killed.  

"Adam?" I ask him again, my voice worn from the moans and hoarse.  Soon, I'll be silent and we'll have only our bodies to tell what's real and what isn't.  Unable to protest, he'll feel my contract or protest in my shoulders, and stop what he's doing, if he feels like it, if the pain is avoidable.  

"Evelyn," he sighs back, grunting in his throat against what I think must be an orgasm he fights from some depth of him.  

In waves, the affection ends by a crashing against him some conviction of all I am and all I have inside me to give, and it begins again with a soft and timid understanding that nothing ever ends.  

Everyone, all those people...they never stop.

Love, 

Annik

Ian 21

Ian,

 

Clyde waits shy like a heavy stone pinning gauzy curtains to the windowsills you sat on as a boy in your romance while the moon set low, Matthew, while the moon set low and your tears gathered in the pendulum soak of your soft and unshaven chin.  He's the walking gentle footsteps of the ghost who lost your toys when you were a child. 

 

I loved him when we were children.  You're meant to recall or be recalled to the nursery I'm sure we shared, white walls and dusty corners, where the dragons were treated like humans.  Where we learned about our world, under the instructions of our parents.  It's meant to feel English, and the green world beyond the wide windows is what darkens, surely, to let us know the magic of Peter Pan.  It's meant to feel woody and dirt-covered, as if the war has only newly ended. 

 

Clyde is a dark stone on our windowsill.  I loved him, when we were children, and I saw his scabbed knees fall to the white floor where we ran the train set together, and his wide mouth puffy from his baby fat spoke about creation.

 

"Feathers," I told him, confused, and he didn't answer, his blonde hair brushing his cheeks.  I touched one wing, and he sighed.

 

"Don't."

 

Clyde ran the train set while in Brooklyn, I climb the catwalk stairs to the roof and listen for his voice. 

 

"Clyde?"

 

"Fox?"

 

I raised my head to him, so very slowly, on our wedding day, I thought I would die at his chest, or the world would end at his throat.  All the family attending in finery, all the children dressed in yellow and black and blue, all the stars looking down at us, all the dragons looking on, how...?

 

His mucus slapped the wood floor and he crouched like an animal, his hair in his face.  Blood stuck the black of his t-shirt to him in a glossy darkening patch, and the tear in it matched the length of the knife in my hand.  He lunged at me, his face, the face of an angel, but the fur I felt in my hands was as black as the river at night. 

 

We wrestled the knife from between us, and he held me down to the floor, struggling to get his cock out and keep my hands pinned at the same time.  I loved him more with every murder.

 

"You have a soul," he growled low enough to sound like a threat, and his hair made a curtain around us as he covered my mouth, perhaps to steal it from me.

 

They were wet, his eyes.  Wet, and wide.  Betty was sobbing onto my mother.  Our daughter, a toddler at the time, clutched at my legs. 

 

"Momma," she said.  "Happy Birthday!"

 

"Thank you, Bluejay," I told her.  Adam collected her away, and Clyde's body collided with mine, and we spoke close behind our hands the secret that comprised our wedding vows.

 

"I've loved you since we were children."

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 19

Ian,

 

My body is a place you lay.  Last night, I climbed the narrow child's ladder to the top bunk we sleep on.  I had a loft bed for years when I was younger, and the sense of being suspended in air is one I think I must be comforted by.  You were spread, one leg crooked, like a hanged man, on the mattress, your skin bare.  When I crawled next to you, overlapping you, your hands snaked into mine and you clawed me closer.  I don't know if you know you do that. 

 

There are low railings that keep children in their top bunk.  The dark wood of them gives me the sense we're in a coffin together.  Would they pose us, dead, just like we were?  Your arm over my waist, our foreheads pressed together, knees interlocking, my arm twisting like a root around the back of your shoulder.  I'm the grave of myself sometimes, much more than the body that lies in it. 

 

You woke tight against me, your hands squeezing me to clutch some realness or substantial thought that I'm here.  I wonder if you have bad dreams, or you fear the black spaces your mind can vanish.  I don't know.  Maybe it feels good to wake up wrapped around a girl.  You woke up, and rolled slightly, and pushed my shoulder into the pillow, and my hip bone under yours. 

 

I pressed my leg backwards and yours slid over it.  I raised the other, and you kissed it.  Under us, my heart beat and fluttered like a sleeping child we share our space with. 

 

"You're awake," you said to me, your mouth against my collar.

 

"You're so hard," I whispered back, touching light the warm skin of your cock where it brushed my thigh, before you found a quick way inside me with a short moan from you and a tensing of my fingers against your scalp.

 

The space of rest in a line of music or poetry where all sound stops is referred to as a caesura.  These can be male and female; the space when the needle drops, and the space when the needle is pulled into slow silence.  Yes, you put your cock inside me, and then...

 

 

The cellars of my creation are messy and dark.  They are inhabited by the loneliest angels and the most dire of consequences, playing on repeat through the dirty water resonations on the floor.  They are not cold, nor echoing, but full of the warm and expectant quiet of the silt at the bottom of rivers. 

 

Heavy, I got drunk with Brad, and he banged the keys of the piano and I crawled like a small animal toward the door of something, to find it unlocked. 

 

Soft, I knit bones together inside me while Adam watched, his eyes squinted in the glare of a yellow and fire-streaked sunset, tired and sleepless, and I told him this might be all I know about science.

 

Shy, I wrote Nick all the letters he clutched in his fists in lives before, while he died alone.  Just to tell him I knew.  Just to show him we're in love. 

 

Eager, I stroked the ears of Clyde's wolf and lowered my arm into the darkest place to be Dismembered by him where the warmest parts of us are his sweat and my blood. 

 

"God," is what I exhaled to you, to break the rest, your mouth finding mine and accepting the word. 

 

Love,

Annik