I’m looking for some advice from Rosie today. It gets to feeling like she has so much shit figured out that I don’t. Clyde said she was becoming a man and that just figures right cuz I was born with a dick but no matter where I put it I end up feeling like being a man is like reaching the pedals to drive. You’re too short until you’re just not anymore so whatever Rosie’s secret is I want to know it so I go to her house but I guess it’s the wrong year cuz nobody’s home and I end up eating my lunch staring at the dust on the tv in her living room. The room is quiet anyway but quieter than quiet how it gets when Rosie isn’t in a room. I don’t even hear it when Evie comes in but she’s moving slow and her arms are crossed like she’s working up to telling me real gentle that she’s divorcing me and I have to move out.
You know…………...I hate to do this. I fuckin hate the catwalk and i hate the look on evies face when she sees me climb up there with a burger and a coke and a blanket like I’m never gonna leave. She looks up at me like right NOW Brad? you’re gonna make fun of my dress NOW when i just triedd on six of them for you and you said they were all just OK but sitting there in the old twenty twenty isn’t like my idea of fun you know. Just know I hate this. I didn’t get stuck two years ahead of this moment for kicks alright?
The metal up here is broken in pretty good by me, it clangs in all the right places making me feel as heavy as my thoughts and when i sit down, she scoffs at me hard. I can’t fuckin help it so evie looks like she’s over my shit and shakes her head and goes back to the scene she’s got going on with the REAL me in the REAL world but guess what? she can’t get her mind off of me sitting up all the way up there and maybe it’s cuz I’m droppin lettuce from my double double or maybe it’s cuz she likes me better than that joke down there who doesn’t have anything to say she doesn’t already know.
yeah ok so she wants to get married to adam so what? So I’ll tell you what. That numbnuts down there with my name and MY wife is gonna tell her that’s cool what does that mean you guys are already married so what’s his sick shit about anyways? Can I be a fuckin groomsman evie wow you’d look great in one of those flapper style thing you thought about that one time JESUS CHRIST MAN, DON’T DO IT. yeah, i’m her brother, I’m her best friend, I’ve been her fuckin mom before but this is a joke.
It’ss real dark up on the catwalk and bright down there on the stage where I’m sitting on the couch that looks like Al Bundy’s. i don’t blink and I start thinking there’s a reason for why it’s like that, bright on the stage and dark up here. You know, a different reason than the obvious. What do I know just cuz I’m up here where there’s more information? Knowing something like the real solid gold fucking wisdom about some shit is not the same as only having the information about it. Yeah I know what’s gonna happen but I’m still in the dark unlike that me down there that’s all lit up in the afternoon that’s the same in twenty different subsequent years. THAT guy UNDERSTANDS why knowing what THIS GUY knows doesn’t matter. I could tell her we’re gonna be married but it’s not gonna make us be married.
I hate Back to the Future, but I know I’m Marty McFuckingFly now because I get it now. I get how it makes sense that you have to go save your grandpa so you save your own life to save your grandpa and so on. That’s real, that’s what it’s like and you can blame Escher and say it’s nonsense if you wanted to but wait until you yourself step in some dog shit just like it and see what you really believe. I don’t believe in God or anything like that but you can bet I believe what Doc Brown says, absolutely. I absolutely do.
So yeah, so I tell her don’t and I tell her that cuz what if I don’t want her to? I already know she’s gonna tell me it doesn’t hurt my chances or have shit to do with us in an invasive or even substantive ripple effect kinda way. I already know but she tells me I’m late anyways so I know she just wants to DISCUSS the alternate universe where she’s not already married to Adam but she doesn’t wanna GO there and I know cuz she tells me I’m a little late when I tell her don’t. I tell her and she says I’m a little late like gee Brad, why are you hanging out over there when we both know that’s not real. Well gee Evie you said Adam wanted to marry you how the fuck should I know you meant he wants to marry you again. a word like again means the difference between so much shit it crushes my chest in and I can’t breathe thinking it’s the ten pound mallet of words and I got one you know, hanging up nestled in the curtain ropes up here I could do a lot of damage raining some AGAIN down on us right now what do you think?
there’s plenty of ways I could save myself from caring about who she marries or if it’s ever gonna be me. her hair color means she belongs to matthew so fuck her. She wants to play the butterfly in a net game where anything i say can and will be used against the girl she is that she has to protect from mean old Bradley who could sew up her pussy and spit in her face with a few halfassedly chosen words. I don’t have to care whether she wants to marry me or not if I remember she walked down the goddamn aisle to me once and I never forgot that and once is enough. There’s more, there’s a ton more, I’ve filled up a hundred composition notebooks with the thousand and one ways I can stop caring if I want to. but i guess hey I didn’t really want to.
I don’t want to cuz see, she’s got her own Back to the Future shit going on. Hell of a time to quit smoking. and at least in 2018 she’s looking at 2018 me with some compassion she doesn’t have for 2020 me. she reminds me i can trust her. at least where the couch smells like we grew up therre she doesn’t think i’m just refusing to change something i couldn’t change if i wanted to. She knows the names for all the moving parts between us and how the years cut in and out. She knows she has to unravell things in the right order inside her own heart to save mine so i can save hers so she can save mine so i can save hers. i wanna tell her that i want it to end, you know? I wanna tell her her that once i save her the loops just ends right? but it doesn’t. And the endless fucking fighting we do and the shadow boxing and the games and the dancing and not knowing where we go or where this ends or where we’ve found ourselves is something i gotta admit i’m not too anxious to be done with. Ok, I like it. I like it a lot, I even did some shit I’m not proud of to protect it and still do. But I’m not talking about me I’m talking about her eyes in the afternoon and how she doesn’t get what it’s like to look at her in the afternoon at her eyes like diamonds caught in spider webs and not see love ther e just these questions about how did we get here and how do we get out. I’m talking about the slipstream of us that gets our heads underwater and I don’t know how we’re supposed to share our breath or if we shouldn’t let each other drown and this is the thing: I don’t fucking care.
Which probably shows cuz I masticaste this moment by saying nothing or all the wrong shit and my stomach starts hurting like I ate too fast but see I got this goal in mind and it’s a lot like………………………..it’s a lot like my dick, actually. I have this thing I wanna put inside her and I’ve done it a lot already and it does different shit every time I try and I like that. I got these ways I feel and this shit I can see from the catwalk and how that gets translated down there on the stage good bad or indifferent from the rise of the stillight to the drawing of the curtain you know, I’M still UP here when the fucking scene ends.
I love her. Isn’t that all that fucking matters? I love her so much and she should be able to see that and it should make her feel like the fuckin queen of my heart and never like I’m just tolerating her but I fucking know I don’t do it right. I don’t say the right thing or show her the right side of me, I can’t even do John’s stupid self-deprecation shit good enough to endear her to me even just a little bit. Yeah alright so I’m not endearing and I go through life sticking my dick in everything and hoping it goes ok and that gets me off. I can’t stop thinking about if there’s a huge stack of old puzzles in the closet I could mix together and light on fire and feed her the ashes. I’m into some sick shit, I know this. but either all this shit will just become enough for her one day or she’ll leave me, there’ss nothing else for me to do.
But I’m a manipulative bastard too cuz when I’m thinking all this boohoo shit, I try to make sure she can hear me cuz it gets her off a little even if she hates it too or she won’t play with my Justiified. but tThe edge of my nihilism is this thing that makes her feel endless weirdly. I can tell when she gets in my lap and slides her pussy around my fingers. Like my iniquity is no roadblock, it’s my fucking will to live and it is. When I fuck her, I wanna leave my cum inside her as much as my real detailed explanation of why this is it. We’re not going anywhere, Evie, this is it. Sometimes I feel sorry about her bad luck but there is no destination and so we’re gonna get married as many times as I feel like it and maybe she never feels any different so what? So she gives up one day? I have no problem dragging her\ corpse around to fight and fuck it and make it watch me crash planets together for her if she does. I made up my mind already we’re never gonna be apart so w/e.
Monday, February 12, 2018
Saturday, February 10, 2018
Denton, 2001
Brad wakes up at 7:30, fifteen minutes before we have to be at school on Monday morning. He is skeletal in his undershirt, and he lights a cigarette before he even gets out of bed.
His room is messy and marred with evidence of his fury. There is a careful slit in the mattress, a haphazard hole in the wall behind the door, empty soda cans on the ground among the laundry. His diary is a spiral notebook, open to a page onto which he's written MELT with his own blood. The walls are gray and the sheets are red. The posters he has on the walls are of Playboy models.
He pulls on his jeans and black designer shoes. His hair is slick enough from being unwashed that he doesn't need to wet it or comb it. It hangs in loose tendrils around his face. In teenage hangover, he dons sunglasses and a black sport coat. He blows a smoke ring at his own reflection before noticing me in his doorway.
"I'm not going."
He turns to me and smiles under his blackout glasses.
"Oh, yes you are."
He marches me to my bedroom, through the wide expanse of our parents' hallway, painted a painful taupe. It's bare and cold over the dark hardwood floor, and it's supposed to be elegant but falls just short, because there's no artwork. Only family photos, lined up in ascending age.
My room is yellow, and has pressed flowers on the walls in white frames.
"Now," he says, throwing open the white door of my closet, and pawing at clothes. "Wear these."
He tosses me a red dress and white sweater I wore to a Valentine's Day dance the year before, and I understand what it is he's doing. I hold the slick material in my fingers for a long moment during which he raises his glasses and we stare into one another's eyes and his cigarette burns down in his fingers. He isn't allowed to smoke in the house.
"Okay," I tell him, and change my clothes.
The downstairs of our parents' house is dark and silent. Behind the closed bedroom door, I listen for a moment and hear the sound of our mother softly crying. Her sobs are listless whimpers now that she is on the far side of her sedatives.
Normally the bright kitchen would be bustling with the sounds of her making coffee and the chatter of her and my father exchanging stories about the news. I walk through the entire downstairs, as if the sound of a normal morning is hiding somewhere in another room. The living room is strewn with tissues and the television is still on, but muted. There's a chair pushed over on it's side on the floor of the dining room, and the rest ignore it like a dying member of their herd.
Brad watches me in the dining room through the doorway which leads to the kitchen. He leans against the counter with his arms crossed until the clock next to the long polished table begins to chime the quarter hour.
"We're taking Dad's car," he informs me, and grabs the keys from the hooks hanging in a neat row on the wall of the kitchen. He stands at the door to the garage and waits for me.
"They're going to stare at us," I tell him, looking down at the fallen chair like there's no way for me to right this at all.
"Yes," he says, his voice biting, and throws his cigarette into the sink holding soaking dishes. It makes a hissing sound, and he swings the keys around his index finger.
"Come on, Evie. Get in the car."
Our father's painstakingly restored Jaguar E-type series 3 Roadster crouches in the garage, and Brad vaults himself over the door and into the driver's seat with a kind of merciless and intentional glee. The interior is clean and black, the steering wheel a gold wood grain outlining the polished steel. The front panel of the dashboard is lined with toggle switches controlling things I was never allowed to touch, but Brad starts the engine like he's practiced a hundred times.
The car comes to life and the sound is threatening in the dark garage. Brad revs the engine and glances over at me as I open the door and sit beside him.
"I could just leave it running in here," he jokes, and revs the engine again. "No more rumors. No more staring. No more finals..."
I press the opener, and he laughs as light from the morning fills the garage.
"I just want to get it over with," I tell him, and he clutches my hand with his, warm and dry.
"I'll be with you all day," he assures me.
We back out into the street and he speeds to school. We arrive just before the first bell and he squeals into the parking lot while the student body on the lawn turn to watch us.
"How does it feel to be the daughter of the worst serial murderer in our town's history?" Brad asks me, lifting his glasses up from the back like this is all a big joke.
"How does it feel to be his son?" I snap at him, and he smiles at me, and pulls on one of the pearl buttons of my sweater.
When he gets out of the car, he throws his arm around me so we can walk in together.
His room is messy and marred with evidence of his fury. There is a careful slit in the mattress, a haphazard hole in the wall behind the door, empty soda cans on the ground among the laundry. His diary is a spiral notebook, open to a page onto which he's written MELT with his own blood. The walls are gray and the sheets are red. The posters he has on the walls are of Playboy models.
He pulls on his jeans and black designer shoes. His hair is slick enough from being unwashed that he doesn't need to wet it or comb it. It hangs in loose tendrils around his face. In teenage hangover, he dons sunglasses and a black sport coat. He blows a smoke ring at his own reflection before noticing me in his doorway.
"I'm not going."
He turns to me and smiles under his blackout glasses.
"Oh, yes you are."
He marches me to my bedroom, through the wide expanse of our parents' hallway, painted a painful taupe. It's bare and cold over the dark hardwood floor, and it's supposed to be elegant but falls just short, because there's no artwork. Only family photos, lined up in ascending age.
My room is yellow, and has pressed flowers on the walls in white frames.
"Now," he says, throwing open the white door of my closet, and pawing at clothes. "Wear these."
He tosses me a red dress and white sweater I wore to a Valentine's Day dance the year before, and I understand what it is he's doing. I hold the slick material in my fingers for a long moment during which he raises his glasses and we stare into one another's eyes and his cigarette burns down in his fingers. He isn't allowed to smoke in the house.
"Okay," I tell him, and change my clothes.
The downstairs of our parents' house is dark and silent. Behind the closed bedroom door, I listen for a moment and hear the sound of our mother softly crying. Her sobs are listless whimpers now that she is on the far side of her sedatives.
Normally the bright kitchen would be bustling with the sounds of her making coffee and the chatter of her and my father exchanging stories about the news. I walk through the entire downstairs, as if the sound of a normal morning is hiding somewhere in another room. The living room is strewn with tissues and the television is still on, but muted. There's a chair pushed over on it's side on the floor of the dining room, and the rest ignore it like a dying member of their herd.
Brad watches me in the dining room through the doorway which leads to the kitchen. He leans against the counter with his arms crossed until the clock next to the long polished table begins to chime the quarter hour.
"We're taking Dad's car," he informs me, and grabs the keys from the hooks hanging in a neat row on the wall of the kitchen. He stands at the door to the garage and waits for me.
"They're going to stare at us," I tell him, looking down at the fallen chair like there's no way for me to right this at all.
"Yes," he says, his voice biting, and throws his cigarette into the sink holding soaking dishes. It makes a hissing sound, and he swings the keys around his index finger.
"Come on, Evie. Get in the car."
Our father's painstakingly restored Jaguar E-type series 3 Roadster crouches in the garage, and Brad vaults himself over the door and into the driver's seat with a kind of merciless and intentional glee. The interior is clean and black, the steering wheel a gold wood grain outlining the polished steel. The front panel of the dashboard is lined with toggle switches controlling things I was never allowed to touch, but Brad starts the engine like he's practiced a hundred times.
The car comes to life and the sound is threatening in the dark garage. Brad revs the engine and glances over at me as I open the door and sit beside him.
"I could just leave it running in here," he jokes, and revs the engine again. "No more rumors. No more staring. No more finals..."
I press the opener, and he laughs as light from the morning fills the garage.
"I just want to get it over with," I tell him, and he clutches my hand with his, warm and dry.
"I'll be with you all day," he assures me.
We back out into the street and he speeds to school. We arrive just before the first bell and he squeals into the parking lot while the student body on the lawn turn to watch us.
"How does it feel to be the daughter of the worst serial murderer in our town's history?" Brad asks me, lifting his glasses up from the back like this is all a big joke.
"How does it feel to be his son?" I snap at him, and he smiles at me, and pulls on one of the pearl buttons of my sweater.
When he gets out of the car, he throws his arm around me so we can walk in together.
Thursday, February 8, 2018
Denton, 1978
There are some parts of the universe my name becomes Girl Soldier. In response, or perhaps by necessity, Brad's becomes Boy Soldier. We live in a Wasteland, and we wear the same shoe size. Dust on my skin, I walked through the Aftermath toward Brad at the end of the aisle. I remember the white chairs were full of the Gray Family, and no one turned to look at me.
There's love that's based on admiration, but there's another kind of love that has to do with seeing yourself in someone else, and therefore finding some kind of permission to exist. I wouldn't know half of the things I now know about myself without Brad, whether it was because he was the same or because he was different. Maybe I just lacked personal imagination, but there were errant punk teenagers, wild unknown species, shy and vindictive nihilists, and trees stunted and persistent in growth I found flowering in the dark shadows we cast on one another. Things I never would have seen before unless I saw it demonstrated in the lash of his tongue and the distance in his eyes.
Maybe there's no way to really know yourself until you watch yourself brought to life in front of you. At the end of the aisle, Brad has his arms at his sides, his hands balled into fists, and I could tell that every violent act of man was collapsing in on itself in his heart, and I was remembering one of our hundred mottos: He fights as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance, and proportion.
Someday I'll write a whole book just on those three words and all the life they breathe into the heart of magic. It will be about how Brad taught magic to me, in the low river underbrush of Eden; dirt on our sneakers and shirts stuck hot to our backs.
For now I simply repeated it, trying to get to the end of the aisle, no matter where or when the end of it was. It's a motto of perseverance and the exactness of warfare. How Brad is an artist, a measured response, and a chemical reaction.
I remember the wind dying, and the sound of him breathing, close and present in the midday when I reached him. Then it was over.
I woke up in the woods, in the early morning, dew hanging on the tips of the pine needles on the trees around me. It was cold, still November, and just after a rain, judging by the smell. Beneath the rain was the copper scent of the river. The wedding was gone, or had ended, and I was alone with myself again, an event stolen or erased or lost under the weight of this existence we've chosen.
"Brad?" I called into the trees.
In open spaces, the human voice refuses to be carried for long. My yell filled my own ears and died around me, snapping small twigs in the clearing I had woken up in. I saw a brown rabbit raise it's head high enough to show me it's proud ears before disappearing into the brush.
Had we gotten married? Was I still myself? Had years gone by where I'd been lost and alone here? Had he forgotten me? Was I in another world altogether? Had I slipped through the virginal hymen that separated universes again?
My wedding dress gone, I could feel jeans underneath the blanket that had been laid over me - a yellow and brown plaid of wide bricks and lines, the fringe stuck with brown leaves. I wrapped it around my shoulders and blew a pale-colored spider from my leg before standing to look around.
The sun was burning mist off of the valley where the woods were thickest. I yelled for him again, expecting no response. Expecting the worst answers to all my questions.
"Brad?"
"Evie!" was his bark of a reply, and I turned in all directions, tricked by his voice to believe he was down every path I could find through the underbrush.
"Where are you?" I asked the blank faces of trees.
"Come up the hill!" he yelled.
I hurried to him, afraid in the forest. I hadn't been to the woods in maybe years, and while I had once counted it as my home, I had withdrawn from it so far, it made me feel exposed and endangered more than anything else. I didn't feel the sense of playfulness at the antics of this place anymore. Just the cold strangeness of a foreign land.
My boots slid over a rock and I stumbled on the way up to meet him, but I found him where the hill leveled at it's apex, standing in front of an old house that I could tell had once been painted yellow. Now it had faded to bone white, with the persistence of time and exposure. There's a pallet to the woods; I remembered that much. A range of shades all things in time are reduced to. Bone white, soil brown, poppy red, lichen green.
Some of the siding had been pulled away to reveal the ribs of the house - a battle scar on it's smeared face revealing the brown frame beneath. Rust crept over the white paint of the screen door. The windows were opaque with rain and dust. The thing which always bothered me about the woods was the way it makes death so inevitable this way. The woods come to claim all things in time, even this house, whoever lived here once, and any happiness they might've shared. If it's not moss, it's mildew, and it's rain, and it's the choking kudzu, and it's Robert Frost in all his smug brevity.
"Look at this," Brad said, tightening a brown leather jacket over his shoulders. He was unshaven, the sides of his face flushing in the cold, his hair tucked into a hat and almost as dark as Clyde's in this green and brown wilderness.
He had an intrigued smile that meant he wasn't afraid like I was. He put his arm around me, and we stood looking at the house. Four steps up to the small porch, the bottom step sinking into the mud.
"I was looking for firewood," he said to me. "I didn't get any closer, thinking maybe there's a witch in there."
I touched a rope hanging from a tree next to me in the yard, knotted at the end to hold up a swing of splintering wood.
"We should go in," I suggested, the suggestion itself clung with the steam that puffed out of our lungs and weighed down the layers of dead leaves underfoot. The woods hold witches, sure, but not any that I can't reason with. Nightmares, absolutely, but none Brad can't make even more vile with the blowing of a casual kiss.
"Yeah, okay," he agreed.
The door creaked when it gave way, popping through grit caught in the hinges. The inside was dim and full of
"Evie?" Brad asked, his voice quiet as he crossed into the living room. "Are these your things?"
books, mostly, strewn from a bookcase which had been knocked over. A typewriter on a desk, a console record player, a couch inside which an animal had been living, floral in pattern and dark green.
"I... I can't remember. I can't remember how we got here," I admitted, and I watched confusion cloud the cold blue of his eyes once I'd said it.
"We were getting married," he reminded me. He picked up a plastic cup splashed with a pattern of orange and yellow daisies.
"Did we?" I asked him.
In a way, I might be a fatalist, and I could tell Brad knew it. If we hadn't gotten married, then maybe we were never supposed to. If he said we hadn't gotten married, then maybe we were never supposed to. The hand of God is fickle and frail in Gray House, and words mean everything. Fear can as easily make something true as an action, and so my question was barbed, and poisoned, and lethal. He knew it, and so he got angry.
"Of course we did, Evie," he almost spat. "What the fuck would make you ask a thing like that?"
But I could tell by his face he was only asking because he wanted me to be certain, because he wasn't either. Because we did wake up here together, with no memory of how we'd come, and now it was time to decide what had brought us here. We could feel between us it was time to choose a path to follow, and to one of many obvious fates, in true Family fashion. It's true if we say it is. It's as simple as believing you're not lost if you can find the north star. It's true if we say it is. Now who would say it first?
No, we did," I told him. "We're married. I just don't know... where this is. We were in the desert, and..."
I started to cry so fast it surprised even me. All the best laid plans of how I needed - fucking needed - to marry him in order to make sense of us were blown away in a dark second, and I'd been dropped into the wet and murky uncertainty of the Girl Soldier and all her infectious insides of the River instead. Brad put his arms tight around me, the leather of his jacket making a soft creak, and we stood there for a long time.
"Hey," he said after the long pause. "We've been married since we were born."
"Are you sure?" I asked him, almost hysterical. I felt his arms get even tighter around me, crushing me of air. I thought of the way Brad's physical pressure has always pushed against me, just this way, and the oppressive feeling of him beside me or within my rib cage has been ever-present, as my twin, smashed into a constricted uterus.
"Yeah," he said. "Absolutely. Just look at us."
I opened my watering eyes to look at us, but saw only our legs close enough to touch in matching jeans, in this strange house. The carpet was rotting around us to a strange shade of blackish-green. Wallpaper hung in long sheet unwinding from it's adhesive. There were shadows on the walls where pictures once hung. Below one shadow was the shattered glass hanging webbish in the frame over the photograph.
"We've always had fuckin' problems like we've been married forever," he sighed into my shoulder. "It's god damn ridiculous, Evie. All we've ever done is try to grow together."
I broke away from him because it seemed like a joke, what he said. It was true, in a way, but it was also a spectacular failure in many other ways. We had tried to grow together, yes, with little to no success because we were compositionally the same, like a piece of music, but played two entirely different ways. Yes, it's the same song, but one is going on the Top 40 and one is staying in the basement of the opera house forever and never meeting that guy at the mall because malls actually haven't been built yet.
While there was more uniting us, what divided us was enough to make it difficult to stand in the same reality with Brad, much less form this symbiotic partnership he was saying existed because we were always fucking arguing. It was the reason the wedding I had planned made the most sense - the desert was a place we had in common, and what was I supposed to do here?
The house became a mockery around us. Adam, even in his starched collars and business suits, would capitulate to the mold of this place, would build a fire, would find ways to trap the rabbits in the brush, would love this place inside me for what it was, would summon butterflies on his fingertips and pull worms from his garden he would plant outside. Adam would know how to love me in a way that made sense, Adam is why this fucking shadow exists in the first place, from which Brad and I could never seem to escape.
Brad, it was plain to me, couldn't stay here with me. What was he going to do, once the novelty of the camp-out had worn off? When my novelty wore off, would we just sit here reading books and waiting for the rain? Would he fix the window? Would we ever live somewhere like this together, alone, and far enough away from everyone else to feel like we'd finally escaped? Because Adam would fix the window. Adam would tell me stories at night. Adam would bring the winter down around us.
I wanted to scream at Brad, "You don't know what it's like to be this kind of animal for him," but he would never believe in anything I told him that he didn't already know.
Instead of screaming, I pushed past him to the narrow hall of the tiny house, which emptied into a bedroom in a better state of repair than the front room.
The window was intact, and so the room was free of leaves and animals, as far as I could see, but there was a layer of dust on the bedspread, which was a vague color between orange and pink I could imagine has a name like "Sunripe." The wallpaper in this room was pale green with white daisies. The light coming in through the opaque glass was early-morning yellow. It was a pretty room, and a poetic enough place to have the fight with Brad I knew I was about to have.
"What's your problem?" he asked me, coming into the room on my heels, his expression betrayed. He tossed back the brush of his hair that tends to fall smooth into his eyes, hooking it between his fingers with an irritated tug.
An age-old question, attached to an age-old dilemma. Tell the truth and lose, or lie and win.
"We can't stay here," I told him.
It was all I could make come out of me that was coherent thought. The rest of me was rising panic that we could try. We could leave somewhere and never be found if I hadn't... sectioned off whole parts of me for someone else.
"I wish I was a virgin," I whispered to him, but what I really meant was, I wish I'd never fallen in love with anyone else. Maybe I felt like I had nothing that I'd saved just for him, or just for us. That one gesture would've made us safe, and free, and clear of all the things we'd left behind us in a ruin.
"This is how we can't ever be married," I told him. "This house. That's why it's here."
He reached out to touch me, and in between the movements, I could almost see what it would take to make it all real. I could almost see it, but not quite, and it was gone before his hand met my cheek. I almost knew who he was - the boy in him which had always been alone with me. Almost, almost. Not the boy who could fix the window. The boy who'd broken it in the first place.
I struggled when he took his jacket off to hold onto what I could see, and conjure him up from the inside, behind his eyes. I struggled to just see him, and not attach as I'm prone to do the labels of story and meaning. Don't think about if we ran away. Don't think about how mad Adam would be if he knew, or Matthew. Don't think about how maybe you just want him to be Clyde.
The single tear, two inches in length, along the hem of
"Evie."
his shirt. Torn by age and wear. The shirt he wouldn't throw away. A color named something like "firebrick." How he leaned back onto a single
"We're virgins, don't you know?"
elbow in the dirt to laugh when I told him a joke, and
"We can stay here, I swear."
hit rocks into the trees with a snub of steel pipe he found in the house, listening for their fall in the brush.
He took my clothes off, slowly, and I told him I couldn't remember who we were.
There's love that's based on admiration, but there's another kind of love that has to do with seeing yourself in someone else, and therefore finding some kind of permission to exist. I wouldn't know half of the things I now know about myself without Brad, whether it was because he was the same or because he was different. Maybe I just lacked personal imagination, but there were errant punk teenagers, wild unknown species, shy and vindictive nihilists, and trees stunted and persistent in growth I found flowering in the dark shadows we cast on one another. Things I never would have seen before unless I saw it demonstrated in the lash of his tongue and the distance in his eyes.
Maybe there's no way to really know yourself until you watch yourself brought to life in front of you. At the end of the aisle, Brad has his arms at his sides, his hands balled into fists, and I could tell that every violent act of man was collapsing in on itself in his heart, and I was remembering one of our hundred mottos: He fights as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance, and proportion.
Someday I'll write a whole book just on those three words and all the life they breathe into the heart of magic. It will be about how Brad taught magic to me, in the low river underbrush of Eden; dirt on our sneakers and shirts stuck hot to our backs.
For now I simply repeated it, trying to get to the end of the aisle, no matter where or when the end of it was. It's a motto of perseverance and the exactness of warfare. How Brad is an artist, a measured response, and a chemical reaction.
I remember the wind dying, and the sound of him breathing, close and present in the midday when I reached him. Then it was over.
I woke up in the woods, in the early morning, dew hanging on the tips of the pine needles on the trees around me. It was cold, still November, and just after a rain, judging by the smell. Beneath the rain was the copper scent of the river. The wedding was gone, or had ended, and I was alone with myself again, an event stolen or erased or lost under the weight of this existence we've chosen.
"Brad?" I called into the trees.
In open spaces, the human voice refuses to be carried for long. My yell filled my own ears and died around me, snapping small twigs in the clearing I had woken up in. I saw a brown rabbit raise it's head high enough to show me it's proud ears before disappearing into the brush.
Had we gotten married? Was I still myself? Had years gone by where I'd been lost and alone here? Had he forgotten me? Was I in another world altogether? Had I slipped through the virginal hymen that separated universes again?
My wedding dress gone, I could feel jeans underneath the blanket that had been laid over me - a yellow and brown plaid of wide bricks and lines, the fringe stuck with brown leaves. I wrapped it around my shoulders and blew a pale-colored spider from my leg before standing to look around.
The sun was burning mist off of the valley where the woods were thickest. I yelled for him again, expecting no response. Expecting the worst answers to all my questions.
"Brad?"
"Evie!" was his bark of a reply, and I turned in all directions, tricked by his voice to believe he was down every path I could find through the underbrush.
"Where are you?" I asked the blank faces of trees.
"Come up the hill!" he yelled.
I hurried to him, afraid in the forest. I hadn't been to the woods in maybe years, and while I had once counted it as my home, I had withdrawn from it so far, it made me feel exposed and endangered more than anything else. I didn't feel the sense of playfulness at the antics of this place anymore. Just the cold strangeness of a foreign land.
My boots slid over a rock and I stumbled on the way up to meet him, but I found him where the hill leveled at it's apex, standing in front of an old house that I could tell had once been painted yellow. Now it had faded to bone white, with the persistence of time and exposure. There's a pallet to the woods; I remembered that much. A range of shades all things in time are reduced to. Bone white, soil brown, poppy red, lichen green.
Some of the siding had been pulled away to reveal the ribs of the house - a battle scar on it's smeared face revealing the brown frame beneath. Rust crept over the white paint of the screen door. The windows were opaque with rain and dust. The thing which always bothered me about the woods was the way it makes death so inevitable this way. The woods come to claim all things in time, even this house, whoever lived here once, and any happiness they might've shared. If it's not moss, it's mildew, and it's rain, and it's the choking kudzu, and it's Robert Frost in all his smug brevity.
"Look at this," Brad said, tightening a brown leather jacket over his shoulders. He was unshaven, the sides of his face flushing in the cold, his hair tucked into a hat and almost as dark as Clyde's in this green and brown wilderness.
He had an intrigued smile that meant he wasn't afraid like I was. He put his arm around me, and we stood looking at the house. Four steps up to the small porch, the bottom step sinking into the mud.
"I was looking for firewood," he said to me. "I didn't get any closer, thinking maybe there's a witch in there."
I touched a rope hanging from a tree next to me in the yard, knotted at the end to hold up a swing of splintering wood.
"We should go in," I suggested, the suggestion itself clung with the steam that puffed out of our lungs and weighed down the layers of dead leaves underfoot. The woods hold witches, sure, but not any that I can't reason with. Nightmares, absolutely, but none Brad can't make even more vile with the blowing of a casual kiss.
"Yeah, okay," he agreed.
The door creaked when it gave way, popping through grit caught in the hinges. The inside was dim and full of
"Evie?" Brad asked, his voice quiet as he crossed into the living room. "Are these your things?"
books, mostly, strewn from a bookcase which had been knocked over. A typewriter on a desk, a console record player, a couch inside which an animal had been living, floral in pattern and dark green.
"I... I can't remember. I can't remember how we got here," I admitted, and I watched confusion cloud the cold blue of his eyes once I'd said it.
"We were getting married," he reminded me. He picked up a plastic cup splashed with a pattern of orange and yellow daisies.
"Did we?" I asked him.
In a way, I might be a fatalist, and I could tell Brad knew it. If we hadn't gotten married, then maybe we were never supposed to. If he said we hadn't gotten married, then maybe we were never supposed to. The hand of God is fickle and frail in Gray House, and words mean everything. Fear can as easily make something true as an action, and so my question was barbed, and poisoned, and lethal. He knew it, and so he got angry.
"Of course we did, Evie," he almost spat. "What the fuck would make you ask a thing like that?"
But I could tell by his face he was only asking because he wanted me to be certain, because he wasn't either. Because we did wake up here together, with no memory of how we'd come, and now it was time to decide what had brought us here. We could feel between us it was time to choose a path to follow, and to one of many obvious fates, in true Family fashion. It's true if we say it is. It's as simple as believing you're not lost if you can find the north star. It's true if we say it is. Now who would say it first?
No, we did," I told him. "We're married. I just don't know... where this is. We were in the desert, and..."
I started to cry so fast it surprised even me. All the best laid plans of how I needed - fucking needed - to marry him in order to make sense of us were blown away in a dark second, and I'd been dropped into the wet and murky uncertainty of the Girl Soldier and all her infectious insides of the River instead. Brad put his arms tight around me, the leather of his jacket making a soft creak, and we stood there for a long time.
"Hey," he said after the long pause. "We've been married since we were born."
"Are you sure?" I asked him, almost hysterical. I felt his arms get even tighter around me, crushing me of air. I thought of the way Brad's physical pressure has always pushed against me, just this way, and the oppressive feeling of him beside me or within my rib cage has been ever-present, as my twin, smashed into a constricted uterus.
"Yeah," he said. "Absolutely. Just look at us."
I opened my watering eyes to look at us, but saw only our legs close enough to touch in matching jeans, in this strange house. The carpet was rotting around us to a strange shade of blackish-green. Wallpaper hung in long sheet unwinding from it's adhesive. There were shadows on the walls where pictures once hung. Below one shadow was the shattered glass hanging webbish in the frame over the photograph.
"We've always had fuckin' problems like we've been married forever," he sighed into my shoulder. "It's god damn ridiculous, Evie. All we've ever done is try to grow together."
I broke away from him because it seemed like a joke, what he said. It was true, in a way, but it was also a spectacular failure in many other ways. We had tried to grow together, yes, with little to no success because we were compositionally the same, like a piece of music, but played two entirely different ways. Yes, it's the same song, but one is going on the Top 40 and one is staying in the basement of the opera house forever and never meeting that guy at the mall because malls actually haven't been built yet.
While there was more uniting us, what divided us was enough to make it difficult to stand in the same reality with Brad, much less form this symbiotic partnership he was saying existed because we were always fucking arguing. It was the reason the wedding I had planned made the most sense - the desert was a place we had in common, and what was I supposed to do here?
The house became a mockery around us. Adam, even in his starched collars and business suits, would capitulate to the mold of this place, would build a fire, would find ways to trap the rabbits in the brush, would love this place inside me for what it was, would summon butterflies on his fingertips and pull worms from his garden he would plant outside. Adam would know how to love me in a way that made sense, Adam is why this fucking shadow exists in the first place, from which Brad and I could never seem to escape.
Brad, it was plain to me, couldn't stay here with me. What was he going to do, once the novelty of the camp-out had worn off? When my novelty wore off, would we just sit here reading books and waiting for the rain? Would he fix the window? Would we ever live somewhere like this together, alone, and far enough away from everyone else to feel like we'd finally escaped? Because Adam would fix the window. Adam would tell me stories at night. Adam would bring the winter down around us.
I wanted to scream at Brad, "You don't know what it's like to be this kind of animal for him," but he would never believe in anything I told him that he didn't already know.
Instead of screaming, I pushed past him to the narrow hall of the tiny house, which emptied into a bedroom in a better state of repair than the front room.
The window was intact, and so the room was free of leaves and animals, as far as I could see, but there was a layer of dust on the bedspread, which was a vague color between orange and pink I could imagine has a name like "Sunripe." The wallpaper in this room was pale green with white daisies. The light coming in through the opaque glass was early-morning yellow. It was a pretty room, and a poetic enough place to have the fight with Brad I knew I was about to have.
"What's your problem?" he asked me, coming into the room on my heels, his expression betrayed. He tossed back the brush of his hair that tends to fall smooth into his eyes, hooking it between his fingers with an irritated tug.
An age-old question, attached to an age-old dilemma. Tell the truth and lose, or lie and win.
"We can't stay here," I told him.
It was all I could make come out of me that was coherent thought. The rest of me was rising panic that we could try. We could leave somewhere and never be found if I hadn't... sectioned off whole parts of me for someone else.
"I wish I was a virgin," I whispered to him, but what I really meant was, I wish I'd never fallen in love with anyone else. Maybe I felt like I had nothing that I'd saved just for him, or just for us. That one gesture would've made us safe, and free, and clear of all the things we'd left behind us in a ruin.
"This is how we can't ever be married," I told him. "This house. That's why it's here."
He reached out to touch me, and in between the movements, I could almost see what it would take to make it all real. I could almost see it, but not quite, and it was gone before his hand met my cheek. I almost knew who he was - the boy in him which had always been alone with me. Almost, almost. Not the boy who could fix the window. The boy who'd broken it in the first place.
I struggled when he took his jacket off to hold onto what I could see, and conjure him up from the inside, behind his eyes. I struggled to just see him, and not attach as I'm prone to do the labels of story and meaning. Don't think about if we ran away. Don't think about how mad Adam would be if he knew, or Matthew. Don't think about how maybe you just want him to be Clyde.
The single tear, two inches in length, along the hem of
"Evie."
his shirt. Torn by age and wear. The shirt he wouldn't throw away. A color named something like "firebrick." How he leaned back onto a single
"We're virgins, don't you know?"
elbow in the dirt to laugh when I told him a joke, and
"We can stay here, I swear."
hit rocks into the trees with a snub of steel pipe he found in the house, listening for their fall in the brush.
He took my clothes off, slowly, and I told him I couldn't remember who we were.
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