For Levi

Levi -

The closet was empty, the back wall a barren space I wrote your name, over and over, where someone will find it after I die.  For now, it wraps the circumference of my ring finger in Hebrew, a promise to burn you into the places of the universe most incendiary.

While I suspected it, I stopped asking if we might be the same creature after you destroyed the lab.  It stopped mattering to me, squarely in a moment, to codify such a thing.

Last night was the new moon.  I don't want to know who you are, really.  I want to sink any inclination I might have about what life is like for you to the bottom of the ocean and lock it in a chest.  I want to have no inclinations, never bring them to light, and forget them utterly, for what it might mean about me....

We might've once been a part of a fairy tale where we find our way through dark woods and discover our mutual father was the moon, but I'm not sure I believe in it anymore.  Not the fairy tale, or the magic, or the sameness, even.

Although I wonder if I mean that, or could even if I tried.

- Z

Man 1

Adam,

The dealings of all men could be counted as the same, if one looked with a broad view and a nameless longing.  I think they must all want to... stay alive, at first glance, but a second would tell me it's that they want to know they're alive in the first place.

I think about the kind of man who would ever know something like that, and what it would take to wrestle that from the world, like drawing a smoke circle from the air.  Practice, consciousness, physical poise and grace, familiarity with the air and the way the ring is formed, and many other factors a man is designed to overlook.

Blow a smoke ring, darling, and think now on how you intend to live before you die.  Think now on how solid and real and present you are.

Now watch it stagger, and dissipate, as shaky as all the realizations of childhood forgotten by an aging mind.  For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

I reach small fingers into the chest of the man, into the hollow cavity of the man, and wind him up.  He winds until he stops, and ticks.  He ticks until he would tick no longer.  Until the ticking should stop, and what difference does the stopping make but to signal the time to wind?  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

Tell me, with your utmost honesty, does a machine fear the evil of which it is capable, as a man does?  But what evil would a clock ever be capable of, but the marking of the passage of time?

And as you are a music box, here I wind you to dance, as the rain turns back to snow.

As Ever,

Evelyn

Homecoming Seven

As the night starts over, I can feel Clyde in the distance beyond me.  I know we're racing to meet somewhere in the city, his wings showing more age than mine ever will.  The dry wind gusts hard to tumble me to one side, and I come to in a hotel shower, a slip of soap at eye-level, white and smelling of roses.

I expected Clyde to be expecting me, but I can't tell if he brought us here, or I did.  The water is a temperature that feels translucent to the skin, bathing in something imaginary.  I shut it off, and open the bathroom door to a room mockingly familiar.  The hotel room he abducted Bonnie to, all those years ago.

The light is dimming with the sunset, and the feeling in the room is one of having sent her out for ice.  He's a timeless version of himself, his skin tumbling over the wideness of his arms, black jeans flexing painful as he turns over in the bed sheets.  I wonder if maybe I am her, or if the clothes on the floor are hers, or he's on his way to find her.

Steam escapes behind me and vanishes in the dry air, reflected in the light from the bathroom.  The room smells like his shed clothing, his sweat, the oils of his skin, and something dark beneath it that might be regret, or longing.

"You look like an angel," he offers, watching me tuck the end of my white towel into itself.  It's stiff, and thick, and it smells like disinfectant and cinnamon.

"I would if my roots weren't showing," I tell him, and he turns a final quarter to lay on his back, his arm over his forehead, his body sinking into the sheets, a color not gray or purple or blue, but bruised.

"Mare," he sighs.  "Your roots are always showing."

The slow shift of the light of the city bleeds into our drawling speech, and the heavy heat of Clyde oppresses all of our sentences to break in half, drained of meaning and consistency.

"Are we lovers?" I ask him, and he sits up to light a cigarette, the pack's white and red label seeming generic enough to startle me into the uncertainty of what movie this is.

"Aren't we always?" he asks me.

The resentment on his face that I would ask such a question makes me laugh, and I cast around for something to wear while his frown deepens.

"I just can't tell if these are my clothes."

He looks out the vast windows, ashing his cigarette onto the floor, the back of him in silhouette.

"This isn't our room," he observes.

"It's not?"

"No," he shakes the back of his black head.  "No, I told you about that one.  It's a hole in the wall in Michigan.  I told you, some starlet took her throwaways there."

"Some boy who..."

He pounds the glass with an open palm, the sound startling me.

"LOVES you," he barks, and then laughs.

There's something harsh about the love he has for Marilyn I want to say is something I don't recognize.  I want to distance myself from it with experience and time.  I want to tuck him away somewhere inside and show him that times sure have changed, and he never needed someone like me, anyway.  Whatever ways I didn't have the time for him before, I have for him now.

But then, maybe that was always the joke.

The small palm plant next to the window reaches for the last beams of the light of the sun, and I sneak up behind Clyde holding my breath because... he actually might feel safer around me if I'm dead, and the man of him lapses and relapses into boys and girls and women and dogs in a fast succession.

"Just who the fuck do you think you are?" he asks me, his voice edging on tears.  Anyone else would think he meant to challenge some idea of myself I had.  I know he's really asking for an answer.

"I don't know," I whisper, touching his shoulder.  "You?"

He shakes his head, and the tornado in his black eyes settles into the sands around us, calm again.

"You wanted to bring me home, and we crashed into Cairo," he observes.  "You think you know something about me now."

"Yeah," I admit, and put my arms around him, to touch his damp skin to mine.  "Welcome home."

"Thanks, Fox," he says into my hair, and I disappear before Bonnie comes back.