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unfolded slowly, like a butterfly from its cocoon.
gripped my shoulders, shimmying me through the door, pulling me back into the world.
The stained-glass windows shimmered their faint blues and golds, and I kept imagining
the hand of God would slide aside the steepled roof to pluck away my mask.
The idea of money for sex thrilled me like nothing before.
Ahead of us, the rectangular drive-in screen resembled a gigantic white envelope. It obliterated part of the sky, the open door to an empty world.
She twiddled the dials and lifted it to her ear. “Listen. I hear something. It’s the voice of God.” She laughed, and I leaned to where she held the speaker, the side of my head brushing against its chilly ridges. The snow began tumbling faster in sharp diagonal darts. I closed my eyes and listened. Wendy gripped my fingers tighter. After a while, I heard a whispering from deep within the speaker. It could have been something as explainable as Wendy playing a joke, or our gloves bristling together, or the wind that gusted the flakes around us. But I wanted the noise to be something else. “Yes,”
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The shadow spilled across our faces like an enormous veil.
catfish tail cut the murky water, droplets pearling my shirt. In the twilight, the three fish gleamed like intestines,
knew she would support whatever move I made next. She would stay beside me until I solved it. Even if to solve meant to lose another block of time, to slip into the unknown world where I was certain they’d taken me before.
“Defenestration,” I said. “‘The act of throwing someone through a window.’” I knew a lot of words like that.
“Ooh, you’re still standing in my shadow.”
If what I felt was love, it had happened unexpectedly, like a slap from a stranger or a hailstorm of cherries from a cloudless sky.
The sky was almost dark, the sun leaving an umber residue across the bank of clouds to the west.
By the time I arrived, the rain had begun again. Under the ballpark’s lights, it looked like billions of needles.
I needed to hurt him somehow, to raze and weaken him, or, as I suddenly longed to scribble down as the line of a poem, “to scissor through the starched gristle
of his heart.”
The key, I thought. It was still under the mattress. It burned its forbidden shape into my hand, catching a ray from the streetlights outside Neil’s window. It turned easily in the dresser drawer’s lock.
“There’s so many of us. Not all of us realize it. Yet we have a drive to know what’s happened. What they’ve done to us.”
Something about the coach stopped me. Strangely, I couldn’t remember anything about him.
Thin tentacles of moonlight stretched through the overhead dome of trees, accentuating some shadows, deepening others.
Something was building from deep inside my throat, something rising toward my mouth that could have been vomit or a scream but felt sickeningly like a fist, a fist slowly opening.
“Us, on the other hand, they can’t kill. But we have to live with the memory of what they do. And really, it’s what they do to us that’s worse.”
cried because, at that moment, I considered the possibility that everything I’d recently accepted as fact was wrong—my new beliefs about my buried memories, the aliens and their series of abductions, these perfect explanations for my problems. What if all of it, each particle of this new truth, were false? What then?
I felt the warm slide of her skin as her fingers reached, reached slowly up, searching higher into the calf’s carcass until her fingers stopped to intertwine with mine.
“Lead My Thoughts Unto Sensation”
The heavy pulse in my hand thrummed against the weaker pulse in my fingertips, blood eddying beneath the flesh. My skin felt elastic.
that instant, the remainder of the acid soothed into me, and my body felt delicate, glistening, a figurine on a shelf.
Yet it was what I wanted: the heavy contact, the two bodies shoving and slamming together, the stuff that could be proved the next day by bruises.
sucking his bottom lip as if extracting poison.
made little crunching sounds, as if dwarf hands were scrabbling to get in from under the car.
I held firm to the belief that my dreams were all clues, pieces of my hidden past now revealing themselves. It was as though my brain had little rooms inside it, and I were entering a room that had been padlocked for years, the key sparkling in my fist.
Before she even touched me, I realized what would happen. It was as if I’d known this for years, that I knew the secret to the reason I’d never approached anything remotely resembling sex: it would take me back to something I didn’t want, a memory that had hovered for years, hidden, in my head.
You’re shutting me out.” She was yelling, her voice a hammer, nailing me in place.
The band of asphalt stretched before us, shimmering and curved like a water moccasin.
cicadas buzzed their autumn lullabies;
He was a compressed landscape, a relief map.
NO MORE TEARS.
I simply held my little brother as night dammed the room around us, until, at last, we fell asleep.
mysterious blue-gray skin
It’s like my body’s remembering, too.”
The house swallowed him.
His voice was a spider’s, hidden away in some far corner’s web.
If I had a spirit, I felt it fly out of me then. And if Brian had a spirit, it flew hand in hand with mine, lifting above the couch, passing through the roof, hovering in the black and measureless air that blanketed the house
Yet
in the dark street shineth, the everlasting light.
I know, because I felt the inside of the calf.”
“You were so dazed you couldn’t stand up straight. It was like he’d ripped something free from you, whatever controlled your balance,
No other man I’d held in my arms—and now, not even I—had blood this pure.
and when I looked to the window I saw a face peering in at us, a head with a red-balled stocking cap, gaping mouth, spying eyes made blue by the never-ending porch light. I tried to picture the scene he saw: two boys in the dark, sprawled together on the couch, holding hands; one battered and bruised, the other bleeding from the nose.
