Don't Let the Forest In

by C.G. Drews

An extraordinary amount of intimacy lay in exchanging art. Not for critique and not for class. Just to look. To feel. To understand each other.

“I think someday you’ll hate me.” Thomas’s voice stretched with a loneliness Andrew had never heard before. “You’ll cut me open and find a garden of rot where my heart should be.” Andrew let the silence sharpen between them, waited until Thomas’s breath caught in quiet anguish from being made to wait. “When I cut you open,” Andrew finally said, “all I’ll find is that we match.”

To write something nice, he’d need something nice to say. But his ribs were a cage for monsters and they cut their teeth on his bones.

Life didn’t fit against his skin and it never had and sometimes everything was just too much.