Yr Dead

by Sam Sax

for everyone who’s kept me alive

please be sure to take care of yourself—you and your life are more precious than words.

No, it is the story of a small child who opens her mouth to sing after her home’s destroyed by a great flood and when she does, instead of a song pouring out: flames.

The myth they love most about fire

The last time I see Edwin it’s the holidays.

On this annual Thanksgiving trip home, junior year, everything’s smaller in the worst possible way.

Edwin at least still has the old pickup, and I can hear its rust wheezing around the corner before seeing him pull up in front of his mom’s house.

1st Degree (superficial):

At ten, I try surprising my parents with breakfast.

Burns right hand

Through the bandages, and the nurses, and the medicines, he calls it a lesson. Says, this pain means I’ll never do it again. I nod my head and the many crows nod along in silent bewilderment. We get icecream, mint chocolate chip, but only after we’ve all stopped crying.

2nd Degree (partial thickness):

Twelve and smoking for the ...

God, someone please notice me. Only, dear god, please not too closely.

3rd Degree (full thickness):

In college, we start a fire with gasoline and trash in the woods near campus. It’s kind of a spell, at least it’s supposed to be. We collect artifacts from the teachers we hate most, from ex’s who hurt us worse than we’ll ...

Immolation:

I’m twenty-seven and looking out through a curtain of flames. Twenty-seven and always cold. A lit match burning in the darkness of this mid-day city. I’m twenty-seven and walking slowly through a city I love that’s yet to love me back, watching people turn my way with expressions on their face that I’ve never seen before, that I’ll never be able to name—not horror or awe, but something far older and strange.

ERICKA: i went to this art museum and thought of you. EZRA: Me?!? ☺

Character notes *

Weekends we drink forties on the flatbed of Edwin’s stepdad’s blue pickup.

The we’s always me, Edwin, and whatever collection of shitheads decide to gather that particular evening. I say shitheads but mean only boys. I say boys and mean some kind of mollusk, hard-shelled with tender meat inside.

We get the beer with Edwin’s fake—says he’s from Iowa, twenty-nine, and his newly grown mustache offers a little wink. I use the money from my allowance, even though he’s got more, and we sit a...

My final year coincides with the Helicoverpa confusa or the Confused moth being wiped clean off the surface of the earth.

This year, I illegally sublease a basement apartment in a giant pre-war building in Queens at least four degrees from the original leaseholder and thumbtack photos of all my friends, those I’ve lost and the ones I haven’t yet met, to the drywall.

He’s still in his early twenties, which of course he wouldn’t be now after all these years, smiling; not being dead.

Edwin is dead

When at last I die, my xylem floods with all these stories at once and I’m so full I break into scripture, into sweat, into four unique seasons.

He studied English in graduate school and can recite whole books almost by heart. The ones he likes best these days are by men whose wives left how Mom did, he says, due to a failure of machinery.

About his father

Shortly after Mom leaves, Dad starts calling me Boychik. The name sticks like a name. Like feathers to a name.

Edwin comes over with a little weed. Even though he lives just three buildings over, it’s the first time he’s been to the apartment or expressed any interest in hanging out at all. Dad’s already gone to bed, as he always does midway through his third vodka. Edwin tells me he’s going to be a cop one day, and I believe him. We smoke out of a bent and knifed coke can.

But recently Edwin’s started messaging me a bunch over AIM. Asks if I ever want to chill. Like any freshman, I deeply want a group of friends it’s easy to be quiet with.

But he used to make fun of him

I can see him outlined through his pants. His body is pressing against his clothing like it has no respect for their utility. Out of nowhere he says, you can suck it, if you want. And it’s only then I realize I’ve been staring. It’s not something I’d considered before in those exact terms, my body was just drawn is all, like a curtain or a weapon. Like a bath, or a circle. But when he offers, it’s like a new world snaps into place,

Bye Boy-chicken, he says slipping out the window, Maybe I’ll come back sometime. My breath catches in my chest like a door on a chain. Bye, I say to the empty second-story window which now only holds the night, one streetlight, and some branches.

This is going to be tragically sad, isn't it?

It’s several months before I even notice the stone angels on the façade of my building, and a few more before I learn this was once a home for wayward girls. Girls like me. How many of us have those angels’ emptied-out eyes seen, walking in circles, waiting to be welcomed inside, looking for something to eat?

Late autumn comes on like a cold dead watch, the trees slowly strip out of their bright colors. I’m in my old room in Dad’s apartment. I’ve been in college only two years but feel already like a wholly different bitch. I wear dark unblended eyeshadow and change my pronouns whenever anyone asks. I sleep on the couch in what is now his “office,” which he basically just uses for storage since he retired, or was fired, or whatever, from his teaching position.

There’s something about being around people dedicated and working desperately toward something, anything, that makes me feel as if it’s going to be alright, and if not alright, then, you know, manageable, and if not manageable, then at least something we’ll endure together. So I owe them my life, these people. What’s left of my life, I owe them.

When Dad sends the YouTube link, I assume it’s a joke. I haven’t seen him since I moved to the city. Not since my short recovery back in his apartment following that four-day stint in my college town’s hospital.

Ezzie,

Ezzie is Ezra? Is Boychin? Is main character?

I can barely take care of myself. So, I give up and share the link.

Dad’s new friends are a bunch of fucking wack-jobs, I think, putting on another coat of black matte lipstick after deepening my electric blue eyeliner.

I like it most when it’s dead. I go to be a boy there, in my most boy drag. One what’ll it be honey? from the husky bartender with barrettes in his hair is all I need, and that little sweetness can carry me through the week.

Knowing full well these tech companies store our gone messages, so that even after death, in some database somewhere, we are both alive and still hungry for each other.

Quinten

College boyfriend

I’ve never been more connected to another person than when I realize we’re still sitting there on that cemetery bench sobbing into each other’s open mouths. Thank you Thank you Thank you, we keep saying. We break up later that month.

(after taking DMT in the cemetery together)

I did not have a home, until it was gone from me.

Even when I almost married Christian, I knew it would only be for a moment, that even “forever” is just a moment in time. With enough pressure or pleasure I can be talked into becoming almost anything, I know this.

He proposes after I’ve moved into the studio in the basement of his parents’ brownstone and I couldn’t for the life of me tell you how either of those things happened. He fucked me raw in his apartment once, and then it’s four months later and he’s proposing. On a knee, like he’s being knighted, wearing the black romper with pineapples that always embarrasses me. There’s a decoder ring in his hand that must have been some kind of joke between us I scarcely remember. I feel empty when he does it but say yes to spare myself the look on his face.

So I shut the fuck up and fuck him until his eyes roll back and it’s clear he isn’t anywhere inside his body.

(edwin; behind the 7-11, off the app with no profile photo or bio)

On his phone, he shows me this video of an octopus caught on a security camera escaping from the aquarium.

Reason for the tattoo

Mom’s a poet too, though not with words, but with paints. One spring she painted the whole living room in flowers. Sunflowers mostly, but also zinnias and dahlias. They looked so real you might have thought they were breathing. The winter she left us, Dad painted it all gray. She was gone only a few days when he did it, and the whole apartment’s been gray ever since.

Drag Race with Quentin at the campus bar. Happy-hour oysters with Malcolm. Board games with Arnold. Bad horror movies with Christian. The opera with Kristopher. And on and on. In each audience, I quickly become a new devotee, seasoned enough to roll my eyes at all the posers and imposters around me. I adapt to whatever the faces around me serve, all adept at their respective rituals of enjoyment. Mom’s Marlboro Lights I refuse on principle. Dad’s unfiltered Pall Malls you can tap out one at a time on your knee from their soft pack.

I’ve learned his schedule. He doesn’t work at the grocery store weekends or Wednesdays, so I go on Thursdays and make sure I’m in his checkout line so we can exchange pleasantries. But that’s the extent of it.

Edwin-lookalike

I bring my own tote, and every time he says something enthusiastic and goofy like, Way to go Planeteer! or Rock the tote! with a practiced dweeby casual wink I’d find disgusting if he wasn’t the spitting hot-ghost-image of my dead ex.