Hazelthorn

by C.G. Drews

People who belong to marginalized groups are often condemned for anger, for letting emotions spill, for messiness and mistakes, but we deserve to feel pain loudly and to feel injustices bloodily.

He should have grown out of the memory by now, but he belongs to it, and not in a gentle way.

They are wrong like this—they should be flint against sharpened teeth if they touch. But instead, Laurie curves himself like a supplicant who would hollow out his own body if only it could be used to fit a lovely god inside.

“Who tells you to be quiet all the time?” Laurie’s words are a low, thickened spill of warm honey. “Pain is meant to take up space or else we wouldn’t know how to scream.

He is not a bird meant for flight; he is broken wings and forgotten petals left to dry between pages of an old book and he doesn’t know how to believe he could be anything else.

If pain is a language of bruises, Laurie has worn his so long under his skin that he’s found comfort in the pattern and his bored, disinterested facade is to hide just how much he hurts.

Evander is breathless as he follows, but doesn’t know what scares him more: Wondering if the garden has sunk hooks so deep inside him that it’s made him monstrous. Or if it didn’t force him at all.

“There is nothing else to me but the hollow spaces I’ve carved out for you. I knew I’d cut myself to pieces on you if we ever had the chance to touch, but I wanted to.” His voice unravels, massacred on yearning. “Let me ruin myself on you.”

“I’m only a monster because they made me monstrous.”