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“Over here, at the winda bed. Come and sit down.” I scooted some of the leaves over to make a seat for him. “What is all this?” His hands moved through the pile. I turned on the flashlight and shined it on the red leaf between his fingers. “It’s Dresden.” He looked at me and I looked at him, but we didn’t say anything for that long while. He slowly looked back at the leaf in his hand, twirling it gently by its stem. “Thank you, Fielding.” And so we were, on into the night, two boys sharing a light and building a way, one leaf at a time.
Simply beautiful
He left the morning after fucking Grand in the woods. Grand didn’t notice how quickly that was. He had felt the connection of another man, and in the clay of loneliness, he shaped it into something he called love. Before Ryker left, Grand asked for his number.
“I’m sorry, but Mr. Tommons is unavailable at the moment, Mr. Bliss. Would you like to leave him a message?”
It’s hard not to fall in love with the only blanket in winter.
Gripping this ball like the old ones he used to. Winding up, a slow pitch to the wastebasket. That was his baseball those days.
He looked out the window and I would be reminded of him doing just that years later when I read a line in a book that spoke of water slipping out a crack in the bottom of a jug.
Dad spoke. “Who wants one of my wife’s blue ribbon cannas? Hmm? All they cost is a stone. One stone for a flower. Sounds like a bargain to me.”
Years later, when I was standing on my last roof, the stones finally came for me. They came sudden and from the sky. They hit cars and dinged. They hit the slate roof and broke the tiles I was standing on. Still, while others ran inside, I stayed.
Give me the Sunday in the warm bathtub when I leaned back against his wet chest and he washed my
His dark skin was like that of the color of a bird’s feather I found beneath my window long ago. I almost told him about that feather. I almost told him about Sal. I almost told him all my baseball-shaped secrets, but I was too distracted by the possibility of happiness with him. Far too distracted by him pulling me in by the loop of my jeans and reading me Langston Hughes. Heaven was no bigger than a queen-sized
After the kiss, he asked why I looked about to break. I said I didn’t know, but wasn’t it because I did know? Because I knew all the great splendor of a man. I knew the heaven of making love to him later. All the splendid, heavenly things Grand would never know.
moment that saw me saying I love you and for the first time meaning it. After I said it, I said I was going out for some shaving cream and never went back. I wonder if he thinks of me every time he shaves? I know I think about him. I feel my beard and know I think about him.
“It looks like blood.”
“Honey, it’s just strawberry jam.” “Strawberry jam?” He closed
In Victorian England, it was hypothesized that having sex with a virgin would cure venereal diseases such as syphilis. This came to be known as the Virgin Cleansing Myth. Myth, because that is in fact all it is. There is no truth to the story that a virgin’s blood will somehow cleanse the blood of the diseased. Yet, to this day, there are some with HIV/AIDS who are having sex with virgins in the hope of a cure. In most instances, this sex is not consensual, and the virgin is put at risk of being infected themselves without their knowledge or their permission. I myself have not had sex since
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The grave of that man, not really a man but the devil. After all, we never needed Sal or any devil to come from underground. I learned at that moment that the devil, the true one, is people like Ryker. I knew I couldn’t show
“Always white shoelaces.” He stretched the untied laces out to the sides like bleached worms. “Why you think this is, Fielding?”
It never occurred to me at that time there was even the slightest possibility Grand had not contracted the virus, as I’m sure it did not occur to him. In those early years of the disease, some feared a kiss was enough. Fear is ignorance’s first shadow.
And so we stand, proved of our existence by those who see us. And how did I see Grand, how did any of us, but as the one who would be great at this and that, as long as it was baseball and girls. He always had to be what we wanted him to be first. He existed only by proxy to our dreams of
Maybe there’d be someone in the kitchen making noise and this someone would come out with the food to set the table and Grand would call him his husband and make love to him after sending me back off next door until next time, until the next day I could see him again. Maybe it could’ve happened that way, but it never will, because I just stood there and he did a half chuckle into his chest and seemed to say, stupid brother. And I was. God burn me for it, I was. “I’m goin’ for a walk, Fielding. Tell Mom and Dad in case
Dad grabbed a flashlight. Looked more annoyed than alarmed. The worry was all in Mom at that time as she called to Dad from the porch, “Find him, Autopsy.”
Oh, God, Dad. You on all fours and scooping the blood up from the ground, trying to put it back into the large gaping slash on your son’s arm.
Even if I had told Dad, he wouldn’t have stopped touching it. How could he? All that blood was Grand before it was anything else. And I mean grand in all the magnificent definition of the word. I fell to my knees at his side and tried myself to put the blood back because, hell, I wasn’t finished with my brother. How could I be when I was only thirteen and he was only eighteen.
No, I wasn’t finished with him. We were supposed to grow old together, me and my brother. If I was going to grow old with anybody, it was going to be him. Our parents would die. Our lovers would die. Our friends would all go before us. But we, we would be the last on the
brother of mine, I had your white hair and wrinkles all picked out. Now I wear them, along with my own. Twice wrinkled, twice gray. I hate you for leaving me no choice but to go forth into this heat-colored future and its long voyage I no longer want to hold.
“Dad?” “I said go home, Fielding.” Then he turned from me. The start of the rest of our lives.
Pity the day she did not see, a day that had been waiting for twelve long years. A day that took but twelve minutes to walk.
The space they filled before us, like twisted wire, embedding into itself. They were one grasp. One curve of flesh. One heart breaking in startled, flickering cracks.
new death. Sal went to her and held her hands as he asked her, “Don’t you know a mother’s got ten good magnets at the ends of
I imagined a series of small falls in the world at that moment. Somewhere the petals of a lilac were falling off. Somewhere a moth was heading straight for the ground. Grains of sugar were rolling off the counter. A baseball was losing its soar. Small falls taking me down with them and to that low where no wings can be found and no rising is ever had.
“After weeks of night, a light suddenly appeared in the woods. The people, desperate and hungry for light, ran to it, surprised to find Cen. They had been so certain of what they thought was wicked. Of what they thought was a sick desire. And yet, in that darkness, Cen was the only light God allowed.
“He took out his pocketknife and cut his arm, the light shining them through the woods to town. There were so many people to see home, Cen had to keep cutting his arm in order to bleed more light.
THE NIGHT BEFORE Grand’s funeral, Dad sat on the porch, squinting his eyes, folding his arms, and crossing his legs. He hadn’t bothered turning on the porch light. In those dark days following Grand’s death, lights were rarely turned on. It was as if we no longer knew how to pull a lamp cord or flip a wall switch. We’d suddenly gone dumb of the way to light.
There are winter dreams to be had when summer makes too good of its time.
Dad sitting so still, staring up at the ceiling as if he’d heard someone walking just overhead in Grand’s room.
I did have my old locker. Same combination. Who would’ve thought a combination could make me so happy? But I liked having the same. It was from that old life, and sometimes I thought I could just spin the lock back to it. I could open the locker and find the old Fielding, a summer younger. I could open it to Grand. There he’d be, squeezed inside, and I could just pull him out. Dresden too. Just keep pulling out all the things
How his mouth seemed to foam. Just another rabid dog at the window.
Elohim looked as though he might have meant it as he reached through the window and grabbed Sal. Dad quite possibly made a leap from the chair to the sofa. Mom quite possibly flew from the lampshade. I know Fedelia ran in from the kitchen, joining Mom and Dad, who each had a foot of Sal’s.
Sal was looking at me. If only I were Grand. If only I had his strength. No one ever said it, but I know it was my fault they pulled Sal away from us. I wasn’t strong enough, and it was me who let him go.
Dad lost his slippers and Mom lost her heels as they climbed out the window, his bathrobe and her apron flapping as they gave chase. Me and Fedelia were behind them, but she broke off before we got into the woods. She said she was going to get the sheriff. No one had time to tell her the sheriff was in the mob. I suppose he always had been.
myself was scratching, biting, and kicking the shins of a guy holding me against him. It was then I saw Dovey with the gas can. Beside her was the woman in the rhinestone belt who had asked Sal if God was a nigger too. Together Dovey and this woman poured gas on the ground around Sal. They did it so steady, as if they were pouring milk in glasses for their very own dinner table.
was still looking at that burst when I heard Sal scream to me to remember Granny. Granny? The flames were all I saw. But then I did remember. Granny. The suffering. The gun. Yes, I remembered what I couldn’t do the first time. Would I stay the
boy could have so many tears, yet not have enough to put anything out.
I ran past the edge of Mom’s dress, to the tree house not far there in the woods. From the crate I grabbed the gun because it was the only water I had to put the fire out.
Follow me, choke me, scatter me, seize me for all sorrows. And yet, if I did nothing, I risked being Him. Just another God. A spectator of war.
“The rain is just the gift I need.” She tilted her face to the drops, thinking of the small jar of water sitting in the study.
shot all those things. The man who was the saving hand when I nearly slipped off the roof. The man I caught fireflies with one summer night. The man I’d known all my life. All shot to pieces by me. I shot all the bad, but damn it all, I shot all the good as well. That’s something you never quite come back from. That’s something that’s a fresh pain every day.
Later, in the cold water of the tub, she shoved the bar of soap down her throat. Internal cleansing, I suppose. It’s said they didn’t even have to use more soap when they washed her body. Bubbles and suds came by just plain water and the friction of her skin. The dirtiest, cleanest woman ever to be buried.
She stopped wearing dresses. Too many edges to catch, I guess. There was also the singeing to consider. She was pants from then on out. Polyester, corduroy, denim. Pants, pants, pants. I lost something of my mother when she lost her dresses. That woman in the kitchen. Floating here and there, as light as the flour on her hands.
the gesture of spitting on Elohim’s grave, Dad dramatically spit on the floor before throwing his arms up as he boomed, “How can you call them guilty? When they were away from themselves. Temporarily gone. These people, your family, your friends, your neighbors, possibly you under the right circumstances. Away from themselves.
