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“Well, that’s fucked,” Ronan had said, discovering the photograph after the UPS man had gone. “It’s not like we can give it back to him. She’s gone completely feral.”
She had to content herself with stolen glimpses through cracked doors, slender one-inch views of duvet and sheets piled like thunderheads, Adam and sometimes Ronan pillowed among them.
“Yes,” Adam had whispered, and Opal had felt a rush of love for him. She loved him the best when he was very sad or very serious or very happy. Something about his voice breaking filled her with feeling, and something about the vacancy of his expression when he was thinking hard felt like she was looking at a dream with nothing bad in it, and something about when Ronan made him laugh so hard that he couldn’t stop made her love him so hard that she felt sad because one day he would get old and die because that was what things with animalness did.
Sometimes they would stop talking and instead begin kissing, and Opal would eavesdrop on this as well. Her capacity for voyeurism was boundless and incorrigible. They were always coming together in surprising moments, going from easygoing to urgent in the space of a few breaths. She watched them kiss messily in the car in the driveway and she watched them tangle around each other in the laundry room and she watched Adam unbuckle Ronan’s belt and slide his hand against skin. With intellectual curiosity, she watched ribs and hips and arms and legs and spines. She had no lust, because Ronan
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But instead, Ronan pressed his face against Adam’s neck and Adam quietly put his head on top of Ronan’s head and they did not move for a long time.
Time marched in a boring and pleasant straight line. These were the rules that kept the animal world small and manageable.
In this way she continuously expanded her territory without losing her way, sometimes making it to the far edge of the woods where there was a place that smelled like gasoline. She liked this place a lot. She liked to watch what people did when they did not think they were being watched.
Sometimes they sat in their cars and cried softly. She liked this best of all, because it was rare, and she found she liked rare things the most.
psychopomp
She was a fluffy, cloud-shaped lady with fluffy, cloud-colored hair, and she always came to the bench with a book and a food. The books were never the same book. They were fat and brick-shaped and the fronts always bore images of men who didn’t seem to have any shirts or other possessions. Sometimes all they seemed to have was another man or sometimes a lady or sometimes both, who they held tightly.
Twice Ronan got a phone call from his Ganseyfriend and both times he did not say anything to the phone, just listened to the ebullient patter on the other end and made grunting sounds in response. Both times after this Ronan went and lay down, once in his own room and once in Aurora’s room; the first time, he was very quiet for a long time, and the second time he held his parents’ photograph and cried a little without making any sound.
Sometimes bad ideas were so bad they looped right around until they became good ideas.
