Negative Space

by B.R. Yeager

Everyone already so much older and doomed than I was, apart from a boy. He was fading pink hair and plump lips and severe green eyes. Forearms all wrapped in bandages, with muddy remnants of older scars crawling above them.

“Hey.” The boy was looking at me now. Eyes wet and shaking. “You can’t sleep here.” “What?” I said. “Don’t go to sleep.” I looked away.

He told me he saw her. Perched over a lantern and an array of shimmering stones. Humming to herself. Her hands wet with red, dancing in the deep orange light.

It wasn’t until I broke down in class, weeping crazy after five days of no sleep, that he finally admitted he’d made the whole thing up.

“When it gets bad, I try and go someplace else,” he said. “And do you think going someplace else is a positive or a negative method of coping?” He smiled weird. “Depends where I go.”

The truth never makes sense unless you force it to, just like anything.

There were lots of things to love about Tyler, even if folks don’t talk about that stuff anymore. If he liked you—if he saw you as an ally, even temporarily—he’d make you feel like the center of his universe. And you’d believe it, at least for a while.

She flipped me alabaster and lukewarm. Steady. Everyone else seemed like they’d kill me if they knew what was inside. I’d play out her day in my head. Close my eyes and conjure her mornings. My insides in her form. Feeling the weight of her comforter. Her muscles (my muscles) going tense stretching out of bed, then rubbery. Fabric slushing soft and loose against her skin (my skin). I’d sit inside her face as she’d eat toast and cereal and grapefruits. Feeling it crumble down her throat (my throat). Dust playing off our skin in the warm nuclear light. I’d feel her walking across pavement, my feet in her shoes, the wind yielding over our face and body. Our hands in her pockets. Alabaster and lukewarm. People would have killed me if they knew about that.

She asked what I wanted to watch next and I almost told her about the Forum but caught myself. She wouldn’t understand. Or it’d make her grow knives for me. So I said, “Anything.”

All the world blurred, a vibrating hemorrhage, and it was fine because I could finally feel how little impact I’d ever have on the world. Losing that dread that one day you’ll somehow ruin everything, for yourself and everyone else. The realization that I could simply leave and the world wouldn’t miss me.

Hector Ferrera was Kinsfield’s 31st suicide that year. Fifty-seven residents had taken their own lives the year prior.

It’d be easy to say it started with Hector’s suicide but that’s not true, really. He was only a piece; a piece of something inherent to here, and maybe everywhere. It’s still happening. Right now. And so on. Pushing itself forward. Because suicide goes on forever. The wrists always bleeding out. The feet always leaving the bridge. The rope always catching short. It never ever stops. Kinsfield is built on graves.

They were sheets of lined paper and torn-off pizza box lids from Utopia, all sharpied up. Words and pictures. Names and dates and stuff like THE SERPENT THIRSTS. THE WASPS SMILE. CLOSE LUNA. Stuff about towers and rope men. Drawings of crude little upside-down arches—like static blips on a life support screen, or a stack of broken birds’ wings—and intricate spirals sprouting more spirals. Google Maps printouts of the town with lines drawn all over, like vines or veins, crosshatches and more of those little arches. Photocopies of photos and newspaper clippings taped together. Hundreds of individual pages.

What forces are we unable to sense that nonetheless influence our existence? Is it possible for us to become aware of these forces? And, perhaps most terribly, what do these forces intend for us?

The worst part about knowing anyone is knowing only that tiny sliver available to you.

“All the people who offed themselves, right?” “Right.” “But no, not really. Trevor was just in the shop the other day. It must be something else.” “But the date.” July 17th. Three weeks from then.

“You all know about my son,” he said, his lips sucking at the podium microphone. “I know you do. My own flesh and blood, who last week defied the will and order of our savior to commit the unthinkable. My son Trevor’s act taints not just me and my wife and surviving daughters, but it casts a stain on all of you as well. “My son was a lost and uncommitted boy, and his lack of commitment reflects a lack of commitment in our community.”

Through the arrhythmic strobes, the basement took on new, foreign shapes, like in a dream, before melting back. The people fell away, and I could almost see trees. A deep rotting forest. Black and grey vines slipping through the branches toward me. Wings flapping. The song ended. Tyler screamed at the audience, and they all screamed back.

Tyler flipped on the strobe lights and stood upright, humming. The image flickered, and the audio cut into a buzzing sound. I knocked at the phone with my wrist, but it kept buzzing. The video

flickered and went to black. And then a sound like a whisper. A whisper inside my head. A thin crack shot across the screen.

The four boys are here. I can’t see their faces but I know who they are.

At first, I couldn’t tell what it was. Several large, dangling objects. When I realized I nearly choked. I turned back to Tyler, still staring up at the bodies, his eyes wide and wild. “It’s really weird,” Ahmir said. “Like taxidermy.”

As we pulled onto the road, I noticed a black and beige shape on the sidewalk. A goose. A goose, but everything about it was wrong. Its neck broken, twisted into a spiral. It dragged its head along the ground, waddling in circles, screaming. No one seemed to notice except me.

You fear the worst because you’d be stupid not to. You’ve been fearing the worst for so long, anything else is just unthinkable. Imagine a single image collapsing all other considerations and possibilities: a hazy-blue early dawn out deep in the woods. A rope strung over a tree’s thickest branch. A distended shadow swaying beneath it.

She pulled back and looked me in the eyes. “You want to take a drive? See if we can’t track him down?” That’s when I realized she really loved me.

Crazy Bob sat beside her with an arm around her shoulder, sprinkling purple-grey flakes into a blunt.

Someday I’ll wake up and it’ll be like my life’s already over, because it’ll be dozens of years from now already and I’m still the same. Sets of mirrors facing each other, expanding space and me and every moment I’ve been here. Nobody knows me, because I haven’t left anything for them, and I can’t stand to look half of them in the eye.

Then he made me take off my clothes and he searched me like that, then made me do something else. When he was done, he said that if I ever told anyone what happened he’d kill me and my family.

The most important thing anyone can know is this: just by existing, by inhabiting this planet and space, we are put into communion with entities we cannot begin to understand, in manners we cannot begin to understand. We float on the surface of an unfathomable ocean, and though we may stick our hands, our feet, our faces beneath, we can never go much farther without drowning.

Once made aware of this, a man can no longer see the Earth as a sphere. It is a serpent. It is a length of rope, forever curling around our persons.

Importantly, information only enters the physical upon interpretation. A man sees a piece of art. In the process of interpreting that art, information manifests as a thought—not just conceptually, but, as elucidated above, physically. Here, an essential question emerges: Where does this information go once it has been manifested?

We woke to pounding on the front door. It was Ben and another officer. I wasn’t surprised by what they said. Mom didn’t cry until after they left. She gestured at herself and me and the room and broke down. “Why didn’t he want this? Why didn’t he want to be with us?” At around midnight, when she finally went to sleep, and I turned the front of my shirt all wet as well. Ben said they found him in the Abandonments.

Uncle Ray and one of the church staff rushed up to her. Insects swarmed, stinging her until they dragged her out of the building and into the snow. The casket was filled with wasps.

I’d seen him before. On the Forum. He’d killed himself a month earlier. Arnold Sepulveda.

“Jill?” Mom’s voice was bright but off. I crossed the living room to the kitchen. Mom stood with Tyler. Both of them smiling and laughing. “Oh, hi sweetie! You’re home early. You okay?” She came in for a hug. Harvey sank low to the wall behind her, quietly growling.

Some candles set up beside a box of salt. A wall covered with lines and shapes drawn in sharpie.

He withdrew it, the cigarette’s tip covered in flecks of purple leaves.

“You want to know about that?” I nodded. He got off the mattress, took me by the hand and led me to the wall. He pointed at a cluster of spirals. “This is how I got back from Hell.” I must have shown knives because then he said, “Hey hey hey, don’t worry. Be cool.” He put his arms around me and held me close. “I didn’t bring it back with me.”

Arnie said he could see things that hadn’t happened yet. Foresight. “But not like exactly. It’s all in code.” More like a feeling in his spine than anything he could see with his eyes. That was how he knew the shooting was going to happen.

New objects were arranged on top: a banged up saucepan, the inside charred and full of ash; a coil of twine; a piece of wasp’s nest; his box cutter. A lock of gray hair, like my mom’s.

I don’t know whether I actually did anything. Whether I was actually responsible for or had any influence on her escape. But I let her believe it, because it meant the world could be something more than just the people trying to destroy us.

Mom said she was proud of me, but her eyes screamed WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME and I went to bed clutching my ulcers. Like it’d become necessary to kill others to feed myself, to clothe myself, to heal, patching my wounds with their hair and skin.

Time compresses the older you get. Days turn to weeks turn to months turn to seasons turn to years, until your life resides in just one moment expanding forever, where each step and breath folds wrinkles into your face, carving minute, irreversible wounds between your joints. Pressing down the notches between your spine, driving your ankles and knees to ruin. I feel it now and it’ll only be worse in the future.

I shook. Flared up. Totally harmless. I wanted to smash his face in, to tell him that he was an idiot, that he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

It was an orange extension cord, strung from the second-floor banister, drawn tight down in a straight line. His shape floated beneath it, toes inches from the ground. A knocked over step-ladder. Distended face, bloated tongue pushed through puffy lips. Eyes frozen on me. The front of his pants all wet and foul. The brick of WHORL lay on the floor before him. A lake of black piss gently ebbing toward it.

The Passat’s whole front end was wrapped around an old oak tree, becoming engulfed in a black cloud of wasps.

I mouthed goodbye to no one and got onto my feet. That’s where I am now. In the space between my gasps. Where I will always be.

The figure standing over Marlon—I thought it was a person, at first. But its shape. Its shape. It wasn’t one thing but many—bound, tethered, compressed into one. A mass of writhing, black and beige things fluttering and curling. A body made of other bodies, pulsing oval bodies; ragged wings and brown-red drippy faces with their beaks snapped

off. Stuck together, forming a torso and flailing limbs. Dozens of geese piled up and fused together into the shape of a person.

I laughed. “So what’s the moral?” Another pause, and then: “One day, no one will ever know you were here.”