Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

The sepulchral vibe ached in his molars, wreckage all around resting silent and still.

No mistaking the ruined flesh and its bleak message, unless the obvious narrative wasn’t the whole story. Maybe instead it was a palimpsest, scrawled in haste over the original draft to cover—something else. He wasn’t sure what.

He listed to the side to lean against the living room doorframe, hovering outside the cousins’ space. Halse took up too much air with his presence alone, and Andrew was too tired to muscle his way in.

“Maybe you should leave the good memories, then, and stop looking to fill in the gaps. He’s gone, you don’t have to follow him into the trouble he made for you,” she said.

Eddie was a hooligan, but an organized hooligan. His professors had found it charming enough to let him skate straight past the occasional missed deadline or lecture, a saving grace that Andrew often benefited from in turn.

He’d written his undergraduate thesis on murder ballads and folk-country, used that same thesis for his admissions writing sample, and had some intention of continuing with the research when he arrived. He’d cared about music, once, though he no longer had access to the emotion, which felt like it had happened inside a different person a long time ago.

Riley stared across the room at West, radiating a dislike that Andrew found out of character, despite having known him for less than four days. West ignored him performatively with a dignified, almost effete slouch in his direction.

West took his glasses off and ground the heel of his hand against his right eye. He wore his stress like a designer jacket.

Once again, his inbox had a number of missed calls and messages that a person more concerned with participating in his own life might’ve been ashamed of.

Riley occupied two worlds but neither matched the other, and Eddie had straddled that same impossible divide without effort or concern.

Riley knocked on the wall and pushed open the half-shut door. His face twisted through several contradictory emotions and he said, “For fuck’s sake, Andrew. Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?”

Ethan looked more high-end model than a law student. Until he spoke: “Want to commit a series of misdemeanors, new friend?”

“This land and the stories people tell about it are fascinating. Hauntings, massacres, dark magic—all that bloody business lingers underneath the surface of respectability. It’s a grim, delicious contradiction. I appreciate those contradictions and what they reveal about us as humans.”

I wouldn’t put it past her to have some secondary motivations for fucking him over, frankly. We’ve never been close enough for me to ask about that.” “Seems petty to be a reason to lash out at Eddie though,” Andrew said. Riley choked on a laugh and said, “When isn’t this academic shit petty?”

None of this academic shit seemed worth killing someone over, but nothing ultimately did, in the grand scheme of things.

On some level Andrew had forgotten, spending his years as a teen and then a young man in northern Ohio, that histories had a longer and uglier reach where he was from.

The house murmured creakily as he descended the stairs. “Don’t, thanks,” he said out loud. The sounds settled. He wasn’t sure if he’d rather that be a product of his imagination or not.

Andrew ignored the reflexive burn of dampness that sprang to his eyes at the domesticity of the morning in favor of the fresh wonder of smooth skin under his cheek, magnetic and allowed. Life coursed through him with each thud of his pulse. He had no idea what he was doing, except that it fit. Sam pulled him apart one notch at a time to release the horror he held under his skin.

Putting aside what it meant, desire had come as natural as breathing once he’d gotten Sam’s body on his—as if the last decade of his life had been secretly leading to that moment, and when the time came to choose, he had no trouble letting go.

He’d known Eddie to the bone, or so he thought. But having Eddie’s memories inside of him was different. The tender awfulness of remembering himself through Eddie’s eyes, beautiful and cherished and wanted with raw confused intensity, with ownership, a sublimated tangled connection that Eddie had never spoken or unpacked, though it loomed so large—that understanding was an answer to the things about himself Del had made him confront, that he’d started figuring out with Halse, but it didn’t help. Having been loved wasn’t the same as being loved.

Andrew had to accept that he was going to take that maybe to his grave.