 
## A Door in the Mirror:

### Collected Short Fiction 2010-2014

### pw cooper
Copyright 2014 - pw cooper

All rights reserved.

### The Softest Thing

The boy sat in the back of the old pickup truck, watching a hazy scarlet sunrise bleed across the horizon. He rubbed sleep from his eyes, all that little grit gathered during the night. He'd dreamed of dust, swirling clouds of it rising to cover the world, to fill his home like the ancient tomb of a forgotten desert emperor. He'd woken in the heat, desperately thirsty. There had been no rain during the night, so there was nothing to drink. Still nothing. All around the empty house empty buckets arrayed with their mouths to an empty sky. His mother checked them all in the morning, every one just in case. He watched her from the window as she bent, stooped and hunched from bucket to cup to basin. He would be given a drink at the work site come noontime. He could already taste it, feel it in his throat.

The last man shut the gate and hopped into the truck. He slapped the side of the vehicle and whooped. The old pickup guttered and spat as it came to life, a raspy gurgle, a sound like chewing rocks. The foreman was driving, as he always did. He pulled onto the highway, leaving clouds of yellow-gold rising behind. The dust drifted to meet the rising sun as the last wisps of cool darkness melted away.

The boy tugged his cap low and slouched in his corner.

Every morning during the season he would make this trip. He used to make it with his big brother Henry, but Henry had moved off. One morning some weeks back the boy had woken to find Henry crouching over him with a pack slung on his back. They hadn't spoken, only met one another's eyes, and then Henry was gone. The boy had watched from the window as his brother wandered away down the road. He didn't seem to be heading anywhere in particular, only away, only going. His mother wept for days after Henry left, and the cracks in his father's stony face deepened.

The boy turned to the soft morning sun. If he could live forever in this dawn he might be happy, in this hour before the light turned hot and angry. He leaned forward on his knees, poking his head out from behind the front of the pickup, into the wind of the highway. He felt it tussle and play at his hair and he forced his eyes open to look at the road stretching out so far in the distance.

One of the workers in the truck was drinking from a flask he kept in his pocket. He would sip at it throughout the day, cradling and nursing. It was his infant child, his treasure. He wiped his whiskery lips and stuck out his wet tongue.

The boy leaned out, looking forward then back. There were no other cars on the highway, no trucks as far as he could see. They might be alone in this country for all he could tell.

He sat back and waited for the sun to burn out the sky. He rubbed his legs and arms. He was still sore from the last day, and the day before that, and all the days which had preceded it. He looked at his hands, stared at them like he was seeing them for the first time. They'd been so soft once, he could remember his mother taking them in her own hands and kissing them. He could remember her smiling face, the brush and tickle of her rough fingers on his skin. Now his palms were callused and broken, his fingers rougher than hers. He could no longer feel any pain in them; he thought he might hold a spark of flame in his hand and not flinch.

The pickup turned off the highway, rattling and bumping. The men in the backseat grabbed automatically for the edge, for something steady. The boy put his arms out, holding on with both hands. None of them thought of it as they did it, it was deep down in their minds; there were no more surprises on this road.

They drove through the little town. The boy leaned over the side of the truck. He stared at the town as it passed. He wished he could live in a place like this, or even stop here just once. Just to be still in this place would be a dream; he could scarcely imagine it in his waking hours. Henry used to ride a bicycle into town; he would leave early in the morning and ride all day there and all day back. The boy had thought he might do that someday, but the bicycle had broken and there was no money to fix it or to buy another.

The town had no name, and some of the men scoffed and spat to hear it called _town_ , but the boy was sure that it was. It was more of civilization than he'd ever seen elsewhere. It took only a few minutes to drive through, but they were minutes which the boy treasured more dearly than any others. He hung over the edge of the truck and watched it go by, a yearning in his heart to which he could not put a name. He thought it might be love.

They drove by a little pop stand on the edge of town. A man in a pinstripe uniform stood mopping his brow and scraping the ice off his cooler. The red piping of his uniform made him look like an enormous piece of candy. The boy's mouth began at once to water, though he could muster only the faintest moisture. There was a pair of girls sitting on the bench beside the man, bottles of pop in their smooth hands. They were laughing, drinking slowly, soft lips pressed to cold glass. The boy stared at them. He wished more than anything that he might be near them, hear the sounds of their voices, their laughter. He wished he could touch their long lashing hair, comb his fingers through the golden waves of it. Then they were gone, away in the distance.

There was a church just over the edge of town. It had been freshly painted, and stood startlingly white against the world beyond. The sun reflected fiercely off it, shining so bright it might blind a person to look too long. The boy turned away, hiding himself from the gleaming spire of the steeple.

There was a traveling preacher who came by their house sometimes. The boy's mother had given him a cup of water when he'd visited, the last of the water. The boy had stared at the cool liquid shifting inside the glass, at the marks in the condensation made by the preacher's smooth white fingers, at the way his throat bobbed as he drank. He'd set the cup down, emptied to the last drop, and told them that they must stay strong and that they must have faith. The boy's parents had thanked him, shook his hand and smiled. The preacher said that god would look down on them and surely he would weep. The skies would open and the rains would come again. The boy wondered why god hadn't seen them already. God saw everything, he'd been told that, so it must be that god didn't care. He was up there in the clouds laughing at them. Not crying, but laughing.

The fields were before them, great waving seas of golden grain and green corn that went on forever. The truck stopped and all the men got out. The boy followed them down to where the supervisor was directing people this way and that, barking orders through his cupped hands. The boy already knew what he was to do.

Years ago his father had been a planter. The boy remembered wandering in the little field, surrounded by cornstalks so tall they blocked out the sun. They had all died years ago. Sometimes he watched his father kneel down in the long-dead field to turn the dust with his fingers, dig his hand into the dry soil and toss it back down. He would stand and sigh and stare up at the sky which had betrayed him.

The boy worked. At noontime he was given a cup of water and an hour later felt it turn to sweat and slide down his back and under his arms and over his brow. He felt like he was drying out, like a fruit left shrinking in the sun too long. He had dreams of waking up and finding himself a wrinkled old man, his mind trapped in a ruined body. He worked hours under the cruel sun until there was nothing but time and the slow arc of fire burning overhead.

He looked up at the house high on the hill, away in the distance. He could see a girl on the porch. The owner's daughter. He'd seen her before, watching them; she was a few years older than him. She had her hand over her eyes, looking out across the field. The boy wished that he were alone, not down here with all the others. He wished he could stand out and be seen, could meet her eyes and look into them. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, her skin pale as milk, untouched by the sun. He leaned on the cart, gazing up at her, his heart full of worship. The foreman cuffed him and barked at him to get back to work.

The boy wondered where his brother Henry had gone to. He'd moved off, was all the boy knew, and that was nothing, really. He dreamed every night of his brother's death, and he supposed it must be a portent. He was not overly given to superstitions or mysticism, but he accepted this as truth: that his brother was going to die soon. Dreams were true things, he had always believed that.

The sun was baking the very earth under his feet. He could feel its heat rising through the worn soles of his shoes. As the day wore on he wandered further and further afield, out to the edge of the cropland.

He stood with one foot on either side of an irrigation ditch flowing with thin rivulets of muddy water. He was so thirsty he thought he might drink it, but he did not – he would be beaten if they saw. He remembered seeing a boy beaten for stealing. The thief had protested that it was only plants he'd taken, just some food, only a plant. The foreman had rubbed cornstalk between his fingers and said that they were not just plants, they were growing money itself, good as gold.

The boy watched the water flow slowly. How long since he'd had a true drink? How long since he'd last quenched his thirst? He could no longer remember any such time. He had always been thirsty, always been wanting.

A fat lizard was waddling in the sandy ground out beyond the crops. It looked back at him and blinked its milky eyes before scuttling on for shade.

The boy turned away. He looked up at the house on the hill. He could no longer see the girl on the porch. He felt the sun pouring into his very skull, filling his head with soft light and turning all his thoughts to mist. He felt himself blink, blink terribly slowly, and he fell. It was as though he were seeing himself from afar, an only half-interested observer watching the boy's shuffling limbs give out, his frail body sway and crumble like a sand sculpture. Dust to dust, he thought, the favorite words of the fat preacher with the shiny new car and the last glass of water in his hands.

He lay in the dust. He could feel the world turn around him, spinning so fast and so slow. His life was pouring away, his years spilling uselessly out, and yet time moved so _slow_. He would see nothing of its true shape in his days, he knew that now. His was a doomed life.

The boy dreamed an old dream. He dreamed of a girl, a woman smooth and pale and full. She looked at him and she pitied him. She held him to her breast and his lips found her and he drank her milk and it was cool and soft in his dry throat. She held him to her and she wept, her tears rained down on his face and washed him clean of everything. And they rose together to go out of this place.

The boy felt a drop of something on his brow, then another, and then a drop on his lip. His mouth opened and his tongue crawled out to lap at the moisture. His eyes opened. He saw a beautiful face above him. The owner's daughter. She held a cup of water and was dipping her fingers in it to flick drops on his face. She was frowning, concerned. He felt his cracked lips smile.

She helped him drink, lifting his head and pouring the water into his mouth. He drank and drank until he could drink no more. He thought it must be the greatest joy in the universe, to be for even a moment no longer thirsty. She touched his cheek. She told him that she had seen him fall and come at once. He thanked her, his words thick and shy. She touched his face again and stood. She looked across the field, and she called to the foreman.

A southern wind came up and set all the crops to dancing, as though they were quivering to be near her, as though they loved her.

The foreman came. The boy was hauled to his feet, his dusty shoulders and backside slapped like an old rug being beaten out. The foreman cuffed him and told him to stop his lollygagging.

The girl scolded the foreman, her voice more harsh than the boy had thought it would be. She said that he was to be taken inside and laid down awhile in the sitting room. The foreman's protest was cut short.

The boy was still dizzy and reeling when he was lifted and carried across the field. His cheeks flushed to be treated so, to be borne before the men who already saw him as less than they. He wanted to speak, to demand that he be put down, but he was not sure that he would be able to walk, so he said nothing.

He felt the shadow of the great house fall heavy upon him. The sun burned right through the slat roof of his own home; he'd not known shade so true in all his life. At once the dry air seemed cool. His skin seemed to drink it in.

They brought him inside and laid him on a couch beside a great window. He marveled at the glass, never having seen so much of it in one place. The girl shooed the men back out and they went reluctantly, clutching their dusty caps close. She pulled the drapes and they fell lace-like across the glass.

The boy thought he might still be dreaming. The opulent sitting room whirled about him, all aglitter and flickering with light. The colors were so bright and so many that they hurt his eyes. He hardly knew where it look, it all seemed so fine and terrible.

The girl darted into the next room. He heard a strange liquid gush, of something being poured out or sloshed. Running water, he realized. He craned his neck to see the faucet, but it was out of sight. Then she was back, folding a damp cloth over her hands. She instructed him to lay back and placed the cloth on his forehead. He felt pinned by it, as though it weighed a great deal. A thin droplet of water rolled down his brow.

She told him that he was being worked far too hard.

He shook his head a little, not wanting to seem so weak, but unwilling to disagree with her outright.

She stroked his face, and he shivered. Her hand was the softest thing he'd ever felt, he was sure of it. The girl spoke, words tumbling out faster than he could make sense of them. She spoke of things he had never known, of places and people and events so far beyond his understanding they may as well have been taking place on the moon. He lay on his back and watched her lips moving. It was an immeasurable delight to see the way in which they formed words.

A man came into the room, pausing at the door. He asked the girl if this was another of her charity cases.

The girl frowned and said he ought not to be so cruel. She called him father.

Her father. The owner. The boy and the man looked at each other. The man's face gave away nothing. It was a smooth and clean face, like no man the boy had ever seen. Eyes that seemed to move right over you, hair dark and slick with pomade. The man had a fresh false scent which carried even across the sitting room. They two looked at each other, and something seemed to pass between them which the boy could not rightly put into words.

Then the man was gone, with a shake of his head and a soft word of admonition to his daughter. The girl seemed to forget her father the moment he'd gone; she spoke on and on, stopping only to lift the cloth from his forehead and feel it with the back of her slender hand.

The boy gazed at her. He wondered what it might be like to kiss her. Could he ever do such a thing? It seemed impossible. What would she say if he asked? She might be angry, or she might laugh. You're only a boy, she might say. It would surely never happen. But he did wonder.

She asked him if he had heard President Roosevelt's speech.

He said that he didn't know who she meant.

The girl seemed shocked. He felt he'd disappointed her. She said that there was likely to be a war, and all the men and boys would be called away to fight. She said that she supposed he would sign up someday soon, and that she wished she might do the same. She said that she was terribly bored and longed to be away. She said that she longed to fight, though many would suppose it unbecoming. I hate it here, she said.

The boy felt a deep dread settling in him. A war. Surely that was the cause of his premonitions. Henry would sign up, for sure he would, and he would die there. Henry had always spoken of how desperate he was to be a soldier.

The boy had never shared his brother's desire. He couldn't say for sure what he wanted, but he'd no desire to fight – or to die – for a man he'd never heard of before. The only thing he knew he wanted was to lay here in the girl's arms a while longer. He gazed up at her. She seemed to him so perfect, so pure.

She met his gaze a moment; she laughed; she looked away. She asked him why he was looking at her so strangely. He told her that he thought she was beautiful.

He thought that would make her happy. He thought that a girl would like to be told such a thing. But her face fell. She stood, and she stepped away from him. He wanted to reach out and stop her, draw her close again. The sudden distance between them seemed immense, and he felt too weak to make the attempt. She asked him a question. Who do you think I am, she asked. He said that he thought she was a beautiful girl.

She went to the window and she looked out. She seemed sad, seemed lonely. You're just like them, she said. Then she came back and took the cloth from his brow and said that she would freshen it for him. Then she was gone, and he heard again the sound of running water.

The boy came to his feet. He thought of his brother, dying so far from home, and he thought of his mother and father, growing thinner and weaker in their broken shack. He thought of the owner, and the cruel curve of his thin lips as he'd looked upon the boy. He thought of the girl, who seemed now so fragile and distant. There was a deep place within him that hated her, for what he could not quite say.

He stepped across the room and without a thought he caught up a fistful of baubles from the table there. Jewelry, shining girly things, clear as cut glass and sparkling with light. They were as pure and fine as ice, like water in his hand. He was sure they were valuable, that they might take him someplace cool and clear and peaceful; a little town, a big city, an island in an ocean of shade and mist. They were hers. He shoved them into his pocket and went at once down the hall and out the door before the girl could return.

He let the door swing shut behind him as he hurried down off the porch and once again into the blinding sun. The limp tongues of corn lashed at his face and feet as he ran.

He looked out across the field rustling, singing always its ancient chant, and he looked at the road back to town, going off in the distance like an endless serpent winding. The boy looked, and he felt a strange sensation of knowing fill him. He could see his future spilling out before him, bright and clear. It was in that moment given to him, as though it had been long ago set down and he had only now been permitted to read the thing.

He smiled – a strange smile which the other men would have called odd and too adult for such a young boy – and he disappeared into the field.

### Fragment

He loved the smell of gasoline and the feeling of oil between his fingers. His ceaseless exigence was a breathing thing, a rasp in the throat, a cold hand at his back. His dreams churned of mechanical dread, of time's weight. He lay on his back watching the ceiling seem to move, and inside him something bright and sharp is growing. He is empty, like a thing trying to be born, wanting only love. Love love love.

He cannot name his desire, he knows only the desire itself, and he will cling to that.

### Development

Of course it was Ben's idea, I'd never have dreamed up something like that. I mean, I needed the money as much as him, but Ben was the one with drive enough to go out and make things happen. Our old soccer coach would have called it hustle – he loved a boy with hustle, he used to say, his fingers chalky with dirt. Back then I never really understood what he meant; it's the sort of thing that only becomes clear with time.

The whole thing started with the camera. It seems so simple now, seems like it should have had a more momentous beginning. But life is like that, things just happen, and you never know what you're going to get swept into. We were at the thrift store – they kept the air conditioner cranked real high there, and it was the sort of place we could hang out without anybody calling the cops on us. I saw it first, this dirty old Polaroid camera stuck up on the shelf behind old copies of a Gerald Ford biography. I saw it, but Ben was the one who took it down. "You want this?" he asked. I just shrugged. It was a piece of junk, real beat up, all nicked and dented and battered about. I said that I doubted it even worked. There were only a few blanks left in the cartridge; the price tag stuck on the shutter said $5.25.

Ben stole it, because five bucks was five bucks and he figured why the hell not.

He took it back to his Dad's trailer and shoved it under a pile of socks or something and I forgot all about it. Like I said, small beginnings.

Back then we spend most of our time hanging out together. We had a couple places, private places away from it all. There was this abandoned RV behind the trailer park that we especially liked, we mostly used it to hide stolen porn mags and cigarettes. A couple weeks after we'd stolen the camera, he brought it to the RV and told me his plan.

"This is it, man, this is it!" he waved the camera over his head as he crawled in through the busted skylight.

"This is what?"

He flopped in, falling hard and bounding back up to his feet in one awkward motion. "Don't you get it? I had this idea. We can take pictures of anything we want, right?"

"Yeah, I guess. So?"

Ben rolled his eyes. It always annoyed him that I didn't catch onto his schemes sooner. But like I said, I didn't have the same hustle.

"What are we gonna do with a camera?" I asked.

He grinned. "Blackmail."

"Who the hell are we gonna blackmail? We don't know anybody."

"Marylou Walker, maybe?" He lifted the camera to his eye and mimed a few snaps, clicking his tongue. "Take a few shots of her stepping out on her old man, see what she'll pay to get 'em back!"

"Please, like he doesn't know already." Everybody knew about Marylou, her husband worked with a logging crew up in Canada and she always left the bedroom curtains open so you could peak in and watch if you wanted. We used to wait outside all night for her to bring some guy back from the bar down the road. I always wondered if she knew we were there, if she was putting on a show just for us.

"Otis Farnsworth, maybe? Catch him smoking dope, get a couple shots of him sucking on that ol' bong of his?"

"I guess. I don't think he could pay us that much."

Ben shook his head. "Jesus Christ. You really do take the cake. A golden opportunity like this falls into your lap and you... _pfft_." He popped his thumb up, like a baseball umpire calling an out. "I'm disappointed, Constance."

"Don't call me that." I glared. He only called me by my full name when he really wanted to get under my skin. Connie was bad enough, substitute teachers always looked surprised when they saw I wasn't a girl. My folks were so doped up back then, it took them a solid month to realize they'd had a boy. That's the story they told me, anyway, but they were laughing while they told it so who knows.

Ben sighed and put his feet up.

I shrugged. "Why don't we just, like... take pictures of birds and stuff?" I didn't really know what people did with cameras. Took pictures of their families pretending to have a good time on vacation, was my best guess.

Ben groaned. "Birds? Je _sus_ , I'd rather take a picture of my own ass."

"Shut up."

"No, seriously. I'll do it right now." He laughed, delighted with the idea.

He unzipped his pants and pulled them down around his knees. I made a disgusted sound and turned away. We weren't those kinda kids who were afraid to get naked in the locker rooms or anything – you couldn't be, the way we'd grown up – but I still didn't really want to see my friend sticking his butt in my face.

Ben was giggling, twisting about awkwardly and lifting the camera with one hand to get a good angle. The camera gave a little hiss when he pushed the button and the photo printed, rasping out into his waiting hand. He lifted it against the light and squinted at it as it came slowly into focus. It wasn't much of a picture, just a dim and blurry shot of my best friend's ass-cheeks. Not the sort of thing you'd expect would change your life. He whistled. "Beautiful! They should add this to the Sistine Chapel."

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, it's a real work of art."

Ben snickered. "I'll just put it with the stash then."

"No _way_. I don't wanna see your stupid butt next time I'm in here."

We found our first pornographic magazine on the side of the highway when we were nine years old, and it had blown our minds. Even today I can still remember the picture that greeted us when Ben peeled back the muddy cover: a woman draped in a red nightgown sitting on the edge of an iron chair, her legs spread wide open. I remember the color of her lipstick, her old-fashioned hairstyle, all of it is so clear in my mind. I don't even remember my mother's face as well as I do the shape of that anonymous woman's breasts. It drove us wild, from that day on we were constantly searching for more. We used to dig around truck stops and convenience stores for porn, or sometimes we'd just find it in the woods all wrapped up in black plastic bags. Everything we found got brought back to the abandoned RV, and was treasured. We called it our stash. I'd come out here sometimes in the dead of night with a flashlight and a box of tissues and I'd stay for hours flipping through the pages and listening to the sounds of the wind cutting through the broken window-frame. I think I knew every picture in there by heart. Anyway, I didn't want Ben messing with it, and I sure as shit didn't want to find pictures of his ass in there.

Ben was lying on his back with his legs up in the air. He waved the picture over himself like a charm. "Alright alright. But I gotta do something with it. I mean, can't just toss something like this. It's our first picture!"

"Hey Ben?"

"Yeah?"

"Get over yourself, will ya?"

He smirked. "No chance."

I'll never forget the next thing I said. I didn't mean anything by it, it was just a joke. Never in a million years would I have thought he might take it seriously. But that was the difference between Ben and I. Between Ben and the rest of the world, really. Joke and fantasies, all those daydreams you put away in the back of your mind: they were real to Ben. There was nothing he wouldn't try.

"Maybe you could sell it," I said, "you just gotta find somebody who'd want that crap."

He sprang to his feet. "Connie, you're dumber than you look."

"Screw you."

Then his expression changed. He looked at the picture again, and a slow smile spread across his face. "You know what, I think I know just the guy. Come on." And he clambered back out the window without another word.

I rolled my eyes. "Come _on_ , Ben, just forget it!" But he was already gone, and all I could do was follow, or else stay behind and miss out. I've never been able to stay behind.

I had to run to catch up, he was already way out into the woods, and he wasn't stopping. He ran, waving the picture over his head, and it felt like we'd gone miles before he finally pulled up short. I stumbled to my knees when I caught him, panting and gasping for breath.

He crawled up onto a rotten log and watched me with his head tilted to one side, kinda like a curious bird.

"Where are we?" I asked.

He grinned and put on a spooky voice, "The edge of the woods..."

"Yeah? And why's that?"

He pointed ahead through the trees. "Look."

I looked, and saw what he was pointing to. It was a house. It took me a minute, but I recognized it. "No way. Come on, Ben. No _way_!"

"What?" he pulled an innocent face. "We just put it in the old mailbox."

"Are you serious? He'll find it tomorrow when he checks his mail."

Ben's grin only got wider. "Nah, I don't think so."

"And why's that?"

"Mailman doesn't even deliver out here anymore. Hasn't for years. It's a dead box. That's what my cousin called it. Nobody would ever look. Hiding right under his nose. It's too beautiful."

I just shook my head.

The mailbox in question belonged to Victor Barnes.

Everybody back then knew about Victor Barnes. His father owned the railroad company, back when there were still railroads, and he'd left his son the big old house out on the edge of town – not to mention about as much money as any one person could expect to spend in a lifetime. He used to be a gym teacher at the elementary school, way back in the sixties. Not like he needed the money, but people figured he had a passion for children. And he did, just not the way they thought. He got caught with his hands down some kid's pants, and that put a quick end to his teaching career. It probably would have landed him in jail if not for the fancy big city lawyer he'd ponied up for. Nobody really saw much of him anymore, but everyone knew he was out there somewhere, this rich old pervert who lived in the woods, haunting our town. It didn't surprise me one bit that he didn't use his mailbox – I mean, who would want to send that guy mail?

"Come on, Connie. It'll be like, poetic justice, or something."

"How's that?"

Ben shrugged. "Well, maybe it's just funny, then."

"I guess."

Ben didn't waste any more time talking. He darted into overgrown scrub of Mr. Barnes' lawn, photo clutched in both hands. I wandered at the edge of the forest, searching for some sign of life in the tall dark windows. I didn't see a damn thing. The place was empty for all I could tell. Ben shoved the picture in the box and shut it with a flourish. He skipped – actually _skipped_! – back to where I was hiding and dusted off his hands. He was real showy like that sometimes.

"See there, my good man? Nothing to it." He grinned.

"Yeah yeah. Whatever. Let's get back home."

"What you wanna go back there for? It's only, like, four o'clock."

"You do what you want, man. I'm gonna split."

He frowned. "What's up, Connie?"

I just shrugged. Our little adventure had put me out of sorts, and I couldn't put my finger on why. I looked back once more at the old house in the clearing. It was like something out of a bad dream; all the paint peeling off and the shutters hanging askew. It was the kind of place you might die and never be found. It gave me a real weird feeling.

I went back into the forest, kicking through the dead leaves and listening to them crunch beneath my shoes. Ben watched me go; he didn't try and stop me.

* * *

It had seemed like a big deal at the time, but I actually forgot about the picture in the mailbox not long after. Life just got busy. Dad broke his parole and went back to prison for another year. Mom went back on dope and started dating her dealer again. Ben got picked up for stealing from the uptown drugstore, but I guess he talked his way out of juvie somehow. School hadn't yet started up again, so I was trying to keep my head down and stay out of everybody's way. A Polaroid in some old bastard's mailbox was the least of my concerns.

It was about three weeks after we'd planted the photo that Ben came to find me. I was paying a visit to our stash of magazines when he came tumbling in through the window. I'd only just settled on a picture – one of my favorites, a tall brunette in a wispy little thong cupping her breasts with both hands, her head thrown back and teeth gritted as if in ecstasy or pain – when he came busting in. It was a total violation of our rules, but Ben hadn't ever had much use for rules, not even his own. I tugged my pants back up and I was about to tell him to go to hell when he shoved the envelope in my face. I could see right away that it wasn't any ordinary envelope. It was made of some sort of stiff cream-white paper, all embossed and stamped with swirling floral lines and patterns. It looked expensive.

"Where'd you get that?" I swept aside the magazine I'd been looking at.

Ben just grinned. "Guess!"

I rolled my eyes. I was painfully aware of the boner crammed in my pants, and in no mood to play Ben's game.

Ben couldn't wait: "It's Barnes, Connie. Victor Barnes."

"What makes you think that?"

"It was in his mailbox."

"You can't steal somebody's mail, it's illegal!"

"I didn't steal it. It's for me."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because of what's inside." Ben tapped the edges of the envelope with the tips of his fingers. "I went back to get the picture, I dunno, I just wanted it back. But I found this instead."

I groaned with frustration. Ben had always liked to tease, everything was always a performance with him. I thought about trying to grab the thing, but he was probably ready for that and would only snatch it away at the last second.

"Just tell me, okay?"

He didn't tell me. He showed me. Slowly, with great care, he opened the envelope and took out a crisp twenty dollar bill and a small piece of paper. He gave me the paper, and put the money back in the envelope.

My fingers were shaking as I unfolded the paper. I don't know exactly why, I guess some part of me knew even then that it was all going to turn out badly. There were two words written on the paper in small neat handwriting: _Thank you_.

I looked at Ben.

Ben grinned back at me. "We are going to be so fuckin' rich, man."

I guess that was about the last thing I expected him to say. I didn't know how to respond, so I just stared.

He snatched the note back and returned it to the envelope. "Think about it, Connie! Just think about it! What's the one thing that old perv can't get?"

I shrugged.

Ben groaned at my stupidity. "Come on, dude!" He grabbed the magazine I'd been reading and shook it at me. "This! This is what he wants!"

"Yeah? And? He's rich, he can buy all the magazines he wants, retard."

"What if they don't make the kind of magazines he wants? What if it's something he can't get?"

"Like what?" I asked, though I suppose I already knew the answer.

Ben smiled. He opened his hands with a flourish, as if to say: here I am.

I shook my head. "You don't know what you're talking about, Ben. Even for you this is... this is fucking crazy."

"Why!" He flew to his feet and burst into a frenzy of motion. "Why is it crazy? Why shouldn't we do it? Who cares what gets the old pervs rocks off?" he snatched up my magazine and waved it in my face. "Do you think _she_ cares that you and me yank off in her face every day? She don't give a shit! It's just her fucking job! She stands there and somebody takes the pictures and she gets paid. It's easy fucking money, dude! Why should we be any different?"

"Yeah... but... but we're not-"

"What, you think we're better than them?" He threw down the magazine. I looked at it. The woman stared back up at me. She was touching herself, her eyes icy and distant.

Ben punched the wall, practically boiling with frustration. "Come _on_ , Connie. Aren't you sick of this shit? Of being nothing? Just trailer trash? He's got the money, and we've got the one goddamn thing he wants. So let's get _rich_ , man."

"I... I can't do..." my voice caught in my throat. My brain was spinning, working desperately to come up with some kind of argument. It was no good, never had been. Ben just thought too quick for me to keep up with. He was always three steps ahead.

"Nobody would ever know, man. You think he's gonna tell anybody? He'll take it to the grave. Nobody would ever know." He slid the twenty back out of the fancy envelope, and looked at it. "I'll bet there's a lot more where this came from. A _lot_ more."

I swallowed hard. "Well... what would I have to do, exactly?"

"Don't worry about that yet, let's just take this one step at a time."

"So what's the first step then?"

Ben retrieved the camera from its hiding spot in one of the RV's unused cabinets. We'd had a lot of plans for what we might put in them, back when we first found the old RV out here in the woods. There had been all sorts of things we wanted to do but somehow never got around to. Ben popped off the lens cap. "First things first, Connie. We need to make sure."

"Yeah?"

"We need to do it again. One more picture."

My throat felt horribly dry. It was difficult to swallow. "Of who?"

"We'll split the money, alright? More for the person in the picture."

"So who's it gonna be?"

"Depends on how much money you want."

"I'll take the pictures."

Ben shrugged. "Good enough. Seventy-thirty?"

"Yeah, alright."

He passed me the camera. I'd never held it before; it was a lot heavier than it looked.

"So... uh... what kind of picture should we take?"

Ben gnawed thoughtfully on his lip. "We can't give too much away, but... got to get his attention, right?"

"I guess so."

"So let's do something... enticing."

"Like what?"

It was too weird to talk about. Ben and I were really close, we always had been, but this was different. It was one thing to pee in front of someone or talk about jerking off or whatever, it was quite another actually taking erotic photos of your best friend. The first time, that stupid picture of his ass, that had just been a joke, like flashing somebody for laughs. This was more serious. I remember the weird feeling it gave me in the pit of my stomach.

Ben's hands were trembling a little. He shook them out and took a deep breath. "Fuck it," he said, and began to strip.

I wasn't sure what to do, if I should watch or not. I looked through the camera lens, as if lining up a shot. It was easier that way, I felt invisible. Distant somehow, almost like I was already looking at a picture and not at a real live person. I tried to think of Ben as just another image from one of our magazines.

He stopped just short of going all the way, kicking off his jeans and crossing his arms. I lowered the camera and looked at him, standing there in his briefs. "Tightie whities?" I remember laughing, though I was probably wearing the same myself. It was all my mom would buy for me. Boxers were for rich kids.

"Shut the hell up and take the pictures," he snapped.

I took three pictures. They printed out, _hiss hiss hiss_ , one after the other. Ben shrugged on his jacket, though his scrawny legs were still bare. We looked at the photos together, leaning over with our elbows on the counter and our chins in our hands. We peered down together at the trio of shots.

I remember how I tried to rationalize it, make it like it wasn't such a big deal, like nothing had changed. But it was different. I'd been looking at my friend through the eyes of desire, as though I'd wanted him, and it was screwing with my head. Ben shuffled through the pictures, not paying my struggle any attention.

"Hell, let's just give him all three," he finally said, shrugging his shoulders and scooping up the photos. "Let him know we're for real."

"Are we?"

"What?"

I swallowed hard. " _Are_ we for real? I mean... do you really wanna do this?"

He looked at me, eyes all flat and hard. "I _am_ doing it, Connie. You bailing on me?"

I shook my head and looked away. Something about his expression was just too intense. "Nah, man... I'm in."

Ben nodded, and smiled at me. He tucked the pictures in his pocket and was out the window before I could say another word.

* * *

Ben and I didn't see much of each other for a while. I wasn't avoiding him, exactly, but there was a distance between us now that hadn't been there before. I could feel the pictures, kind of sense them somewhere out there, waiting for the old man to find them. I had this nasty feeling down in my stomach that everything was going to go wrong. Or maybe I didn't, maybe I just remember it that way now because of how everything turned out. It's hard to say for sure.

I stayed home mostly, hiding in my Mom's trailer. Not that it was much of a home. Her dope dealer boyfriend was always over; they'd screw for a while, get high, then screw some more. There wasn't much privacy in a trailer, not one like ours with thin walls and no locks on the doors. She didn't care what I saw or heard, much less what I did. Mom wasn't really aware of me anymore; I was just a ghost haunting the place, just that shape drifting by. She wasn't much of the maternal sort.

Eventually, Ben tracked me down, found me hanging out behind the diner across the street. He didn't say anything, just handed me three folded-over ten dollar bills.

I took them. "Mailbox?" I asked.

He nodded.

"And seventy for you?"

"That was the deal, yeah."

"Was there anything else?"

"Yeah."

"And?"

He shrugged. "Another one of those fruity envelopes."

"With a note inside?"

He nodded.

"Okay, so what did he say?" My heart was thundering, my pulse pounding in my ears like a fist pounding on a car window.

Ben made a face. "Bunch of shit, man, don't worry about it. Point is, I was right. He wants more pictures."

"Yeah?"

"Says he'll pay extra for... you know... _more_."

We didn't look at each other for a while. I stared off towards the trailer park. Ben kicked his ratty shoes in the dusty earth.

He chewed his thumbnail. "So?"

I shrugged. "Whatever."

"What you up to?"

"Nothing in particular."

Ben didn't look at me. "Wanna go make some money?"

I bit my lip hard. I thought I could almost taste blood. "Guess so. Why not, right?"

Ben nodded. "Why not."

We started heading towards the woods at the far edge of the trailer park. I guess we were both trying not to think too hard about what we were going to do.

I stuck my hand in my pocket and felt the money there. That strange rough feeling of paper money, like you could feel the clothy stitched quality of the paper. It felt dirty, torn and wrinkled by a hundred folds. It felt like waste paper, like a used tissue or something – like nothing anybody could ever value.

"He gave us a hundred dollar bill, you know." Ben piped up. "I had to break it at the gas station downtown. My cousin works there. No questions asked sorta deal. He looked at me real funny though."

"Probably thought you'd stolen it."

"Probably."

"You think he'd tell anyone?"

Ben snorted. "He grows weed in his basement, he's not going to rat us out."

We didn't talk much after that on our way into the woods. The summer sun above was like a blister in the sky. We pulled ourselves up through the broken window and into the RV. The air was musty and close, the light dusky with all the shades pulled down. We looked at each other for a long while.

"Come on," said Ben. He got out the camera and shoved it into my hands.

I swallowed. "You come on."

Ben grinned, but the grin was half a sneer. All those years we'd been friends, as well as I thought I knew him, I really couldn't even guess what he might be thinking.

"Just do it." I said.

I tried not to look when he pulled down his underpants. I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. His _thing_ was right there, right in front of me. And here we were, alone in the woods. I stared at it from behind the safety of the camera lens. It looked like mine, but not. A little longer, a little slimmer, Curved gently to one side. His balls looked smooth, one noticeably larger than the other. I'd seen it before, of course, we jerked off together in this very RV once, staring at the same pages of the same magazines. But even that hadn't been like this. There was something between us then, the pages of the magazine up like a curtain in our minds. Now there was nothing, only the naked eye of the camera.

I started taking pictures of my friend.

We didn't talk afterward. He got dressed and gathered up the pictures. He left, alone, to go put them in the mailbox. I went the other way, back to the trailer park, with no company but the sound of blood rushing in my ears.

* * *

Two days later, Ben brought me another thirty bucks. It was just too easy. We did it again almost right away and it was easier still. It got easier every time we did it. I made a hundred and fifty dollars in two weeks. I hid the money under my mattress. Taking pictures of Ben became a kind of routine. It became normal somehow. My turn eventually came. Ben told me that it would excite the old man to see someone new, so I did it. I did what Ben told me to do, just as I had always done.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It was just the two of us out there in the lonely RV, Ben not saying a word, huddling behind the camera like I'd done. It was almost like I was alone. We made the pictures, I put my clothes back on, and we were done. Took about ten minutes. Seventy dollars in ten minutes. I knew guys who couldn't make that in a week working steady, bagging at the grocery store or whatever.

I felt rich for the first time in my life.

I didn't spend a penny of it, not ever. I still can't explain why. I think somehow that it meant a lot more just to have it, to know that I possessed it. Ben, on the other hand, spent it all, usually within a day of getting the money it would be gone. He bought all sorts of things, some clothes and food but mostly just stupid shit. Dumb useless crap. It was like he was trying to get rid of it, spending it just because he could, on _anything_ he could, as if he didn't even want it. I warned him not to attract so much attention, but he told me it didn't matter. And of course it didn't. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared about us. Nobody except Victor Barnes.

We never talked about him, never said his name. If he needed to be referred to, we called him "the old man." His letters got longer and longer. I saw them, but couldn't ever bring myself to read them. Ben kept them all; he poured over them obsessively when he thought I wasn't paying attention. I preferred not to think of him, or what he was doing with the pictures we sent him. It was just too weird; you had to make it simple in your head. I would tell myself that the mailbox was magical. Pictures went in and turned into money, like there didn't have to be anybody else involved.

School started again. Mom broke up with her dealer and he sent her to the hospital, where she traded her dope habit for a prescription painkiller addiction. Dad called once from jail. We didn't talk long. He didn't want to tell me anything about what it was like inside and I didn't want to tell him what was happening to me outside. He told me that he loved me, but it was more reflex than emotion. I said the words back, but they were hollow. They didn't mean anything. Nothing meant anything that year. Nothing was real except being in the RV with Ben.

"Does it feel different?" I set the camera aside and put the little stack of pictures on the counter.

Ben pulled up his jeans and buttoned them. "Does what feel different?"

"You know. School."

"Not really. Why?"

"It feels different to me. Like I'm not really there, you know?"

"Nah. Feels the same to me. It's a drag, I don't think about it."

"Yeah, I guess not."

He looked through the pictures, shuffling them like a deck of cards. He tossed a few aside and slid the others into an envelope. We'd bought envelopes, nothing so fancy as the old man's, but better than nothing. We had bought film too, another full cartridge for the camera. Ben had drummed his fingers on the hard plastic. Like printing money, he told me.

I scooted up on the countertop and pulled out the drawer beneath to rest my feet on. There was a magazine inside, something from our stash. I picked it up and flipped idly through it, gazing blankly at the naked women. I didn't come out here to look at them much anymore. It just didn't seem right for some reason. Maybe I'd just lost interest. It was a hardcore magazine; there were pictures of two people doing it. I looked at the man, searching for some trace of myself. What would it be like to be him? I wondered if I could ever be like that.

Ben was lacing up his shoes. Outside the RV the sun was going down.

I tossed the magazine aside. "How much longer are we going to do this, Ben?"

"Do what, Connie?" he parroted my name back sarcastically.

"You know. _This_. I mean, eventually he's gonna get bored of us, right? I mean, how many different ways can we do this?"

"Don't sweat it, man. I've been thinking."

"And?"

He tugged open the RV door and set one foot down on the first step before he answered. "We'll just have to do something to keep him interested, right? I mean, shit, not like he's got much choice. We're the only game in town."

"Makes sense, I suppose."

"Yeah."

Ben stayed there for a moment, one foot inside the RV and one out. He stood bathed in the radiance of the setting sun. His skin seemed to glow with an unnatural fire; it was like he was burning. He looked at me and the reflected sun turned his eyes to sparks, like reflections off bright hard stone. And then he went out into the world.

I followed.

The woods around us were all aflame with the sun, shimmering and golden as though we'd stepped out onto the surface of an alien planet. I hurried after Ben.

"How long do you want to keep going?"

He said something I didn't catch, hacking through a patch of brambles with his sleeve pulled up over his fingers.

"Huh?"

"I said I'm not going back."

"Back where?" I struggled after, plucking thorns from my shirt.

"The way it was before. I'm not going back."

"What makes you think the old man won't cut us off?"

"He won't."

"I wanna read the letters."

"Huh?"

"The old man's letters, I wanna read 'em."

"Connie. You don't."

"Shit, Ben, what's the big secret?"

"You just don't want to read them. Trust me."

And then we were out, pushing through the last of the shrubs and into the tangle of the overgrown field behind the old man's place.

Ben went right for the mailbox. I jogged after him. "I think he's gonna get bored."

The sun was dipping down behind the house by the time we crossed the field. We stood there in the shadow of the old mansion. There was something in the mailbox already. A package wrapped in plain brown packing paper. There were no addresses or names on it, only two words written in fine-point pen in the top left corner: _My Boys_. Ben swapped our envelope for the package. He flashed a grin at me, and I know right away that he'd been expecting this. He'd known it would be here. Chances were, he already knew what was inside.

"Trust me, Connie. He won't be bored."

* * *

It was a video camera.

We opened it that night in the RV by the glow of a dying flashlight. It was packed naked in crumpled old newspapers that tumbled out like scurrying rats and crunched under our feet when we moved. Ben lifted out the camera. Its blank glass eye caught the flashlight beam and winked at us. My skin crawled; it felt like he was watching us through the lens somehow, even with the camera off he could still see. I fished out the lens cap from the bottom of the box and snapped it back in place.

It was an older camera, maybe ten years out of date, but it seemed to have been kept in good enough condition. It would have looked like it was fresh out of the box if not for the slight signs of wear on the hand-strap and the fading of the little symbols on the buttons.

"What are we supposed to do with it?" I asked.

"Come on, Connie. You know."

I nodded.

"You in?" His face looked ghoulish in the flashlight glow.

I swallowed. My throat was horribly dry.

"Connie?"

I thought of my mother, strung out and fucked up back in the trailer. I thought of my father sleeping in some cramped jail cell. I thought about the old man hiding in that big house like some terrible secret made real. I thought about a lot of things.

"Connie?" Ben said one more time, but softer, more inquisitive.

"Yeah. I'm in."

We agreed that we would make the film as soon as possible. Tomorrow. We would do it tomorrow, sometime late at night after everybody in the trailer park was asleep, when nothing in the world might see us.

I went to bed as soon as I got home, but I couldn't sleep. I took out the money hidden under my mattress and counted it slowly. It was a lot of money for me, more than I'd ever had. But, at the same time, not so very much in the grand scheme. It wouldn't last long out in the world. I tried not to question my decision, to just think of the money.

I didn't sleep too well that night.

* * *

I still think about it sometimes, even after all these years. Making that video with Ben. It's strange, I don't really remember it very well. You'd think, of everything that happened, that it would be the one thing I'd be sure to remember. But there are only images, fragments, only isolated moments. The feel of Ben's bare shoulder under my hand. The way his eyelashes fluttered the moment before I kissed him. The heat of his body against mine. How he clutched at my thigh and whispered into my ear. The unblinking red light of the video camera.

I don't think I ever watched the video. Maybe later, years later when it was all being dredged up, I might have seen a fragment of it, been shown by somebody. But not then, I couldn't have watched it then. I hardly believed that I was doing it at the time, it was all like a dream, like sleepwalking. Maybe that's why I don't remember it too well. Maybe it was just too distant.

There was a moment, just after we turned off the camera and put our clothes back on, there was one small moment in which I felt... I don't know. The feeling was too expansive and complicated to put into a single word. It was a kind of power, something surging through me like searing energy. It was a fearful sensation, like all my insides were on fire and I might burn right through and leave nothing but a white hot afterglow.

Ben put the videotape in brown bag and wrapped it up. "He's going to send us more blank tapes."

I nodded.

He stood there by the door, not quite looking at me, and I sat on the floor, not quite looking back. Neither of us knew what to say. It felt like everything was happening so easily, like everything was falling into place and spinning wildly out of control, both at once.

Ben went to take the package to the old man's mailbox and again I went with him. The wood seemed absolutely still in the summer twilight. The air was cool and clean. Crickets chirped and thrummed in our wake as we moved through the long grass. The gray-blue sky was alive with soundless bats, tumbling and whirling after mosquitoes like scraps of dark cloud caught in a storm.

Ben and I didn't speak. Our feet led us away from the direct path. Somewhere out there was the old man's house, that looming ruinous thing. All the lights would be out, and he would be inside somewhere, haunting its darkness. We couldn't bring ourselves to go directly there, and so we wandered awhile.

Our directionless path led us to a murky little pond, a drainage run-off where we used to swim. We hadn't been there for years, and it seemed smaller now. Pale reeds stuck up blue from the glassy surface. It was almost a perfect circle. At that moment, in the fading light, it looked to me just like an enormous camera lens.

Ben kicked off his shoes. "Let's go in."

"You serious?"

"Come on," he said, "it'll be fun. Anyway, I feel kinda, you know... Let's just go."

I shrugged. "Yeah, okay."

We stripped naked, not looking at each other. Something had changed between us. It was like everyone else on the planet had died, and we had no one but each other.

I watched him walk into the black water, shivering and milk-white in the moonshine. It seemed to erase him as he went in – to the ankles, to the knees, to the thigh, to the waist, the breast, the shoulders and then everything. He dipped under and was gone.

I followed.

We swam in circles around each other, our pale legs kicking just beneath the surface.

I floated on my back and stared up at the endless sky. All the stars were coming out. I remembered playing here when I was younger. Ben and I would come out and swim together. It was like an adventure, journeying together into some wild unknown. We did everything together then, because we had nobody else.

I felt him come up behind me. He was shivering, but his breath was warm on the back of my neck. I felt his arms wrap around me, his hand covering my heart. I felt very peaceful, very still. Everything was about to come apart, but I felt whole. I felt his hand slide down my chest and disappear below the surface of the water.

For some time after we floated together, just drifting in the iris.

We walked naked together awhile after leaving the pond. We didn't have anything to dry ourselves off with and we didn't want to get back into our clothes, so we just padded on barefoot through the gathering dark, like native boys treading a hidden path. Ben had the paper bag gripped tight in one fist.

"How much is he giving us?" I asked.

"A thousand dollars," Ben said.

I whistled.

"Yeah," he said.

We could have stopped then. We could have turned around, destroyed the tape or lost it in the woods. We could have gone home and lived our quiet sad lives. We could have done a lot of things, but back then there had seemed to be only one option. It seemed as though we were on a road which could not be abandoned. All there was to do was keep putting one foot in front of the other.

And then, all of a sudden, we were out of the woods. It was just as I'd known it would be: the long shadows of the house reaching across the dead grass, all those dark windows devoid of any light, the mailbox gaping like a toothless mouth.

We dressed, pulling on our clothes over wet skin, and we started across the field. My shoes squelched with every step. The mailbox groaned when Ben opened it. He held out the paper bag.

"Put it in," I told him.

"Yeah," he said, but he didn't do it.

"Ben, come on. I wanna get out of here."

The porch light came on. It was a sickly sparking yellow, the color of a bug-catcher. I jumped; my first instinct was to drop down and hide in the grass or run for the woods. Ben didn't react, he just turned to look at it. He pulled the paper bag close against his chest.

"Jesus, Ben, let's go!"

He looked at me, and his face was lit with the eerie glow of the Old Man's light.

"Ben, come on!"

Ben shook his head. "I'm going to take it to him," he said, "I'm going to get our money right now."

"Are you crazy? Let's just go!" I stared at the house. I don't know if it was just my imagination, but I thought I could see a dark shape moving just inside the front windows, a lurking figure peering through the blinds and trembling.

"Come with me," he said.

I shook my head.

His eyes and mine were locked together. We stared at each other.

"I'm going, Connie," he said, and he turned away.

I stood by the mailbox and I watched him walk towards the house. I thought of all the times I'd seen him walking to school with a bag lunch in his hand. I thought of the videotape. Somewhere beyond the clouds the moon was shimmering pale and whole, waiting to break through. The long grass seemed to clutch and tug at his bare legs as he crossed the field.

I don't know why, but I thought of the RV. We were eight years old when we'd first found it in the woods. It seemed to me like that had been a very long time ago, thousands of years, lifetimes. We'd been so excited, we'd had so many plans. I remember going inside for the first time, the whole thing full of dead leaves and overgrown with vines and scrub. The sun shone green through the mossy windows, this weird magical light. Ben and I had felt like we were going into another world. We used to sit in there together and he'd tell me about all the things we were going to do, how we were going to fix up the RV and take it across the country. We were going to be free, with all the world stretching out before us. We were going to live however we wanted, wherever. All over the damn country, no home or family, just each other.

Ben stepped up onto the first stair of the Old Man's porch. He looked back at me. He grinned, but I remember feeling like it was only for my benefit, just to reassure me that it was going to be okay.

The door was pushed open from the inside, and there was this horrible black nothing in there, thick and deep as a starless sky. I couldn't see the old man. Ben and I kept looking at each other. He went up another step, but no further, just standing there on the brink of something awful and irresistible.

It's strange to think about it now, about everything that happened to us that summer. I remember Ben now and it seems so distant and somehow so beautiful.

I remember the way I ran through the forest that night, it felt like I ran forever, away from the house, away from the old man, away from everything I'd ever known. I was lost, but I didn't feel lost. I felt like I knew exactly where I was going, and I was sure that it would be alright, no matter what happened, because I knew that Ben would be there waiting for me with a cocky grin and a stupid joke. He was indestructible, bad things just slid off him, nothing stuck.

But of course that wasn't true. It's one of those things you learn, growing up, one of the things that makes you wish you could stay a child forever. Bad stuff can happen to anybody, and does.

### Fragment

Yeah, I remember Garrett's magazine. God, we were so desperate back then! Fucking underwear catalog, and we went crazy over it. For a while Garrett would only let us look at it, we couldn't touch it or anything. I begged him! Come on, just a little while, loan it to me for a few days, man! He couldn't be budged. It's weird, how open we were about it back then. We all knew that we wanted the catalog to jack off with, but nobody seemed to care. There was no judgment, no weirdness. And it wasn't like we were nasty about the pictures either. About the women in the pictures, I mean. I practically worshiped them, each and every one of them.

Eventually Garrett let us borrow the catalog. Every week after church we would go out into the field and it would be passed from one boy to the next. There were only four of us at first, but I guess by the end there were about a dozen kids out there, all boys of course. I remember when it was my turn. My cousin Sam was in town. I wasn't sure at first, you know, if I should show it to him. I did, though. He was in a sleeping bag on my floor and I was under my covers with a flashlight, staring at this woman modeling this silky purple bra. He asked me what I was reading, and I said that he could come under the covers with me if he wanted to see. I didn't mean anything by it, I just... I wanted him to know. I had my pajama bottoms pulled down around my knees. I don't remember if he looked or not. He held one side of the catalog and I held the other. The flashlight was balanced between our heads. It got real hot against my cheek, and the blanket was pretty heavy. We were both sweating, breathing hard, hands down between our legs, side by side on my bed. The catalog shook. We didn't look at each other, but I remember catching a glimpse of Sam, you know, out of the corner of my eye. He bit his lip and he took a big breath and held it in, then he stopped moving. He went all stiff, and then he just sort of melted away. He slipped back down off the bed and got into his sleeping back. I hid the catalog and we never talked about it. We weren't... I don't know... traumatized, or anything. We just knew not to say anything.

Duncan Bauer was the last person to have the catalog. His mom caught him using it in the bathroom. I think she burned it, who knows. Huh. Garrett's fucking catalog. Real Rosetta Stone moment, that.

### The Young Christ

She found god in the earth and drew it from the sun-warmed soil, clutched in dirty hands and lifted to the naked sky. Virgin alabaster fingers cupping soft black dirt. Too real to be real. She swayed, gazing in awful wonder at the earth in her palms. She was lonely, and ready to believe. The willingness of childhood had not yet left her, and she ached to see the world around her put into proper order.

He came to her uninvited, stepping from the mouth of the woods without a sound. There were wisps of hair on his chin and upper lip, and angry red spots where he'd worried at his acne. He approached her with the guilty stride of a voyeur, too-rehearsed, too-stiff.

What they would become was buried deep, then little more than the glimmer of metal in water.

She sat back on her haunches, feeling the warm dirt press up against her bare thighs. She watched him. She was not afraid. An envelope of poppy seeds was open before her. She'd stolen them from the store. It was the first time she had ever stolen anything. She could not say what had drawn her eye to the little packet with its brightly colored picture. Some instinct, maternal perhaps, had compelled her to reach out for the seeds. She would create, she would summon from the earth her red-faced children with their bright petal eyes and they would turn to bask in her presence and they would owe everything to her who had allowed them to be.

He stood over her, his hands shoved awkwardly into the pockets of overlarge thrift store jeans. "Hey," he said to her, "what's up?"

She looked up at him and squinted into the hanging sun. "Nothing." The light was unbearably bright, but she did not look away. "I'm Juliette."

"I'm Brian," he said.

* * *

A sungod born in this garden on the edge of the town, on the edge of the day as the home star tumbles earthward. In the morning it will be reborn, and we will follow it.

* * *

Juliette's parents worried about her. She'd overheard them talking: "She's such a quiet girl. She doesn't seem to have any friends. That girl doesn't know what she's doing. She'll come to a bad end."

Juliette had learned to keep her words strictly to herself. Her parents and her teachers, those adults in authority over her, they all assumed that she was slow. That was the word they used, _slow_. They made excuses on account of her sex. Her father said that it was only natural. After all, girls were simpler than men and she wasn't an ugly girl, so what need was there for her to be smart? After all, she would always have her looks. After all, she could find a man to do her thinking for her, couldn't she? Her mother did not argue this, and nodded her head. Of course he was right.

When Juliette heard them she bit her lip so hard that it bled and the blood ran red down her chin like a curtain of wet silk pulled slowly from her mouth. And she kept her thoughts closer and quieter.

Juliette's father was the pastor of the little church on the edge of the town. It had a steeple and a bell and a single stained-glass window. We were entranced by that window when we were children, continually amazed to see the colored light scattered on the floor of the holy place. When we grew older we began to hate the window and the light which shone through it, and we took every opportunity to tread maliciously upon the malformed sunshine – as empty a protest as ever there has been. We came also to despise the teachings of Juliette's father. We took special care to learn words like hypocrisy and ignorance and blasphemy. Large words which felt too big for our mouths. When we formed our tongues around them it was always with an awkward delight. Words were our only weapons against adults, whispered together in quiet conference as we tromped the swaying yellow fields behind the churchyard in the after-service hours.

We hated Juliette then. She refused to talk with any of us, and we feared to speak in her presence lest she carry our words back to her father. We had to be careful then, we apostates, and we turned our caution to rejection. Whenever Juliette came quietly near we would glare at her and depart. She had black hair and blue eyes and pale skin and whenever we turned away from her she would go to sit alone in the corner and cry hot tears into her hands. We never felt guilty; we felt like we were striking back at her father for his ignorance, his hypocrisy, his blasphemy.

Our feelings mattered little to the adults, who all seemed to adore Juliette as much as we feared and rejected her.

I always thought it was kinda sad, how they would ignore her when she cried. They only ever seemed to see her when she was forcing a smile on her face. She was so pretty when she smiled, it was like she was a little angel. That's what they all called her, you remember? The little angel. Sitting there in that spotless white dress, always the same dress. She told me later that her father forced her to wear it. It was a symbol of purity, I guess. She said that she hated it. I couldn't stand seeing the way they fawned over her. "What a doll," they would cry, pawing at her sleeves and her hair, "What a toy!" It made me jealous back then. I guess I never really saw how hard it was for her.

Her father made her wear the dress so that he could always see the stains. She knew that she would be punished if there was dirt on her dress, yet the dirt called to her, hungered for her. She ached to tear the dress from herself and run naked through the grass, to feel the dirt between her toes, to roll in it and be one with it, to be clasped in the arms of her true mother. The dress was like a leash, a tight collar around her throat holding her back from the beckoning world.

Juliette's mother did nothing, she was nothing but a wife. God spoke through Juliette's father, God spoke with her father's voice and acted through her father's hands. God told Juliette's mother that she was nothing without Juliette's father, that she was nothing but a womb and a mouth, nothing but flesh. Joy in service. Joy in submission. Joy in subordination. Joy in the foot grinding her down to a beautiful shape. She took what joy she could. Who was she to speak against God?

Juliette's mother had sad brown eyes. She submitted without argument. It was only right. God's hand closed around her wrist, tight as a shackle. Her face became a mask in servitude to the whims and mood of God. Take care of your man. Please your man. Don't give your man reason to stray. Don't ever let go of your man. Tell your man that he's strong and let him prove it against your weakness. What are you without your man?

Juliette's mother had a name, though it was rarely spoken. Her father was called Reverend Theodore.

For three days Juliette had kept the poppy seeds hidden deep in her sock drawer, where their presence drove uneasy spikes of fear through the days. Surely they would be found! Her sin would be uncovered. You could not hide a sin from God. And did God not speak to her father? Surely he would know, he would be told, he would find her sins out and she would be punished.

What would they do to her, she wondered, what punishment? In her childhood she feared pain above all things.

She could not be left home alone, could not leave the house on her own, could not exist it seemed without the presence of her parents. Other fathers spent their days at work, but her father the pastor remained almost always at home, reading in his study, demanding silence. Other mothers spent their days at parent-teacher conferences and book groups and social clubs, but her mother could not be spared from father's side. There was a second umbilical cord, invisible to the eye, which had not yet been cut. She could not get rid of the seeds and she could not plant them. She waited.

She waited three days, and on the third day Juliette's father left the house to attend a prayer meeting with several of the church elders. Her mother sat there dozing in her chair and when sleep took her Juliette watched the peaceful mask slip away and the dreams behind her mother's face begin to twist and writhe in her features.

Juliette sat quietly for several minutes, fear building inside. Finally she rose and quit the house with seeds in hand, her white dress catching the sunlight as she stepped down off the porch steps and onto the immaculately maintained grass of the yard.

She was free. She looked up towards the sunny blue sky and basked in the heat of the day. For the first time she could remember, Juliette smiled without having to tell herself to do so. She felt alive.

Her house was right over the hill, just down the road from the church. You could see it from the ridge. None of us knew that she lived there, though. It was just a house to us. You know, anonymous. I used to walk out into those fields after church. It was like breaking the surface sometimes, like getting the first breath of air. It's funny, you can see the whole town if you look back that direction but, if you look the other way, Juliette's house is the only thing there. And I mean the only thing. She must have been lonely.

Juliette left her yard and walked out into the field. She worried that her mother might wake or her father return early, but the sunlight and the caress of the endless oceans of neck-high grass swept the fear from her. She didn't mind being lost, and wandered deep into the field until her house was far behind her and the grass gave way to shrubs and scrub brush and little trees just tall enough to shield the earth below from all but a few fingers of golden sunlight.

She walked there, touching the slim limbs of the young trees, until she found a clearing where the light shone down from the sky in dusky beams. The ground was soft and bare, the earth giving beneath her feet. She kicked off her shoes and pressed her toes deep. There was a sound of moving water in the distance, a mystic tinkling of liquid over rock.

Juliette held the packet of seeds before her. She looked up towards the sun.

She pulled the white dress up over her head and hung it off the limb of a sycamore sapling. It swayed there in the gentle breeze like a ghost struggling to be free. She knelt down in the dirt. The sun kissed her naked back and her shoulders and her legs. She pushed her hands deep into the dirt, and she began to turn it, to let it breathe, to bring it wearily to life.

* * *

Brian never knew his father. This was something new to us. We could not understand it, our lives were given shape and form by our fathers. They were the great and terrible architects of our existence, the models for our understanding of the patriarchal divine.

We never learned the name of his mother. Brian hid her from us almost completely, and the bits and pieces we did manage to scrape together were inconclusive, if not outright contradictory. She did not attend our church, nor any other. We knew of her only that she would tolerate no mention of any god under her roof, though we couldn't say why.

As for Brian, there was little to go on. Some of us knew him from school, but little was known _about_ him. He kept to himself for the most part. Nobody ever knew him well.

Brian and his mother lived outside town, alone in the woods like something from a dark fairytale. He loved magic, though the word was forbidden him. He believed in magic, in a world of spirits. There is magic in the veins of the earth, running beautiful and foul alike beneath the crust.

He told me once that he wished he had never been born. I remember being really freaked out by that. But Brian was only a kid then. He didn't act like he was anything special, really. Not at first, anyway. I don't think he felt any special burden in those days, other than the same we all felt when we were young. It wasn't until he met Juliette that he realized how much more there was to the world.

Brian walked. What drove him from the house was never revealed to us. If some argument with his mother prompted his wanderings, we have no knowledge of it. He walked aimlessly in the woods. The sun went down and the moon rose. He listened to the creatures of the night all about him, to their cawing and howling, to their rustling through the great wood.

He slept. None of us would have dared, sleeping outside was anathema to everything we knew of the world, to every carefully instilled value. Natural becomes unnatural, and artificiality grows like a curtain over the world, never to be stripped away.

The next morning Brian rose and, for a moment, did not know what had happened to him. He told us later that, in that instant, he had felt himself die. He woke in the forest and, to his dreaming mind, it seemed the entirety of humanity had been wiped away overnight. Whether this was a premonition of what was to come, or merely a dream, we do not know.

He stumbled to his feet. He had forgotten everything, who he was and what he was doing and why he had done it. There were dead leaves in his hair. An insect had crawled up the sleeve of his shirt, he shook it loose and brushed away the leaves. The morning sun glimmered high above like a silver eye.

He remembered himself soon enough, but the boy who had woken there was not the boy who had slept. Perhaps it was simply the shock, the dull ache of the body having lain on hard ground. At the time, even gripped as he was in a state of near transcendent clarity, he still felt a measure of doubt. There was a part of him which longed to return to his mother's house, to return to what he had been and forgotten.

He wandered in the wood, aimless and hungry and alive with ideas.

What if his mother was wrong? What if there was a _presence_ , a spirituality of some kind? He could not believe that the world, so teeming with life, so potent with energy that it seemed to hum in his ears and shimmer in his eyes, could be so simple, so bloodlessly formed as his mother insisted. There was something _else_.

The hours vanished unnoticed as he wandered. His thoughts did not turn inward, but outward rather to the forest around him. Everything seemed too beautiful, too wonderful. He wanted to kneel down and stare at every insect, every plant, every lichen-spangled rock.

Those of us that knew Brian would have found him at that moment almost wholly unrecognizable.

He was a moody kid, but he wasn't, like, weird or anything. He was just a normal guy, you know? He stared with everybody else when a hot girl walked by, he just didn't have the guts to talk to her. Not that I did, but I think he was more frightened of girls than I was. I don't know where I was going with this. He wasn't one of those sad-sack types who was always swanning around with a fistful of poetry, that's all I'm saying.

Brian found the water around midday. He thought about swimming. He touched his toe to the clear surface. It was cold. He heard a voice.

"Don't worry, I'll take care of you. I'll come every day, and I'll make you grow. Don't be afraid."

Brian crept through the brush. Another person. How far had he wandered? An instant before he had felt totally alone in the world, alone _with_ the world. Who was this intruder?

He peered out through the brush, crouching low. His breath seemed to him horribly loud.

He saw the dress first, fluttering weakly in the breeze. And there she was, kneeling in a patch of sunlight, patting down soft earth over planted seeds. She wore nothing. Brian felt his throat turn dry. She was younger than he was, hardly a girl even. At once he was attracted to her, though it wasn't a sexual attraction, wasn't lust. She pulled rather, drew him closer like a vortex might. He could not but fall towards her.

She was like nothing he'd ever seen.

Brian stepped out of the bushes and he walked toward the girl in the sun. He knew, somehow he knew, that it was something he was supposed to do.

* * *

"Why are you planting those?"

"So they'll be safe. If I plant them at my house than my father will dig them up."

"Why would he do that?"

"He says that God would have put flowers there if he wanted them."

"How far away is your house?"

"I don't know. Close."

"Very close?"

"Not too close. Where's your home?"

"I think it's far away. I walked for a long time."

"Are you going somewhere?"

"Not really."

"Are you running away?"

"No."

"Do you _want_ to run away?"

"Sometimes. I..."

"What?"

"I don't have anywhere to _go_!"

"There's this place. You can come here."

"Have you been here before?"

"No."

"Do you want to help me plant these?"

"Alright."

"Don't bury them too deep. They have to be able to reach the surface."

"It's funny, what you said before. About God."

"What's funny about it?"

"Nothing."

"There's nothing funny about god. That's what my father says."

"Who's your dad?"

"He's the pastor."

"Of what?"

"The Church."

"What church?"

" _The_ Church."

"I don't have a dad."

"Everybody has a father."

"I know that. I mean I don't know where he is. He's somewhere, but he's gone, I've never met him."

"You don't even know what he looks like?"

"I guess he looks like me, but older. I think I'd probably recognize him if I saw him. You know. I sometimes feel like I can remember him, but before I could remember anything."

"When you were a baby?"

"No. I'm talking about before I was even born."

"Nobody can remember that."

" _I_ can."

"What was it like?"

"It was warm. I heard my Dad's voice."

"I'm not sure I believe you."

"Do you believe in God?"

"I have to."

"Because your father does?"

"I guess so."

"But what if you _didn't_ have to. Would you then?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"God isn't like they say."

"You have your own God?"

"We all do. Living inside."

"Doesn't that make everybody a god then?"

She laughed.

I remember a story that my gran once read to me. It was about a girl who wandered away from her family and found herself in the fairy gardens of a world beyond. Gold dust falling from the sky, little people living in the mouths of lush purple flowers. There was no hate or greed or religion. My parents took the book away before gran could finish it. They said that they didn't approve of those kinds of stories, and I didn't get to see much of gran after that. I never got to hear what happened to the little girl after she went into the fairy garden. I hope I find out someday.

* * *

The poppies grew.

They made no plans to meet, nor did they take any special note of the location of their hidden bower among the trees. As the days passed they found themselves drawn there often.

Juliette found it easier and easier to sneak away from her parents. Her father was more often called away on the business of the church – and it was a business, he was often occupied with the economic concerns of his parish. He had little time for his silent and dutiful little daughter. Her mother seemed hardly alive. She lived out an automated existence without comment or complaint, responding only when spoken to. There was no light in her eyes. Juliette found it quite easy to slip away, and her absences – if they were noticed – went unremarked upon.

She came many times to the clearing under the cover of darkness, slipping from the house while her parents slept and running noiselessly through the moon-blue grass. When she was far from home she would throw her head back and howl at the blackened sky, scream with bared teeth to the great yellow eye and the smoky clouds as they slid across the dome of the sky. It made her feel free.

Having stolen the seeds without incident, Juliette turned again to thievery. She felt guilty about it, but the theft was never for her own gain, but rather for the sake of her budding children: a corroded silver goblet stolen from the dusty dining room cabinet that she used to ferry water from the spring to her thirsty poppies, a pair of over-large work gloves from the garage which she wore when she tugged up the snarled gray weeds which sprouted so easily. Brian and she decided to keep the cup and the gloves in the hallow of a twisted old willow tree that grew on the edge of the pond, an elderly giant amongst saplings.

Slow time slouched off, and deep in the earth her children grew.

* * *

Eventually we started to realize that Juliette was changing. We couldn't pinpoint exactly what form her difference took, but the transition was obvious. The first blossom of summer was upon us then then; the days were long and the nights warm. We only ever saw her at church, and that was not a place in which we looked for either truth or change. It took some time before we noticed.

We draped ourselves on the steep wooden stairway leading along the back of the building and we gazed idly down at the churchyard below and at the boys romping wildly in the golden fields beyond. We laughed behind our fingers and we basked in the sun.

Kendra Hendricks brought us a cigarette which she'd stolen from her uncle. It was long and white and beautiful, clean in its symmetry. Everybody laughed when she took it out, a nervous laugh that tripped its excitement from one girl to the next like a spark of electricity racing around the circle. Sara had a matchbook, and she held a wavering cardboard flame up to Kendra's mouth until the crushed tobacco lit and Kendra coughed up a cloud of smoke. She gave it to the next girl, and she to the next until half the thing was burned away and smeared with a half-dozen shades of lipstick.

Gloria Vern was keeping watch at the window, up on the tips of her toes with her cheek pressed against the warm pane. All at once she spun around and hissed at us. "Get rid of it, someone's coming!"

Patricia Daniels had the cigarette. She went pale and froze.

The door opened, and there was little Juliette. She was twelve years old that summer. She had long black hair and piercing blue eyes. Even her lips were pale. She was not tall, even for her age. Her dress was startlingly white, like a little puff of cloud wrapped around her.

She looked at us all, surprised and curious. Patricia hid the smoldering stub behind her back too late. Juliette cocked her head and we were all sure at once that we had been found out. Our minds were racing to the punishments which were ahead of us if she told her father and he told our fathers and our fathers told our mothers. Then Juliette stepped forward and plucked the cigarette from Patricia's trembling fingers. She brought it to her lips and drew in the acrid smoke, drinking it deep into her lungs before expelling it in a slow gray breath. She coughed a little, and frowned. "This tastes horrible," she said, and went on down the stairs, the cigarette in the corner of her mouth and her hands in her lacy pockets.

We told the boys what had happened when they returned, and none of us could think of any sort of explanation for her behavior. It was agreed amongst us that it was very odd, and most unlike her. Juliette had grown up. She was not a child anymore, not like us. We felt that there was something special happening around us, and we wanted at once to be a part of it.

* * *

There was a songbird high above her, dancing from branch to branch as it chirped.

Juliette pushed her fingers into the dirt. Out here she was herself, and she knew that she _was_ good. Brian didn't judge her, he seemed sometimes to hardly acknowledge her as a separate being from himself, like she was one of his limbs, or he hers. It was a strange feeling.

He talked a lot about magic, the magic of ordinary things. She found it thrilling, not only because she was breaking her father's rules to say that word, but because of the grain of truth she saw in what he said. There _was_ magic in the world. She knew that, because she had touched it. They both felt it, both knew it.

Brian plucked a long strand of grass and turned it idly in his fingers. The sun was warm where it showed through the trees.

Juliette looked at him. His body fascinated her, so like her own and yet so very different. He had a strength to him which she did not see in her own figure. Her strength was in grace and mind. She liked to watch the muscles in his back when he knelt in the garden to coo mysterious words into the earth; she liked to watch the muscles of his arms flex when he gripped a handful of weeds and tore them from the soil. She wanted in some damp corner of her mind to touch his skin. She did not know what to do with these feelings. They confused her, and they frightened her. Was it wrong to feel that way about another person? About a boy? She had a feeling that her father would say it was.

Brain looked at her. His eyes glittered.

She knew what she had to do.

* * *

I used to play in the forest with a girl named Abigail Brighten. There's a path behind my house that winds through the town, eventually looping around the lake and leading into the stone pits. We were walking there one day, dancing back and forth across the dirty black trail of broken rock. There was a fisherman on the side of the path, trailing his line in the murky water below. He called out to us and smiled a broken toothed smile. If we'd been alone we probably would have been scared of him, but together we just laughed and raced off down the path. We crossed a little bridge, then came back to splash in the shallow water. The rocks were so slippery that Abigail fell over and got the back of her dress all wet. She tried to splash me, but I scampered away, shoving into the clinging underbrush like a rabbit tearing through. She ran after me. We found a blackberry bush and ate until our fingers and clothes and tongues were stained purple.

We came back to the path and there was little Juliette crouched in the dirt, sobbing. We were at once ashamed, though I'm not really sure why. We circled timidly around her, touching her gently and asking in little voices if she was all right, was there anything we could do, what was wrong? She opened her hands and she looked right at Abigail, her tear-stained cheeks shining.

" _Is God punishing me? What did I do wrong?" And she fell weeping to the dirty path._

We tugged her at once up onto her feet, panicked to see her in such a state. It wasn't right, we knew. Something bad had happened and, although we didn't know what it was, we were sure that we didn't want anything to change. If only she would stop crying, we thought, it would make everything better. It dawned on me then that Juliette's home was nearly two miles away. How had she come here? Where was her family? I didn't want to be discovered there, and be drawn into her misery. It was selfish of me, perhaps, but I was afraid, truly afraid. I grabbed Abigail by the arm and I tugged her away. Juliette staggered without us holding her up, but she stayed on her feet. The hem of her white dress was soot black from the dirty path. Abigail and I ran back down the trail, and didn't look back until Juliette was so far behind that she was nothing, just a shape in the green wood.

* * *

"Our flowers are dying. Our children."

"Why? They were only just starting to bloom."

"There's no blood. You can't live without blood."

"That's not true."

"You know that it is. That's how it has always been."

* * *

She took out the knife and she held it towards him. The leaves above were reflected on the surface of the blade like an image of green fire.

"Where'd you get that?"

"It belonged to my family."

Brian swallowed.

She pushed the knife into Brian's hands.

He looked at her. "What am I supposed to do with this?"

Juliette looked back at him.

He held his hand out, palm turned up.

Juliette shook her head. "Not like that." She took the knife from his trembling fingers. "Do it this way." She opened her mouth and pushed out her tongue. Brian winced when the tip of the knife pierced the muscle, and a red flower bloomed behind her teeth.

"Now you." She gave him back the knife.

But Brian's hands were shaking too much. Without a word, she took it from him. He tilted his head back and stuck out his tongue, squeezing his eyes shut as tight as he could. The pain was startling, and didn't fade at once. He could taste the blood in his mouth, hot and coppery; it made him think of a foundry he'd seen once, the taste of that air.

She plunged the bloody knife hilt deep into the soft black dirt and she reached out to take his face in her hands.

"I... I just..." he shook, staring right into her deep blue eyes, "what if we're wrong?"

She smiled. "You just have to have faith, Brian."

Her mouth pressed to his. He tasted her blood. Their slit tongues touched and recoiled in pain, then came back together again. Her mouth was hot and wet. His mouth was cool and soft.

When they broke apart, neither of them said a word. They had gone beyond words.

* * *

Juliette slashed blindly at the wispy grass. Her house was just on the horizon. There was smoke rising from the chimney, which was odd, because they almost never burned wood in the summer. She picked up her pace a little, tossing aside her knobbly stick and letting it vanish in the yellow-green sea as the wind drove tidal swells, and ticklish stems brushed the skin beneath her chin. She ran home.

Brian, traveling in nearly the opposite direction, was taking his time. He mother wouldn't care if he was out late. He wondered sometimes if she'd ever actually liked him. It felt sometimes like she only put up with his presence because it was what she'd been brought up to do, because it was the polite thing.

It was turning dark by the time he returned home. There were no lights on inside the house; a window was broken which his mother didn't have the money to fix. They'd taped a piece of cardboard up, but it was cheap tape and the panel kept flapping open on one end or the other. It looked like the aftermath of a crime scene, left empty after a murder.

He was starting to have second thoughts about things with Julie. He wasn't sure anymore what he believed.

"You know _better_ , Brian!" his mother was always telling him, but it wasn't true. He didn't know anything. Not for sure, and she had taught him to be skeptical, above all things skeptical. "Don't believe it unless you can see it, Brian," she would caution him. He didn't want to live like that.

His mother looked him over when he came in through the door. "Where have you been?" she asked.

"Out." He went on to his room.

She watched him go, but idly, the way one might watch a caterpillar moving across a flat stone. And when he was gone she put him from her thoughts.

* * *

"Oh God... _oh Christ_..."

"Don't say that. He hasn't got anything to do with this. _You_ have to do it. _Do it_!"

"Oh _Christ_..."

Blood sprays. It sprays over hands and face. Blade sawing, fingers swimming in the hot liquid. Bone snapping, eye rolling, white and red-shot.

"...I... I _don't_ -"

"Shut up! We've got to do it this way, we agreed. We made a promise, a _blood_ promise. You can't break that."

"But I don't want to do this!"

"It's too late to go back. Everything has changed."

Blood flows, broken back, limp jaws limp tongue limp limbs limp life pooling hot and wet to be lapped up by the hungry dirt mouth of the world below. And everything changes.

* * *

There were things we knew, but most of life was a mystery to us, inscrutable and unarticulated. Of death, we knew nothing but abstraction. None of us knew – really knew – anybody who had ever died. We had only fiction and abstraction as a guide. We thought that we would be young forever; we thought that we would never die, that nothing would ever change.

I had a bug collection when I was nine years old. My grandfather gave me an old cigar box and, over the course of a single summer, I filled it with the pinned corpses of every insect I could get my hands on. I especially loved butterflies and moths. They were like scraps of lace, so fragile and weak and yet so beautiful, their wings spread and their bodies dotted right through by the sharp silver pin.

I liked to watch them in the killing jar. I don't know... it wasn't to see them suffer. What is the suffering of a mute insect to a boy? There was something beautiful, that was all, about the way that they would slow, the life sinking away, draining slowly out of them, leaving behind nothing but the beautiful body.

I loved the smell, that cloying chemical death smell. Then one day my mother found me with my nose in the killing jar, and that put an end to that. She took away my jar and she took away my pins and she took away the cigar box to be set aside until I was "mature enough for it," though of course by the time I was deemed old enough I was no longer interested.

Even today I remember that smell. Sometimes, at odd times – hunched over my desk at work, riding down the escalator in the subway station, buying cleaning supplies – I'll catch a whiff of a smell, similar enough to trigger the memory, take me back to that sweltering summer when I killed so very many. I remember it fondly, there is no guilt, no shame. I have dreams sometimes, dreams that I am inside my home or at the office or in the subway train or wherever. Every dream is the same: I am doing nothing of consequence and then I smell that familiar smell and I look up and I see the lid going on over the sky and I feel myself growing weaker and weaker as life slips away.

Every time I smell it, I think I am back in that dream and I always look up, excepting to see the lid of the killing jar above me.

Brian and Juliette taught us about death. They taught us that death, even death without meaning, can be beautiful.

* * *

The dog nipped eagerly at Brian's heels. Its mouth hung open, tongue lolling and teeth gleaming off-white in the moonlight. The long grass swayed around him, blue and black in the darkness. He reached down to pat the dog, but thought better of it, and went on his way. They were almost there, and Juliette was waiting.

They had agreed to meet just before morning on the day of the Autumnal Equinox. It seemed a day of special importance. He could almost feel the slow-burning sun somewhere out there beneath the horizon, inching closer as the world turned beneath him. It would be a long day when it came. Sunlight was everything, there was no life without the sun. He missed it now, wandering in the half-light of the stars, leading the animal to its death.

He'd found the dog in the street. Something had drawn them together, the dog and he. It was a mutt, its parentage indistinct. It was a child of the town itself, it had come from all of them. All those childhood house-pets, all those dogs slinking off in the middle of the night and breeding in the back allies and causeways and then back home with a dumb grin on their faces. Beneath the surface was submerged another world, cast-off puppies, seed spilled in secret couplings. Wild dogs, the half-breed mongrel offspring running wild in the shadows.

Brian was starting to feel better about what they were going to do.

It had been easy to find the dog, a good deal more difficult to make it follow him. He'd had to steal a candy bar from the gas station across the street and use it to lure the mutt. The sun was going down, and the streets were nearly deserted. It was almost three miles back to his house. He decided to cut through the town and go straight to the woods. It hadn't worked out so well. A bunch of older kids had seen him leading the dog into an alley and followed.

He had never been chased before, never been in a fight. They surrounded him. They pushed him. "Where are you going?" "What's with the candy?" "What the hell are you looking at, you prick?" they asked him. They hit him. The dog barked. He fell to his knees and his nose burst out in a gush of startlingly bright red that trickled through his fingers. They kicked him until he curled up on the ground and screamed, and then they left him.

The dog lay down beside him and whimpered; it licked his bloody hands.

He lay for a long time in the cold alley. The sun fell and the stars above all came out. His tears dried on his face. He washed off the blood in gutter-water. The dog was still with him, its mouth an empty smile.

He went on further down the alley, stumbling against the dingy brick. One eye was swollen shut, the flesh puffy and sensitive to the touch. He gave the rest of the candy bar to the dog and staggered on, expecting it to remain behind. He only wanted to make it to his own bed, to lie down there and sleep until the world disappeared.

He turned back at the edge of town. The dog was still at his heels. He crouched down and scratched it behind the ears. "Go back, okay? You don't want to come with me tonight." The dog smiled at him. Hot drool spilled from its mouth, silver in the blue darkness.

It followed.

He stopped, and he looked at it. He looked up at the moon, full and round as a hole in the sky. He touched his lip, raw where it had been struck. His tongue slipped out; he touched it too. It stung. The cut had mostly healed. He thought of the knife, of the promise. _Blood Promise_ , Juliette had said, as though there was power in the very words, and her eyes had shone with belief. Belief in _what_? The dog nudged his legs with its nose.

Brian changed direction, starting into the fields on the edge of town. The copse of trees was out of sight, far beyond the horizon. It would be a long trip out there. If the dog turned back at any point, Brian decided, he would too. He started walking.

* * *

The dog padded slowly into the clearing. It bent its head and sniffed at the barren ground. Dying and wilted poppy flowers littered the dirt, red petals decaying in the soil.

Juliette stood at the edge of the water, stripped to the waist with the knife in her hand. She met the dog in the clear moonlight and knelt down to embrace it. "He's so beautiful, Brian!"

Brian put his hands in his pockets. He remained on the edge of the shadows. He looked over his shoulder and saw the field shimmering behind him. The starlight and the shadows and the wind did strange things in the long grass. It was another world, different from any he had ever known.

Juliette was drawing shapes in the dirt. Some of them were familiar – having been previously chosen by the two of them – others were new, swirling looping lines drawn deep in the dirt. The dog stood patiently in the center of the unfurling lines. It seemed to know what was expected of it, what was going to happen. It had shown no hesitation. In fact, Brian had begun to feel that, by the final leg of the journey, it had been leading him.

Juliette ushered him forward. She shimmied out of her dress and laid it on the gnarled roots of the willow. Her skin was luminous in the darkness, pale as death. She nodded at him, and he took that as instruction that he too was to remove his clothes. He did so with some hesitation. The horrible white eye of the moon glared hideously down on him.

" _Brian_!" Juliette stepped against him, pressing her hands close to his skin. He started, then realized that she was tracing the angry purple outlines of the bruises on his body. "What happened?" Her blue eyes were electric pools, wet and flashing.

"Nothing," he shrugged her away. "Forget it." He looked at the symbols in the dirt. "Are you sure you want to-"

She pressed her hand over his mouth. She held up the knife, held it between them. Brian couldn't tell if she was trying to threaten him or reassure him.

"We already decided, Brian. Take the knife."

He nodded, swallowing hard. The knife was cold in his hand. He looked at the dog. It stared at him, eyes wide and innocent, open. It seemed to be waiting for them.

Juliette closed her hand around his, lacing her fingers into his. "This is _right_ ," she said, her voice glowing with a degree of fervency that Brian had never before encountered outside of his own thoughts, never before seen put out into the world. The dog closed its eyes and lifted its head. It howled at the sky, a terrible sad sound that made all the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

And then the killing.

* * *

"What happens to little girls when they grow up?"

"You won't be young forever."

"Don't let them touch you. Don't ever let them touch you like that."

"Make him happy, it's your job to make him happy. That's all you have to understand."

"You'll be a woman soon, do you know what that means?"

* * *

The water glistens beneath her, hideously blue, dreadfully torpid. She stands ankle deep on the first rung of the steel ladder. The sun above is crawling by so very slow. Her father walks through water deep as his breast. He reaches up and takes her in his arms. He lifts her out over the water. She is afraid of him. There is a horrible twisting inside her, a pain at the base of her spine that cuts up into her. His big hands wrapped around her waist, she is safe. He holds her up to heaven like a sacrifice. _This is not mine_ , he says, _I give it to you, Jesus_. But she will not be anybody's sacrifice.

Yesterday, Juliette's father stood over her. Outside the window the sunset spread out rosy across the hills. He was proud of her, proud of the thing he had made. She looked up at him. She could see it in his eyes, he thought he owned her, he thought she was nothing without him. He bent down and put a fatherly hand on her shoulder. He smiled at her. "You're turning thirteen tomorrow. Would you like to be baptized, Julie?" She did not have the strength to oppose him, to confront him. She shook her head a little bit, her face pale. _Not like this_! She had no belief in his world. But how could she say so? How could she go against the will of her father? She shook her head.

He patted her on the shoulder. He smiled warmly. "I knew you'd say yes," he said, beaming with pride. He was so proud of her. Couldn't he _see_ her? Couldn't he see she's trying to say _no_? "We'll do it tomorrow," he said, so proud, and he left her trembling.

_Thirteen_!

That is some kind of landmark, she is sure of it. Not a child anymore, not an adult yet. The in-between, tadpole with legs. Her father lowers her into the water. Her wet dress clings to her skin. There are people all around them: Stern men holding their hats before them, clutched in wrinkled fingers stiff as wire. Sad women who will not meet her eyes, as though they cannot bear to see her now.

And she sees us, most of us. We stand at our parent's sides. Some of us have already been baptized, here in the community pool. Some of us have yet to be, but knew that we are all fated to go eventually into that water. We watch her and she is not the person we thought her to be. She stands on her tip-toes, neck deep in the chemical blue, and she shivers with fear. Her eyes are red with tears and chlorinated irritation. She is like a martyr down there in the water, a martyr to something without a name. We wonder what she knows that we do not.

Her father reaches down to touch her cheek, to lift her chin up so that he can look into her eyes. He does not seem to see there the same defiance we see, the same hopeless fear. He sees only his daughter, his property. He puts his hands on top of her head to push her under.

The morning before her daughter's baptism, Juliette's mother ran a comb through her hair. She spoke softly, reciting words with no meaning beyond their soothing sound. Juliette stared into the mirror. She saw her face, and her mother's face behind her, eyes downcast. Like looking into the future. She felt a pain in her abdomen, a harsh new pain that ate inside her, a cramping down in her pelvis. She wanted to lie down, to sleep. Her black hair fanned through her mother's shaking fingers. Juliette looked at her face, and her aging features twisted with anguish, only for a moment, only for a second before she forced back on her placid mask.

If only she could be with Brian, he would know what to say, what to do. Together they could do anything. How many hours have they spend lying under the stars, staring up and speaking of earnest things, of hidden truths and the way of all things.

She thinks of the last time they met in the woods. Dancing together, cheek to cheek, tears running down their faces though they knew not why. They both felt it; this hot summer was a poor cover for an autumnal world, for the universe moving into its final winter. "Everything is ending," she whispered, "it's all falling apart." He didn't say anything, he just danced on, and the new green seemed pale around him. He held her close.

Her father's hand is on her crown. "In the name of the father, the son, the holy ghost." She doesn't know their names, doesn't want to know. The water is so cold; cuts into her prickled skin. He begins to push her down.

Her knees lock, her neck stiffens. For a moment, she resists. Tears pool in the corners of her eyes. Her abdomen is ringed in such pain. She stares into her father's troubled eyes, pleading please no, please don't.

He frowns, confused. He shoves her down. Too strong for her, much too strong. She gasps desperately, swallowing chemical-tainted water as she goes down.

We hear a horrible cry from her lips, a despairing moan which makes our mothers reach down to clasp tightly our hands. And we stare open-mouthed at the girl being pushed into the clear blue water, her face a mask of agony.

Underneath. Her eyes shut for a second, and she feels herself upended in the cool water, as though drifting weightless through the cosmos. Her father's hands on her like leather clasps holding her under. The moment seems to last an eternity.

Can she weep underwater? She is floating in her own tears. She is limp, body drained of struggle. Her eyes open, but she does not feel the pain of the tainted water. She stares up into a clouded sky, translucent and bending as though the nature of light itself has been changed. Everything relaxes in her, and she feels her father's hands slip away from her.

She does not have the strength to rise. She floats. Why doesn't her father bring her back up out of the water? That is how it must be done, he has to bring her back up or it isn't a baptism, she knows that, has seen it happen enough times. He is supposed to lift her back up into her new life, her life of service and complacency. Why doesn't he? Is she free?

Juliette herself lifts her head above the surface, sucking the cold air and coughing blue water like sludge from her lungs. She blinks away the sting and looks out.

Her father is treading water on the deep end of the pool, horror on his face. The faces around her, the faces of the adults, are colored with suspicion, anger, disappointment, disgust. Hatred.

She looks down into the water.

All about her she is wreathed in red. Something unstaunched within her coming out angry and wet. Sanguineous tendrils writhing round her like unfurled limbs reaching out.

She pushes the damp hair off her face and swims wordlessly to the steel ladder. They all watch her as she comes up out of the pool like an angel of the sea, her white dress clinging to her skinny little girl's body.

The boys were all confused, of course, and frightened. To them it was like magic had been performed. Some of us knew a little bit about what happened to girls. "That time of the month." Some of us had seen our mother's or older sister's sanitary pads in the trash, like used bandages crusted black with old blood.

The girls knew more. We'd been shown videos in health class that taught us all about _menstruation_ , that elastic-long word tugged off the tongue like a strand of chewing gum, and never in the presence of a boy. Those of us who had "done it" knew better than to let it be evidenced to our fathers. That, for many of us, would have been the ultimate embarrassment. The unveiling of an ugly female maturity. No more "Daddy's girl," no more "little angel," just a bleeding _woman_.

But Juliette has no shame, no fear, no embarrassment. She comes unaided from the water. The crowd parts for her, in some terrible awe. She goes to her mother with eyes red and shinning, and her mother flinches, shies away, cheeks colored and eyes wide with panic. She is the unconsecrated, one foot on land one foot in the water.

Juliette stands there for a moment, alone in the crowd like a living god on earth. And then, at last, she goes away, walking at first, then faster, then running – not away from us, but _towards_ something. We watch her go, sprinting wet and bloody and unholy into the wilderness of tangled elms beyond the grounds of the community pool, and we ache to follow, knowing in some part of ourselves that we _must_ follow. But not right now, not with our parents lacing their fingers through our fingers, not with their eyes upon us.

Someday soon, though.

But _where_ is she going? There is nothing there, only the woods and the rolling fields beyond. What does she know that we do not? Where has she found the courage to break free?

We watch her father come out of the pool. Water drips around him and makes little black marks on the pale smooth concrete. The temperamental summer weather takes a turn and drives a cool wind across the town. He shivers in his clinging wet clothes, hugging his skin.

This is god's chosen? We begin to doubt that there is a god, a god like they say.

Juliette's father looks around at us. His wife wraps a towel around his shoulders. He seems to be trying to think of something to say, but nothing comes to him, nothing comes from his wet mouth. So he stands there in the chill breeze, shivering hunched over a little with a wild look on his face like a creature driven into its last hole.

And that is when everything begins to unravel.

* * *

After the baptism, she went to him. In that place in the field, the little grove of trees where the poppies were waiting to open again, drunk on blood far under the surface of the earth.

The water glistens beneath them like scattered silver, rivulets of sunlight running like molten steel over the hungry surface of the pond. They're draped in the tree like cats, limbs hanging loose and bloodless from their bodies, pendulous in the afterglow of the sun as it slips lazily down over the horizon. He presses his cheek against the warm bark and licks his broken lip.

Yesterday, Brian's mother stood over him. "You little _bastard_!" she said, and she kicked him again. "You _know_ better!" Her foot drove hard into his ribs, and he whimpered at her feet, cowering on the floor, curled like an infant with his arms over his head and his knees against his chest. Her dark eyes flashed. "How _dare_ you!"

"I'm _sorry_ ," his voice was a broken whisper, "I didn't _mean_ to, I couldn't help it..."

She bared stained teeth. Her eyes wild. "Couldn't _help_ it? _Fucker_! _Fucker_!" She started to kick him. He tried not to feel it.

Juliette climbs above him, higher and higher. He can feel the tree responding to her weight; they are all one being now, the tree and boy and the girl, orphans together in the wilderness. He lies on his back and watches her move across the splayed branches above, darting nimbly as a squirrel.

Her bloodstained dress drifts on the surface of the water like the floating sail of an abandoned ship. And his jacket and pants there on the bank like the person inside them has turned to smoke and left the cuffs soaking, the water moving slowly, darkly up the legs.

Her flesh is pink and new in the sunset, the muscles tensing in her legs and arms and the long black hair flowing across her bare shoulders. He runs his hands over his chest, rests them between his legs, holds himself in the warmth and lets his eyes shut slow in the dying heat of the day.

The night before, his mother had started drinking. Brian was afraid at once. He knew what it could get like, what it had been like before. _Why why why_ had she started drinking again? It was because of him, he was sure, it was always because of him. That's what she told him, all those times when he was just a little boy, just five or six or seven or eight years old. "Because of _you_ , you _bastard_! You bastard _boy_!" she spit the words at him, her hands flashing out faster than he could duck away. For years Brian lived in fear, in terror. She came home drunk most nights, and most nights she beat him.

But then she quit. She quit and it had stopped. She never touched him when she was sober, only ever sometimes said things to him. But he could handle that, insults were practically nothing to him; he was used to them. But now she was drinking again. It couldn't be like it was, could it? Of course not, he was older now. Fourteen years old! Practically a man! She couldn't touch him now!

Still, when he saw her staggering up the front steps with a bottle in her hand, he knew by instinct and memory to hide in his room. He ran from her, locked his door. He could hear her drinking, could hear the bottles clacking together, could hear her singing and laughing and swearing and then, finally, calling out his name.

Juliette comes down the tree. She stands on the tips of her toes, looks down at him with her chin resting on a sturdy branch and her arms clinging. "Brian?" she says.

He turns on his back and he looks up at her.

"Are you going to love me forever?"

He nods.

She watches him with a curious sort of boredom. Leans close.

Something twitches between them, something living and violent and sweet. She bends down, her mouth opening, and she hesitates a moment before putting her mouth to his. She is warm and wet and her tongue is alive against his teeth. She clasps his hand, she draws it to her. She is warm and wet and alive.

His eyes stare into her eyes, gnawing at the space between them, seeing nothing but her. She is breathing softly, strangely. He is too, his breath tight in his chest with a lazy excitement.

His fingers come away red.

She smiles, brings his hand to her belly and draws two red lines there with his fingers. "Blood Magic, Brian. Just like I told you."

"Open the _fucking_ door, Brian!" His mother's voice, moaning, cajoling, teetering on the edge of fury. "I'm your _mother_!" Her fingernails scrabbled at the frame like a rabid animal's. The knob twisted, clattering angrily. "God _damn_ it, Brian!" His body tense with fear, he reached out and unlocked the door. As much as he feared her now, he feared the future consequences of disobedience even more. She slumped into the room, her hair down over her eyes, her makeup smeared across her face. She leaned against the doorframe, like her body weighed more than she could stand, and she brushed her hair to the side and fixed him with one malevolent dark eye. "Do you remember when you were only a boy?" his mother slurred. Brian nodded. He knew he was supposed to nod, not to speak, not to interrupt, just nod or shake his head. "I was so _proud_ of you then, I had such _hopes_. Now look at you." She smiled, almost fondly. "What a ruin you are. You were supposed to grow up to be a man, Brian. Why didn't that ever happen, Brian? I suppose you blame me?" her eyes flashed. "Not my fault you never had a... a f-father figure." She blinked, dazed, and she licked her lips. "Not my f-fault at all, Brian."

Juliette climbs down and lies in the water. Night is crawling up the dim sky. She looks up at the stars. She smiles up at him and her teeth are white pearl glowing in the moonlight. He climbs down after and drops into the water.

For a moment, he isn't sure if he is above or beneath the surface. Which way is up? The sky in the liquid, reflected upon or seen through, shimmering and velvet black. He reaches out for the surface of the water, that silvered mirror in which the world is caught to either side, and his fingers push through, up into the cool night air.

"We could stay here, Brain," she says to him, their faces almost touching, cool water lapping at their mouths, "we don't ever have to go back to them."

This is their baptism, Brian thinks, and sinks back under. Juliette kicks away beneath the churning water; she disappears, naked into the blackness.

"You're not a fucking _man_ ," she said, slinking towards him, "you're just my little baby." She laughed, a throaty husky sexy laugh, and she pulled herself up his lap. She began to kiss his tear-streaked face, sloppy drunken kisses. "My baby," she cooed, "my _baby boy_." Brian was frozen, paralyzed, his mother's hands crawling all over him, her breath hot on his face. He was sweating – his palms, his crotch, his armpits, his collar soaked with sweat. And then her hands were tearing clumsily at herself, pulling aside her shirt and tugging down her bra so that one fat breast hung free, clutched in her hands. She tugged softly on her dark nipple, rolling it between her fingers. "Hungry baby, hungry baby," she murmured, clutching him by the hair and drawing his mouth down to her. He struggled. "I don't _want_ to! Stop it, Mommy, stop it!"

_Mommy_. That's not what he calls her, not since he was a child. That's not what he calls her. "Don't want to?" She laughed. "Baby needs to eat, Brian, baby needs to eat, everybody knows that." He was crying. She sneered, pushed him away. She brought the bottle to her mouth. She drank. Then she began to kick him.

Juliette rises from the water and goes; she goes away into the field and leaves him there. The glow of her remains, brighter than the moon.

He stays there by the pond long after she has left. He feels himself, touches his bruised skin. He sits on the edge of the water and masturbates. A strange feeling sweeps through him when he cums, cold to warm. He goes rigid and his fingers dig into the earth. His thing twitches in his hand. He spills silver onto the glittering black mirror of the pond. He watches as it moves out and sinks beneath the surface of the water, vanishing from the world.

He lays back and he looks at their poppies struggling to grow, on the verge of flowering, timid still in their adolescence. Sacrifice is everything. Life demands blood. And he knew what he had to do.

* * *

They never returned, but we saw them sometimes, on the edges of the town. We couldn't say how they lived, but survival seemed to come easily to them. There was something between them, we knew it at once. Their heads were always bent close together, foreheads touching, and he smiled a broken smile. She touched his bruised cheek and a tear ran down her face. All around them, the chaos of the town, the shouting jostling nothing of our meaningless lives crammed in around them. And somehow they rose above it, they were not part of it. Some of us saw them, caught a glimpse of their radiance out of the corner of our eyes. We knew at once that we wanted what they had. We wanted to share it, or steal it if we had to. They seemed more than grown up, they were _alive_.

But it couldn't last forever that way. Of course it couldn't. Change couldn't be put off forever. We would have followed them, fallen helpless into their web. Spilled our blood for them.

* * *

She finds it in the earth, presses her hands deep into the warm soil around it and draws it up to hold out towards the world. She looks up at the sky above. The sun shines black through the curling leaves, and its black heat radiates through her flesh.

First the throat. Held by hand slick with sweat. Fingers clutching through matted hair. Draw the head back. It struggles. Draw the head back. First the throat. Blood leaps out black and slick like oil. Hand slick with sweat and blood. Strangled whimpers, thrashing in the darkness. Hold it down.

Brian had gone away pale that night, wandering into the breaking morning with the look of one who has been forever altered. She had watched him go, feeling herself strangely at peace. She stood over what they had done, strewn about and below them, strands from the trees, garlands of viscera and curtains of skin. Her skin sticky, tacky with it. She went to the water and lay back in it and she breathed deeply, staring up into the pink morning sky, up through the mist and the fog and the cloud and the smoke. The fire still smoldered behind her. Her cheeks were singed black with soot. But even that washed away.

Can't let it die yet. Cut away the skin. It peels back hard, like tearing apart a book. It makes the sound of ripping paper, but wet. Shrieks of pain that they had never heard from a living thing before. It wants to run, to get away. It will not live long now. Open the gut. Everything rushes out as though it were scarcely being held back. It slides out and fills their hands. Steam rises into their faces, and the smell.

She lay on the rock. Two weeks she lay there. Her mind struck dead on the hot stone even as her body gathered itself up and dressed itself and went quietly back through the field to the little house in the crook of the valley and fell into bed and sleep after that. Her mind and thoughts remained, prostrate on the rock, basking the glory of the earth. Earth Mother, she thought, Earth Mother had given birth to me, to die and to exist. The sweet stench of it! Filling her nostrils even now, waiting at home for the summer to end. Waiting in the pew for the service to end. Waiting for it all to end. She couldn't wait to go home, to die and to decompose herself into the warm black body of Earth Mother. To be reunited with her larger self, her true being.

Cut out the tongue. Its teeth snapping, lips foaming. Now it's dead. Cut out the tongue. He begins to retch. She clamps her little hands around his mouth. She will not let him vomit here, not while the sacred body is spreading out before them red and glossy in the faint light of the coming morning. He swallows back his vomit and it burns in his throat, eating away at him from the inside. He digests himself as she cuts out the eyes. She holds them up to the faded moon and she howls. The dead thing shudders beneath her and around her.

She takes it from the ground and she begins to walk with it, unsure where she is going but confidant she will get where she needs to go. She goes in the direction from which he came, and she does not stop.

Arms out. Finger into the blood. Draw the lines. There is no pattern at first, only the swirling color on the skin. He stands straight, jaw trembling. Blood on the cheek, blood on the shoulder, blood on the chest and blood on the thigh. Blood on the forehead and blood on the face. Blood on the legs and blood on the penis, red-soaked hand wrapped around to leave a mark. He shudders, and she puts her arms out and he puts his finger into the blood and does the same as she. Its gaping mouth between them, empty sockets glistening with the mysteries of life and death.

She sees his house over the ridge. Like a hole in the earth. Walls dingy with dust and mold and cobwebs. The porch is rotted out in places; some of the boards are newer, brighter. Others have simply been left to decay, gaps into the wet dark beneath. The doorway is the color of dead grass. There is a silence there that allows nature to speak; the wind sighs. She steps to the door and she opens it without waiting to be let in. She steps inside his house, carrying it still in her fragile hands.

Cut off the limbs. Harder than it looks, have to break the bone first, saw it apart and tear them free. They set the limbs, surprisingly heavy, at each of the four corners of the plot, where they will keep away the impure spirits. They draw strands of gut coil through the branches above, webbed in sacred patterns which they draw by feeling beyond knowledge. The garlands sway, pale and red and dripping like slow thick rain on their upraised faces. An offering to the god of the sky.

When she first came to this house the woman was there. The woman spoke to her then.

"Who are you?" She was tall and shapely, the full languid shape of motherhood. Her hair dark and her skin smooth and olive dark. Her eyes the shape of almonds and the color of liquid chocolate. Her hair fell long and sleek across her back. Her face was narrow with suspicion.

"I'm a friend of Brian's."

She snorted. Contemptuously. Doubtfully. "Bit young, aren't you?"

"Please, where is he?"

She wore drab and shapeless clothing that nearly masked her sinuous form. She did not show it on her face, but she was unnerved by the stillness of the little girl in the white dress, and by the way the little girl's deep blue eyes seemed to see beneath her very skin. Her skin crawled, and she felt the desire, compulsively, to wrap her arms around the little girl, to draw the little girl against her breast. "He's in his room," the woman had said to her then, "Down the hall."

And now this place is empty. The woman is no more.

Bury the organs, one by one. Eat the heart, the poor weak heart tough and raw and knotted in their hands as they tear it to pieces, their lips and chins smeared with it. Burn the bones, burnt in a red-white pile until they go black and brittle and ashy. Look at each other naked in the ritual of the blood frenzy, dance around the fire and scream at the dead black sky filling with rank smoke like fire in their lungs.

She opens the door. Brian lies on the bed, his eyes wide towards the ceiling. He turns on his side, turns away from her. He cannot bear to see her. Tears squeeze from his eyes, but he is not sad. He feels nothing, only an awareness perhaps, a feeling of touching something beyond the earth.

She held her arms out. Her hands were full of black dirt, and from that dirt there sprouted a red flower, as red as life. "Look," she said, "I told you. Look what she gave us."

Brian looked. His tears were gone. He didn't want to believe in magic, but that was not a matter of choice any longer. It was in front of him now and he could not turn away.

The woman was gone. The house was empty but for two children, and a blood-flower grown of sacrifice.

* * *

The church burned down that year. Christmas morning, I think. I wasn't there myself, but I remember hearing about it. Juliette's father pacing back and forth before the blaze, screaming for the firefighters, screaming for god, for anybody to come down and put out the blaze. I heard how the snow melted away from the building, how the virgin and the child in the manger blistered and blacked, nativity plastic warped and melting.

A lot of the kids who saw it say that they saw Brian somewhere inside, engulfed in flame. We all knew he'd started the fire, we knew as soon as it happened. I could see it from my house, flame licking the sky just over the horizon like a sun settling to earth. I knew it was Brian. They say Juliette just watched, just stood there so close to the fire that her hair was singed and her dress dried out like paper in the sun. Nobody could call her back. She just stood there with her face to the sky and her arms out, eyes shut.

The next day there was nothing left but a ruin smoldering. They never rebuilt it, there wasn't money and nobody seemed to want to contribute. It was just gone, erased from the earth by something stronger than fire.

Brian wasn't dead. We never saw him again, but we heard Juliette speaking to him as though he was beside her. We knew that his spirit was alive, still burning, moving like an unquenchable fire through the horrors of the world.

I asked her once, in a moment of rare courage, why he'd done it. She just looked at me, and she smiled. I don't mind saying that I didn't understand it. I didn't understand her. I don't suppose I ever will. There's so much of the story left to tell, but there aren't many of us left now who witnessed it. I only remember snatches, bits of memory, feelings. It's all so distant now, almost like a dream.

* * *

Juliette stood on the edge of the field, looking out across the grasslands where she had once lived. Her hair was tangled about her face, whipping in the wind like a living thing. She brushed it aside, feeling the long gray strands slip through her fingers.

She stepped into the ruin where her father's church had once stood.

It had been sixty years since last she'd stood on this ground, watching the fire burn. It could have been yesterday, nothing grew in the ash and rubble, it was a dead scar upon the earth. She stepped into it, her shoes disturbing ash and char.

She went to stand at the center of the ruin, where once had been the great alter, the place from which her father had spoken every untruth of the old order. She knelt, sifting ash, and she smiled.

There, blooming still, the only living thing in the wreck, she found a red flower – Brian's flower and hers – turning its open face to the sky.

### Fragment

Our growing need took us all over that miserable city: Groping in the cold back storerooms of the Mr. Templeton's grocery store, accidentally at first, then with a purpose, our hands cold and blue and all around us dead carcasses swaying. Clandestine masturbation in the record store downtown, one hand shoved deep in our pockets and squeezing at the funny spot between our legs, gaping-wide eyed at the pictures of exotic creatures like David Bowie and Madonna. Trading kisses in the park while old men slept on the bench with their open paperbacks clutched in weary hands, and we, boundless, scrabbled about the fortress-like jungle-gym, clambering up slippery plastic tube-slides with both feet braced on the sides, nervous giggling lips pressed together with those of strange children known only by the commonalities of age and innocence. A desperate hormone-charged screw on the sun-drenched black rocks on the far side of the reservoir, where – if you swam far enough out – you were pretty much hidden from all the world by the steep rock walls hewn into the earth, and could do anything you wanted. In the reflective surface the sky would turn upside down and ripple outward from where her feet entered the water.

### Coital

They turned onto the chalky dirt road. The Station Wagon rumbled, shuddering over uneven ground and rocking James against the confines of his tight cinched seat-belt. The edge of the strap gnawed at his bare chest; he shifted his towel so it rested between his body and the wide synthetic belt.

His friend Ryan rested his head against the window, his skull knocking dully against the glass with every jolt. He wore a ratty yellow Laker's T-shirt, and the untied laces of his sneakers and swim-suit were spread limp as loose rigging trailing behind a sailboat.

James saw his mother's face in the rear-view mirror, directed intently at the road ahead. Strands of wispy brown hair curled across her cheeks, framing her features to a diamond shape. Her eyes were invisible behind silvery reflective sunglasses. Over the seat-back he saw the tanned nape of her neck, curls suspended above with a fuchsia hair-clip. He could see her bare shoulders, and the pale lines like stripes of cream where her swimsuit had kept off the sun.

"How's your mom doing, Ryan?" his mother asked, her voice interrupting the car's mechanical drone.

"She's okay, I guess." Ryan's voice always sounded the same when he talked about his parents: quiet, tense. He sounded older than fourteen when he talked about them.

"Is she seeing anyone?" He saw his mother adjust her glasses in the mirror, and could imagine her eyes behind them, wide and desperate to know.

Ryan replied with a shrug and an inconclusive grunt. James looked out the window, embarrassed, trying to make it as clear as possible that he was in no way responsible for anything his mother might say. Why did she always have to ask?

The parking lot gravel crunched beneath the car's tires as they pulled in. There were a dozen other vehicles there. Beside them a family was maneuvering a card table from the trunk of their blue-gray SUV. A tall girl with dark hair stood a few paces away from the rest, her weight on one hip and a ribbed cooler held with both hands; she watched the others wrestle free the table. The cooler was damp with condensation, the ice inside shifting noisily.

Her eyes flickered at him for an instant when he stepped from the car, and he felt a wave of crushing shame. What prompted the emotion, he couldn't say for certain. He felt naked, horribly on display, as though ever motion were an act and not an especially convincing one. He could feel her dismissing him. Just a kid, just another thirteen-year-old. She shifted her weight to the other leg. What was she thinking about?

"Hey James!" Ryan called, already moving along the path. There was a shimmer of reflected light showing iridescent through the trees. James nodded and hurried along behind his friend. Ryan's t-shirt hung on him like a poncho; it had been a gift from his father and was several sizes too big.

James was scarcely conscious of his mother following tiredly after. He was sure he could feel the dark-haired girl watching him. Or what if she was ignoring him? He didn't know which would be worse.

They emerged from the trees and walked together onto the beach area. Gold-gray sand was scattered in a dirty circuit around the deep hole of gleaming black water.

Water filtered into the pool from half-a-dozen tributaries rushing to the far edge, where it spilled over smooth stone in a sun-catching mist. The sound of falling water filled their ears, a great roar that swelling over the slap of bare feet on damp rock and the muted shrieks of swimmers paddling on the surface of the abyss.

Black rock shone wetly, and glassy little pools in the mangled topography trapped bits of reflected sky. There was a good crowd of people assembled at the diving line, clutching their shivering bodies, wet hair plastered down over their foreheads and about their faces. Those who chose to stay out of the water lay on the crafted beach, stretched out on striped towels with their cheap broken-spine paperbacks.

James and Ryan established themselves, stretching out their towels on a patch of promising beach. They covered the ground, clenching warm sand in their toes as they knelt to brush the rough grains from the swaths of bright fabric. James' mother arrived, depositing herself in her parental seat behind their towels and turning her attention to her phone.

"Don't forget sunscreen," she called after them, stretching in the sunshine.

There was a faint wind. It meant nothing now, but James knew how it would feel when they were emerging, dripping, from the chill depths. It would cut then, as it did now at the straggling line of people assembled ahead of the officially sanctioned jumping-off point. A white stripe was painted on the black rock, and below it a ceaseless pale ripple spread on the liquid surface. Each jumper renewed the constantly dissipating impact before it could fade completely.

The two of them joined the line just behind a pair of older girls. The ground was hard and wet, smooth stone roughened by a scattered layer of sand. The girls' swimsuits clung to their bodies, wrapped like slimy undersea weeds over their smooth backsides and the high protrusion of their breasts.

"What'd she say then?" one of the girls asked the other, her teeth chattering and her long blonde hair darkened and clumped in damp strands on her shoulders. The girl's bodies seemed to strain and pull against the wrapped strands and wet suits; he could almost feel his fingers at the knots. The pleated material of their swimsuits seemed painted on, close as shadow. He could see the imperfections of their skin, the fiber-thin hairs rising from their goosebumps. He felt almost delirious, his stomach clenching.

"Look at that." Ryan said, tapping his arm and half-pointing at an older boy with a whistle hung around his neck – the lifeguard. He was leaning against the chair, not bothering to sit. James looked, and he saw immediately what Ryan meant. The lifeguard was erect under his tight wet trunks. "Jesus," Ryan made a disgusted face, "do you think he knows?"

The older boy seemed oblivious, he was completely relaxed, draping himself languidly over the wood frame of his chair and eying the swimmers passing by.

James looked back at the older girls. The second wore a bird-egg's blue one-piece, the suit detailing her hips and the curve of her belly. She tugged at the wide shoulder strap, laughing at something the other had said. Her hair was the color of rotten straw.

He glanced at Ryan. His friend's legs were crossed one awkwardly over the other, revealing nothing. James felt himself stir, the sensation uncoiling from low in his abdomen and slipping warmly downward.

The air around the dark pool seemed to thrum with energy. He imagined those sprawled on their towels and staring from behind their sunglasses as observers on a space station, watching from safety as a young sun went unexpectedly supernova. Another of the burning children fell shrieking to the water, vanishing under in a white splash and emerging face-first, gap-tooth smile skyward.

The line crawled forward, falling off and growing again as those below clambered back up to take their place dripping at the rear. The rock seemed a living thing beneath James' feet. There were only a few people now between him and the white line. Why were they doing it? What energy drove them on?

The blonde girl jumped, plummeting swiftly downward in a sharp arc. All her poise vanished in the fall, the careful way she had held herself on the rim was abandoned in the moments before impact. She seemed naked, revealed as she tumbled through the air. Where had she gone?

He watched her as she swam away, her legs kicking dimly under the water, near the surface but never breaking it. He watched her swim into the colorless mist beneath the falling water and felt the near irresistible urge to leap in after her, to swim to her.

"You wanna go first?" Ryan asked. The pale stripe on the rock seemed to glow. The empty distance separating them from the marker was near-volcanic black.

James shook his head. "No, you go."

Ryan nodded. He sucked in a breath, his thin chest convulsing, ribs pressing against his tight skin, too tight to be real. James could see right into his friend: the organs, the lungs, the coiled guts. He could not sense his own physicality, so aware was he of Ryan's. He felt like he could cease to exist at any moment.

And then Ryan was gone, feet slapping at a run over the four feet of rock, and outward. He made no sound as he fell, arms windmilling and feet pumping for some kind of traction. He seemed to be clawing for something to grab onto.

The splash stained the black mirrored water, spreading slow. Ryan surfaced wet and gleaming, and he swam out, further into the pooled shadows.

The lifeguard waved James to the line. It was time to go.

James stepped out to the edge. His toes curled on the sharp edge. The rock fell away below in a sheer wall, like the jagged igneous at a volcano's throat.

He wondered what it would feel like to drop below the surface, to penetrate the thin layer of tension and sink into the mystery below. To sink toward the algae-clad boulders down so deep they seemed part of the darkness, silt-stirred water thickening around him. His feet would press into the soft mud on the bottom, his ears popping from the pressure, and there, at the lowest point, his knees would bend, his body would make its furthest descent, and he would straighten, kicking down and propelling himself upward to the surface.

James drew in a breath of cold air. The lifeguard leaned towards him, expression hardening to concern. "Hey, kid," he said putting a hand on James shoulder, "what are you waiting for?"

James nodded. And the lifeguard took away his hand.

James let himself tilt forward until he knew that he was beginning to fall, and his legs pumped once against the stone. He sprang out and, as he went breathless through the air, he felt himself awaken in the cold.

And the water beneath, yawning like an immense mouth, took him in.

### Fragment

She's the sort of girl, she'll drive you to despair. You're with her, and sometimes you even feel like you might love her. But it's so hollow. You feel like you've crested a hill and can look back the way you came and it's all wrong. You made all the wrong choices, turned the wrong way every time.

Now it's too late, and there isn't anything you can do. You're lost out here, and it was all for nothing. What's worst is that, as bad as it seems looking back, you cannot bring yourself to look forward for the dread that clutches at you.

It seems you're facing an eternity, and no time at all.

There doesn't seem to be any way out.

### Beauty

Unfortunately, you've seen Martin's videotape so you pretty much know what you're in for when he gets up from the cheaply upholstered chair and reaches for your hand in a gesture that's like so transparently needy and infantile that you don't have any choice but to take it and follow him blushing and hand-in-hand up to the podium and you're pretty sure that he knows just how manipulative he's being, but you've got to go along with it because you'll basically end up looking like a total bitch in front of everyone if you don't give him what he wants because he's asked for it in such a transparently needy and infantile sort of way. This is essentially the same kind of like emotional trap that he used to get you to watch the tape in the first place: you, standing at his front door and he opens it still smelled faintly of the hospital this like sick sterile odor and he ushers you in and says that you're the only one he's called since he got back. So you follow him into the house, all the way to the basement stairs, which he trudge-slash-waddles down with such laboriousness that it like nudges the line between pathetic and funny in that nasty _America's Funniest Home Videos_ kind of way, and all you can do is just stand there on the step above and watch him go and just _wait_ while he pants and sobs pretty much on the verge of tears, saying he knows how unpleasant an experience this must be for you and he's so grateful that you're making an effort to hide the total contempt and disgust that he knows you're feeling. This also really gets under your skin because you're pretty sure he's just saying it to make you feel guilty for feeling the way you do but it's not like you can help it, now can you?

It's a Saturday night in November and the city above is slick with this clingy wet hard-crystal slush that just won't stop drizzling down. You're in the basement of one of those drab inner-city churches that seems to be making like a conscious effort not to appear in any way affiliated with quote _religion_ unquote and basically looks and functions like a shitty community center except for a few tacky (in your opinion) posters like this one in the foyer of a _really_ particularly Caucasian-looking Jesus like clinging to this little sheep-thing is a manner which strikes you as sort of humorously needy and above them in big drop-shadowed baby's-first-Photoshop letters is the vaguely Orwellian and creepily adolescent-directed: _The Great Shepard watches over even the smallest of his flock._

Martin grabs the sides of the podium and begins to sway and he sucks his lips the way he does when he's about to start talking with no anticipation of stopping anytime soon and you stand behind him alternating the position of your hands from crossed across your chest to stuck in your pockets to brushing back your hair over your ears to clasped behind/in-front-of you to just kinda swaying at your sides thinking about the last time you went into a basement with Martin which was of course the time when he showed you the videotape.

The tape that goes something like this:

Martin is in the bathtub, which is one of those old fashioned bathtubs that stands on four ornate stub legs and looks like it was made from the ribcage of a grotesquely huge buffalo-type animal. It is the sort of tub that very tasteless people (in the parenthetical: Martin's parents) put in their ground-floor washrooms in an effort to appear wealthy and sophisticated, only to discover far too late the dreadful impracticality of the thing. And by that time they're stuck with it.

Martin is up to his chin in lukewarm and rather rosy-hued water, having apparently retained the presence of mind to drape his arm and loll his head in the romantic fashion of the post-mortal Jean Paul Marat, whose image he confides to you as an aside he has always admired on an aesthetic level. The Martin on the static-clenched basement television screen is holding a pair of chrome scissors and is letting them clatter against the hard shell of the bathtub. The sound is like that of a broken metallic clock, clicking not quite in time to anything, but relentless.

Martin's sister is the first to find him, about four minutes into the tape, and she screams horrifically, at an octave that is well beyond the capacity of the video camera's microphone to accurately record and results in a squalling crunch of high pitched feedback. She (Martin's sister) then falls to her red-stockinged knees and begins to sob into the toilet, wrapping her arms around the smooth sky-blue porcelain and spilling into the reservoir tears which Martin informs you were elegant and shapely, quite the Platonic ideal in terms of teardrop form.

Martin's father is the second to arrive.

It is at this point that Martin pauses the video and turns to look at you. He touches your leg and asks if the videotape is too shocking and that he's very grateful you're willing to watch it with him like this and he knows it can't be easy for you but he thinks he should stop and explain why he decided to record this deeply personal event in the first place. You stare at the flickering image of the paused tape and don't really register much of Martin's explanation, except for his repeated insistence that he _did not_ recorded the event basically just so he could show it to people like yourself in a transparent plea for attention and sympathy. He assures you that it is art he has made, an art- _piece_ in the fashion of the grandmasters of the time. He touches you again and resumes the tape, which proceeds:

He (Martin's father) dashes recklessly into frame and kneels at the edge of the bathtub and stares down into the pink-hued but still quite transparent water. Martin's father wears on his narrow face a look of wide-eyed and bloodless panic. He thrusts his arms into the faintly chromatic water nearly up to the shoulder, fishing blindly in the tub for something.

Your single memory of him (Martin's father) is of him carefully selecting over the course of like a week or so over a hundred works of famous art – among them the aforementioned image of Marat – which he then replicated, quite poorly, with his new laser printer. The memory of a pixel-blurred _Mona Lisa_ grinning slyly from within the confines of a two dollar frame and looking like a mosaic made entirely from dried mud is particularly vivid.

On film, Martin's father plucks one of his son's testicles from the water and holds it gingerly between his thumb and his middle finger. It looks like an eyeball minus pupil and iris, a miserably blind sort of fleshy bulb.

Martin shares with you then, in a form of live commentary, that he was quite aghast at the time, having counted on his severed penis and testicles floating artfully on the surface of the water. The image was quite clear in his mind of the spherical tissue bobbing about the cylindrical. Submersion, he acknowledges, is a minor disaster as regards the like overall presentation side of things, but what can you do?

At some unrecorded point Martin's mother arrives, though she remains out of frame for some time after she first speaks. Martin's mother is a former army medic and her voice is very horse and unpleasant, you assume this to be the result of a lifetime of smoking. You can hear her off camera rasping at Martin's father for him to get it all so maybe they can sew it back on and then finally she comes into frame and lifts Martin (rather dramatically) from the tub (dramatic as in like: water dripping and splashing everywhere, sister weeping hysterically, father searching also hysterically, Martin sort of sighing/screaming very much hysterically, mother grunting not at all hysterically as she lifts her son's nude body from the quadrupedal basin) and she rushes him out the door to where an ambulance is presumably waiting. The camera never really gets a good shot of Martin's mutilated nether regions, but there is a rather arresting image of Martin's mouth like falling open as his mother hefts him and like blood and bits of pink muscle dribbling out.

Martin is explaining thickly from the podium that the reason for his slurring and like neigh incomprehensibility around the s-sounds is the result of his having unknowingly chewed off the tip of his tongue whilst in the midst of hacking off his masculine apparel. He didn't scream once, he says, not until the job was done.

In Martin's basement the tape is still running, still filming the now deserted bathroom. The water moves in a very understated gulping sort of undulation which you gather probably indicates an imperfect seal between the plug and the drain. You're picturing in your mind that the recording equipment is like hopelessly antiquated and there's a like Dickensian-looking type cameraman standing behind the device just staring through the eyepiece like totally shell-shocked under his floppy brown cap and is cranking automatically, turning rhythmically, hypnotically, his whole existence depending on the turning of the crank. A single abandoned testicle bobs to the surface of the rosy water and floats about tadpole-like. You and Martin are equally at a loss to explain why it would float now and not while he was in the tub. You sit there, and you watch the organ move on the undulating surface for like three minutes until Martin's father dashes back into the bathroom and snatches it up.

Martin is nearly finished explaining these events to the increasingly uncomfortable members of an organization whose exact name you don't recall but which could be for example called _The Clinically Disfigured Persons Support Group_ , members who are themselves mostly the victims of unfortunate happenings that were, relatively speaking, outside of their control. They're pretty much each in the midst of their own like individual downward spirals of depression and self-loathing (not helped by the fact that their inability to view their own deformities with anything but disgust and horror serves pretty thoroughly to convince them that there's no possible way that these people without deformities feel any differently about them than they do about themselves) and many of them would readily admit that they pretty much just come to these meetings for the combination of sympathy and pity that feels a lot better coming from people who are themselves terribly disfigured (since sympathy and pity rather rankle coming from the non-deformed, given that they, they being the disfigured, are pretty much all convinced that they know how people, people being in this case the non-deformed, feel about them, them being the disfigured again) and the like front row seat to Martin's creepy mental breakdown is way beyond the pale for these people, so-to-speak.

This discomfort only intensifies when Martin starts to talk about his compulsive addiction (you think that a rather redundant turn of phrase) to masturbation, which was essentially the root cause of the eventual self-castration. Martin's fear of his genitalia began, he tells the group of disfigured citizens of the city much to their like chagrin and feelings of genuinely real embarrassment on his behalf, in a church service at the tender age of like maybe thirteen when the minister or pastor or priest or whatever started to talk about the like demonic personification of lust and somewhere in Martin's adolescence mind he just clicks on and realizes that the priest is talking about sex and he compulsively shoves his hand in his pocket and starts like stealthily rubbing the tip of his penis through his pocket, and the priest slams his hand down on the pulpit and shouts out something quite vehement about the like whore of Babylon just as Martin experiences an orgasm for real for the first time ever and he fills his pants with an unpleasantly warm ooze that dribbles down his thighs when he stands and walks wide-eyed to Sunday School feeling a confusing combination of euphoria and like utter terror.

Thankfully, Martin glosses over the next few years of his masturbatory career, skipping ahead to the pre-castration nadir, an incident which involves him sneaking away from a partially disrobed potential sexual partner in order to pleasure himself furiously and repeatedly in the next room as a means of dispelling the psychic tension brought on by the impending coitus and being discovered by the very girl, now wearing only lace underwear, and seeing her face take on a monumentally spirit-crushing look of like disgust and revulsion at the sight of Martin standing in what's basically a closet with his pants down around his ankles and not even then able to stop jerking off and like grunting ecstatically at the prospect of his impending issue.

Martin at the podium has been talking for so long now that he's quite short of breath, and is panting out the sordid events in a ragged and groaning tone of voice made truly all the more unfortunate by the context of what he is saying. But he struggles on and shares with the crowd that the _worst_ part worse than anything he could have conceived of even while in the midst of the excruciating pain which he'd naturally assumed would itself be the worst part of the process was that he still wanted it _all the time_. He didn't think of anything anymore except masturbating. He thought about it whenever he was awake and when he slept he _dreamed_ about it like no dreams he'd ever had before just like his whole subconscious was this like churning oily machine just lustfully grinding away day and night and he'd wake up like poking and picking at the mess of scabs and raw scar tissue between his legs having confused in his sleep the raw painful ache with like feelings of pleasure and he doesn't really know what to _do_ about himself he says as like a conclusion grabbing again the sides of the podium and twitching.

You are pretending determinedly to be not present and not looking at the faces of the disabled persons support group and not just standing there cataloging their brokenness and not feeling terribly alone and not hating yourself for feeling that way when these people have it so much worse off.

This man who no longer has a nose or mouth or even chin really but just this raw-fish pinkish _space_ in the bottom part of his face brings up his fist and coughs damply into it from the exposed hole that is his bare-toothed maw and you find the gesture like sickeningly natural but like why bother exactly? And the guy next to him is looking around like you can just tell from his expression that he's asking himself what's _wrong_ with these people like he can't stand to be in the same room as these repulsive creatures and he's got only one eye with which to be gazing judgmentally about because the space where the other would be is closed off by this like cancerous-type mass of puffy sort of greenish meat that seems almost to be swelling as you look at it.

Then there's this beautiful like _achingly_ gorgeous woman sitting in the back of the room whose hands have sort of like melted together like the skin's just this unidentifiable fleshy mess and there are narrow bird-type bones jutting underneath it all pressing out in odd ways and there are bits of surgical gauze wrapped around bits of hand but it seems sort of hopeless like why not just wrap up the whole mess, of which the single worst aspect is the relatively intact finger like sticking out that's got the like bruise colored imprint of a wedding-type ring no longer worn. She, this stunningly beautiful woman, has been sitting there absolutely alone, having been through so far three of the projected eleven surgeries on-going in an effort to restore her extremities to some semblance of usefulness, and is very near to giving up all hope and isn't really getting much at all out of the meeting so far. She is sitting beneath a poster of some like virginal-looking round-faced saint who's staring up at the cross like _the_ cross in the traditional hands clasped prayer pose and there are tears streaming down the printed face and with her hands brought together she seems almost to be mirroring the woman sitting below. The poster, which you think is on the whole sort of nastily ironic in this context and is like peeling off the wall, says in those ugly big superimposed letters placed there by some doubtless rotund-faced sweaty type in the feverish grip of a like religious drug-type high and tellingly composed in the like King James echoing flowery hyper-English favored by the desperately portentous: _Yea though the beauty of this world may fade, his divine kingdom shall endure forever_. And she this breathtakingly perfect woman with twisted and rotting hands is like looking past herself looking at nothing hearing none of what's been said and is just staring like she's left her body crippled in the basement and is rising towards something vast and mindless, a limitless force shuffling endlessly forward to engulf and consume everything it touches and it feels to you like all the air is going out of the room and it's like the world is pressing down so hard on the church basement that you think you can almost hear the streets above breaking crumbling breaking

into nothing

### Fragment

I was raised to believe, you have to understand that. We weren't taught to question. We were supposed to accept things as they were.

We were the children of infinite credulity. It was all we knew.

So what were we supposed to do? Thrust out into the dizzying light of the world, tossed adrift in a churning ocean of limitless conjecture. You have to find something to cling to in order to retain any kind of sanity. You need to believe, or you'll be nothing.

You'll just die.

I really wanted to believe in something real.

### If I Hurt

He puts the plastic bottle of Astroglide on the counter and looks at me. I sweep up the lube and wave it before the scanner until I hear the beep, then into the bag it goes. I feel that I am moving with unnatural haste, I feel a desperate urge to put the thing out of sight. To spare him the shame and indignity of what he is about. He licks his lips. I tell him how much it costs. Just _it_ , we both know what.

I wonder what he'd going to use it for, and he wonders if I'm wondering. Maybe he hopes I'm not, but of course I can't help myself. He pays cash, anonymous dead cash dry on the fingers and almost brittle. The register rattles and clangs mechanically, vomiting itself open to display rows of bills like off-color tongues. I give the man his bag and he leaves, lubricant bottle tucked into his too-small pocket as he strolls out into the dusk light beyond the glass door.

I watch the roll of his shoulders under the tight covering of his shirt, like mounds of clay and sand, shapelessly huge and waiting to be formed by practiced hands. I picture him bent over some young squirming wet thing with slick clear liquid webbed between his thick fingers. A squelching sound like stepping on a dead frog, a groaning and a birthing push and a face twisted and red as though in pain. I watch, and in my mind see.

Then he is gone, as they all go: without name, without knowledge, without being. Commerce is a line and a stone and a ballast.

I fix his image in my mind.

Colin the manager is here. Colin is the sort of person who becomes a manager, always on time, always tapping his foot, always with papers in his hands to shuffle about when he is lost; he has those to search through like a script, has only to find his part and repeat his line. I ask him if it's time yet for my break. He frowns and looks at his papers and says that he supposes I can go. I thank him, absurdly. My break is mandated by law, I don't have to ask permission. Colin himself doesn't take breaks, except under protest. He is the sort of person who becomes the manager of a place like this. He would have acted more professionally than I if faced with a customer purchasing personal lubricant. He would have set his face and buried his thoughts. It would have been like anything else to Colin. He is almost unable to care anymore.

I tear strips of toilet paper off the roll and lay them on the cool seat so that my skin will not touch the plastic. I think of the man and his lubricant and I start to rub myself. I feel very daring, pleasuring myself almost in public. I imagine there is someone else to hear the soft swallowed moans or the dry-then-damp shuffle of skin rubbing against itself. It's not though really, not pleasuring myself, I mean. I don't feel anything. I dig my fingers into my thigh when I ejaculate and press down hard enough to leave marks, little pink crescents in trails around my legs. I leave scrawls of myself clinging to the interior bowl.

He comes again several days later. I don't know how many exactly. I'm not the sort to keep track of time as it passes. I operate on a continuum: there is no yesterday, there is no today and there is no tomorrow. He buys another bottle of lubricant.

I study his face. He looks old, verging on old. He is like an ancient thing carved of stone. Sixty or seventy maybe. He wears a thick grayish beard and thinning hair brushed across the blunt dome of his skull. I tell myself that he does not look like my father, but the truth is that there is some resemblance. I ignore it; self-deception is more comfortable than truth. His eyes are hazel, his fingernails cut long and clean like a guitar player's, his mouth is full-lipped and red. He opens his mouth and licks his lower lip. One hand resting on the soft curve of his relaxed belly.

I go on my break when he leaves and take quite a long time rubbing myself over the toilet. Colin tells me when I get back that I'll have little chance of becoming a manager someday if I don't demonstrate a greater commitment to the business. I tell him that I've no interest in becoming a manager, and he frowns like he does not believe me. If not to advance – he is the sort of person to think – then why be here? Why even exist?

I come back to work the next day and it is as though I have never left. I am living in a haze of responsibility and tedium. Menial labor and corporate-mandated small talk swirls in my mind like a fog, obscuring and enveloping all else. Who is this creature that I name me, what purpose this automaton?

He is there again, hours later. And again he sets his bottle of lubricant on the counter. And again he looks at me. This time, I am unable to keep myself from looking back. When he leaves, I will follow after him.

This is how my life reveals itself, always searching, always hoping, always looking for something that will imprint its shape into the advancement of my days.

I could be his.

I could be yours.

### Fragment

She's the one, and somehow you just know it.

You look at her, and she's everything you want, everything you ever dreamed of. You think that if you could only just have her, even for a moment, everything might be okay. It would all be worth it if you could hold her, feel her breath on your skin. If you could touch her.

If she would just look at you, you could come alive.

You dream of her, think of her at the strangest times. You're standing at the gas pump, and the money's ticking away, and you think of the way she laughed so hard it made her cry, and you wish you could make her laugh like that. Or maybe you're just lying in the grass, flicking ants off your shin, and you think of the way she plays with her hair.

If you could just have her. If she only wanted you.

But she's gone. You lost her, man, couldn't keep up with that. Before you ever had her she was gone gone gone.

She's the one, the only one. And she's gone.

### In the Republic of Pigs

He watches impassively as the four men undress his wife. They tear away her clothes, ripping stockings, tearing buttons, clawing through sheer fabric. Their naked bodies glisten with sweat, hairless and pale under the studio lights. Their hands squeeze at her flesh, gathering handfuls, leaving red marks where their fingers dig in. Her head thrown back, offering the swan-curve of her white neck, skin painting bruise-black. He pauses the film and studies the frame. They are reduced to nothing in the glow of his computer screen, little creatures subhuman in their frantic congress. They mean nothing to him. He finds a close shot of her red lips opening and splices it in. Swollen lips smeared crimson. Lips you imagine parting with the tip of one finger, sliding into. The wet mouth, the wet redolence. He returns to the footage. One of the men is putting a leg up on the couch and arching his pelvis at her. She takes him in her mouth, squeezing herself tight around him. He clutches her hair and pushes himself deeper. A mouth you could lose yourself in.

He fights a yawn, fails to hold it back. Only dregs in his coffee cup. Swirl and pour. Grit in the back of the throat. He pushes up his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. Something went wrong in the world today. He turns the phrase over and over in his head. It is stuck there, revolving in his thoughts. He does not know what it means, from what truth it was born. He feels a sort of cosmic unease. The arithmetic of the universe slipped one digit and the whole equation gone quietly off. He does not like to see a good thing end. What are we going to do now?

The men are parting his wife's legs and reaching two hands four five to clutch and worry at her. He looks away from the video, his attention drifting. He is vaguely aware of his arousal, a faint and distant throb in his lap. It almost amuses him, seems somehow quaint. He hadn't been aroused shooting the film. Too much worry over technical matters, too much the desire to get the thing in the can. Timing the pulse of human sex on a digital clock. And this is their last film. He wants to get it right.

He remembers meeting her. He was just a cameraman then, gravitated by some as-yet unexplained freak of chance away from juvenile Hollywood dreams into the glitz and filth of the porn world. And it is a world.

Just a cameraman, he told himself, and shot what they told him to shoot. He said to his mother that he was filming movies and when she asked which she wanted to see them he demurred said they wouldn't be playing out there ma. He wasn't exactly ashamed but it was his mom, you know?

She was his sixth shoot. It was still exotic then, a kind of hideous magic. The stench of sex in the air, silicon lube and silicon bodies. The starlets smoked and read magazines or novels between scenes, eyeglasses back on and fluffy bathrobes draped over absurd bodies. He'd been filming down at her, she kneeling and smiling up with her mouth wide while a pair of men jerked off in her face, sprayed strands of themselves across her cheek and she cooed her delight. He handed her a towel when the scene was done, he didn't remember where he'd got it, somebody must have passed it to him. She'd thanked him after wiping off and with the words he had finally noticed her. You're alive, he'd almost said, caught himself in time. Churning meat product looking up and talking at you, it was an unnerving thing. Something dead coming alive. He'd been so young then.

He ran a sepia-tone effect through the editing software. An artistic touch, he thought, then decided against it. Too showy, too weird. Just let it play out. Her and the four men like a puzzle of twisted limbs. One standing above slapping her backside with his cock, another pumping from below, one at the mouth. The forth standing back a pace, holding his dick. That annoyed him, that he'd not caught it during the shoot. Ruined the fucking shot. He used another angle and cut out a bit, stitched his way past the offending image. Cut it out, slice it up. Here is time in my hands, string it out as you like. He cuts past a long sequence of her lubing her anus, stretching and flexing. He cuts straight to the man kneeling behind and thrusting himself inside. Like none of the rest had ever happened. Nobody wanted to see that, the preparation, the tawdry reality. Her mouth was twisted into a tight snarl: Fuck me! You fuckers! Fuck me! Fuck that asshole!

He sneezed, caught the snot in his hand. Momentary disgust, regret. Wipe it off in the tissue. Nose twitching. He takes a squirt of hand sanitizer and rubs it into his skin.

She'd been his big break. He started dating her just before she went big. Kalinda Knox, the name of new industry. He asked her once how she had come by the name, what made her pick that one. The hard rhyme nom de plume. Kalinda Knox loves cocks. It had been chosen for her, she said. Picked by the company. The brand, burned in on the thigh. It was just starting to become a real name when he first asked her out. She'd been surprised, he liked to think flattered. He wasn't some cretin trying to fuck her. He didn't want to screw her. Anybody could fuck, that was the first thing he'd learned in this business. He wanted to hold her, caress her cheek. Kiss her softly, put her to bed like putting a child to bed, tucked up under the warm covers and her eyes shut her soft snores her cold painted toes finding his leg in the middle of the night. They'd only had sex a few times. Not so much after the first few months.

He shot every single one of her films, hers exclusively. Sometimes it made him faintly sick, the wet slapping of the flesh, the heaving the moaning the gritted teeth and pearls of sweat the machine of the body churning and groaning and writhing like a broken toy. He forgot sometimes who he was, lost in that slaughterhouse din. Pink pigskin flesh surrounding him and he strapped to his machine, his great glass eye.

Who are you really? You just do a job. You just show up and stand where they tell you, fuck who they tell you. Get down on your knees and shut your eyes.

She told him that sex was like music. You play it with your entire soul and everybody can feel it, vibrating way down the spine. Make something beautiful of it.

But not love.

Not love. But beautiful.

She started getting her name more and more places. At a certain point, he didn't know when, she stopped attaching her name to projects and starting having projects attached to her name. Kalinda _Knox's Virtual Vixens_. _Kalinda Knox's Threesome Extreme_. So on, so on. It was a blur to him, an inverted mirror. Nothing quite the right way up. But it was a kind of fame. They went to a premiere together, a real movie premiere. He wore a suit and everything, tuxedo. Down the red carpet. Photographers shouting out her name, her brand name. Kalinda! Kalinda! He hadn't realized at first that they meant her. He'd felt like a child playing dress up. The director said they were all fans, got her autograph and made few nasty jokes that made Kalinda Knox howl with brassy full-throated laughter.

He'd chuckled along and tried not to look while the guy grabbed her ass.

The studio door opens behind him and she comes in. She wraps her arms around his neck, loose like a pendant two hands clasped. She kisses the back of his neck. Her body hanging over him. She feels old, worn, used up. Her cheek is against his and they watch together as the men plunge into her body over and over. It is soothing, he thinks, tidal. Cosmic. Squeeze life until the blood runs down your arm.

"Maggie asleep?

"Yep."

"Good."

"How's it coming?"

"It's coming."

"Huh." She smiles.

He reaches up, touches her arm, strokes the skin.

It was three years ago that they decided to go on their own. She had all the connections, all the equipment, all the people and crew she needed. Porn wasn't hard to get into. All it took was a camera and a body. He shot and edited and directed, though there was little for him to do but stay out of the way. He tried, in his own fashion, to make a mark on it. He'd dreamed of being a filmmaker. A child dreams: astronaut, marine biologist, an explorer of some wild darkness. He'd plunged himself into the closest mystery, and greatest. They got married last year, a little ceremony. All the men firm-bodied with fake tans, the women tattooed and long-nailed, grinning like a hive of drunken aunts. His parents hadn't known what to do with themselves. Her five year old daughter was the flower girl. She was just becoming aware of what her mama did for a living and that, he suspected, was what had pushed Kalinda into calling it quits. And now here they were, stitching together the last scenes of her career on his home computer.

After this, what then? He feels the great tug of yawning space and time opening, waiting to swallow him. He'll have nothing left but her, and ugly memory.

She was crying in pain, an ecstatic pain, warped beyond natural emotion. Everything taken to its peak. The crescendo rising rising. That nude form doll-sized on the screen. They watched her in silence, fascinated, amazed. It was beautiful and repulsive. He took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses.

"This is good," she said, "I like this shot, that's cool." She points to the screen.

His lip turns towards a grin. He knows that she is looking for something for which she can praise him. Make him feel good about himself. He appreciates that about her. Simple kindness like spilling milk.

On the screen she is staring open-mouthed up into the fish-eye lens, yards of semen spooled out across her face and breasts. She licks her lips, raises one hand, waves two fingers. Goodbye.

The screen goes dark. Sudden plunge into lightless oblivion. There's nothing there, no credits, no denouement. An absolute blank. He'll have to put something in. The black unnerves him. She hugs her arms tight around him and speaks in his ear. "Guess she's dead now."

Deep inside himself he feels the first cold twist of sickness.

* * *

She strokes his hair, tracing her fingers over the whorls and tangles of it. Like a fingerprint. She brushes over the thinning crown. It fills her with a terrible love to see the light shine through and reveal the balding scalp. She has never told him this, it embarrassed him terribly. At parties he would cling to the shadows to hide the signs of age, as if concealment were as good as a cure. But she loves to see it; it reminds her that they are alive.

She leans down and kisses his head. He flinches, hunching lower in his chair. She rests her hands on his shoulders. "What's wrong?"

He swivels his chair, face slouched in his hands, gnawing the thumbnail. "Nothing, nothing."

Always nothing. Nothing was ever the matter. Worse than pulling teeth, this man, this closed-off thing. He could go blank, close it all off. He could turn to stone before her eyes. "You can tell me." she says.

"What's to tell?"

"You're upset."

"I guess I am."

"Why?" But of course she knows.

"I just... Forget it."

"You don't want me to quit."

"I don't." He looks at her. She can see her image on the screen reflected in his glasses, always between them like a wall, that image. Can he even see her through it?

"We'll talk in the morning."

He sighs and turns back to the screen.

She leaves him there, walks down the hall, trailing one knuckle against the wall.

She should feel worried, upset. Something wrong with him and it's going to come out ugly and fierce, as it always does. But she rejects that sensation, feels rather curiously buoyant, fulfilled. The world is open to her, and everything in it. She'd once worried that she might miss Kalinda Knox, would miss being that person.

She is content.

In the other room the television set is switched on, playing crude late night cartoons. She watches idly, far away from what she is seeing. Who is this world made for?

Her daughter is sleeping in the next room. She goes there, watches the child. She wonders what her daughter will think of her when she's all grown up. Mommy did porn, sweetie. She wants to laugh. It is such an alien thought. She a mother, she not the child. She doesn't feel old, doesn't feel like an authority figure or whatever. She feels so alive, so full of energy. There are a thousand things she wants to do.

She brushes a curl of black hair off her daughter's sleeping face. Everything is beautiful.

### Fragment

Going down now, and deep into the heat of subconscious. Dark and wet and steaming like an abandoned gulf in some mythic jungle; a dark continent. This is the male mind bubbling up to the surface. Angry red like leaking pus, like a fierce eye.

"Nobody loves the word cunt like a feminist loves it. That's because they all loath themselves at heart."

"Women want to be our slaves, it's the only way they'll ever be happy. They're all masochists deep down."

"They say that women are sexually excited by rape as an evolutionary defense mechanism. I think we both know that's not exactly true."

"You know what I hate most about women?" he said to me, "It's their smell. I can always smell them."

"Fucking bitch was asking for it, looking like that." he said.

"I don't think that men can be feminists. We don't have the right." I said as he hacked her apart. As I watched her die.

### In the Garden of Love

June 22

It crawl.

Breath rasp in throat. Fur fall out. Skin blister. Skin break. Skin sores weep. Gum bleed. Teeth fall out.

Weak. Weak. Weak.

Crawl.

In dirt. In mud. In brush. Thorn tear flesh.

Limbs heavy. Head heavy. Drag self. Mouth ache.

Eye blister. Eye red. Eye water. Blind dog. Eye ache.

Bone ache.

Claw click sidewalk. Breath wheeze. Blood mouth. Needle to flesh. Break the needle.

"Good dog."

Hand touch head. Skin slough. Fur shed. Snarl mouth. Blood mouth. Claw click.

"Are you okay, boy?"

Weak. Tired. Weak. Lift head. Boy face. Hate boy. Needle? Mouth snarl. Blood mouth.

Shoe squeak sidewalk. Claw click sidewalk. Blood mouth. Tooth ache. Weak. Boy. Man. Needle.

Bite.

Boy scream. Boy kick. Bone break. Boy stomp. Boy kick. Skull break. Skin break. Body break. Eye break. Ache. Ache. Ache. In dirt. In mud. In white room. In white light. Needle. Hate needle. Eye roll over. Mouth in mask. Eye in glass. Hate needle. Chew leg. Chew self. Eat self. Ache. Break. Chew wire. Chew fence. Teeth break. Mouth ache. Crawl. Crawl. Bite. Kick. Kick. Break.

Dead dog.

July 4

Fireworks are blooming over the lake, and all down the shore picnickers huddle on checkered blankets, half-eaten sandwiches and sticky beer cans scattered in damp grass. There is light painted on upraised faces, blue and red and gold. A man stands at the grill, turns the last few hotdogs over glowing charcoal. A craggy veteran stands against a tree and smokes a cigarette, shaking at every boom and not looking and swallowing back bitter memory. A child runs along the shore, throwing stones out to break the reflected faces of the fireworks on the water. Above the lake, just under the shade of long low elms, a boy in the backseat of his father's station wagon leans close and presses his lips against his girl's mouth.

This is America.

She lays back. He can feel the muscles tense in her back and neck, in her arms her legs her thighs. His weight is against her, his heavy male weight. Hers is such a presence. Her mouth is open. He leans down over her, covers her with himself. The heat of her mouth is more than he can bear. Her hands are everywhere, caressing, squeezing, stroking, reaching in. Her hands hot on his skin. Her eyes alive with feverish light, her breath a hungry groan. She touches his cheek, kisses him.

Fireworks are trapped in the glass, in the windows. Caught there and raining down. All of this light is raining down.

His fingers trace the sheer nylon length of her leg, up toward the hem of her skirt. Twitching skirt. He slides his hand under. She catches the wrist. "Are you sure?" He kisses her. No word has ever meant anything. This is a time before words. He has such a need of her. Such a desire. He covers her mouth with his mouth. He covers her body with his body. There is here a waking animal.

Touching her underpants. The thin hot fabric, silky and clean and tight. Thin as anything. He can feel her inside, feel her right through. The smooth mons curve, the soft bristle of tuft hair, the wanting lips. The wet heat of her. His finger slips around, back of the knuckle run up and down that slick vein.

She is shuddering, head arched back, eyes squeezed shut, hands in tight fists, legs bracing. Her teeth are pressed tight, her lips parted. Her body shakes. He touches her.

"Have you ever done this before?" her voice small and brittle.

He shakes his head. Wordless question, unspoken: Have you?

She says, "I want it to be you."

He kisses her. She is reaching for him, toward the bulge in his jeans, the masculine form. But she pulls back. He unbuckles the belt himself, unbuttons the button, unzips the zipper. He tugs down his jeans. She reaches out, touches. Her fingers wrapping around the stiff smooth thing, light, gentle. His entire body shakes with his need for her, his want. His breath shakes.

His leg is throbbing. A searing constant ache. The two crescent-moon marks of the dog's teeth there. The wound does not seem to want to scab over. It runs sometimes with a clear liquid, like pus. Burns with bleary fire. He has grown accustomed to the pain. He will not allow it to worry him, the unhealing hurt. Why won't it stop? He had seen sickness in the animal's eyes.

She pulls him inside her. She cries in her throat. An open-mouthed noiseless cry. A curve of the spine. Inside she is all soft and wet. He shudders. He is inside.

It is not as he thought it would be. He doesn't know how to think. This is something beyond his knowledge of the world. His mind burning, his skin afire. Her arms wrap around, nails scraping down his back. Her teeth bare, bite the soft skin at his neck. Her breath is hot on him. Something in him is burning. A great fear rising, a fear he will be drawn in too deep, will disappear into her and never find his way back out, wander forever in a blissful darkness.

The fireworks are building towards a great finish. Fire fills the dusk sky, and color. Night is falling. Flashing flashing flashing. All the world on fire. Independence Day. Everything is burning.

"I can't stop," he says. He is so afraid. His leg is burning. Burn radiates from bite. He thinks he can feel thick blood running from the crusted wound, winding down his leg. There is a wet gathering between her legs, sticking to him, clinging.

"Don't. Don't stop." Her face wreathed in pain, or something like pain.

The sound of the fireworks obliterates everything. He sees her groan and cry but hears nothing. He moves with panicked effort. The light blossoms hot in the sky. He works desperately. Outside it is like the end of the world. His father's station wagon glows under the eerie flash. He buries his face in her hair.

And then the show is over. The last echo rumbles away way across the lake. Faint smoke over the water. A smattering of cheers, of applause. A silence that shows all the dreadful noise lurking beneath. The whir of insects. The rocking of the springs. The lap of water. The moist violence of his penis sliding into her vagina, a sucking squelching sound. Her soft exhaled breath, her little cries. His grunting, his heavy breathing. Under the silence there is so much sound.

She clutches him tight. Everything in him is building towards something terrible and beautiful. He cannot stop it. He cannot turn back. A shudder moves through his body. The glow of the fireworks is still in his eyes. He goes stiff and tight all over and

He can feel himself letting go. He feels it pouring out of him, flowing into her. He is spilling life, and a feeling like death fills him. Weak in the limbs, shuddering, lips open but unable to form words. The bite across his leg throbs wickedly.

All that he is flows into her.

July 30

She coughs. Deep hacking cough from way down, from the innermost self. She can't shake it. Two weeks now. Like her lungs are decaying, tearing away through the throat. A weight in her chest.

They lay on their backs around her as in an immense morgue. They could be the dead after a natural disaster or a war. Hanging from metal trees over them are slow-filling blood bags. The needle goes in at the arm. They stare at ceilings while their blood pumps out.

Men and women in blue paper facemasks move slowly among the beds, checking needles, feeling arms, feeling veins, plunging the needle in, taking it out.

She stares at the clipboard in her hands. The words elude her, flitting in and out of focus. Now a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, and then a squiggle. No meaning. She puts the pen against the paper, puts it to the center of the little box. Tick. Next box, another tick. Counting down all the reasons. Purity of the body and spirit. Healthy vessel. She feels like she is bursting at the seams with blood. She wants to have it out, give it away, smear it on the walls if she has to.

An empathetic girl, they called her. Selfless. An angel.

She is no angel, no girl, no child. There is a deep well of selfishness inside, she can feel it. A need for pleasure, a need for admiration. She gives because it makes her feel. Take from me, take take. Strip me bare if you would. All I am is yours. Take. Make me alive.

The words swim into focus, out again.

Unprotected Sex?

She hesitates, pen in the box. She withdraws. Does not make a tick. A little ink-mark remains, the faintest smudge. She puts her thumb to it, to wipe away. It will not come. The merest touch of the pen. It does not come off. She bites her lip. Nobody will notice.

She can't tell them. It's been two weeks, more. She feels fine. A little sick is all, but that's just a cold probably. She'll be better soon. Anyway, there's no reason for them to know. She feels an angry determination over it. By what right can such a question be asked of her? Is she impure? Despoiled? All those things her mother would say. Ruined, a ruined woman.

She does not feel ruined. She is whole and right in the world. He loves her, she is sure of it. And she, she loves. _He_ loves _her_ , that's important. She can still feel him, still call up the memory clear and perfect as anything. They are still in the backseat of his father's car. Still touching. She didn't do anything wrong. She is not ruined.

She feels grown. This body is too young for her. She would step out of it if she could; leave it behind without a backward glance. Let them take from it what they will; she has no need of it.

She signs her name at the bottom of the questionnaire. Here am I.

The doctor – a man with graying hair and a stooped back and wide wrinkled hands – sits down across from her. He looks over the lists of questions. Points to one, asks her a question. She shakes her head. He nods, makes a note. I see. She looks away.

She has so much she wants to give.

She saw a man bleed once, bleed to the point of death. Lying on the side of the road in a pool of light. The lamppost stretching up toward the night sky. Her brother running for the nearest house to call an ambulance. Her father kneeling beside the man, trying to stop the blood. She was standing by the car, watching. The man's truck was on fire. The light of it flickered and writhed in the darkness. The blood flowed out, filling in the cracks in the pavement, spreading. So much blood. She had not thought a man could hold so much blood inside him. Her mother held her around the shoulders. Don't look. She couldn't not look. She had to look. The man was gray and shaking when the ambulance came, his limbs quivering. Death spasms. There was so much blood on the road.

She gave blood every year since. She has this to give.

The nurse leads her to the closest empty bed. The sheets are faintly discolored, a yellowish stain of sweat, now dried. She lays down there, her skin prickling. The nurse talks idly with the doctor as she assembles her needle. They talk about a break in, or a break out, she isn't sure. She doesn't pay attention. They're talking about an animal testing facility, about the CDC, about containment specialists, about no need to panic anybody. She doesn't listen.

She coughs. The nurse holds her arm. Pushes the needle in. A moment of pain, like a bite. She shakes, like she did when he put himself inside her. Her mouth open, her eyes shut. And now it is beneath her skin. She stares up at the ceiling. She can feel the blood drawn out, like bearing snake venom from a wound.

What would her mother do if she knew? It's only sex, mother!

Would she be cast out? Abandoned to the world? One of the world's children now, not mine, not my little girl.

She hates her mother, and is afraid of losing her. Of being lost herself.

She is late. A week late. She worries, cannot sleep for fear. A week late. She has never been that late. She hasn't yet told anybody. It will come, please god let it come. Please god.

She is afraid. Is there something inside me? Something growing? Some malignant being wanting to stretch out little fingers to choke out her life.

Please god, I'm still a child. Let me be empty.

She lays back. She can feel the blood running out of her. Just let it all drain away. Let it all be gone from her.

August 18

It hurts to breath. Hurts even to be.

He cannot see.

Purple-red darkness, a throbbing primordial blindness like a cotton gauze in his mind. He feels the swollen flesh around his eye. Christ, will he ever see again? He cannot bear the thought of going blind. He thinks he will kill himself rather than go on like that. He remembers the boot-heel striking his face. Remembers a shooting pain through his skull.

He cannot hear.

Something rings in the distance. High painful timbre like a tiny bell shaking, frozen mid-chime. The sound pierces his mind. He feels like a child, like he is again in the womb. Hands striking the sides of his head. God, the hurt of it! He remembers the face, the beloved's face pressed against the sidewalk concrete. He remembers the high cawing laughter of the men circling round. Blood and broken teeth.

He drifts off. Sleeps awhile. His dreams are terrible. He cannot wake from them, cannot escape them. Waking and dreaming twined together. He drifts in fear like cloud on water. He longs to be free. Morphine dreams murmuring beyond. The beloved's eye wide with terror, ringed blood red. Stares into him. He cannot see but into that eye. He falls through the iris. He wonders if his beloved died looking at him.

Where does this hate come from? Who made this world?

He wakes and he can see a little, hear a little, feel a little. The steady blip of the heart-rate monitor. The soft cotton sheets. The clean-rot hospital smell. A faint light. Voices over him. They seem so very far away. Bodies on a distant planet, murmurs from another world. He strains to hear, to hear if they know anything of his beloved. His everything.

He tries to open his mouth. Tongue stuck, dry and thick and useless. He feels cracked teeth in his mouth. Tastes the blood of little cuts opening again. Pain and anesthetic all in a whorl and his eyes roll over into sleep.

Later, hours later, he looks up. The television is playing, too distant to focus on. He sees a plastic bag full of blood hanging over him. Drip drip. He sees the clear tube filled with red fluid, traces it down to where it enters his body. Through the arm. He'd tried to give blood before. They turned him away when they knew who he was. _What_ he was.

"I'm sorry," she'd said, "we just can't." The shrug of the shoulders, the shift of curling blonde hair. He remembers leaving that room with his cheeks burning, a shame growing inside. Here is the proof. He is less than. Unwanted.

His own mother told him that AIDS was a plague sent from god to turn people like him back to Jesus. "It's not too late," she told him, "not too late to come home." It was the last time they'd spoken. He missed her sometimes, down below the anger and disappointment. Maybe one day they could know each other again. Like it had once been. A good child, the sweet boy. Mother's child.

Voices enter the room, low and static from the television. How many dead? He can't focus on it, it seems too far away, seems to swim just outside the range of his vision. Something about a disease. How many dead? They're speaking of symptoms, about a boy killed by a dog bite.

His father died when he was a boy. An accident at the factory. He did not know even now what was the cause of death. Many nights he had been kept up by it. A child still, waiting with his covers pulled up under the chin and fear pouring in from every direction. What if this... or that? Kneeling at the side of the bed, hands pressed together as he had been shown. Tears in his eyes: Please god bring him home, bring my daddy home please. He feels his lips move, forming those same words again. Would god hear him now, after all this? He despises himself and his weakness. He had been so weak, so useless.

He is sure now that his beloved is dead.

He stares up at the blood; watches it drip in the bag. It is all coming inside him, filling him with life. The hospital room takes shape through his heavily swollen eyelids.

_This is my blood, given for you_. The words thunder in his mind. He tries to recall when he first heard them. Some Sunday School bullshit, he supposes.

God, but he feels lonely here.

That day is in his mind, the moment of change captured clear and undiluted. Their hands together, fingers wrapped over fingers. The obscene sunshine. Their lips together. The first calls of the men. Rowdy tough men with flat features and bruised hands. Hairy knuckles and flat noses. He remembers laughing at them, taunting them. He remembers waving in their direction and kissing his beloved. He remembers defying them there on the sidewalk in the white heat of the day.

And then they came close, their disgust turning to anger. The anger turning to pleasure. Fist strikes gut. You like that, don't you? Come here, faggot. Heel pressed down on knuckles. Bones crack, break. Bet you candy-ass faggots never met seen a real man before. Nose crushed against pavement. Belt rattled. Pants yanked down. Held down. Stabbing pain. This how you like it, faggot?

He was ashamed to cry, ashamed of what they'd made of him. He remembers crawling, mouth full of blood, fingers curled in a wretched tangle. Leave us alone, just leave us alone. And the sun showed all this. He remembers raising his head and seeing a man walking down the sidewalk. Going the other direction, looking, walking on. Help us. Don't leave me here. The man walked on, hardly even broke his stride.

He sleeps in the hospital. Borrowed blood seeps through his veins. The blood is everything. Pure blood into an impure vessel. He is ashamed of what he is. He wants to die. He wants to die and be again with his beloved.

He shuts his eyes. Sleeps. Blood drips down.

September 3

The young man leans against the dumpster. A cigarette dangles between his fingers, worn and burnt out. The frail glow is like a beacon in the evening dark. He lets it sway, losing ash over damp asphalt. There's a clean cool scent in the air, the aftermath of a summer rainstorm. His shoes squelch in the layer of garbage strewn about the dumpster. There are cars pulling up to the gas station. Fat men and fat women standing listless and slack jawed at the pumps. He watches the numbers roll over higher and higher and feels a growing jealousy. Of course what does it matter now? They're all going to die someday.

The headlights sweep through the glassy-wet city streets, reflecting on every surface, diffused in puddles and gloss. Taillights a burning-out red thrown recklessly behind. Cars coming, cars going. He has not moved for two hours almost. His fingers are cold. His lips cold. He shivers. The nights are turning cold. Summer is coming towards its end, he feels it in his bones. His jacket is soaked through.

He lights another cigarette – the last in the pack – and lifts it to his mouth.

One might wonder how a person ends up in his position. He has never wondered, never given any thought to his situation. Life is a force which draws him along, takes him motionless through time. He does not question.

He crumples the empty pack and tosses it towards the great steel bulk of the dumpster.

The car sweeps up out of the gathering night. A wet churn of tire on road, a splash of weight through water gathered in reflective pools. The car idles there, just across from the dumpster.

He rises, stands lithe as if weightless. Rocks on his heels and takes a long drag. Eyes the car. Sometimes you run into undercover cops. But he's got a good eye for them. Never been caught yet, not really.

The window rolls down. A face pale from inside, thrust out fearful into the night. Looking around, looking at him. He sidles closer, shoulders rolling. He leans down, blows smoke. The guy coughs, puts the back of his hand against his mouth.

It's the typical sort. Average-looking fag. Round face, sad nervous eyes. He knows those eyes. Eyes that live in fear. Mouth opens, hangs there a moment before: "I'm looking for uh... for directions?" The usual line.

He taps ash. "I know what you're looking for."

"Can you, uh, can you show me?"

"I'll take you there." Like actors in a play, reciting the lines night after night. The scenes replay until he knows them backwards, knows them through his skin. Only the face of his partner changes.

"Alright..." a hesitation. Then: _click_ , door unlocked.

He goes around to the passenger side and slips into the car.

The guy's got bruises all over his face. Black swollen eye, capped teeth, fingers in splints, busted lip. Looks like he got worked over pretty seriously not so long ago.

The young man's cigarette twitches in his skinny fingers. "You mind?"

The guy shakes his head. "No. No, that's fine." The first-timers never object. Do whatever you want, whatever, just don't judge me, don't revile me. Please don't let me be found here! Shame is thick in the air, almost tangible. A person would have to be desperate to do this now that everybody has started dying. His business is vanishing, everybody's dead or gone.

He leans back and points this way. The guy drives. Wipers flick, sweep away drops of water. Point this way, down that street, around that corner. And they're here.

The ruin of the fire-gutted apartment complex staggers up toward the sky. Ambition paid in blood. Wipe this all clean. The street is empty and dull. He flicks his cigarette out the window and rolls it up against the night.

The guy's looking around, all nervous and twitchy. "Are you sure this is safe? Won't somebody see us?"

He touches the guy. Hand on skin. Guy goes stiff, then relaxes. A kind of pleasure. The need of another human's touch. "It'll be fine," he says, and leans over to unzip the guy's pants. He withdraws the flaccid cock. Takes it in his mouth. It takes a minute for the pleasure to overtake the fear. The guy gets firm in his mouth, gets hard. The taste of him is musty and sweaty, a biting taste. His head bobs up and down, throat working. The soft wet sounds of this.

The guy puts his hands onto his head, holds him there and strokes his hair. Finding the shape of his skull. Breath in short inhalations, like there was something sitting on his chest.

And then the release. The hot salt taste fills his mouth. Thick liquid silky and slick. Slides down his throat.

The guy starts crying. Weeps like a baby. Face down in his hands, body convulsing with the shock of grief.

He waits. He sees this a lot. Bunch of drama queens. Most of the people who come find him are coming off a death or a break-up. He worries sometimes about this new thing, like he worried sometimes about HIV, but it's not a significant concern. Whatever happens will happen. Life will carry him on.

The guy is shaking, half-phrases spilling out: "I never... I don't... I'm not that kind of..." Confession and denial and regret. He's used to it.

He waits for the guy to pull himself together before collecting his forty bucks. The guy hands it over rather sheepishly. Two crisp twenties. What's the fucker's name? Jackson? He looks at the face and it means nothing to him. History is a distant thing, and irrelevant. He leaves the car and walks back down the streets, long legs carrying him towards the dumpster once more.

He lies down against a pile of old newspapers and touches his lips. The papers speak of death in running black letters. He flicks his fingers through the pages, dances through speculation and desperation. The disease is running through us all. Nobody's sure where it came from, how it started, everybody's got an idea but nobody knows. And nobody knows how to stop it. It's a purge. This great city is emptying itself.

He can feel the taste of the man's semen still in his mouth, all that encoded mucus, the whole of the man's life inscribed on the genetic level. He can feel it inside.

He watches the lights sweep across the rainy sidewalks and he feels like he is alive.

October 11

They live in a dreamy world, bodies entwined, minds submerged in a ceaseless bliss.

He lays there, eyelids fluttering, fingers twitching, muscles tightening. His lips quiver.

She watches him, his long thin body. His shape. The needle still pushing towards the vein. The rubber still wrapped around the bruised upper arm. She unwraps the tube and slips out the needle. He shakes.

A fire burns in the old fireplace. Faint heat. She can hardly feel it now. This world is all shadow. She can see it above, far above, the dim flicker of some faint truth. Some final awakening. She wants to touch it, float towards it. She wants to transcend herself.

The tip of the needle gleams silver in the firelight.

Her brother twitches. He's been sick lately. She doesn't know what it is. She is beginning to worry. She tells him not to go out anymore. She blames the cold, growing as it is more severe every day. She blames the johns, filthy strange men with sickness clinging to their bones. She strokes his forehead. He groans, writhes. She strokes his hair, his soft short hair. He murmurs, convulsing, twitching. Feel this happiness.

"It'll all be okay," she says, running her fingers through his hair, "everything will be better soon."

His mouth opens, the lips parting. "I... I... I..." He is very far gone from himself, drifted away, floated out of his body. She aches to follow.

She flicks the lighter, holds it under the stained silver spoon. Waits. Watches the liquid boil and the stuff melt down.

She has lived here in this house with the brother for almost eight years now. Mother died. Father left. Nobody ever came for them, nobody. Here they are in the empty house out beyond the edge of the city. A lonely satellite of the greater being. The paper is peeling off the walls in long low strips; it hangs toward the floor like tears of the weeping. Garbage gathers in the corners, under the porch, all around. She doesn't know where it comes from. It simply is. Their bed is an island in the chaos. The mattress stained and torn, dark with old blood and urine.

She hates this place. Hates the dirtiness of it, ordinary dirtiness. She longs to escape all this. She longs to be _above_. She knows only this one way to escape. Nothing else has ever worked.

Needle pressed against a bit of cotton. Filthy liquid into the needle. She holds it, fingers clenched. She stares into the fire.

There was so much she wanted to do, to be. She had dreams once. A thousand little dreams. I will make something of myself, she promised. And then she dropped out of school, settled for a job. Then she quit her job, settled for this. She gave up piece by piece on everything she had wanted. It slipped through her fingers one sliver at the time and she'd not noticed it going until there was nothing left. She had dreamed once.

Eventually, It rules everything. It is a jealous master and It is a sea of pleasure. The sea swallows everything it does not love.

Her brother shakes on the bare floor. She sits beside him. She is half-naked, she realizes. No pants or underwear. She reaches down and touches herself, plunges her fingers into a nest of pubic hair. _What am I_? she thinks, searching for some part of herself.

She lives in a state of pleasure and pain, alternating grays and color. She presses the tip of the needle against her skin and pushes in. Feel the rush, the sharp clear bite. The veil of real slides away. She sinks into the world, floats up towards the glimmer of light. Everything around her drifts away. She can feel it moving in her.

All the world is connected.

December 21

It's dark. Middle of the night. He's just over the border, blinking away sleep. Snow falls in dicey wet sheets, big scraps like torn paper. They're talking on the radio about the end of the world. How high is the body count? They can't keep track anymore. How does it spread? They're still not sure. All we know is that it kills, it kills baby, it _kills_.

He lifts a fistful of pills to his mouth and washes them down with bottled water. Just to take the edge off. Keep awake. Nothing serious, he doesn't touch the serious shit himself. Admires it, maybe, but doesn't touch it. Only business. The lights of his semi blaze out across the wintery parking lot. Mounds of soft snow gathered, shaped. It's nearly empty, a few trucks, bleary-eyed travelers stumbling in and out of the restrooms, pushing quarters into vending machines for stale cookies and flat sodas, scratching their bald heads over crumpled maps. The shifting lights on the highway are all a blur, a smooth tapestry of light. He watches.

No cops in the parking lot. Not that he expected any. They've got more important things to worry about now. Order is breaking down, chaos leeched into the world.

He steps down out of the cab. His boots crunch over crisp cold snow. It falls on him, dancing under the wide brim of his hat, whirling about his face and clinging to his beard. He goes towards the rest stop, a long low dark building. One light burning over the door.

There are picnic tables covered over in snow, handicap parking signs pasted-over white. Sheets of cool ice hanging heavy off the sides of the roof.

It's quiet inside. The faint hum of out-of-tune electronics. A light sputtering. A little stand stuffed with out-of-date tourist pamphlets. Highway maps and faded pictures of national parks. There's writing on all the walls, scrawls in red and black of the usual inane variety. An old man is asleep on the padded bench; all the stuffing is spilling out between his legs, seat cushion bleeding. A girl is sitting on the floor. Long tangles of dirty blonde hair. Thin face, scrawny body. Firm white breasts pushed almost out of her loose halter-top. There are goosebumps raised all along her narrow legs, bared to the mid-thigh by her shorts. She looks at him closely.

He ignores her, goes into the men's room. The door swings shut behind, doesn't even go still before the girl's already pushing in. She bursts through, looks away shyly when he sees her.

"Men's room," he says.

"You don't remember me?"

"Should I?" He stands at the urinal, legs wide, and pulls out his cock. He can smell piss, not his own.

"I've come here before. I remember you."

"How's that?" He stares at the wall. The faded stained tile. More scrawled marks in marker and pen, halfheartedly washed away.

"You sold me some stuff before?"

"I don't sell anything, girlie. Just a driver."

"Come on, help me out."

"What do you want it so bad for?"

She snorts. "What else is there? My brother is dead. What else is there? We're all going to die."

"This stuff I supposedly sold you. How much?"

"Eighty."

"Yeah?"

"See, the thing is, I-"

He cuts her off, "Get out." He starts to piss, deep gurgle of liquid mixing with liquid.

She shifts by the door, hands wringing.

He hears her move. Hears her come close. Turns. She is crawling across the floor, knees to the tile, hands spread out, fingers wide.

He watches.

She is at his feet. She lays her head down. She kisses his boots. Tongue on the leather. Long slow lick up the cowhide. Looks up at him through lacy lashes. Hurt eyes, lost in themselves. Liquid filled eyes.

He shakes off his cock. She's only a girl really. Small body like a toy, fragile breakable thing. She holds him by the hips, her nails sliding across his jeans. He guides her mouth to him.

Slow wet thing. He leans against the wall. Appears to shut his eyes but keeps one open. Always keep one eye open in a place like this.

Hand pushes into her hair, fingers close, pull tight. Muffled whimper.

The door opens. A man comes in. She tries to pull away, he stops her, holds her in place. On her knees.

Middle-aged man, balding without grace. Weary circles under the eyes. A young boy behind him, his son. Eyes wide when they see. He puts his arm around his son's shoulders. They hesitate, in a confusion of half-sleep. He starts to pull his son away; the boy squirms, squeezes his thighs together. His father stands between him and them as the boy pees. He ushers his son out, turning back to spit. "You should be ashamed. Fucking whore!" A flicker of inborn shame at the curse. This is a good man. His watch gleams on his wrist, his shirt is starch white and shoes new, uncolored. He is unused to curses, to dirty things. He calls himself a good man. He ducks out the door and into the winter's night. His son carries something inside which is killing.

The truck driver leans against the wall, breathing slow. The girl is crying. Fat liquid tears rolling down. He pushes her down. She doesn't try to stop him. Pulls her shorts aside, pushes himself in. She weeps, grips the edge of the urinal. Her nails are painted aquamarine blue.

It's over quickly. She slumps down, curling on the floor, rocking.

He looks at himself. He is wet, slick with her. The water of love. He tucks himself back into his pants, zips up, reaches into his pocket for the little parcel. He tosses it to the floor and she closes her hands around it, clutching it close to her body. She coughs, a grotesque cough from way down in the throat. He leaves her there. He's not afraid of the sickness, not anymore. He's already dying, everybody is, everybody always has been. Death is the fate of all life, that's plain enough.

He goes out into the cold. The snow has stopped and the world outside is eerily still. The only sounds the far off murmur of the highway and the crunch of snow under his boots. He climbs into the cab and his truck rumbles back to hot life. Lights spill out. He puts it in gear and pulls back out onto the highway.

He drives. Hours of silence. Night breaks and azure dawn rolls out across the sky. He drives. The familiar signs and sights of the endless road come up on him through the morning fog, like something out of a dream. Something of half-known childhood now lost forever, now left far behind.

### Fragment

You know how it is. Some people are just _off_ , and you know it right away. Like this one guy. Long twisted braid hanging down his back, eagle feather over one ear, big metal belt buckle the size of a freaking dinner plate, you know? Short guy, not too big, not too imposing, but kinda wiry with a lot of crude tattoos up and down his arms. Easy-going guy, seems like, nothing special, but he's got this edge, you know? Like he could go off any second.

Anyway, he comes by every once in a while. Brings his woman with him. She's this odd doughy thing, kinda wanders around with her mouth open a little too wide, looking at things for a little too long. She talks slow, too thought out, sounds like her tongue's too big for her mouth. You know she's got some kinda damage, right? Not all there upstairs, you know? Not exactly a retard, but she's slow. She's pliable. And he, like, _guides_ her, fingers gripping her fleshy upper arm and kinda maneuvering her around the place. She points at stuff she likes, says in her thick too-loud voice that she wants something. Says it like a child, like a baby almost. Real simple.

You know looking at them that he's fucking her silly. Like, that's why she's there. That's why he puts up with her. You can just see it in your head, can't you? Scrawny wiry guy wound too tight, and this big slow fleshy woman. You can just see him with his lips curled back, hurling himself against that body. She's just, like, just holes. All empty inside. Like, you're not sure if she really understands what's happening when he's doing it.

It's all so dirty. Makes your skin crawl, makes you shiver. And it makes you jealous. You hate that it makes you jealous. You think that maybe, just maybe, he's got a good thing going. He's got it figured out, man. He knows what's what.

Makes you wanna fucking puke to think about.

### Slaves

The earth shakes around him. Planes rise like ash into the riven darkness of a foreign sky, into a deep endless black pricked by flares of electric intrusion, multicolored landing lights and warning beacons and the slashing headlights of rusted automobiles pulling endlessly through the narrow arrival lane.

He picks flakes of long-dried semen off the leather seat and lets them fall to the stained linoleum floor. They tumble down like snowflakes, wafer-thin and cracking into stars. He wonders where they came from, and how long they have been there. From whom did this seed once issue, and where is that man now? Dried cum, uselessly spilled out like a prayer to the universe. He scrapes away the stain from the edge of the leather seat. He finds it all built up under his fingernail, dirty gray stuff like dandruff or corroded battery acid in the compartment of an electronic toy left too long alone. He cleans it from under his nail and flicks it away; and it comes to him only then that it is a repulsive thing. He wipes his hands on his pants but still feels dirty.

He leaves his seat and goes to the window to watch the planes. He does not wonder about the people onboard. They are rising from the confines of a foul world, rising to a place of pure cloudy dark. He does not wonder where they have been or where they are going. Their lives are nothing to him. He is thinking only of her:

His hand is cold and stiff, trembling. She takes it and she puts it against her bare thigh, prickly two-days ago shaved. Her skin is so warm. His breath comes in shakes, his lips quiver. She presses her mouth against his, warm and then wet. All she is is open to him. His hand moves up her leg. She pulls at her skirt. His fingers touch the hem of her cotton underwear, pull and push to be beneath. Her skin is so hot. She breathes against his mouth; her breath is warm and damp and stale with coffee. She is pulling him close, speaking in his ear. The blood roars in his head; he can't hear a word. He bites her neck, his teeth tugging at the skin, his tongue to flesh. His hand finds her beneath her clothing. She is damp with sweat and lust. She wants him. He wants her. They fall together, clutching and raking and squeezing at each other. They scramble desperately, all pretense falling away. He tugs her underwear down in a tangle around her knees. He pulls her thighs apart. She is hissing through her teeth. When he is inside her he forgets everything. He is no longer himself, but something far far better. He is something which transcends such a sallow being.

He walks through the airport concourse with his head down. He will not let himself met the eyes of other travelers. If they look to him he turns away, if they speak he mutters wordless things. The voice calling out over the speaker system is wholly alien to him, he knows neither language nor purpose. What country is this? He feels in his pockets for the ticket stub which he knows is not there. He tore it to shreds more than a continent ago and let it scatter in the wind.

There is a terrible silence through the airport, the ghastly breathing machine of an institution after nightfall. Like a quiet hospital floor or an empty school building. The sounds of his shoes on the filth-blacked floor seem to fill the space around him, and the thrum of pallid light builds to an ache behind his eyes.

She beats her hands against his chest. "You bastard! You bastard! You bastard!" He tries to talk but the words are thick and stupid in his mouth. His mouth is all full of her kisses. "You bastard! How could you? You bastard!" He wants to explain. He wants to understand it himself. He catches her hands by the wrist. Her wrists feel so thin, so delicate. The muscle is tense beneath, the bone sharp. He wishes he could explain.

He walks through a swinging door, back into the hidden recesses of the airport. He is swallowed into the bowels of the great machine. Heavy ventilation ducts hang above, intestinal coils of thick wire lay piled on the floor. There is a rattling hum that fills the air, fills his head. He wants to push his fingers under the skin, rake the flesh away. His penis throbs with latent energy. It drives him horribly on, groans in his blood. His body is screaming. He is wholly subservient to want.

A strange man emerges from the industrial gloom, clasps him by the arm and propels him, babbling all the while in his mysterious language, back through the doors and into the sun-burnt halls of the airport lobby. "Go!" he says, pointing, "Go! Go!"

He waves the man off and goes where he is bidden, no longer sure what he was looking for through the swinging doors. The feeling had been so strong, had felt so right. Now there is nothing, and he is left emptied.

His throat is dry. He wants a drink. He wants a fuck. He looks around him. There are women all around. If he could only touch them, put his hand on their shoulders, caress their smooth backs and arms. If he could just brush his lips against them, could breathe in the scent of them. He wants to weep and to be held, to disappear inside a women's giving body. He wants to tear her clothes off and shove her down, wants to bash her skull in like breaking a china doll to millions of beautiful pieces. If he could gather the shards and swallow them he would do it, something to cut away at the empty place howling inside him. His desire is running hot through him like a poison and a fire, burning corruption to shining white. If he could just stroke his knuckle against her cheek. If he could just close his lips around the swollen bud of a woman's naked breast, he would suck the life until it ran like water. If he could only have her.

He walks through the terminals, past the arrival and departure gates, sees families greeting each other with laughs and kisses, or else parting in tears. He feels himself move past them like a shadow on the wall. If they would look and turn their gaze might flow right over him.

He walks through an elevated walkway all enclosed in glass and comes out the other side into a dim sort of lounge. Dull music throbs and pulses, off-duty pilots nurse weak beers and overpriced liquor as if it is the last drink they will ever taste. Women worn from travel lay exhausted on shoddy upholstery.

He sits and looks at the bottles against the wall behind the bar.

He had some kind of hope once, burning like a flare in his throat, bursting to get out and spill into the world. He doesn't remember when he lost it, only that it died out by degrees. He'd been able to feel it die over the course of his life, had felt it slipping away. He would have done anything to keep it burning. It was all gone now. He could remember the things he'd dreamed he might one day become, but he remembered them only distantly, as one might recall a bedtime story heard in childhood or a song caught halfway-finished on the radio.

He'd given up hope for such things long ago.

All he had left was her, and now he'd lost her. He didn't think he could ever love a woman. It was all so false. What was man anyway? Just the instrument of sex. Just a self-replicating machine.

He orders a drink, not knowing or caring what it is, and shoves dollars at the bartender until the man stops holding his hand out. He drinks fast, letting it burn in his throat, and he watches the doorway.

He has let all preconceptions fall away, all notions of beauty or desirability. He has embraced the central truth: that all women are equally desirable by virtue of their being. There is nothing to distinguish them anymore. He'll take anything that crawls if it will just slither his way.

There is nothing in the bar for him, only rejection and disgust. He staggers out, coming up the throat of the airport and vomited out the great glass mouth into untamed darkness. He shivers, tugging his coat close about him. The silent air is broken with the groans of the machines rising from tarmac to weightless space. His cock is throbbing with painful need, like a nail driven deep, hammered by every thought and motion.

He watches the cars drive slowly by, sees his reflection distorted in their reflective windows. He feels dizzy and weak, alcohol is buzzing in his head. He staggers against a post and leans there, lifeless and thoughtless.

Then he sees her.

She is standing under the light, waiting. Her clothing is cheap, luridly tight, all zippers and clasps. She meets his gaze and blinks slowly, not turning away. Her eyes are liquid and guileless. He can see it right away: she does not want him, but she will take him. He goes to her.

She speaks to him in her foreign language, the words a meaningless babble to him. He shakes his head. "No, no, English."

She cocks her head. "English?" Her voice is thickly accented.

He nods, points to his chest. "Yes, English."

She opens her synthetic fur coat to show off her body. "You want?" she asks, gesturing at herself.

He breathes a desperate sigh of relief. "I do," he says, "God, yes... Yes, I want."

She points toward the airport building and speaks again, chattering in her own language. It seems that they have exhausted her command of English. He nods, and follows her as she goes. She leads him through the building, deep into the bowels of the place. Her high-heeled shoes clack on the floor, counting down towards some certain misery.

She opens a heavy metal door and they pass together into darkness.

He hears the knocking of her shoes come to a stop, hears her turn and approach him. He feels her body press against his own. She takes his hand and puts it on her breast. He squeezes the plastic-bound flesh, his whole body quivering with desire. He knows that this is the thing for which he has been made. This is his purpose, his whole being. This is who he is and all he ever could be. His mouth falls violently against hers, open and devouring.

She pushes him back hard against the wall. A light-switch clicks and they are bathed in sick green-yellow light. He sees her now, so horribly close, and wishes to be again submerged in darkness. Her eyes are hollow and red, with no soul in them. There are sores on her lips and cheek. Her nostrils are ruined and viscus, the blood vessels broken under pasty white powder. Her teeth and hair are the same ocher shade, have the same filthy sheen. Her tongue plays at an empty brown hole in her mouth. She holds out her hand.

"How much?"

She hisses, slapping her palm, giving no betrayal of understanding.

He digs into his pocket and shoves money at her. Her fingers close around the crumpled bills. He thinks that she has the hands of a small child, weak and thin, dirt beneath the nails – hers are the hands of a man's daughter, lacy with scars and burns.

She sinks to her knees and undoes his belt buckle. She pulls his pants and boxers down around his knees. He can feel how dirty he is – sweaty and rank between the legs after eighteen hours of travel – and he feels a flash of terrible shame. Her breath is hot on him. She touches his penis, pulling it like a milkmaid who'd done the morning chores too many to count. She cups his testicles, as though weighting them in her hand. It happens without thought or consideration, only impulse.

She takes him in her mouth. Her lips are dry and cracked, her mouth sticky. His penis is dark with hair and gleams like a sick thing, a leech, a hanging parasite. Her saliva is thick and runs slowly. He can feel the ragged edges of her teeth catching the numbed sags of skin.

He shuts his eyes. He knocks his head back against the wall, wishing he could die.

Need burns in his stomach, the sickness, the want. He looks, his eyes focusing and fading to the confines of the room. They're in a small outhouse. The porcelain figure slumped akimbo in the corner of the room, drooling filth. His nostrils clench at the reek; his skin crawls.

He takes her, half push, half drag, drapes her languid form over the toilet and scrabbles at her clothing, pulling it away. She lays there, eyes rolling lazily, gnawing the end of one fingernail. He rips away the last of it and there is all she is before him. He plunges headlong into her, hurtling like a savage through the endless jungle.

The awful sounds of it fill the room, the slapping of flesh against flesh, the wet muddy squelch of two bodies, her low bovine grunting, his own snarled excess and in his ear the faint electric whine of the light bulb singing.

The tedium of the act is unbearable, and so frighteningly present in his mind. He grapples to her, fingers digging into bruised flesh, clutching skin-clad hip and hairless thigh. They are joined now, a machine in operation. This is the endless tangle, the moribund dance of the universe.

She speaks, calling words to him which he does not know. He does not let this deter him, he carries on his plying. Her hands reach back, grab at him, pushing, the fingers brushing off his skin. Her voice rises, shrieking with scorn and abatement, but he will not be swayed now, not so close. "No!" she says, "No, no no!" She wriggles away, her waxen flesh squirming from his grip as she tumbles to the floor. He falls, shin cracking hard against the toilet and he is sent down clutching it and groaning, his pants tangled about the knees. "No, no!" She is on her feet, animal-like, skittering away. He grabs at her and for one instant his hand is closed about her fleshless wrist.

Something flashes in the gloom, a bright spark drawn from beneath her vinyl garb. He feels a hot hard burn in his gut and looks down to see a knife handle protruded from his lower belly. He falls away, blinking, dismayed, and the girl is gone out the door, her being scattered to the wind.

His new protuberance turns sour, and the blood flows. He feels himself fall backwards, but experiences no sensation of landing, no crashing down, no thudding collapse, only the endless fall – the void spin.

He tugs the blade out and is brought down again. He feels a cry of pain tearing at his throat, screaming out. He touches the wound, a gynecologic slit below his belly, and his laughs.

He laughs, choking on pain in the foul outbuilding, blood slipping free while all the world rumbles about him its great mechanical song.

* * *

The sun is going down on the eleventh summer of his youth. The car roars as his brother revs the engine. The older boys laugh their clear high laughter. An emptied beer can clatters across the road, bouncing once twice three times, and rolls into the gutter.

The boys beat the side of the car with long gangling limbs, hooting and cawing. Their pockmark faces milk-pale in the moonlight, their dental appliances glinting as though weaponized. His brother feathers the gas, sending noxious fumes up from the spinning tires. Their father told them once that a car was like a woman, you had to treat it right and keep it well in hand or it would turn on you. Something releases and they're gone, nothing but a blister on the road and into the gathering night.

They drive. The quiet town sleeps around them. It is like a tomb, every family inside dead through. Only they are alive, and only their speed keeps them breathing. So they race through the silence, engine grinding and wheels squealing.

They know that there is a certain girl in a certain house, so they stop there, car idling and desperate to go while three lanky boys hop out to call up at her window. She comes clambering through the opening with laughter spilling from her lips and she collapses over the door of the car onto the laps of the boys. They cackle and paw at her. She slaps them away and pinches them and grabs what is between their legs.

He sits still, neither touching nor being touched though he wants both more keenly than any want he'd ever felt. The energy is changed now, she is theirs but they are subservient to her. She is object and idol, she is pure being beyond humanity. He cannot see that they are of the same species, he and she. Between them is a gulf which he can neither define nor cross. Hers is the unknowable. They don't want to know. What use in knowing? What matter who she really is? The fact of her is all that matters to the boys.

They leave the town, driving blind into darkness, slugging back beers and pinching her tits and telling dirty jokes. She climbs into the front seat and a boy reaches up her skirt as she goes. She sits in the lap of a boy and smokes a long cigarette with her jaw defiantly jutting. The smoke whorls behind them and the ash falls away. Her lips are painted blood red and leave smeared marks like cuts on the cheeks of the boys she kisses.

The car stops on the shore of the wooded lake. It seems to come to a halt of its own accord, and there is nothing to do now but get out. Only he cannot bring himself to leave; he watches the others climb over the doors and into the forest. They stand silhouetted against the shifting water. His brother pulls the girl close around the waist and kisses her mouth. She laughs, breathing smoke in his face.

Somebody says that they should go skinny dipping. The girl laughs and says you first. The boys strip in the silence of their nervous laughter. His brother walks back to the car and turns on the radio and the lights. The pounding music is masculine and metallic, a tribal beat expectant. The headlights spill out, burning at the damp trees and far shore. The illumination seems to be swallowed by the forest, it cannot penetrate far, only grope and grasp.

The naked boys all watch as the girl slowly removes her clothing. She wears rings on her fingers and her hair seems alive as fire in the car lights as she begins to sway and move to the music, cigarette still burning. The boys circle in slowly around her, dancing their idiot waltz among the trees, moving slowly on towards the distant shore.

He sits in the car and watches them dance against the darkness until the song ends. In its absence their only music is the groaning of the machine and the lapping of water, though they dance to it just as well. He feels something opening inside him, a space he is sure will never be filled. He feels set apart from the others, and it occurs to him as a heavy and terrible sadness. They are the older children of the world.

He leans against the leather seat and watches their naked bodies twisting silently in electric light.

### Fragment

He is alone in the mirror.

Groping towards something, his fingertips to the silver.

The heat rises, the door opens, he pushes through to the other side and what lies beyond.

### Table of Contents

The Softest Thing

Fragment

Development

Fragment

The Young Christ

Fragment

Coital

Fragment

Beauty

Fragment

If I Hurt

Fragment

In the Republic of Pigs

Fragment

In the Garden of Love

Fragment

Slaves

Fragment

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