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 Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:32 pm
i. “What are they for?” Mare asks him, softly, her bone-gentle fingers sliding over the curve of his back.
Thorne bows his head as she runs the washcloth up from the basin and against his skin, his neck, the soft hairs of an undercut growing out. She traces the lines of renewed tattoos, deep veins of green and black and gold growing into thickets, into snares and traps for the birds and the roses. It is not Euclidean in its geometry. There is no pattern to it, but rather a whispering sort of chaos. The dripping fangs of a snake. Danger is written on him in sharp lines, the throw of his back and the slope of ivy against the scars of his wrists. They should have known. They should have known.
Mare presses down on a petal, baby pink and bright against his dark, dark skin.
Thorne sighs out, an animal sound.
“When I was younger,” Mare continues, her voice lullaby-soft, “The sailors would parade their tattoos around for all the ladies to swoon at. Swallows for miles and roosters for survivors, sprawled across their backs like storybooks. It was all very poetic, and I marveled at it. All of the young women wanted to marry a gentleman while reading the messages of the officers with their fingertips in private company. How beautiful and lonely it was, we thought, to belong to the sea. But the language has changed, has it not?”
“Do you still believe that?” Thorne asks her, and Mare’s breath slips from her throat. “That there is some sort of beauty in being lonely?”
Mare is quiet for a long time. Her fingers trace the shift and slither of tattoos, as though she is charming snakes, whispering away the poison. She does not answer him.
But slowly she follows a black ivy down the slope of his back, and traces the pattern of a rose on his shoulder.
“They’re to remember,” Thorne says eventually, as she smooths the washcloth across his bowed head, the wet cotton running pink with stains. “What story do they tell to you?”
Mare sings him a soft lullaby sound and touches his arm gently. She is unlike Corr. There is a quiet terribleness in her. One that is infinitely worse somehow. Corr was a monster, inhuman, too old to let himself be moored by the tidings of the world. Too ancient to understand emotions past what they fed him, what they filled him with to keep him from feeling nothing. But Mare recites him soft sonnets and poetry. Dreams and whispers and laughs, and she is almost human.
But her beauty, her softness could cut any man as deep as a knife.
She puts the washcloth down and stretches her palms over the broad width of his shoulders, right against the divot where a shifting rose garden has bloomed beneath the weight of nettles, of thorns. The bleeding ink tattoos her skin.
She says, “It says that you are a survivor too.”
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:34 pm
ii. He doesn’t remember how he stands up, only that he does. It could be seconds, minutes, hours, after Chris left. He doesn’t remember.
Someone once told him that grief was a weight, an anchor. It did nothing, could do nothing. You’ll drown beneath that weight, they’d said.
Someone once told him anger was more productive than grief.
He cleans the warehouse. He does not sleep. Everything finds a place, even the parts that never had one. The unruly stacks of books become neat, the couches uncluttered. He washes the bedding, runs out the scents of two people living together in one space. In the moments in between he doesn’t know what he does. His hands feel restless but he is trapped inside of his thoughts. Everything buzzes louder the longer he waits. He relives the words that were shouted at him, and tries to scratch at his skin to get them out.
The bed is redone. The kitchen is cleaned, scrubbed, emptied of anything useless, anything that would have been bartered off or traded or argued over. At the end of it all he stands in the center of the hungry space, the shadows greedy and wandering. He knows there’s a word for what he’s doing but he cannot stop and think about it. He knows he could be doing it better.
Or he could just find something to punch.
When he’s done, the warehouse looks like it belongs in a photograph.
Rich kid with nothing better to do redesigns building in disuse, the headlines could read beneath it, redefines modern architecture and urban gardening.
If he reached out and folded the edges over, would it collapse in on itself?
Thorne paws through his drawers. Folds and refolds clothes. He pulls himself apart, piece by piece. And then quietly, he pulls himself back together. Replaces the faded henley shirts and jeans for the sharp three-piece suits he reserves for sermons, for church services, for his brother, when he comes.
His fathers ghost crackles in the soft fabric. The night-dark vest slides low and tight against his back, a striking contrast to the white dress shirt, the folded collars, the ebony trench that he lays over his shoulders as he straightens the cuffs.
You are your fathers son, so many had said to him, when he’d dressed and spoke and acted the part, you’ll go far, just like him.
“If you cannot conquer something,” the ghost said, “set it on fire.”
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:35 pm
iii. “Tell me a story,” Thorne says.
Mare twirls in her new dress, sunflowers dancing in the half-light. Thorne is settled in the chaise lounge they stole from one of the other rooms, A book open and forgotten in his lap. He’s been spending more time on this side lately. Tonight his hair is still damp from the walk through Other Ashdown, droplets sliding down the sharp line of his jaw. He runs a hand over the back, the fresh shaved undercut.
Here, magic works through their veins like oxygen.
Here, he could choose not to feel it anymore.
“Happy or sad?” Mare asks from where she stands.
Thorne looks up at her, his eyes the color of stars gone dark, galaxies in atrophy.
“Sad,” he says, and her laugh is like a bell.
“I’ll break your heart.”
Thorne looks up at her. The soft storm of Other Ashdown has dampened the white of his shirt so that it sticks to his skin, see-through. The black vest shines with water, rain, the petrichor of the world on this side of the veil.
“You can’t,” Thorne says. His voice is a slow drag, cutting across the room. The book smells like soil, like flowers. “It’s already broken.”
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:36 pm
iv. Even the night drives don’t help the noise anymore.
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:38 pm
v. Mare tells him a story about a girl.
She had a beautiful sister, and a beautiful life. Her world was soft and simple. In her time, marriage was the most important thing a woman could have, followed shortly by children, and a happy husband to hold her close. Not such a far off dream, for her and her sister, when their father had the money for dowry, when there was a title to be earned by marrying into such a line of descent. She had a voice like a songbird, the girl. She would sing for all the gentlemen, their courtship beautiful, even as shallow as it was.
“Here is the conflict of the story,” Mare says, “she loves her sister more than she loves the rest of the world.”
“Oh?” Thorne asks her.
She smiles at him, sweet and soft.
The girl falls in love with a gentleman. The sister falls in love as well. The girl is replaced. No one knows.
She waits for three years, no one comes looking. She waits for four, and her reflection appears. It sings her a story about a world where she had chased her gentleman away. Where she had begun a beautiful affair. Where she had broken her sisters heart. Where she had disgraced her family, ruined her fortunes, ruined herself.
No one would ever want to love a thing like that.
The girl fights at first. She tears her dress and tries to choke her reflection, because it doesn’t matter. Being a disgrace, loveless, without hope of marriage and children, is not as bad as being in her cage, singing like a songbird that has forgotten what it’s like to be free. But it tells her there is nothing left on the other side. Her sisters heart is mending; she sets sail for England in the morning again.
“Will you break her heart again, the reflection asked her,” Mare says softly, “And she said no.”
“Why?”
Mare looks outside of the room to the night-dark sky.
“Love is nothing without sacrifice,” she says, “If I must be in hell for her to have been happy, I would choose it again, and again, and again. Until the stars burned out of the sky and the galaxies crumbled to ashes.”
She touches her chest, her hollowed out remains.
“You know what it feels like,” she says, “You’ve made that choice too.”
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:39 pm
vi. He goes to church.
He is a sharply dressed figure in between the pews, wholly alone. The sun bleeds through the stained glass windows. An angel arches upwards against a pillar. It might be singing a song, its mouth carved open, beautiful and wide. It might be crying out.
There is so little a difference between the two.
“Why are you here?” someone asks beside him.
Thorne says, “This is a dream.”
And Chris is smiling, the beanie sliding halfway off, his body so real that Thorne could touch it, if only he reached out.
“Maybe,” the dream says in Chris’s voice. “Alright. Why am I here?”
Thorne looks up at the altar, sun-drenched with the last red-purple light of nightfall. He feels his tattoos slide against his skin, serpents, hissing, whispering. He’d told Mare that they were to remember, and he hadn’t lied.
They were to remember.
But they weren’t meant to be forgiven.
“Because I don’t want to be alone,” Thorne says.
The dream creature hooks a finger around his. It is such a painfully familiar gesture that Thorne almost shies from it.
“I miss you,” Thorne adds, like a confession, the words painful in his throat, and looks at the dream that smiles and looks and acts like Chris.
“If you miss me,” it says softly, “Why did you leave?”
Thorne wakes up, and his chest feels so heavy he cannot breathe.
So heavy that he cannot think, cannot even rationalize that it was not real, it was not whole, as it overwhelms him, and the darkness, like a cradle, pulls him in and swallows the sound.
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:40 pm
vii. Mare washes his split knuckles in that night after the encounter with Jeremiah. Thorne cannot even say his name out loud, as though he might lash himself in the process. But she sits there and sings hymnals and sonnets and runs her bone white finger over the ugly scratch-work of concrete walls and bony fists.
She says, “Why?” and it sounds like a song.
Thorne says, “I wanted to remember what it felt like.”
Mare kisses his knuckles softly with her pale lips. She places them in his lap, and looks up and tells him, “There are better things to remember than pain.”
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:41 pm
viii. Thorne goes out and buys paints, and throws himself sleeplessly into work.
The far wall of the warehouse, the one that stretches out next to the kitchen and yawns into the very corner of the cavernous space becomes his canvas. First he simply throws black at it. Black and purple, the night-dark shades of blue. Until it is the liminal spaces between galaxies. It drips down in a rhythmic chaos, and around it, Thorne paints the stars. Planets in suspension, nebulas in disuse.
He paints until the exhaustion runs bone deep. He paints until he can hear Jeremiah’s voice in his head without making himself sick. When he runs out of wall space, he moves mutinously to whatever he can find. Doorway arches, empty patches along stairwell walls. Flowers and birds and stars and galaxies. It is not the refined work of an artist in a gallery, built up within their lights and postures, built delicately, with thought and rhetoric, logic and decisiveness. It is the wild fury of something come undone, someone in a hurry, and still it reflects a raw and aching message. Beautiful in its dissent.
He refuses to sleep in the bedroom, collapsing on the couch instead, where the scent of Chris doesn’t linger as harshly. Too close to home.
The dream creature greets him at the bottom of the fall into unconsciousness. It hooks a finger around his.
“You’re not real,” Thorne tells it.
“Maybe,” it says, “But I am all you have left.”
It looks down at his paint-touched fingers.
“Why are you doing this?”
Thorne closes his eyes.
“So that he’ll have something to remember me by.”
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:42 pm
ix. Thorne puts a key under the mat. He paints a trail of comet tails and spiral galaxies on the floor that stretches out from it, down the steps, into the gravel.
He leaves.
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:44 pm
x. They take a walk.
Mare skips ahead of him, between puddles, into the deluge with a smile on her face. Eventually she circles back though and winds her elbow with his. Thorne lets her, the rain soaking through the dress shirt, the blazer draped over her shoulders, borrowed even though he is sure she needs no warmth in this forgotten body of hers.
“You’re quiet,” she says, and Thorne looks at her, rain dripping from his lashes, running against the hollow curve of his throat.
“Am I?”
“I can hear you thinking.”
Thorne laughs.
“Oh?” He asks her softly. “What are my thoughts?”
Mare gives a soft hum. They avoid a puddle. They stare up at Coalsmoke, inverted. Coalsmoke on the other side of the veil. Mare lets go and she walks to the steps and reaches down to touch a star.
“You’re thinking about him,” Mare says.
She looks up at Thorne. There is something wild, unavoidable and snaring about her gaze. She is so soft, Thorne thinks. He never remembers that she herself has nettles in her bones. He understands at once. There is no way to lie.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Thorne slides his fingers through his hair. He walks past Mare and up the staircase. The petrichor fills the air, but if he pushes past it he can still taste the headiness of paint, soil, two bodies together in perfect silence, going nowhere, going nowhere.
“I want him to be happy,” Thorne says and traces a spilling work of nebulas that fade into nothing, into the hard nothingness of Coalsmoke’s exterior. “He left, and I still want him to be happy. But I’m selfish, and I want him to remember me. Even in the next cycle. Even in this one. If he comes back to this place, I want him to remember me.”
Mare takes his hand and lets her fingers trail over the healing skin of his knuckles where he’d split them open in some desperate attempt to bleed out the pain before she’d told him to find another way.
“If you never let him go,” Mare says, “He will never learn to move on.”
Thorne bows his head.
“I know,” he murmurs, droplets falling from his eyelashes to the ground, “And maybe that is what makes me a monster more than everything else I’ve done. Isn’t that what villains do?”
Mare touches his face and says, “We are all someone’s monster.”
She turns to look up at the comet tails, the falling stars. The raw, aching desire that spills out from everywhere, into bursts of starlight, into the night-black hunger of space.
“If he comes back,” she says, “What will you tell him?”
Thorne does not open the door to Coalsmoke. He does not look for the key beneath the mat. He turns and walks down the steps until he hits the gravel. Mare watches him from the top, her dress billowing out around her, wet and see-through. She looks at him with sad, sad eyes.
“Anything,” Thorne says, “Everything. There’s nothing left of me to hide.”
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Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2016 8:50 pm
xi.
Coalsmoke sits empty and hollow-mouthed in the twilight hour, expectant and hungry, patient and weathered by time. It smells of paint and soil, ink and unmarked papers, but it longs for something more.
It waits on voices to fill it. It waits on people to come back, come home.
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