Author’s Note: Happy Valentine’s Day; have some HORROR. <3 <3 J
Image Description: A silhouette of a person in a hooded sweatshirt and ball cap, surrounded by white smoke.
Three.
Male, 16. Broad of shoulder and narrow of mind, shouting slurs at his friends as he thumps his chest. In every way, the opposite of my birth body. I tug the edges of my sleeves down to cover the strange hue of my skin and jerk my chin, forcing the baseball cap’s ragged brim lower to hide my forehead.
I watch him fake a football pass to his friend, his Varsity jacket flapping open against his chest as he throws air. I watched this summer, too, hidden in the shade on the other side of the chain link fence that surrounds the football field, as he flew through the coach’s drills. A body with speed and strength. A body that other people surrounded, touching easily and calling out to with warm, rounded tones.
At the front of the school, hundreds of kids are pouring into the building desperate to find someone to worship. He’s as good as any god.
I catch him beneath the bleachers. He stands a head taller than me, pulling himself even higher as he does chin-ups on the supports crisscrossing above our heads. My hands shake. The bag of weed I’d saved to buy flutters where it hangs between my pinky and ring. I’d flashed it at him, and he took the bait, following me under here with just a shout over his shoulder, “Gotta get my school supplies!”
I pull bills from my pocket, change for his hundred. A fifty falls. “Oops,” I whisper hoarsely. “Your money.”
“Fuck!” He drops, crouching to catch the bill before the late summer wind snatches it away. “You want a pounding on your first day of school, weird ass?”
I reach out and brush a lock of hair back from his temple. Rage fills his eyes, looking up at me from where he kneels. I whisper, shhhhh. His lips spread back over perfect, white teeth made for clenching mouth guards. I grasp each side of his head and breathe deep, pulling his making out of him and into me. His jaw goes slack for an instant before it clenches tight in pain.
you don’t have to cancel everyone the second they misstep or do something dumb but you also DON’T have to defend everything that your fave does. you can say “hey this particular thing sucked” without getting into this all-or-nothing mentality. you are not an extension of the things you like. you can think freely and criticize the things (and people) that you like, and a criticism of something you like is not something that you should take personally or feel the need to correct/defend.
Image Description: Two hands crossing, just seen above the grey-green surface of the water.
I am tired of singing.
You have changed.
This is your fault, my silence. And so I will take your trash and fill it with my words, cramming full bottle after bottle that you have left castaway in my sea so that when they wash up on your beach and you open them perhaps it will be you that drowns.
In wonder, of course. I do not actually want to hurt you–I got that out of my system with Odysseus and his beautiful wooden boat.
Boats do not break the same way anymore. They are all too high; these ugly metal beasts rearing up out of the ocean like Poseidon’s buttcheeks. I cannot be bothered to sing to your boats these days.
Odysseus’s boat was different. A wooden boat creaks, sighing beautiful grinding noises that I cannot find under the water. Wood on wood on nails on wood, twisting against itself in constant agony to serve. Oh, how I loved his boat. I had to have it, and so I sang.
You, though, get only words.
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I have found another bottle. A few drips of something brown and fetid inside. I let the pelicans have it, dribbling it on the corner of a buoy. They squabble and I scribble. Scribble scribble. I wonder what you think the ocean is like. Shall I tell you?
Perhaps next time. It is hot today, and my scales itch.
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A young boy tossed this one overboard. You learn to destroy early.