Quietness Renamed

Ho hum, oh look, a new story that's completely unedited and unfinished and weird and YEAH it's goin' up. I hope it doesn't suck, guys. 

"Quietness Renamed"


The power lines were sharply dark and dangled loosely in the pink sky. The pair held hands and her black flip flops slapped the wet pavement quietly with each step.

He wanted to tell her that the sky looked like cotton candy, or roses, or the finger nail polish he would imagine his mother might have worn. He scratched his nose with his free hand instead, and said quietly, “I have to be home by seven, or seven thirty, or something.”

“Okay.” She squeezed his hand tighter.

Lights came on in the houses and over their heads as the sky faded slowly from cotton candy pink to a fiery orange, then blushing red, then bruised purple until entirely deadened black. There were no clouds to break or crowd the expansive air.

She took her hand with its painted nails back for a second and wiped the clamminess off her palms onto her worn blue jeans. They threaded their fingers back together seamlessly, and kept walking, on and away from his house of hollowed sobbing and pain.

“Is your dad okay?” It was a tentative, gentle question.

He didn’t answer.

She felt an aching tiredness for him, through her bones and her toes. She saw behind the black, pressed pants of this morning and the wrinkled white shirt that had been clean, and the tie loosened and sagging from his throat. She saw it all twisting around his brain, worms of thought that wriggled and squirmed unpleasantly when prodded.

After a few moments, she realized the laces on his left shoe were hitting the ground like dull plastic rain drops, thudding quietly, and she squeezed his hand in hers again. He turned to her, and blinked before she saw the blank, hopeless expression in his eyes, and stopped.

“What?”

“Your shoelaces...”

She sat on the ground heavily, not caring if her jeans got soaked through, and took the sopping laces into her fingers, threading them quickly back together in her long pale fingers. He looked up and around at everything as she was sitting on the ground, with eyes that felt huge and dry in his head. He did not squint when a car’s headlights flashed in his face.

He wanted to tell her everything had changed, everything had been skewed into pain from what it had been, and he felt a quietness that had not been there before, and he saw it with a blankness that he didn’t recognize, and everything he saw was dulled.

But he thought she already knew. Because she said quietly, sitting very still and doe-like, looking at the bow tied on his shoe, “I don’t hate anyone.”

And his voice broke when he said “I know.”

He remembered people who did hate though. The woman who had rat poisoning in a coffee mug, and a shotgun just in case, and a Bible from her mother with worn pages. She had been questioned about her whereabouts Wednesday morning, between 6 and 8:30 P.M, and Angeline had yelled at his father, while she was bodily carried from the room. His father, whose face was puffy and red and there were purple bruises under his bloodshot eyes, and he had clutched at his ring, staring at it. She yelled that he deserved it, and you do too you disgusting excuse for a human being, how dare you insult the natural order of life, you faggot.

Faggot, faggot, faggot. His dad had broken then at that word from his father and his childhood and high school and now Angeline.

And the boy sitting close to him paled, eyes saucer-wide, nails digging into his palms from clutching his fists together so tightly, knuckles white.

He watched one of the few people he loved break on that worn, splintery bench. His father’s other half was already gone, somewhere else, but not where Angeline was convinced she would go, oh no, never there. Somewhere else. But it wasn’t with them, back in their clean white house, making blueberry pancakes early Saturday mornings when the light filling the kitchen was orange and yellow, and asking how his day was after he came home from baseball practice, and singing badly to Queen on the radio, and kissing his father lightly, holding his hands, and grinning and dancing in the living room when they didn’t think he noticed, just quiet private love, and happiness and happiness and happiness seemed to be always, but now he was somewhere else. Bright intelligent eyes closed forever and fingers tight and cold and mouth in a straight line on his starkly white face.

And now he was somewhere else. And his father had lost half of himself, and Angeline was going to jail, and their house was a mess, and his grades were slipping, and his father sat most nights and stared at nothing, noticed nothing. But she was here.

And when she stood up and took his hand again, silent, he pulled her to him tightly, wrapping his arms around her shorter frame.

The thought came over and over, why won’t he come home, circling around his brain, a bird squawking loudly and over everything else that was dulled.

He heard distantly “be okay, be okay, please breathe, be okay.” And that was all she said until she went quiet again, and he fingers dug into his wrinkled white shirt almost painfully. Her face turned to his neck and she pressed a kiss there, dry and chapped lips. He hadn’t cried, he never cried, but he choked at this moment, feeling her there with him and he knew she wouldn’t leave. She smelled like her laundry detergent she used, and rain, barely there from hours ago. And she smelled like turpentine that always seemed to linger around her eternally paint-stained hands and face and hair, clinging to her like a tiny fuzzy animal that warmed her and clutched her with small pudgy fingers and smiling like a child.

He felt her heart beat against his chest, and he thought he might love her, maybe. Just for her, in the middle of the rain soaked street.

There was a stinging wetness behind his eyes when he remembered, and felt the quietness touched again by the worm thoughts, and he closed his eyes tightly, and thought about death, and he loved her, and everything with his soul, everything felt sharper.

It was something distant now, to think of goodness, like yelling across a canyon to someone you thought you knew.

He felt a crushing tiredness. She knew, and she knew, and she loved him, just maybe.

The thought fluttered across his mind, a final black bird in the pink sky, of his fading hope, and his new unnamed quietness. That maybe it was new. Something, new.