Rhymes With Nothing (pt 4).

You’re sitting on John’s chest, your fist cocked back, your entire body shaking, a single screaming note of outrage escaping you, and when a man screams his voice tends to go high-pitched and awful, like that of a pig knowing it’s about to be slaughtered. John has his arms up to fight you off and you are simultaneously horrified and exhilarated, because the son-of-a-bitch sure sees you now, doesn’t he? How many times has John stared at the floor, the wall, the ceiling until you went away? How many times have you watched the man you love turn you off like an old television from the seventies, the kind that fades gradually until the picture compresses into a tiny white dot? You’re a man, god dammit, a man, and men are not to be dismissed like some hysterical housewife: men fight. But John dodges out of your grip and runs out of the room; you hear the car start. All of this has happened before, and before that, and before that too.


*

The kid walks him through the cemetery’s curving, quiet roads and stifling pine trees, all the way to the river on the other side – the plots end well before they reach the water, the ground scoured of old graves by the flood that had cheapened the land and brought him and John to this state in the first place. There is no preamble or pretense – the kid simply points across the river to the bank on the other side, where Lee sees scorched, smoking land blasted and charred with cinders, and a million times a million more of the damned clawing at the burning dirt.

Lee staggers, gagging. He’s there? he coughs out. John? My John is there?

The kid, January, son of the Liars who people say walk anywhere they want, anyplace at all, shakes his head yes with certainty. His eyes are overlayed orange on top of blue, the pinwheels spinning so fast that Lee believes anything he says. Everything.

I can’t live without him, he said hoarsely. I just can’t. I can’t. I can’t at all.

The kid reaches for Lee’s hand and he is unable to refuse; like a child he is led back through the cemetery, and the kid’s throat is bleeding and there is blood in his teeth, and the grass at their feed is as sharp as knives and the trees are made of bone. The pain doesn’t end until they are back at the diner, back in the blaring sunlight, back into the real that never did anyone a damned bit of good.

The kid lets go of him and goes to the back door, stooping to pick up his plate. There is still blood in his eyes. The sun overhead is like a hole in the sky. The kid goes inside.