by Lila Felix
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“Love is sanity at its purest.”
Lila Felix
Despairing clouds troll in despite the sunshine on my face.
Pops of wind—bullets through my ears,
They sting without pain and pierce without knife
Gateways open the threshold
Muscles crocheted around these calloused knees of mine,
Giving my chin a bed divine
Will they see the corpse—unabashedly so.
Covered in bathing white ashes and flitters of glittery eaves.
Throbbing veins bulge and seethe against my wishes
The sunshine is all they see
Death and silence are not company for me.
Brightness. Rounds and round in circular joy
Pigtails of wet sand reflecting their need to see me
As good
As sweet
As anything but wrung out and tattered.
Sunshine
All of it.
Have the shell of me.
Dastard Shining, Aysa Branton
(Written by Lila Felix)
Ezra
My psychologist is the devil. She wears red all the time, straight skirts, stripper heels, and lipstick—sometimes all together and sometimes separately.
My brother, the priest, is scared of her too.
Not scared enough.
My brother and I came to an impasse in my counseling exactly three days after we started. For the future, I will keep in mind that my brother and I cannot talk without shouting, even in the rectory.
I had a session the day before Halloween and she was dressed up as a devil girl, red glittery horns and all. She opened the windows halfway through the session to get some air in the place—or to let her demon minions in.
Or to let the smell of brimstone and sulphur out.
That’s right, I pick the only therapist in the nation who smells like rotten boiled eggs.
Because that is my luck.
And here I am, entertaining one of the things on her list. Dating more.
I hate every second of it.
“So, Ezra is an interesting name.” What the shit is this woman talking about? She can’t just let the jazz quartet play and the Bourbon get into my system before she starts the trip down ‘awkward first date conversation’ road, could she?
This is why I don’t date, devil woman.
I tip my chin at the waiter and after a double glance at my date, he complies. From the way his eyes bulged out, I think he’s gonna bring me the bottle this time. Her name is Andy or Jesse, some boy turned girl name—if only it fit her personality.
I’m supposed to be observing her apart and separate from any—comparisons.
Which is the closest thing to impossible I’ve ever attempted.
Comparing her to anyone in particular was out of the question according to the bride of Satan.
“It’s Biblical.” I reply, aloof yet polite. I don’t want her to get attached to me in any way, not that I was a catch, but it is therapy in itself, all this dating. I don’t even want this one as a friend or a sour look in passing on the street. I’d prefer she just get up and leave while I’m still sober. She looks to the side, ignoring my reply, as a cart with the dessert offerings pass us by, more interested in that than anything I have to say.
Which is fine with me.
I give the place a once over while she pretends not to be with me. My suit is itchy and I’d much rather be home in a pair of basketball shorts, playing Xbox and pining over—you know.
But I suppose the devil knows what she’s talking about. At least, that’s what the degree on the wall says about her. In my opinion, she’s full of shit all the way up to her eyeballs.
Hearing a noise akin to a squirrel opening an acorn, I zero in on the woman in front of me and try to focus on the task at hand. The noise, now a fuse, lit and gaining ground at a rapid pace toward a bomb of a headache, was her—clacking her teeth on her black, chipped, and artificial looking fingernail. When she pulls her finger away from her mouth, a sliver of the black is caught on her eye tooth, but I don’t have the heart to tell her. Besides, it serves as a form of entertainment. It mesmerizes me. I’ve never tasted nail polish per se, but I can’t imagine how she isn’t hacking and gagging on that taste in her mouth.
Sitting back in my chair, I inhale, trying to take in all the senses of this girl who I’d asked out in the Starbucks line. She doesn’t smell like—wait—I’m not supposed to compare—she smells like fermented rain. Like someone left a piece of bread in the rain to get soggy and then it molded and got rained on again.
Speaking of bread, she’s eaten all the bread. Who does that? It’s a whole basket of bread. Would it kill her to share?
She—she—she. I really should know her name at least.
“So where do you work?”
I always squirm at this question. Girls like this with perfected bodies and less than perfected manners don’t get what I do. I work for a paycheck. I’m not, nor have I ever been, interested in status, socially or financially. The factory pays me for eight hours and I leave my work at the time clock. I don’t have to pull long hours and come home with a briefcase and there’s no client dinners to take me away from anything or anyone.
“At a motorcycle parts factory.” I shrug, pre-excusing myself from whatever criticism she’s sure to offer.
“Oh. That sounds interesting.”
The waitress appears and though I’m not supposed to, I mentally compare her to the one on the pedestal.
The devil woman said I couldn’t compare my date, not the waitress, or the lady sitting at the table next to me, or the hostess or anyone else within a breath.
“Hi Patty!” The waitress apparently recognizes the woman across from me and now I know her name—Patty. Patty is not really a boy turned girl name, but it’s close to Pat, so I let myself slide.
When Patty answers the waitress’ question about what she’s been up to, she rolls her
eyes toward me while she responds.
She must be having as much fun as I am.
A girl with strawberry blonde hair passes outside. Her hair is straighter than—and her hips aren’t quite as rounded as—and she’s not hiding like…
I push back a thought, vowing not to allow her name to fill my throat and try to escape. It escapes too often—it doesn’t escape often enough. I hate not talking about her.
It feels like she died instead of killing me.
Like she drowned instead of filling me with emptiness.
Like she tipped over the edge of a cliff and took me with her.
“Evan, what will you be getting?”
Patty is poking the hell out of the laminated menu in front of me as her recently re-acquainted friend tapped her pen on her notebook, needing to move on to her next table.
“It’s Ezra. And the chicken marsala.”
This was an Italian place. I hoped they had chicken marsala.
Then again, nothing about the whole scenario was right.
Nothing in my life is quite right anymore.
Aysa
From the sixth to the eighth grade I wore a hemp necklace, more of a choker. All the girls want them and at the time I was still trying to fit it, laughably so.
I’d bought it at Claire’s with a gift card from school for being student of the month. They obviously thought that I was studious enough already—I would’ve preferred a gift card to the local bookstore. I’d flicked through the lot of them. Even back then I was a conundrum, wanting to be the same yet different all at once. I remembered not wanting the ones with the hearts or the little cupids with arrows. A necklace like that was advertising my need for love, in my eyes. Finally, at the bottom of the rows, all the way in the back, I found one with a pair of doves on it. There was also a shell and some kind of turquoise bead. For the first three days, it scratched the hell out of me, but I refused to take it off—it was the only badge of honor I’d ever bought for myself—a reward for being me.
Toward the end of the eighth grade, I went to a pool party at a friend’s house. Her family owned a pool that had a waterfall and little niches cut in the foundation to make seats. That was the night I’d met Bill. He was nice and had eyelashes that looked almost fake.
But I couldn’t get past his name. It made me think of a pelican bill—or a hat bill—or a pill.
I’d shivered as he hooked his finger under that necklace, the one I thought made me look sexy and dangerous. Because that’s what all chokers do, right?
Despite my aversion to his name, I’d given Bill my phone number.
The next morning, I had two great disappointments that, in others’ books, wouldn’t have been that big of a deal. One was my best friend texting me—apparently Bill had spent the evening with a desperate redhead and was now spreading rumors about her lack of self-control with him in the pool. The other was two rusted doves sitting on a necklace that should’ve been replaced a long time ago, or never purchased in the first place.
Salt water and cheap necklaces don’t mix.
The ghost of that necklace haunted me for two weeks after I tossed it in to the trash along with any hope of Bill. I could still feel the weight of it along my neck. In my mind, I still envisioned outfits completed by its position on my neck.
That cheap necklace stayed with me far longer than it should have.
Then again, maybe it was me, because for the life of me, I couldn’t shake the weight of Ezra either. He hung around my neck, choking and strangling the life from me, reminding me of who he was and which one of us had opened the clasp and let him fall to the floor.
I had to let him go. Too many people had caged him in one way or the other for his entire life and I’d be damned if I’d be another owner to feed him treats and ask him to repeat my sentiments for a cracker.
That didn’t mean he didn’t keep me company at night, in my dreams and in my heart.
I see a sliver of light beneath my bedroom door. There’s a light on in the living room and it pesters me.
Roman is asleep on my couch again. On the weekends, he is usually around. I don’t know if he is protecting me from Ezra or protecting Ezra from me. For the first three weeks, his name was purposely avoided in conversations. Having had my fill of them ignoring it, I went on a binge and used his name as a curse word, my verbs and everything else for an entire day just to get my point across. I sounded like Papa Smurf. Get the Ezra away from me. I’m gonna go Ezra some pizza.
They got the point.
And though I’d made sure he wasn’t tiptoed around, I hated to hear them talk about him—what he was doing.
Yet, I crave it at the same time.
Night after night, I’d sit in my bed, staring at that Godforsaken box on my dresser. It fascinated me. It could be something that broke me. It could be something that melted me down to a puddle and forced me to flow to his feet.
I could easily push it to the back of my mind, but Roman demands I face it every once in a while and before any good mornings can be had, he’s doing it again.
“Why don’t you just open it babe?”
Roman calls me babe, now. I hate it. Not in a hate to love it way. I flat out hate it.
I can’t even pinpoint the moment when it started.
I do know that one day a kiss to my temple turned into more kisses to my face and I’m sure there would’ve been more—except I backed away.
We teetered on the edge of things better left unsaid, though I’d said them millions of times.
He forced our intimacy. It was a pathetic substitute, but I accepted it selfishly.
Roman is kept close enough for me but far enough away for him.
“It’s better this way.” That unopened package proves to me that it was all real. That for a second I had Ezra’s love and maybe it matched the strength of mine—maybe it didn’t. Either way, that unopened package tells me he was here—he was once mine—he is gone and I’d sent him away—for his own good.
Someone in his life had to do something for his own good.
“It torments you. It’s like that weird beating heart in the cement.”
Forgiving the night for not gifting me sleep, I toss back the covers and jump out of the bed, hoping that a change of scenery will halt the gears of thought about all of the what ifs.
“What in the holy hell are you talking about?”
I pass him and he reaches for me like he always does. I make sure he never makes contact. Our relationship is exhausting now, but pushing him away would hurt too much.
I need him.
Because I have no one else and just this once I have to have someone to lean on.
I hate to hurt him over and over again, but he is seeking something I can’t spare and somehow in the back of my mind, I know that if I allow it, my skin would remember that he is not Ezra.
My skin knows the difference.
I wonder if there is some kind of skin memory wiper.
“You know that story where the guy kills someone and buries the heart beneath his bed, but he hears it beating in the night?”
“The Tell-Tale Heart?”
“Yes, that one.”
I exhale and put the kettle on the stove. Tea has become my liquid soother. I’d never drank a lot of coffee since it put my normal paranoia into a drama spiral. And coffee reminds me of him.
This godforsaken kitchen reminds me of him.
Breathing reminds me of him.
It has been seven months since I’ve last seen him—seven. Which means that it is almost a year to the day that I met him. I was so stupid. When he’d pushed me over in that church, I should’ve taken it as a sign. The whole thing could’ve been avoided. If I would’ve stayed on the ground, forgotten about the rosary and those eyes that wouldn’t let me rest, I could still be okay.
“It doesn’t torment me, Roman. It reminds me that some things are better left a mystery.”
He scrunches his mouth up in defiance. Poor Roman, despite my clear as g
lass talk with him about us never having anything other than a platonic relationship, he still gets irked when I talk about Ezra—and he still tries to hold my hand sometimes—and he tells me he loves me all the time.
Wearing me down is turning into wearing me razor thin. He is my friend, but he has to stop.
“My birthday is next week.”
He and I both know that his birthday was next week. What he is really hinting at is that Ezra has been invited and we would be in the same room for the first time since that day that I ripped his heart out and mine simultaneously.
Raising up on my tiptoes to get some tea bags from the cabinet, I look over my shoulder and try to conjure a facial expression that would read ‘calm the hell down’. “It’s going to be fine, Roman. It’s your birthday. Nothing can ruin that.”
“I can think of one thing.” He mumbles. I go along with him, pretending I didn’t hear what he said.
“Anyway, I got you the best present.”
He smiles, but it isn’t real.
“I think I’m gonna go back home.” He shuts the refrigerator door harder than necessary. I am hurting him. Just breathing and needing him here, even as a friend, is hurting him.
“Be careful.” There is no point in trying to stop him.
It is still early. It only takes a half hour of staring at a box for me to know that there is no way I’d get much sleep until I face it. Looking at the door, I know Roman was right. This thing will continue to plague me if I let it.
I can do this.
Ezra
Shopping for another man’s birthday present should be against the law. There should be some bromance personal shoppers to do it for me. I will gladly pay a hefty fee for someone to do this for me.
“Sir, can I help you with anything?”
“I’m trying to find a gift for a friend of mine.”
There is a bloated pause and I know what is coming next. “Oh, a girlfriend?”
For once, I want to say yes.
Yes, there’s a gorgeous redhead waiting for me at home, under a ridiculous amount of blankets.
Because she’s always cold.
“No, it’s for a man-friend of mine.”
That doesn’t sound curious at all.
The blonde girl perks up at my reply. “Sure. Is he a gamer?”
