We sat side by side on the bus and he told me a story, playing with my words. His eyes glowed as he spun this yarn, this skein of words and flow. I interjected, adding details, but mostly let it drift over me. There’s a room at the end of an alleyway, he said, an alley which grows more narrow as you reach a little door. It’s rough planking, tied together with twine, small enough to duck through, like it was made for a dwarf. Inside is a small room, filled with wires, with a small space in the center, just large enough to stand in without touching anything. It could be a hide-out for a child if it weren’t in such a bad part of town. There are shelves lining all the walls and sculptures made from twisted coat hangers cover every surface. They’re hung from the ceiling like model airplanes and tacked to the wall with little pieces of chewing gum. The floor is rough cement, though clean, but for a small drop of what might be blood, right in the middle, but it’s not noticeable in the visual jumble. The coat hangers are everywhere, twisted into incomprehensible shapes.
A person enters this door, unhooks the latch of grubby string and steps inside. He tells me this with his peculiar grin, which says there’s a joke coming. They avoid the coat hanger sculptures until they have space all around them, until they’ve found the middle. They look around and realize if they shift just right, it becomes a story, one giant picture. All the wire meshing into a grand diorama and then they look up. It’s more than genius. The coat hangers have become a sweep of birds, seagulls looking grander than the flying rats they are. Their head turns to follow the flow and one deadly piece of wire, sticking out from all the others, catches them in the eye and kills them, leaving on perfect drop of blood on the floor to match the other as they crumple and fall.
Maybe later somebody drags the body away.
I remember kissing him as I write this. A drunken evening that bled into a morning where he promised he would share and my hands smoothing his gold hair behind his ear. He doesn’t taste of storm static, but something infinitely different. There’s another layer of history patina which could be partially because he’s one of the first people I ever kissed. In the Top Ten, High Fidelity style. In spite of a unique feeling left on my tongue, it makes me think that he tastes like remembering things. A pale weight which dissolves into smoke, like the memory of a voiced idea with undertones of something untouchable, like I’m not tall enough to reach it yet.
