You promised you’d stay with me. Even after I’d approached the magician –
There was a man who was said to live in a house of raw unfurnished brick. He was rumoured to be a magician, with one of those eerie moustaches and a quick smirk that made your knees want to bend. He was also rumoured, but perhaps rumoured with a bit more circumstance, to be a pedophile. He was said to take the virginity of underage girls – though all was consented, and the girls who fell victim fell in love with him, so the police had trouble ever pinning the guy down. Given all the rumours about him, they couldn’t pluck one whisper up and say this is the truth anyway. The man was quite clever.
I went down to the man on a Spring day, my mouth flaming from the taste of Bourbon. You see, for some reason, the girls wanted to go to the man. It was like a shared unspoken wish for them. He was oddly attractive, and he had masterful hands.
One day my sister came home. She was fifteen, and liked to think she was older. I am the mishap of the family, and everyone else seems to have a level head, so I never worried about her visiting the man. She was small and brittle and pretty enough to fall in some high school love to keep her distracted until the age where she was wiser, or even to the age where the man would not touch her – they all had to be underage. All of them. But when my sister came home, she was shaky like a loose plank. It was just me and her in our little kitchen, and she sat down at the table, holding herself, and staring at the floor. Of course I knew. When she came to, which I waited for, she asked me for a drink. I was sixteen at the time, only a year older, but I was a drinker – as I said, I am the mishap. I took some of my fathers Jack Daniel’s and put a fair shot in the glass, and slapped it in front of her. With a rattling hand she drew it to her bottom lip and downed it, as tears flew like angels down her cheeks.
With a broken voice she asked my back; “What happens now?”
And I told her; “You’re older now. Now you have to fend for yourself.” And so I left the Jack Daniels out, for her to reach, and took the Bourbon and was on my way, as my little sister sat crumbling away her old skin.
The day was bright and it felt like Summer was peaking through the sky of Spring. I knocked on his door once. I wasn’t a virgin, I wasn’t a girl, but I knew he’d like me. The most popular delinquent, someone who was feared and respected, at his front door. He would know. And of course he knew. He knew who all the kids were in this town.
And he did take me in. And he held my hand as he lead me to the room. It was a tasty blue, the smell of soft baby powder scenting the light colour. The curtains were closed, the bed was made, and the decor was outstanding. Posters, drawers, a tiny marble clock with a loud tick.
I let this man inside my body, I let him do what it is he wanted, I let him feel in charge, and I let him smile as he did so. And then I took him captive.
I sq uee zed his jaw // tightly, I thr /ew him arou//nd the ro om. I ////smashed//// his head off th e drawers he so c aref ully clea//ned. I r/i/p/p/e/d the {curtains o f f their hook, I s mas./hed the window. I to/re the du-vet into sha-/-mbles, I k.icke,d the do,or o f f it’s hin/ges, I b//rok//e his no./.se and I b//rok//e his h-and..s. I to)(ok a piece of g.l/a.s/s and dr_ew his blood //// from him and wr;o:te ‘RAPIST’ on his fore#head. I shaved his moustache. I cut his lip in half. Then I stopped.
I took a look at the devastation I had caused, as if a hurricane had left this place for rubble, and then I left.
And I told you. You promised you’d stay with me. And my friends celebrated me that night. They threw a huge party, and so many of the underage girls came and cried because that man had been destroyed, but so had a part of their life, and my friends assured me that I had done the right thing, and that night I had been crowned King of the town, and from that day on I was remembered as the boy who destroyed the magician, and me and my friends were respected even more, and we were called ‘The last of the hometown heroes.’ And we kept to that reputation. We fought every nightmare of our town. But we were so young. And the damage we inflicted took it’s toll on us. Such a burden to bear.
My friends and I decided we couldn’t keep it up anymore. We would devote our lives to our town, but our lives were dissipating, and so the younger folk, those who we inspired, would do our jobs. We had one last night, together.
I hated you. I needed to keep you away from me. We kept it all secret. We took LSD and hallucinated our day away.
I could see chemicals explode like fireworks on my skin. Me and my friends we all came together that night – in a romantic way – we connected in the only way we hadn’t connected yet. And I found myself heart-broken.
And I took it out on them. In the climax of it all I sank beneath them, and from under I raised apocalyptic hell – I brought up our lives all together and i to/re it into tassels. My friends, my family, were r/i/p/p/e/d from the inside out. And then I stopped.
I took a look at the devastation I had caused, a personal devastation, my family, brothers and sisters, crying, screaming with hoarse voices. I shook their lives and everything they stood for and it lay in wreckage.
I had gone into that place, with the mindset that this was our last day as a family, and I had been correct. After the words I had spit, with such venom, all of our steel bonds melted from the acid, and we parted our ways. Our youth and all we did in the Summer and the Spring and the Autumn will never diminish, and in that way I suppose we will always be together.
And you found me. I don’t know how long you parked in that stiff spot, but as soon as I descended from the hooded room, you jumped from the car like you were the one on LSD and pulled me into you. You reminded me of your promise, and then you sheltered my face and put me in the passenger seat and drove off, away from the disdain. I could feel the gentle glow of harmony leak into tears of jagged discord all around me. My hands felt electric as lightning, my voice thunder.
You drove for hours. You needed to get me out of here. Madness was inescapable there. By midnight the rover ran out of gas and we stopped on some road-cliff in the dark. It’s a dangerous place to be stuck, right at a turn, with no lights to show you’re present.
You panicked. I waited in the car. You made a fool of the moon, and kicked the rocks, and I knew you were the last thing I needed to fix. You were the last ember of that town I needed to add substance to. So with a final breath, I went to the trunk of the car and took out the crow-bar you kept back there. Your arms were suddenly all over me, telling me to ‘snap out of it’ and not to let ‘it’ ‘overrule me’. But I knew what I was doing. I violently smashed your car windows, I stabbed at the tyres, as you screamed hysterically at me, begging me to stop. I got on top of the the car and let it r/i/p all over. When I was done, I dismounted from the car, and I went over to where you knelt defeated. And I took your face in my hand, and I softly kissed you.
“Hurricane.”
And then I walked off as it started to rain, wandered into a different town, and prepared myself for the connection I would have with it. And even though, my heart turned backwards and pulled against me like the tide, I wouldn’t stop.
Leo Grey 