If I could, I’d neatly gather the reasons why I like you into rows, call them to attention and have them salute me. They’d stand feet together, back tall, their hands zipping in a quick, neat slash and await my command.

And then, as they look at me stony faced and maybe just a little bit eager, I’d obliterate them all.

I’d blast them all away in a volley of shrapnel and gunfire, catch them unassuming the same way you caught me. They’d keep their rank and file because they are good little reasons, they are behaved, and they’ll let me wreck my raging havoc until not a single one stands, until even the smallest ones at the very back of the formation are counted as a casualty.

The guns are warm in my hands and smoking. Craters litter the ground and make pockmarks in what was once lush green grass. There is an eerie quiet; the wind moans as it blows over the plain.

Pulling my cap down over my eyes, I smile.

I turn, and I march away.

The music infected her. It surrounded her, pressed against her, and settled into her bones, liquefying marrow as it congealed blood and sweat into one mass, vibrating through her until she was helpless and the only option was to succumb to it, to raise her arms and thrash and sway. Adriana looked at her dancing partner and smirked, seeing the bravado in his movements, the clumsy jerks and odd isolations as he tried to beat her, tried to gain more cheers from the circle of people that had surrounded them. She rolled her eyes, grinning, and flipped her hair in his direction as she spun away, the ends catching his face. She barely caught the sound of laughter before it was drowned by the music.

She looked back at him over her shoulder, saw him laughing as he extended his hands to her, palms up. He said something, but the words were carried away. Adriana edged closer. “What?”

“You’re too wild!” he shouted, and Adriana smiled only because the line was a mimicry of what her brother always said to her. Her partner knew this, and she suspected he said it to get a rise from her, but the tone of the words from his lips were more impressed than scornful and so the effect was lost.

She winked at him and answered, true to form, with the same reply she usually said to her brother. “Better beastly than compliant, Nico.”

Her partner—Nico—laughed again and shook his head, slinging an arm around her shoulders and twirling her hard. His movements were a bit clumsy, and Adriana figured it wouldn’t be too outrageous an idea to consider him slightly drunk. “Can you believe,” he was saying into her ear, gesticulating wildly with his free hand, “that Riley almost left you home? Wasn’t gonna bring you. Took me and all the guys to convince him. We said we’d all pitch in and help him keep an eye on you.” He ruffled the back of her hair, careful not to disrupt the pins she used to pull back her bangs, and Adriana smacked his hand away with a scowl, annoyed at the newfound information.

“What an asshole. I’m not thirteen anymore.” She ducked under Nico’s arm and tried to dart away, but his fingers caught the back of her jacket with surprising nimbleness for someone who was tipsy and tugged her back, making her shout in indignation. She struggled and writhed, but Nico only laughed and pulled her back under the heavy weight of his arm.

“C’mon, Adriana,” he said, grunting when she caught him in the ribs with her elbow. He shot her a look, but kept her pinned to him. “He only does it to keep you safe.”

“Keeping me safe is one thing and treating me like I’m completely incapable is another. You’d think he’d have a little more faith in me.” She looked around the crowd, searching for a familiar brown head, but anger and indignation bled her vision red. She started pulling toward any brown head she saw, only to stop abruptly when they turned and revealed themselves not to be her brother. After a few moments of futile searching, she looked up at Nico, her brows nearly meeting in the middle. “Where is he?”

He smirked at her, clearly amused by her attempts. “Oh, but Dri, you were doing so well by yourself.”

Her hand twitched, and an itch started in her fingertips before coursing up through her palm, eventually crossing its way into her arm, her lungs, her heart. Heat exploded in her and colored her cheeks and when she narrowed her eyes, Nico sensed the danger. He lifted his hand and pointed. “Over there. Right over there. You passed him twice.”

She ducked under his arm and Nico let her go this time. Adriana craned her neck to try and see over the writhing crowd, looking for empty gaps between bodies covered with glitter and sweat. It took her a moment, but she finally spotted her brother after jostling some people out of the way, Nico apologizing on her behalf as he trailed after her.
Adriana’s brother, Riley, was grinning and talking with a girl, leaning forward to tap the neck of their beer bottles together. Adriana imagined the clink of the glass, and the sight of her brother so nonchalant made her even angrier. Who was he, a mere three years older than her, to act as if she were naught but twelve years old and try to keep her from doing what she pleased?

She made a small noise of contempt, turning on her heel and rounding on Nico so suddenly that the man had to take a step back in surprise, looking down at her with raised eyebrows. “Adriana?”

“Make sure he sees me. And I hope you don’t get into too much trouble.” She smiled up at him, the white of her teeth flashing before she’s off, darting in the opposite direction and zigzagging through the crowd to lose her undercover bodyguard. Adriana kept her eyes peeled for the familiar faces of her brother’s friends—for a familiar face in general—as she moved towards the edge of the roof, shimmying through people that laughed at her and reached out to try to touch the red and orange streaks in her hair.

She let herself go in the beat of the music, let herself become a whirl of recklessness and orange, red, blonde, brown hair. Adriana leaned too close to boys she isn’t interested in, bumped hips with girls she doesn’t know, but it’s easy to forget in the music. Easy to pretend that she wasn’t constantly living in the shadows and shackles of her brother. She plucked someone’s beer from their hands and tipped half of it down her throat—an extremely reckless move, but at the moment she didn’t care, she just hoped her brother saw and would be livid—before returning it to their hands, smiling and saying, “thanks, babe” without seeing the face. 

Adriana adjusts her rhythm when the music slows, bending her knees and rocking from side to side, giggling when boys looked at her and let their eyes skim over her bare chest, linger on her neck and cleavage, take in the look of her legs encased in slick leather. She winked her kohl-rimmed eyes at them, watched them lick their lips as she threw her hair over one shoulder, a flash of flame.

As she danced, Adriana hoped her brother was watching and hoped that he was growing more livid with each passing moment. But most of all, she hoped looked wild. She hoped that these people thought she was beastly.

Rima was sizing him up, and she made no effort whatsoever to hide the fact from him. Twice her eyes scanned him slowly, the downturned corners of her mouth telling him without words that she did not trust him.

He tried to play it nonchalantly, his expression the perfect balance between apathy and mischievousness. It was that precise control of his emotions that made her wary, the way that he could control even the minutest quirking of the brow into exactly what he wanted to convey. She envied him for it just as much as she distrusted him, knowing that any displeasure or joy would be broadcasted across her own face whether she wished it or not. She watched him lean back against the protective rail of the roof, the line of his body speaking of languor, and ruffle through his dirty blonde hair with his free hand. “Like what you see?” he asked.

She didn’t humor him. Rima merely snapped her eyes to him and scowled, feeling the venom of her expression sinking into the lines of her face. She stood at least six or seven feet from him, every part of her held rigid as she glared.

He chuckled and shook his head. “You’re very ugly when you do that.” He said it matter-of-factly, his voice light enough that it didn’t quite sound like an insult, but she took it as one anyway. “It’s your eyes, I think. Too amber. When you frown, it makes you look savage,” he pauses to gauge her reaction before continuing with a baleful grin, “and, of course, we know that’s my job.”

Rima tried very, very hard to keep the fury out of her expression, to make sure that he did not know that his veiled threat had upset her so, but when he laughed she knew that she had lost the battle of tamping down her emotions. She felt her cheeks flare and her ears burn, the blood pounding through her making her feel like the world would start spinning.

He pushed off the wall and took a step forward, prompting her to step backwards. His eyes flicked to her backpedaling feet before focusing again on her face, a smile that was by no means friendly spreading across his lips. “You were quite the chatterbox downstairs with your brother. What’s wrong? Lost your nerve without your safety net?”

“I could kill you.” She blurted the words out without thinking about them, but the moment they were spoken she wished desperately to fish them back, to push them into her mouth with both hands and swallow them so that they burned in her stomach instead. She could kill him, yes, but only if he didn’t kill her first. Quickly, Rima tried for bravado. “I could set you on fire. You’d be a pile of ash before you knew what was going on and even you can’t come back from that. I could kill you, Elias. I could.”

He stared at her a moment with wide eyes, his eyebrows lifted in surprise and she had a second to wonder if he meant for his expression to look that way before she was flinching at the sound of his laughter. It was not a nice laugh, Rima decided. It wasn’t husky and infectious but rather dark, clanging like metal and much too sharp. It sent shivers down her spine but not in a good way, not at all.

She would never admit it out loud, but Rima was afraid. And as Elias continued laughing, bending at the waist and clutching at his own stomach, she felt herself becoming more and more scared, felt the blood draining from her face as she moved two more steps back.

And suddenly, he was a blur, wicked fast as he slammed her back into the metal door that lead downstairs. Her head cracked against the metal and throbbed, but as black danced in her vision Rima was still coherent enough to realize that this was not safe, that he was a vampire and the fact that he had covered the roughly twenty-foot distance in the blink of an eye did not tip anything in her favor.

He had his hand against the column of her throat, not choking, but firmly enough that it was uncomfortable when she swallowed. His fingers were a vice on her jaw, pushing her head back against the door and Rima was scared, so, so scared that he would pull her forward only to slam her back again. His other arm was braced above her head, leaving her hands free but Rima knew, without a doubt in her heart, that Elias knew how terrified she was, knew perfectly well that she was so frozen in her fear that she wouldn’t lash out, not now. He leaned in close to her and her lip trembled, her heart battering in her chest as she wrenched her eyes shut, feeling tears well in them.

“I should rip out that smart tongue of yours,” he whispered, the scent of blood and wine on his breath washing over her. “It’d be a wonderful trophy to present back to my sire, wouldn’t you agree? Her little firebird silenced so that it couldn’t yap about how it could kill a vampire.” His fingers tightened and she let out a little sound of protest, keeping her eyes resolutely shut. “Your fire, you have to mentally will it, don’t you? You have to see in your mind’s eye someone engulfed in flames before it actually happens. Fine and dandy when you’re using it against someone who’s your pathetic equal, maybe even a sluggish werewolf if you’re lucky. But a vampire? But me? You’ll be dead before you can even conjure my face in your mind, Rima. Don’t forget it.”

His laugh in her ear made Rima nauseous, and she felt the traitorous tears roll their path down her cheeks, felt the vibration of Elias’ laugh in his chest and she hated him, hated all that he was and all that he stood for.

“Let’s hear you say it,” he murmured. “‘I won’t forget, Elias.’ Go on. Say it.”

She opened her eyes, the world blurry through tears, and saw the feral planes of his face in front of hers. She tightened her jaw, her lips pressed together, and Elias’ eyes narrowed when he saw the show of defiance.

Just as she had earlier feared, he pulled her forward to knock her back into the door and the sob that flew from her lips made her burn with shame. “Say it!”

“I won’t forget!” she cried, the words ragged and shrill, “I won’t forget, I won’t forget.”

He smirked at her and released his fingers. Though he backed off of her, Rima was too frozen with shock to move, pinned still by an invisible body. Her breath came in and out of her erratically, the sheen of cold sweat on her face catching the dim evening light. She stared at him, the tears still making tracks down her face, and shuddered when he smiled a bright, friendly smile in return, as if he hadn’t just all but concussed her.

“Good.” His hands slid into his back pockets as he cocked his head at her, the smile still fixed. “Make sure you don’t.”

He smells like petrichor and has a thunderclap smile, there and gone in the time it took you to blink. He makes her feel like running sometimes, the same way she ran to get out of the rain (but she usually doesn’t run from fear of seeming silly, childish). She doesn’t run in the rain, and she doesn’t run from him.

He touches her and it makes her think flowers will bloom along the path his fingers trace. She smiles, leans into his touch, (it’s not as romantic as it sounds, though, in fact it’s rather sad because her skin is barren and cracked and flowers will never bloom in that type of ground) and imagines. He leans in close, whispers in her ear, and she can’t make out the words he says but figures that if she thinks of the sound of rain on a tin roof, it’s close enough.

He has a funny habit of lingering too long on things that don’t matter and not long enough on things that do. He’s a bit too volatile for her taste, a little too sharp (sometimes the things he says wounds her, but she’ll smile and carry on regardless because he doesn’t mean it, the words out like a lightning bolt before he can think, and he always apologizes afterwards) and she figures that he’ll ruin her but she’s always liked the feel of rain on her face.  

Somehow, she stands resolute against him (granted he batters her some days more than others, but she has yet to crumble) and when he marvels at her strength, she’ll just wink (because she knows it’s not strength at all but rather fear—she won’t fall simply because she doesn’t know how).

He’s rain (she’s not, but she isn’t sunshine either) and he makes her feel, even if it’s just the feel of the pressure before the hurricane, the eerie calm before a sudden gale. He’s not anything she needs, but she contends the fact that he’s just enough of what she wants (because what she needs, she decides, she will find in herself) and that, to her, is plenty adequate (neither a storm nor a drought but a drizzle).

Wyatt figured it was either a very odd turn of events or the world’s cruelest practical joke that he should be in a grocery market helping his friend buy the food for a birthday party that would also covertly celebrate his friend finally getting the girl—

that he used to, still does, love.

He wandered the aisles with his friend, eyes flicking over but not taking in the multitude of colored plastic plates and it wasn’t until the other man tapped him on the shoulder that he realized he was trying to get his attention. “Sorry, what?”

The other man frowned at him, annoyance flashing momentarily in eyes that were almost too blue. “I said, do you think I should get the red plates or the blue? Or maybe the clear, now that I think about it…”

He raised an eyebrow. “Travis, man, since when in the hell did you care about what color plates to get?”

Travis smiled, a little hunch in his shoulders telling of his sheepishness. “I don’t, but, y’know, I wanna get something that’ll make Cybele happy. I mean, it’s only been like four months so I’m not sure she’d care but don’t women usually get really picky about that? I know Diana was.”

“Cybele’s not Diana.” The words come out startlingly brisk, even harsh, and the tone of them surprised Wyatt. If Travis even noticed, he did a fine job of not showing his surprise.

He saw the slow, private grin that slid across Travis’s lips and had the sudden, almost overwhelming urge to slam his knuckles into Travis’s mouth. “No,” Travis murmured, sliding the clear plastic plates from the shelf, “you’re right. She’s definitely not.”

This was insane, thought Wyatt. How was it that Cybele had never told Travis? How was it that, with all the billions of people and trillions of circumstances, that the stars would align and he’d find himself in the presence of the one girl he’d ever wholeheartedly loved with her current boyfriend, who happened to be his best friend from college, reunited through work and the most uncanny coincidences? And most of all, how was it that he got wrapped into helping buy the damn party supplies?

Travis looked him over after pitching the plates into the cart. “Hey, man, is everything okay? You look kind of pale.”

Wyatt looked away. ‘I look kind of pale because I know that your girlfriend doesn’t like crunchy peanut butter or blueberry muffins but she does like cream cheese with Ritz and refrigerated brownies. Not to mention the fact that I also know exactly where to touch and where to kiss and what to do to make her breathless. Do you?’

“Yeah,” Wyatt said, shaking his head. “Everything’s straight.”

Placing his hands on the shopping cart, he pushed resolutely through the aisles, walking past boxes of Ritz and brownie mix as Travis scrambled after him.

I am not a poet.

I am not a poet because the brevity terrifies me, because the beautiful schooling of words into neat verses and stanzas is something I am incapable of doing. My finesse is not gossamer-fine and springtime delicate. It is not feather-down soft and mist fragile. It is loud, it is rough, and mostly it is ugly.  Sentences often run into words and squeeze between commas and semicolons and in poetry, it is clever, it is an enjambment, but in prose it is sloppy and unrefined, a run-on that is an indicator of untalented work. My protagonists flounder as they drown in words and half-formed plots, twirling amongst words like treacherous, perilous, and risky while reaching, straining for triumph and sanctuary.

The middle is not so much a brief interlude as it is a monolith of—unnecessary—action. No one’s thoughts are cohesive, none of their choices matching with their thought process. Nothing makes sense, everything is a tumble and whirl of past participle and verbs and adverbs, and as I read over it I only realize that I cannot be precise and exact as those blasted, beautiful poets. 

The ends are even worse, because they are neither thoughtful nor clever. They are not provoking, but instead pathetic. They usually cause someone to wrinkle their nose, to wonder ‘That’s it?’ and decide, resolutely, that what I thought to be profound is merely a cop-out.  

For that reason, I am not a poet. I am not, I am not, I am not.  This here, my friend, is a cop-out.

It is a quiet night, the kind where the silence makes you shiver and pull the blanket around your shoulders, up to your chin, and withdraw into yourself, because it is a night meant to be solitary. If it is clear enough, I might throw back the curtains of my window and stare up at the dark sky, counting stars and taking note of the crescent moon as I fashion a lingering cloud into a unicorn, a shoe, a leaf with my mind. 

You will not cross my mind. I will not trace your name in the twinkling stars and I will definitely not press my hand against the cold glass to imagine that, maybe, you stood on the other side of my window, dark and unseen and, most of all, intangible.

When I lay myself down to sleep, burrowing myself into a feather coverlet that does nothing to mimic the warmth of a body, I will not think of the muscles that ripple in your back when you stretch over me to switch out the bedside lamp when I’ve drowsed off, barely awake and mostly asleep. I will not feel a phantom kiss pressed against my temple and my mind will most certainly not conjure the sound of a deep, husky chuckle that is roughened from two parts whiskey and one part cheap cigarettes.

I will lay alone, curled on my side with my eyes squeezed shut in vain hopes that if I bolster every flimsy inch of me with comets and steel-satellites and grind my teeth to the point that the dull, radiating pain will remind me that I will not miss you.

Does it work like that? If you wish it and want it—your heart, I mean—will it cease mid-crack from breaking? Will a fissure form right down the middle of it, between a ventricle and an artery and travel and grow, but eventually stop a centimeter, a millimeter from splitting it right into two because you said, “No, heart, not today. Today, today my friend you will hold.”?

As I lay on a mattress that is entirely too cold and a tad bit too soft, tracing circles with my finger into a pillow a bit too warm and entirely too firm, I will figure that it doesn’t quite work like that, that the world isn’t quite as kind as I hope it to be.

Alone, cold but not frigid, melancholy but not devastated, I will figure that there are worse things than heartbreak and that, should I want to learn to live without you, I had better start now.

Rolling onto my stomach, I’ll lean over and turn out the lamp with the very tips of my fingers, let my hand wander to the window and linger on the cool pane but not touch the glass, and then return nearly every part of me—heart excluded—into my warm bed.

I’ll close my eyes, heave my last sigh of the night, and fall asleep to thoughts that are not sorrowful, but ruminative, and not for the last time wonder where you are, if you’re dancing with girls made of fairy dust and dreams or if you, too, have fallen prey to a loneliness that you’ll nurse with fire and ill-disguised vehemence.

Whether you want to or not, you will sing for me beautiful things. I will wrench your jaw open, hold it there with steel and iron and with my bare hand clawing into you, I will pull the kindness out of your body that you have so firmly ferreted away. I will ignore your gags and your choking just as you have ignored the cries of those around you, their crestfallen smiles and their dying glimmer.

You will be benign; I will make you so.

Once I pull it from you, I will dash your rancor to the ground, watch it shatter like clouded crystal and I will not flinch when you scream around my metal pry, the noise vibrating against the bars that lock your mouth widewidewide open. Bile will rise in your throat—I figure that bitterness acted as a stopper—and flow out of your mouth to stain your tawny dress, dripping like acid down your front as you moan and writhe against me. I will not smile for this is not happy work but instead merely work.

I will dig my hand into that cavern where your heart should lie. My fingers will tear past flesh and cloth, puncture meat and muscle and you will curse at me, your tongue forming noises that your lips cannot finish, the syllables broken and feral as they fly into the air. My hand will fist around malignancy twice as large as a human heart should be. Around the narrowest part I will squeeze my fingers, and with a brutal sudden jerk, I will tear it from your ribs and your body as your arch your back to try to keep it within you. The laugh to escape my lips is cold and without humor. I will set the still-beating tumor beside my foot to burn later.

You will be but a ruin, with your burning eyes and blackened mouth and gaping, twitching, open chest. I will stare at you, contemplating, and for good measure I will tear that profane and godless tongue from your jaws, feel your teeth scrape away my skin as I jerk my hand back. That I will throw far, far away, so that your words will hurt no one forevermore.

My work will be finished, then, and I will stare down at you as I stand. Your breaths will be harsh and rattling, your eyes glassy and delirious with pain and humiliation. I will shake my head, wipe my stained hands on the front of my pants and collect your tumor in one arm.

I will walk away, because even without your mangled heart and your malice and your vitriolic tongue, your soul is still an abomination.

And I, perhaps a liar, am by no means an exorcist.

Your name litters the pages of my worn and yellowed moleskine and the curvature of the letters settle in dark, smeared ink. Your words fill the moments of my breaths as your bones grind into the bend of my body, your cursed presence lingering in every unsaid word and corner-of-the-eye glance. You trail a path of devastation and destruction in your wake and people are powerless but to cower in your presence.

Your voice is the ranging and jangling and banging in my ear and even as I press my palms against my head I cannot drown you out as your screams fill my mind and reverberate through my body and batter the lovely things out of my skull to make room for your horror and infect my lungs to stain them black with your violence and steal my breath from me—

IcannotbreatheIcannotbreathe

But nonetheless I am sprinting next to you, trying to reach out to curl my fingers into your shirt only to find that you are as substantial as smoke and lies. I am opening my mouth to howl at you but all that leaves it are gasps and thick black fluid which I am not at liberty to name (though I have been told it is a mixture of heartache, ink, and poison).

Eventually I will fall and you will not be there beside me, instead pages ahead and unfurling into a story I cannot pen. Your whim will fill another heart, will blacken another soul, and I will be left the ruins of your muse.

And to think that we are to be left a story untold.

You were everything I could never hope to be and everything I was expected to fear. Standing too close to you was a danger in itself; your personality was tempestuous at best and absolutely malefic at worst. You shouldn’t have been interesting in your horror, but I think that horror is what captivated me.

You caught me staring one day, and I am sure that it was that exact moment that I realized you were not a normal boy, that the warnings I’ve heard about you were absolutely true. Your eyes glinted something wicked, the color odd as it shifted between deep brown and hazel, and you met my eyes unflinchingly, flashing me a jaunty smile. Like what you see?

I looked away, startled and frightened by the inhumanity in your eyes, but in the back of my mind you lingered, made hazy by fog as you were illuminated by moonlight, eyes the only thing sharp in the mist. Like what you see?

I didn’t, because you were hard-angled and frigid. Your manner was reckless, your thinking cruel. You lacked a beating, true heart, and I wanted no part in that.

I had no want for a boy who had one hand grasping humanity, the rest of him dangling into savagery.

I was curious, yes, I was interested. But I was not stricken. I was not enthralled nor mesmerized.

I simply wanted to understand the monster that lurked within the shell of a boy that had too bright eyes and too dark smiles.