I don’t know what happened. The sun began torturing the moon. Everything visible was scraped with light. The peonies dripped petals in the hedge, and my mind told me everything was directly adjacent to its normal orientation. I had no family to drag me back inside away from the sky. My apartment sat empty. There was a book called Process and Reality on the shelf, there was an alocasia with spider mites. It’s not quite true. I had some family left, but they were distant and insular, withered by their own self-absorption. Having turned inward, they had nothing to occupy their mouths except their own problems. I lay paralyzed in the grass. The house made repeated gurgling noises, and water fell out of a pipe on the side. There were other people living there. I had two neighbors. The apartments were small and connected by holes in the walls. I could sometimes smell smoke.
Loving men had changed me. A clover trembled in the breath leaving my nose. The light had me pinned on the front lawn. I saw, through trial and error, that I wasn’t interested in seizing the vibrating object of love, but rather in manufacturing episodes of pursuit. I wanted to be alive when it was happening, but not before, after, or between. I hated what it looked like from the outside. My family never made eye contact.
A man came walking down the sidewalk, his face, like everything, scraped with light. I saw him before my eyes did. He looked at me bent in the grass and stopped. “What’s happening?” he said, looking at the sky.
I bolted upright. The uncertainty of his question and the insecurity in his voice gave me absurd strength. His gestures were soaked in self-pity, and I felt vigorous in his anxious presence. My purpose began to accumulate around his loss. This vulnerability, a great need for a hand or mountain. The air smelled like peonies. He looked up at the sky again. “What is this?”
Was he weak in the light? Beautiful? Incomplete? He looked at me wonderingly, and I imagined his face in a softer light. “The first law,” I said. “Someone broke it.” He didn’t understand. “Don’t you know the three laws?” Laws of what, he wondered. No man is this innocent. A car drove by in the wrong lane, its driver trying to look at the sky. “What are you talking about?” the man asked again. He was cute in the light. He was troubled and ugly. I could love just about any man, but it put me farther away from everything else. I did it anyway, knowing something of the cost. It wasn’t a choice.
I began to tell him about the three laws. “Bring two teenage boys to the Face every 48 hours. Always walk away from Night-holes. Don’t touch the Orchestra unless-“
“Enough!” the man screamed. He shook his head vigorously, giving me a headache. He bent down in the grass. “I’m sorry,” I said. I got down with him. His sadness filled my abdomen with flowers that were opening. “It’s okay.” He put his hands in my lap. His face was in the grass. His lips pitied the worms. “It’s okay,” I said. “You’re a good boy.” The comfort I offered or the sadness he presented made me recklessly horny. That’s what the longing is for. The cavity. I could be okay with this tableau until something happened to change it. Let them starve in waiting for a crescendo. I’ve had enough of limitations. The world was made and unmade by people who enforce rules for no other reason than that they are rules. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” I told him. His hands held a part of me.
I was aware of the fat, pink, evil flowers. Loving men, you don’t even have to try to hide, but no one knows what it’s like to love a woman either. Everything is stitched together with nothing and governed by a puzzle. The mask is presented because we can understand the placement of holes on a mask, but looking further would be like asking us to take the second letter of every sentence and arrange it into a new one that tells us everything about reality without knowing the rules by which to arrange them. I couldn’t just tell my mother that I was falling in love with men. That’s not enough. She would have to understand that my family feels small to me because they don’t know who I am.
The man whose hands I was in whined. He smelled good, like aged sweat under arms. His legs imprinted a shape in the grass that remained when he bent into another shape. I hated childhood, but this was worse. The best years were lost between, when memories were so bright they became invisible against the backdrop of the reality of having loved so many men in such a short time. “Please tell me what’s happening,” the man whined. He could be imagined to be beautiful. He could be delightful. “Shhh, it’s okay baby.” His confusion or my ability to disrupt it made me think about the future. I imagined him bringing in the cows. We were in Spain. I stood at the door with honey in my mouth.
My dream was interrupted. The third dimension of things was peeled off from the solidity of the others. We experienced it together, an unbelievable pressure. The agony of air, water, and blood filched from us. My soft lungs deleted. Our hands were the pages of books. I think the puzzle that governed us hated that we weren’t intoxicated by the little freedom we had. Someone had broken another law. “It’s okay,” I told him, “you’re a good boy.”
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Kyle can usually be found wandering Michigan’s forests, turning over logs looking for life. He currently teaches creative writing. His work has appeared in Clarkesworld, ergot, and Propagule, among others, and he won first place in poetry at Poetic Visions of Mackinac 2022 and again in 2024.