Spark
Jericho holds his head beneath the faucet, shaking out the tepid water that percolates through his mop of maroon hair. The formerly white sink is rimmed with red like an underslept eye and his henley, the worn ivory of porcelain veneers, is pocked with smudges of fuchsia dye. He turns the spigot and pestles his hair with a towel, looking at me earnestly.
What do you think, he asks, spitting pink.
At eleven, Jericho had been ingenuous, with ash brown hair overdue for a haircut framing his round head. Two years had added several inches of height to his rangy frame and indented the oviform circumference of his face with haughty cheekbones and a sharp jawline, I want to tell him that he’ll always be striking, that the color of his hair is just an insignificant cog in the machine of his beauty.
You look like shit, I say with a wry smile.
A wounded expression dances into his eyes, then quickly away.
You’re such a dick, he says, whipping me lightly with the dye-stained towel. He smiles, too.
Jericho and I share a locker and five out of six classes. He is a celebrity within the context of our middle school, pulling at his polo to expose the impasse of gooseflesh between his pelvis and navel and batting his eyes coquettishly to the click-click-click of imaginary paparazzi. In the dance recitals twice a year, he always finds a way to usurp center stage, his temples smeared with violent eyeliner fingerprints, waving to a multitude of adoring fans. I am at the forefront of the throng.
He rarely shares the spotlight. So when he pushes me up hard against the brick wall behind school and clasps my wrists in his spindly hands, the air reeks of significance. The security camera swivels in a mechanic waltz above us, and I am as much the star as he is. All I can see is the tooth that he chipped on a bottle of wine when he was twelve, its jagged edge displaced in his sheepish smile.
And he kisses me, and it is nothing like the tentative pecks in clandestine games of spin-the-bottle, nor the touch of that lithe blond boy from Texas the past summer. It is strange and soft and wet, and I keep my eyes open and stare at his ear, like I do at the optometrist when I set my chin on the cold metal plate and the man says Look at my ear and a machine blows startling puffs of air at my frantic iris.
My hands grope at the air in senseless cartwheels until Jericho grabs them and intertwines his fingers in mine. Initially, the gesture feels alien. I only hold his hand sometimes, when I think nobody can see us: on the bus, digits locked underneath my backpack, or in the dim security of a movie theater, his palm clammy from clutching the cup of soda.
I think privately that he looks like Jesus, radiating light from the epic expanse of lucent skin that keeps his insides from spilling out and leading me to salvation with his almond eyes, the darling-how-could-you-do-this-to-me eyes that spill with tragedy at the end of sad films. But I look at him and stick my tongue out, say, Sink or swim faggot, even though I’m afraid he’s sickened by my pretensions of impassivity. I want to tell him that after he falls asleep, I try to memorize his freckles and hairs so I can map the constellations across his forearms and calves like glow-in-the-dark stars on childhood wallpaper.
Apathy tempts me, enticing in its safety.
On the corner of Fourth and Main, a man with dirt on his face asks if we can spare a little change. I sneer, True change comes from within, with the same casual derision as always, but Jericho fingers his faded denim thigh hesitantly, then fishes out a handful of pennies and nickels. His pockets always jingle and snap with coins, occasionally the weary face of George Washington. Silent capitulations of poverty quiver at exposure: the strips of cardboard glued to the sole of his sneaker to keep his socks from colliding with the dirty ground; the faded reduced-fare bus pass courtesy of the school office; and vague allusions to the long-delayed check from the car accident that left his mother’s coupe defeated and bruised, gazing with demure shame from two shattered headlights.
Interstate 405 corkscrews toward his house, intersecting dilapidated houses and husks of industrial headquarters. Drunks amble away into the night. I step heavily on the crumbling slabs of sidewalk but Jericho walks on water, floating toward the peeling paint in strides that match the cadence of the power plant’s electric hum. Christmas lights blink perennially, and the interior doorways lack doors like missing teeth in a grotesque maw. His little brother whoops and shakes the furniture, a smudge of grease smeared across his forehead: war paint.
I reach for his hand. I want to see where you rest your head at night, I whisper.
The ceiling is low, with a round hole above his bed through which I can see his mother’s bedroom and the rafters above, cotton-candy insulation the color of exposed gums at the dentist. Cracks extend in haphazard veins from the circumference of the gap. A clump of cigarette ash sails through it like a firefighter sliding down an invisible pole and sizzles on the sagging mattress.
Squinting, he squeezes a thread of goo from a tube of hemorrhoid treatment and rubs it into the purple bags that droop beneath his eyes.
It makes them fade, he says.
I study my reflection in the mirror, still tan from summer and unmarred by pubescent maculae. And Jericho lies atop me, rests his head in the hollow of my chest, and I inhale that familiar organic smell of Dial antibacterial soap and the rain. Traffic drowns the heartbeat in my ears. His kisses are sloppy and I learn how to breathe through my nose, suffocated by the weight of his tongue.
With arachnoidal curiosity his long fingers explore my skin, waiting to pounce. Venturing outdoors on summer afternoons as a child, I had to souse myself in insect repellant lest I return swollen with mosquito bites. My mother would smile and squat down to my level, dusting the wounds with aloe vera.
They love you, Sam, she said, her touch soothing the protruding red lumps. Your blood tastes sweet to them. When Jericho and I are middle-aged, will we apply our own remedies to the abrasions of our children? To one another?
Our idle pencils doodle poetry on algebra worksheets and in the margins of young-adult paperbacks. My parents are going to Washington next week, I scribble. I want to adhere to your skin like dust to the sunlight. Love is like bumper cars, he responds. An incongruous rose in a field of clover, I counter. No, he writes, it’s like swimming. It’s better if you aren’t afraid to get wet.
The sickly heat of the September sun stiffens the grass in the fields around my house. After school, we dash there anyway, ignoring the prickling blades through our clothes. Lying belly-up in the dirt, muscles clenched, he grabs my hands and pulls me close. One. Two. Three. And we twist and turn over one another, gaining momentum as we churn down the face of the hill, and I am yelping and the sky and the earth are rotating in a merry-go-round above me, and we finally land near the bottom, face to face, too exhilarated to wipe the dirt from our jeans or regain balance.
What do you fantasize about? he asks softly, tucking an errant lock of hair behind my ear.
I close my eyes and think about fey boys twirling in endless ethereal ballet. Their allure has passed; Jericho has crippled them with his intoxicating, listless life.
You, I say, uprooting the filemot strands of grass. Caesura. We lock eyes.
The silence deafens in my empty house and we stand motionless for a moment in the foyer, sneakered feet rooted by indecision. He follows me down the stairs to my bedroom and, at the doorway, cautiously rests one warm hand in the small of my back, the other in my hair.
In a shoebox buried under a pyramid of laundry, I stashed cabernet sauvignon and two glasses. I wrestle with the cork before Jericho, snickering, pulls it easily from the mouth of the bottle. Sitting crosslegged on the bed, I pour sloppily and slosh a few drops of wine over the rim of the glass and leave a stain on the duvet in the sweet ferment of a nosebleed.
Tell me about your father, I say.
Jericho tenses, hunching slightly and avoiding eye contact.
He’s a racecar driver. I don’t see him much. Just on holidays, sometimes, if he’s in town.
Together, we spangle the surfaces of my bedroom with unlit tea candles. On my bedside table sits an enormous cylindrical candle the smalt of a fresh bruise. Jericho’s fingers tremble as he caresses the wick with a lit match, but his hands are calloused like those of an adult fisherman. The aroma of rosemary and bergamot whiffles through me as I scroll with increasing hysteria through the music on my laptop, trying to find the perfect song.
I don’t know what to play, I whimper.
Jericho stretches his arms open.
Then don’t play anything at all, he says.
His touch is tender and tentative, then forceful and knowing. And my heart, that oft-personified thing that when stripped of context and symbolism is nothing more than an organ surging fluid to my capillaries, doesn’t race or slow or do anything it’s supposed to. It flutters. Like the lashes encircling a blinking eye.
And then we are Vishnu, deified in the endless splay of our limbs. And it hurts.
Afterward, lolling in the carnage of assaulted pillows and knotted sheets, I envision the farrago of juvenile vestiges stashed under the bed: creased childhood photographs, the shredded remains of my baby blue security blanket, protuberant-bellied teddy bear upon whose ear I once gnawed, and a Mead composition book dripping with proclamations of love and mawkish poetry. And just as the tendrils of ruefulness snake around me, he endears me with his own inexperience; says something stupid like, You have no idea how lucky we are to have found each other.
Through the window, the night smears the verdant canopy of trees with azure. We missed the sunset.
His toes poke mournfully from the foot of the bed, warmed by the hiss of the space heater. The open window toys with the flicker of the blue candle. My nerve endings buzz, honored that his hands grace my cheek in their steady tipetoe across my eyelids. Transfixed in the warmth of the moment, I can feel the juvenility of my body electrified in kinetic wisdom: knees skinned, nails bitten, toes stubbed. And I can sense myself voluntarily whirling away from construction paper and the familiar glow of nightlights, loosening my grip on the peppermint-candy promise of an impending Christmas, one that will never come again. I do not want it anymore.
Then me, nursing at the chalky sterility of a glass of tepid milk; the sparkle of clean silverware; the hum of C-SPAN left pontificating in the living room. My mother relays her conversation with Tipper Gore and describes in muted detail the dress she wore at the banquet. Someone in me screams, While you were away, I submerged my body in the sweat and spit of a waitress’ bastard son who I love with earnest desperation.
The weekdays hurtle forward, leaving Jericho and I in a furious game of catch-up. Time never knocks on the bathroom door. Instead, it passes us in a haze, second hands and minute hands exhausted in their indiscrimination.
We stand for hours, glued to the wall of a toilet stall in the boys’ bathroom. I trace the ellipse of his mouth with one hand and shape it with the other. Love leaves lust as its sultry spoor and Jericho, hot on the trail of the elusive prey, surrenders to the baseness of lightly slammed fists and the tremulous, stroking hyperventilation of almost-subordinated sexuality. On the rare afternoons when someone interrupts us by entering to urinate or wash their hands, his eyes flash and dart around in firecracker glances shooting into the dazzling skies on the fourth of July.
And I think, where will I fall - that place, when the sparks are all gone?
Tradition emerges in the delay to exhale until gushes of water erupt from a tap or the door softly swings shut. I release a sigh of relief, say for the nth time, We almost got busted. He kisses me on the mouth, maybe the nose, and says, We’re lucky.
Are you cool enough? he taunts me, clinging to the apex of a latticed fence. In one limber breath, he flips over the top, crunches in the grass with a satisfying thump. I grope for the top, flip, catch myself on a tangle of rusty wire, fall, feel air jolting from my windpipe. His face appears over me, contorted in fear. I am impaled on the vitelline scrub of grass.
I’m hemorrhaging, I laugh. He breaks into a grin, and grabs my arm. Shakes it.
In the hollowed field under the cold autumn sun, Jericho takes his clothes off. Streaked with light, he huddles, vulnerable in nudity that cannot be compromised. I study the flow of epidermis and the jutting of bones. His neck is prickled with burrs and his back judders in a celebration of scoliosis. I want to walk forever down the winding road of his spine, turned over to his jessant abdomen that gravitates toward the sky. And slowly, some insatiable need claws its way into the world.
What do you think, he asks, spitting pink.
At eleven, Jericho had been ingenuous, with ash brown hair overdue for a haircut framing his round head. Two years had added several inches of height to his rangy frame and indented the oviform circumference of his face with haughty cheekbones and a sharp jawline, I want to tell him that he’ll always be striking, that the color of his hair is just an insignificant cog in the machine of his beauty.
You look like shit, I say with a wry smile.
A wounded expression dances into his eyes, then quickly away.
You’re such a dick, he says, whipping me lightly with the dye-stained towel. He smiles, too.
Jericho and I share a locker and five out of six classes. He is a celebrity within the context of our middle school, pulling at his polo to expose the impasse of gooseflesh between his pelvis and navel and batting his eyes coquettishly to the click-click-click of imaginary paparazzi. In the dance recitals twice a year, he always finds a way to usurp center stage, his temples smeared with violent eyeliner fingerprints, waving to a multitude of adoring fans. I am at the forefront of the throng.
He rarely shares the spotlight. So when he pushes me up hard against the brick wall behind school and clasps my wrists in his spindly hands, the air reeks of significance. The security camera swivels in a mechanic waltz above us, and I am as much the star as he is. All I can see is the tooth that he chipped on a bottle of wine when he was twelve, its jagged edge displaced in his sheepish smile.
And he kisses me, and it is nothing like the tentative pecks in clandestine games of spin-the-bottle, nor the touch of that lithe blond boy from Texas the past summer. It is strange and soft and wet, and I keep my eyes open and stare at his ear, like I do at the optometrist when I set my chin on the cold metal plate and the man says Look at my ear and a machine blows startling puffs of air at my frantic iris.
My hands grope at the air in senseless cartwheels until Jericho grabs them and intertwines his fingers in mine. Initially, the gesture feels alien. I only hold his hand sometimes, when I think nobody can see us: on the bus, digits locked underneath my backpack, or in the dim security of a movie theater, his palm clammy from clutching the cup of soda.
I think privately that he looks like Jesus, radiating light from the epic expanse of lucent skin that keeps his insides from spilling out and leading me to salvation with his almond eyes, the darling-how-could-you-do-this-to-me eyes that spill with tragedy at the end of sad films. But I look at him and stick my tongue out, say, Sink or swim faggot, even though I’m afraid he’s sickened by my pretensions of impassivity. I want to tell him that after he falls asleep, I try to memorize his freckles and hairs so I can map the constellations across his forearms and calves like glow-in-the-dark stars on childhood wallpaper.
Apathy tempts me, enticing in its safety.
On the corner of Fourth and Main, a man with dirt on his face asks if we can spare a little change. I sneer, True change comes from within, with the same casual derision as always, but Jericho fingers his faded denim thigh hesitantly, then fishes out a handful of pennies and nickels. His pockets always jingle and snap with coins, occasionally the weary face of George Washington. Silent capitulations of poverty quiver at exposure: the strips of cardboard glued to the sole of his sneaker to keep his socks from colliding with the dirty ground; the faded reduced-fare bus pass courtesy of the school office; and vague allusions to the long-delayed check from the car accident that left his mother’s coupe defeated and bruised, gazing with demure shame from two shattered headlights.
Interstate 405 corkscrews toward his house, intersecting dilapidated houses and husks of industrial headquarters. Drunks amble away into the night. I step heavily on the crumbling slabs of sidewalk but Jericho walks on water, floating toward the peeling paint in strides that match the cadence of the power plant’s electric hum. Christmas lights blink perennially, and the interior doorways lack doors like missing teeth in a grotesque maw. His little brother whoops and shakes the furniture, a smudge of grease smeared across his forehead: war paint.
I reach for his hand. I want to see where you rest your head at night, I whisper.
The ceiling is low, with a round hole above his bed through which I can see his mother’s bedroom and the rafters above, cotton-candy insulation the color of exposed gums at the dentist. Cracks extend in haphazard veins from the circumference of the gap. A clump of cigarette ash sails through it like a firefighter sliding down an invisible pole and sizzles on the sagging mattress.
Squinting, he squeezes a thread of goo from a tube of hemorrhoid treatment and rubs it into the purple bags that droop beneath his eyes.
It makes them fade, he says.
I study my reflection in the mirror, still tan from summer and unmarred by pubescent maculae. And Jericho lies atop me, rests his head in the hollow of my chest, and I inhale that familiar organic smell of Dial antibacterial soap and the rain. Traffic drowns the heartbeat in my ears. His kisses are sloppy and I learn how to breathe through my nose, suffocated by the weight of his tongue.
With arachnoidal curiosity his long fingers explore my skin, waiting to pounce. Venturing outdoors on summer afternoons as a child, I had to souse myself in insect repellant lest I return swollen with mosquito bites. My mother would smile and squat down to my level, dusting the wounds with aloe vera.
They love you, Sam, she said, her touch soothing the protruding red lumps. Your blood tastes sweet to them. When Jericho and I are middle-aged, will we apply our own remedies to the abrasions of our children? To one another?
Our idle pencils doodle poetry on algebra worksheets and in the margins of young-adult paperbacks. My parents are going to Washington next week, I scribble. I want to adhere to your skin like dust to the sunlight. Love is like bumper cars, he responds. An incongruous rose in a field of clover, I counter. No, he writes, it’s like swimming. It’s better if you aren’t afraid to get wet.
The sickly heat of the September sun stiffens the grass in the fields around my house. After school, we dash there anyway, ignoring the prickling blades through our clothes. Lying belly-up in the dirt, muscles clenched, he grabs my hands and pulls me close. One. Two. Three. And we twist and turn over one another, gaining momentum as we churn down the face of the hill, and I am yelping and the sky and the earth are rotating in a merry-go-round above me, and we finally land near the bottom, face to face, too exhilarated to wipe the dirt from our jeans or regain balance.
What do you fantasize about? he asks softly, tucking an errant lock of hair behind my ear.
I close my eyes and think about fey boys twirling in endless ethereal ballet. Their allure has passed; Jericho has crippled them with his intoxicating, listless life.
You, I say, uprooting the filemot strands of grass. Caesura. We lock eyes.
The silence deafens in my empty house and we stand motionless for a moment in the foyer, sneakered feet rooted by indecision. He follows me down the stairs to my bedroom and, at the doorway, cautiously rests one warm hand in the small of my back, the other in my hair.
In a shoebox buried under a pyramid of laundry, I stashed cabernet sauvignon and two glasses. I wrestle with the cork before Jericho, snickering, pulls it easily from the mouth of the bottle. Sitting crosslegged on the bed, I pour sloppily and slosh a few drops of wine over the rim of the glass and leave a stain on the duvet in the sweet ferment of a nosebleed.
Tell me about your father, I say.
Jericho tenses, hunching slightly and avoiding eye contact.
He’s a racecar driver. I don’t see him much. Just on holidays, sometimes, if he’s in town.
Together, we spangle the surfaces of my bedroom with unlit tea candles. On my bedside table sits an enormous cylindrical candle the smalt of a fresh bruise. Jericho’s fingers tremble as he caresses the wick with a lit match, but his hands are calloused like those of an adult fisherman. The aroma of rosemary and bergamot whiffles through me as I scroll with increasing hysteria through the music on my laptop, trying to find the perfect song.
I don’t know what to play, I whimper.
Jericho stretches his arms open.
Then don’t play anything at all, he says.
His touch is tender and tentative, then forceful and knowing. And my heart, that oft-personified thing that when stripped of context and symbolism is nothing more than an organ surging fluid to my capillaries, doesn’t race or slow or do anything it’s supposed to. It flutters. Like the lashes encircling a blinking eye.
And then we are Vishnu, deified in the endless splay of our limbs. And it hurts.
Afterward, lolling in the carnage of assaulted pillows and knotted sheets, I envision the farrago of juvenile vestiges stashed under the bed: creased childhood photographs, the shredded remains of my baby blue security blanket, protuberant-bellied teddy bear upon whose ear I once gnawed, and a Mead composition book dripping with proclamations of love and mawkish poetry. And just as the tendrils of ruefulness snake around me, he endears me with his own inexperience; says something stupid like, You have no idea how lucky we are to have found each other.
Through the window, the night smears the verdant canopy of trees with azure. We missed the sunset.
His toes poke mournfully from the foot of the bed, warmed by the hiss of the space heater. The open window toys with the flicker of the blue candle. My nerve endings buzz, honored that his hands grace my cheek in their steady tipetoe across my eyelids. Transfixed in the warmth of the moment, I can feel the juvenility of my body electrified in kinetic wisdom: knees skinned, nails bitten, toes stubbed. And I can sense myself voluntarily whirling away from construction paper and the familiar glow of nightlights, loosening my grip on the peppermint-candy promise of an impending Christmas, one that will never come again. I do not want it anymore.
Then me, nursing at the chalky sterility of a glass of tepid milk; the sparkle of clean silverware; the hum of C-SPAN left pontificating in the living room. My mother relays her conversation with Tipper Gore and describes in muted detail the dress she wore at the banquet. Someone in me screams, While you were away, I submerged my body in the sweat and spit of a waitress’ bastard son who I love with earnest desperation.
The weekdays hurtle forward, leaving Jericho and I in a furious game of catch-up. Time never knocks on the bathroom door. Instead, it passes us in a haze, second hands and minute hands exhausted in their indiscrimination.
We stand for hours, glued to the wall of a toilet stall in the boys’ bathroom. I trace the ellipse of his mouth with one hand and shape it with the other. Love leaves lust as its sultry spoor and Jericho, hot on the trail of the elusive prey, surrenders to the baseness of lightly slammed fists and the tremulous, stroking hyperventilation of almost-subordinated sexuality. On the rare afternoons when someone interrupts us by entering to urinate or wash their hands, his eyes flash and dart around in firecracker glances shooting into the dazzling skies on the fourth of July.
And I think, where will I fall - that place, when the sparks are all gone?
Tradition emerges in the delay to exhale until gushes of water erupt from a tap or the door softly swings shut. I release a sigh of relief, say for the nth time, We almost got busted. He kisses me on the mouth, maybe the nose, and says, We’re lucky.
Are you cool enough? he taunts me, clinging to the apex of a latticed fence. In one limber breath, he flips over the top, crunches in the grass with a satisfying thump. I grope for the top, flip, catch myself on a tangle of rusty wire, fall, feel air jolting from my windpipe. His face appears over me, contorted in fear. I am impaled on the vitelline scrub of grass.
I’m hemorrhaging, I laugh. He breaks into a grin, and grabs my arm. Shakes it.
In the hollowed field under the cold autumn sun, Jericho takes his clothes off. Streaked with light, he huddles, vulnerable in nudity that cannot be compromised. I study the flow of epidermis and the jutting of bones. His neck is prickled with burrs and his back judders in a celebration of scoliosis. I want to walk forever down the winding road of his spine, turned over to his jessant abdomen that gravitates toward the sky. And slowly, some insatiable need claws its way into the world.