1930, Bristol
He'll remember the rain in Tuscaloosa. A bookstore in Lewiston. The way the train sounded better in the West than East, cleaner, clearer, less chaotic in the thoughts of the people. The piano concert he tried to attend but could not sit through past ten minutes, in Medford. How people seemed more real and his self faded for weeks at a time.
How the summer wasn't noticeable, and how it was five weeks passed before he'd realized he'd passed and overlooked his twenty-ninth birthday, too, same as the one before it. He'll remember when words failed him, when it clogged every inch of him, and the music, already running, grew so deafening that silence screamed at its wake.
But he'll remember most Bristol in the fall.
It had been almost a month since he'd found someone.
Something was always wrong, something they said, something they thought.
Topher Kendrick was far better than perfect. Laid out on a plate of his sins, waiting for damnation. His thoughts, his actions, his words -- all of them beside themselves with begging to be broken. The man he'd beaten half to death, and the women he'd thrown against the dumpster, while Edward had sat watching the scene for far longer than he could even justify on the cusp of the year's madness.
But when he had slammed the man, and himself, into the alley wall, hands digging into fragile shoulder bones and legs pinned, he could not move anymore. He found himself, through the funnel of drenching fear and rapid sure-fire human thoughts, studying the lamp light glow in the man's blonde hair. It's not even the right shade. It isn't. It's not fine, or clipped. And suddenly he feels ill. Dizzy. And disoriented. In a way that shouldn't be possible.
The blue eyes are wrong, too, not that he'll ever know what was right. The mouth won't stop moving, but he isn't listening. To it or the thoughts, flies buzzing in the redness, about a wife. She was wrong, too. All of it is wrong. All of it. Screaming inside of him and coming up with only frame of reference. Denied for so long it is undeniable, undeniably already a part and parcel of every square inch of lost thought and being.
And he'll remember how he felt revolted, and incapable of else, leaving a true monster, howling about a broken leg, on the floor of an alley -- still alive.
How the summer wasn't noticeable, and how it was five weeks passed before he'd realized he'd passed and overlooked his twenty-ninth birthday, too, same as the one before it. He'll remember when words failed him, when it clogged every inch of him, and the music, already running, grew so deafening that silence screamed at its wake.
But he'll remember most Bristol in the fall.
It had been almost a month since he'd found someone.
Something was always wrong, something they said, something they thought.
Topher Kendrick was far better than perfect. Laid out on a plate of his sins, waiting for damnation. His thoughts, his actions, his words -- all of them beside themselves with begging to be broken. The man he'd beaten half to death, and the women he'd thrown against the dumpster, while Edward had sat watching the scene for far longer than he could even justify on the cusp of the year's madness.
But when he had slammed the man, and himself, into the alley wall, hands digging into fragile shoulder bones and legs pinned, he could not move anymore. He found himself, through the funnel of drenching fear and rapid sure-fire human thoughts, studying the lamp light glow in the man's blonde hair. It's not even the right shade. It isn't. It's not fine, or clipped. And suddenly he feels ill. Dizzy. And disoriented. In a way that shouldn't be possible.
The blue eyes are wrong, too, not that he'll ever know what was right. The mouth won't stop moving, but he isn't listening. To it or the thoughts, flies buzzing in the redness, about a wife. She was wrong, too. All of it is wrong. All of it. Screaming inside of him and coming up with only frame of reference. Denied for so long it is undeniable, undeniably already a part and parcel of every square inch of lost thought and being.
And he'll remember how he felt revolted, and incapable of else, leaving a true monster, howling about a broken leg, on the floor of an alley -- still alive.