I’m breaking a promise. I said I wouldn’t post fiction here, but I’m going to. This is an old story, a relatively short one, and I happened upon it again today. It’s indicative of the unclean way my writing mind works. It’s unpublishable. It’s not imbued with any meaning that I can detect. It’s just snapshots of sadness and tolerance for all the crimes we commit against each other. I don’t remember why I wrote it, but I know I can’t submit it anywhere, so I’m putting it up here.

Both Look Home

HE there, my first memory of him. HE taking us away to bring us home. The door closing, HE downstairs on the porch, our guard.

Danny on the banks of an African river, standing on a bar of sand no wider than his feet. A marionette strutting on the tips of the campfire as the expedition passes around a bottle. Danny listening to tomorrow’s plans for the dig. Danny later perched at the edge of the river, dreaming of maneaters and thinking he saw their eyes there, watching him. Someone putting a hand on his shoulder, drawing him back to the fire.

Danny’s bed laying beneath this body now. HE went and found it long ago, on the side of a road, brought it back for Danny. Sitting here for years, gathering dreams, eating dreams. An open window for light and breeze, sad paint to suck it away. Danny to read and study, Danny to understand, Danny to sleep here. But not anymore.

HE put it here and gave it to Danny and patted him while I curled in the corner and sniffed at the stuff behind the walls. The plaster becoming moist and uncomfortable. The feeling of rain through the roof. I next door, scratching at the wall, and Danny answering me with his fingertips.

Danny in the desert, the strange feel of this old country, where lights of the city wink off sand. The water, twenty paces away. The awful deep. The nagging need to laugh while slipping. Danny awake, moving but mustn’t. A moon too bright to hide the way.

Danny home with a bag. Books with colour. Words spoken and read, pronounced. Danny at the table, grass outside, burning in the summer. Browngreen life. HE out there on a machine, roaring, cutting it down.

Danny whispering about Egypt. The weed of great earth. Humankind eroded, rebirthed. High in the grace of god, any god. Learning over the concept. A boy.

HE out there, in a wind. Coming in.

Danny looking at me, brother in all ways but one. “Try to say it after I say it. Try hard.”

Door opening. Lips moving, words tumbling, not right, not right. Danny’s hand on my knee, do good do good don’t do wrong not this time it’s better if you’re right you can achieve. Danny telling me to try again.

Danny underwater, above water. Diving. The bottom elusive, the top unreachable. A moment for breath. For old wind, in an old land. A glimpse of the trial. Pulsing skin. Twisting muscle. Strife. A brace of old wind sweeping across the desert to reach these senses. The spirit of movement and adventure. Passion for two more breaths and three more strokes. Deep down, surprise that there is sand here, too.

The rushing roar of current. Fighting for life. An opponent. A prison.

Danny screaming: don’t, hush, not so loud. Danny upending his bowl and lunging for the door. HE to catch him and bring him back. Me at the end of the table, howling. Moon creature, moon creature. One fist hammering the table, one thought to the boy I loved.

HE to take Danny upstairs. Chains rattling, footfall overhead. Silence. Mice in the walls. Black nights within summer. Howlers in wind twisted by snow. Fall, the only one, forgotten.

Danny at my hand later, panting. “Go to sleep.”

Dragged out of the water, Danny clinging half in and half out to a chunk of rock on the bank. Lying hopeful. Lost, listening. Treading on a spot never touched before. All alone when there were others moments ago. There were others who struggled, fell or returned. A campfire light out there, somewhere. Voices calling, demanding that Danny breathe, rise.

Liberty, challenge. The moment: where are we?

Danny outside, singing. The axe glinting and the tree shaking. Leaves jerking, defiant not of wind but of a boy. Little strange blond loved unloved boy. Danny swings and matter explodes. Two hundred years dying in one day. Hips twist, feet dig, arms swing.

Something moving up the lane. My lips moving, saying something: cease, desist. Look and see, one quick glance. Witness this pointing arm. Grunt. Croak. Animal, disguised as a human. Moon creature. Look.

“I’ll have it down.” Danny close to smelling the dust cloud but far from seeing it.

Screeching tires. Metal creaking open. Footfalls. The tree half-broken, one hundred years whittled away, Danny standing there, the axe on the grass. Danny breathing.

Footfall.

Ten thousand miles of desert, water drying on skin, dripping from skin. Danny’s feet moving back to where the campfire might be. Not a voice anywhere. Walking free, walking lost. Testimony to any but none who will listen. The lines of pyramids, height and breadth and width and inner support, the impossibility of it. The thought of Danny falling to the side of the river, lost. And in ecstasy.

Ahead, something coming with the river’s flow towards him.

Danny in his bed, fevered. Blind in the darkness. My shuffling at his side, on the floor. Danny smiling at me. The smell of family downstairs, the smell that never lasts. Me and the boy. HE patting our heads as prisoners enter and depart. But we stay forever.

“When you get out,” whispers Danny, “don’t come back. Run. Don’t come back. Keep going. Find a desert. Find where it always snows.”

A prison. Family people who want no part of it striding out into the snow. Knowing it. Hating it. Refusing the invitation to be caught. White wind slashing from the northwest, them lashing back with whatever remains. Don’t practice revolution. Don’t look at the window, at two boys loved/unloved. Chains, metal. The quiet house.

Danny’s eyes bleared by looking for a myth, a legend, a prison or more. Lost? Figures in the water. Alive? The bodies in the flow, everywhere. The remains of an old country floating, coffins for those who erect nothing to themselves or to others. Thick across the waves, like a gel of hardness and skin. Torso and head. Fingers glinting with silver. Dark skin. Too old for the crocodiles. Too impossible to appear in the day. Once a millennium, they come. Tonight, in the eyes of the river, they are homewards bound with Danny the only witness.

Danny on a page. Danny in a note. 

“Run not coming run straight away not back go find tomorrow’s better.”

Reading, like saying it, a farewell in print. Through the window, a tree half dead. “Run not coming run straight away.” I in the room, Danny’s room, thwarted moon creature. Still here. Read the words again, they’ll change, Danny will appear. But the words stay. I stay. “Go find tomorrow’s better.”

Ten minutes alone with goodbye. The door opening. HE there, standing. Only me to read the words.

All these ancient deaths in the river, floating, silent. The remains of the past, suggesting that it end. That home is a tree half dead and without memories. Danny watching as the river goes there. Lurching, pushing, further from the current. Gentle hands on flesh. Danny’s flesh, as the living return. Eyes open and unblind, but no words to describe the river. Choking, hacking. Tell them something, reveal, invent, discover, follow their eyes.

Home, they all look home.

I there to stay on Danny’s bed. There, here, to stay. A year. Two years. Twelve years. A million minutes. Fifty good moments. The rest just silent or sprained.

An ache of words not seen again, but remembered still. “Run.” Run where? “Straight away.” What is straight? How is something not a circle, returned? Twelve years, on Danny’s bed. The dust cloud coming down the lane, the rebellion born in one heart, quelled in another, suppressed by HIM, condoned by a country, and surrounded by a river.

“Run, run, run away, don’t think of coming back.” Twelve years after the strange little blond boy, I promised yes yes yes, coming back never, returning not even in mind or thought, worry nothing. Run run, up the lane, something in my pocket, a half-strangled tree to watch and direct, or to sound the alarm. Ahead, the great broad country.

Run run coming back, run run came back anyway. The river left behind, still pushing me. Crawling up that lane, to the hill with no tree only a stump. HE. There to watch me. The creaking of wood. An open door. Danny’s bed in the room. A chain. A promise. Block the window, heat the irons, talk no more talk no more talk no more talk no more talk no more.

The rattling of chain. The door to Danny’s room standing open. HE there and me here. Run run run. Run where, which way doesn’t come back? Me here, Danny a broken tree on a sidelot above the lane. HE standing there, tall, at the confluence of streams where words and boys are sent to sink.