after a moment of silence, deepwater lungs upwelling, keeping Eoran’s holy trust closer to his heart than the beat that ran through it, Kasse stepped into the space in between.
Eoran’s breath hitched for a gulp of air, the manual motion forced as he
yielded to
irresolution
their passage of time
the absence of time
unfurled whole
adumbral
kaleidoscopic, atomic
corybantic, chaotic
&yettheyare
stable
surrounded
in hyaline sheetrock
their sheath a static flow
through solidity
unmade
but united
untied
a cavity transpiring
a transcription matter
mineral fingers combing through
sentience, slippery past a slack
negligent in existence
innerspace of exoform
he
w
a
s
s
t
o
n
e
s i f t e d
t n
r v
u e
c l
k o
p
g e
g e l i d
o
g
e
n
o
u
s
abyssal essence
atrophic
arrested grasp
afflicted heart
asthmatic
I N T E R S L T I C E D
eoran is a hanger on
a trifle of momentum
force a garbled proximity
vocea sequester in versa
suspended by his gut
kasse is disparated .
iri
| he is d r a k e s t o n e slitherum slatherum thrownundone mouth unraveled contused caress aggrieved in searching embattled |
he was inhibitions undulate |
|
Diaphanous to a fault he was a snarling thing his bones all a-tangle
|
a point so stolid captivating in execution perversely cognizant of his recoiling reflexesStill, the torment in his exercise remained controlled in the way his fury was swallowed in full persistent and incautious in that reliquary of heathen infliction A quiver shook his bones, resonant to his that indecent appraisal of |
wasn’t
he
?
| hypothermic h y p e r p y r e x i c isothermicacutus sphara hypoxemia charnel graspings their growing unstable everymoverepassing in agony of the in seeing dying |
hyperbolic h y d r i o t a p h i c adiabatic adductus sui asphyxia decadescent trappings that dissarayed forfeit everytouchreplaying in reply to the in feeling alive |
please
please
When the boys hit the ground, it was mid-day. The mountain spat them out, their bodies discarded pistachio shells, sunflower husks, cherry pits. Chewed up, hollowed out, trashed. The heat rose in waves, a hallucinatory mockery of perception, a bend in a reality already broken from the pocket of quantum entropy Kasse had ripped through the fabric of the avalanche.
They landed in shade, beneath a wide mouthed stone overhang excavated out of the avalanche—one could only assume to attempt rescue of the two friends they’d made inside the cave. Kasse hit the ground first, wrenching Eo’s cold shiver of a body from the stone’s granite grasping, its longing embrace. It felt like his own longing, his own desire clawing at their guts, but that wasn’t right. It wasn’t really possible. They’d only been inside the in between for thirty seconds tops, maybe—but the electromagnetic manipulator could have sworn it had still been night when they’d entered. Hadn’t it? Something was wrong.
When were they? How long had they been gone? Six hours?
Six days?
Regardless, neither of them had maintained their body heat. As they lay with their supplies scattered around them like bullet casings, Kasse’s 90 degrees and falling called him to action as he gathered Eoran into his trembled grasp. He kissed the other man’s dazed mouth, numb but recovering
and fucking determined not to continue alone.
“F-f-fucking open your… open your eyes… open, Eo—”
Smoothing back his lover’s hair, the older boy tried to find him in those half lidded rolling shadow eyes, tried to hunt down the spark of his engineer in the dim of his heat-leeched mind.
“C-come on, come on, I—I fucking need you. You c-can’t… go. You can’t g-go…”
Eoran’s pupils lurched to meet Kasse, suffused with vast bewilderment, either unwilling or unable to comprehend anything outside of the timeless splatter-spray of their molecular geometries. He was there, but fricasseed; thoughts ricocheted and reordered, marbled oil churning atop a bog of semi-lucidity. Such a state made reconciliation a lethargic process. Eoran wasn’t sure if he was then or now, he couldn’t quite place himself on a spectrum whose antipodes were alive and dead.
“I thought we were running,” he maundered through some tenebrous connection made amidst his uncertainty, “I promised I’d go with you.”
Eo’s frame shivered in the fade of the overhang, but the air was warm. His chin tilted toward the daylight, dark eyes unable to fully meet the bright landscape from the vortex that had just coughed them up. A blade of sun made a threatening slice at the mouth of their cavern—he wanted nothing more than to sacrifice himself to its molten edge, but instead, he held tight to that sweven of a boy haunting his delusion.
“When they relieve us, come with me to lay in the sun. Dev said there’s a spot around the trucks where Brint never goes…” Out of place, out of time. The words didn’t feel right, and he was beginning to recognize as much. Eoran’s vision met Kasse again, dissected the look of him against the malformations of dim Earth in the background.
Wait.
“Wait—”
Icy fingers were a dither at the ghost’s jaw, the only thing familiar in that wilderness unknown.
“Did we die?”
Kasse was ravenous in his welcoming, holding Eoran graveyard tight with his kiss apoplectic in apology, distraught and overlong. The ghost would wring the threat of the desert from that entropy cooled hollow slowly regaining consciousness in his grasp, he would spit his own blood into Eoran’s mouth if it would raise his temperature a single degree.
“Maybe.” The older boy was denatured, raw, still trembling from the cold, extremities in pinpricks as his circulation resumed. “If I’m dead I’m glad to have died with you.”
Forehead to forehead, Kasse’s sorrow cut him till he no longer felt anything but relief at the mere sound of 18C’s voice.
“I felt you everywhere I wasn’t,” Eoran said into the softness of Kasse’s lips, “Maybe even where I was. In recesses, in force, outside of the rut of everyday interval like we were booted from the gesticulations of a reality wound too tight. I’ve never been left so violently empty, Kasse; I’ve never had to put the pieces of my very being back together. I think I’m doing a bad job.” If there was any withheld warmth to be had beneath the folds of the other’s clothes, Eoran sought it in languid exploration. The movement, however, was uncharacteristically vestal, needs prioritized over wants for once in his life.
“It probably says something about me that if I was standing on the precipice of my death, my last thoughts were a carnal recollection of your likeness.”
Kasse laughed. Maybe his own recovery was affected by his familiarity with existing intangibly, his residual welcome in those miniscule spaces where matter wasn’t, where nothing mattered,
where only he ever truly dared trespass.
Maybe the in between, where he’d left so many objects engulfed, so many bodies swallowed without any real awareness of where they actually went had spoiled that darkness and now, offered Eoran, it was loathe to let go.
But that was fucking dumb. The negative space between atoms didn’t have a consciousness, the quantum universe didn’t have desires or motivations or loneliness, it only had what they informed it to have with their own memories, their own bodies, their own desperately human need for heat and oxygen.
The void was an energy sink
ready to eat them alive.
Slowly, cognizant of Eo’s blind searching for skin to skin contact, Kasse began pulling sopping articles of near frozen fatigues off, through, their hypothermic bodies. Unwilling to lose contact even for a moment, he tossed piece after piece of their pilfered garb away to bake till dry at the edges of their shade.
“We can make a fire,” the older boy offered, knowing full well he’d have to pry Eoran off in order to spark it. Knowing full well he didn’t have the will to separate from the man he was trying now to bring fully back to life.
“No,” Eoran gently replied, unfazed by his expedited denudation. “Not during the day. Just lie here with me for a little while. Then we’re going to get food, ok?” From where, he had no idea, but they would have to make it happen. Finality was ever persistent, a hound after the residual iron in their blood.