“That was a raven and besides, Lenore was the chick the poem was about, not the raven’s name,” Hylas said around his finger. “I know you know that.”
“I do know that,” Tobias said. “Her name was suggested to me.”
“Dawn Marie knows Poe?”
“Not personally, I don’t think,” Tobias said. “I’ll have to ask her. It wasn’t Dawn Marie either.”
Hylas laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Who was it then?” Hylas said. “I know it wasn’t me.”
“Mooncricket.”
“That makes no sense.” Hylas glanced over at him. “How much sun did you get today, man?”
Tobias sighed, tired of the confusion over the boy’s silly name. He understood why people would think that he was just flinging words around to make nonsense though.
“Mooncricket,” Tobias said.
Before he could finish his thought, Hylas said, “Ah… Gesundheit?”
“Tristan.” Tobias said. He had tried to respect Mooncricket’s absurd choice of moniker, but he could not do it because it led to the exact sort of thing that was happening with Hylas. “Tristan is his real name, but he goes by Mooncricket.”
“Huh.” Hylas thought about that for a moment then declared it, “Cool.”
“Now you think it’s cool.” Tobias pressed his lips together.
“Yeah,” Hylas said. “Before I thought you might be having a stroke.”
“Not today,” Tobias said.
“Not ever,” Hylas said with absolute conviction.
Tobias gave him a sharp, questioning look. Hylas had insights just as Tobias did, but they were not the same kind of insights. Unless Hylas had never told him that he, too, could also tell when people were going to die if he focused on them. What he found instead was his brother smiling at him, utterly convinced that nothing bad or painful would happen to Tobias.
“Pesto chicken it is then,” Tobias said because he found it touching.
“Sweet,” Hylas said. “Risotto?”
“Don’t push it,” Tobias said.
“I’ll take a shift or two stirring,” Hylas said.
“Fine,” Tobias said. “If you don’t do it though then I’ll just throw it out the back door.”
“Nah, you’d put it in your compost bin,” Hylas said as they reached the front door. He looked at the heavy wood double doors and said in a musing tone, “You think these things could keep out a zombie horde?”
“Obviously,” Tobias said as he opened the door and stepped inside.
“Even a huge one?”
“No doubt,” Tobias said. “This place is the perfect shelter should the unlikeliness of the zombie apocalypse come to pass.”
“I dunno, you have lots of windows,” Hylas said.
They went into the living room and Hylas flopped down in one of the recliners. He was wide awake, not a single yawn so far; he must have taken his medication. Tobias thought maybe with the poetry contest rising like a gathering storm that Hylas should have skipped that day. Hylas loved his work though, even the crappy parts.
“Fair point,” Tobias said. “But they’re thick glass and they are easily boarded over. There are also the storm shutters to consider. Not to mention the passages inside the walls.”
“Yeah, yeah that’s right,” Hylas said. “Now tell me about Tristan.”
“A sudden shift in topic has never once surprised me into spilling the beans about anything.”
“Not even what I got for Christmas, yeah,” Hylas said with a frown. “Fuck you for that, by the way. But tell me anyway about the Mooncricket Tristan dude.”
“All right,” Tobias said.
He recounted the story of Mooncricket and his unpleasant-sounding boyfriend for Hylas and what he had inferred about their relationship—though he was quick to tell Hylas he had no proof of such things.
“The guy being covered in bruises all the time is indicative of an abusive relationship,” Hylas said. “Either that or he has a serious inner ear problem on top of a habit. That’s painful.”
“I don’t think it’s his inner ear,” Tobias said.
“Me either,” Hylas said. “You know Jeremy Harris?”
“Only in name,” Tobias said as he leaned back on the sofa. “Do you?”
“Kinda,” Hylas said. “He’s kind of a recluse; rich guy. I mean, rich like whoa, not rich like you who won the damn lottery.”
“I shared,” Tobias said. For his twenty-first birthday their father gave them each a case of beer. Hylas also got a new camera that likely took half his father’s paycheck. Tobias got a stack of scratch-off lottery tickets and won the jackpot on two of them.
“You did.” Hylas touched the side of his neck where a tattoo of stars trailed down from behind his ear to disappear under the collar of his t-shirt. The stars reappeared from under the sleeve of the shirt and trailed all the way down to Hylas’s wrist. Some of Tobias’s lotto winnings had paid for that tattoo.
“Where did you get that shirt, by the way?” Tobias said as he followed the path of Hylas’s tattoo.
“You like it?” Hylas asked, pulling it away from his body to look down at it. “I had it made at Shirts-N-Stuff.”
Tobias choked on his own saliva. “You did what?”
“Yuh-huh,” Hylas said. “Tammy Faye Fuck Face wasn’t real happy with me about it, tried to give me a lecture about vulgarity and such, but I cozied up to her and told her how much I like her Bible verse cross-stitch sweatshirt and how it was a bold move to wear it in this heat. She was cooperative after that.”
“How… you,” Tobias said. He couldn’t have gotten the hyper-religious proprietors of Shirts-N-Stuff to print him a t-shirt with a verse from Leviticus on it if he had tried, much less one that boldly—and randomly—declared PENIS. “I don’t understand that shirt either.”
“Dude,” Hylas said with a laugh. “Try it sometime. Just say penis really loudly and I guarantee that everyone within hearing range will be giving you their full, undivided attention. It’s like a magic word. Who needs ‘abracadabra’ when you have male genitalia?”
“No one, I suppose,” Tobias said. He rose from his seat with a soft laugh. “I’m going to shower then I will start supper. You’re in charge of making the salad.”
“I can rock the fuck out of salad tossing,” Hylas said, already half tuned out as he rooted through his messenger bag for the first batch of poems to be read, frowned upon and then discarded.
“That is—” Tobias cut himself off with a shake of his head and walked out of the room.
Behind him, he heard Hylas’s muffled, “Heh.”
After his shower, Tobias knocked on Dawn Marie’s door to get her to come down and help with supper as well. It was a thing they had been doing for as long as he could remember; when they were younger, Dawn Marie ate at their house more than she ever ate at her own. One of her favorite things to do was help out in the kitchen. Tobias had asked her once why she did it and she said it was because it made her feel like she had a real family, maybe not a normal one, but a real one. The kind of thing you saw on television shows—the entire family pitching in to make dinner, laughing and talking as they did. The Dunwaltons actually ate at the dinner table, not in front of the television. They had real plates instead of cheap paper ones so thin that anything with sauce or moisture in it would soak right through and you’d end up with a lap full of spaghetti.
“Yeah?” Dawn Marie called.
Through the door, Tobias could hear Hank Moody casually berating a classroom of his students, but it cut off as soon as Dawn Marie called out. A second later, she was standing in front of him. “Hmm… Tobias Dunwalton at my door, shirtless and dripping water,” Dawn Marie said. She tapped her bottom lip, eyes crinkling as she smiled. “What is a girl to do?”
Tobias blinked at her and looked down at his shirt in his hand. He put it on and said, “Come help with dinner.”
“You don’t even know how to play flirt, do you?” she sai
d as she fell in step beside him.
“Is that what that was?”
“Well, Toby, I figure if I was going to really try my hand at seducing you, I would have done so by now.”
Tobias tipped his head to the side with a little frown.
“Your twenty-fifth birthday doesn’t count,” Dawn Marie said.
“Oh. Okay,” Tobias said.
At twenty-five, he had still been a virgin and Dawn Marie had declared it a state of emergency and took it upon herself to divest him of it. He hadn’t complained though he had managed to embarrass himself the first time. He had done much better the second time though, so he thought it balanced out. Tobias had not been overly interested in keeping or losing his virginity, but he still counted that night among one of the best in his life.
“No, hey, I’m not being an asshole,” Dawn Marie said. “I’m sorry if that came out shitty. I didn’t mean for it to.”
“It didn’t,” Tobias said. It was time to change the subject. “We’re having pesto chicken with some pasta, it was supposed to be risotto, but I’ve changed my mind. Hylas is making the salad.”
“Yay, Hylas,” she said. “What am I making?”
“The pesto, of course,” Tobias said.
“Hell yeah,” Dawn Marie said. “I think I’m pretty much a pesto prodigy.”
He went to get Hylas who was stabbing a piece of paper with his pen. He glanced up when Tobias walked into his line of sight.
“One Shakespeare rip-off, one Plath and two Elizabeth Barrett-Browning thieves,” Hylas said. “How do I hate thee, let me count the ways. Ugh.” He stabbed the piece of paper again.
“That is dreadful,” Tobias said. He wrinkled his nose about the Barrett-Browning. He hated that poem. “Come help me in the garden. We need the greens and such for the salad.”
“Damnit,” Hylas said though he stood up. “I hate having to pick my own supper.”
“At least you don’t have to kill the chicken,” Tobias said.
They stepped out into the baking heat of late afternoon, the sun still up, but blazing orange and sullen red as it set. Whippoorwills were calling in the dusk, the sound of their voices almost a cacophony there were so many. It sounded like they all cried out a repetitive chorus of, Dick married the widow. Dick fell out of the white oak.
“Wow, they are loud,” Hylas said, wiggling his fingers in his ears.
Lenore perched herself on Tobias’s shoulder and cocked her head from one side to the other. The whippoorwills sounded frantic their calls were so loud and close together. Tobias tried to tune it out with little success as he went to gather the basil for the pesto. He crouched beside the fragrant patch and began picking leaves as Hylas sang the whippoorwills’ song back to them.
After supper, Dawn Marie went back to her Californication marathon and Tobias helped Hylas with the poetry after he washed the pesto off his face. He’d suffered an unexpected nap near the end of the main course and landed face first in his pasta. He took it with his usual good humor and finished the meal with bright green bits on his cheeks and in his eyebrows. All throughout the meal, the whippoorwills cried and the owl sang back-up.
The plagiarists—and their lack of originality—were unending.
“That’s it, seriously. I am keeping a list and this year as a preface to the winner, I am writing an article listing all the plagiarized pieces and the number of times they were submitted this year,” Hylas said after tearing up a plagiarized copy of “Tyger-Tyger”. “I should print their names, too. Huh, yeah, I might do that.”
“You have my support,” Tobias said as he laid aside an original poem that was a terrible piece of writing. It was melodramatic in the extreme, the similes beat to death with a branch from the goth tree and the attempt at some kind of metaphor ripped from the back of every emo song that ever was. Actually, Tobias thought it was pretty funny because it was so awful. So, he picked it up again and said, “Listen to this.”
When he was done, Hylas looked like he wanted to cry out of frustration despite the fact he was giggling. “This is hopeless.”
“It isn’t,” Tobias said. “There has to be one in here that’s readable. Somewhere.”
“Maybe.” Hylas did not sound like he was too sure. He picked up another poem. “Oh, look, erotic poetry: Touch the petals of my womanhood, open my flower so it may bloom/My velvet tunnel aches for the piercing of your flesh dagger/I dream of your digits caressing me—”
“Stop. Just stop,” Tobias said. “Digits makes me think the guy is touching her with numbers.”
“Numbers one through ten, for sure,” Hylas said. “Also, hi there, mixed metaphor. Wait. This is gross.”
“What is?”
“The entrant lists her age as nineteen, which isn’t illegal, but it’s still awful and mayhap a bit too young to be talking about opening flowers being pierced by velvet flesh petals or whatever,” Hylas said. Then he laughed. “It’s Brandi Reynolds, the little waitress over at Bouchon’s. All she really dreams about is of being a dirty girl with someone. Seriously, her libido is frightening. I had to stop going in there because she was disturbing me so badly. I mean, wow, she had thoughts about me… and pretty much everyone else.”
Hylas’s talent for insight, similar to Tobias’s, was the ability to catch a glimpse of a person’s subconscious. He could snatch bits and pieces from the brain stew that made dreams.
“Don’t tell me about it.” Tobias held up a warning finger when Hylas opened his mouth anyway. “Really, do not.”
“Fine, make me suffer alone,” Hylas said.
“I don’t tell you what I see,” Tobias said.
“Because you see the extra fucked up shit,” Hylas said. “I just get a peek inside peoples’ dream factories. That’s fun. Usually. I mean, if you think Brandi Reynolds is bad, you should take a look inside Wes’s head.”
Tobias thought about what he’d overheard earlier that day and shook his head. “I don’t think I need to. It’s about Nick.”
“How’d you know?”
“I have ears,” Tobias said as he laid aside a poem that wasn’t bad actually, but it also wasn’t good. He added it to what Hylas called his ‘desperate measures’ pile. He also had a ‘thieving ass clowns’ pile and a ‘so bad the only way to kill it is with fire’ pile. After the poetry contest was over, Hylas hosted a bonfire where he burned the poems he hated the most. He had named it Hylas’s Annual Pyre of Very Bad Things (weenie roast optional, bring your own stick).
The next poem Tobias picked up he made a scoffing sound then just let it go and laughed. He waved the page at Hylas. “We have a clever plagiarist,” he said.
“Do tell,” Hylas said.
“Emma Jane by… Well, this can’t be right,” Tobias said frowning at the name of the “author”.
“What? What?” Hylas asked.
“The name on the poem says it is by Dick Raper,” Tobias said. “That is not a real name.”
Hylas laughed so hard he slapped his knee. “Oh, yes, it is. I know little Dicky Raper, sorta. Fucking unfortunate name he’s got, but he’s a really nice guy.”
“No.” Tobias stared at the poem. “No, you do not. No such person exists.”
“Does so,” Hylas said. “His full name is Richard and he tries like hell to go by it or, well, he used to, but it didn’t take. Because Dick Raper is funnier. I guess he finally adjusted to it.”
“That poor man,” Tobias said.
“I know!” Hylas crowed then burst into laughter again.
“Anyway, back to the poem,” Tobias said when Hylas had his laughter under control. “It was many and many a year ago/In a kingdom by the sea…”
Hylas’s face fell and he seemed to get a touch pale at the sound of the familiar lines.
“Say it isn’t so,” he said.
“Alas, it is,” Tobias said. He kept reading up to the fourth line: “By the name of Emma Jane.”
“Because obviously if he didn’t do that then no one would ever know it was
a ripoff of Annabel Lee,” Tobias said. He rubbed his face and laid the page on the ‘thieving ass clowns’ pile.
“That’s it, I’m naming names,” Hylas said. “End of.”
“It is a lovely idea,” Tobias said as he stood. “I’ve had enough for now though, so if you’ll excuse me.”
“Fine, leave me to my torment,” Hylas said, giving him big, blue puppy-dog eyes. “Bastard.”
“I am supremely evil,” Tobias agreed. He patted Hylas’s shoulder on his way by and smiled when Hylas bumped against his leg affectionately. “Goodnight, Hylas.”
“Goodnight, Tobias,” Hylas said. “You supremely evil bastard.”
Tobias laughed and left him to his work, the last sound he heard from the living room that of the pen tip popping through another piece of paper and, “No, no, no. So bad.”
Upstairs in his room, Tobias’s curiosity finally got the better of him and he dragged out Hot Spots, the adult curiosity catalog. He flipped through it with mild interest and vague surprise at some of the things people got up to and were just plain into. There was an inflatable foot, perfect for licking, sucking or fucking, so claimed the little product description blurb. Apparently there was a special ‘love tunnel’ in the heel that guaranteed a realistic feel.
“A realistic foot feel?” Tobias said.
He frowned and turned the page to find an array of dildos and vibrators in ‘many titillating shapes and sizes to tickle any dirty fantasy’. Tobias skimmed over the selections, ranging from an extra-thick realistic penis to a dragon penis (and how, he wondered, would anyone know what a dragon penis looked like as they were not real). He was morbidly curious until he got to the dildo shaped like a dog penis ‘with an inflatable bulb for a realistic knotting sensation’.
“Sweet mercy no,” Tobias said as he slapped the catalog shut, got out of the chair he sat in to read and tossed the catalog in the trash. Then he went back to his chair and picked up the collected short stories of Ray Bradbury from the table he kept his reading material on. That should suffice as a palate cleanser to wash the unsavory images of dog penis dildos from his mind.
Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2) Page 13