He grabbed his coffee and slammed it into the wall across from the table, sending latte spatters everywhere and he struggled to get out of the booth, his eyes filling with tears. “I suppose I’ll go back to the middle of nowhere, in that case. I’m sorry I bothered you,” he said, his voice cracking at the back of his throat. The other people in the café were all staring at us, and I sat there with my coffee-stained hoodie as he stood up, towering over me, dark against the sunlit street through the glass behind him. “After all,” he added. “It’s not the worst way to end up, right?” And he stormed out of the building, leaving me to clean up the mess with a lump in my throat.
*
I learned to drive and bought a car after that so I could visit Harvey on the farm.
“I’m suffocating out here,” he said on one of my visits. “I don’t even feel like I’m alive anymore.” We were walking down the gravel road that stretched forever to the end of the earth like a lonely, white ribbon.
“You’re fine,” I said finally. “If I can be fine, so can you.” I shoved my hands into my hoodie pockets, wanting to ask him what happened all those nights I had spent worrying about him, watching him turn into a ghost. We walked in silence, with the trees whispering on the horizon.
“Look at you and your college sweatshirt,” he told me with a half-grin, and he reached around and flipped my hood up over my eyes. “I don’t even know what I’m doing out here,” he added quietly.
I shrugged. “I can’t feel anything anymore.”
He started to laugh, and it echoed out across the empty sky, bouncing back to me and stinging my ears. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Now you get it.”
I watched my uncle interact with him, and puzzle pieces assembled in my brain to replicate the patterns the stars used to make in Harvey’s eyes. His voice was lower when he talked to Harvey, and his knuckles were always bruised. This was all wrong, and the black, empty, dark hole where Harvey had been in my life opened up wide, threatening to consume everything.
Harvey and I left in my car when Uncle Bill was sleeping, and I snuck him back to the dorms until he got a job as a dishwasher and could afford a motel room.
One night, Harvey showed up unannounced and we went back to the lonely farm in the corn field desert and set the house on fire. Those same flames that consumed the house where my uncle slept also danced in Harvey’s eyes as we watched from the road.
“You don’t want to know what he did,” he said to me.
*
I still think of the fire, sometimes, and of Harvey’s wild, flickering eyes staring out from the deep holes of his eye sockets that night. I learned a lot of things about my brother from watching the skeleton of that house crumble into a flaming mess of death. I think of him watching the fire dancing behind all the windows and singeing all the wallpaper to black curls, and I wonder if Uncle Bill had ever looked up at the stars and wondered what made him do those things to Harvey. After college, he and I got a little house in a patch of woods, far from any town, where no one would ask any questions. I don’t answer questions because I don’t like explaining things. It just makes my head hurt.
*
Sometimes, when I don’t recognize the ghost looking back at me in the mirror, I think of the fireworks on the lake. I think of the whistling right before the explosion, spider webs of light streaking across the sky, the water coated in a thin film of ash and memory. I think of my brother in his hoodie, staring up a night sky that was alive with the burning remains of freedom. He was the fireworks, and I was the ground: bathed in his light, in awe, lucky to be burned by his embers.
I think of the ghosts I always assumed were waiting in the woods to haunt someone, too, and I realize that I can relate to them. I haunt the trees around our house, the furniture in our bedroom, the dishes in our kitchen. I stand on the back steps and stare at the trees, and I’m no longer a human, not quite a memory, but somewhere in between, some limbo that I share with Harvey and all his flaws. He’s a gas giant, glowing red and hot in the emptiness, and I am the cold, rocky world that can’t quite escape his gravity. I’m happy here. I’m okay with falling slowly toward the surface, the fiery death of a satellite.
I’ve thought about going back to the lake, but after that year, there were no more fireworks. Eventually, the whole park closed and everyone went home and never came back. All that’s left are the stars overhead, the distant band of the milky way, explosions of white hot heat so far away now that we’ll never know them again.
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About the Author
I was born in the wastelands of the American Midwest, and I still live there, much to everyone's regret. I started writing as a teenager as a side effect of what psychologists refer to as the "personal fable." I believed that I was unique, that my personal life story impacted the world, and that the world revolves around me. In my mid-twenties, I picked up writing again because I was sick of reading slosh and tired of having to go back fifty years to find books I actually want to read. I was especially over the only gay literature available in 2008 being soft core porn romance bullshit with jacked, oiled-up porn stars on the covers. I decided that if I wanted to read something that wasn't 500 pages of comma abuse and boners, I'd have to write it myself.
And so I did. It may not be the best, but it's what I want to read. Thank you for the support, and I hope my writing means something to you as well.
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Thanks for the continued support and thanks for reading.
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Dedication
This story is dedicated to my partners in writing, a very select group of people who are also writers. They are all extremely talented and they write things that I look forward to reading (a rare thing these days because, in my opinion, there's a lot of literary slosh in the world right now) and they have all at one point or another helped me shape one of my typo-riddled landmines into a finished book. Without the guidance of these awesome folks, I wouldn't have the courage to publish anything I've written. I'd like to say that I do everything myself, but without the help of these people and being constantly inspired by their ability to keep writing and creating new works, I'd have given up long ago. I am inspired almost every day by you guys, even by things so mundane and inconsequential as status updates on social media, so thank you.
Gypsy Snow
Chelsey Barker
Brianne Chason
Joe Egly-Shaneyfelt
Elizabeth Verger
Barbie Butler
If I forgot anyone, I'm sorry. I blame my advanced age.
I want to extend a very special thank you to all of my readers for your support and encouragement during my career. I'd like to extend it like the neck of a giraffe, but alas. I have no god-like abilities. You'll have to accept some kind of mechanized extension.
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Life Among the Voids Page 4