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Siddharta (until I change it lol)
It was summer, the sun hung languidly as it slid into night. Jack walked with Dylan, just short of holding hands as they wandered together. There was not much to see but that didn't bother them. Before either knew it the street came to an end. There were rusting metal trailers they called homes behind them and flattened used up corn stalks in front with a forest off to the left and some more decaying units on wheels opposite of it. " Aint nothing like it. " Jack said, and he meant it. If he had cigarettes one would have hung out his mouth but he did not and his mouth remained empty. " Its fine I guess, " was followed by Dylan's leaning in, looking up to the taller boy. If Jack had cigarettes, he would have bummed one from him and let it hang out of his mouth too. " I dont really like it though. Its just whatever I guess. " He added on with a slight frown. " Cept for you of course. I like you. " More silence from the bigger boy followed.
" I like you too. " He finally responded. The frown faded along with the light on the horizon with neither completely gone yet. Dylan shoved his hands inside his pockets, the dark black jeans enveloping his pale hands and gently painted nails. It was colder outside than expected and these clothes did not do much to distract from that fact. He leaned closer again, directing his attention upward. " I really like you. Really, really. " The hair covering his face, his eyes, was a savior. A blonde shield for the frail blue spheres behind. He gazed at the glistening belt buckle of the other, its shine disappearing slowly. " I dont know what Id do without you. " Now they honed in on the cross that always dangled from the other's neck. The pain resurfaced. It caught the light better than the belt and stole it away. It was an eternally lustrous gold that made him jealous. Why couldn't his hair look like that? Various musings of guilded forms.
" Whats that mean? Really really like me. Aint that what friends are supposed to do? Whatre you tryna say? " He questioned, looking off into the distance as if something rather interesting was there which Dylan could not see. Dylan resorted to leaning closer, resting his head on the other while staring up pleadingly. " I dont understand ya. Unless youre talkin some nerd shit shit I can figger it most the time. Not now. " They could both agree on that. Dylan pouted but hid his face and dug into Jack's shirt. Once he realized what he had done, Dylan reversed course slightly. " I just think youre special. To me, anyway. " Silence. A long silence that darkened along with the sky.
The sun had long been digested in the clouds but the light peaked out partly. " I guess yous special to me too. " A strange look came over his face. It reminded Dylan of how it looked when Jack tried to figure out the math homework without his inevitable help, lost hopelessly. He was looking outward, the wind swaying the short tufts of hair that topped his head and the golden piece around his neck coldly. Dylan rubbed up against Jack and stayed silent as they both watched the grey take over, the last of the light swallowed up finally. The boy shivered, looking to the larger one. " Its late. Can we go in Jack? " He asked uncomfortably. The question came out slowly, deliberately. No response. A slight whimper was followed my a pull. Jack flinched. " What? " He responded lazily. Dylan repeated the request and then Jack nodded. " ... Sure. "
The dark made the walk. Slowly the boys traced their earlier journey. The streetlights would reflect off the slight metals from Jack's clothes and effortlessly attracted Dylan's attention. It made him feel like a crow after some meaningless baubles and he giggled to himself at the thought to Jack's detriment. Jack had moved his hand to Dylan's side and squeezed once he heard the smaller boy's noises. A deep vocalization crept out of Jack's mouth, disapproval radiating much like the heat in his breath. Dylan blushed and tried to turn away. He wanted to slap at Jack's hand and tell him to stop. But they would be there before long, there was no reason to sour the mood. Jack was leading and leading well so Dylan felt as if he had no right to complain for a slight uncomfort.
They arrived. Jack slid the screendoor open with unusual precision, not wanting to deal the last bit of damage that would make it finally come off. " Stupid fuckin thing. Be careful. " Dylan snuck in right behind. They entered into his home, looking into a large space that was a combination of the living room and kitchen. Everything smelled like mold out here. The stove was partially gunked up with a rancid black material and the gas was effectively useless, only making the clicking noise and pretending to be making an earnest attempt to start. It could still let out that disgusting fume that gas stoves let off, the odor that made Dylan want to puke until he could not manage and the bile ran out. The ceilings had a horrible pseudo-popcorn texture and housed some oddly bolbous lighting fixtures which were somehow smeared with grease of some sort or another inside and out. There was something resting at the bottom of the glass - it seemed that way at least, the lighting was low enough to make it hard to tell. The semi-globular lights had a sickening pigmentation, some nasty yellow color that fit the ill feeling one got by witnessing the fixture in situ. A strange dying twist of a kitchen-parlor space. The other portion was a bit better, but you were constantly reminded of the first half when you sat down on the feaux-leather couch. Dylan much preferred to be in Jack's room anyway; his parents were rather austere, mean folks from what little he'd seen and heard. It was just second nature by now for Dylan to slink off to the bedroom. Whatever was beyond the relatively limited view of the hallways Dylan possessed was best left alone, both according to Jack and his own senses.
This room was better. It wasn't perfect, but nothing was. The carpet felt vaguely damp and there was a hole in the wall on the eastern flank of the room that he could never shake a sense of unease looking at. When asked he said it was an accident but this felt like an odd place for one. Not like he'd done anything wrong to Dylan - but there were always rumors, rumors of all types and severities. There would probably be rumors about Dylan, but no one really cared about him enough. That's what he assumed and there was never a reason to suggest otherwise. The only person who cared was right in front of him and he knew what it was like to have that filth spread amongst hostile audiences that would feed upon it. Voracious carnivores that wished for nothing but the worst for them and would gnaw on their despair eagerly... But today the hole drew further attention. It was leaving his mind itchy. The physical discomforts were trivial compared to the sinkhole in the back of his mind at this sight that he'd seen a hundred times by now, maybe more. Jack had returned but he took little notice and opted to stare into the abyssal space instead.
Before he knew it Dylan had a strange can in his hand that tasted disgusting but he didn't care. It went down and the end of the can brought him back to awareness. His pupils at a pinpoint and eyes bored deeply into the flesh of the face, fine stonemasonry unobscured. Jack placed his hand on the other boy's shoulder. It was rough, a slighter form of the sandpaper from Dylan's cats. Jack said something. It wasn't exactly clear what that something was. More words, more and more. He flinched. He felt hot all over. More timeless floating. It was so warm. Staring up revealed a strange sight. A fleshy tan color was intersected with his blonde streaks and there was not much else. It was so warm, all of it. His hands weren't seen but he could tell they were clutching at something, whatever this mass was in front of him. Some type of mumbling came out of his mouth and the wall he grasped desperately was live, expanding and contracting in a predictable pattern which made his hands move in a simple arc back and forth and back and forth. His vision was rosey tints, odd reds and pinks smeered on his contacts. The smell was awful, frankly - Jack normally smelt rather pleasantly to Dylan's tastes, but this overwhelmingly salinated sweat and strange mold was too much. He hurt too, with aches in places he'd never. In this junglesque manmade microclimate the sun was close and tantalizing but blocked by a fleshen canopy; his whole being felt melted and weak despite this cover from above. This did not particularly matter to him for the moment.
Some more time passed. An indeterminate amount, it could have been an hour or a minute or any other unit which experiences as these are compassed in and in any enumeration. He smiled. A vixenly smile of adoration. So warm, so fuzzy. " I love... " loosely came out, wetted with some strangeness. A tensing was felt, but the boy did not take note. He managed to drool out a " ... love you, " and could not have felt more giddy. The rigidity of his support became undeniable now. What had once possessed much give had little. He felt an active, manual touch, a feeling better than any he had felt. Warmth like boiling cascades, roiling infernally down the weak shoulderblades much the way the falls he'd seen as a young child with his father in the parks. It touched his neck now. The sensation pushed into the neck, softening it with the sheer heat. The tickly, bristly fur of his arms now came into Dylan's purview, it was a electrical sensation. The view he had was already vague, and it slowly faded as those parts he loved so much dug and dug and dug further. What a gorgeous day, what a brilliant sunset. The sun tapered off and left the dark again, into a rest of a thousand years.
They were called from a lazy summer day close to the end of break with the news that his mother had died. They ought to come to the hospital ten hours away in the city. The grandparents were dressing quick with the children behind in schedule but prepared before long. They packed in the car with the grandmother driving and the grandfather on the right and the children in the backseat. The heat melted them into an ill-defined langour that calmed them of the anxiety which seaped from the ear canals to the center of the brain and was taking root in its agonizing finality, forcing the tendrils to recede for fear of being scorched in place forever inert. Instead they remain playing at the edges patiently. The elders in front were more aware by need, leaving the children to their own for a time. Radiosong to sleep with and the car's cold conditioned air fully activating kept them comfortable enough for a rest without much hassle. There were odd conversations in the front but he cared not and drifted past it into his mind.
He had been at rest for a time before his head was full of things. Strange incidents which made the rest negative space, valueless and without color as his slumber continued and followed a vague form that made sense in the moment but would be hopelessly lost upon his rising from it. At last something permanent came into focus. Acrid precognitions displaying his mother on the sunken hospital bed and machinery weaving inside and outside of her, the body having the appearance of a gigeresque being stripping her bare of life, its bizarre digestion processes hidden by burial under the drab blue garb of a patient. A visitor's band covered a tattoo relating to the boy masterfully on her yellowed wrist and in the dream he started to cry. The intubated body was limp and still a slightly warm mass. Her stomach was smaller yet partly bloated and her hair had thinned. Beeping from the machines that had sustained her much as he had been within her. The nurses came in filled the drips with more saline fluid before leaving in what seemed a hurry. There was a man he failed to notice prior mourning over her as well, standing still as a weeping garden angel with something analagous to flowers but not of nature on a chair behind. Worldly delights of a few variations. He looked back to his mother and the presence of his grandfather was felt as they sobbed together.
It was a night terror in day and he was frozen to silence. He felt lightheaded and the smallest portions of his time asleep were fleeting. He had woke to delirium tremens of some sort but they felt real. They had hit a point he could never on his own in all his rational waking being. Once he had recovered the boy recalled Coelho and considered how the best stories are the ones untold and unshown, the ones experienced. There would be no pyramid and certainly no treasure under it even if there was. The elders were staring ahead without notice as he had made few sounds in his fear. He stared out of the window and saw greyed green, brown expanses of leaf and highway that stretched far down and under the horizon line. The dry grasses that always accompanied the concrete arteries of the land, worming through the wide open interior and bringing the good country people and cityfolk of the continent to an union of some kind. Yellow road markings that had faded and now reminded him of the tinting on his mother's skin in his premonition. He let out a noise at last and was noticed. " You arright bud? " the old man asked. The grandmother was too busy driving to have noticed. " Yeah. Im fine. " came out of the boy's mouth. " Okay. If you need anything let us know. " replied the grandmother. He nodded and said no more. He would have been hungry if not for his nervousness stifling all other things. The boy closed in and attempted to be bothered no longer. The images played in his head time after time and he felt something after them.
He was not asleep but not exactly awake or aware, statically moving along his track to their collective destination still hours away. Time slid painfully and rest could never come, or if it could it chose not. It had cooled off and at last the seeds could spread their wretched roots within his brain unrestrained by the muffling of summertime and the gross pressure of the sun's exuberance. It had slanted off and hit the car at a low angle that sliced right at his eyes when they were open so he opted to leave them closed for a time, but the rejection of light was weighted upon itself. Visiones de sangre. He forgot where but he had heard this in his halfhearted Spanish lessons for some reason or another. The same as before but the bloat had stopped and the skin's color had been drawn from every vestige, drained painfully and leaving an outer coating no more vibrant than the sterile bedding she lay upon in still death, inanimate as a puppet liberated of its strings. The once luxurious hair had lost its shine and left a strange pyrite impression that saddened him greatly in both his mental and waking worlds once he returned to the latter unceremoniously. These two merged in forms that were never fully recalled; the songs from their surround sound system infiltrated and mangled the already ghastly visions. Industrial buzzing tones and unbearable sickly sweet singers with such heavy digital processing as to seem more machine than man were contorting to shapes which would have seemed nothing more than the audio equivalent of a particularly dull wallpaper in a greater state of being. They became the wailing of the damned and the cries of bondage, the steady goosestepping of nightmares. But still his eyes remained closed.
Time dragged further on and on. He must have fallen asleep for the hours felt as minutes and minutes as hours. How we disparage time once there is too much and plead for it on all fours once it has left us. It pulls our bones from our form and rests inside a calcified nest with them strewn carelessly in its ever wakeful view. A greedy, prideful beast which holds dominion over all from the largest to the smallest of things. He awoke to a journey nearing its destination. The country had changed from dulled yellow and black cropland to strange green hues carpeting the land, ochreous undertones hidden by large kudzu growths. It was the same temperature as when they had left even as the sun had shrunk below the horizon. Past the rice and tobacco plants now taking rest from the sun, nearing the city that looked as bright as ever no matter the time of day from the outside, its bright light only shining moreso in the vacuum of night than even the most overcast days. Cars lined the highway even in the early hours. A constant flux in and out that seemed to replace whatever left and expell the excess, never tipping too far in either direction of excess or abscence. They entered the city at last.
Jake sat down at the table and looked across it. He was stuck with a man that looked about seven times his age. A rotting veteran of some American-oriental conflict with a branded cap which displayed this fact proudly. His mother had to go do something and he didn't have anywhere else to be, so sitting and babysitting this ghoulish corpse was what she came up with. He had a littany of pills laid out. Jake counted twelve, but he wasn't paying too much attention and did not care to count them again. This happened before every meal apparently, he had a whole smorgasbord of medications before he could get to the meal. How miserable. It hurt when they went down his dried-turkey gullet, his throat would convulse in response but they would go down anyway. His vocal cords seeed rotted; his face contained agony, sound and fury, yet nothing c ame out. The ticking of a little wallclock in the kitchen was the only real noise, a normally unassuming piece which now took on more and more of Jake's capacities due to the lack of anything else. The rest of the house was dull as Charles. Desaturated, clean, settled.
The man was moving. His parkinsons hand grappled onto a spoon and he started to attempt eating. Jake groaned when he noticed that five of the capsules were left out on the table untouched. Jake was told to make sure the old man was taken care of. Not like he had anything better to do. He stood up and tapped its shoulder smartly. " No. Not yet. " He took the spoon quick, facing a resigned noise which could have been mistaken for a breeze. " Take em. Come on. " The boy picked them up and fed them one by one, feeling as a mother bird might. This overgrown grub having bloodthinners, thyroid medicine, whatever else spat into its mouth. Once the reds and blues were down the old man's throat the boy sat down in his place of origin. The ticking of the clock emphasized the impotence of his motions. It took one hundred tick... ticks to get the spoon back in the bowl after picking it off of the table. Another two hundrend and fifty or so to get it to his lips. Even the slurping had a weakness to it Jake did not know possible. So slow and quiet.
He sat through the first few spoonfuls. The blank, glassed stare combined with the trappings of homemaking of a dead woman and a rapidly dying man who had lived without color televsion was draining. " Hurry up.., " Jake mumbled to himself. The man's stare seemed to sharpen dimly before being reverting to an even less alert status. He got up. Jake had never been in this house before. His mother never particularly had much of an affinity for this side of the family; having met one of them himself now, it was not hard to see why. Jake found it hard to believe that this man had ever been anything worth seeing, he was such a husk which stretched the definition of life. There were dead plants in the windowsill which were more lively, more interactive. He set off down the hall. There were photos of a man of some sort with a lithe young woman that shared hair color with his grandfather's ex-wife, his mother's mother which had long been dead. It was family legend that his grandfather had killed her in a fit of shellshock. It was not a legal fact for murky reasons which vaguely pointed back to corruption and distasteful dealings of one sot or another. She was vibrant and never felt a day over thirty according to his mother and the photos corroborated when he squinted at them. Somehow that stiff meatmarionette had managed to do her in before Jake could remember, most likely before he was born. Strangled off five times legal blood alcohol and a firework in the neighbor's yard. No one wanted a thing to do with him after that. He was left alone until his mother realized there was much to be gained from his will including the house Jake was currently imprisoned in. The old man could not even manage to hurt himself anymore; he had long lost the capability to go out with his drinking buddies which leached off of him for beers and he could not have held anything long enough to do anything notable with it. Jake noted a few more pictures of a similar sort and moved past them, hitting what his mother insisted on calling a parlor to humor his grandfather's perceptions.
He found himself in a livingroom of some kind. An older television on a oaken entertainment center stood at the other end against the woodpanel walling. Leftward was a wall which had a yellowing, aging window. Pollen on the outside he thought. There was an old floralprinted couch and matching acessories which splashed color in the darkened, dried room. Still the ticking. The right had an opening into a mudroom which did not get use anymore except for the help that came and walked right by the old dirty mud and grasscovered boots which had dried from inaction. The carpet had dark brown stains near the door which blended in with the burgundy carpet with a vaguely european pattern. Jake thought it was pretty, it reminded him of flowers. But it was much too dark. The whole room was, really; he imagined that anything much more animated would probably give the old man a stroke. The boy gravitated towards an ancient recliner shawled in a black and white afghan spliced with tacky colors. He managed to sit on the chair and after some struggle got the legs up. The remote was placed next to a glass ashtray that had nasty pestocolored globs of snus and the juice it produced. It was a blocky tool that took a bit of handling to get used to. He laid back and surfed the channels after working against the confusing device in his hand. Before long he found something accceptable.
The boy awoke to darkness outside. The afghan had slid down and veiled his forehead. He shook it off and looked at the time. The big hand and the little hand were on eight. He yawned and stood uneasily after toying around with the lever which pulled the legs back into their shell. He got the urge to use the bathroom and fumbled until he found it. Thankfully it was not up the stairs; it was built into the side of them in a strange manner he had never heard of except for books and other fictions. A set of dentures floating in a plastic cup like a pickled toothset in an apothecary. The toilet flushed and he shut the oaken door. The boy poked around some more. There was a second floor that he visited briefly. It was an empty domestic space where many had slept prior and none slept now. It was cold and dark. The heat was probably cut off up here. He tried some of the doors and the only ones which opened were storage. The help had cleared everything of note away to be more efficiently dealt with upon the old man's death which came creeping closer by the day. He took particular interest in a golden walking implement which paralleled a cane. He attempted turning the lights on in the closet but the bulb appeared to be burnt out. He left the scene with the door hanging open and walked down the stairs. It didn't take long for him to return back to the kitchen. He had left his phone charging and it was about time to collect it. He waltzed over before feeling wind. His head slammed into the hard counter and blood gushed, staining the counter and the rest draining down onto the floor and pooling under his face with the metallic sanguine rushing out and clotting on it. The old man's head jerked up but he returned to his slumber in seconds.
She returned at ten. The door slid open easily and she passed the hallway with little thought. She heard the television working and chose to turn it off. She set the recliner back in its position and thought little of it. She wandered into the kitchen and saw the flies swarming the white streaks that had mixed with the bloodied flooring. The old man was snoring with a vague smile on his face and soup dripping down into his beard and onto the table in specks. The white bowl it was once contained in had evidently been knocked over, shattered into small porcelain shards. The reek wafted into her nose and it stung. She put her back to the wall and cried.