I Am No Bird

Zip heard the slip of his shoes on the rain-soaked fire escape before his cracked knuckles rapped at the window, but she took her time scooting away from her desk and slinking across the room to unlock her window. She turned around as he slipped in through the crack, bleeding into the bright space like an ink stain spreading across the surface it has chosen to penetrate. From the corner of her eye, as she picks up her pen to resume her homework, she can see that he’s shivering and his eyes are wide and bleary in the deep set of his face. 

“Take off your jacket and get into bed,” she said softly, hoping that through the thin walls his entrance hadn’t been heard. “You’re making a puddle on the floor.” 

He nodded without looking at her, the hair that looked like a black brushstroke against his scalp shook free, just a smidgen. “Sorry,” he mumbled. He peeled his jacket off his wet skin, pale and glimmering from the cold and the wet. His sneakers and socks followed before he crawled into bed, burrowing himself below Tzipporah’s covers. She winced a little at the sigh he made, knowing that he probably hadn’t been in a bed this week and that when she herself went to bed tonight, a giant puddle would be waiting for her. 

She decided it was probably worth it. 

“Did you go home?” she asked absently, not looking in his direction. 

It feels like the room is caving in. It is much, much too hot under these sheets that feel like they’ve been plastered--no, cemented--to his skin. He’s too scared to move and wake her but my God he has to get out of this bed or his lungs are going to collapse and the ceiling is going to fall and smother him and he’s going to die. Everything is wet and if he doesn’t get a shower he’s worried that he’ll vomit or his lungs won’t stop taking in all this extra air and spitting it out before it can use and then his heart will stop and he’s going to die. He needs a bath desperately. 

He feels used. How do you love someone so much, he wonders, clawing at is neck trying to stop the gasping fish sounds he makes before his lungs collapse and his heart stops and he’s going to die. 

He loves her and she’s ruining him and her sticky smell is still all over him and he’s drowning in the goo she left all his over his body. 

She’s sleeping, breathing shallowly. 

“What is that thing, anyway?”

Milo’s head jerked up rapidly at the question and her fingers stilled where they were working circles over the deep burgundy fleece clutched in her palms. The scarf, which spent its days tied securely to the post of the sibling’s bed and its weekends wrapped tightly around the throat of either the sister or the brother. The cloth had become almost thread-bare in its recent abuse. Kain had often looked up in the dead of night to see one of the two releasing the scarf from its prison and crumpling it into a ball, holding it secure in the bed with them. It meant something; it was one of the only things they’d brought from home with them and it never seemed to be out of their possession for long. 

Her eyebrow twitched, low and quick and she forced a smile.

“It’s a scarf,” she said plainly, but not rudely. “Really soft.” 

Lips pursed, he replied, “Whose is it?” 

There was the twitch again; almost inperceptable--almost. 

A long pause ensued, as if she was considering to lie or what version of the truth to tell him. She dropped her eyes and again began to play with the fleece fringe on the end of the scarf. 

“It’s one of our brother’s,” she said quietly. “Our younger brother. He always wears scarfs, even in the summer when it feels like the sun must be exploding outside. His health is poor, regardless, and he usually stays inside. It’s very hard to keep him healthy. Travis and I...we worry that, with our absence, he won’t be taken care of as well.” 

Kain nodded, feeling something tasting oddly enough like pity pinging around inside his chest. 

The hand that rucked roughly through his hair did little in the way of calming him; in fact, it seemed the limb’s mission was to set all of his nerves on fire and send electricity of varying degrees down the length of his spine. Still, the hollow pounding ache in his chest seemed to ease, and leaned into the man beside him. 

“I don’t trust her,” he whispered into the lapel of the man who seemed to hold him upright with just the curve of his little finger. It was as if a string had wound them tightly together and his body only felt like his own when he was beside the other. The taller boy squeezed the neck of the smaller one, before trilling a finger up the hollow of his neck. More lightning rocketed down his spine. 

“We have to trust her,” he murmured into the other boy’s hair. “Or at the very least, we need her.” 

“You need her,” the other hissed, pressing his face farther into the neck of the other. 

“It isn’t about that--” 

“It never is, with you is it?” 

Venom crept into his blood, and he let his hand leave the neck of the boy and removed his chest from his space. 

She was made of beams of light. They tripped out of her fingertips and poured out from auburn strands of hair. Light streamed down her bareback in a river, down the valley of her spine, roaring absently the past the sunflowers that sprawled and bloomed on rotating shoulder blades of her bare back. A cluster of lightning bugs pooled in the small of her back and they hummed and buzzed with all the goodness and energy she possessed in the whole of her lithe frame. Tan skin stretched and paled over the bone as she lowered herself to the linen sheets, skin bare and raw and bright from the summer sun. The warm night blushed her cheeks and brightened her eyes, despite their hesitancy to stay open as the sunset bled across the sky behind her.