tumbleweeds

His shirt is drenched in sweat, tacky against his skin. He feels hot, and cold, and like nothing at all.

He’s found out, through habit, that he doesn’t writhe with nightmares. His sheets are untangled, and if his eyes worked properly he would see the very same ceiling he fell asleep staring at.

No, while the monsters prowl his mind, he is eerily still. Arms folded on his stomach, legs straight, chin resolutely pointing upwards. Robin once said he looked like a pharaoh in his coffin. Steve hopes she was wrong; hopes the mummies had better dreams.

It’s early, the birds still quiet in the dark gray night behind his shuttered window. He wishes he hadn’t closed the blinds, right now, but can’t bring himself to get up and open them. He strains, yearning for air hard enough that he can almost feel it, a ghost of a breath washing over his cold sweat.

By his guess, he’s only slept one, maybe two hours; it’s hard falling asleep, because before asleep there is falling. It’s hard to stay asleep, too.

The skin around his eyes hurts, taut and wary. He’s staring, hard into the static of barely-there dawn, no doubt finishing the thorough fucking up of his vision. It’s not like there’s anything not fucked up about him at this point anyway; the world is blurry, lights like blinding phosphenes shooting straight to his brain, and everything is distinctly more muted out of his left ear. Not to count the permanent headache that ebbs and flows at the back of his head, or the gaping wounds on his shredded sides. He’s been chewed up and spit out by a greater force; he feels like a speck, a crumb, too insignificant to bother killing properly anymore.

He doesn’t register when his eyes finally close again; the nightmares don’t come back, but sleep stays fickle, taunting him, washing over him in tepid waves, then promptly fizzling out. It’s like water in his lungs, air evading him when he gasps.

Feverish images come and go; when he’s lucid enough, he can tell how disjointed they are. But seconds later he falls back like a rock in a river, and his mind constructs more and more scrapbooked images to parade around him. Cardboard cut outs look realer in the dark. He’s the man in the cave, chained to the rock floor, flames behind his back casting shadows on the wall.

He wishes they’d burn through him and finish it off, but they never do.

Instead, he wakes up again, and this time the birds are awake, just like the episodic cars and, really, most everybody. Steve can’t really tell if it’s noon, or past it; doesn’t really care, because time is made up anyway.

It’s hard to fall asleep, it’s hard to stay asleep, and it’s also hard to wake up.

The sheets coddle him with illusions of warmth – his sweat has dried, leaving his skin tacky. He knows he won’t fall asleep again, but he yields anyway, because what else can he do? He can feel his wounds burn through his sides, knows he should get up and tend to them. He can’t bring himself to move, but the thought runs through his mind still, obsessive. He can almost feel them festering on his flanks, coughing up bad blood. He doesn’t mind the unending thought, because it steals his mind away from all of the others. The void and the Walkie on his bedside table and the fact that he can’t project himself further than five minutes from now; it all melts away, because his brain is imagining maggots under his skin.

It’s like this, most of the time – he can’t be sure, though, because everything blurs in his memory, the crisp Before, the ugly During, the shell-shocked aftermath. The Again and the pain and the After – that’s where he is, right now, the After; every morning spread in his bed like a rotting corpse, everything in him focused on the sullied bandages around his abdomen.

Eventually, like every day, the record in his mind becomes unbearable, and he springs up. Every joint in his body groans in protest, the lip of wounds tear open in toothless grins, and the constant headache threatens to grow, and so he has to force himself to stop. Force himself to swing his legs slowly to the ground, force himself to breathe, to swallow back the nausea.

Head bent, his eyes focus on his thighs; the hair pattern disrupted by large swaths of mottled skin, the discoloration disappearing under the lip of his underwear. They’re healed, have been for a while. If the new injuries ever do, he’ll end up with more scars than untouched skin. A monument of pain, more wound than boy.

He’s never liked being a boy very much – the empty house or the look on his father’s face or the lonely summers before he learned you could be lonely even in a room full of people who knew your name – but he does miss it now, in an ugly, selfish way. He feels as though he’s skipped the part of man, jumped straight to shambling corpse. He feels so old.

He doesn’t dare touch the scars, keeps his hands on the sheets. Touching them makes them feel real, and he wouldn’t know how to conciliate that with the fact that every cell of his body feels pixelated, made up.

He waits until his brain stops trying to evade his skull and only then does he inch himself upright.

His shirt hangs askew on his back, stiff with dried sweat. He can’t sleep shirtless anymore; because of the wounds, and because the barely-there weight of the fabric feels safer. As if monsters cared about a flimsy Garfield tee.

His stomach hurts, and he knows, intellectually, that he’s hungry – he hasn’t felt real, honest-to-god hunger, in too long to remember what it feels like. He doesn’t go downstairs yet, instead walks through the bathroom door. Needs to peel off the sweat and bad dreams from his skin – his brain is still chanting wounds, wounds, wounds.

The mirror isn’t cracked, which misses out on a great metaphor, but ultimately doesn’t matter, because Steve is cracked enough for the both of them. He takes off his worn-down shirt, swallowing down the part of him that feels vulnerable about it.

He doesn’t take a proper shower, just wipes the fatigue away with a damp towel. Doesn’t trust himself to be fully naked under the showerhead, doesn’t trust it not to start spitting out vines or gore. He’ll have to, at some point; thinks he’ll probably call Robin, ask her to sit on the closed lid of the toilet while he bathes. If she talks fast enough, maybe his mind won’t conjure the damn things, imagine blood dripping off him instead of water. Even if she stayed silent, her presence alone might be enough.

He wishes she was here, wishes he’d asked her to stay with him. In the same breath, he changes his mind – he’s a barely-there shadow, blinking in and out of existence like a misplugged device. He doesn’t want her to have to see that. He can barely withstand the stench of his own rot; can’t put that burden on her, too.

He stares, for a second, at his bandages. Red blooms on his side like an obscene sort of flower. He’s like a grave, a grey, dead thing with more colourful, just as dead, things strewn upon himself.

When he carefully unpeels them, there are no maggots; the wounds are unhappy, frowning, lips torn from his brutal jolting upright, but they aren’t too terrible-looking. His hands are slow and practised as he methodically cleans them, wraps new gauze around himself.

His form in the mirror does the same, just as slow, just as practised, another world where the bats bit on the other side of him. Maybe in this one, Eddie’s still alive. Steve doesn’t believe so, because when the guy in the mirror looks up, his eyes are just as empty.

*

The next day is the same, and the next day too, and Steve isn’t really counting anymore – never really was.

The nightmares repeat, and somehow still send his heart reeling – nothing like a practised horror movie, where you can feel all the beats coming, anticipate all the jumpscares until the glint of the knife is no longer surprising. The mornings repeat, too, long and stretched out and miserable, until it’s six p.m and the nightbirds start calling. He stays up, late, first because he doesn’t want to succumb to sleep, then because he can’t. Wishes he had weed on him, but he hasn’t gone out in the backyard in ages, let alone farther than that. He knows it’d give him a headache, but he already has one anyway. Wishes at least he could be the one to cause it; hold the origin in his hands, a small thing burning out between his fingers.

It jolts him out of his miserable routine when knocks sound on the door. He knows, intellectually, that this isn’t monsters – monsters don’t knock – but he still grabs his bat as panic rises in his chest.

“Is everyone okay?” Are the first words out of his mouth, shaped on his tongue before he even cracked the door open. His eyes drop to Robin’s face, scan it for injury, urgency, something. All he finds is concern.

“Are you?”

The adrenaline leeches out of his body in seconds, stealing back the energy that had temporally filled his limbs. He doesn’t answer, barely moves when Robin slinks under his arm into the empty house.

“Steve,” she says, but she doesn’t add anything. Like his name is some sort of incantation; like it’s enough to make him understand.

He doesn’t say anything either, because he doesn’t understand, or the part of him that does is cowering far, far under the roiling mists.

“Today is–”

“I know what today is,” he snaps, and his whole body shudders with it. He knows, and he doesn’t want her to say it, doesn’t want to hear it out loud – barely lets his own mind utter it, either.

She seems to understand. “Can I hug you?” She asks instead, and he says yes, and she pulls her arms around his sides. She’s careful not to jostle his slow-healing injuries, but her hands push firmly into his back, enough that he can feel her there, that his body recognises hers. His mind no longer needs telling, because she’s here, and she’s real. All the tension in his muscless unravels under her touch, and he sags into her, breathing around a shuddering sigh.

“I missed you,” she says, and she says it for him, too, because she can tell he can’t, not yet.

They stay quiet for a moment, late afternoon drawing out around them, and it feels like Steve is seeing colours for the first time in forever. Robin’s hair is painted peach by the pre-sunset glow.

“The others…” She doesn’t move, talking against his chest.

“I know,” he whispers back. “But I can’t...not all at once. I’ll…”

“Okay, Steve. Later. Do you want me there?”

He squeezes her a bit harder, biting down the pain of his jostled injuries. He feels slightly more alive with it. “Please,” he mumbles in her sunset hair.

They stay like this for what feels like a long time. This is the first time Steve has touched another human in ages, his starved body drinking in the proximity.

Eventually, they unclasp from each other – it still feels like they’re hugging, though, when Robin trails him up the stairs, her hand on his wrist, and later when they come out the door, her shoulder slotted in his side.

Water drips in rivulets down his back, his wet hair growing cold in the March wind. They walk to his car, and he drives, melting back into the comfort of it, the worn wheel under his fingers, the seat under his jeans. He’s dressed for the first time in forever; it makes him feel more and less real at the same time. A shadow, an imposter in acid-wash.

Robin is silent in the passenger seat. The Beemer groans mutely, smooth on freshly-mended roads.

The cemetery is silent too. No one’s there but ghosts, threaded in the dried bouquets and sun-bleached plastic flowers, hanging from trees in wisps.

They walk up the small hill, Robin’s hand in Steve’s, warm and present. He’s spent so long wading in pixelated fever dreams, his own skin feeling foreign, that the world around him seems twice as real. Trees, purple in the dusk, graves like orderly rocks, the more expensive ones blinking like mirror fragments. The wind weaves through his hair, licking his cheeks with a raspy tongue, peeling old skin away and leaving him an empty sort of clean.

The hole in his chest remains, though. It’s larger than the knitted gashes on his ribs; yawns blacker, toothless mouth vomiting scraps of soul with every step.

He squeezes Robin’s hand as they walk past the spines of graves, towards boneless, flatter land. For a moment, he thinks it’ll be the wrong one, they all look the same, empty and stoneless. But no, it’s the right one; he can see the imprints of recent steps in the spring dirt, the shadow of what looks like a neckerchief held under a rock. The kids were here, and he wasn’t with them. It makes the gaping mouth between his ribs spasm again, but he knows he didn’t have the strength. Shoulders the guilt instead, like he does everything. His back hurts, but he ignores it.

The last time he was here, the dirt was freshly overturned, dark and wet. Now, moss and grass have crept over it, swallowing the grave in green. It’d be almost unrecognisable, a mere bump on the ground, if the little plaque hadn’t held on, lichen recently pruned away.

Steve kneels down next to it, and Robin follows suit, wet dirt staining both their knees. Steve collapses on her shoulder, head nestled under her chin, and they stay silent for a while. Her hand traces patterns in his hair as light slowly leaches out of the sky, the stubborn line of pink dissolving from the horizon.

Nausea rolls over Steve in waves, the empty kind you get from forgetting to eat. The aimless reaction to thorough emptiness, body constricting around nothingness.

He wishes there was a song in his head right now; something appropriate, something Eddie would’ve listened to. Lyrics he could kneel over the grave and spit out amongst the bile and dryheaving. They wouldn’t reach him anyway. The words would trickle down through the earth, weave between roots and insects, and drip down on an empty coffin.

Eddie’s body is elsewhere. Steve supposes it didn’t matter. What made Eddie Eddie wouldn’t be stored into a corpse. It was an untethered, intangible thing even in life; a vague halo of something fluttering around him.

It still feels weird, though. Kneeling over an empty grave.

Carefully, Steve unwinds his fingers from Robin’s hand, and grabs the packet of cigarettes from his jeans. He’d found it in Eddie’s vest. For some reason, he’d taken it out and kept it on his bedside table for months. Kept thinking he’d smoke one, but he never did.

Now, he picks one – feeling oddly like a boy choosing a card in a tarot deck – and places it between his lips. The paper is dry and rough between his equally dry and rough lips – chapped by night after night of fever and nausea.

He doesn’t have a lighter, but Robin wordlessly supplies one from her jacket. She doesn’t smoke, but she always has one on her; says she likes having fire at her fingertips, likes the sound it makes when gas hisses out.

The cigarette doesn’t catch the first time. A gust of wind blows out the second try. Eventually, it takes huddling against Robin to protect the flame, a little chapel of people bent over a single altar. The cigarette catches like a funerary candle.

Steve doesn’t know if Eddie’s ever been to church, ever believed in God or been told to; but it still feels fitting.

The smoke fills his lungs like a prayer; for what, he doesn’t know.

He hates the taste of it, bland and acrid, scorching his palate. But it tastes the way Eddie’s vest smells like – maybe the way his hair did, too, if he could bring himself to remember it. And Eddie cannot smoke anymore, where he is, so Steve smokes for him.

The cherry blinks, agonising, between his lips. When this cigarette dies, he lights another one. Wishes someone would’ve thought to do the same to Eddie. Wishes there was a body under all this dirt, because maybe then he would claw his way to it. For what? To hold it? To breathe air back into its lungs? Maybe he would share that cigarette with it. Put it between its dead lips, picture its chest rising with the intake of smoke.

“Do you wanna say anything?” Robin says eventually, while he’s finishing the fourth cigarette, while night slowly descends over the world. Everything is blue and purple, except for the orange ember.

Steve breathes in more smoke, letting it hit the back of his throat. He slowly unclasps from Robin – they’d melted into each other like a wax figure, a black shadow that looked like another tombstone from a distance – and keels closer to the grave.

He takes out the remnants of the cigarette from his mouth and squishes it in the mossy dirt. It dies with a weak sizzle.

“I could’ve loved you, you know.”

The tomb stays silent.

When they amble back down the hill, weaving through marble slabs in the dark, the wind picks up again. Steve’s hair is still humid, his cheeks are cold.

It is the 27th of March. His flanks feel clean, no maggots, no rot.

*

Somewhere, dissolved in shadow, lights flicker. A lighter, clicking on and off, or the stubborn cherries of a pair of cigarettes.

From a distance, they almost look like eyes.