Free The Gospel of Winter by Brendan Kiely

just me and the girls.”
    â€œThat’s cool.”
    He laughed. “No. No, I didn’t mean it like that.” Thenhe added, “I’m just saying that it’s nice to have another guy around. The perfect square. I like that.”
    â€œSuits me,” I said. “Obviously.”
    He laughed again. “You’re all right, Donovan. You’re all right.” He shook his head, smiling, and I didn’t know what else to say.
    We walked along in silence. I was in a fog—still trying to figure out what had happened all afternoon and how the hell I’d become a part of it. We were cutting downhill, beside the back nine of Stonebrook Country Club. While a lot of the snow had melted around town, there were still drifts of it clustered in the sand bunkers spotted over the course. As clouds passed by overhead, the sun occasionally broke free, and bursts of light ignited and glistened on the hard crusts of the embankments.
    At the bottom of the hill we curled around the other side of the country club and came to the short bridge that was just a ways up from the harbor. To get to our homes we had to go in opposite directions, but Mark didn’t seem to be in a hurry anymore. “So, this party . . . ,” I finally said to him.
    â€œIt’ll be cool, I guess. Kegger over at Feingold’s. Everyone’s going. It’d be too weird not to go,” he said. “I don’t know. I’m going to this one, but I don’t go to most of the parties. They can be lame. Everyone’s there, but nobody is really talking to one another. Like none of it’s real.” He waved his hand in the air in front of him. “I don’t know. Sorry, man. I’m stoned.”
    â€œNo,” I said, “you’re probably right. But maybe it’s because everyone is too afraid.”
    Mark looked at me. “Of what?”
    â€œI don’t know. Everything. Maybe everyone’s just faking it because that’s all there is.”
    â€œSo they can’t get real?” Mark asked. “That’s depressing.”
    â€œTell them to take their fucking faces off,” I said, but it felt weird now to say that so casually. “They can’t, right?”
    Mark gazed down into the river, and I did too. The chunks of ice and dead foliage floated from beneath the bridge and zigzagged out to the harbor. “But we can,” he said. “We are.”
    I nodded but didn’t say anything else. I was too locked away in myself. I had to be. I was afraid to speak anymore for fear of saying something I didn’t want to. We were both quiet for a while. Mark put his hand on my shoulder again. “Dude,” he said. “I have to get going here. I’m totally late.” We cupped each other’s hand and pressed shoulders into each other’s chests the way I’d seen athletes do on television.
    Mark went the other direction on the bridge, and I let him go on ahead of me. I waited, hoping the dope would wear off and I’d sober up before I got home. I stood on the bridge for a while and looked down into the black slick of river that tumbled forward into the saltwater harbor beyond. I thought about Josie’s tongue and humming lips, Mark’s voice springing from his strong jaw, and Sophie’s laughter. I jumbled all their body parts together in my mind like a fractured Picasso, shifting the images so they splitand re-formed into a new shattered mosaic like a kaleidoscope shifting colored crystals. I wanted to keep shuffling the pieces—tongues, lips, fingers—until I found some language to the pattern—because there was something deeper than only sex, wasn’t there? I had to believe that when our bodies came together, it was a bridge to something deeper and more meaningful, a conjoining of parts to make a fuller whole, just as a breath is not only an inhale and an exhale but one act in which they complete