Free Dear Hearts by Ericka Clay Page A

hovering high beyond the trees and spying our breathing
bodies, the two empty wine glasses at our heads
     “Elena
thought we were, I guess, unraveling.”
      “At the seams.”
      “Yes, there, at the seams.   Everywhere
really.   It got to the point we couldn’t even sit outside on the
back porch without yelling at each other.”  I think of her naked feet
which is a stupid, stupid thing to do.  I hate that, when something comes
tearing out of you and blinds your eyes.  I blink hard and look at the
sun.
     “Yelling
about what?”  Aaron perches his head in his hand.  My fingers stroke
his bicep.  Glimpses of golden light filter through the space his arm
makes.  I want us, but I want us in a different time and place. 
There they are again, her toes, her arches... 
      “The past.   She thinks I cheated on her with another
woman.”  The woods are silent but they’re also not silent because twigs
crack under the weight of stalking deer.  Live it up, I think.  It’s
not your season. 
     “I
don’t think you’re the type,” Aaron says.
     “What
type am I?” 
     “Gay,”
Aaron says and laughs into my shoulder.  I laugh, too, but the word is a
steel blade between my teeth. 
     “It’s
not the worst thing in the world,” he whispers when met with the look on my
face.  He glances at two lone tombstones on the outer banks of the toothy
circle.  Alistar and Bonita Jenkins are the names of the man and woman
rotting in the ground a few feet from us, our blanket.  “Shit we can
breathe can’t we?  We can walk and talk, and take a shit like every other
man so here’s to fucking us!”  Aaron grabs me and we roll beneath plaid
and light and birds flapping through leaves.
    To us.
    ~
    Clothes
on, we're all business.  Aaron folds up the blanket and puts the empty
bottle of wine into the otherwise untouched picnic basket he brought.  I
glance at my cell and figure/pray Jimmy is still out picking up the
material.  St. Bonaventure's roof is leaking, water flooding through worn
holes around the steeple and Jimmy agreed to pick up the flashing grade while I
agreed to walk the roof, prepare the holes and not think about the edge butting
so perfectly close to the sky.  
      “You first or me?” Aaron asks.
     “Me. 
Jimmy should be heading back now if he hasn’t already.”
     “Don’t
get in trouble,” Aaron says and kisses me on the lips, but before he does he
takes off his glasses. 
    "I
love you."  Aaron says.  I've had dreams before, these dreams
where I'm supposed to dance and there's this instructor who has my mother's
face and a switch in her hands.  She smacks it back and forth and the
thwacking sound is hard to handle so I try to move my feet like she tells me
to.  But I just can't.  And I feel the same way now.
     “I
hope so,” stumbles out of me and my shoulders shrug.  My eyes are boiled
from the sun as I walk through the cemetery, the one with the fucking rabbits,
to the blacktop that leads back to the church.  Aaron is behind me and
stares at me for a minute before getting into his car.  I think he's
waiting to say something.  I hope he says something, but his door shuts.
    I've
hurt his heart.
    I
eat the gasoline streaked air on my return to the church, to the ladder I made
a big show of propping up as Jimmy was leaving.  “Yup, I’ll just be up
here seeing what I see,” I said before Jimmy sped away, and I headed off in a
dead sprint to meet the man I love. 
    And
it is love, on some blatant level.  Because in the night, or morning, when
3 a.m. reaches for me, I sit outside, back against the house with the phone in
my hands and I think about being the kind of man who calls and says, “I wish
everything were different” even though “different” is fear streaming beneath my
skin like veins pumping blood.
    I
climb the ladder, and at the top, I skim out beyond the edge of the roof, a
foot loose in the air, but pull it back as Jimmy squeals through the