Free The Deadheart Shelters by Forrest Armstrong Page A

hardly pity it.”
    “Then you’re cold. I’ve always known you were cold.”
    “Maybe our burden is that we were forced to get cold. Or at least to be unquestioning. The truth is it doesn’t help. I did the only thing you do. I ran.”
    “And didn’t go back?”
    “I didn’t think that far ahead.”
    “I bet that’s a lie. I bet you thought you were gonna do it. Now you don’t wanna lose it for yourself—”
    “Stop.” I hit the ground when I said it and the black dust curled like kettle steam through my fingers. “Stop. That’s plenty.”

It was as if the sun escaped its airtight plastic and rushed out into the sky like laundry-water, the way I saw things then. Lilly’s face above mine like a black thumbprint; her un-featured girlishness. “You poor bird,” she said cupping me in her hands. Warm milk that did not soak into, and slept. As she neared me to her mouth I couldn’t see the light tissueing in the sky anymore, just the blurred shape of her head getting bigger, and soon it was all.
    If time were the thing dragging you behind it. The hungrier I got the more things I thought like this. Lilly with her legs open and the wetness, but no moans. I never heard her moan, I never made her moan. If I did could I put it on a cassette tape forever? I thought If Dirt were an animal and the meat bullfrog-soft. Why think of it?
    It can be a relief to realize you’re imperfect, but not if you hadn’t wondered about it before. Myself with no lips and hers when pressed against mine breaking like glass water bottles, making a hole in my face that all the white moths of ecstasy could rush into, and the termites that crawled out—(this never happened, but could’ve). O (because we believe our love is for the privileged only).

Every man spends his entire life justifying himself, when it is much easier to understand that he is unjustifiable, and wash his hands.

And then Dirt died before I could tell him I was sorry. Or at least have ignored what he said to offend me and told him any deathbed story he wanted me to tell. His last breath blew out until I imagine his lungs were pressed flat, and the black dust hung over him like a bell tolling some o’clock. When it fell, it was as the sheets that lay over the flat-lined hospital patients, until received naked by the frozen shelves.

We were sitting in the soap opera kitchen, looking at the mobiles spin on the ceiling and the diminutive lullabies they make sounded of small steel drums. Because this had always comforted us. I held Lilly’s hand and when she’d grip mine tight for a second, as if to remind me she was there, it was like there was a blackberry between our hands she’d be breaking. Abe started to snore and Lilly turned her head to whisper “I love you.”
    I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you are just syllables.
    The front door opened up, two different footsteps coming in. We thought it must be Mark and Clyde, but then Mark pushed a young kid into the kitchen ahead of him and said “Look.” We could see the bones through his upper arms and knew he hadn’t been fed much. “I bought a slave,” Mark said. “I had all this money but nowhere to spend it, so I bought him. Look at him.”
    Mark struck him across the back and he fell forward, coughing up phlegm and saliva onto the counter, and Mark shouted “Aw you little bastard you’re making a mess already. Now I know why they keep slaves outside, you can’t help making a mess. I buy you to make my life easier, you can sleep outside. Under the stars. You’d like that right? Animal. No blankets and you’ll get used to it because all animals get used to it. Look at them, pretend you ain’t an animal long enough to say Hello.” The intensity of eye contact he gave, when asked to give it, and how it would break so soon after starting. “Hello,” he muttered softly.
    “Try again.”
    “Hell-oh,” the kid shouted, and started to cry a shaking cry like airplane