Free Lord Fear by Lucas Mann

surroundings—proud parents taking mantel photos in the place where Iggy Pop used to cut his skin to let fans lick his blood.
    But Josh is backlit onstage, and he looks the part. There is a red glow coming from behind his neck. His body is pulsing with breath. His arms are like snakes snapping at the keys. His mouth is open and his eyes are closed as he sings a low harmony. Dan is standing as tall as he has ever stood, right in the middle of the front row, fists raised, metal buckles jangling on his leather jacket, howling at my brother engulfed in a spotlight as the first song begins its crescendo.
    —
    Static. Then the downfall.
    Six years later, Dan’s leather jacket is folded up tight and rests in a plastic box in a hall closet at his mother’s apartment. The motorcycle that he bought with his first string of paychecks, that even Josh was jealous of, is packed up, too, covered in an old sheet. The bike makes his girlfriend nervous. She’s a nurse and she has pulled metal shards out of bloody holes in a triage unit, so danger carries no awesomeness for her. She works all day, comes home with sore feet, and likes to lie on the couch with Dan in their starter apartment in Queens, with the news on, feeding each other lo mein.
    Josh is in their apartment now for the first time, and just his presence, his insincere compliments about their taste in furniture, is making her nervous. Dan is busy staring at Josh’s sweaty face, the ring of new flesh that submerges his once lean jawline. Dan is trying to remember what Josh’s jaw used to look like. He wants to take his fingers and frame Josh’s head, to cut out all the excess from the image and remind himself. Then he wants to put his girlfriend’s face behind his finger frame and say,
See?
    He and Josh rarely see each other anymore. It’s not like theyhad a fight; it’s just that Dan began living this life, and Josh began living another one. Dan isn’t exactly sure what that life is. For a while, he just assumed that Josh had finally found more interesting people to be around. Dan would call his apartment, and when Josh picked up, he sounded distracted, far away. He said, Dan, I’m working. Or, Dan, I’m writing. Then he mostly stopped picking up.
    “Nice candles,” Josh says to Dan’s girlfriend, then smirks. “They smell great. What’s that smell?”
    “Autumn,” she says.
    They are silent after this. Dan wants to tell a story about the time he saw Josh onstage at CBGB playing the keyboard, then turn to his girlfriend and say, “You like music, right?” He wants to reconcile two lives. He wants to defend his home and his matching furniture and the woman that he bought it with. But more so, troublingly more so, he wants to defend Josh to her. It is a special loneliness to be flanked by two people who you love who do not like each other, an empty feeling to know that they don’t see what you see.
    Dan defends nobody and instead goes to piss, walking stiff and hurried out of the room like it’s an emergency. For two minutes, he leaves his girlfriend alone on the couch next to Josh, leaning away from the slow breath and dilated eyes that she diagnosed the moment he walked in the door.
    Dan returns ready to tell a story about middle school that is too boring to upset anyone, but Josh is at the door, putting his sneakers on and mumbling that he’s late for something. Dan stammers out a noise, not a real word. Josh is already opening the door, then already gone. Dan’s girlfriend is up, saying, “If he comes in here again, I’m leaving.”
    “Wait, why?”
    She speaks fast. “He asked me to write him prescriptions andI said I could lose my job for that, and then he asked again and I said please stop, but he wouldn’t so I told him to get out.”
    Dan says, “What does he need a prescription for?”
    She says, “Oh, Jesus, Daniel, really?”
    In bed that night, she asks him what it is about Josh. What’s worth caring for in a man like that? Dan stares up