Illumination Read online

  I looked up to see him coming in from the kitchen, and he smiled at me. "Hey you."

  I laughed. "I had the dream." I slurped spit back into my mouth and coughed.

  "Yeah," he said, and he sat down in front of me on the floor. "You look awful."

  "I hit my face," I told him, and he smiled. I closed my eyes and listened to him breathing, but my breathing was louder.

  "You want to go home?" He asked.

  "No. Maybe."

  Mom came in and said, "Oh good. Good, good. I made the cake."

  *

  Cody's car was shiny and blue under the streetlight outside, and Mom was out the door behind us with the cake. "Are you sure you don't want to stay the night?"

  "I just want to go home," I told her, because my face hurt.

  "Take the cake at least," she said, and Cody took it from her and put it in the back seat.

  Mom hugged me, and then she stepped back to watch us drive away. I let myself drop into the seat and shut the door, and then I looked over at her. She was smiling sadly from the sidewalk with her green veins. "Be safe. Something's wrong."

  "I'll call you, Mom," I said to her. "As soon as we get home, I'll call, okay?"

  "Does it hurt?"

  "Yeah. I'll call you later."

  Cody dropped into the seat next to me and started the car. "Goodbye!" he called to my mom, and she waved as we drove away.

  Ahead of us was an hour of night cows and night horses and the glowing yellow windows of lonely farmhouses.

  "You look like shit," Cody said to me.

  "Your veins are blue, Cody."

  He didn't say anything.

  "My veins are pink."

  "Just stop talking about veins." He laughed. "It's gross."

  We said nothing for a while, with the world passing silent and dark outside the car.

  "I need to get more pepto," I said eventually. "My stomach is killing me."

  "We can stop at the gas station across the street," he said, and I looked out at the road, trying not to think about the pain. Cody's car was the world for a while, with nothing but the headlights to guide us home.

  "You suppose the world is still out there?" He asked.

  "No, it's gone I bet." I laughed and said, "It's burned up."

  "Your mom seems nice," he said.

  "Yeah." I looked out at a lone farmhouse passing far away. "Everyone seems nice."

  We rode for a while with the silence filling the car like water, and then Cody turned the radio on low volume for noise.

  "What else are you afraid of?" He asked.

  I sat thinking for a minute, and then I said, "Being alone."

  I guess I fell asleep on the way home.

  *

  Don't look, don't look, but I do. I look in the mirror, and my eyes are full of capillaries. There's this pain in my stomach, creeping down my spine, spilling cold down my vertebrae and into the dark night outside the bathroom door. I open my mouth to say something, and it's pink. Pepto bubbles spilling down my chin, dripping onto the counter. My stomach is killing me.

  *

  "What if we're already dead?" I asked him one day not long ago.

  Cody looked up at me from his side of the scrabble board. "Quit stalling. And no more tiny words."

  "No, really. I mean, what if we died in some crazy accident and we're just haunting the earth now?"

  He shook his head. "You need to learn bigger words."

  I put some tiles out on the board.

  "That's not a word."

  "I speak gibberish. It counts."

  He rolled his eyes. We played in silence for a minute, and then he said, "I think we would have noticed by now."

  *

  When I woke up, we were in the gas station parking lot, with the lights flickering overhead. Cody handed me his debit card. "Get me a soda, yeah?"

  "Are your legs broken?"

  "Yeah."

  I smiled and rolled my eyes, and then I grabbed the card. "Lazy."

  When I got into the building, I saw there was no one at the counter. Probably changing trash or something. I knew how these jobs were. I'd worked shit jobs before. There's always trash to be changed.

  I grabbed the pepto on my way back to the drink coolers. Pink, like my veins. What a weird night. I could hear someone's car alarm going off in the distance, so far away it was almost inaudible. It was a sound in the back of my head.

  At the coolers, I pulled a soda out for Cody and happened to glance over to see a row of dark red bottles marked "90" in the alcohol section.

  The car horn was louder now, and I went up to the counter. I put the bottles down and looked around at the empty bakery area, the empty deli counter. "Hello?" I said to no one. "Hello?" My voice echoed off the walls and back at me.

  Suddenly, my stomach knotted harder, and I had to brace myself against the counter. I looked over at the huge windows at the blue car all the way at the end of the lot, the lights flashing and the horn blaring into the night, sending distress signals out into the void.

  I took the soda and the pepto outside with me, and my feet were small against the asphalt of the parking lot. The horn blared louder than the music had been at the roller rink, and outside the lights of the parking lot, there was nothing. No city lights, no other headlights. There was nothing.

  "Cody," I said to myself, and I knew I was walking with a limp now. I'd known it all along, I think, but I didn't want to know it.

  Don't look in the car. Don't look. I think, therefore I am.

  "I think," I said aloud, and then I stopped. I looked over at the pay phone by the building.

  The car horn honked and honked, and I cracked open the pepto lid and took a drink of it. My stomach was killing me. I put the bottles on the edge of the trash can, and the pepto bottle fell and spilled out onto the parking lot, painting the concrete pad with pink spatters. I looked down at my pink veins.

  "I think, therefore I am," I said to no one, and I limped to the pay phone, dragging my damaged leg behind me. Blood and pepto mixed on the asphalt and swirled down the drains.

  I picked up the receiver and listened to the silence with the car horn blaring and echoing into the speaker. "Shut up!" I screamed. "Shut up!" I dialed Mom's number, and after a minute the recorded dead woman came on to tell me to try my call again, and I looked out at the void beyond the parking lot.

  "Mom, help me," I said into the phone, but the recording had already hung up.

  I dropped the phone and turned to look at the car. Pepto was still pouring out of the bottle, spreading to cover my feet, circling my shoes. I closed my eyes, thinking of all the times I should have died and all the times I did die. I thought of all the parties and all the conversations and all the things I'd never say again. The benders and the good times and the late nights with Cody.

  I opened my eyes. "I think, therefore I am," I said, and I said it again. "I think, therefore I am. I am, I am. I exist."

  The car horn blared over my words, and I yelled, "I exist, god damn it!" I yelled it to the gas station and the car and our bodies in the front seats. I yelled it to the pepto bottle still pouring pink liquid out to cover the asphalt. I yelled it to the dead stars, wherever they were, because they weren't here. Then, suddenly and forever, the world went dark and silent except for the car alarm echoing into the void.

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  About the Author

  I was born in the wastelands of the American Midwest, and I still live there, much to everyone's regret. I started writing as a teenager as a side effect of what psychologists refer to as the "personal fable." I believed that I was unique, that my personal life story impacted the world, and that the world revolves around me. In my mid-twenties, I picked up writing again because I was sick of reading slosh and tired of having to go back fifty years to find books I actually want to read. I was especially over the only gay literature available in 2008 being soft core porn romance bullshit with jacked, oiled-up porn stars on the covers. I decided that if I wa
nted to read something that wasn't 500 pages of comma abuse and boners, I'd have to write it myself.

  And so I did. It may not be the best, but it's what I want to read. Thank you for the support, and I hope my writing means something to you as well.

  Visit my Goodreads page, where you can further abuse me by leaving me comments and questions and rating my worth as an author by a vague five star scale! Click click! Do it!

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  Dedication

  This collection of poetry is dedicated to my partners in writing, a very select group of people who are also writers. They are all extremely talented and they write things that I look forward to reading (a rare thing these days because, in my opinion, there's a lot of literary slosh in the world right now) and they have all at one point or another helped me shape one of my typo-riddled landmines into a finished book. Without the guidance of these awesome folks, I wouldn't have the courage to publish anything I've written. I'd like to say that I do everything myself, but without the help of these people and being constantly inspired by their ability to keep writing and creating new works, I'd have given up long ago. I am inspired almost every day by you guys, even by things so mundane and inconsequential as status updates on social media, so thank you.

  Gypsy Snow

  Chelsey Barker

  Millicent Rosethorn

  Joe Egly-Shaneyfelt

  Eli Verger

  If I forgot anyone, I'm sorry. I blame my advanced age.

  I want to extend a very special thank you to all of my readers for your support and encouragement during the 2013-2014 season. I'd like to extend it like the neck of a giraffe, but alas. I have no god-like abilities. You'll have to accept some kind of mechanized extension.

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