the boy

I met the boy on the burning bridge. He wore trunks and sandals, and sat on the red hot iron rail with his legs swinging slightly over the sides as though he were somewhere else. It was Bishop’s Bridge. The boy looked serious.

“What are you doing?” I asked weakly to the starkness of outside. “What are you doing?” Firmer, stronger.

He turned to me disinterestedly, then turned away. He spat into the river.

I felt a compulsion to approach him, picking my way through the heat of flames. I placed a tentative hand onto his shoulder. The flesh was cooking like pork and burnt me; all the same I left it there. We watched the river trying to flow, me and the boy, and the bridge as it burnt.

*

The boy came to my place. I cooled him with moisturiser and ice packs and frozen peas, and fed him the insides of a loaf of bread, doughy like bleached white guts, which he chewed gravely before the off TV set. I threw the crust away hungrily.

*

The boy told me about his school and how it worked like a distant memory. In school all the boys burnt and life was to be forgotten. It was a top school.

*

We went to the park in an afternoon and threw a Frisbee, the boy unusual in his trunks, his charred skin like spoiled barbeque. Children cried in a circle about us, in a way that seemed involuntary, and the boy kept on throwing the Frisbee. He was very proficient.

*

It built up for many days before I kissed the boy. He was unresponsive at first, and throughout the kiss, but he didn’t try to stop me. When I went to touch his slight dick he slowly moved my hand away, but didn’t say anything. I tried to kiss him again, only this time he laughed and looked past me at the blank screen. It was late.

*

The boy emptied the fridge with a passion for milk. I didn’t mind. He seemed to bask in the electrical light that was activated by the opening door. It shone on his abs and his back and I drank water from a glass and watched him.

*

The boy couldn’t stop burning himself. It had started on the bridge, or maybe not. Maybe the bridge was the middle of something far bigger. He burnt my car, seats first, then my table, my soft furnishings, my house.

*

The boy was the culmination of a lifetime of promises.

*

The boy sang a heavenly silent song, the notes inconsequential to the point of epic. He was a master of the glamour of alternative lifestyles.

*

The boy exhibited adjacent characteristics.

*

The boy used the bathtub for his interior excavations, an odd habit but one I found reassuring. The bathroom smelt terrible, brown and full, but I still washed it out daily without complaint, the boy watching curiously from the kitchen door, his eyes a-glaze with clandestine examination.

*

The boy knew not the ways of the mattress, asleep instead on a loose carpet patch in the draft of the front door, itself warped by poor weather and bad construction, his eyes open like fish eyes in the dark.

*

He was gone when I woke up, nothing but a boy shaped mark left on the carpet. It wasn’t as if I needed the boy or knew him that well, but all the same I was crippled with the reality of myself, and cried at the thought of my ill-conceived memories, longing for the burnt browned hues of his flesh, the frailty of his imagined touch, the physical companionship of his mysterious genitalia.

*

I wonder where the boy is now.

*

Without the boy I was ash falling into the river, I was twisted hot metal, I was humanity engulfed in the spreading heat, I was children burning and hanging in their blank classrooms, I was man.