by giuseppe manley (art by Edward Lee)
Sometimes when I am frustrated with the students in my middle school class, when they are too consumed in petty relationship squabbles and unable to move on and learn, I imagine telling them the story about how I rode by your house each night that summer before the night where I eventually found you sitting alone on the front steps. You were looking at stars, wearing loose shorts, a flannel opened most of the way down your chest—that tired smile you wore so well—and you couldn’t have known it was me at first. You were eating fruit, letting it drip in the dirt as you picked out and ate the seeds red-handed.
It hadn’t rained in a while before that week, maybe even since spring had ended a few weeks before, but it rained earlier that night, one of those brief moments where it felt as though everything lay mesmerized together under the same spell. It’s true, the early summer rain falls softly in our hometown, like an incantation or a prayer, and it left the streets that night slick with dirt, the muddy slush of New England winter road treatment runoff; it left the road slick beneath bicycle tires, and though the spell of the night had none of the feel of a curse or even a mild hex, gravity threatened to spill me from the roadway on each turn I pumped and pounded through on my bike. A mild charm, maybe, some minor enchantment to make everything slow and pause for just a moment, with woe for anything that refused.
I rode by your house each night that summer, before and after the street sweepers would come to rid the roads of excess sand and salt residue, and it wasn’t unlike when we were kids and I would ride by just to see if you were around, as you almost always were, always slowing and stopping when I saw signs that you were home, always dumping my bike on your front lawn as I climbed the steps to your door having hardly slowed. Of course, when I was mad at you, I wouldn’t stop but instead shoot your house a glare and keep on moving, pedaling a little harder, a little faster, hoping you’d see me but still fleeing to avoid being caught, hoping you’d see me and give chase, deathly afraid I’d disappear from the world if you caught even a glance.
That night, you held the fruit out toward me and asked if I were there for you. I didn’t know how to respond.
I considered leaning elbows on handlebars and refusing to move closer but thought this would be in bad taste, too closely modelled on those summer days when we made our way all over this part of town on our bikes, stopping occasionally to look down at whatever bug or piece of refuse might occupy us for a few minutes. One summer day, we had eaten orange ice cream, it had dripped white and creamy and already lukewarm onto our hands, you had smiled in the freer way you did when you were younger—always looking out from beneath that boyish haircut, whether you were wearing it short or long that particular season—all because I had called it “sherbert” without knowing any different. You were always the smarter one, but later that day you rode over a snake by accident and kept on when I stopped, for great science, to examine the agonized, squirming creature on the sidewalk below; halfway down the road already, stopped finally but not looking behind or returning for me.
I might have seen you shudder from fifty feet down the road but had eyes only for the thing beneath me, mostly black, seemingly ridged but actually scaled, ribbed in yellow, which was shuddering as well, squirming but somehow unable to move in any real direction or avoid the bike tire, slowly wheeled up to it and back, as I tried to scare it into moving out of the way. It was a few minutes before it found whatever it needed, the wherewithal maybe, some purchase, the nudge it needed to slide back into the tall untamed bushes preceding the woods on the side of the road. I expected it to be slimy but found it was dry to the touch, felt like smooth muscle in my hand. I had never touched anything like it. Ahead, you were already gone and moving on.
That snake wasn’t like the chicken my mother caught us slaughtering in the backyard later that same summer. We cut off the head and watched the chicken drop almost immediately and make no attempt to get up. So thoroughly lost: the snake unable to leave the sidewalk, the chicken out of place in the grassless part of the yard where we had taken it. You had told me we would see the red shift, the Doppler Effect; when a chicken staggered around with its head missing, this was how they knew where rain would fall. When she found out, my mother made us bury the motionless bird we crouched in front of and watched die, not unlike the way you hovered in your mother’s hospice room that same summer. You were utterly confused why the bird hadn’t kept trying to move, hadn’t run around like it was supposed to, like that saying, like in cartoons. My mother told me later that it was because we hadn’t severed the head high enough, that part of the chicken’s brain was in its neck and they only raced about when someone neglected to sever it that low.
“It’s not actually where the droplets fall,” you had said, wiping at a brow and leaning against the small shovel for a moment before handing it off at my gestures. “Well, it is, but different from what you’re probably thinking. It’s the patterns they make, that’s how the clouds will be distributed. Those are the shapes. It’s going to rain just like that tomorrow.” But there weren’t any shapes in the dirt.
The next day it did rain, and when I told my mother in remorse that I didn’t want eggs for breakfast, she made me French toast instead. I didn’t know the difference.
I didn’t know why I rode at night, back from a first semester away at college, except that it felt good to ride, hands-free, down streets my parents hadn’t let me cross until I was old enough to drive them. They didn’t know about all the times you had led me across them in growing up, violating their orders. The streets were different at night, always empty after eleven, quiet with the wind in the pines that bracketed most parts of the road the way reeds bracketed the length of river just past my house, though the song of the reeds was different from the song that wound through the pines. It wasn’t the same, you said, you valued our friendship too much. I remarked remarking mildly that we had played Monopoly many times without ruining things. You were always ending up with Boardwalk and Park Place, always willing to trade me Park Place for Marvin Gardens because the name made you laugh and I would do most anything to make you smile. “Yeah,” you agreed, mildly, we had, and you had to admit it never ended badly.
Most of growing up with you was some fairytale, something mythic and unbelievable, like the story an elementary school substitute teacher, Mr. Teko, told us about a chicken and a snake. You hated that story, tried to discreetly keep your ears covered by pretending you were leaning your head on your hand and also happened to have something in your opposite ear: the kind of pretend that only a fifth-grader could believe would convince anyone else, the kind of acting that would seem satisfyingly authentic to a twelve-year-old. But even then, when my parents asked why we did what we had done together, they wouldn’t accept that we were young enough to not have known better, and when they said as much, I realized it was true, that I couldn’t come up with a reason for why we had done what we had. And I wanted to know. I realized then, if only to be completely sure of things you had already figured out, it was always worth experimenting. And maybe someday something might change.
Mr. Teko was a political exile from Africa, but the country he was from never stayed with me. It went through a civil war, maybe, someone started executing journalists and potential political opponents in the 80s, which really meant anyone that wasn’t vocal in their agreement. I realized eventually that this would be enough in the information age for me to find the details if I went looking, if I ever wanted to find the personal tragedy that must have encompassed his past. He escaped with a daughter, emigrated to the US in the 90s, found work happily as a substitute teacher in the Northeast and his daughter turned to teaching as well once she was old enough. He was one of the better substitutes, or at least the one most favored by students, because he was always telling outrageous stories instead of teaching prepared lesson plans. “Before I left Africa,” he would say, “I had to stay in hiding in the countryside. I lived in a small cabin with my wife and our two daughters, and we did not have electricity, or running water, and we would travel three hours to get supplies. We kept chickens,” he would begin.
But chicken coops are eternally plagued by foxes, by badgers, by children that know better, and most especially snakes that could squeeze, boneless, through the tiniest cracks. You always said that was what you hated most about snakes: that they were boneless, could scale sheer walls, there was even one that could fly a little. I never told you they had bones like most other animals, didn’t tell you I spent more than one fascinated afternoon admiring their skeletal and muscular systems in an issue of Zoobooks. It was when I touched it, when I reached down to try to pick up the snake from the sidewalk, that it found purchase finally and disappeared into the grass while you disappeared on your bike down the road. The major characteristics of reptiles are the scaly skin, the eggs they lay, and especially the cold-bloodedness. Mr. Teko said they hadn’t been there long before a snake discovered they were keeping chickens.
“The snake, he was a big fella and poisonous. I knew I could not go after him myself. Sometimes I would yell at him and he would sneak off, but I always heard the chickens later. I would go to the chicken coop and open the door and he would be there, going down each row and looking at each egg like this—like he was at the market. He had these little pits instead of eyeballs and he would turn his head side to side and flick his tongue out like this. And then he would take one egg, the snake, he would swallow the egg and go outside. The egg was too big to swallow all the way, you see, so he would swallow it and head outside and he would—” and here Mr. Teko would slap one palm against his leg, “he would beat his neck against a rock and this would break the egg so he could swallow it the rest of the way. I tried everything to get rid of that snake but I would still see him in the yard with a lump this big—” and here Mr. Teko would put his fingers together to make a circle, “and he would, the snake, he would beat his neck against that rock.”
You always put your palm to your ear during this story but Mr. Teko would always tell it when I asked—some things never got any easier for you to hear. More often I would have my chin in my hands, wondering what kind of snake it was, how the snake or the eggs could possibly be as big as Mr. Teko always said they were. In our part of the country there are only garter snakes like the little one you once ran over, and the chickens my parents kept always seemed to have much smaller eggs than the ones Mr. Teko described, though that did not scale back their anger when they caught us after killing a chicken. You were destructive, they said. They didn’t want us together. It didn’t matter that your mother was dying, that I was your only friend, that you were the only person I wanted to be with. “But one day,” the story would continue, “I figured out how to kill the snake. It did not matter that he was too smart for all of the traps and the poison I left for him, it did not matter that he always ran away when I had my rifle, because one day I went out early and took all the eggs and put out eggs of my own. And then I waited because I knew the snake, he would come.
“And sure enough, he came and snuck into the chicken coop, and I heard all the chickens making a ruckus. You could hear the noise outside from inside the house. And when he slithered up to the rock, he tried to smash the egg in his throat against it but the egg did not break because I hard-boiled all the eggs. And the snake usually broke the eggs like this—” and here Mr. Teko would slap his palm again, “in just one hit, just like that—but this time it did not break. And the snake, he tried to beat his neck against the rock again, he hit it harder this time and he began to thrash about but it still did not work and it was too far to spit back out. And after that, I never had to worry about my eggs being stolen.”
I remember looking at you in wonder at the end of this story the first time, and was surprised at seeing that you weren’t awestruck in the same way I was but instead wore an expression of horror, as though there were something monstrous about the chickens that would step away from their nests and let a snake take their eggs, or the man that would in turn let this happen so long, or maybe the snake that was only doing as its body commanded. Mr. Teko told us once that a regime change had long since made it possible to return to his home country but that he liked his life teaching us children in America too much: besides that, what he didn’t tell us was that there was little enough for him to return to. He never told us the story about when a militia found his family at the cabin while he was in town with one of his daughters buying supplies, but some of the teachers knew, some of the ones that would stick around and eventually tell it to a nervous new staff member teaching for the first time in a school they once attended, and we all could see the story untold in his eyes, though only sometimes, when he spoke to the young girls and made sure to repeat every story they requested, and though we didn’t really understand what it was inside him that looked so defeated even in his happiness at watching a rapt audience take in his stories.
You understood narrative well already back then, told me once he couldn’t tell the story because he wasn’t there at the time to see what happened, he would have had to have heard it from someone who had been there—and no one was—in order to tell it the way he would: you made me wonder, had he really seen the snake trying to break the egg lodged in its throat or had he only imagined what it must have looked like after eventually finding its corpse? You asked me once, after I dropped and cracked an egg on the wooden floor of the coop, why the chickens would just let other animals take their eggs so complacently. It seemed heartless somehow, barbaric, and wrong of us to take them in the first place. We were still in elementary school then, knew little of how barbaric people could be whether they meant to cause harm or not. You hadn’t yet learned whatever lie it was that eventually led to your research into weather forecasting.
I’m sure you imagine middle school students are barbaric: I remember your confusion senior year when I told you I was going away to school to become, ideally, a middle-school teacher. I’m sure you remember asking me in the week before that revelation if you should call me “Mr. Shankly” because of the horrible poetry I had just shown you, said you always thought I’d be more of a “Mrs. Robinson.” You didn’t tease me much, but you never had to. My first semester of college, I kept writing poetry after making new friends and falling in love with the new music they shared with me: Explosions in the Sky, The Weakerthans, Broken Social Scene, all of these bands I had never heard of before, that you and I had never listened to before. Some of the afternoons when I’d put on a new album and draw the blinds, when I’d lay on the floor in the middle of the room and just listen, it almost felt like you were there in my dorm room with me, close enough to touch. You didn’t seem to care much when I messaged you another poem of my own and a link to “Without Mythologies.” You didn’t have much to say and I didn’t bother to reply afterward. What was there for us to say to each other at that point?
Middle schoolers aren’t barbaric, though: like adults, they are animals acting out animal urges, most thoughtful when things don’t go their way, and they become sorrowful and moody and morose quickly. Rarely is it a personal tragedy, more often that they have fallen “out of love” after only a day of dating, as though they needed the dating as validation that what they felt was real. They are as likely to call someone they’ve known for a week a best friend as someone they’ve been with since much earlier in childhood.
You were always smarter than me, but you were always a little advanced for our age too, and sometimes that got in the way. The chickens and their eggs were an existential problem to you but for me just another daily chore that I was happy to have your company for. You were smarter than me but your parents didn’t raise chickens, you didn’t know the eggs would never hatch or that the hens relied on people taking them and would continue to lay them as long as people continued to do so. I didn’t know that the chickens particularly cared whether it was a human or a snake, and you didn’t know either, but the implication was different; to me a chore to put a little food on the table, whether we ate each particular egg or sold them for some extra money, but to you the horror of a mother hen losing her child. I didn’t have an answer to satisfy your curiosity, though, rarely did, could never do anything but acquiesce and try to satisfy my own, as far as I dared, whenever you took action to discover, whatever action you took.
It wasn’t the snake that put that expression on your face that first time, even though I knew it was snakes that always killed you, could so quickly drain all the blood from your face, turn you white as a shade. I knew that intuitively when we were young children but didn’t really receive confirmation until I scared you with a rubber snake in middle school. You shouted in surprise then, made a very different expression from the surprised and disgusted one you wore at the end of Mr. Teko’s story: it was drama, you were justified in your reaction, even if you weren’t acting, and just being in that drama club was taxing for both of us. It was the first time our world of two really started to accept or welcome anyone new for any longer than an afternoon, it wasn’t just you and I every afternoon anymore, and I resented the way you took to theater so easily. You thought being your understudy left me with a bitter taste too hard to swallow but I was fine with it, thought you made a great Eurydice.
And even so, you made them change my role—you always had the power of command over people, not only over me—and just like that I became an attending nymph. We didn’t have enough of the right sexes, had quickly realized as a cast that gender-bending was a necessity. From the outset we played it up, messed with the story, switched every role we could and then switched it again—our faculty director called it “queering the narrative” and maybe didn’t know any better—and so when the time came, Aristaeus chased us both around the stage before finally killing me, and then he chased you in circles around me, while I stared out past the edge of the stage at the hazy crowd filling seats under harsh lighting. All those people watching us, looking at me between the flashes of your legs. And then the length of lithe rubber appeared and you fell to your death, right in front of me.
You grinned at me because you were facing the back of the stage and the audience couldn’t see your face but you had worked and practiced so hard every day until you could swoon perfectly. Your back shielded me from the stares of the crowd, and I reached out to tug at your tie where it lay draped on the stage between us, and I grinned because I had worked and practiced so hard to impress you, until I could smile back at my queer Eurydice.
It was my parents, after opening night, who led the charge to get the director removed from teaching at the school. They didn’t see why the gender-bending had been necessary, couldn’t we have just done a different story? I thought it appropriate to send flowers, to contribute to the small pot we put together to get a perfect-bound translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses signed by all of our cast members—we were middle schoolers with none of the income necessary for the leather-bound copy we had in mind—but they sent a letter to the principal, and then the superintendent, instead. They pulled me from the club after opening night, but the show went on without your attending nymph for only two out of the three nights originally planned before the school had to cave to the pressure. I sat at home, feeling ways about things, desperately, and wondered how you would have swooned, if you would have done it differently without me there, if you would have glared at where I should have been or if you would have looked out at the audience instead of at the back of the stage and glared at where my parents had sat the night before watching in their own horror.
Somewhere, I began to realize that we belonged apart, could no longer think of you as Eurydice, or the world and myself Persephone, stolen and captive and held somewhere away from you. The world was never cold and dead without me, not like the album or the story, and I took to calling you Hades and Jealousy in my head instead of Jesse. I couldn’t keep all of our songs straight, never knew which was meant to be about us—because didn’t at least one of “our” songs have to be—and which was just fun to sing, as we peed together in adjacent bushes in the woods, or stood side by side later, holding each other up in moments of youthful and drunken bliss, singing about things like lovers and siblings and friends.
The you I remember from elementary school is so different from the you I remember in high school, the one different even then from how I think of you after all of the other challenges that would slip between us, different from the one I would see earlier that same summer night before I found you on the front steps. I had pretended not to see you, earlier that night, avoided walking directly in front of the deli counter where you stared out at the darkened, closed pharmacy with that expectant but weary smile you started wearing after your mother finally died at the end of elementary school. You inherited that expression from her, I remember seeing that look for the first time on her face when she told me about her brother, how there was a trespasser one night when most of the family was out of the house, how carbon monoxide robbed you of an uncle. He had been a meteorologist at a local station, she told us once he had a quirk of always interrupting stories to remind people of what the weather had been like that day as if no one could make sense of a story without a hint about how the weather had been. That weary and expectant smile, as if she still always felt him nearby, as if he might chime in with what the weather was like on that night when everyone else was gone. I remember her with that look then, and know that she had to have known, but it would be a while yet before you figured it out, still longer before she sat you down and told you one night.
Nothing seemed to touch you as you stared out from the deli across from the same pharmacy where you used to ride your bike to pick up her medication, bottles and bottles of it, and I wondered if it was because you were really waiting for something, if you were always waiting for something. You used to boast to our sixth-grade class that your mother had to take pills this big—and here you would form a circle with one hand, which was largely accurate, but only because you always had such small hands—and sometimes she would even do it without drinking water. I ducked into a different aisle and didn’t let you see me. I’m not sure it mattered: you were so focused on searching the empty pharmacy. You hadn’t seen me, then, since before I left for school, and though it was a clear night when I went into the store just before closing time (another of our songs), it was raining when I left the store without having passed in front of you. You complained endlessly about the fluorescent lights when you first started working there in high school, but you later admitted that it felt like leaving home when you would leave at night, alone at the end of a shift, especially in the dark of winter. You didn’t plan to become anything more serious than a part timer, but then you didn’t want to go to college and you already had the job.
I never knew what you were waiting for, why we hadn’t been lovers, why things happened the way they did while I was away at school, how anything more significant than a necktie ever came between us—I kept your tie after the first performance, driven by a whim and fueled by song lyrics at first, and then later a growing realization that you would probably never wear it again—but you said it was me when I asked.
“It was me.” Almost an echo, as though the curve in the street where your house was located were a riverbend instead, lined with reed and flower, almost as though there were an Echo, successful for the first time at calling some Narcissus to bend down at the water’s edge.
At that point, I couldn’t tell if you were looking up to me or beyond to the stars. I guess there was something hard to swallow in that, and I shifted on my feet slightly. Your expression didn’t change much when I was silent for those few moments. You had long since stopped holding out the fruit.
Sometimes I might like to tell students that was it, that I left and never spoke to you again after this. They would tell me I’m full of shit, and I would smile. They would say tell us what happened next. I would tell them some stories don’t have a climax, that there’s no resolution, that the lack of climax is sometimes the conflict. Most of them wouldn’t understand this, but some of them would. They would look up at me without saying anything, or maybe they would tell another student to shut up and I wouldn’t scold them, just this once, because I can see that they know, and that they realize for the first time that someone else knows too.
giuseppe manley is a queer Black writer who grew up in, and currently resides in, the state of Maine. They have two dogs, work in IT, and are fond of making three item lists. giuseppe sometimes writes fiction, has read poetry for The Open Field, Puerto Del Sol and Wend Poetry, and tweets as @gehnmy.
(Artist) Edward Lee is an artist and writer from Ireland. His paintings and photography have been exhibited widely, while his poetry, short stories, non-fiction have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen and Smiths Knoll. He is currently working on two photography collections: 'Lying Down With The Dead' and 'There Is A Beauty In Broken Things'. He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Lewis Milne, Orson Carroll, Blinded Architect, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy. His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com
Artist’s Statement, “Nothing Is As It Appears,” 30x20, oil on canvas
Memory, emotion, existing in a symbiotic, sometimes parasitic, relationship, at times layered over each under, through each other, while at other times beside each other, tantalizingly close, painfully distant, always connected, neither able to survive alone.