Brilliant Bruisers :: [Kronos + Basil]

[L△LIA]

born at the hearts of brilliant bruisers
where we find them and til we do
we'll have to drift until we find them
and the sea was alright and it was alright
it's all we know now to never go back

I know every second of every day that they need me, but I'm too young to be their dad. That's not even to mention how I was never meant to be anyone's mother — not now, not ever. Yet each morning comes and I wake with the dawn, cracking eggs into frying pans to feed the open mouths of four hungry baby birds, smoothing down the cowlicks in Pony's hair as he trundles by and bringing Mosca breakfast in bed when she's too weak to lift the sheets I tucked up under her chin the evening before. Months have passed this way: herding my younger brothers down the road and off to school, a trio of wayward lambs that nag at my worries, and dragging my father's axe out into the woods in a desperate attempt to pretend my shoulders are just as broad and capable as his were.

THWACK. I know I'm the oldest and when the time without our parents was still being measured in days and weeks, I thought age was enough. THWACK. The reflection in the mirror was almost proud at first, confident that I was a man and that this sudden weight of responsibility was something I could carry, maybe even with ease. THWACK. Except that each day I come into this forest to chop wood, the act of slamming a sharpened steel blade into the trees feels less like self-preservation and more like a race to see which of us will fall first. THWACK. The trees are older than I am. THWACK. Taller than I am. THWACK. Stronger than I am. THWACK THWACK THWA—

My father's axe lodges itself too deeply into the bark and stubbornly refuses to be pulled free. After ten minutes of tugging, I fall.

Sprawled out on the ground, I punch the earth with empty fists, burying my knuckles in dirt and hollering nonsense at the canopy of leaves above me. Our mother used to tell us endless stories of the faeries that watched over us from up there — from all around — but my mother was a liar. There's no one watching over me. So much of my life was wasted chasing her stories of magic and mischief through these woods, invisible glitter embedded into the lifelines stretched across my curious palms and now the memories of her tales taunt me with unfulfilled promises. For all the deer tracks I followed in hopes of meeting a centaur or every message for the Fair Folk I scrawled onto scraps of paper and tucked away into hollow trees... I feel cheated. It's enough to make me hate these woods, enough perhaps, to be the reason I continue coming out here each day, trying to single-handedly tear them down.

Today the trees continue to stand while I lay with my back pressed into the soil, however.

Hauling myself up, I glare at the axe. It leers back at me, taunting me with blunt evidence of how I'm probably not strong enough to keep going. These are the things my younger siblings don't see, can't see. Around them I have to be better than this, every look swearing that taking care of them is horribly easy, so that no one worries. We've all worried enough since our parents disappeared and now it's up to me to quell their fears and keep the magic alive for them, even when I don't believe anymore. Looking into their eyes, I know all too well that I can't get away from this... but right now it's just me and I don't have to put up a front for anyone.

I spit childishly at the axe and turn on my heel, stomping off in the opposite direction of my responsibilities. On and on, I walk until I reach the creek that stretches out in two directions: one way leads back toward home and the other runs away to somewhere less familiar. My feet refuse to turn back and I follow the water until the fence rears up before me, caging me into this place of false magic and too much, too much, too much. Without thinking, I'm already in the water, ducking beneath the surface and escaping with the fish that swim so freely to the other side. It's the first thing I've done in a while that has truly felt easy.

The forest beyond the fence feels different and if I still believed in magic, maybe I'd describe it that way. It's not a sixth sense for faeries dancing in the branches above me or flocks of rainbow crows cawing out in the distance, but that the air feels lighter. Less heavy. More free. Even the footprints I leave behind seem less weighted and when I close my eyes and turn my face up to the sun, I'm not thinking about Pony or Atreyu or Ama or Mosca. Here, there's just me. It's a warm kind of selfishness.

Coming up on a stretch of sun-bathed grass, I strip my sopping shirt off and hang it on a low tree branch before laying down in the light, sprawled out with no cares for anything. The incriminating water of escape that lingers on my skin slowly dries and I think I could stay here forever. I feel eighteen again. Not in the way where I'm supposed to be a man, but in the way where I'm still allowed to be a kid. Here, I'm no one's dad and that's okay. Everything is okay.

[chelsey]

BASIL ANATOLA
"TWO CORPSES WE WERE, TWO CORPSES I SAW."

It's not much at first - just his smile. I tell myself it's so I can remember it. There's a tug at the edge of his lips, something that always made him look kinda goofy, and his teeth are always obnoxiously showing. When I move on to paint his eyes, I'm almost ashamed to find that I can't get rid of the fear in them. They glitter with the anticipation of knowing that something is coming, and reveal a hint of anxiety that screams that it has no idea what that something is. Next is his skin (battered, bruised, bloodied to a pulp), then his hands (nails grimy with dirt, fingerprints smeared with blood that isn't his), then his jaw (stubbornly set, determined to win a game he already knew was rigged), then his heart (spilling out of his chest, inanimate, still, irrelevant). It's almost laughable, thinking up the thousands of different ways my cousin, Gavin Barker, could've died - and then having the gut to actually paint them -, as if painting a different version of his death is enough for me to feel like I can control the way things have actually turned out for him. Sometimes, it even feels like enough. 

I could hate him for leaving me here. I'm nearly there, too - I'll go to the graveyard and muster up all the spit a mouth can muster up preparing to launch it all at the foot of that damn Barker's grave... but then I'll swallow it all back down before I even have the courage to let it out, patting his tombstone, instead, as if I was just patting his back after a nice little conversation.

Mr. Holloway says I'm ridiculous, and that "forgiving and forgetting is the only way to move on" (like forgetting blood and bruises on a broken neck that'll never heal is as easy to forget as what day it is or what time your dentist appointment was), but he never considered that I just maybe don't want to forget, because forgetting means to forget what color his eyes were or how he sounded when he laughed, and if I can manage to forget that, all I'll have left of Gavin Barker (sweet, stupid Gavin, the boy who couldn't kill a fly and who volunteered his life to the Games, anyway) is the dirt on his grave and the paint on my canvases.

It's shocking to know how enough dirt and paint can be. 

In between bickering with my dad, Mr. Holloway, and myself, painting in the forest is one of my favorite pastimes. There's sunlight and wildlife and enough colors to gloss over all the red and purple ones in my head. Sure, it's a struggle to climb over the barbed wire fence with brushes clenched between my jaw and random scraps of paper slipping out of my crammed pockets, but the thrill of being somewhere I know I'm not allowed to be is an enough of a reward.

These days, I'm not in as many places I shouldn't be in as I should be. I don't streak my tears with heavily empty spray cans in the middle of a graveyard, anymore, but the forest can sometimes substitute what I lost there. Where Roland and I used to paint over the names on the tombstones with pictures that might've been pretty once, I now carve names I'm afraid of forgetting onto the trunks of tall trees, and the reversal of the whole situation is enough to make me laugh, if I'm not already crying.

For now, at least, my eyes are dry, and that alone makes me grateful for the fact that I haven't lost control over that part of my life, yet.

However, Destiny, Fate, God, or whatever other Bullshit laughing at me in the sky always has a funny way of reminding me that there will always be things I'll never have control over. If it's not Roland, it'll be Gavin, and if it's not Gavin, then it'll be the shirtless corpse sun-bathing in the grass before me. 

I have the gall to think "Jesus Christ, not here," (even if I subconsciously know that by "Not here," I really mean "Not now" and "Not ever" and "Not again") before crouching next to it and poking it in the chest with the back of my brush. "Oi, are you dead?"

Bullshit knows that there will always be parts of us that are.

my god I'm so sorry this is horrible