Bits and Pieces

[CharmedFan28]

This story is wrapping up within its place in the bigger story very well I think. I will miss this story when it is finished. Great writing and I look forward to the ending tomorrow.

 

[ChrisGibson]

AND NOW, THE CONCLUSION OF BITS AND PIECES


Alone in the room Logan had made for him, Kenny looks down at what he has written.

Head aching, tongue tried out like deserts after
the lights come down in cold bleak world,
after the last carol is sung, let us clasp our
hands together and pray in penance to Lent
Let us set out minds on fasting, penance,
and crucifixion, let us give our bodies
wholly to the hole inside, and then sigh,
take our clothes off, and cling together,
making love again.

His nostrils are still filled with the semi musty, deeply sweet gingery essence of burning frankincense and myrrh swung through the aisle and then around the altar until the old marble altar and the crucifix portending a day far in the future is obscured. The smell of incense still clings to him as Kenny comes up the stairs and to the large bedroom of this house on the outskirts of town, on the outskirts of things where he feels most welcome. It is good, he decides, to be on the outskirts of things.

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?

From the east, from the edge, and better it would have been had they stayed there. If they had trusted the edges they would have never gone inside of Jerusalem. They would have crept along the edge of Israel, along modern Jordan, and slipped into Bethlehem and right back out. They would have found God small, and on the edge of things, under the light of a wavering star.
The images are flowing through him like poetry, and now all his life is poetry. Lines come together and fall apart, lightly, in his mind.
Time to crawl into bed. Time to sleep. Time to… soon. But just to lay on this bed, just to close ones eyes and nap. Just a little bit. Just a moment. Not to turn out the light but to let the golden light of the little lamp sit in the room like a friend.
There is a tap on the door, and Kenny grunts, he doesn’t even say come in, but it means the same thing. The door opens. Logan comes into the room. He is naked and walks into the room.
There is no embarrassment or even lust in looking at the beautiful man’s body. Logan is unshaven, and he holds his glasses in his hands.
Kenny shimmers out of his clothing like a fish laying on the bed, naked himself, watching his own cock rise.
Kenny lifts the covers, and Logan comes into the bed. He is long and strong and forty and golden and golden brown and bronze brown. He smells like the shower early this morning, like the small spicy sweat of a winter’s day. He is hot at the nape of his neck, a warm valley, the small of his back. His buttocks smell like the earth, smell like richness. Between his legs he taste like a seventeen year old boy, like Brendan, long ago, a distant memory that boy’s hands clinging to the pillow, that boys feet bunching. It is Logan, that expert lover, who has loved so many, whom he is loving now. Gift for gift, entry for entry. Love for love. Not the love of the lonely looking for the soul mate, but the love of those with love to give, with long strong hands backed by golden hair with the first touch of silver. There is spearmint on his breath, and while Logan’s body moves under the golden light, Kenny sighs and thinks, “If I am the poet and the artists, you are the art…. You are the poetry. Everything you do is poetry.”
He is startled by the door opening again. But, after all, this is Logan’s house where everything happens. Where nothing should be a surprise. Coming out of his reverie, though, Kenny is surprised.
“Sheridan?” his voice quavers.
Sheridan is in snug jeans and a tee shirt. For a moment his face hidden by the bib of his ballcap. But now he is stripping and coming to the other side of the bed. He was never very tall, but just tall enough, narrow with long thighs and a lightly muscled by, white as marble almost. Kenny could always understand what Brendan saw.
“Does…?” Kenny begins.
Does Brendan know?
There is no place for that question as Sheridan comes behind him, hooking a leg around him, kissing the small of his back, wrapping his long arms around him. As Kenny turns to kiss him full on the mouth and feel Sheridan’s hands snagging in his thick hair. Brendan will know in the morning, and then, perhaps in the afternoon, he will be this way for the first time in years with Brendan, or maybe Brendan and Sheradan, or maybe Logan too. And things will not be the same again. Though they might be worse, they might be better, but they will not be the same.
Kenny gives himself to one and then to the other understanding that before he could be in Brendan’s bed, in some way it was only right he be with Sheridan and his old lover, tangled in that story, watching them love each other and love him as well, feeling tongues inside of him, opening Sheridan and burying his face in him. Arms, legs, kisses, embraces, surrendering.
Sheridan comes first, and lays exhausted beside Kenny who is still being pleasured by Logan. Trembling with his own pleasure, nearly out of his body, Kenny watches Logan shudder and come for him, honey arcs spurting across the bed, caught like pearl in the light of an old lamp.



While the house was still deep in sleep and sunrise was some time off, Fenn whispered to Todd, “Go take a shower.”
After their first year together, Todd never asked why. He always just did. It took a while to make the water hot, and then Todd got in, murmuring in his tone deaf way half of some music he had heard on the radio. Todd was the least musical person Fenn knew. He waited a while, and then he followed Todd into the bathroom where he took off his things and went into the water with him.
Todd blinked down, startled.
“Hey, Husband,” he began.
Fenn embraced him, feeling the muscles under the slick skin. Todd held him too as the water poured down. They cleaned each other and kissed and then Fenn toweled him and half dry he led Todd to the bedroom. They shut the door and were in their a long while before Todd held Fenn’s face in his large hands.
“Don’t make me say it,” he whispered to Fenn. “Don’t make me beg you to do it. You know I hate using that word.”
Being the one entered could be easier. People didn’t know that. To just be there, to just open up and take someone in could be easier than the entering. There was a certain letting go required in fucking. He was drawn to the roundness of Todd’s ass, to the promise of home that came with being pulled into the heat of Todd. It was a shock, almost frightening. But once in he couldn’t stop. His loins against the roundness of Todd, his penis in the deep heat of him, his stomach against the other boy’s back, his chest against his back. Fenn began to love the rhythm they built, the vibration Todd sent through his body from the very inside of his. He loved the way their hands caught to each other, and he buried his face in the softness of Todd Meradan’s silver hair, drew his ear into his mouth, kissed his eyes, massaged the scalp beneath the hair, the planes of the face. When Fenn came it was in a hot, gentle flood that made his body tremble. After the initial orgasm was done, it continued to send waves through Fenn, whose penis was still held firmly inside of his lover. When Todd came, it was between his legs, not in him. He felt the slick heat between his legs drip to his buttocks, anoint the bed spread.
Neither of them got up from this. They just lay there. He didn’t want to get rid of Todd, slick between his legs, in the cleft of his buttocks. Todd was curled on his side, this long, tall, muscular man all dusted in dark hair, his Adam’s apple, the cords of muscle in his arm, the seriousness of his face still there even after this, who had just brought him inside of him, who lay fetal position to his fetal position, face to face.
“I wanted this,” Todd said. “To be with you.”
“I’m always with you,” Fenn said.

THE END

- - - Updated - - -

afterword





I heard somewhere (which is a way of saying I was only half paying attention) that the difference between American writers and other writers is that while other writers say they are political writers, Americans say they write for themselves. Well, dividing the world between “American” and “everyone else,” the “nations”, the “gentiles” could be a silly thing and maybe I can suggest that the differences are artificial. After all, looking back on the Rossford books I have told a story with a Black lead characters and series of characters who are, for the most part, gay men, a tale which is not only sexual to the degree of pornographic, but which features pornographers. Rossford is a story that is as much about religion as it is sex, where God and fuck are possibly the most used words. There is more I can say about it, but it would be hard not to see the story and how far it exists from popular writing as not a little political, and yet I think of it as wholly indulgent. Perhaps the most political thing you can do is set out to please yourself, which is what I did and why you are reading this.
When I sat down to write the Houses in Rossford, it is was with the idea that it would begin a trilogy, but that the trilogy would lead to other books. I wanted to crate a world that was open, that I could easily return to. I had done a trilogy already and other one offs and was tired of saying goodbye to characters. Rossford, I assumed, would get me through my thirties. I did not forsee being at the end of them. Forty seems a long way off, more than enough time to write the trilogy and what was tentatively two after. The trilogy was done—in rough form—in about eighteen months and I was satisfied, believing I would return to Rossford, Indiana one day.
The next year I kept hearing about suicides and particular type of suicide I had never known—a copycat—the phenomenon where, if one person killed themselves, several others came to the same spot. A girl in the neighborhood had taken her life after being raped. Rape was as big a word as suicide and it seemed at the time men were becoming ugly, boys were doing ugly and fearful things and I wanted to write about a town where these things were happening. The story kept falling apart in my mind until I realized that town would be Rossford, that I had, up until now, shown a smaller part of the place and made it seem, porn not withstanding, the very image of a peaceable town. But it was, of course, a city, and every town I knew of had its troubles. And so came the City of Rossford. It began by introducing wholly new characters and linking them to the pervious ones and took place ten years after the last book. After that came what I believed was the last book, five being a goodly number, but so many problems and characters had been introduced that even as I was wrapping it up, giving it the lovely parity of ending with Brendan and Dena watching a movie featuring Paul Anderson, as the books had begun, I knew there would be a sixths which would necessitate a seventh. The story of Dylan and Lance, which would prove to be—for me—far more important than the previous love stories (save maybe Fenn and Todd’s) had begun and had to be seen through. That Elias would complete it seemed right. I had pushed the story past the comfort levels of others, now I had to push it past what was then my comfort level, by opening up the possibility of love in ways yet unseen in the books.
And so there were seven and the end was, undisputably the end. A friend had said, “I suspect there would be nine,” but he had never read anything I’d written and had a habit of making strange predictions. Five or seven was my idea. Nine seemed a bit much. I still think it is.
Freed from Rossford, and I have to explain, for the five and not ten years I was writing the books I did not feel free to do anything else, I set down to write many others things and devote myself to them. But Rossford had been created with the intention of living forever and so, long after the pen was down, other stories formed in my head, what happened to them in the future, what things had happened I had never written down. There were whole stretches of years that were never in the story. What happened to them? I had told Noah Riley’s story, where he had come from, but never much about Paul. There was a great deal missing.
I felt the story was finished, however. The seven books were as done as the first three had been. After that trilogy there never really had to be another book and the fourth book had begun a new and very different story that went from the fifth to the sixth to the last. The seventh was no incomplete at all. The tale was told, and yet, bits and pieces of it never told and bits and pieces of something new rose up. To take carre of this business, and bring them out of Rossford, I introduced Dylan, Lance and Elias into novel Bird Came Down, but this did not stop me from thinking of Rossford and so, finally, one day, while I was working on something else entirely, I just sat down and wrote:

“When Dylan was Mesda was fifteen years old, he had been a fool, and he would spend the rest of his life making up for such foolishness. He had been loved, utterly, and he had turned from that love to be with someone else. For seven years Dylan, who had in his early youth, put no bar on his sexual curiosity, had been completely faithful, never looked outside of the strange relationship he shared with two men who shared their lives with each other.”

and thought, well, I will just see where it takes me. If it ever gets long enough, it will be a book, and by its very execution, it will be quite a different book than what has come before. There was no plot. There was no deliberate storyline. I thought, possibly, it might be a set of short stories. There was no urgency in its tone, no build up to a final conclusion, not really. And I was not in a hurry to tell the story. I was working on entirely different things and then, on breaks, having greater and greater interruptions from Rossford. Now I took a long time to flesh out the story of Lance and Dylan and Elias. Now I had to really sit down with Paul Anderson. Now I had to stretch the story back into the future, learn things about Layla and Will Klasko, now and again leave out characters or put them far to the side. By the time I began to draw out Rob Affren’s story I knew this would be a book, though I was not sure of the length, and it was nearly a whole year later, waking from a dream, that Brendan Miller’s story began to haunt me before I spent several days writing it down. That was really the last part, and so, after a year of working on another story, I knew it was time to weave all these various threads into a novel, or something like a novel.
It’s different from the other books, but I guess it’s a novel. After all, Ullyses is a novel and all sorts of books I don’t think of as readable, orderly or even stories are novels, so this is one too, and if you’re hear, then you’ve read the rest, so it must be readable enough. More importantly, the tale pleases me.
There has never been an afterword to a Rossford book, or any other book for that matter up until now, but I thought this deserved one. It is also the height of sense to know when to stop writing and when to say goodbye. This was primarily a love story, or a series of them, and a story of sexual revelation. I even wondered if it was too much, but I think there has been far too little and the only revelation is too much.
The center of Brendan’s story is his experience at the first Christmas party. The evening he and Sheridan have is, in some way, the crux of the whole book and the center to all the other strange events that happen. It is dreamlike, but it is also lifelike. We wish to judge life, to give it morals, to declare many experiences good or bad and ourselves good and bad based on them. While there are many things which are good and bad, many of our experiences, especially the way we experience ourselves sexually, are simply happenings which we are not entirely sure how to describe. Much our life, in love and in religion, is defined by mystery and disconcertment, not moral and solution. A moral implies an end. When something happens and then leads to something else, we say, “Well, that just goes to show…. ” or “The moral of that story is…” But when A leads to B and then B leads to C and then there is more after D, it becomes impossible to so easily produce a moral to the story. And so our tale ends not on the comfortable Christmas, but the somewhat strange Epiphany. As Laurel says, . “At Epiphany we discover, and what it is we discover we are not entirely sure. The Wisemen see the baby in Mary’s arms, but what it all means…. Who can really say?”
For this very reason, the reason of mystery, this novel is, in an unfinished story. Not all questions are answered and certainly all bows are not tied up. This may mean there are more stories to come, but what comes after will not be like what came before, and if that means anything it means that neither Brendan Miller nor myself will type in bold print the six letters which make up the phrase, “The End.”

C.L.G.

 

[CharmedFan28]

That was a wonderful ending and I enjoyed your afterward! A lot has gone on in the Rossford stories and I have enjoyed them for that complexity and that they were very well written. I look forward to whatever you post next and as always that was some great writing!