The Kind Earth

[ChrisGibson]

“This is a horrible fucking place,” Jay Strickland said.
“And let me be very clear about how fucking horrible this place is.
“It’s not horrible like four years of high school was horrible, and it’s not horrible like borderline depression, and it’s not horrible like when I felt like I was losing you and then when I got a phone call from your mother that said you were missing. It’s not horrible like when I sat in that cabin on Christmas Eve and thought you might be dead. This,” Jay Strickland said, as they sat on the sand dune, “is an ordinary kind of horrible. It’s the kind of horrible you want to have, the horrible of being in a shitty, dull place and paying too much for too little food. This is common horribleness, and when you can afford to go on and on about it, then life is otherwise pretty good.”
Beside him, in baggy brown swim trunks, his very ordinary and pale chest exposed to the sun, was the curly haired Michael Cleveland, whose eyes were behind black shades with rounded flames and who muttered “Fuck,” because he’d been trying to light a cigarette against the wind and no amount of shielding his hand made a light possible.
“Hold on,” James Strickland said, taking the cigarette and using his white fedora to shield his hand. He bent down in a particular way and a moment later came the smell of burning tobacco. He handed it to Michael and out of his madras shirt, Jay took a cigarette for himself and lit it off of Michael’s.
“The ordinary kind of bullshit,” Michael said.
“Do you know, when I was gone I read the Bible a lot, and I remember reading about Jesus taking seven demons from Mary Magdalene, and then I read something else where Jesus talked about someone being exorcised and then more demons coming back worse than before. That sort of fucked me up.”
“I think it’s smart to not take Jesus too seriously,” Jay said. “If you read that fuckin’ book too much, you’ll lose your mind and, quite frankly, neither one of us can afford to loose much more of our minds again.”
The dune was almost clean, but there was, coming up through the grass, the fair share of cigarette butts—to which they would contribute—and plastic bottles and, yes, there it was, an old condom. But beneath them the white beach spread to the deep blue water, and before them stretched the great lake till its horizon reached a deeper blue and then touched the pale blue of the sky. People milled about on the beach and a red house on stilts was the life guard’s tower.
“Well, yes,” Michael blew smoke out of his nose, “I never even looked at the Bible until the end of last year, so I see what you’re saying, but does it make sense to say that there are certain parts that speak to me? Like little echoes, and I wonder about Mary Magdalene and think, was she ever afraid that those demons would come back? When she was on her best day and the sky was bright and sunny, did she ever get afraid that she would go back to that place?”
“Do you?”
Michael leaned back on his elbows. Jay was not sure if he’d grown the little beard on purpose or not.
“Yes,” he said.
“When we first got together, all those years ago I was so happy. I was happy, but I was still earthbound if that makes sense. I still felt the old depression, knew I needed to take care of myself and shit, was used to it, knew the black dog wasn’t far off. And then I began to decline, to spiral down, and Mickey Avedon… well ,you know what that did to me.
“But lately, after Christmas, especially after I found out you had come for me, I felt like all of that was lifted from me, like this demon that had been on my back, sometimes heavy and sometimes less heavy for thirty years was just—poof—gone. And the truth is. I get a little afraid when I’m feeling happy that he’ll come back. And when he comes back I won’t know what to do with him.”
“I need to clean my glasses.”
“What?”
Jay repeated, squinting through them, “I need to clean my glasses.”
“I was talking about—”
“I know what you were talking about,” Jay said, pushing his glasses back up his nose, “but I don’t know what to say to that, and the fact remains, I need to clean my glasses.”
While Michael shook his head, Jay said, “But I do know what to say to that. Let’s get up off this hill and go back to the water. It’s the only reason we came, and no matter what everything else is, the water isn’t horrible.”
Climbing down the dune is far easier than climbing up. All through this dune are paths leading up and leading down, and there are others walking through the grass. Any path will take you down, and as they travel theirs they see, lying half in and half out of the grass, a woman red and freckled by the sun who must come out here every day she is so hot dog colored. She looks about sixty and in her black bathing suit her legs are splayed open in a way that makes Jay smile to himself and think it’s a good think he isn’t thirty years older and one hundred percent more heterosexual.
After the splayed open woman, the path descends to a little sand valley and on the other side of this rises another dune, but that dune is not their concern. They are turning toward the water. The walking is hard and hot on their feel till they come to where the water packs the sand and walk over the pebbles and warm waves heated by all the ninety degree days before this cooler one was over their feet.
“I would say it’s like liquid glass,” Jay says as, in his white shorts and Madras shirt he wades in up to his waist, “except liquid glass is a real thing, and it doesn’t feel like this at all.
The water is transparent at the shore and chalky blue, glinting sunlight as heavy waves wash over both of them.
Michael laughs and splashes him.
“It’s like water. The water’s like water.”
“You can stop splashing me now.”
“I could,” Michael agrees, but he does not.
Jay takes a great breath, ignoring Michael, and waits for the next big wave. When it comes, rolling up milky blue and translucent, he bobs down and rolls into it. He turns like clothes in a washing machine, does a little circle where his whole world is water, feels the wave carrying him to the land, comes up again.
Michael looks back at him, and Jay smiles. He cannot tell the look on Michael’s face. Jay dives into the water again. Eyes closed he moves for Michael and yanks him by his calves down into the water.
Michael comes up spitting out water and shaking his head.
“You’re a horrible person,” Michael spits out water, and his face is hidden by dark seaweedy mass of his hair.
Jay stands, arms crossed over his chest, legs planted wide apart in the water.
He pulls Michael toward him and stops because now he sees two boys walking along the beach. He can’t stop looking at them. One boy is black the other white. Now, to him, children look like children. They may be sixteen, but sixteen looks like childhood, and their bodies are spare and tight and muscled, but spare and tight and muscled like kids come out of childhood who haven’t lived life or eaten enough biscuits. The white boy is deeply tanned and wears silver shades. The Black boy is in green trunks. Both of them are completely dry, so they are here to be seen. Cheerfully they wave at Jay and Michael and Jay waves back.
“It’s the funniest thing,” he says, watching them depart. “There was a time when I would sympathize with sad and unhappy teenagers, and look back and remember what it was like, but now I see the beautiful ones too, and become so happy. I am happy for them that they’re setting out on life and everything is right for them right now. I don’t know what happened to them yesterday or what’s happening tomorrow, but right now they are beaitful and happy, and that makes me feel beautiful too.”
Jay stops talking.
“Am I rambling.”
He looks up at Michael who is looking down on him, smiling.
“No,” he says. “You never really ramble. Even when you do.”
The waves push against them so they both sway a little and regain their balance. A gull gives a cheerful screech and skims just above them.
“Life is actually a pretty good thing,” Michael says.
Jay takes a strand of Michael’s brown hair
“You’re starting to look untidy. I think I’d like to cut this.”

MORE TOMORROW

 

[CharmedFan28]

That was a great start to this new story! I can't remember if we have seen these characters before but if we have not they are very interesting! Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!

 

[ChrisGibson]

You have seen them before. It's just been a long time and they are in a much better place, as you will learn while the story progresses. It's the thing about posting these stories so far apart, but then, I just edited it, so.... yeah.

 

[ChrisGibson]

In this last year they had moved as slowly as possible from West to East, and only now were they starting back again. Life seemed, for both of them, to have started again on Christmas Day in a driving snow storm in North Dakota. Michael had thought he might die and that it was an okay thing to do, and James Strickland was sure that Michael had died, and that there was nothing to do but stay in the lonely guesthouse a while and mourn him and then return to Ohio. Whoever does not believe in resurrection, whoever cannot comprehend it, was not at the door when Michael came in, and when Jay beheld him. In every story of resurrection Jay ever read, no one said anything but Jesus, Everyone else sat around him dumbfounded. Well, Jesus was not here, not in that cabin, and the two of them just looked at each other in wonder. Michael had not expected Jay to come to North Dakota to find him, The further he got from Lassador the more he was sure North Dakota was a quiet place to die. And Jay, knew Michael had not expected to see him again at all.
“There’s tea in the cupboard,” Jay had said, hs eyes full of Michael, though there was no smile on his face.
“Yeah,” Michael had said. Then, “Yes. I know.”
“I’ll get you some,” Jay said.
In the kitchen he wondered why in the world was he getting tea for this man who had caused him so much trouble. He had thought his life was gone and there was no one for him but Michael, but right now he was so angry, so angry that the person who had caused him this misery and this fear was simply walking through the door like he’d been on a midnight stroll.
“Your mother called me,” Jay said, unable to be happy. “She called me and Dalton drove me to Chicago, and I took a bus out here. I stayed with the monks. I sat here all night. I wondered if I would die in this snow. I was sure you were gone.”
Michael only had one sip of his tea.
“You can’t keep doing this to me,” Jay said. “You can’t.”
Michael didn’t say anything. He wasn’t entirely sure what he could say, and he knew Jay couldn’t go on this way, and he knew he had fully thought of never coming back to this life.
He went on drinking his tea and finally he said:
“Please tell me you’re glad to see me, James. Please tell me that. The gladdest moment of my life was seeing you at that door.”
“And the gladdest moment of my life was you coming through it,” Jay said. “But I can’t forgive you for what you put me through. I wish I could, but I just can’t. Not right now.”
“I’m going to Christmas Day Mass at the monastery tomorrow. Say you’ll come with me.”
“Yes,” Jay said, not looking at him.
“Hey, why don’t you take the bed tonight and I can stay here on the sofa?”
Michael had hoped that Jay would say, “Well, that’s ridiculous. Come to bed.”
But Jay looked at him, irritated and said, “Of course. How the hell else did you think it would go?”

There was nothing more doleful than an old Christmas hymn. They should have been happy in that saccharine way if they were like the rest of Christmas, but the one thing that had never gone away from the old hymns was the ancient longing, that sweet terrible sadness. Jay never let carols or recordings that weren’t less than fifty years old play. In the darkness of his room, the choir sang:

O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

Michael, exhausted, had said he needed to shower. In one last bid for peace and love he asked Jay if he would come with him. Jay said he would not, that he was tired himself and had bathed and needed sleep. He lay in the annoying doorless room, covers over him, truly tired now that he allowed himself to relax, now that Michael was here. Westminster Choir sang over his sleeping head and as his body untightened from fear and the anticipation of death, hot tears came to his eyes. Jay Strickland, who never really cried, felt himself doing so now..
Now the choir was singing something else about silent nights and dark nights where all hope seemed gone and there was one light and the light was coming from a stable where a child was born. In the song it was bleak and midwinter, or the earth was cold like a stone or it was snowing even though it never snowed in Palestine. Dark streets shinethed with the everlasting light. The songs all sort of went together He did not notice how the the shower water had stopped long ago. James Strickland did not entirely notice that he was still crying, just a little. How ridiculous. How foolish. This was not something he did.
“I’m sorry James,” Michael said.
This was the second time he had called him James, and in fifteen years, not since they had met as Freshmen at Saint Ignatius, had he ever been called James.
“I am sorry.”
Jay said nothing. The heavy comforter was pulled up and Michael climbed into the bed and pulled the cover over them.
“You said you were going to the couch,” Jay made himself say. “I’m so upset with you.”
“I know, Michael said. “But please don’t let’s go to bed without you holding me and me holding you. I swear I’ll go if you want me to.”
His voice was sober and desperate and Jay thought to himself, after all your sadness, you becomes so angry you turn you back on him like this. You are so foolish. He did not turn around, though he di let Michael wrap his arms about him
“You’re naked,” Jay accused.
“When did either one of us ever sleep with clothes on, and what do you not know about me?”
Jay knew he was like candle wax, melting now, but soon to go back to hardness, not ready to forgive. He turned around and let Michael into his arms and he wasn’t sure which one of them kissed first, and when they had kissed and their limbs were linking nothing else mattered. While the carols continued in the lit living room, they gave themselves up to lovemaking in the darkness of the cabin bedroom. Jay was shocked out of himself by an orgasm so bright it lit the darkness of the night, shocked out of his anger. They shook together in the darkness looking into the shadows of the other’s open mouth and open eyes, settling on saying nothing, not even cleaning the pool of semen welling between their bellies.


When you left the beach you came through the park, and after you came through the park you crossed a bridge over the river that lead to the marina, and on either side of the bridge were townhouses. To your right were the merry sails of a marina. But if you walked on a little bit, past a turn, things became desolate. Even the streets were dry and desolate, their asphalt so grey it was white, and at this time of year blank lots and empty fields were browned with weeds. Michael cut a staff from the wood he’d collected along the shore, and handed it to Jay and then cut another one for himself and they moved on. It was, despite the desolation, a beautiful day. The large old houses were beautiful even when you looked close and saw sinking porches, chipping paint, cardboarded windows and rotting eaves.
“This must have been one hell of a city,” Michael murmured “It’s a little ruined, now. That’s a shame. So much in this world gets ruined and forgotten, but it’s still lovely. It’s still worthwhile.”
“I’m seeing that a lot lately,” Jay said.
“Hum?”
Jay pointed his little finger quickly and then away from a woman who was walking down the street carrying the luggage of her life behind her. When she saw them, she bowed her head proudly, and Jay bowed back. Before the synagogue, on the bright green lawn of the empty brick building there slept fitful and twitching under a blanket, a homeless man. Well, he must have been homeless.
“Is that tent city still up?” Jay asked. “You know? Back home?”
“The one near the old church that everyone was complaining about? Yeah.”
“Does it seem?” Jay asked, “like people are gathered to do battle on the weak things of this world?”
When Michael didn’t answer, but only looked serious as they kept walking, Jay continued, “It feels like everyone in America hates the homeless and hates the poor, and everything in this country hates the oppressed. But everything in this country works to make the poor and makes us homeless and oppress us every day, and no one sees it.”
“I see it,” Michael said. “When we were at the abbey we were so safe and so away from all of that. But we had to get back to it. We were away from the ugliness of the world but we knew it was there, and maybe I’m an idiot because I feel like somehow living in the ugliness of the world is doing something. Is that crazy?”
“It’s all crazy,” Jay said. as a man who looked like he might have been drunk or touched, rode by on a wobbly old bicycle with no seat. A Confederate flag was tied around his neck and billowed orange and blue and soiled behind him. As it whipped past Jay he tugged and heard the man crash to the sidewalk, but kept walking as if nothing had ever happened.
“Perhaps,” he said, as the man murmured, “Oh shit, goddamn,” behind them the only way to answer the crazy we’ve gotten used to and learned to despair over is with a hopeful crazy we’ve never seen.”
They walked two more dry, hot blocks without talking, and they could see Twelfth Street coming up with the little bus shelter that was not a bus shelter, but what passed for the train station here.
“You know,” Michael said. “It’s the maddest thing. But I am hopeful. I am full of hope. It’s not like that hope I had the first time when I went into teaching and tried to do everything and almost lost my mind. It’s this hope that says that right now, even if I lose everything, even if I lose my life it’s all going to be alright. And I don’t even know what that means, but I feel it, and I’ve never felt that way before. And now I’m not afraid, Jay. I’m not afraid of anything.”
Jay knew why he had chosen Michael for his best friend, and then for his boyfriend and now for his husband, which is what he was even if they were never properly married. Most people married, he knew, and learned to live with not being understood until they just grew used to it and forgot they had anything to say. As long as Michael was around though, he was the cave, and if Jay shouted across it, an answer always came back matching him. With Michael he never looked into the abyss alone, and with Michael he reached into the abyss and pulled up… glory.

The train came through the center of the street, the rails were in the asphalt so that it didn’t even seem as if a real train could ever show up in this place. When the claxon sounded it was a surprise, and when the train, large and silver, orange striped, rolled onto the street and stood by the bus shelter, ti was a wonder. Jay and Michael climbed on board and went looking for their seats. They sat down in them as the locomotive began to roll and the houses of the weary beach town rolled by. Soon houses gave way to trees and rivulets with sewage dumps and then there were the green trees again, the sights of deep forest paths and now farm fields. As the train gathered up speed, Jay sighed and leaned against Michael’s shoulder.
Finally, they were going back home.


MORE TOMORROW

 

[ChrisGibson]

“Todd!” Fenn ran to the young man who had invited himself into the apartment and embraced him.
“You’re huge now.” Fenn had to climb up to reach him.
Todd had a full head of black hair and in his ears winked two diamond studs that Fenn couldn’t help but be a little turned on by. The young man held Fenn apart from him, beaming at him, and as Todd laughed, Fenn couldn’t help but notice how strong the olive complexioned boy’s arms had become.
“It didn’t happen over night, you know? I’ve been taller than you for years.”
“And bigger?”
“And bigger. I’m so not a little kid.”
“No,” Fenn said, sitting down. “You’re not.”
Then he said, “Let me get you something.”
“Water’ll be nice.”
“What about a beer?” Fenn said, from the kitchen, “Now that we’ve established you’re a grown up.”
“A beer would be great!” Todd said. “I didn’t want to impose and invite myself to your booze is all.”
They were sitting, drinking, and Todd said, “Where’s your boring half?”
“Stop that.”
Todd shrugged.
“I just always thought you could do better.”
“Well, you’ve always been honest. I’ll give you that.”
Todd belched lightly, and said, “Excuse me. And excuse me for insulting Tom. I don’t know… I just thought it would have ended by now. You all are so different.”
“And who would be better suited for me?”
Todd shrugged and took a long pull at his beer. Fenn cocked his head.
“Wait a minute,” Fenn said.
“Alright.”
Fenn got up and returned with the little red book.
“Read this,” he opened it up to Todd.
Todd put the beer down, Fenn noticed, on a coaster, not the table, and then began reading before he first snorted and then outright laughed.
“Oh, fuck!”
“So it’s funny?” Fenn urged.
“It’s absofucking ridiculous.”
“Tom believes in it.”
“Well, then Tom’s weak in the head.”
For some reason it made Fenn glad to hear Todd say that.
“But I have to warn you,” Todd said. “I don’t really believe in God. Not that one. Nell tells me I should go to church. I… Look, if there’s a God….
“I know there’s a God,” Todd said. “But it’s not like this shit we’re hearing about. Hell. He’s probably not even a he. What’s more, I don’t really want to talk about him.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
Very quickly, and very expertly, Todd kissed Fenn. It was such a shock, and then it felt so good that it took Fenn a moment to pull away, and then he knocked Todd upside the head.
“Ow,” Todd complained, rubbing his dark, spiked hair.
“I knew you would do that,” Todd said. “But it was worth it. I’ve been dying to do that for years.”
“Well, you can’t do it again,” Fenn said, feeling more disconcerted than anything.
“I accept it,” Todd said, but he was grinning even while he rubbed his head. He was so cool about it! Fenn almost wanted to laugh.
“However, you asked me if I had someone better for you in mind. And I do. He’s all grown up. He’s tall, dark and a little bit handsome. He would have been off limits a while ago, but he’s perfectly available now.”
“Todd Meradan, are you hitting on me?”
“Fuck yeah, I am.”
Fenn sighed.
“What?”
Fenn stood up: “I think I’m going to need another beer.”

“So he kissed you?” Tara said. She sat back with a pleased look on her face, and Fenn said, “I don’t know why that makes you smile?”
“All sorts of shit makes me smile,” Tara said.
“What did you do after that?” Adele said, concerned.
“After what?” a little girl’s voice asked.
They turned around and Layla was walking into the kitchen with a gangly little, tow haired boy, and the dark haired Dena.
“Layla, what have I told you about grown up conversation?”
“I know what you told me,” the little girl said, “But I still want to know.”
Fenn called the little girl over and pulled her roughly to him, tickling her while she laughed, and cried, “Fenn! Stop!”
“That’s what nosey little girls get. Dena, Brendan, how are you?”
All of the children were eight, and Brendan Miller was a generally shy boy, but around Fenn he opened up quickly.
“I’ve got my first science fair,” he told him. “And I’m doing a report on hogs.”
“He got in trouble,” Dena said earnestly, “because Mrs. Nothnagel said, ‘Oh, you’re doing pigs.’ But he corrected her and said, “They’re not pigs. They’re hogs.’ You should have seen the way she looked at him!” Dena narrated, wide eyed. “But he was right.”


“Well, I sure am glad you called,” Tom said in a low voice from the kitchen.
“That’s what I like to hear,” Bryant laughed. “It cures my low self esteem.”
Tom chuckled and said, “These days I’m coming down with a case of it myself.”
“Really? What’s all that laughter in the background, then?”
“That laughter is not for me,” Tom said.
“You remember the priest whose ordination you played at?”
“Yes, your friend.”
“No, Fenn’s friend. Well, he’s staying the weekend. He just got back from a mission. The two of them are sitting on the sofa yukking it up like kids.”
“Make you jealous?”
“Honestly?” said Tom. “A little.”
“You should come and visit me.”
Tom’s voice changed. He looked back at Fenn and Dan laughing on the couch.
“I honestly can’t say what I’d do if that happened.”
“That’s the fun part,” Bryant told him.
The truth was Tom hadn’t had a sustained period to seriously regret his infidelity.and so he said, “You’re right. It probably would be. I might have to make my way down to Sainte Terre.”
“Saint Terre or wherever I end up,” Bryant said.
“What’s that?”
“My contract’s up at the end of this term. After it I’m not sure where I’ll be going.”
Tom was about to say, “Come here!”
But before he could speak, even as he realized how inappropriate a suggestion that would be, Bryant said, “I think I’ll head back to Pennsylvania.”
“You hate Pennsylvania.”
“No, I hate my family. Pennsylvania is fine.”

When Tom got off the phone Fenn looked up.
“How was Bryant?”
“Fine, but he’ll be looking for a new place to go next term,” Tom said.
“I never really knew him that well,” Dan commented.
Fenn said, “I never knew him at all.
“But what about you? Where are you going next, Father Dan?”
Dan gave Fenn a goofy look and then said, “Wherever the Spirit sends me. Or more likely the Archbishop.”
“Don’t you get a say?” Tom asked him.
Fenn looked at him. Tom had never addressed Dan when he didn’t have to.
“Maybe,” Dan said with a shrug. “Sometimes. A little.”
He didn’t seem to want to talk.
“I’m going out,” Tom said.
When he was gone, Dan said, after a while, “Am I out of line to ask what’s going on with him?”
“Little things,” Fenn said, shrugging. “It’s been almost nine years, you know? Little things start to show up after that long.”

Tom’s problems had to take a backseat to the trouble that befell the Meradans. Fenn heard about it from Brendan Miller first.
“We should go pray for Mrs. Meradan,” Brendan said, soberly. He asked the eight year old why, and Brendan told him that Dena’s grandma was really, really sick.
The really, really was enough to make him take the two children from his apartment and whisk them straight to the house. Dena was there with Nell and Todd as well as their aunt and uncle and Adele.
“Kevin came earlier,” Aunt Mary said, “but I asked him to leave. For Nadine’s sake.”
“A little for mine too,” Nell admitted.
She smiled, but she looked fragile. Fenn didn’t want to hug her or show any of the the warmth that would make her fall apart. She was trying to hold it together right now. He understood that.
Brendan didn’t quite understand it though. And the boy went up to Nell, gave her a dandelion, and then wrapped his arms around her waist. Throwing her arms over Brendan she began to cry. Then Dena began crying too and went to them, and then Layla looked at Fenn with a question in her face before joining them in the embrace.
Fenn went to Todd.
“How sick?” he whispered.
“Renal failure brought on by a bone cancer.”
“Oh, my God.”
Fenn sat down right beside Todd, so close they were touching sides. But he wouldn’t touch his hand or coddle him. He knew Todd would hate that. Or at least hate it in public.
“I was so worried when my mother went on dialysis,” is what Fenn said, instead. “We wore brave faces, but—”
“She didn’t have cancer, Fenn. Anne made it. We all knew she would.”
“I didn’t.”
After a moment, Todd said, “Then I was an asshole right then.”
“Well, you’ve been an asshole your whole life.”
Todd chuckled at this, and shaking his head he said, “You’re the only one who would say that to me at a time like this.”
Fenn looked at Todd looking at him. They held each other’s gazes a while and then Fenn broke it off, namely because it looked like Todd was going to try to kiss him again, and Fenn realized he kind of wanted him to.
“I can’t go back to school in the fall.”
“Don’t be an ass, of course you can,” Fenn said.
“Fenn.”
“How is you not getting your degree going to make your mother any better? Well, it might make Nadine get out of bed and cross the state to kick your ass.”
“I want to stay here and watch her.”
“Nell’s here. We’re all here. I’ll stay here and watch her.”
“I love you, Fenn,” Todd said.
“I love you too.”
“And I don’t mean in a sexual way. Well…” Todd put out his hand and screwed up his face, “not in a totally sexual way. Sort of in a three fourths—”
Fenn looked at him.
“Am I pressing my luck?”
“Yes.”

MORE TOMORROW

 

[CharmedFan28]

I am enjoying both stories! A Kind Earth is getting interesting. I hope Jay and Michael can work things out. I will have to wait and see about that. Rossford is fascinating too as usual! Fenn may still be with Tom but I think the roots of Todd and Fenn are already starting to show! Great writing and I look forward to more of both stories tomorrow!

 

[ChrisGibson]

Yes, the roots are there but were probably there before. Todd certainly knows what he wants and God bless Fenn for not jumping on it.

 

[ChrisGibson]

JAY

I heard somewhere that speech came late to human beings. That for hundreds of thousands of years, like all the other animals, we communicated without words and at first there was only song and gesture. Our first speech was art. Our first talking was song and so we had myth and legend and wonder and story and only after that, much later, did we have reason and rationality. This makes sense to me, explains why me and him have such small need for words. We will be on this train for the rest of the day and into the night and not come home till morning. Now and again we will roll through a city, but mostly we will ride past it in the distance and see trees and farm fields, hills rolling up over us, rivers passing under.
“When you go far, far out west it’s so much more dramatic,” I heard some white woman say. “It’s all of these mountains and sometimes you see nothing for days and days.”
But we’ve been a little out west and it was plenty dramatic.
Michael says nothing. He sits beside me for a while and then across from me, and then we doze, and then I wake up and he’s looking out of the window, chomping on a piece of gum. I’ve always loved his hair, but there’s just too much of it now. Why haven’t I attended to that? There are certain ways in which lovers are supposed to look after each other.
After about three hours of our mutual silence he turns to me, and grins, still chomping his gum. That is it, and then he turns around. I stretch out and yawn. Words have an end.

That Christmas when he came back to me, or really I came to him, there wasn’t much to be said, and that was the failure of our words. What could he say? “I’m sorry that you love me. I’m sorry that I’m crazy. I’m sorry that we’re both crazy. I’m sorry for the things I put you through that I could not help but put you through? I’m so glad you came for me. Aren’t you glad I’m alive? What can I say but, I’m so glad you’re here. I rejoice that you’re alive. I’m so angry at the pain I’ve been through.
When he comes to me in the dark, and I’ve thought about this many times since, I am angry because I know I cannot ignore him. I don’t want to say “resist him” because he is not opposing me. Since I’d left Ohio in pursuit of him, I had longed only tto touch him and now here was all of him. Kissing is touching, all of it’s touching and I needed to touch and be touched by all of him.
He kneels over me, and I take the lube I brought to masturbate with. I rub it over his cock and we both marvel at how a cock can swell grow. He shudders as I stroke him bigger and bigger. Like a fruit toward the sun he curves, arches and blooms.
In the living room the Christmas music is playing, the sonorous Little Drummer Boy, and the dim light of the Christmas tree shines. In this room there is only darkness, and our bodies move, pushing the covers away until I lie on my back and open for him, until running my hands up and down his goose pimpled skin, I draw him between my legs. Neither one of us makes a sound as he enters me. We savor it. How long he has been gone from me, how much I felt like he’d never be here again, but here he is, deep inside of me. Here his arms are over me, here is his face, his curly hair, his back, his ass his long thighs. I thrust up for him and he thrust down into me and we move together silently, and the bed creaks a little, I run my fingers, then my nails up and down him and pull him deeper in.
“Fuck me,” are the first word I whisper.
“Fuck me.”
Our bodies move faster. There is the satisfying slap of his body against mine. We both thrust together, and in the dark Michael growls, “Fuck… Fuck… Fuck.” It is the only word we say over and over again. He marvels, gasping, “You make me get bigger. I get bigger and bigger when I’m with you...”
We fuck in the dark. Until he makes a strangled noise and comes, half in me, half out of me, making a trail across my stomach and the bed sheets.
We lie there in the dark. Time passes in silence and then, with the ministrations of an old lover he wakes my body and at last strokes my cock. I understand what he meant now. My dick is never this swollen, never this big, never feels so much as with him. He lies on his stomach while I fuck everything out of me into him. We grunt. We groan We curse. We swear. We bite, we kiss, we scratch. We fuck. We fuck. The orgasm startles me and I scream a little, flying out of my body. We buckle together as my insides fold and the world tilts. Our hands fly up in hallelujah as so much seed, the unbelievable like an river bumps out of me.
We are exhausted and hot. My balls throb and we curl together like commas.
In the after sex we say nothing.
There is no need.


Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
“As for me, I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”

The next morning we go to Christmas Day Mass. The monks rejoice over us in a way that tells me they weren’t exactly sure any of us would see Michael again. Brother Mario ruffles Michael’s hair and says, “He’s a good boy. He needed to be found.”
Brother Romuald says, “I knew. I knew, and look at you all. Full of the light of God.”
I was practical. In the morning, before we left for church, I called Christine and told her I had found her son. I left it at that. I called Dalton.
“You got him.”
“Yes.”
“Do you need me to come and get you guys?”
It seemed like too much to ask one lover who there was little chance of me staying with to come and get me and the love of my life and bring us back to Ohio.
“Are you in North Dakota?” I said.
“No,” Dalton said.
“Then I’m going to say no.”
“How are you getting back?”
“I imagine the same way I got here.”
I added, “I will call you when I’m home.”
“Please do,” said Dalton.

“I want to stay here for a while,” Michael says, later, when we are back in the cabin.
“It might not be a bad idea,” I agree. “And yet, I am not willing to stay here with you, and I am not willing to travel to Lassador without you, so you’ll have to come with me for a time.”
“You should be with your family,” Michael agrees. “And I guess my family should see that I’m alive. What did they do to get a crazy kid like me?”
I don’t say that I’m sure they had a hand in his madness, and of course, we can’t leave today. The brothers invited us to eat with them, and then we stayed for prayer, but now we are back here and tired all over again.
“I’m taking the train back. There’s only one stopover. Chicago. We can be in Lassador in two days,” I say. “And you can be back here whenever you feel you need to be.”
That night we sleep in the same bed, naked and embracing, do all the things lovers do.
“Are we together again?” Michael whispers, pressing his bearded chin to the top of my head.
“It’s such a weird question. How do you gauge something like that? Yesterday I thought you were dead.”
Then I say, “Have you learned to love things?”
“I think,” Michael says, his thigh pressing between mine, “that I’m learning I always did love things.”
“Well,” I say after a while, “If you’re going to end up back here for a time, then why say we’re together? When you have had all you need of this place, and we can live our life together, then we can be together.”
“Yes,” Michael says, his lips pressed to the back of my head. “Yes, that makes sense.”


MORE TOMORROW

 

[ChrisGibson]

This story isn't really about Jay and Michael working things out, especially since in the present they are together and clearly have worked them out. It's about other things, really.

 

[CharmedFan28]

Very true, I just like them as characters though and want them to be happy. I am liking how this story is going. Some excellent writing that struck a chord with me. Its always nice to see your poetry anywhere is what I mean! The title The Kind Earth is also great. I look forward to more tomorrow!

 

[ChrisGibson]

That's very kind of you, though I cannot claim that poetry as my own, it's from the Book of Psalms, so you'll have to give credit to King David. By, it's not about them surviving I mean, they have survived and its not up for debate. They are not splitting up. That's not in the cards. They are and will be together even when the past scenes show them apart.

 

[ChrisGibson]

SORRY TO POST SO VERY, VERY LATE

When I left Lassador it was in Dalton’s car. Now I return in Michael’s. My parents came here because my dad got a job when I was eleven, and I’ve been here ever since. The city is cold and grey like a dirty window, that winter time dirty window where, once you clean it, you look out and things are still grey, dirty, frozen. The motor plants and the factories we pass over as the expressway winds toward downtown are old, and the buildings of downtown are tall and grey. Approaching East Birmingham there is a dumster fire near the vacant hotel and a congregation of the homeless in fingerless gloves and gas stained faces holding their hands out to the blaze. We pass under a viaduct and I see a clumsy, swastika spray painted onto the scum of the wall. The lights of the car shine on the puddles and trash and briefly on a man in an orange winter coat curled into a next of blankets and luggage. Snow collects along the curbs and the cars are stained with salt and mud. The expressway takes us over the black, swollen river, away from downtown and to the north side.
“Why are we still here?” I wonder. “Why did we never leave?”
I can’t help but shake the idea that Ohio is an unhappy place, and if we’d left it long ago, we might be better off. Lassador is so huge. I am almost oppressed by its size. It doesn’t have the charm of a small town or the function of a properly big one. It isn’t like Chicago. It’s like a post industrial Midwestern city too huge for a personality, that you must drive forty minutes across to find anything you need. When we were in high school, Saint Ignatius was (and is) on the north side, I lived on the High Northside and so did Michael, and yet, the north side fanned out so far that it took a good twenty minutes to get to school or to Michael.
“I wonder if part of depression is not knowing you can move,” Michael says. “I know part of it is being afraid that no matter where you go, you take yourself and your shit with you.”

Two nights later we make the rounds, heading to Mom and Dad’s house for a later Christmas dinner and presents. I want to pretend that at thirty gifts don’t matter, but they do, and later on that night we go to Michael’s mom. Back in my apartment we sit watching the news. There is a Black mother, and I can’t pretend she looks like my mother or my life. She’s in the Old West End talking about the police violence and how they locked up her son for now reason, and there’s a small riot outside the courthouse that must have happened while we were coming back into town. It would take us forty minutes and a drive across the river to get to the Old West end from where we are in a part of Lassador that’s almost no logner in the city, and yet the report makes me feel unsafe and claustrophobic.
“They beat up my boy and it’s a wonder he wasn’t killed, but why should it have to be a wonder?” she demands. “Why should we be worried the police will kill us?”
Michael says, “This shit makes me angry. I’m going to walk around the block and have a smoke.”
“It’s cold as fuck out there,” I say.
Btu the truth is, even though Michael is very, very white, the news makes me scared for him walking out there in a way I wasn’t when we were in North Dakota.
“Don’t worry,” he says with a grin, “We live too far out for me to run into any cops.”

Later he says, “When I used to get angry it turned to sadness, and then despair, and then I wanted to die. I wish I wanted to break things. I wish anger made me want to change the world. But that’s not how it’s been for me. So I need to take walks. I need to sort my shit out again.”

I’ve stopped worrying about him. You have to. I wasn’t even worried when he went out west until Christine called me. I shower and am going to bed when he comes back and gets in the shower. I’m asleep with only the little light on for him when he comes in, turns the light off and climbs in bed beside me
“You’re still awake, right?”
“A little.”
“I was thinking. You may be right. It may be time to do something new. When I get back, let’s think about that.”
“Michael, as long as we think about it we’ll never do it. Let’s just do it.”
“You’re right.”
“I know.”
“Good night.”

It’s still Christmastime when he heads back out west. I am tempted to say, want to say desperately, “If you ever think about killing yourself again, at least let me know you’re planning it. At least let me talk you out of it.”
But I think that’s not the way to start a new life. That’s not the thing to say. All day I stop myself from talking that way.
But before Michael leaves, he leans down and kisses me deeply. As our lips part he says, “If I plan on doing something stupid, I’ll let you know. I won’t leave you out ever again.”
And then he adds, “But I don’t plan on doing anything stupid. I’m done with that.”




As the train rounds a long turn near South Bend, Indiana, Michael wonders, can you possible be done with that? Done with being suicidal? Can you simply wipe your hads of your suffering and sadness, shrug it off and move on? That is insulting as fuck, insulting to the people who couldn’t be done with it. He remembers the girl his age, at Morelton who couldn’t be done with wanting to die and who finally was able to carry it out. He remembers Tony Fabian. If they simply couldn’t “be done with that” were they losers? Was his sheer strength of mind and ability to escape suicide a sign of his superiority? And if it was, why the fuck didn’t he feel superior?
South Bend is an ugly town, or at least the part the train shows is. Now he understands the phrase wrong side of the tracks. People won’t put their trains in pretty places, so passing through these towns all you see is the ugly places and goddamn, this summer there is plenty of ugly to see. But it doesn’t matter. He looks at the backs of ragged houses and it doesn’t matter. He passes cars on cinder blocks and it doesn’t matter. . Someone has spray painted a huge, detailed image of Abraham Lincoln with a bullet hole in his head and Michael is so surprised, he takes out his camera to film it as he approaches. The train has, miraculously, chosen this time to slow down as he filks the wonder of the murder of the sixteenth President, and later, when he rewinds it, he makes out the Latin words: “Sic semper tyrannis”.
They pass through ragged high weeds and ditches of discarded auto parts and none of it matters. Above all of those are high deep trees. Untouched by trash are the sparkling creeks they pass over. There is the reservoir pool, green with summer, trees and algae, sparkling like a strange jewel, and now, as they break through it, there is the high sky, looking like God polished it just for them with clouds high as skyscrapers piled up and up and over each other.
And Michael sighed because, no, when he said so many months ago after Christmas, I’m done with that, he felt freed, let go, thankful. Thankful to God? Maybe. And now, as Jay lies passed out, head lolling inelegantly, and he props his best friend up a little, what Michael really feels is relieved, released, overjoyed.
“Jay,” Michael whispers, leaning forward and nudging Jay with his foot.
In response Jay gives a great snore.
“Jay,” he whispers again.
James Strickland murmurs something, and Michael gets up, sits next to Jay and whispers, unnecessarily “Are you asleep?”
“No,” Jay says tiredly, “because you won’t fucking let me be.”
“Are we still going forward with our plan?”
“I always go forward with my plans,” Jay says.
“Leaving?”
“Yes.”
“And we don’t know where.”
“And we don’t even care,” Jay grins without opening his eyes.
“See what I did?” he says. “I made a rhyme. Now please let me go the fuck back to sleep.”

MORE TOMORROW AFTERNOON

 

[CharmedFan28]

No need to apologise! That was an interesting portion! I am liking this Jay and Michael story a lot and I look forward to more tomorrow! I hope you have a great Friday and weekend!

 

[ChrisGibson]

Oh, you're plenty welcome. I'm glad you enjoyed. I'm on my slow way to bed now, and I hope you have a good weekend too.

 

[ChrisGibson]

AS THEY TRAVEL FROM THE BEACH BACK TO LASSADOR, WHILE JAY SLEEPS, MICHAEL REMEMBERS....


It was like Lent when Michael went away. Jay had to explain this to himself. He had always felt hopeful about Lent, like, when they began in the midst of winter, the trees still frozen and the river still black under its ice, he knew they were headed toward spring and a spring in his heart. All of this penitence, all of this fasting and looking forward was truly looking forward to something new and wonderful, and he felt like that now
At the moment he was living off of savings, old earnings and his classes at the university, and he went into the city once a day to lecture. In class he heard the ills of his students and on the bus he looked out of grimy windows and saw miserable people walking, pushing shopping carts, bundled in three coats and sleeping in the corners of old buildings. He knew if he went south toward downtown he’d see more than that. At home, at peace, in his apartment on the far north end, he saw, as if from another planet, the riots in the West End that had gone on toward Collingwood. Heard about boys black but not quite like him shot, one by a cop and two by each other. Saw an old woman with a gold tooth say, “If things keep, this city’s gon explode.”
The truth was, with everything that had happened, living up in the far northeast toward Rawlston, rarely heading toward downtown or the West End, it was easy to be removed from that world, easy to forget about it, But lately the unhappy world seemed to be coming closer and closer.
Fridays, Jay did not teach, and that Friday it snowed again, but lightly. The last two days there had been a warming trend that melted the ugliness, and now the world looked pretty in January. He was going to visit his mother tomorrow. This evening he walked three blocks up to Dorr Street and bought some cigarettes from Raleigh,
“I had to call the cops again on the homeless guys cause they were sleeping under the door.”
“I saw them at the corner, but under the door of the shop?”
“Yeah. How do I get customers if there’s a bum in front of the door.”
“Fair,” Jay said. “Did you hear about the tent city around that church in Monroe Park?”
“Yeah, but they broke it up, and now they’re all over the city.”
“It seems unfair,” Jay said, “that no one wants to shelter you, put no one wants to let you shelter where you need to. I don’t see it’s much cause to block a doorway, but homeless people need to sleep somewhere.”
“What about the cemetery? Or what about the homeless shelter?” Jay heards someone new in the shop say.
“Or what about getting a job,” the man just come in grins at Jay, waiting for support.
But Jay knows he is blessed and privileged and in another world might be on that street too, so he says, “Where from? The job tree?” lays down his money and sets back up the road for home.
These are old beautiful apartments, and the now is falling softly outside on a street that’s almost the country. Out here they are by Boston Township which is as peaceful as it sounds. Jay Strickland is not one of those people who believes watching the news makes things better and that his feeling bad makes suffering people better off. But he simply cannot not think of the other people. The other people are practically at his door. His heart is disturbed. He sits down and writes.

“I have decided to be a writer…”



MICHAEL

Maybe if Jay is going to be a writer, then I should at least be a thinker. I feel like people think that if you’re depressed, it’s because you think too much, but that’s not really true. For me there are all these hallways and corners that I just won’t look down, and all the crap is in them, or behind the doors. Jay said thinking is opening those doors, looking inside and deciding what to do. It’s having a good hard look at things. He said it’s like house cleaning.
I have tended to walk away from things. I walked away from Jay, and when I say that, I mean the first time, back in high school. When Mom couldn’t pay for school anymore and I ended up at Whittier. It never occurred to me to pick up the phone and call him. I never tried to find him. I just went on about my life. But if I say went on, that makes it sound like I was happy instead of miserable and in a black hole, and now I wonder, was I unable ot do anything because I was in a black hole or was it the other way around? I think this without trying to blame myself.
The first time we hung out, me and Jay, we drove out of town, west past Woodland, till we got to the quarry lake, and then we were in that beautiful wildness and that was when we saw those kids partying. They’re definitely kids to me now, and we saw that one drunk girl and she was being raped, and we didn’t do anything. I don’t know what we would have done, but there it is, another moment of doing nothing. And I was able to put it out of my head. I was able to walk away from it.
At Morelton the people weren’t very helpful. I mean, not the ones who were supposed to be. But the patients were. There was this one patient, Millie, and she said to me. “Just cause you don’t look at the shit doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
She was right. She ended up killing herself, and for a few years I spun it like it was a triumph, cause she wanted to do it and she finally did. But, now I don’t know. Being here on earth kind of seems like the triumph.
When I get to Clouds everyone is happy to see me, and the Abbot says, “We’ll just treat you the way we treat the postulants. Except, you can sit down in the chapel or take a nap while we pray.
They pray five times a day. They march double file into the church and then when two of them come to the altar, they bow to the altar, and then they bow to each other and turn in opposite directions to stand in the stalls that are on opposite sides of the chapel. It’s then that they start singing. I sit in the regular church part and just listen. The chapel is a modern kind of place full of exposed wood beams, and the winter light is always good. The monks make cheese and fudge and cakes and work from eight in the morning until twelve, when they pray. There are two goggle eyed novices about my age and they study during the afternoons, but the afternoons I have to myself, to wander the flat lands. One day I go to town to eat with the Pottersheds, the folks who helped me out at Christmas, when the car was stalled and I went walking and walking, waiting for death and ended being rescued by them.
But mostly I am thinking. Mostly remembering. I am trying to make sense of things. I used to try to talk to my dad about life, but it was weird because he could never remember things properly, and my mother never liked to remember the past at all. I love them, they’ve never been to a crazy house, but I think maybe they should try it because they live their lives in a crazy way. I feel like if you can’t look back and get an accurate read of what was, you won’t be freed to live in the is.

But I’m skirting around shit. I’m skirting around a few years ago, the year I left Jay, when I packed my stuff and left our apartment and moved back in with Mom. Jay said, “Don’t move back in with your father because you’ll be crazier there.” I listened, but only for a little while. Living with my dad was almost like living alone, which is what Jay meant. But I wanted that, and we were never home at the same time, so it really was like living alone.
Up toward the north of Lassador, it’s like you run out of city and we’ve got two townships and gravel roads and old houses filled with humble folk... okay, borderline hillbillies. But not meth hillbillies, just sort of like, shabby white folks, like me. There’s not a lot of trouble up here, and it’s almost like not being in Lassador. It’s almost like not being anywhere.
Who should come down the street but Mormons? They’re both tall and good looking, but one is taller, the other broader. They look good the way missionaries are supposed to, wearing those night black coats and carrying briefcases and I say what the hell, come on in, because they look like someone should treat them decently, and I start listening to what they have to say. I already know about the Golden Tablets and Nephi because Jay told me all that, and the truth is I’m just very lonely. I want some people in my life, and so I invite them to come back. I always have questions for them, but one day, Elder Nelson, who is very tall with dark hair and dark eyes asks, seriously, if he can baptize me under the One True Baptism to the church of Jesus Christ established in these Latter Day by the One True Prophet Joseph Smith?
I am bowled over, though I shouldn’t be. I say, “Well, I’m already baptized.”
This leads to a little bit of an argument and Elder Redmond, the shorter one, who looks like he might lift weights or something, marmalade haired, thick legged like Jay, ends up saying, “We’re men! We’re just men!”
This makes me want to laugh because they’re scarcely boys. When they leave, I wonder if they’ll ever come back again.


***

When they did come back, Elder Nelson took the petulant approach.
“Why are we here, anyway? Are you going to get serious or what?”
By then, Michael had been hospitable and brought out water for them and he is sitting between the two elders on the sofa.
“Yes,” Elder Redmond said, “if you have no intentions of joining the Church, then there’s no need for us to keep coming.”
Michael knows why he wanted them here. He liked them. He liked to talk. He enjoyed the company. But if he could get to why he did what he did next, if he could turn that weird little jewel over, he feels like he’d get somewhere. And what he did could have gone so wrong. Well, now it did go wrong. Because it was wrong, but…
When Elder Redmond said, “There’s no need for us to keep coming…”
Michael looked at his marmalade hair, at his green eyes, at his pleasant face. He looked down, between his well made thighs to the not bulge—Mormon missionaries wore clothes that didn’t quite fit, that didn’t really expose, and then he deftly opened Redmond’s trousers. The boy froze. Everything froze. Behind him Michael felt Elder Nelson’s breath stop. And then he pulled out Redmond’s penis, bent down and began to suck it.
Was he trying to find any way to make them stay? This seems more likely than the desire to recreate a cheap porno. After all, along with dads and sons, Mormon missionaries and Catholic priests were the most popular pornos, and Michael had never felt the desires to fuck a priest or his father. But now, whatever was happening, Michael felt more alive than the time they’d gotten him to go to their church, more alive than he had in a while. He didn’t feel good or bad. He felt like he was past that, and he was on his knees now, his head forcing itself between Redmond’s thighs, his mouth full of cock.
Behind him he heard a sound sort of like an old dog with breathing problems, that was Nelson, and he placed his other hand between Redmond’s legs and began to stroke his stiff penis through the fabric of his pants. Nelson was making small noises, and then a wail, and then Michael’s mouth was thick with semen. He swallowed it and Nelson looked surprised, drained and terrified, but he also didn’t stop Michael from doing the same to him.
Nelson was his favorite anyway. Nelson could have been a best friend, so he wanted Nelson’s reaction, the flail of limbs, the twist of body, the hands in his hair, massaging, bucking his hips up as he got into it, murmuring, almost snarling, at last the sharp growl of “FUCK,” as Nelson’s cock leaped and Michael felt semen filling his mouth, gagged on the load as Nelson’s hands held him down for the baptism. His cheeks ballooned and semen fell from his lips but he tried to hold it in. Michael had swallowed Redmond’s semen because he thought he should. He swallowed Nelsons’ because he wanted it.
When he was done, Redmond was sitting on the couch, looking disheveled and his pants were still undone, his hair a mess. But his clothes were so baggy, his shirt so long he didn’t really look indecent. Nelson lay spent on the sofa and Michael said the only thing he could think of:
“Do you guys smoke weed?”

***

O God, come to our aid.
O Lord, make haste to help us.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be,
world without end.
Amen. Alleluia.

As evening turns to night, and it does so early these days, the monks at the Monastery of the Clouds sing:

Now that the daylight dies away,
By all thy grace and love,
Thee, Maker of the world, we pray
To watch our bed above.
Let dreams depart and phantoms fly,
The offspring of the night,
Keep us, like shrines, beneath thine eye,
Pure in our foe’s despite.

***

There are two boys in this house. Their coats are on the chair, their shoes and trousers and special vestments, that don’t look very special, are abandoned on the floor.
He doesn’t feel like anything right now. He doesn’t feel like anything and he knows this moment will pass. The blinds are pulled and the light is that dark brown amber color of late day. He’s high as well, and almost floating, totally relaxed and thinking, if I could smoke weed all day all the time everything would be fine.
But no, this is not the time for thinking. This is the time to wonder how he never knew Elder Redmond had it in him, how he’s glad he could to see those thick legs and suck that fat cock, and it was fat! And how all the talk about golden bibles and angels spinning around on Joseph Smith’s bedpost was bullshit, and deep inside they knew it was bullshit. But this is real, his face buried in the pillow, the low growl coming out of Redmond’s throat as his hands hold Michael’s shoulders down, and Michael’s ears are filled with repetitive music of flesh slapping flesh, of Redmond fucking him.
He blinks and opens his eyes a little while his body shakes, and he presses back taking more of Redmond’s cock. Passed out on his back, half asleep and high, naked with his dick out is Nelson. His hand is half open and keeps reaching out to Michael. Michael takes it, remembers what it was like with him.
“Home,” Nelson whispers, glassy eyed, looking at Michael. “We should get home… They’ll wonder.”
Redmond’s body bunches up. His strong hands are like claws. He gives a long hard, horrible groan and Michael feels him coming in his ass.


MORE OF EVERYTHING LOMORROW NIGHT

 

[CharmedFan28]

That was an excellent and hot portion! I like where this story is going and even though I know where Jay and Michael end up it is nice to read about their journey to that. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!

 

[ChrisGibson]

In the last story, Michael briefly mentioned seducing two Mormon missionaries, and that couldn't go unexamined. This is just the beginning of that lustful bullshit, and even though it was hot, we'll see where it leads on the other side of the weekend. Thanks for reading.

 

[ChrisGibson]

BEFORE WE BEGIN...

A little over four years ago I was definitely writing, but receiving unbelievable news about an election. It really nearly knocked off the top of my head and sent me into a huge despair, but when I came out of it, I thought how there was work to do and much to be learned, and this morning I took a look at that work, at these stories and was amazed with what I had done in these last four years. This last Jay and Michael story is set before any of that, but in a world that is leaning toward it, a world nearly at war. Tonight I am tempted to say all of the madness is over, but of course, the madness has only abated. The poor are still poor, the hateful still hate and much work remains to be done. We should always been ready, always be awake, and always be gentle to the kind earth.


The first night he is at Clouds, as he is on his way to bed, old Brother Romuald pads toward him with the rocking and rolling step of an old man.
“This is for you,” he says, smiling, and holds out a slip of paper.
Michael takes it, and Brother Romuald nods encouragingly, and so Michael opens it and reads.

“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.”
― Hafiz of Shiraz

“Is he a saint?”
“Of a sort,” Romuald says.



Yes, yes, but that was it, that was the thing of which he was most ashamed. In his bed at Michael confronted it. At that time of his life he was so desperate not to lose friendship he not only cultivated it from traveling missionaries, but seduced them. He could never get over that shame, never deal with it properly. With all that happened that day, the largest memory he had was of finally shutting the door to the house, and standing there with the smell of weed and the flesh memory of two young men fucking him, but standing…. Alone.



When the train pulls into Lassador at Union Station it is around two in the morning, and coming out onto the platform, arriving in the fluorescent lit station, it had been a long time since either one of them has taken a train into the city and Jay was fascinated by the wide space of the station lobby, the high rounded ceiling, though he thought it was a little too hard that all the venders were closed.
“We should have come earlier.”
Michael looked around suspiciously. He thought that Jay was a little too open eyed about things. Weren’t Black people supposed ot be careful or cagey about shit like this. Street smart? Hands in his pockets, walking casually, Michael looked around at the homeless people in their sleeping bags and on benches or on the great circular seats around the potted plants in the middle of the station. He wasn’t afraid of them, because they were asleep, and he wasn’t afraid of the dirty and the crazed milling about talking to themselves, but he feared that where they could be seen there was, in the shadows, the guy with the knife who might be here at this time of night. Michael, like the few other people who had gotten off the train in Lassador, was moving as quickly as he could toward one ot the main doors. Jay, though he looked about, eyes wide open, did not slow him down. On his way through the great glass doors into the night, Michael looked back and felt a little sorry for the people who had to stay in the station waiting for another train.
Michael had had his doubts about parking downtown, but was glad that they had.
“We could take the bus back home,” he had suggested to Jay.
“When’s the last time you took the bus?” Jay asked him, raising the eyebrow which reminded Michael that, while Jay might seem to take life easy and pay little attention to things, he was no stranger ot the ways of the world.
“We’d have to catch at least two different buses to get back to the North,” Jay said, “and for some reason half the buses stop running after five o clock anyway.”
“Or a cab—”
“A cab from the station to our home would cost as much as a train ticket, and really, I’m, not sure we could asily find one downtown anyway.”
Michael squeezed his keys and the car merrily whooped at him. They trod across the parking lot, walking a little slow, tempting muggers to come out, insisting in their stride that they were unafraid. To their right was the abandoned Radisson Hotel, and behind them was Birmingham Street with its little diner and the brick façades of the old newspaper building complex.
They climbed in the car, and Michael looked around, then pulled out and headed toward the gate while Jay appreciated the arched roof of the old station and the many sub buildings coming off of it like spider legs in the night. The car turned and they headed onto Birmingham, driving through the night time downtown and heading toward Dorr Street and the expanse of the Dorr Street bridge that would take them over black water into the north and, eventually, home.
He wished it was day so he could have seen downtown better instead of what he had seen which was an impression of tall buildings beside tallish buildings, the occasional fountain, a viaduct or two they passed under and all too many people wandering around in rags or sleeping in the streets. As they passed Priory Street they saw a burning can and Jay repressed the urge to tell Michael to stop so they could observe a little better. Before they reached the intersection of Dorr and Birmingham where Birmingham would become more residential and give way to old apartment buildings, they passed the abandoned Castile Theatre and, camped out in front of it like people who were lining up to buy tickets when it would never open again, were the blue tents that marked the homeless.
Was it a relief to cross the river and come to nicer areas with townhouses and restaurants overlooking the river, and the quaint old shops of Old Town? Yes. And then here was old Saint Ignatius, the old high school, the Presbyterian church that looked like a courthouse? And then they were passing Burnett’s Grocery Store, and now the carillon of the main building for the University. A few minutes later they were driving through Orchard Slope and then past Ontario Hills, and by the time they were in Carlisle, it was almost impossible to believe in downtown. Living in the Carlisle District, which had its strip malls and its own shops, and which was twenty minutes from Rawlston, twenty five minutes from Ballard and fifteen from Jacinth, you never really had to bother with downtown. And, Michael thought, that was part of the problem.
When they parked outside of the apartment building, the first thing Michael said was, “We need to go back there.”
“Huh?”
“We need to go back there and actually see what that looks like. Every time we have a day away, every time we see how beautiful the world is, the reality of things intrudes. I don’t mean to be like some gloomy teenager. Life is beautiful and we are fortunate, and strong, and not strong because we made ourselves that way. I look out the window while we drove and I saw all of these people that I could have ended up like, if I wasn’t safe, if I didn’t have things. If I wasn’t loved, if I didn’t have you.”
Michael stood outside of the car because in Carlisle you could stand outside of a car and listen to cicadas chirp in the black summer night.

That night they hear, on the repeat of the late night news that riots have broken out on Stickney.
“Rahim Martin was shot,” Jay said.
“Rahim Martin isn’t the guy from this winter?”
“No,” Jay said with a sigh. “Rahim Martin is new, and ordinarily he would have been just another Negro with a gun, but he didn’t have a gun, and it was a white cop who did it. I thought things would have calmed down, but… no.”
Jay saw someone run out into the street and hurtle a smoking canister at, yes, a small crowd of white people with bats and some with… guns.
“Part of me hopes it doesn’t calm down,” Jay said. “I hope it gets louder and louder.”
Michael remembered coming back into town, the swastika painted under the viaduct that he had ignored as a fluke rather than an ensign.
He confessed, “I thought we more or less didn’t have that problem here.”
Jay had thought the far west end was universally trashy regardless of color. He couldn’t imagine most of the white people who lived there turning against their black neighbors.
“Glendale, though,” Michael said.
“Never been to Glendale.”
“Almost the country. Almost the clan. Pretty resentful about being compared to white trash and ghetto people. Those good hearted white folks you see scrapping are from Glendale.”
A plump white boy who reminded Jay more of a donut than a Klansman was unlocking his gun and declaring, “I’m not gon let anyone threaten my rights or my property. I refuse to be afraid…”
“Why the fuck are we watching this,” Jay said in irritation.
“I just want to be aware of what’s going on in the world. See if there’s anything we can do.”
“I wonder,” Jay said, “is watching doing anything?”



“That is the most cheerful knock on the door I’ve ever heard,” Jay said from bed where he lay deep under the comforter while the air conditioning blew into the room.
“I bet it’s Nelson,” Michael yawned.
“Who else would it be?” Jay said. “But I’m not getting out of bed, and he should know better.”
Michael grunted and climbed from under the comforter scratching his head and he said, “Should I send him away?”
“Of course you shouldn’t,” Jay said as Michael was heading out of the room.
It was a few moments later that Rulon Nelson, tall, taller than Michael, thin and sturdy in shorts and tee shirt, his big feet in red sneakers, his long hands grasping a hand rolled cigarette, came into the bedroom, sat down on the bed as if Jay was not asleep and declared, “I thought you guys would never get back.
“Were we gone that long??”
“You were gone two weeks.”
“So we were,” Jay said, making no attempt to take his head from under the covers.
Nelson stretched and Jay saw his flat stomach. As he let down his arms, his tee shirt fell over his belly again.
“I didn’t get back from the plant until about five this morning, I saw your car in the driveway and I thought: I’ll let them get some sleep and come over when I wake up.”
“And then you just decided to come over at…. What time is it?”
“Um…” Nelson squinted. He had a flat face and tilted eyes that spoke of some distant steppe country ancestry, “almost eleven.”
Michael came back into the room, rubbing his hair and yawning and he said, “I put coffee on. Jay, do you want me to get rid of this loser?”
“Awww, no fair!” Nelson said.
“No,” Jay said. “He’s like the German Shepherd I never had. Everyone needs a frisky Nelson to leap up on their bed at eleven in the morning.”
“You know what we need to do?” Nelson began.
“I need to roll over and just let you talk while I keep sleeping,” Jay answered, doing just that.
“We need to do shrooms. Jay, is it true you still haven’t done that yet?”
Jay’s head popped out of the pillows.
“You have shrooms.?’
“I do.”
Jay looked at Michael.
“I think it’s worth it,” Michael said, judiciously. “It’s not like acid. You can’t take too much. It won’t dehydrate you. You’re not going to wish the trip was over four hours before it is.”
“And cocaine!” Nelson said, excitedly, clapping his hands.
Jay raised an eyebrow.
“You have cocaine?”
“No,” Nelson said, truthfully. “But I think I can get us some. It’s not like something you’d want every day, though. Coke is more like…”
“A treat?” Michael supplied.
“Exactly,” Nelson snapped his fingers jubilantly. “A treat.”

MORE TOMORROW

 

[CharmedFan28]

Congratulations on your new president! I hope it means better things for America without Trump leading. That was an excellent portion! Its interesting to see where these characters are at the moment, especially with what you were thinking of while writing it! This is a great story and I look forward to more tomorrow!

 

[ChrisGibson]

Oh, I have sometimes been overcome by emotion this day, and possibly for some days to come, and yet I put all the problems of the story in a time before the last four years, because these problems go beyond the last four years and certainly won't be solved in an instand. I am in the strange place of being joyous in the change of a regime but being conscious in the writing of this story that though regimes change, people need to change, and whatever we saw was a symptom of something far deeper. Ah, but this threatens to get longer, and my feelings are very complicated at the moment, so this may find its way to a PM later on.