In the Summer We Eat Roses
© Michael Buckley

Warren has bad dreams he doesn’t remember.  He wakes up scared or crying, feeling something behind him, a sort of fading darkness; to banish it he goes to Virgil’s room.  The moonlight, the streetlight falls a certain way there, across Virge’s bed.  The hum of the respirator and the strip of light calm Warren, and he watches his brother sleep.

            In that room he builds the dreams he wants to remember.  Sylvia on the grass at the playground, the big grass and no one around.  Sylvia says: Warren, you’re handsome.

            He doesn’t remember these dreams either. 

            Warren gets up late.  It’s usually about eleven when he hears his father’s boots in the kitchen.  He passes Virge’s room on the way out. 

 “You feed your brother?” his father asks.  It is the first thing he says every day.

             “No.”

            “Well go do it.”

Warren hears his father’s moods.  The quieter they are, the quieter he needs to be; if his father is laughing and jingling keys in his palm, Warren laughs too and tilts his head like his father’s.  If he is quiet Warren shrinks.  He haunts the muted shine of the wood cabinet, gets a glass of milk, mixes protein powder into it and is gone. 

            And here he feeds his brother. 

            He peels the t-shirt back to find the rubber nipple snuggled in the hair of Virge’s belly.  He raises the feed tube and blows old milk out of it and connects one end to the nipple and pours.  The protein powder smells like crushed chalk, the milk has taken the color of it, the same color as Virge’s skin, cake-batter yellow.

            Virge angles his head and smiles.  His breath smells like a rotten wound and Warren tries to get him to meet his eyes. 

            “Get him to look at you,” his father said when he was showing Warren how to feed.  “It helps heal his brain.”

            “Look at me,” Warren says.

            “You’re a good boy,” Warren says. 

            His father has taught him to say these things.  He explained it this way:  Virge drove fast.  Just after their mother died Virge drove so fast the stars and trees tangled and the road opened up and part of his mind got caught on the hooked moon.  Catch his eyes enough and it’ll come back, smooth the starburst scars on his forehead, settle and stay.

            “Fuck you,” Warren whispers.  His brother doesn’t react.

            “Fuck you in the butt,” he says.

            He waits and watches the milk go down the tube. 

“I love Sylvia,” he tells Virge.

            After feeding Virge, his father is usually gone.  His father’s shift in the restaurant begins around 12.30 and goes late.  Warren wets a t-shirt and runs it over Virge’s face and it rasps on his whiskers and Virge moans like a reptile.  Warren slides a chair in front of the window and stands on it and makes shadow shapes with his hands in the sunlight blanketing Virge.  He makes buttefly shapes; he makes dog heads.

            “Dog eating your head,” he says to Virge.  The comatose man smiles but this happens sometimes, it doesn’t mean anything. 

            Warren puts his shoes on and takes an apple and a pen from the kitchen.  He says goodbye to Virge—sometimes he shouts it to see if he will look—then leaves.  Walking away from the back gate he gets to the old train tracks quick and finds his dwarf palm tree, his because three short columns of tin foil are pushed into the dirt around it.  He pulls a piece of cardboard away from the base and reaches into the rotten root cavity underneath.  He finds an envelope he has covered in strips of waterproof tape.  He sits with the envelope and the apple between his legs, laughing for a second when he thinks about Virge getting out of bed and dancing, doing the running man, smiling as he does with shattered teeth.  Warren knew Virge for awhile before the accident.  He was about five and most of his memories are of Virge as a big, dark shape, shouting things across the house.

            To make himself laugh, Warren will often think of Virge dancing.

            He will also think of the homeless guy who lives in the wilderness space, the man who yells in Spanish, dancing.

            Then he will think of dancing with Sylvia.  His hands will be on her hips; he has seen people dance this way, it happens.  People touch this way.  They have dances at school and they dance this way there, turning circles under moving lights.

            Warren takes the apple and bites the stem off.  He uncaps the pen and pushes it into the indentation where the stem was and forces it down.  Pulling it out he sucks the juice on the pen and at his wrist then jams the pen into the side of the apple to form a channel which meets with the first channel near the seedbed inside.  Sucking the juice from these wounds he laughs at his own slurping sounds.  Slurp means you want something.  Dad slurps on a beer; in school, in the cafeteria, kids slurp apple sauce.  I’d slurp in Sylvia’s hair like a bug she can’t see. 

            Warren takes out a nugget of weed and jams it into the side of the apple.  He finds a lighter in the envelope and lights the nugget and sucks from the swale where the stem had been.  Weed smoke tastes good like this.  Like apple juice.  Like the sweat from palms.  Moving to shade nearby, low clotted dwarf palms, he sits underneath in almost-black, smoking.

            When he finishes he goes back to his dwarf palm and slides all of his stuff into the envelope and lays it central on an old lunch box in the rotted-out root cavity.  He finds an old apple too, takes it out and shakes the ants off of it.  As he stares at the apple more ants pour from ruptures in its skin and he throws it into the trees. 

            Down the tracks, out back in the houses and stores, is the school.  Warren stands along one flank of it and watches kids bunched in PE uniforms under the ancient, thick-based trees.  He watches the kids for black hair that turns the color of light when light hits it and he watches over his shoulders.  Truant officers have stopped Warren before and asked him why he wasn’t in class.  These truant officers are big people with faces like sliced meat and Warren runs when he sees them.  And there it is: silver moving through the shade, lighting up the leafy bellies of the trees like they were broken caves and moving past the bike racks, waving to him.  Warren looks around again—the street is empty—and he waves his arms.  Sylvia runs to him.

            Passing him, breathless, she says:

            “Come on, Warren, run.”

            He chases and they run up the block and into low, overgrown lines of bungalows.  Truant officers won’t come here; they stick to the main streets.  Sylvia is wearing jeans today, tight and high on her ankles.  Stitched over the butt are ornate mouths of color and the knees are worn white and thin. 

            “I’m gonna find Jessica and fuck her up,” Sylvia says.  “She was talking about me all through home room.  Said I wear my sister’s clothes.  I’m gonna take that pony tail and twist.” 

            They take position a block away from the front of the school.  Sylvia squints to see the gates.  “People talk so much,” she says to Warren.  “All they do is talk.  It gets in your head and that’s all you hear.”

            Warren is stoned.  He hears birds in the trees, detached and separate, each a bell tied to a branch by black hair.  

            “She’s stupid,” he says to Sylvia.

            “Who?”

            Warren thinks.  “The girl you’re talking about.”

            “No she’s not.  She gets A’s.  She has friends.  You’re eleven, Warren, you don’t even know who I’m talking about.”

            They wait.  After awhile kids start coming out of the school gates.

            “She leaves late,” Sylvia says.  “A lot of times Brian walks her home but he’s sick today.”

            Sylvia sees someone she recognizes. 

            “There she is.”

            Sylvia starts walking and Warren follows.  The girl coming towards them is willowy and blond.  If there was a wind, Warren thinks, she’d be caught by her wrists with the birds in the trees.

            Sylvia shouts to her and the girl crosses the street.  They cross too to meet her and Sylvia shouts at her and the girl turns to walk the other way.  Warren sees her pony tail, a gash of white on her blue backpack.  Sylvia sprints and grabs it and the girl shrieks.

            The two tumble onto a lawn.  Warren watches as the girls struggle.  He wants to laugh but can’t; there is another feeling.  It hurts him to see tears appear on the blond girl’s face.  They roll then Sylvia is on top of her, angling her head back by pulling her hair, tearing up handfuls of grass and smearing them onto the girl’s face. 

            The door of a house near them opens and a man comes out.  He laughs and shouts at the girls to stop.

            Warren runs.  As he does he waits to hear if Sylvia calls his name, if she is angry that he is running or sad that he is running but she does not call out to him.  He looks over his shoulder as he turns a corner.  The girls are being pulled apart.

            Back home he stands in Virge’s doorway.  Virge looks like he is sleeping; the sun is on the other side of the house now, the room is motionless and dim.  Warren walks to Virge’s bed and whispers into his ear.

            “Virge the turd.”

            Virgil moves and moans deep in his chest.  Later Warren will feed him.  First he goes to feed himself.  He leaves Virge’s room and gets slices of bologna and cheese from the fridge and sits in front of the TV eating it.  The show he watches is about soldiers.  They are fighting in a city made of brick and ash and they shout to each other and cower, bullets from the enemy hitting with the sound of thick glass stalks being cracked just behind his ear.  Warren falls asleep.

            His father wakes him.  It is night and he has returned from work.  He smells like burned food and his eyes are red.

            “Get up, Warren.  There’s food on the counter.”

            He has brought pasta.  It was made awhile ago and has solidified into a mass shaped like the to-go tin container.  Warren puts it on the floor so he can get leverage on it.  His father opens a beer and lies on the kitchen floor too.  Watching Warren eat, he props his head up on one arm.  His forearms are hairless from working close to the stove flames. 

            “How was your day?” Warren asks. 

            “Shit.”

            “This is good.”

            “It’s called Alfredo.”

            His father watches Warren eat then gets up and goes to the other room.  When he comes back he is in his underwear.  A dust of hair covers him, sparse chains of old scars.

            “Feed your brother?”  He lies on the floor waiting for Warren to chew and swallow the bite of food he has.

            “Yeah,” Warren lies.

            “He looks skinny, huh?”

            Warren chews and waits to see what his father means by this.  Father leans up on an elbow and Warren can smell his armpits and see hair, shiny and dense, as if his father were stuffed with it and at this joint there was a crack. 

            “Listen,” he says.  “You’re a smart kid.  There’s no easy way to say this.  People like Virge die all the time.  His head’s fucked, Warren, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

            “He’s OK.  He looked in my eyes today,” Warren lies again.

            His father stares a long time, his eyes tangles of red wire, his teeth crooked like a kid’s teeth.

            “He looked in your eyes.” 

            “Yeah.”

            Father exhales and Warren smells beer and something sour inside him.

            “Finish this for breakfast,” Father says, taking the pasta and putting it lidless with Warren’s fork still in it into the fridge.  Warren waits as his father walks towards the couch, the kitchen light reflected in the skin of his back, then reaches up and turns the light out.

            He goes to Virge’s room.  It is black inside and Warren can hear Virgil’s slow, labored breath.  Sounds like a dead dog being dragged through the dirt.

            Sylvia.  Warren imagines her as he last saw her today, her legs spidered as a man pulled her off the blond girl.

            “Sylvia,” Warren says, at Virgil, at the dark.  The name is a spell and saying it into a room that has no see-able things makes Warren’s throat ache with wanting.

            His eyes adjust.

            He touches Virgil’s head, brushes his hair aside to expose the polished fish-scale patchwork of his forehead.  Warren pushes a finger hard onto a nexus of stitch scars on Virgil’s head.  He has done it before; afraid his brother’s head would rupture and spill out whispering tendons the consistency of putrid spaghetti.  It holds, and Virgil moans in his sleep.

            You won’t die, he thinks.

            You will die, and we’ll spin like dropped oranges.  You will die.

            He lies down on the carpet by the bed.

            “Sylvia,” he says.

            Sylvia standing along the wire fences caught in their stringy shadow.  Reaching out and holding his arm with both hands then twisting the skin till it sings.  Sylvia throwing dirt clods, months ago on a hot day in the wilderness space, and one catches Warren and he falls in a bright snap of sound.

            My heart is small and I’m sad a lot, Warren thinks.  I’ll take Virge’s heart and give it as a gift.  He was nice before the accident and now he looks at you, calm as a cow.  Take his heart and roll it through a pan of glitter and say Sylvia, even a heart as big as this doesn’t shine like I do when I’m near you, hold the heart and look into it Sylvia and I’ll take you out of the hot blocks of town and to the hill as it curves to the ocean water and the thick green plants that smell sugar in the cool air and the oily water and blocks of empty buildings.  I’ll show you the webs at the corners of the buildings, full of purple tissue petals, feathers, dead spiders.  I’ll show you piles of trash and the cats that walk to it, shy, spines and skulls hanging.  We’ll eat French fries.  You’ll talk and talk.  When it’s night we’ll climb the hill to the abandoned cemetery and we’ll sleep in the blue flowers and you’ll wake up and tell me my dreams and I’ll tell you yours.  This is what I’ll say:  We live in a house, painted red with a wild jungle for a yard, it is a hot summer.  You take your shirt off and I touch your back with my fingertips.  I hold up a candy house like they have in stories and I bite it and you bite it.  We eat and watch each other and we’re married now.  I hold up an apple, smoked soft and so sweet it makes you sick to smell.  I break it with my hands and we each bite, in love now.  I hold up a rose, fat as a basketball, and we eat.  We eat rose petals ‘til all that’s left is a hard green nugget and all else is night around us and I look at you and see me and you look at me and see you. 

            Virgil’s breath catches hard in his throat and Warren sits up, terrified. 

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