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「For Here or to Go」~ 404 words
They etch one into the other, kisses that verge on too much and tangled limbs and the fall is damning – the world combusting through half-lidded eyes, and the man shaking him apart till he shudders limp with a sigh, a punctuation. He says nothing as he carves a slick path between his thighs, so Shigeaki pulls him by the hair, clashes their mouths together and draws the hallelujah from the flawless line of his lips, the answer to a question he had never asked. He wants to know all about him, learn how to read his moods by the dance of his heartbeats, wriggle in the dip of his shoulder and press down even further, till he can feel his soul fuss between finger and thumb.
Shigeaki thinks about aligning his words properly sometimes, how easy that would be – a name here, a handshake there, business cards and paper cuts and parted lips sucking on devilish fingers squirming down his throat. When does your shift end, I know this nice place. And the scent of coffee beans in the air as the man blinks at him, fumbles with his hands and doesn’t know what to do with the tray he’s holding. Soft and clumsy and ever so radiant, everything she had never been to him.
But then the man places a chipped cup on the counter and rocks on the balls of his feet as he looks down at him, and the smell of tobacco on his clothes takes Shigeaki out every time, pulls him back to reality with a slam. ‘You look thoughtful today’, he says with a polite smile, and Shigeaki doesn’t know what to do with his words anymore, stirs them in his cup with a spoon of sugar.
‘She’s pregnant’.
And Shigeaki wonders when the man sways on his feet and folds his arms across his chest, wanders. ‘Ah, is that so’. ‘Hmm’.
He wonders what’s gonna happen to those stolen kisses, hips pressed close together in the bathroom stall and orgasms moaned with clenched teeth. He wonders about the things he never get to discover, introductions too risky to spill, all those words stuck in his throat, tumbling down in a rush with a side of burnt coffee, and it burns burns burns. And maybe this is what the world combusting is all about. Ashes and regrets, and a period to a story they never get to write together.
*
「Stuck In Between」~ 714 words
He knows he’s a writer. His hands are stone-hard and icy, and Keiichiro feels soft and warm as he grazes them. The man isn’t that much of a company but here they’re anyway, and he feels… he can breathe now.
He’s reading one of his books and he thinks he’s not that good of a writer – too self-absorbed, left-brain orientated – and Keiichiro wants to shake him awake and tell him to make it right, because he knows what it feels like to lose a wife to childbirth, and what the man has written so far ain’t it. But the man looks at him with wide, blank eyes and doesn’t seem to care. He’s way too absorbed in his vegetative state, and couldn’t care less about what Keiichiro got to say.
They’re wasting the night away in the hospital room, and Keiichiro has just ended his shift, washed the man clean and shaved his beard carefully, biting his upper lip in concentration when it came to the soft underside of the chin.
The man blinks at him with a blank stare, furrows his brows. There isn't much he can say, but Keiichiro doesn’t mind. He’s already heard all his ears could take, ‘It’s a shame the baby didn’t make it either’ ‘What name had you picked anyway?’ ‘How long has it been since you went home, you look like shit’. It feels good pouring out his sorrows without having to weight them first, so Keiichiro talks enough for both of them – a long stream of consciousness with very few commas in between. He can’t remember how it had started, why he had started it at all, but here they’re anyway, and he can breathe now.
On those days when misery is closing in on him, he shuts the front gates open and rides his bicycle to the hospital. Maybe it’s some unhealthy projection-thingy, the kind where you cup all your feelings, pour them onto someone else, and hope for the best; or maybe is the man over all, the gentle curve of his eyes, and the way his brows furrow when Keiichiro talks that… he doesn’t even know. If he were to tell how they had come crashing down, the two of them, he wouldn’t even know from where to begin, but it feels comfortable here, the fitted sheets undulating as ripples on the sea and those eyes shining like pearls.
When he feels like it, he tells him of a past he doesn’t want to remember, raspy breaths and shaky hands he has to tuck in his pockets. The man would frown at him on those days, curl the corner of his mouth in this curve – that thoughtful look that he loves to flash on the back covers of his books, all pretentious and mighty. I can tell you’re moping again, he seems to mock, and Keiichiro clicks his tongue and says, What do you even know. He talks about something else on those days. On those days oxygen feels lighter and the sun outside looks bubbly and pliable, and words come easy, roll off his tongue with so much ease it almost frightens him.
He knows the man is a writer, and that he got his twisted way around moments, can paint entire stories with them, and maybe what happens on that night is one of those: he breathes a stifled breath, blinks a few times in a row and grabs Keiichiro by the wrist, looks at him in the eye before squeezing tight.
‘Noisy’, he croaks. ‘Noisy’, he repeats. ‘You’re so noisy you woke me up’.
And Keiichiro stops talking, but he can’t do much about the way he’s shaking, and that hand feels firm and solid in his, and when the man does something with his thumb and strokes him lightly, it feels like something has been lifted off of him – that closure for so long he’s yearned for, and loose ends he didn’t know how to properly thread, and death – God, just so much of it. And it makes Keiichiro think: I can start again from this.
But then the man tilts his head and doesn’t let go, squints those pretentious eyes at him and asks, Why do I know you?
And it makes Keiichiro think: hold on a second.
*
「Will Always Stain」~ 514 words
His first memory of Shige is upside down, shaky and unfocused, ruined by the blood flowing inside his head and making him dizzy, and Keiichiro swinging left and right as he’s hanging from one of the many traps the Jack had set. There’s this memory of Shige approaching through some nameless path carved in the woods, fluid and slick like a large cat – back when being a Jack still meant something to him, back when Keiichiro hadn’t corrupted his mind yet out of self-preservation and made him forget his men eater nature and animalistic instincts. Back when Shige was wild and whole and derailed, and Keiichiro only an abomination going unnoticed in a zombie apocalypse, ugly and devious, but not cruel.
He was walking towards him, and there was a knife in his hand, and this bored look on his face, and leaves crunching under his boots, dead and stale like the corpses he had devoured.
Keiichiro can’t remember anything else except he was staring at the man – Death looking at him upside down, and it was the scariest thing he’d ever seen – and how much he wanted to break free, feel the wind slap his face and cramps gnaw at his muscles, see and breathe and touch life one last time, because this was probably the last chance he had at it.
Keiichiro remembers the sting of the knife and remembers Shige holding him still by a wisp of hair, crouching down and stroking him gently on the cheek. I’ll make it quick, he said, with a monochord tone and this hunger at the corner of his eyes, stretching far and deep. And Keiichiro had spread his fingers then, there, where he had accidentally cut himself on barbwire and blood still oozed rich, grabbed the man by the nasty gash on his wrist, and said, ‘It’s love, what you’re feeling is love’.
Shige inhaled, sharp, pulling his arms back and then up so that his palms now cupped the back of Keiichiro’s head, hunger dissipating like gas and leaving his eyes softer and rounder. It's that roundness what Keiichiro remembers so clearly, that innocence so tender and smooth.
‘What have you done?’ Shige smiled, but the way he’d stretched his lips contradicted with the fear starting to pool in his eyes, and Keiichiro, that contradiction slammed through his head in a echo of wrong wrong wrong, and he spat his sorry ass excuses at the speed of a bullet as the man cut the rope he was hanging from. When Keiichiro flopped to the ground with a thump, he pulled him up by a wrist and curled his lips sharp enough to break skin, peered at him through watery eyes and asked again, ‘What have you done?’
His first memory of Shige is something he’ll remember for a very long time: Shige hugging him tight, the firmness of his chest and the terrified thrumming of his heart. He had been pushed in love and took Keiichiro with him, to leap down together from an indescribable high, and the fall pulverized Keiichiro to dust.
*
「Better Than Any Picture」~ 641 words
They blow up like meteors, harsh and fast and with Koyama leaving a trail of ashes and stardust as he goes, and Shigeaki’s sense of time all over the place. Koyama comes over one day and asks him to take some pictures for a portfolio sample he wants to send, and together they struggle through the details, lightings and composition and just how good Koyama’s tanned skin contrasts with Shigeaki’s ratty couch, feels like velvet pooling up in piles, and Shigeaki suddenly asks for a break, I want to try with another camera, and his legs feel like jelly as he stumbles out of the room.
It’s just a poor photo shoot – the two of them standing in the living room and Shigeaki trying his best to crop out of his rusty sink, but then Koyama does something with his hair and Shigeaki doesn’t know what to do with his finger anymore, taps it pointlessly on the camera shutter, his spine stiff and rigid, and then Koyama smiles up at him and it knots something funny in his tummy, squishy and ugly, and Shigeaki feels a little off of center, blurred like the picture he has just taken. You know what? The old camera felt better after all, hold up.
Koyama blows up like a meteor, harsh and fast and with Shigeaki’s sense of self all over the place, scrambling his thoughts like eggs, and getting squeezed painfully in between his thighs every time he has to sort out the photos they’ve taken. Koyama is on the covers of fashion magazines now, and the first thing people notice are his legs, miles and miles of them all wrapped up in big brands and poorly manufactured jeans.
What Shigeaki notices instead is that glint at the corner of his eye, charming and enchanting, the sharp curve of his brow, and when Shigeaki develops those pictures and studies them properly, there’s something in the way Koyama looks at the camera, something raw and twisted, and it consumes Shigeaki what he thinks he can see there.
They work mostly in silence, Shigeaki tiptoeing barefoot on long paper sheets and Koyama tilting his head sideways, pushing out the curve of the hips, messing up his hair, and when he lifts his arms the trail of skin on his abdomen looks soft and velvety, makes Shigeaki think of honey and sugar and spices. Sometimes, he asks him to pose like that for no other reason but to catch that glimpse, store it properly in a part of his mind he doesn’t like to visit often out of guilt, and shame, and stuffs.
Sometimes, Koyama holds his poses longer, in between shots or when Shigeaki is fixing the lightings at his back, and their shoulders brushes slightly, hands and maybe souls too, and Shigeaki has the feeling he does it because he wouldn’t mind at all, to visit that place together.
‘Shige-chan’, he says one day, ‘Shige-chan, how do I look?’
And Shigeaki winces because Koyama’s breath is tickling the nape of his neck, and it feels cold, so cold it’s burning hot. ‘We might need to switch a light bulb’, he says, because it’s true.
And when Koyama loops his arms around his waist and then gently – ever so gently – pries the camera from his hands, Shigeaki starts to think about how bright he’s blown up, about how much time has passed since he was splayed on that ratty couch, and how piercing his eyes looked like, how charming and enchanting, and how not much has changed since then, or maybe everything has.
‘Shige-chan, how do I look?’ Koyama asks again – low, so low even Shigeaki’s legs are sinking. And when he leans over and presses his lips there, right there in soft underside of the ear, all Shigeaki can think is: better than any picture.