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It is seven in the morning, which means that the sun is ever-rising and so are its teeth children, which is a dental way of saying that Lorenzo is up and brushing his teeth, showering, shaving—the whole fucking Sunday ritual on a day that isn’t Sunday. What day is it again; Monday? Thursday? Not the weekend is the most Michael knows. It has to be Tuesday, because that’s the weekday he’s the most irritable in the morning, and he’s especially irritated today. He’s not like the others. In fact, Michael quite enjoys Mondays, maybe because it starts with a big ol’ M. A familiar letter. An upside-down win, which is whatever he has with Lorenzo.
And of course, since Lorenzo has chosen this morning of all possible mornings to do everything imaginable in a bathroom, he is singing rambunctiously, his voice nowhere close to something humane, something cloud-soft to the ears. He sounds like a tussling ermine attempting to sing opera amidst a battlefield, like sharp edges grating against bumped surfaces. In short, he sounds fucking awful. Which is bullshit. It’s bullshit because Lorenzo can sing, but whatever method he’s using this morning to pluck the strings of his larynx is not singing, it is living Hell. With a capital H. Michael is in Hell.
Lorenzo's pitch is all over the place, as if he's playing badminton with the notes, up and down, and left and right somehow. That's how terribly he's singing. He is singing so terribly that he's creating a whole new pitch class at seven in the morning.
The notes ricochet off the walls of the windowless room he’s shaving in, like pellets bouncing after a shootout in a bad neighbourhood in Colombia, which Michael is only familiar with because of Snuffy, who is Colombian, and also has a big nose, and is really annoying, and likes The Muppets. The adult one, the original. Because Snuffy is old. Michael only likes Snuffy because he’s the one person who can get Lorenzo to eat three meals a day. Sometimes the old man is magic. Other times, he is just an old man.
It’s not even an existing song that Lorenzo is singing. He’s code-switching between English and Italian, throwing random German words into the overflowing pot of song here and there because he’s been learning the language recently, which Michael grumbled disagreement on for months. But one day they were in Heidelberg revisiting dead pasts because that is what you do in order to heal, and Michael gave in and said without looking Lorenzo in the eye that he’ll teach him how to speak German, because he was caught in a moment of weakness, which is the short way of saying he was caught in a moment of reminiscence while staring at the profile of Lorenzo’s tablecloth purple eyes while visiting his Oma’s grave.
Lorenzo is singing about shaving and the shining sun as he shaves his face and the sun shines outside the gilded, translucent curtains. Michael is irritated, immensely so because it’s seven in the morning on a Tuesday and Lorenzo is purposely singing in a not-singing manner, and he has to be up and leaving for the airport with his stupid new team in two hours, technically one, but Michael is a special entity that knows how to bend time to his own will. He is German birthed by a bitch of a mother, so he has two hours on the non-existent watch on his wrist.
The sound of Lorenzo’s deep-canyon voice is beginning to hurt Michael’s ears like blue light hurts his eyes. The man in the bathroom—termed ‘bathroom man’ for short—sounds to be engorging the syllables of words across three different languages as he sings them to forever sleep. Bathroom man is killing three languages with one voice box like Mussolini half-killed handfuls upon handfuls of regional languages because he was a fascist bastard and fascist bastards do not like languages unique to every other region, and bring culture and connection within those select few communities. Michael is only passionate about hating fascist bastard scum because of the numerous papers bathroom man, more affectionately termed Lorenzo, has written on such people and issues and politics, and because Lorenzo is punk, and perhaps his boyfriend. In short, Lorenzo has a lot of influence over Michael because he l... Michael gags at the words his head almost thought. He does not like, let alone ____ Lorenzo, especially not this Tuesday morning with that voice.
This is Hell. Michael rolls on his stomach that has some fat on it for once and covers his head with a pillow while groaning in pure dismay, the groan sounding more harmonious than the shit Lorenzo is, quote unquote, singing. What’s worse is they don’t even share a room in either of their respective places, they sleep separately because Lorenzo has a bigfoot circadian rhythm, which is to say that his circadian rhythm is fucking abnormal, and Michael cannot sleep with another body in the bed because of reasons undisclosed to the public. The only time Michael ever tips the line of this boundary is when he’s had a nightmare, knocking softly on Lorenzo’s door shod with light at its feet like a child anxious to tell their parents that they pissed the bed.
The murder of three languages by bathroom man doesn’t falter the slightest, headlines marked in red writing in Michael’s head. He groans again in attempt to trip bathroom man with guilt for his lawbreaking actions, but the slaughter continues. Michael feels like a lamb watching the rest of the flock be eaten by a wolf, his doom never to come because the wolf is Lorenzo, and he is Michael’s lamb. Disobedient lamb, but lamb nonetheless.
You’d think Michael would be the wolf, but he’s the lamb. Not a normal lamb, not even close to domesticated because he had a shit-stain of a shepherd, one he betrayed and ate alive because he is a carnivorous lamb, not even close to normal. Lorenzo, on the other hand, is a wolf, declawed and tamed by a lamb, whose larynx is more of a working clawed paw than his actual paws will ever be again. Lorenzo is domesticated, tame, while Michael has never had a day of peace because that is the life of a lamb.
He is the lamb and Lorenzo is the wolf, or maybe it’s the other way around. Michael can't tell. They're one in the same, but they're also not. Maybe they're two in the same, Lorenzo on one end of the spectrum and Michael on the other, but this spectrum is actually a Cartesian plane, and this Cartesian plane is actually a carousel, spinning and spinning. Maybe on Tuesdays Michael has a turn at wolf and Lorenzo has a turn at lamb.
The problem is that if Lorenzo is the wolf, declawed and tamed, there is no way he would ever kill Michael as they promised at nineteen. He has no natural weapons, no bloodlust. For fuck's sake, Michael is a lamb and has more bloodlust than the damn wolf that is Lorenzo. All this time, Michael has been clawing his way to the top in the most unethical way, always working the hard way instead of the smart way, although he tends to fool himself into thinking he is working the smart way, because teenagers don’t have the best judgement when it comes to morality, and he certainly didn’t. He clawed his way up just so he could jump off the edge, but Lorenzo is standing at the bottom, staring, looking at him with the full confidence that he will catch him with his spaghetti-bone arms. Always overestimating himself, always chasing things bigger than the world, although Michael has downsized to the size of the moon.
Lorenzo loves like a dog. Blind, blind loyalty of his. He doesn’t register the distance between the fall and the catch, just waiting at the bottom with his tail wagging and the resolve of this story of theirs shining in his purple eyes that look midnight with the distance. Michael doesn’t get to die the way he hoped he’d be able to when he reached the peak. He doesn’t get to die the way he’s been thinking he would since he was nine years old. Because Lorenzo is the wolf, and he refuses to kill Michael. The power dynamic doesn’t matter when the power has been swallowed by the one with fangs.
He hates the disparity between them, how Lorenzo is a declawed wolf and Michael is a lamb that has learnt to eat meat. One of these is stronger than the other, and it’s not the one that has bent the laws of mother nature, but the one with forever ruined appendages. In a bittersweet way, this is a good thing. It’s for the best.
Michael groans a third time, much louder, loud enough to get the new stray Lorenzo has made a pet out of to pounce on him and onto the bed. There is no reaction, no acknowledgment. Lorenzo continues to sing—well, it isn't singing at all, but Michael digresses—while he continues to lay in bed, suffering and surrounded by the smell of oatmeal.
Lorenzo has created a purposeful Hell this morning, as if he doesn’t know Michael has to be up soon, as if he doesn’t know that Michael is debuting with his new team today in a new league and a new country. Michael has heard him properly sing a number of times, during late nights or randomly throughout a day of training, a habit Lorenzo indulges when he’s too bored and needs some form of oral stimulation, to hear something dancing in his ears and feel it tiptoe along his tongue.
So, Lorenzo can sing. Except he isn't singing right now. And it's sending Michael on an excursion through the cores of every volcano on earth, the ring of fire a noose around his neck.
“Dono,” Michael says, the noun grating at the back of his throat as if it’s made of cheese. He’s tired and pissed off, but the anger barely comes through. The stray Katze has taken its place beside Michael’s head, but he doesn’t have the energy to be annoyed at it being in his bed.
“Dah, what’s this?” Lorenzo sing-songs, the razor in his grip pausing its shaving as he points it at Michael like a wand. “Giving me another name to add to the collection, Michel?”
“Can you stop singing like that?” Lorenzo blinks at him as if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “I know you can sing better.” Michael rolls over, his voice muffled as he curls away from the open en suite door, the smell of oatmeal overwhelming his nose. Of course, Lorenzo bathes every new stray he takes in with the most expensive products. “I need to be fucking up soon, so sing better.”
He doesn’t have to see Lorenzo to know he’s smiling, the scraping of the razor resuming. Michael doesn’t get why he shaves every other day, all because the facial hair grows back too fast. He might as well just let it grow as dense as the forest on his chest.
“Asking me to sing you to sleep, dolcezza?” Lorenzo teases, but the comedy is cut short when he begins to sing, softly and lightly, without an echo, even though he’s standing in the bathroom. No loud Zapow! or Kablam! as Lorenzo loves to utter to himself in corridors. The number of times Michael has laid awake in silence in a hotel, only to be shattered by Lorenzo’s whimsical sounds, is innumerable. He’s got into the habit of staying awake during away games or championships until he hears Lorenzo come back from whatever hole in the wall he’d visited. It’s his own circadian rhythm.
“…Is go dté tú mo mhuirnín slán.”
Some syllables are mumbled, every second word sounds too heavy or too light with mispronunciation, but Lorenzo doesn’t falter. He carries on, singing a song that Michael cannot understand, but that he can understand nonetheless. He can hear the translation writing itself in Lorenzo’s voice, as weightless as bodies in space, his body curling further into itself, the words echoing in its shell, oatmeal filling his sinuses.
“Siúil, siúil, siúil a ruin."
Honey. Honey is the word that pulsates canary yellow in his head as Lorenzo sings the next line, dandelions flying a storm around Michael’s head. It sounds like running, as if the words were intertwined hands tittuping through an undisturbed field, its body stretching as far as the eye can see. This field is golden. This field is safety.
“Siúil go sochair agus siúil go ciúin.”
The song isn’t sung with Lorenzo’s voice box, his mouth or his heart, it is sung by his teeth. Each and every standing gold tooth sings a letter each, the voices melding together into golden jewellery—bracelets, earring studs, wedding bands. The room fills with the smell of sunlight, a sunspot burning on the corner of Michael’s shoulder. The teeth children do not stop singing. The sun does not stop rising.
Lorenzo's kintsugi teeth sing, mended from rot to gold—from something worthless and dying, turned to something priceless and glinting the very essence of life, winking distant stars from distant, distant pasts, for time is stretched between every light year. The Pillars of Creation have since been extinguished by a supernova, but they can still be observed today because their death hasn’t quite reached Earth. Although Lorenzo has died more than once, he can still be seen walking in the flesh and singing with golden teeth, because his death hasn’t quite reached his life.
“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom. Is go dté tú mo mhuirnín slán.”
The next lines after the last two become more familiar, almost registering in Michael’s brain if it weren’t for the fog and the growing lack of consciousness. Lorenzo’s mellifluous voice swims in and out of his ears, some words and lines anchoring themselves in separate wrinkles of his brain, embedding themselves in blurred memory.
Though he doesn’t know it, Michael falls asleep to the sound of Lorenzo singing the words of a song in a language he doesn’t understand, and dreams of a distant world covered in golden sunflowers.
♳
When Michael was nine years old, he attempted to run away and found himself lost in a field of sunflowers, although technically this was a dream because nine-year-old Michael was too scared to attempt anything of such ambition in reality. His mother was night, she would catch up eventually.
But this field of flowering daylight felt like a safe place, like a circle of salt that could protect you from an incoming army of demons, the salt circle being the sunflower field, the incoming army of demons being Michael’s mother. It was a dream of yellow against a backdrop of light blue shining with more yellow, whiter yellow. It was a blinding dream. Michael believes that his sensitivity to blue light began when the dream first appeared in his psyche.
His imagination as a child was quite active, arching rainbows and scribbled walls, but his mother was good at killing invisible things, like hopes and dreams and imaginary friends. Michael’s imagination was a treehouse with a big ‘NO GIRLS’ sign hung on the door, but with wet seasons come storms, and with storms come lightning strikes, and what better place to hurl a bolt of Zeus than a tree keeping a young boy safe?
Moral of the story is that nowhere is safe for as long as night proceeds day. But there’s one thing Michael has learnt ever since he left:
It is never night forever.
♴
Airports are a liminal space of time paused and wingless. It is a grave town covered with the clipped wings of every time zone around the globe of the world. In this space, you are in thirty-eight places and none. In this space, you do not exist, just as much as time’s wings do not exist.
It’s cloudy outside, but it’s still bright inside, too fucking bright, because anyone who builds airports has never been taught what a ratio is in mathematics. The extra lights from the paparazzi only makes matters worse, and Michael’s head begins to pulse in time to the flashing lights.
He was nowhere close to being late because he’s German and biologically punctual at all times. If you give him five hours, he has eight. Give him three days and he has a week. It’s that simple. Michael is the time being.
They’re walking through the airport, smells of ethnic food across continents tapping against the mask that shields Michael’s lower face, of perspiration from the pit of every insufferable member of the paparazzi lining the path. Michael keeps his head straight, his gaze honed on the horizon of where they’re going. He doesn’t give the paparazzi a white-gold smile as they so desperately want. That’s Lorenzo’s gig.
With every big step his legs can muster, the horizon gets closer. Michael just wants to hop on the aeroplane and knock out. It’s a simple wish. But the universe is clearly against him on this Tuesday morning, the horizon of his view becoming obscured by the tips of dark Katze-eared hair. There is only one individual on this team that bothers to style its hair in such an obscurely time-consuming manner, and that individual is a pest.
“Almost late for your first day on the team, huh?” Yukio says with a lithe grin, because everything about Yukio is lithe. Its thin body that is thinner than Lorenzo’s, its movements on the pitch, its way of breaking into people’s line of sight and ruining their day. Lithely deadly.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I was right on time.” Michael replies dismissively, making his way around Yukio to dismiss it further, but once Yukio’s Katze-eared self has you in its sights, it won’t let go until it’s satisfied. Michael knows this. He hates that he does.
Just as Michael manages to overtake Yukio, Yukio is back and bouncing in his vision. Michael sighs frustratedly through his nose, the mask his only ally on this Tuesday morning as it catches his sigh before Yukio’s four ears do.
“Not a good look, Mickey Mouse! It’s your first day on the team. You’ve got to pick up your slack, you know?” Yukio smiles an open slit, snake eyes staring at Michael in deceitful mockery. Whatever almost impossible piercing you can get on your body, Yukio has it. There was a time when Yukio threatened to quit because the higher-ups wouldn’t allow such jewellery to be worn on the field, and they bent the rules in Yukio’s favour, and Yukio’s favour only. It’s the only thing Michael respects about the bugger.
As always, the sides of its head are freshly shaved, black mullet cascading night sky over its head and pooling some degrees below the shoulders. Yukio only ever lets its hair grow to its chest and then cuts it back to shoulder length. It’s very particular about its appearance. On the right shaved side, Michael’s left, is a tattoo of an open-mouthed snake that looks to be moments away from chomping on Yukio’s jewelled ear, right where the industrial bar shines orbiting stars due to the overhead airport lights reflecting off the silver. Its fringe is neatly organized over its forehead, almost looking like a fifth ear added to the collection.
Even though Michael doesn’t give Yukio a single centimetre square of light for the day, Yukio continues to walk backwards in front of Michael, bobbing up and down right in his line of vision, which is only possible by standing on its tiptoes since Yukio is considerably smaller than Michael—the rest of them, technically, although none of them are the New World’s Eleven anymore, because they’ve grown up, grown older, but Yukio has remained the same size ever since.
“I used to be a striker too, you know?” Yukio dances in Michael’s vision like a highway mirage at the end of a long road, its boots stumbling as it tries to stay tiptoed and in the centre of Michael’s vision. Michael can’t even be pissed off at the annoyance because of the effort Yukio makes to annoy him specifically. It’s almost endearing. Almost.
Yukio’s total size actually corresponds to its childhood upbringing, unlike Lorenzo who, by some kind of magic, is almost two whole metres tall yet has a history of malnutrition. This always pisses Michael off. How the fuck did he get the long end of the stick in every department? It’s not fair.
“Had to change position to defensive midfielder so I could get a shot at playing since everyone was body piling to get a chance at striker. It was crazy, you know? Pack of baby hyenas.” Yukio laughs, or something akin to a laugh, which is incredibly hard to do when it’s half Russian and half Japanese, a conception not the end result of a sweet and unifying love story after a big bad war.
Michael keeps his attention forward, looking straight ahead in the direction his feet are leading him, where Yukio continues to stumble and pitter-patter in some kind of solo battle of dominance in his blurred vision because someone this morning couldn’t let Michael sleep in peace.
“That’s some story.” Michael says to acknowledge that he heard Yukio, an attempt to get it to stop fucking bugging him, his voice coming out impassive with a snake’s hiss. He only tolerates Yukio because it talks a lot like Lorenzo. “Now leave me alone. I’m fucking exhausted.”
Expecting resistance, Michael is almost fully awake when Yukio simply gargles a laugh and disappears from his line of vision, the fishing line no longer bobbing in the water. The water is calm, except for the flashing lights and the murmuring voices. It is calm.
Michael sinks further into his clothes, as much as is humanly possible, for time is paused and dead frozen in this space, chills worming their way through the air with warmlust. Michael wants to be back in bed, where it’s warm and cozy and free of paparazzi gazes. He used to prefer the cold once, was the one kid who always wore a tank top and shorts in freezing weather, but now he can’t stand a single degree below twenty degrees Celsius these days. His bones have grown delicate to temperature, his skin soft around old scars.
His body heat begins to envelop him, warming his face. Michael doesn’t heed the paparazzi or the PR team or anyone for the matter. He’s warm and content in this space of stasis and that’s all that matters. Lorenzo isn’t pestering him with an awful voice, Yukio isn’t pestering him with non-consensual anecdotes. All is well. The planets are aligned for Michael to fall asleep while walking, his eyes closed and drifting far, far away, to the ceiling of the airport and beyond.
Only for them to drift back into their orbits when there’s a light tugging at the string of Michael’s balloon. The death was misdiagnosed, a Lazarus phenomenon has occurred, he is alive and walking again. There’s no need to send helium balloons to heaven with his name on them. He is alive and well. Disturbed from almost attained slumber, but alive and well.
“Hey, Mickey. Hold this for me.” A teammate says, voice too playfully childish to be Yukio, which sounds more like the moon if it had a voice. Calm and mellow, tugging at waves and keeping them rolling.
Michael doesn’t even bother to open his eyes, ignorant to the developments around him and the soft, almost endearing snickering. He doesn’t stop whatever-teammate from wrapping his hand around whatever-soft-mush. It could be a moss-covered bomb for all Michael cares. He has better things to do, like continue walking to the plane and finally get some damn uninterrupted sleep, which is a wish made in a tree burrow.
He doesn’t look down at what his new, rowdy teammate has handed him. He’s tired with exhaustion and tired of the fucking paparazzi lurking in every corner of his life. He just wants to get on the aeroplane and sleep the whole flight into nonexistence. Get the whole airport ordeal over with. The worst thing about flights is having to go through two airports. Michael hates travelling. He’s fucking sick of it.
After one last flash, right in his face and as bright as the sun, even with his eyes closed, the black brightening to red-orange, they finally turn the corner into the tunnel, where the paparazzi no longer linger, and Michael blindly follows the giggling voices to the aeroplane, a little too trusting on his first day with his new team.
He doesn’t let go of the moss-covered bomb his new, rowdy teammate had gifted his hand. Not even when they’ve made it onto the plane and Michael can finally get some sleep.
♵
Image description (courtesy paparazzi): Michael Kaiser holding a Don Lorenzo plush with Don Lorenzo keychains on his bag at the airport, wearing Datiébam's grey, pear green, and white winter uniform after his debut with the team.
♶
Michael has been eating a lot of sunflower seeds the past year, so much so that fucking Noel Noa, the guy who looks like the sun and the moon fucked and gave birth to him, because that is how children are (unfortunately) made, gave him a gigantic gift basket full of packets and bags and more packets of sunflower seeds. It wasn’t even Michael’s birthday, or nearing the day of Noel, although it was nearing the end of Michael’s last season with Bastard München, but even Lorenzo didn’t know that at the time.
So, Michael has been eating a fuck ton of sunflower seeds lately, because they taste like sun and flower, and he has since entered the years of adulthood where you start to like the sun and the light and the warmth, where you take the trouble to get down on all fours during a daily walk to smell a flower on the sidewalk, just for the hell of it. Noa picked up on the habit with his piss-coloured eyes and then organised a gigantic gift bag of sunflower seeds, because he’s part Slavic and almost middle-aged. You know how fathers love you in silence, watching your eating habits with an eye or two, only to find the fridge stacked with carrots after carrots one day because they saw you eat a carrot on two separate days, a month apart? That’s what Noa does, and it pisses Michael the fuck off.
If it had been Michael of three—maybe six, just to be safe—years ago to whom Noa had gifted the basket, he would have thrown it away out of spite. But Michael is older now, not much wiser, but a little less pissed off and a lot more sun-filled. Well, not a little less pissed off, actually, the anger just isn’t the red of blood anymore. It is more the red of a rose. Michael picked up a fabric art the other year, which means he has picked up at least twelve fabric arts since then. He has started to bake his own bread and make his own clothes with Lorenzo’s help, so he now has yeast to knead the rage into, yarns of wool to thread the red into something fashionable. Michael is older now, so he planted the sunflower seeds in Lorenzo’s backyard, which is his backyard and everyone else’s, because Lorenzo is a weirdo and likes to share even though he grew up being robbed, and Michael bought trays to hang on his penthouse’s balcony to plant more seeds. His place has started to look like something to come back to, to actually live in. It is beginning to look a lot like a home.
It’s an ugly-looking flower if Michael looks at it for too long. A shit-stained centre surrounded by pissed-on petals, but that’s the Michael of three, six years ago talking. When that Michael isn’t around, the Michael of today looks at a sunflower and the image of Lorenzo appears in translucent cloud form like a dead lion. And he begins to think that maybe, just maybe, living isn’t so bad after all. Turning a house into a home instead of a grave isn’t so bad. Maybe he, Michael Kaiser, deserves this. Maybe, just this once, it’s okay for him to want and have what he wants, to own it. To hell with his mother. To hell with his former self which is still his present self.
Michael Kaiser deserves an endless supply of sunflower seeds, even ones gifted by Noel-motherfucking-Noa.
♷
Image description (courtesy Datiébam teammates, specifically Yukio): Michael Kaiser clasping a Don Lorenzo plush with both hands like a bag of sunflower seeds, sleeping peacefully in a leaned back seat, half-covered with a dark blanket and zipped up in Datiébam’s grey, pear green, and white winter uniform.
On the right hand corner is written: “He sleeps well with you, doesn’t he?”
♸
Kyanite eyes follow the gentle sway of the tall sunflowers in the backyard, sun catching on the yellow petals and turning them blind, brown centres glowing like the pupil of an eye. The sunflower seeds Michael planted some time ago have sprouted, the flowers not as tall as him or Lorenzo, but still tall, still adult. They wave to invisible passers-by, swaying to a soundless song. He hasn’t been able to take his eyes off them all day, gaze flicking from Lorenzo cooking to the sunflowers past the sliding glass door, from Lorenzo crocheting a hat for future strays to the sunflowers. From Lorenzo, to the sunflowers. Flicking from east to west, the same path a sunflower treks every day.
Michael is at Lorenzo’s place, which is his and everyone else’s, his back chafing against the lines scratched into the couch. He can feel the clawed couch doodles rubbing against the scars on his back, but he doesn’t pay them any mind. They no longer make him squirm like they used to. They simply exist.
Lorenzo is parallel to Michael, sitting in an armchair next to the couch with the sliding glass door to the side, the sun scattered across half his body from the angle it’s currently hanging in the sky. He’s sitting bridal-style, his body hanging limply over the limbs of the armchair like a painting. He looks dead, which means he looks perfectly alive, because this is Don Lorenzo we’re talking about; the dead man. He is a man who looks like an intimate sculpture of bones, the thinnest layer of skin holding the piece of Don Lorenzo in place. He is like a dead body if it were alive, and that is art in itself.
Michael shifts slightly in his position on the couch, his lower back pressed into the arm, a bag of sunflower seeds crinkling in his lap from the movement. Half the bag is eaten, Michael having stopped when his brain suggested the possibility that the sunflowers outside were sentient and sad about the murder, so he paused his eating out of respect. Or madness. Either way.
“You’ve taken good care of it.” The random sentence snakes through the silence, words scaly smooth, silence unbroken. Lorenzo raises his head to look at Michael with a question marked head.
“Dah?” Michael nods to the sliding glass door in answer, Lorenzo’s head curling back over the chair’s arm in pursuit of the nod, gaze landing on the sunflowers. “Of course I have, you planted them.”
Michael just hums in response, his eyes tracing the shadowed outline of Lorenzo until he catches movement out of the corner of his eye and looks back at the sunflowers. Lorenzo doesn’t say anything more than a yawn, and neither does Michael. It has been a busy day. This year’s season has been busy, with Michael changing teams and making a comeback, one so good that some people have forgotten all about the scandal.
As the Michael of three, six years ago begins to resurface, thinking ugly thoughts about excrement, the Michael of today turns his attention away from the sunflowers and Lorenzo and looks at the coffee table in the middle of the living room. It’s in the shape of a coffin, a self-made gift from Yukio. Lorenzo and it are good friends, have been for some time. Yukio may be the black sheep of the former World’s Eleven, but Lorenzo has a thing for the colour black.
The top of the coffin table is made of glass, the interior covered with purple velvet, with a skeleton laid inside and holding a bouquet of sunflowers. It used to be a bouquet of red roses arranged with other flowers, but at some point it was changed to sunflowers. Michael hadn’t noticed until now. He stares at the sunflowers held by the skeletal hands, wondering if they’re real or not, but his wondering is interrupted when he notices Lorenzo’s phone on the coffin table lighting up with a notification, his eyebrows furrowing at the lockscreen.
Hold on.
Where the fuck did Lorenzo get that picture from?
It doesn’t show for five full seconds before the screen fades back to black, Michael’s mind racing with questions. What the fuck? Who the fuck? When the fuck?
Without a second thought, Michael leans over and grabs the phone, the bag of sunflower seeds moving with him and sliding into its own place next to him. Michael turns the phone on to see if what he saw was real and not just a resurgence of some kind of déjà vu.
Just as his eyes had seen before, Michael is greeted by the image of him asleep on what is clearly a plane seat, a navy airline blanket halfway past his waist, his Datiébam uniform zipped up and his face mask still on. His hands are on his chest, and where his heart should be beating, under a layer of skin, flesh, muscle, and bone, is the face of a Don Lorenzo plush. The same one Michael woke up to upon landing and stuffed into his bag without further interrogation. Who the fuck sent Lorenzo this image? He’s going to kill them. Or it. Michael already has his suspicions.
He saw the paparazzi pictures the next day, but there was a sequence showing him being handed the plush, so Michael couldn’t care less about them being publicly released. The keychains with Lorenzo’s jersey and signature and customised cleats have been on his bag for over two years because of a dare that has since been long over, but Michael is a lazy bastard and can’t be bothered to take them off.
He turns the phone screen towards Lorenzo, who has been staring curiously at Michael since he leaned over and grabbed it. His facial features rise like angel wings in realisation, a small laugh coming out of the quirked corners of his lips as Michael continues to hold the phone up accusingly, as if he’d just found out that Lorenzo has been cheating on him all along. But this is worse. It’s so much worse.
"You saved it as your fucking lockscreen?" Michael speaks almost every word italicized, all teeth and no tongue. Lorenzo is unphased by his harsh phrasing, his face split into dual macaroni dishes; cheese on the bottom, mince beef on the top.
"It's also my TV screensaver and laptop background."
"Are you fucking..." Michael pauses, an exhale filling his uvula like a third lung. "It's voodoo, you dumbass. Not some cutesy shit. I wish you dead by squeezing plush you like it's a boiled egg."
Lorenzo’s face is painted with a Renaissance look of rapture as his eyes remain fixed on Michael, who still holds the phone in his hand like a candelabra. Lorenzo's Adam's apple moves with entrapped notes before Michael's ears are filled with the sound of sparkling laughter, water filling his lungs.
"Dah~ Voodoo, huh? Who knew Michael Kaiser would go to such lengths to make the Don Lorenzo fall in love with him."
They talk to each other as if they haven’t been together for over a thousand days now. It’s all one big, comedic bit, and Michael plays the part generously.
"You are a stupid man." Michael’s eyes narrow as if they were fingers pointing. "I'm killing you with my mind."
Fuck that dumb Florentine expression on Lorenzo’s face. He hasn’t even visited his hometown since he was twelve, or ten, or some other number Lorenzo dropped whenever the subject came up. And yet all the traces of the city are still there, etched into his small, graphite-scrawled worm eyebrows, and the potholes of his cheeks. He is the most Florentine man Michael has ever seen, which isn’t many, but the purple man encapsulates the whole city, so it’s more than plenty.
Lorenzo’s smile grows wider and wider as the scene unfolds, so much so that the scar at the corner of his forehead, on the side where his hair is out of the way, seems to be smiling with him. The blue dragon river crawls across the corner of Lorenzo's forehead, its belly dry and full of mud, darker than the surrounding banks of skin. It's a pretty scar, Michael will give him that. Prettier than the ones Michael has dug into his own back. Prettier than the ones he's learnt to hide under a layer of skin.
One of the things that annoys Michael about the limited plush versions of Lorenzo is the lack of skin texture. None of the scars are there, nor are the blackheads. Michael is surprised that they managed to remember his facial hair, a small little triangle on the too-round chin of plushified Lorenzo. It's funny. He's beginning to understand why Lorenzo is so passionate about the paparazzi editing his face, filling in his pockmarks with flawlessly smooth skin, drawing in his eyebrows and applying a filter that ruins the deep ombré blue of his tattoo. There have been so many nights where Lorenzo had gone on and on about how they ruin the darkness of Julien’s skin and the size of Snuffy’s nose. Michael understands now. Fuck the paparazzi. To hell with them.
“You like how plush me looks?”
Michael’s thoughts snap like glow sticks but do not glow, blinking at Lorenzo as he comes back to reality. He recoils at the sight of a miniature plush Don Lorenzo dancing in front of the face of human Don Lorenzo. Where the fuck…? Michael doesn’t bother to solve the mystery. He can tell that Lorenzo has been waiting for this scene to unfold since the day he changed his lockscreen and the flowers in the coffin table.
“No, I fucking hate it.” Michael clicks his tongue in dissatisfaction at the plush model of Lorenzo, the homo sapien model wilting like a sunflower isolated from the sun. “You look much better in mortal flesh.”
Michael doesn’t look at Lorenzo because they’ve been together for three or four or five years, and eye contact isn’t important with all that time and the time before it and the time that will come after. It is definitely not because Michael is afraid to look Lorenzo in the eyes that are identical to his dead Oma’s, or anything along those lines. Eye contact is simply unnecessary where they are concerned.
But humans need the sun on their petal-skin just as much as sunflowers do, because humans are just another kind of flower, living and breathing and walking bounds of life, and Lorenzo has so many suns in his mouth; or looking from another angle, sunflowers. Once they were rotting seeds, but now they are living and breathing and terribly singing sunflowers. Michael heliotropically turns his head like a sunflower faces east in the morning, and he looks Lorenzo in the eyes, only to see a sunflower seated across from him.
“OK, dolcezza, I think you might be falling in love with me.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
Michael huffs a laugh, because it’s a Monday afternoon, and he quite likes Mondays. And he also quite likes Don Lorenzo. And he’s learning to like this little sun-seeded life of his with and without the night.
“I fell a long time ago. You know this.”
This time, Michael doesn’t turn away from the sun or the light or the warmth. This time, Michael faces the sun head on and he loves it, because he’s in those adult years where you sleep as soon as the sun sets because you have grown into a sunflower and can no longer stay awake without it up there in the sky above you.
The largest field of gold Michael has ever seen stretches across Lorenzo’s face, staring back at him with the light of a thousand suns, a thousand stars, a thousand sunflowers. Every grain of sand in the world is another thousand sunflower fields added to the list of existence, to a distant world far, far away. A moth’s wings flutter behind Michael’s eyelids, keeping them open and anchored to Lorenzo’s sun face.
“Ti amo, dolcezza.” Lorenzo is now sitting up in the armchair, his head resting on his fist like a decapitated head on a pike, and he blows a loud kiss in Michael’s direction, who doesn’t turn away or catch the delivery with murderous intent. He just blinks slowly at the affectionate display, a soundless response that is louder than a Thunderscreech.
It doesn’t matter what the night used to whisper to Michael. He’s decided that, after all this boundless time, he deserves this life. And he’s going to make the most of it.
“I hate you, too.”
♹
What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?