Stripling in Loose Attire.

Stripling in Loose Attire.

Published in Critical Bastards Issue 11 October 2014.

He sat for a long time staring into the cavity of the man’s kiss as he drove for a long time, winding his way up the curve of a head stone smiling back broadly, thighs and knees wrapped around each other’s necks and stroking their faces with indexed fingers, until it tickled in a strange way. His mouth felt warm and wet against his tongue, awkward at first but he soon forged his own peculiar rhythm. He was rough and ready and looked a little tired; he was in between as far as the boy could tell. Broad shoulders and nouveau-riches bred features a slight beard covered his aging face and it scratched a little as his mouth devoured each kiss. A nervous neck tickled its orange tint down toward the man’s belly’s pocket, reaching for some cigarettes he pulled out a new persona. Shifting his weight and adjusting his head in time to his own. He slumped gradually back into his rolling seat until he lay almost horizontal.

The cross-hairs came here to fish and saw snippets of their unintelligible squawks, but that ground cast a breathy night, all spread like wild fire voices, dark water takes over. The little black van used to fall away. Youth had been defined by a nervous cough that survived the blast. News shuffles like a crab, a devil-in-the-making would appear. The men who remained in the small town drank into the open air. With eyes, huge televisions. Fires to warm them, lifting them up to the sky.

Again he thought of the mountain men, birds so beautiful under such a virgin melody. Night fall, the sun was dying to dance around the town, lightened by the headstone mixed, with stale smoke. They huddled in small groups all around the sky. Loops of oddly scented laughter rise like thick white smoke, it changed everything utterly, and it was a cushion for his body. Suddenly he had been here too long, he was beginning to look like a permanent entrance, a sculpture of sorts. The full moon stalked us all the way up the “Windy gap”, then hid itself, like stubborn little children by the wrists, as he dragged the country road, where the houses became less frequent and where a thick Dublin accent passed them by. Long grass grew up the middle of the road pronouncing the blades that brushed the bottom of the car.

He didn’t know it but tonight he would meet the man. With peachy soft skin and congealed blood eyes, that would pierce right through impulsion. That would change the way my dishevelled body cast a shadow on the damp tar macadam anorak that covered half of his features, but boys whizzed past on black-sporty-bicycles. Tartan skirts shorten the further post-adolescent girl’s shuffle, after leaving the coloured night sky of their convent. The burst of beer cans opening, a bird’s eye view of the comings and goings in the middle of a corridor. Married men fell from this hand and bounced. I could see a figure it was a sign of my stupidity, of my day dream headstones.

The only words he ever spoke, were:

-          When will we be equal?