Work Text
This is not a story where a man says
I will come back from the dead for you.
This is not a story where a man says anything at all.
In this story, you have two young men, eyes meeting across a coffee table in a room where they know they are not safe. In this story, you have two more young men, who don’t. In this story, you have two women, splitting the difference.
But this story is about destruction, so there’s really very little difference to split, when it comes down to it.
What’s your gift?
The taxi driver asks, and the convict shows him.
It begins there, with six lives, and soon, six minus one, but they don’t know that until it’s too late to do anything about it.
Reckless young men that the world doesn’t have a clue what to do with, and if you just shifted the camera a little ways an hour ago, they would have been the heroes. This is how five people live through one night, and how two young men are reckless for the last time.
A man with fascist impulses and bad taste will enter the room, and his words are slimy, his visions compelling to one of the women — the one who knows that she is not safe.
The woman who has never had to think about it shakes her golden head and says
We have to do something.
Two young men touch for the last time with hot summer wind moving through a broken window. The Devil’s come down to Virginia tonight, but he only wins one soul — but in the end, he takes away another, too, so does it matter how many he wins?
They don’t say anything to each other. They don’t need to.
Two young men look each other in the eyes:
Alex!
A convict’s lungs burn as he tries to kill for the first time.
An
amazing evolving boy
can’t survive the experience.