The Quiet Things

         The cold ate at his skin like a living organism, the bite numbing and ruthless. His flesh felt plastered tightly in plastic wrap against his bones, painfully stretching at the slightest flex of muscle or twist of the mouth. The cold and the feeling could devour him for as little as he cared; he could become a plastic man in a plastic kingdom, made of plastic feelings, and he would not mind. Plastic men did not know pain.
         His hands clenched the frigid metal of the chain-link fence surrounding him, a square of five feet or five hundred, it didn’t really matter. It was still a prison, still a cage designed to keep his insides from spilling out on to the concrete at his feet. The cries and sounds of his school mates behind him were only a distant backdrop in his ears.
         He exhaled softly, his breath bursting in smoky, billowy clouds from his lips.
         He knew better than to fall into the black crevices of his mind, the machinations addicting, incapacitating, foul, and irritatingly captivating. After the first taste, he could not escape- he became swallowed into their dark snares. From there he would wallow in their taint until some piece of the world around him awoke his senses, and broke the connection like the snip of scissors to Hercules’ golden life string.
         Most of the time he thought about life, the world, and what kind of person he wanted to become. For now, he dwelled on the memory of his parents, their freshly pumped corpses and graves of newly turned soil, a pulsing shadow in the back of his skull.
         He remembered kissing each cold, powdered cheek in the dim light, the room devoid of the living except himself. He had crept down to their rich casket the morning before. Before they had gone down into the roots, never to see a strip of brilliant sunlight, or catch a glimpse of fluffy, cotton candy clouds. He had opened the coffin face, looked at each sleeping stone replica of his parents in their silky shared cradle.
         The air had held still for those few minutes. Silence had pounded in his ears, deafening and hypnotic in the artificial gloom. He had leaned over the casket and wrapped his fingers around the couple’s death clasp, stated in their will as a monument to their love. A gold Catholic cross had been twined in their fingers. He remembered pulling that cross away from their still hands, and slipping it into his pocket.
         Then he had hissed into the air, more to himself than to the bodies before him, “Is all that we see or seem, but a dream within a dream?”
         He had scrubbed a shiny tear from his face, and bent down to each corpse, whispered into a deaf ear he would love them forever. He had kissed each fleshy, dead cheek and had walked away. He hadn’t looked back.
         He hadn’t cried the morning they were swallowed by the cold ground. He hadn’t shed a single tear.

         He awoke from his reverie, a hand in his pocket, clenching the golden cross that had somehow never seemed to leave his side. His palm throbbed painfully, and he could feel the warm tendrils of blood seeping into the fabric of his coat. He pulled the cross out, face open on his bleeding palm, the pretty gold glistening in the sunlight, the corners stained an awful red.
         It had been over a month. A month since they had been imprisoned in the ground, a month since he had pulled that damned cross from their hands, a month since everything had been alright.
         His hands were trembling, and he could feel his heart racing, pulsing in his ears.
         A draft crossed his face, intimate and gentle like a mother’s hand. He winced. He gripped the cross tightly in his hand, the blood welling and plummeting to the cement below in fat drops. His flesh was slick with blood, and the cross was stained crimson, the gold a past long forgotten.
         His eyes burned, and staring off into the bright afternoon sun his eyes filled with tears, salty foulness coursing down his face in giant rivulets. Shaking, he stared off into that sunlight and with as strong an arm as he could muster, thrust the Catholic cross into that brilliant whiteness. His lithe body was pressed up against the chain-link fence in momentum, his hands clasping the metal links as his eyes followed the spiraling object into oblivion. Somewhere very far away, he heard the gold ring against metal.
         He was choked in tears, his throat burning, as his stomach twisted and revolted against him. His bloody hand wrapped around his abdomen to clutch his insides, the insides that threatened to splay across the ground. The bile danced in the back of his mouth, but he could only sob silently to himself. He closed his eyes from the world and let the sorrow fill him.
         A month was too long.
         It was several minutes before he heard the crunch and twist of gravel behind him, and spun to face the Intruder, hands raised in defense.
         It was only a girl. While the rest of the world played behind her, oblivious to everything, she watched him- a meter away! He froze in his grief, momentarily stunned. How had he not heard her coming before now? He stared at her through blurry eyes, his brow furrowing in anger.
         She was curiously beautiful, a pale wraith of blooming womanhood, her slender form encased in a thin t-shirt and holey jeans. Her face was smooth and freckled, lips full, eyes jade facets. Passionate red flames of hair draped her shoulders and coursed her dark frame. And there was knowledge behind that face, a face that seemed to hold the world in it’s scope. Behind her, scratchy, ink black drawings of wings hovered and twitched like insects. They were there and not, phantoms of retching pen strokes crudely- invisibly- taped to her small back. They were beautiful, the epitome of angelic bird wings, but they writhed in the air like the darkness itself. It must be his imagination…
         “Go away!” he spat at her, his words almost unintelligible, as he spun around to face the burning sunlight again. The tears- dirty tears -were sharp diamonds against his flesh, cold eating into the dampness.
         The world was silent for a moment, and sure she was gone, he clawed at the tears on his face. But as they dried and evaporated into the light, they burst forth anew. He stood limply, his shoulders shaking, his hands held loosely at his side.
         It was then that he felt her hand encompass his own. Her cool soft flesh cupped his warm, bleeding palm. She twined her fingers into his own without flinching, wordlessly gazing out into the bright afternoon.
         But he didn’t have the strength to send her away, he didn’t have the strength to yell anymore…
         Time seemed to disappear and he cried-- he cried until his eyes hurt and the cold was liquid fire on his face. And her hand was there, a welcome, solemn comfort amidst a swirling abyss of pain that had been nailed down to the lip of his conscious for too long.
         When at last he gave a shuddering breath, he felt his hand crushing the girl’s in a mass of blood and pulsing flesh. But for some strange reason he didn’t want to let go. He didn’t want her to leave. He eased his death grip on her small hand, but still held fast. She held on unblinkingly.
         He could hear there weren’t any kids on the playground anymore. The world was still.
         And he didn’t want to leave the moment. His soul, wasn’t fresh, but released and he felt alright. He felt better than he had since Great Uncle Louis had come to tell him his parents were dead. He held the strange girl’s hand and he felt alright. He didn’t think he would be able to ever let go.
         The two stood there a long time.


He looked for her, the next day of school. And there she was that very morning, a lonely vision of perfection, in a dark corner to herself; a corner he had somehow always just overlooked. Her eyes were cast off far away from him, the world, from everything, but once he looked long enough, her eyes would flicker and she would see him again and return his awkward smile.
         Their friendship was mutual and quiet; they were two lonely travelers, cast down a road of broken dreams, laid down to rest for a while in a boulevard that wasn’t home- but it was something. They didn’t talk much, and sometimes he was sure he didn’t know anything else about her, except her name. Madeline. And that she was beautiful, and even in the short time he knew her, he came close to falling in love with her. That much he knew, too. His sweet Madeline, he liked to say in his head. His angel.
         The wings frightened him. They hadn’t been an illusion of his grief, or a mirage to comfort him. His imagination hadn’t gotten the best of him. They were vile, twitching aliens, that were as much apart of his Madeline as her smile, or her pretty green eyes. Her wings amazed him, astounded him. But he was still scared of them in some odd, pointless way. They were attached to his friend, and somewhere in their flickering black mass, more beautiful than could be evil, more wraiths and black devils then could be good. He never got the nerve to ask her about them, but somewhere in his deep heart he knew only he could see them, and only he would be able to distinguish whether they were God’s blessing, or the devil’s curse.
         Near the end, he started to walk her home, allowed only to take her as far as the edge of the last street. From there she would grace him with a brief hug, or a tight clasp of his ruined hand, the hand stabbed by the golden cross. Then she would trot home, the feathers of her black scratchy wings sometimes eerily wafting in the wind, like leaves.
         Everything seemed less ugly and harsh with Madeline-- school wasn’t so much of a problem anymore, the days didn’t seem to drag on endlessly, and he could even block out the sound of Aunt Stephanie’s pink-powdered rants that were not only frequent, but exceedingly useless. Most important of all though… his dead parents didn’t haunt the very creases of his mind anymore. Sometimes he would cry himself to sleep, remembering their warm hugs and beaming faces, burying his face into the sheets to smell their lingering smell, and to emulate the cold earth that had swallowed them and carried them home.
         But the pain didn’t incarcerate him, and that was something..
         For a while he had her, his Madeline, and she saved him from an insanity. She saved him from a sickness so enduring that it would have destroyed him. She had saved him from becoming a Sam Bolware, who burned baby birds and tiny kittens alive with a lighter he’d stolen from his parents; she had saved him from becoming a Katelyn Perkins, who had “run down the river” with some razor blades and died in her sleep the year before. That much he knew about Madeline too- that she had saved him- and that was something.

The rain had just stopped, and the air was muggy and humid when the bell sounded, on that last day. Laughter, and bustling, and the delightful sounds of children permeated the space with unerring familiarity. He gathered his generously small stack of books and sheaves of paper together, tucking them placidly under an arm as he went, slipping through the crowds like water in a stream. As he walked he could feel his bones aching as they stretched and grew inside him, noting that he felt slightly taller, though it could have been his imagination. But he didn’t think so.
         Stepping outside he inhaled the thick air, reveled the moisture filling his throat, until he remembered he was off to see his friend, and  then it wouldn’t have mattered if the sky was cracking and breaking like delicate china all over everyone’s heads. He tromped down the school steps, turning at the end to the place where Madeline always sat beneath the willow tree to wait for him.
         A break in his stride…
         She wasn’t there. For a moment he knocked the possibilities off, torn between waiting for her and searching through the school. But both seemed wrong. In fact, that she wasn’t sitting there beneath the tree waiting seemed wrong.
         In that instant, worry and indecision became fear, his books slipped from his hand, the world became parallels, and he felt himself begin to run. He was blind to his surroundings, caught in a world of his own.
         His small body tore through the thinning crowds of classmates and odd teacher, down into the hard mass of cars and buses, avoiding traffic clumsily. Worn sneakers hugging the dark asphalt, he pressed through familiar streets, familiar sights of the ugly, urban epicenter, places he had to come to know with his Madeline beside him. His stride, long and impressive at first, became off-beat and shuddering. His lungs gulped larger and ever larger hauls of muggy air. There was a moment, as he drew closer to the street that Madeline would tell him farewell every day, a panic-stricken moment of fear, that he would not find her. That whatever terrible thing that he felt inside was happening was beyond his path. Or perhaps worse¾ that she had merely been late to the willow tree, and he had made himself out to be a fool.
         Turning down another avenue to rows of corrupted slum houses, the sight of fiery locks caught his eye. His mind registered the other boy too, or no, not a boy. A man. Some way down the abandoned street, the man held Madeline against a wall, a sputtering roach clamped between his lips. The stranger held Madeline fast, his whole body pressed against her own young one, a hand to her mouth, the other pawing at her multi-colored skirt.
         He felt his heart skip, then pound harder in his chest than before, the roar of a thousand hooves hammering inside his own body. He was moving no sooner than he had stopped, running toward the man, the stranger. And Madeline.
         Before he collided with the tall brute, he smelled the unmistakable waft of cigarettes and sweat. Then he was on top of the man, crashing into him so hard they tumbled onto the pavement in a heap. His body clipped the cement hard, but in a swath of rage so impossibly strong, he felt almost nothing. He hadn’t stopped falling yet before he had turned to the stranger, his small fists bound into knots, whaling into the stranger’s face and nose and jaw. Somewhere very far away, he heard Madeline scream his name.
         Then the man awakened from his haze, a tendril of blood curling from his nostril, his eyes gray smokestacks of bitter, ugly wrath, and there was no time to hear Madeline. Knuckles of iron pounded into his cheek, and he was on the ground again, goliath of a man kneeling on him. More fists crashing against him. Again and again, hurt, then he tasted blood in his mouth, red filling his vision, then for a moment he was beyond pain, beyond Madeline’s screams, beyond the world…
         He drifted.
         Then he opened his eyes. Madeline was crying over him, and nearly shrieked between horrid, fluid sobs as he stirred. His head throbbed more painfully then he could ever remember, and it vaguely occurred to him that this must be what a hangover felt like. His mind was dull and void, before realizations came home, and he sat up from his place in one great surge. Madeline threw herself on him, clutching him to her like some lost teddy bear, her face buried into his neck.
         He blinked once, twice, then returned her vigor, catching sight of a man with no throat in the shadows of a door step nearby. Blood was still gushing from the hollows of his neck, and his face was caught in an expression of terror. Pools of the nasty red stuff blossomed around the still body and stems of smoke still clambered obscenely from the roach. He closed his eyes against the sight, holding on to his friend as tightly as she clung to him.
         It was a moment before Madeline finally pried herself from him, and there was suddenly a sense of unbelievable loss that captured him as he looked into her jade eyes. She was observing his face, one little hand in his while the other traced the unknown pains that thudded in his skull. Madeline’s black, skittering wings flashed in and out of his perception continually, distractedly.
         “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, God sorry sorry,” she mumbled, pulling her hand from his to rip at the ends of her skirt. The tattered pieces she pressed against one eyebrow, the flash of pain almost startling.
         “Did he hurt you?” he replied. His jaw hurt when he spoke.
         “No, I’m fine. I’m okay. You saved me, damnit, but there’s so much blood.” Madeline’s eyes were filling with tears again, and he felt an overwhelming urge to just hold her. Her lips were tight and thin, her face bloodless, crimson hair in tangles around her face, but he could have sworn she was more beautiful in that moment then he had ever seen her.
         “I’ll be okay,” he shrugged at her. “But I think we need to get out of here.” He shrugged at her again, pushing away her insistent hands, and clambered to his feet. The world spun and hurt, he felt himself slipping, but his Madeline caught him, and he didn’t fall. He loved her for that.
         She held his hand and pulled him along, away from the dead man in the empty street and away from the horrific amount of blood that remained where he had once lay. He could feel his shirt was damp, drying stiffly with the junk, but he didn’t care much. Madeline was taking him further down the street, instead of back from where he’d come. Madeline was finally taking him to her house. He scuffled blindly behind the girl, body aching with every step.
         A foolish sort of excitement gripped him, while the other filled with dread and foreboding. His pretty angel pulled him around a corner. Again he felt lost, as though he had dropped some priceless treasure into the sea, never to be recovered.
         He knew Madeline had killed that stranger, somehow. His tiny friend had dismembered a man’s throat and left him a still portrait, a statue fount of blood on the cement. Madeline had killed that man, and now she couldn’t stay. His only friend would have to leave. Madeline’s hand tightened in his as if she’d read his mind, as if she knew what he was thinking now. But then they both understood, didn’t they? Places inside where kids didn’t like to dwell, those places that were reserved for older, wiser people, in those places they felt and understood. They both knew what she had done, they both knew what would happen after if she stayed, and they both knew that she had no choice now but to go. He clasped her hand tighter, squeezing like he had not so long ago, on a cold morning where he had discovered the very essence of grief. He squeezed, and she squeezed right back, both taking solace in the pressure and the pain and the small comfort of having each other for just a little while longer.
         The two children passed along the streets, a car drifting by here and there, until at last Madeline turned into another average slum doorway, where cute pink flowers hung from the seal of the closest window. They were the only flowers on the street. Madeline pulled him up to the top of the steps, but froze beside the door, dropped his hand, and turned to look at him.
         “You know what’s coming don’t you?”
         “Yes, more than I’d like to…” he stared hard into her eyes, devouring them, pressing them into his memory.  A fear clenched at him, made his blood boil, made him want to vomit. A dreadful sort of fear, like when his great uncle had come to the house, come surrounded by policemen and their cold expressions, the sort of fear that had told him his parents were dead, even before Great Uncle Louis had told him so.
         “I’m gonna fix you, and then I have to go.” Madeline choked on her words, and as she grasped his hands in her own, he could feel her trembling.
         “Fix me?” his brow quirked into a frown at the odd statement.
         “Yeah, I’ll fix you ‘cause you’re an idiot, but you saved me too, so I guess it’ll be okay.” Her sweet voice sounded like music to him; he never wanted her to stop talking, he just wanted to listen to her sweet music. They stood alone on the top of the doorstep looking at each other for a long long moment, Madeline crying softly. In that moment the excruciating pain in his face increased, sharpened, peaked, and then was gone. Madeline’s hands stopped trembling so much.
         “You look a lot better I guess, now you’re just covered with dried blood all over.”
         “Thank you Maddy. Do you really have to go now?” he asked her simply. A smaller voice inside noted the change, noted that he felt fine.
         “Yeah, ‘spose so.” Her wings were darker, crisper in his eyes for a second while she gave a gentle toss of her shoulders- a shrug- and those wings were more clear and real than they had ever been. And then, wink, gone. They flickered again, sputtering black light bulbs on their last rounds.
         Another awkward moment passed, both unsure of what to say. If he had known that this would be the last time he’d ever set eyes on his lovely angel, with her flaming long hair, and her jade eyes, and her smooth porcelain skin, he may have been able to say something more important, more gallant and eternal that his Madeline could remember forever, something sort of noble like the corny princes in fairy tales.
         “Love you Madeline,” was what he finally managed to whisper, so soft he was almost afraid she hadn’t heard. But she did. She wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly to her. He held her back, hand around her slim waist, the other to wring around her shoulder and run his fingers through her pretty hair. The wings flickered, then stayed, and he truly did hold his angel in his arms.
         “Love you too Sammy,” she cried into his ear, and then she let him go. She kissed his cheek, her lips soft, light, and then she had slipped through the doorway, and vanished from his life.
         He stood staring at the closed door, long enough to feel his throat swell in grief, long enough to feel his face heat and salty tears sting his eyes before he turned and walked away.
         He wandered the streets for a while, thinking about dead men and irony, and how life was so fickle. Fickle-- he loved that word. Most kids didn’t know those kind of words, but then, they hadn’t had parents who loved words and literature and had wanted to share these things with their son. But then most kids still had parents too. He finally passed by the emptying school, and was still thinking, thinking about despair and grief. They were things that scuttled away into the recesses of the brain, that haunted and plagued, but were really just bottled up anger and tears. Despair and grief, two enigmas, quiet things that no one ever seemed to pay attention to unless they were the victims. They were things to be ignored, kept away in a closet somewhere. Hell, they were monsters in the dark, despair and grief. Who wanted to deal with those sorts of emotions? Ignore them, make them worthless, and shun the rest of the population if they can’t do the same… People are selfish that way, he thought. Time was irrelevant in his musings, and there was hardly a day he would remember thereafter, where he had ever thought so much as he did then. He thought about despair and grief, he thought about the future, he thought about tomorrow.
         But mostly, in all considerations, he thought about Madeline.

The next day of school, Madeline wasn’t there to smile and greet him. She was gone, as if she’d never existed. Had he expected any different though? He screamed and cried in the back of his mind, while a smile played his lips, and he learned about being an adult that day. He learned about the viciousness of life.
         And he learned about the quiet things that no one ever seems to know.