The Garden

once upon a time, there was a garden. it was surrounded by a chain link fence and barbed wire grew on the trees like ivy. next door there was a school, and a Lost Boy. he liked locked doors and never lost a fight. he walked fast with his shoulders up, counted airplanes at night and kept his heart in the garden.he planted it under a bed of dying violets and scattered the ground with broken glass, so if anyone tried to dig it up they would come away with bloody fingers. but mostly, no one tried. as he grew, so did the garden and his pupils got bigger as the world got darker. the airplane lights were replaced by new ones that he sought out endlessly. lights in the bottom of bottles and lights in pills and razor blades and needles and powders spilled on mirrored table tops. and the world was bright, sometimes. one night he looked up from his feast of stars and saw the light in the eyes of a girl lost behind a cigarette. his ribs cracked and she breathed fire so he collected her skeleton in his scarred arms and took her to the garden. that night the Lost Boy learned another way to fight, a new light to chase and catch, devour and burn through. with desperate hands on hips and breasts and mouth to mouth he leads them all to the garden. laying on broken glass and poison ivy they tear holes in their skin and flowers from their roots. they are his Flower Girls and he plucks them one by one. to each he gives a pressed violet and tells them, this is my heart. sometimes they believe him. sometimes he gives them glass instead and sometimes they left scars but mostly he went to the garden alone for scars.one night as the Lost Boy and one of his Flower Girls tore up a flowerbed his heart was unearthed and lay quietly beating as they tried and tried to burn brighter. it wasnt until the next morning, when the Lost Boy returned to dig up more flowers, that he noticed it.as he bent to pick it up, there was a loud THUMP behind him. He turned and saw a Mouse Girl sitting on the frozen ground, wide eyed surprised and with razor blades gripped in her fists. her light was blinding and he tried to pull her out of the bush and into his violet bed but she came only far enough to lift the cigarette from behind his ear then fled up the tree. her dirty bare feet dangled above his head and he saw that her toenails were painted blue. why are you sitting in the wire tree? he asked. I want to be closer to the stars when they come out, she said. be my star, he said. come down here and be my star tonight. but she only climbed higher, his cigarette between her lips and leaves stuck in her hair. So he left the garden to find a more compliant flower. he found one drifting in the smoke behind a bar and her long red hair looked like october spread across his pillow, for he did not bring her to garden. in fact he did not return to the garden for a long time, though he passed it on his nightly prowls. every night a dull glow of fire flies and sex pressed down on him until he could not stand it and climbed the fence into the broken garden again.