~The /screwed up\ side of me /I keep\~ [Kneedles]

My name, my full name is Citrine something, something Tunbark (I don’t know what my middle name is, it never really came up between me and my Mom though I assume I have one) but most people know me as ‘Tri’ or ‘hey you, get back here with my wallet’ and I have a problem. You‘d probably call it an addiction, the way it gets right into the corner of my brain and won’t let go and let me just say that its way worse than morphling or alcohol or anything else…probably. My name is Tri and I am addicted to crazy people. Right now it’s a crazy person, singular, but before that there was my Mom too and between the two of them the whole spectrum of crazy is pretty much covered (and I suppose I’m there to up the crazy quota too).

I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to realise, but in this moment the recognition pretty much hits me like a giant rock between the eyes or a huge fist in the face. This is, I’m assuming, what’s happened to Bean- actual fists though and not metaphorical ones like mine. When he staggers my way, back into our alley- maybe it was his first but it’s ours now-, he’s trailing drops of bright red blood like the sticky gunk that comes out of a slug, he’s been beaten about eighteen different shades of purple and, let’s get real here, it’s disgusting.

It’s disgusting the way that one eye swells up like a balloon and each scuff mark and bruise flares obvious and ugly like bad children’s drawings, all coloured outside of the lines with crayons pressed too deep into the paper. It’s disgusting how I want to find out who did this and physically force them to eat every last one of their teeth. Separately. One by one. Most of all, it’s disgusting how much my heart actually hurts right now, looking at him like this. As though I’d been beaten up almost as bad as Bean has.

I should be angry about that, because making someone feel like this just isn’t cool and it’s pretty sneaky too- this just isn’t like me. For everyone else, I’d probably just shrug it off and say that they deserved it, that it would teach them not to be annoying fuckfaces or to have a face that plain old needs to be punched. But everyone else sucks. And Bean is definitely not everyone else. So I surprise myself, kneel down next to him as he slides against the wall like he’s actually deflating and touch him gently, trying not to scrape against anything broken, winding a cloth around his arm and poor sore wrist like I actually know what I’m doing.

And some part of me is jumping and skitting like rodent that I’m actually this close and actually getting to touch his wrists, he might even let me put my hands through his hair when he’s in this state but I’m reluctant to try that in case all this closeness gets spoiled.

He probably needs a doctor, but we’re not paying for one of those and I’m just wondering how quickly I can get some incriminating pictures of a guy cheating on his wife so I can blackmail one into helping Bean when he starts to sing. Actually sing. No getting mad or swearing revenge on anyone just full on singing, with his eyes shut and everything. Getting lost in the words, going someplace far away, leaving behind these dumpsters, the overwhelming fetid smell of off food and garbage juice, the rats and the soggy cardboard.I want more than anything to ask him to take me with him too.

Yep, this is when it hits me.My name is Tri and I’m addicted to crazy people.

But does this mean I’m going to do anything about it? Try and kick the habit, stay clean and sober? Ha, ha, nope. That’s the whole point of addiction, it’s supposed to be awesome for the addict, or at least make them feel like it’s necessary, the reason they get up in the morning, like they can’t breathe without it and if it goes away their mind would shut down and they might as well stop their heart from beating.

Now I’m not saying that, to me, sitting in a grimy, stinking alley listening to Bean sing is the most awesome thing ever, but it is pretty nice. It will do me for now. He has a good voice, and I’m surprised I didn’t know that until now; there’s a nice tone in there, sweet and soft like a gentle hand threading through my hair, musical enough that it’s like Bean is a band all by himself, you could shut your eyes and hear a piano and a violin too, easy. It’s calming really, stops my heart from fluttering with worry and my fist curling into a tight white ball behind my back, where Bean can’t see. When I really listen to him like that, when I really hear what he’s singing about, the words remind me of my mom a little.

For you know, once even I was a little child, and I was afraid. But a gentle someone always came to dry my tears, trade sweet sleep for fears, and to give a kiss goodnight.

I used to do that all the time for my Mom if it got too much for her and she’d start crying. I’d find her curled up in a heap on the floor somewhere in a dusty corner of our dusty old house, bleeding too sometimes and I’d wipe her tears and her blood away with my grimy little fingers and kiss her forehead whispering ‘night, night mommy’. I’d do that for Bean, if he needs it, if that’s why he’s singing like this, though I probably wouldn’t call him mommy when I did it- because, well, that’s just a little bit twisted.

When the song is finished, softer than a sigh or a whisper, I reach out with two of my fingers and lightly touch the space underneath the eye that’s been beat up. Let me take care of you, I’ve done it before, and I’m pretty good at it- well, you know, up to that whole thing where my mom killed herself and all. Before he can do anything, it’s back at my side through, like I’ve been caught with my hand inside of somebody’s purse and I smile, gently, reassuringly like a good nurse should- not that I’d know obviously, my Mom never really got doctors in but after inhaling cat shit fumes from age one onwards my immune system is pretty much iron strong. I bet Bean is good at getting sick though, skinny and little for a boy just like one of my Mom’s sickly cats or something. He’s certainly good at getting beat up.

“I dunno what you said or did, but someone sure did a number on you. You look like shit,” I say, softly and there is a certain amount of fondness in my voice. I don’t care that he looks like shit, I care that he’s been through shit. I should have been there for him- I’m not sure what I coulda done but I should have- he’s been helping me and we’re supposed to be looking out for eachother. I mean, how the crap is Bean supposed to realise that we make a perfect team if I’m not there to be in a team with him? “Nobody ever taught you how to run away right, Mister Smarty Pants?”

But I suppose that’s my area of expertise, no one runs and hides quite like me, but Bean is the smart one- I’d say supposedly, because he doesn’t look to clever right now, if I didn’t know all about how smart he could be. So smart all the way up there in the clouds, singing songs with his eyes all the way closed and everything that there’s too much in there to bother with little old insignificant me. Whatever. None of that matters now, anyway because I’m the one taking care of him and yeah, if that isn't a reason to smile right now, I don't know what is.

Listening to his story, I only have to tip my head back and look up towards the sky beyond the towering walls and slipping slate rooftops to picture it. A real family, a real home. It’s weird, but when I was a little girl I never longed for that kind of thing- a mother who cooked dinner as opposed to lancing the corrugated metal of a tin of beans with a knife in trembling fingers, sometimes skating too close to her skin and sinking to the floor as little droplets of blood slowly dripped onto the floorboards in patterns and whorled shapes. A mother who danced and sang in the kitchen, brothers and sisters. I’d never wanted anything like that, never knew anybody could have something like that- but with the wistful way that Bean tells it, it must have been nice. Makes my heart sick for him, to think about it.

Because people like me were born to be here, in alleyways, barely clinging onto the edges of a life with nimble, dirty fingers and cracked, sharpened nails. I was always one step up from a feral child anyway, always dirty and surviving among the flaked and cracking parts of the world, closer to an alley cat in my DNA than anything else resembling a human being. I’ll spit and scratch if I have to. But Bean, Bean is here and he’s so slight and civilised with that perfect little full formed memory like something ripped from out of a catalogue, pretty mother with a pretty white smile I bet, neat hair, clean skin, everything glossy looking on the glossy pages. He shouldn’t be here, but I’m afraid to ask why he is, almost certain that something bad had to have happened to take him away from all that. Me though, I’ve pretty much always been here.

I miss my Mom so bad that my heart wants to burst every time I think about the fact that she isn’t around and it’s only now, when Bean stutters out through tears that I really acknowledge that. Scanning my brain, I try to dredge up one of our happy memories too; autumn when dead leaves sneaked into the attic through the gaps in the shingles and we flung them at each other, red and gold and brown getting caught in the tangles of her hair, dripping from her as she walked like shedding a skin. Maybe she sang too, I try to recall, twisting melodies in a low voice, repetitive but with no words only elongated vowels and staccato syllables that felt safe and right. That was it- we had no songs, but we made our own.

“I don’t know any songs, anyway- but that's probably for the best,” I confess, pull my knees into my chest and rest my chin on my knees. It’s safe like this, all tucked up into myself, warm and comforting. “But s’not rambling…and I wouldn’t mind if it was.”

Honestly, I wouldn’t- normally Bean isn’t like this. It’s all distance and coldness, but here and now I see him unfurling like a flower, ever so slightly or if the distance between us is like an icicle then here and now it’s starting to thaw, much quicker than even I’d anticipated. I’m gorging myself on the new information, the new kinship starting to build the way that I always knew it would and it’s more nourishing than any of the food that keeps running through my mind. He should get beaten up more often if this is what happens.

Though I only have to look at him and his beat up face to feel really guilty about thinking that.

“She sounds like she was nice…your mom, I mean.” Was, is- that’s where my words get a little bit unsure. I know that my Mom is for sure a was by now, saw that well enough when I found her in our tub; the steam still fogging up the glass in the bathroom, her blood staining the porcelain and shifting as her hair floated out around her like falling leaves in autumn. She’s not still there, I know that- the first time I went back I thought she might have been, still pale and ethereal as always, untouched by time and decay but she wasn’t. I suppose her husband must have paid for the funereal, or maybe not, and if she’s buried or if she was burnt then I don’t know. She’s just gone- every bit of her and the only things left are my memories.

So I have to assume that Bean’s Mom is a was to because if my Mom, my imperfect and crazy Mom, with her moods and her crying fits who never taught me real songs or made me real dinners became an is again then this place wouldn’t see me for the dust, that’s how fast I’d go back to her and to our house again. I can’t think of any reason other than death why Bean wouldn’t go back to his either.

I think about mentioning her to Bean, her hair, her eyes and that bright red lipstick she always wore smeared around her mouth and sometimes stained on her teeth but I only have to look over and see the shining tracks on his face that the tears have left and realize that it isn’t the time for my memories. Besides, I’ve kept my Mom locked so tight away inside of me for so long that it half feels like I made her up anyway- I don’t know anyone else that knows her, anyone else to share with, and sometimes being in that house only feels like a dream.

A slow, sardonic smile crept over my face as I turned round to look at Bean, “You really think I was the pink bedroom, porcelain doll type?” No way, more like the dead cat, barefoot, bite you as soon as look at you kind of girl. He’s tone doesn’t sound serious, but there is a probing question in there; something about family…drama? It’s a strange way to put it, more like a story in a book than something that had been real and tangible only a few years ago. I remember the events, have condensed them down into a neat little tale, but the emotion is something I can hardly recall- don’t really want to recall. Anyway, I wouldn’t call it drama- it’s not like I’m still traumatised or anything.

Mom’s wrists float up to the surface, deep welts in her skin. The bathroom is caked with mould, so I look at that instead, don’t scream or cry or beg her to wake up because I know she won’t.

“Shit,” I say and laugh a little, more hollow than I’d imagined, “I dunno…being out here sometimes other kid’s stories get back to you, kids like us- younger than us even- with these just…really bad things happening to them; parents and family members doing the most twisted sort of stuff,”I grimace, thinking of all the messed up kids I’ve seen over the years, with their bones showing through their skin like rocks in the thinnest paper bags, snapping and snarling, not daring to let anyone touch them…not after what their daddy did, their brother or whatever. Those girls who couldn’t have been more than fourteen sitting on dumpsters, crossing, uncrossing their legs and trying to catch the eyes of men passing by. That’s what I see as ‘drama’, me though…I just had my mom.

“So I had it good, I guess…got lucky, learned how to run or whatever and before…you know,… there was my mom.” And I can’t help but say it in the same, breathy reverential tone that Bean did. Sure I could sit for days and talk about all the ways she ended up screwing me over, all the things that she did wrong and all the things that I should have had, but I won’t. I won’t say anything bad about her, won’t hear anything bad said- not out of, I dunno, respect for the dead or anything like that. More out of respect for her and all the things that she did do right, or at least tried to- for everything that happened, she was never meaningfully cruel, never knowingly hurtful and she never once laid a finger on me.

I scratch my nose and laugh, look up to the sky and think about her red hair turning over to gray for as long as I could remember, my blue eyes, her brown ones, “She might not have been my actual mom, I dunno, it never really came up,” I confessed, airing some long festering suspicions- like a knowledge of how biology works; that it takes two people to make a baby and that most of the time a mother isn’t in her fifties when it happens and that half the time there is a passing resemblance between a mom and her kid, “But she was my mom in every way it counts.”

“And that was it. No brothers or sisters…no dad or uncles or aunts, no school, no nothing, holed up in this shithole of a house, like you can’t even imagine what this place looked like. Just her and me.” I smile, and murmur,“Against the world.” My smile faded slightly at the next part. “So yeah…she killed herself..in the tub, all laid out for me like a pretty picture and after that there was no one left,” I rushed out, not really wanting to reflect on it, on the night she cradled me close, stroked my hair, kissed my head, waited for me to sleep before doing it. The bathroom door was wide open, she had to have known I’d find her. Had to have known that she was all that I had.

“I was ten. And there was no fucking way I was ending up in some community home or with her husband,” I said hotly, voice trembling with anger as my fist curled into a ball “who, by the way, didn’t even know I existed til I was about nine years old….and he made me call him daddy…” I laugh bitterly again, nose curling in disgust of the memories of that whippet thin man in a sharp suit appearing one day like a spectre, holding out a handful of sweets, ripping apart my life and my house as easy as tattered old newspaper. I remember daddy’s pretty blonde lover, half his age, him putting me into pretty dresses, getting people to comb out the knots in my hair, trying to smile though there were always spiders running through it.

“No- he was happy to let my mom stay locked up in this old house with no electricity or running water, dead cats all over the floor while she just got sicker and sicker, no matter how hard I tried taking care of her, until he decided he wanted the property. Fuck that- someone like that aint in charge of me. I am. So I left mom…she left me anyway, I just ran and well,” I gestured to the alleyway like it was a shiny new palace, “here we are…I know people are looking for me…I can feel it, sometimes- but they won’t find me.” And that’s a solemn promise; to Bean, to daddy, to my mom and to myself.

I realise that what started out as something blasé, a straightforward telling of something that almost feels obligatory by now has descended into little more than a heated rant when one certainly wasn’t called for. I’ve said too, spilled it all out and found the contents of my soul to be quite meagre indeed when at first I felt as though they were insurmountable. People’s moms die, don’t they? All the time. People get over it, I’m over it.

“So yeah…it’s no big deal, really…not like what I’ve heard on seen and this aint so bad,” I shrug, forcing a joke.“Put me in an alleyway without a dead cat or a tonne of poop in it and it’s like I’m staying in the capitol. I got a place to bed down, I got my legs and my life…I got you,” I got you, I got you, and if I don’t I want to, badly…so badly that I immediately regret saying it, as is always the way with me and the things I want, and so I add, with a forced laugh “I got you, bleeding all over me like a stuck pig. Couldn’t be better.”

I clench my fists, slowly unclench them, watch them turning white, realising that there was I reason that I normally absolutely do not do this kind of thing. It makes me wince to think of what I’d said earlier, about all those kids whose stories had been worse than mine- after a while you stopped listening, stopped even trying to be empathetic because, living like this, it takes too much not to walk around in a daze; walking around and wondering what the point of living even is. Those kid’s stories made me hate people, hate adults and anyone with a shred of power over someone else, even more than anything else in this stupid world. In the end, all that hatred and concern and compassion is enough to burn a person down to a stub like a feeble candle peeling away to the wick, and once that candle is burnt down it won’t ever light again. It’s too exhausting to burn like that forever, for other people and for all their misfortune. So you just stop listening, just stop caring and every story starts to sound the same.

But I couldn’t ever stop caring about Bean even if I tried. It’s why just listening to him makes me feel physically ill, to the point of nausea, to the point of wanting to shake and lie down or something. Two years, only two years of memory is enough to begin with. I have a whole lifetime with my Mom compared to that and it’s a lifetime that I clutch so close to me, use to get me through the more difficult times in my life. If I didn’t have those memories of my mom, her hair, her lipstick and her night gown then I have no idea what I would have done up til now. It’s bad enough but the rest…

I want to cry- I don’t because it would look so stupid if I did, I don’t feel like I have the right to anyway, the right to have any reaction this at all- shit, I was fighting the urge to when my Mom came up. My dead mom when people die all the time, everyday without any fanfare at all. I don’t have the right to even think about it, because the stuff he’s describing…I have no reference point for at all and I shouldn’t be imagining it. But I do, I do and I can’t help myself. That one line ‘Cut me open like a fish’ plays endlessly through my mind, over and over again, and I have to picture it.

Picture something sterile and smelling of disinfectant, strange bright chemicals that look inviting but burn to the touch, or poison the system. But that doesn’t seem seedy enough, so the place becomes more like here. Grimy around the edges, stained strange, deep red with rust, other things and with an over powering smell of biting metal wrapped around decay. And there’s a kid there…and he’s a baby and he’s frightened and skinny and pale and he wants his mom so badly it’s like he’s missing a limb so he cries, and he cries- they don’t like that so they come in their white coats with their sticks and they inject him with something so that he doesn’t cry no more.

I want to find them, especially that man…scientist…if you can call him that; monster feels far more apt to me…I want to find that man and I want to kill him. But not at first, I want to find him and take him somewhere, away from what he knows and what he loves and make sure that he is frightened. And then, when it’s just the two of us, I want to open him up like a fish. I’ve seen the way they do it, a knife from stomach to sternum , toe to tip and pull apart the two sides of him with my bear hands. Listen to the scream as I plunge my fist into his guts, rummage around inside, see what makes him tick. And I’ll bash his big scientist brains against a wall, watch his eyes get dim and stupid, watch all the light and the life get drained right out of him.

I want it so badly that it frightens me, makes me convinced that it’s going to happen, as though wishing this hard makes something an inevitably. I should know by now of course that this isn’t the case; I’ve wished hard for big things, important things this hard before and never had anything good come of it. This time, I want to send up a prayer to something, anything, just as long as it gets all the way to the people in charge telling them that I won’t stand for this. That this person deserves to die for what they did to Bean. Killing him would have been kinder.

But if they killed him, I wouldn’t know him. If they had never taken him, I wouldn’t know him. I could have hated him even, a well dressed boy from a good part of town flicking me a coin on his way home from school, which I take of course because I am starving but it doesn’t stop me from resenting every inch of his pity. I don’t know how to feel about that, because I want him to be happy of course I do…but I also want me to be happy and I am sure that I wouldn’t be without him.

Which is why the curling thought, ‘They could still be looking for him you know, Tri. They might even find him” fills me with all sorts of dread, either side really- the scientists or the family. Either way he’d be going somewhere that I just couldn’t follow. It’s too depressing a thought that I can’t even draw comfort from the fact that he’s said that being with her is better than a lot of the situations he’s been in because…really, it’s a small comfort when most of the other situations he’s been in have been so horrific and terrifying. It’s like saying that I’m akin to a single punch in the eye when he’s been kicked repeatedly in the shin for however many years.

But what he says is so hopeless, I can’t help but loop my arms around him a little…but I feel frightened to do it now…just a little bit, and not in the skin prickling way that I was frightened before but more in a- is this okay, will this remind him of anything- sort of way, second guessing myself the way I used to do with my mom in her moods. I was never quite sure what was okay with her sometimes either…whether she wanted me there, wanted to stroke my hair and cry into my neck or be left alone with her thoughts. I hold it there timid and try to rearrange my face into a smile. It’s been oscillating wildly as far as I can tell through his story, curling disgust and bubbling anger and overwhelming sadness at the thought of it all. It’s such a weak pathetic smile that I finally manage to dredge up that I may as well have not bothered with it at all.

“It might happen,” I say weakly. It isn’t like me to do this fakely hopeful sort of routine, I’m too honest for that- priding myself on my ability to call a spade a spade, a crappy little alley way a crappy little alley because on the streets there is no time for false hope and sickly sweet sentiments. If we want to get by and keep ourselves alive we always have to put those things far aside and deal only in the harshest hardest truths. An honest thief, that’s what you have to aim to be. There is a snowballs chance in hell that Bean will find his parents, especially since its been…who even knows how many years…But I can’t help myself. And maybe it’s true. Knowing my luck he’ll find them. The people I love always find a way to leave me, why shouldn’t he be any different.

“You…you have your first name. That’s a start,” I say with a nod of my head. “Not much of a start…the teeniest tiniest start…but it’s still something, honest.” Am I hallucinating or am I pushing this? I don’t want him to find them, but here I am still making suggestions. It’s because I know that if I didn’t have my mom and I knew that there was a chance that she was out there somewhere still alive that I would do whatever I could to try and find her. “I mean…how many people like you can there be…how many two year olds get snatched from their beds?” Too many probably, dammit I hate this world so much sometimes that it’s hard to even breathe right.

“They won’t have stopped looking,” I say firmly. “No way. You don’t just stop loving someone because they aren’t around anymore,” I say, speaking entirely from personal experience. The day I stop loving my mom is almost certainly going to be the day that I stop living. “I mean if I knew my mom was out there somewhere maybe…if I hadn’t seen her dead in front of me myself…I would still be looking. And I wouldn’t stop until I found her either.” I would do the same for Bean to now, I know that I would. If I lost him then I’d spend my whole life getting him back. Because it’s not like I have anything else on. We are all of us creatures of habit, who fall hard and fall forever into things without asking to, if we aren’t vigilant, if we aren’t paying proper attention. I nod firmly like I know. “You just have to be strong.”

I slide down and rest my head slightly on his shoulders; the hunger is making it hurt a little, twisting up my synapses and making it difficult for me to focus so the urge to rest it a little while is almost overwhelming. Like the lights from the street lamps starting to glow, which are boring holes into my eyeballs, so I let them rest for a little while, eyes fluttering shut. “I don’t know why I’m telling you that though. Shit Bean, I didn’t know it til like five minutes ago…but you’re the strongest person I know. Hands down. Out and away.” My smile is broad and real as I add the cheeky aside, “You’d never guess it to look at you though.”

His shoulder is warm against my cheek, I can feel the slight heave of his shoulders as he breathes out. In that instance, I feel the urge to pull my head out and draw my head back out to look at him.

My Mom used to say that I was born of a falling star and she just plucked me out of the earth where she found me, but that isn’t who I am at all, I am made of dirt and twisting leaves and cat corpses, mundane and of the earth. But here is Bean, beaten up but still ethereal looking, who’s tumbled through inferno and supernova before being spat out from a distant place to be in front of me.

I lean forwards again and place a kiss on his cheek, why? I don’t know. It seems like something to do, a way to check that he is here and I have imagined him up the way that my Mom imagined me. It’s brief, I make sure of that, but he is there and solid. Pulling back I just smile, tilt my head to the side,“You know…I don’t know what they called you before…but you don’t look like a bean to me." No, to me, he looks like an exploding star....what do they call them? But somehow looking at him doesn’t burn my eyes…

No one’s ever looked at me the way that Bean does after I pull my head away, my lips from his cheek. No one’s ever wanted me or wanted me around. No one’s ever kissed me before. But I have burned with it and been burned down by it, wrapping myself into twisting knots of quiet frustration for the time we have spent together and as he presses his lips to mine, I can feel myself unravelling. And from something so simple too. If someone had told me this time last year that a kiss could make my stomach flip so, turn my heart into something so feeble and fluttering I would have laughed in their faces.

And yet, here I am, twisting my hands through grit and stones searching desperately for something to hold onto, to stop myself from floating. This wasn’t what I’d expected, when Bean had staggered in from the eye of a storm all bloodied and battered and broken. It was what I’d wanted but since when do scrappy little street rats get what they want? I’d wanted my mother to come back to me when I was a little girl and Daddy took me away from my house to his concrete tower and the world had delivered her to me in the form of a beautiful corpse, floating ethereal and strange in a porcelain bathtub bright red with her blood.

I’m rigid and cold under his lips at first, I can’t help myself- I’ve never done this before and it’s not something that you can learn to do all by yourself the way that running and surviving has to be,. Unwieldy as an icicle, I don’t push and I don’t pull. I simply am; only breathing and barely that. My hands drift forward, perhaps to touch, but only linger in the alley mud. I don’t venture forth, I don’t know if it’s even allowed and I what will happen if I do. Stuck solid and impotent I can only breathe his breath, feel his face against mine.

But, like icicles do, the cold doesn’t last and something inside of me melts, starts to burn. I close my eyes from the dank alley and press back into the kiss, trying my best to pour out these feelings creeping to the surface of me because contained as they are inside of my body I feel as though I am about to explode like the brightest of the supernovas. ‘I have wanted this for so long,’ I try to get my kiss to say.

But the wanting and the getting are always two very different things entirely. Take now for instance, me with my eyes clenched so tightly shut, a strange desperate element to the way that my breath escapes my nose. For all this dreaming of him kissing me, and I will admit that it has happened from time to time, there had never been any thought devoted to what would happen afterwards in my day dreaming. It’s not what you do. One rarely needed to think beyond the present in a split moment of perfect fantasy.

Pulling my head away, I examine his face closely, to either marvel at the new strength of my imagination; how lifelike the bruises on his skin look, how well I’ve managed to capture the gleam in his eyes. I’ve gotten it right down to the last detail; the cold bite of the ground on my backside, the bricks pressed into my back and the stifling air that rises in the hair’s breadth between us. That or this is real and I can marvel at whatever wind, however ill it might be, has brought me to him. Either way I am scared for it to end, scared for the consequences that this happiness and this getting what I want will bring me. I do not want another beautiful corpse to run away from.

So of course the logical explanation is just not to stop. I break the kiss, only to let my eyes flicker over him, for a minute…to whisper the words “Julian” breathy when wrapped around a smile, before darting my head forward for another, gripping hard with my fingers until I can feel the bones in his shoulders, pressing into the kiss with all the force that I have. I wish that I could be kinder, tenderer about it, kinder to him even if time and the people of the past had not. But I am frightened that if I don’t pull hard enough that he will pull away; that in the moment when he kissed me, he realized his mistake, brought on by a concussion, by misplaced feelings of regret and high emotions. I’m just some scrappy little street rat, and we never get what we want. So we take it.

Just as I take his shoulders now, take his lips. Stealing kisses.

You don’t ask before you pick a pocket. Because who would ever say yes to a thief?

My hand slips from his shoulders, up around his neck to cradle him close, the other coming around his back, possessive as anything because he is mine. All mine. No other family, no other relations, no owners locked in labs. And I am his and only his too, a girl without a mother, perhaps who has always been without a mother. Both of us with seemingly no identity, so together we can make our own, build each other up from nothing; piecing together hands, eyes, teeth and hair- bringing each other to perfection .

Kissing the corner of his mouth, I curl my fingers around the hairs at the back of his neck and finally force myself to pull away from him. It’s a wrench, but I know that it has to happen some time. We are separate things, two halves of a whole but separate all the same. And the pulling away now feels lonelier than all the years on the streets fending for myself, missing my mom, ever did.

He doesn’t look like a Julian, no more than he looks like a Bean. Those are other people’s names for him. Now though he is something new, unique and unnameable. Say something, my brain urges but I have no words. As though all those stolen kisses have stolen them all.