get a little restless (flip + icarus)

flip jones.

the door swings open. icky looks like shit. the circles under his eyes are deep and hollow, and his eyes are so red if i didn't know better i'd think he was high out of his mind. nah, he's been crying. but you can't blame him, really, after the month he's had. he holds up an empty bottle of some sort of spirit. it's hard to tell exactly because the bottle is empty.

"you're late, asshole. i started the party without you." this much, i can tell.

i grin at him, hold my hands up like i'm being apprehended by a peacekeeper. "i wouldn't want to hold you up, my man. you go right ahead."

the kid deserves a break. i'm surprised he hasn't kicked the shit out of something yet, just to get the pain of it all out. maybe i'll suggest that to him later, if the vodka doesn't do the trick. behind him, i can see a little sliver of the inside of his house. it's a mess. i suppose his whole family is having some kind of combined breakdown. i'm not really sure how these things go. but i can bet cleaning seems kind of futile when you're whole life has fallen apart. (my life is pretty much the same as it was last year, and you'd be hard pressed to find my bedroom floor.) nah, it's my job to encourage him to forget about all that hard stuff.

i hold out the flowers to him. "picked these for you. maybe put them in water." i wasn't a flower-keeping expert, but sometimes ma bought some at the market, if she was feeling extra depressed about my dad walking out on her. she always trims the stems with scissors and then arranges them in a glass jug with water. they always die, though, so i'm somewhat sceptical of the whole plant-care ritual.

i remember, then, that his bottle of drink is empty, and he is probably worried about that. drinking is a significant part of our evening plans. i dig around in my backpack and emerge with my own bottle, completely full. "don't worry. we're sorted," i say, reassuringly.

"hop on, then," i tell him, returning the bottle to my bag for safe keeping and gesturing dramatically to my bike. he looks somewhat unsteady on his feet, so i'm hoping he has the strength to balance on the handlebars while i peddle him to our picnic destination. i have the perfect field in mind. 

flip jones.

he takes my flowers and then he is ready to go. i think briefly that he could look more impressed, but then i remember the bad time™ he is having, and i make the gracious decision to forgive him. the last dregs of his drink drip onto the ground; a waste. i was raised not to spill even a drop, to worship at the altar of the bottle, but he spills it without so much as a glance down. the ground drinks it up, parched. here, he takes his cue to act grateful: "cute. you're a real gentleman, flip... bringing me flowers before you get me fucked up. how did i get so lucky?" the note of sarcasm in his voice is loud and clear. i am glad, this means he is still alive, and the dead rot in his eyes doesn't permeate through to the core. he joins me on my bike.

it has been a while since i have had a passenger, and this passenger is already half-drunk and all out of balance, so we start of at a wobbly, haltering pace. it doesn't matter. we are not in a rush. in fact, i have a good go at taking a swig from my own bottle while we are moving. the liquid drips down my chin. i put the bottle away, save it for when i can focus on the task at hand.  

i'm trying, really quite determinedly, to bury my memory of getting fucked up with rhys beneath a hundred other renditions of getting wasted. so far, it hasn't worked, and the whisky still tastes like him, but i'm willing to try a thousand times on the off-chance it will help. icky does not know that tonight is not only to help him recover, but also, just a little bit to help me. 

"hope you picked a nice spot," icky says, and i almost can't see the path ahead of me because for a second all i can see is the other nice spot, the spot up on the rooftops. i had had drunken visions of spending a summer up there, away from the world, two boys in the sky. i will never go there again, never see the skyline from that angle. i will need to find a new nice spot, a new drinking partner, a new fixation for my wandering mind and wandering hands. it's as simple as that, although it doesn't feel like it. it was just a silly little hope anyway, a tiny flame lit in my stomach. there was no promise of it spreading, of blooming into fire. despite this, it has been extinguished and i am cold all the way through. 

i choose another spot. this time, it is a field on the outskirts of the district. long grass provides shelter, great long evening shadows, and a sort of sanctuary. the road that leads here is long and empty - we didn't see a single other soul as we peddled here, icky clinging to my waist just a little too tightly. i don't tell him it hurts a bit, because i'm a tough guy, and anyway, he is sad, so i better not push it with him. on the way, he says, "maybe i'll pick you some flowers, braid it into that rats nest you call your hair." 


i laugh at this, pointedly unbothered, but i run my hand through my unruly waves anyway. they are wild, and, like me, staunchly against the following of rules. i skid the bike to a stop, offer icky a dramatic helping hand, see his expression, already groggy. 

"here we are," i indicate the field to our right. "i know, i know. i outdid myself. you can't believe it, you've never seen a place more beautiful." the dead grass rustles a laugh at my joke. i jump the fence, lay out the blanket from my backpack in a makeshift picnic set-up, and collapse dramatically onto it. "i'm sure it'll be fine, but if you see anybody coming, run, okay?" it would be no fun if it wasn't trespassing.

i raise the bottle to the sky. "cheers," i declare, and pass it to icky, letting him decide for himself what, exactly, we should be toasting to. 

flip jones.

icky refuses to run. i resign myself to leaving him behind if anybody comes to shoo us away; i want to get so drunk that i can't feel my extremities. probably, it will be fine. i've used this field before for various activities. only once have i been caught. it was a pretty ridiculous sight; i ran with my pants down for about a mile until i had to time to stop and pull them up. tonight, though, i plan to keep my clothes on, out of respect for icky's dead sister, or something. i am here to cheer him up, though, so whatever he wants is okay with me.

i lay back on the blanket and look at the sky. the stars are starting to creep out. the world moves a little below me, the beginning of a good time. icky is a blurry silhouette against the moon, a spectre. it is fitting. he has one foot with me and another planted somewhere else far away. 

"do you want to play truth or dare?" i ask him. it is juvenile, the sort of game we might have played in fifth or sixth grade, but also the sort of game i find myself proposing when i am six or seven drinks deep and the night is full of possibilities. he seems like he has something to get off his chest. i don't wait for his reply. "i'll go first. truth or dare?" 

flip jones.

we arrive at the part of the game that i never see coming. the part where i have to come up with an idea. this is not my strong-suit. i take a long swallow, drag it out for an unnecessary amount of time. it settles in my stomach, does not even try to jump back out again. i make a dramatic 'ah' sound, stalling. 

i run back through all my favourite ever dares in my mind. i remember streaking through the middle of the sports fields at one o'clock in the morning, pouring a quart of cooking oil over my gym teachers head, cutting the strings on everyone's tents on a camping trip so that the little domes blew away and scattered themselves about the district like discarded balloons. i glance around us. we are cloaked in darkness, here in the field, far enough from the road that a passer-by would miss us, just icky and me. there is nobody else's day to fuck up, and, if i am honest, i don't really want to fuck up icky's day on the first dare. i am here to make him better. i need to ease him into it. 

"i dare you to scream as loud as you possibly can for one whole minute." 

i read about catharsis in a book once. apparently if you are loud, aggressive, violent, all of the bad thoughts seep out of you. it might be possible to empty out some of the rot in icky's head. "i'll scream with you, if you want." i have some rot of my own i wouldn't mind shifting. 

when it is my turn, i pick truth. 

flip jones.

when icky screams i know i made the right choice, pressed the right button. i scream with him in support. our voices carry far across the fields, maybe almost far enough for another human being to hear them, maybe not. i stop screaming, after a while, catch my breath, but he goes on, and on and on, and i watch his face. it is contorted, twisted. it would be ugly if i did not find his pain beautiful in the way that art is beautiful, art is beautiful when it is disturbing, distressing, grotesque. his face is all of these things. he does not stop for a long time. while he screams, i continue drinking. 

he grabs my hand; his fingernails cut deep in my flesh. the sound of his yell turns to white noise in my ears, it becomes a background to my own thoughts. only the grip of him, his palm in my palm, keeps me grounded in the field. 

eventually it is over. he looks refreshed, as though he has gained a little power back. he gasps, splutters, coughs, and then drinks. the alcohol quenches him, he recovers. 

when he is ready, he has a question ready for me: “who did you lose?” he says, as though the question is obvious.

i falter. the game requires that i root around in my soul for something worthwhile to offer. i cannot brush him off, dismiss his question, and then expect him to keep playing with me. to receive, you must give. to take, you must find. so it goes. i search for the words. i remind myself he is so drunk, i am so drunk, that neither of us are likely to remember any of this tomorrow. it will be a hazy blur of screams into the darkness. we will laugh about it over breakfast. here we are anonymous even from ourselves. i relent. 

“myself.” i say.

icky deserves more than this. i know all about what he has lost, who was taken from him. it is written all over his face every moment of every day; he is a wide open window. rain is getting in. i attempt to prise myself open a little more. 

“i’ve lost a lot of maybes. like maybe, if my dad hadn’t left, i’d be a better person. or, maybe not. maybe ma would give a shit, then, maybe she’d be happier. or, maybe he would hit her and things would be worse.”

that isn’t all, i am on a roll. 

“maybe if i had never met rhys i wouldn’t have cared, or maybe if he’d never been reaped i’d never have seen him again anyway. maybe it would have been nothing. maybe it would have changed me. or maybe not. i don’t know a lot of things.”

i shrug. it is the first time i have said his name aloud since he left. it feels foreign in my mouth. i am perpetually running to avoid the television. i wonder if icky ran, or if icky watched. i cannot ask him this question. even i know it is tactless. i am not all rough edges. 

“is it even possible to lose something you never had?” 

the question is rhetorical, open-ended. but it is the truth.