Basil Anatola ➤ 7 ➤ fin

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
- OSCAR WILDE

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1. THE PAINTER

"Is this yours?"

If you were to tell me that there is nothing romantic about gravity, then you're wrong. You see, pessimists tend to observe that no matter how many times you try going up, you will always be forced back down. Gravity is just a teasing tyranny, a reminder of our vulnerability, a push towards the bottomless realization that we were made out of dirt and dust and carbon - not wings. Humans don't fly. What's so romantic about falling on your back every time you climb up? Where's the beauty in battle scars and faded bruises?

Sure, everyone looks at the fall - everyone notices how the scars never fade and the bruises never stop tingling. Pessimism is a glittering rag doll that a neglected child would grasp with sticky and greedy hands because she knows life can't get any better than this. People spend a hell of a lot of time trying to define humanity - we spend our lives trying to pinpoint our own identities and self-driven purposes as if our entire existence was some map we had to navigate without the roads - but maybe humanity was simpler than we all originally thought it would be. Maybe that's all humanity gets - a worn rag doll and a few purple bruises from on the way down.

"Yeah, it's mine."

"Pretty good, kid."

"Thanks."

No one seems to notice the feeling they get the split second before they hit the ground. Lungs inflated with sweet breath, palms spread wide open, gravity - even if for just a moment - feels like a parachute. Every nerve in your entire body goes haywire, fuzzy with electricity and a demand to survive. What isn't romantic about humanity's instinct to live, even when they know the scars and bruises will immediately come next, even when they know all the odds are against them? We weren't made simply to exist, to bypass life like colorless commercials or the muffled noise of traffic. Humanity goes beyond survival and instinct and endurance, it is about creating something even while we are falling.

"Finding good art, these days, is like finding good people: it's hard to weed out the counterfeit from the real deal."

"Yeah. I guess so. I know a lot of people like that."

Artists are the ones who take the split second during a fall, and use it for leverage for climbing up again. To many people, gravity seems to just be a matter of science, or in other words, no matter at all. It is something we learn to become numb to; we bare its weight in the same way Atlas bared the sky - merely because we have to.

Why are we so afraid to push up against the sky? We shouldn't just bare the weight of the sky, but march with it. We are not made soldiers in the womb, but somehow, we still learn to cradle guns like babies and march to the beat of our pulses. No, we are not made soldiers, but life does make an army out of us.

Skies are heavy burdens, and if there were a star for every artist who made art like he made love, our nights would be pitch black.

Except, maybe, for one single light dotting the blank and unpainted horizon.

"My name's Henry Holloway, by the way, kid. Mr. Holloway, to you."

"Pleasure."

"Well, not just yet."

When I met the last person I'd offer patronage to, he carried the entire universe on the palm of his hands. Literally. Black and blue and yellow paint smeared against the creases in his flesh when he rubbed his palms together - and I'm no astronaut, but it sure did look like a galaxy. He walked like a man who came back from the moon, too, like his return to Earth and the gravity in the atmosphere pressed down against his worn skeleton so that everything about him drooped like a wilted flower, even the corners of his lips. He walked like he's seen it all, like he's done everything that's needed to be done. He was a young boy carrying a millennia’s worth of stardust in his hands.

He sat on a corner of a street, selling paintings for $5 each. You would've spotted him from the top of a 10-story building - the way he held his brush like a lover, and not just an instrument, made him stand out like a sore thumb.

"Do you know what a patronage of the arts is?"

"Yeah, of course."

"You see, kid, that's sort of my job."

Looking at this kid's paintings felt like falling all over again, as if I were spiraling down an atmosphere that had no ground for me to land on. These needed to be in galleries, not on the corners of gray sidewalks.

"You... you want to be my patron? You want to sponsor me?"

"Well, it beats selling paintings in the middle of a street."

"Mr. Holloway, I-"

"Telling you now, kid, I won't take no for an answer."

"Well, yes! I don't know what to say -"

Gravity can be as romantic as it is lethal. People never really seem to realize that falling doesn't hurt - hitting the ground does. Existence occurs on accident - our entire world was created through a blizzard of cosmic dust and carbon - but we at least have some control over what we want to do with it.

"Maybe start by telling me your name. Do you have one, or am I just gonna have to keep calling you kid?"

Choose what you want to do after you hit the ground. There are alleyways, and there are staircases - and either choice will lead you to another fall again, this time higher, faster, and more painful.

There are people who choose to stay on the ground and watch the stars like that - backs pressed on the damp floor, neck swollen from straining to catch a glimpse of the sky, battered by their own defeat and the weight of gravity. And, then, there are people who cannot stomach defeat, who cannot look at the stars until they are cupping them in the palm of their own hands. Stars can burn through your skin, but every artist who has not experienced tragedy - who has not held his own sadness in between the expanse of his palms - is probably not a very good one. Those who hold on are the ones who will climb back up again, and the ones who can call themselves artists.

"It's Basil Anatola."

2. THE GRAFITTI ARTIST

We forged cities in our wake, trampling weeds and wilted flowers from ceremonies raised for the dead. Our calloused hands were more dangerous than iron and more destructive than bombs as we shook tin cans filled with metallic paint and sprayed them across oceans of forgotten names carved onto concrete. Zelda Munich, Napa Thorns, Drake Albany - the colors we painted onto their tombs were more colorful than their entire lives must've been.

Most of these graves remind me of wilted rose gardens - nothing more than just mounds of yellow weeds that no gardener bothers to look after anymore. Even water from a fountain of youth could not resurrect this cemetery.

"Promise me you'll paint my tombstone." We were lying under a tree, with our hands behind our heads, and the damp soil beneath us seeping into our winter coats. "If this is gonna be my eternal resting place, it better be fucking paradise."

"Sure, if you'll paint mine." He said, his voice coated in sarcasm.

I snorted. "As if I'd live to see the day, Basil."

Constellations spun above our heads, and streamed through the silhouette of the tree's black foliage. I wanted to hold the universe in my hand, but instead I was grasping at dead earth and empty tin cans. My life is a cigarette stub crushed on a curb. I've spent too much time in a box to be buried in one.

"Wouldn't this be the perfect place to be buried?"

"Shut up, Roland, stop talking like you're going to die."

"We all do, eventually."

"Yeah, well not anytime soon, asshole." A small laugh escaped his mouth like a whisper.

"Wanna bet?"

The friction lit between my palms as I rubbed them against each other was bright enough to heat atomic bombs. Or, at least, enough to light the cigarette perched between my teeth.

Basil lifted the flickering flame of his match to the tip of his cigarette, and then did the same to mine. We both laid there, stiller than corpses, except for the smoke we exhaled through our lungs.

For the past four years, life was like this - synchronized routines of lighting fires only to put them out at sunrise. Peacekeepers call us the graffiti bandits, the graveyard artists. Our bodies are lanky enough (with torsos so tight that our ribcages sometimes press against our chests like fingerprints after a harsh winter) to slide through the gaps of the iron gates that surround the cemetery. At night, we paint universes onto the gravestones of those who couldn't even light a city. When the darkness melts away into nothing but cowering shadows, we leave nothing but fading foot tracks on the dew kissed grass, and wet paint sinking into the crevices of stones. We make their corpses worth remembering, we make the people clean their names and plant them roses.

Of course, that's just a pettily pretty way of masking what we're really thinking. We are not the benevolent Robin Hoods of District 7 - all artists are crude and blunt in their own work. Every artist who has not encountered tragedy is probably not a very good one.

I met Basil in art class, four years ago, when we both got suspended from school for turning in nude portraits of the teacher for our art final. I showed him how to steal cigarettes from the drugstore owner while he wasn't looking and he showed me how to light a match without burning the tips of my fingers.

Our minds are both as scattered as ashen debris of an abandoned city, as disintegrated as the skin of the corpses we lie on top of. I've tried to disinfect my mind with rotten images, but Basil seems immune to this kind of torture. Either that, or he's pretty good at hiding it.

He's always been that way. He stares at the skies when we live in the gutters. I wish I could crane my neck up as high as he does, but my bones have grown stiff from years of looking down with clenched fists. The gutters made me forget about the stars, because, by God, it is bleak down here. So dark, it can make a child shrivel into an old man in a matter of minutes (I should know, it happened to me). But somehow, each and every time, Basil manages to light a match.

When a flashing light slivers across the grass a breath away from our feet, I shoot him a look. We've never been caught before, but there have been nights when we were pretty damn close to it, but I'd much rather this night not be one of those nights.

"Put out your cigarette, we gotta go." I whisper in a hushed tone while flopping over to my stomach and in an attempt to crawl away from the light as cautiously as possible without catching any attention.

"It's hardly 10 PM, Roland, are you serious?" Basil said in a harsh whisper, but he followed my moves anyway.

"Unless you wanna get your ass whipped, I suggest we get the hell out of here." I wish I could say I was exaggerating.

"You've lost your spunk, Roland," He replied, a smirk on his face as we crawled on our forearms, away from the glaring light that was now beaming in shaky movements across the graveyard. "Your spunkness, your spunknity -"

"I'm almost completely sure those aren't words."

"- Your spontaneity. Goddammit, this isn't english class! You're proving exactly my point! Jesus Christ, you turn nineteen and suddenly you can't accept made up words?"

"God, shut up, Basil!"

Suddenly, he sat upright from his crawling position, dangerously close to being netted by the light. "If growing up means losing my spunknity, then I'm not sure I want to grow up -"

"Are you fucking nuts?!"

"I know, I know. You'll say, 'But everyone grows up sooner or later, Basil baby,'" His voice increased in volume as he mocked me in a not very accurate way. "But, I'm still seventeen and have got a chance at living and keeping my spunknity! So, if you'll please, don't try poisoning me into conforming to your toxic ways." And then, in a crouched position, he ran to the nearest gravestone and pulled out a tin can from the inside of his jacket, evading all flashlights as he did so.

"This fucking kid," I muttered under my breath as I hastily followed him, almost tripping as I ran after his trail.

Basil's like that, he likes threats more than he likes safety. I'm not saying I'm any different (hell, I'm pretty sure I'm the one who even made him this way), but I do know where to draw the goddamn line. He's more of a sculptor, than a painter, in the way that he can sculpt challenges from moments where there are none.

The lights beamed like a lighthouse scanning for lost ships amidst a storm, or, perhaps more appropriately, the lights of a jail tower detecting runaway fugitives trying to hop over barbed wire fences. I heard footsteps coming closer as my desperation to get the hell out of here heightened.

"Basil!" I hissed as I reached him. He was kneeling down behind a tombstone tall enough for its shadow to cover our figures if we crammed ourselves behind it close enough.

"Oh. Roland," He replied nonchalantly, as if I encountered him during a stroll in the park. "Just in time, I've seen to hit some artist's block -"

"God, I don't have time for this."

" - What should I paint on this beloved deceased one's stone?"

"How about a fucking flashlight?"

"God, Roland. That's brilliant."

"Are you some kind of idiot?"

"If so, then idiocy has never felt so brilliant."

He began to spray the outline of his painting just as the footsteps reached us. I clenched my eyes shut and dug my nails into the grass, already knowing how hard the punches would come toward my face but bracing for it anyway. That's the funny thing about life, we prepare for survival even when we know the bruises will come.

Instead of a hit to the cheek, however, "Basil?" hits my ears instead.

I open my eyes to glance at the man before us, covered in as probably as many wrinkles as there are tombstones here. His white hair is tucked neatly under a brown hat, and in his hands he carried the beaming flashlight.

"Mr. Holloway?" Basil squints against the white light, bringing a hand above his forehead to shield his eyes, and his back straightens as he drops the can. "What are you doing here?"

"Visiting my wife," He makes a gesture toward the stone Basil was, only seconds ago, drawing a flashlight onto. "My nephew's a guard here. He let me in." He raised an eyebrow. "What're you doing here?"

"I'm, um, I'm just... I'm working?"

"What kind of work involves spray paint at 10 PM?"

"Um. I'm not really sure."

"Huh." The white haired man says as he steps back and places his hands at the waistband of his khakis. He takes a look around the graves around him and I can tell from the change in his facial expression that he's seen the paintings. "Are you vandalizing a cemetery?"

"Well," I say, taking this time to pipe in with my input during this unlikely conversation. "I'd hardly call it vandalizing. I see it more as beautifying."

The man looks at me, then to Basil, then back again.

"You got an explanation for this, kid?"

"Oh sure," I say, slapping the now pale faced Basil on the back. "This kid's got lots of explanations, his mouth is full of words. He calls it his spunknity."

Basil rushes to stumble to his feet, shooting me a quick look that probably means I'll pay for it later, and raises his palms out to the man. "Look, please, I'm sorry about this -"

"I mean, damn kid, I know you've got some talent, but I didn't realize you exercised that talent over the dead."

"I don't mean to! I'll clean this crap off, Holloway, I promise, I -"

"Kid, I don't want to hear it."

"Please, Holloway, I'm sorry! I'll clean it all off! I'll buy you a month's worth of cigars or something! Holloway, please!" Seeing Basil bend to someone like this was both comical and painful to watch.

"Don't you realize how many people you're hurting by doing this?"

"I didn't mean any harm, I swear, Mr. Holloway, I'm sorry, I'll clean it off -"

"Clean 'em all off."

"What? I mean, yes, okay I will, I'll clean them all!"

"All of them?"

"Yes, I swear -"

"Good." He replied, sticking a hand in his pocket and smirking. He extended his free hand to tap the top of his wife's tombstone. "Good. Remember, Nina wants hers extra shiny."

"Yes, okay, of course -"

"Alright, then, get out of here, kid."

"Yes, sir, okay, see you then, bye, sorry, good night -"

Basil walked away feeling smaller than we had moments, ago. I could tell in the way his palms hung by his sides unclenched, and his shoulders sagged gently like his coat was too heavy for him. I offered him another cigarette and he took it without hesitance.

"Who was that guy?"

"My patron. Or whatever." He ran a hand over his face and let out a shaky sigh. "He sponsors my art. Gives me money, advertises my paintings and shit." Basil glanced at me with a hint of a genuine smile traced on his lips. "He's my chance out of the gutter."

We slipped through the ironclad gates quietly, our footprints already fading behind us as we walked away. The saddest parts of my nights are coming home. In the graveyards, I am a giant trampling over shadows, where the cemetery is my city and the tombs are the skyscrapers. For once, we are not the ones beneath someone else's feet. Leaving this place is just a reminder of what a pair of fragile fools we really are.

"What's so bad about the gutter?" I asked. "After a while, you get accustomed to the smell."

He laughed. "Is this your way of saying you'll miss me?" In typical Basil Anatola fashion, he sloppily hung his arm around my shoulders and leaned his weight against mine. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were in love with me."

"Yeah, if being in love with you meant to miss saving your ass from the Peacekeepers."

He laughed, again. His arms retracted themselves from around my shoulders as he lifted his neck to look up at the sky. My gaze didn't follow his, but I like having him around to remind me of the possibility that, one day, maybe I still can.

"Okay, then, maybe I am just a little bit in love."

3. THE STORM

There's been an ache in my chest for a long time. I spend a lot of nights painting in Mr. Holloway's empty house, since I can't do it at my own. He tells me that there are ghosts in there, but not the kinds we were raised into fearing, but I also think I'm becoming one of them. My skin feels translucent, like my flesh is burning away after seventeen years of trying to hold back universes behind them. I'm made of hot gas, but I can't expand any longer. Oh, but "Basil, baby, you're such a kid." You don't understand - the paint on my hands feels more like blood, even after the soapy water drains them away. Mr. Holloway is usually quiet, but when he speaks it hits me like a canon. He tells me that artists who have never experienced tragedy are probably not very good ones. I wish he wasn't so damn right all the time.

I don't remember when home stopped feeling like home. I remember wood breaking and the sound of iron clashing against iron, but I don't remember when my family collapsed upon itself. I still come home to them every night. Cause isn't that what family's about? Not leaving each other? No matter what?

I ask myself a lot of questions these days, but I'm always being force fed the answers to questions I never even asked. My throat is sore from swallowing harsh words down my throat as my family collapses upon me, time after time again. I've stopped fooling myself into thinking I can rebuild them.

One night, I came home late and my father spewed venom at me until we woke up the sun. I don't remember what we said, but I do remember my father throwing a book across the room, and my mother crying into her hands until she decided to go back to bed to "leave us to deal with it." After spending a night tagging dark alleyways, with the old spray cans that used to be meant for graveyards, my hands were stained with paint - but my father would've much rather seen them dipped in blood or, better yet, amputated. It was winter, but he pushed me out into the frost-covered lawn, to the side of our splintering house, and forced an ax into my hands. At first, I thought he was going to chop them off himself.

Instead, he put a block of wood onto the tree stump he uses by the side of the house to chop firewood into halves. Then, in all his rage, he crossed his arms and jerked his chin towards the ax. "Go ahead."

"What?"

"I want you to cut the fucking wood, Basil! Go ahead!"

In the house, I could hear the muffled sound of feet shuffling against the wooden floors and a door slamming. My mother and my sister were far too used to the swell of rage attacking this house. How long do you have to endure anger for it to make you numb? However long, I've endured far longer.

"Why?"

"You ask too many questions, boy."

"Not like you've got answers for them anyway."

"What was that?" When he spoke, fog rushed out of his mouth. My knuckles were turning white from gripping the handle of the ax, and the cold weather nipped at my thin t-shirt.

When I lifted the ax, that felt too shaky and too big to fit in my hands, it landed at least two inches away from the block of wood.

"For God's sake, boy! Try again!"

When I let the ax drop in my hands, again, the steel edge landed in the middle of the block, but did not cut all the way through. It was stuck.

He made a gesture as if to strike me, but stopped himself. I wish he would've hit me, though - it would've given me a reason to hit him back. His face was as red as my face was white, and his jaw clenched and unclenched until he dropped his arm and let out an exasperated sigh, the fog from his breath unfurling around him. "You can raise a fucking paint brush, but you can't pick up a goddamn ax?"

"What is it? Tired of raising weak boys in your house?"

"No, boy, I'm tired of raising you!"

We weren't always like this; families aren't born into venom. I have foggy memories of sitting on my father's shoulders as he walked around the forests by our home, where the trees seemed tall enough to pierce through the sky. He thought he was raising a strong boy who would grow into broad shoulders that could bear the weight of tree trunks and tree roots, but I was enamored with the light that splattered across the thin foliage. It wasn't what he wanted, and he hated me for it.

Once he left the lawn and I could hear the front door clattering behind him, I lifted the ax and threw it at the one place I knew I couldn't possibly miss - the house. It broke through the splintered wooden wall, and I ran before he would notice the broken shackles.

I've spent long nights asleep on Mr. Holloway's couch or shivering under bridges. I was used to running away from home when the one I already had was touched with a darkness that even daytime could not eliminate.

When I knocked on Mr. Holloway's front door, my jaw was clenching and unclenching and my eyes were red with tears that wouldn't fall. I could be a ghost, but I looked worse than one. My skin was pale all except for the red rimmed around my eyes and the edge of my nose.

The door cracked open, and revealed a Mr. Holloway with a cigar in his mouth. It was still morning, and I could smell coffee brewing from his kitchen. "Shit, kid," He began, cracking the door open wider. "You look horrible. What happened?"

Somewhere between "shit" and "horrible," I gently pushed past him and entered his house. "Nothing, I just needa paint."

The room where I keep all of my supplies was open, and I swiftly hauled up a blank canvas onto a frayed easel and grabbed my brush and some paints. I didn't look, but I could hear the wooden floor creaking under Mr. Holloway's weight as he leaned against the doorframe. "No, you need to tell me what's going on."

I didn't answer him, instead, mixed the brush with black paint and splattered it against the canvas. I wasn't really painting anything, just stabbing at the easel until the brush was worn into a stub and my face began to fade from white to red.

Mr. Holloway walked up next to me. "That's definitely not going to sell."

"Nothing's fucking wrong, okay?!"

"That's not what I asked."

The ache in my chest that has been sitting there for so long, now, felt like it exploded in my rib cage. I wish I could've died, right there next to the old man's feet, but instead I sunk to the wooden floor and put my head in between my knees. My breathing was rapid, like my lungs were to weak to absorb anymore oxygen but they kept trying anyway. Humans are such pitiful creatures, always grabbing at any instinct to live even when there are no more reasons.

It wasn't his fashion, I know Mr. Holloway (in his Sunday robe and a cigar still hanging from his finger tips) would rather be eating his breakfast than dealing with all of this right now, but he sat on the ground next to me, anyway, so in silent appreciation, I didn't protest. For a while, it was quiet, except for the sound of our breaths. The quiet reminded me of dust drifting through golden air, or the sound of funerals.

"You know," He started softly, "When my wife died, I snuck into the cemetery and chopped down a tree. The one right next to her grave." I didn't respond, but I lifted my head from my knees and looked at him. He laughed like he just told a dinner party joke. "I was a 65 year old man walking through a graveyard, at night, dragging an ax around. Can you imagine that? Probably scared the shit out of a couple of workers." He shook his head and smiled. "You know what I did after that?" He turned his head to look at me, his eyebrow lifted. "I came back the next night, and planted a new tree."

I know which one he's talking about, and I know he knows, too. It's the same one we used to lie under after escapades at the cemetery, where we buried as much empty tin cans and cigarette stubs as there were bodies.

"I still wasn't okay until a while after that," He continued, his voice so low it was almost a whisper. "But, you know, that - that helped."

"You want me to chop down some trees?" I laughed, dry and humorless. "You're beginning to sound like my dad."

He shook his head, and twirled his burnt out cigar in between his fingers. "That's not what I'm saying, kid. You know that."

I leaned my head against the back of the easel and spread out my legs before me, not meeting his eyes. Instead, I stared at the wall in front of me and waited until my hands stopped shaking to speak again. "A lot of people keep telling me things that I should know. 'I should know better than to start trouble, I should know how to be a good son, I should know how to use a goddamn ax'. I don't really know anything, though, at least not for a while now."

Mr. Holloway opens his mouth as if to speak, but I interrupt him. "People keep telling me about the five stages of grief." Like I'm some kind of sick patient who needs their false sympathy and delusional therapy sesssions. "They say I'm stuck in the anger stage." For the last month, my knuckles have collected purple bruises like medals, and more than once, I found myself lying in the middle of an alley, wishing I was dead - but not quite there, yet. I guess, in that respect, they're not all wrong.

"I think you're stuck in the denial stage."

I turned my head to glance at him. "What? How?"

He shrugged, not meeting my eyes. "You didn't go to his funeral."

I blinked. "And?"

"Well, why didn't you?"

Funerals are monotone ceremonies for the dead. Black suits and muffled condolences aren't even a footstep in comparison to the stampede of the person they're burying. It would have been easy to sit on the stiff pews in my Sunday best, but, on that day, I cracked my knuckles across the jaws of other broken boys I met in dark alleyways. The purple bruises dotted my face like constellations, and if you connected all the pieces together, it'd form the image of a boy with a fractured smile and vacant eyes.

"I was busy."

"Bullshit."

"What?"

"Bullshit. That's complete bullshit."

"You know, you curse an awful lot for an old man."

"You lie a lot for a kid who hasn't lived long enough to lie about many things."

"Goddammit, I'm not lying about anything. I know what happened, you don't think I know by now?"

"Yeah, kid, except 'knowing' something and accepting it are two different things."

"He's dead, Holloway!" Already, my words begin to swell in my throat until my mind is throbbing from a pressure I've tried suppressing for a month. The dam I futilely built was collapsing, and the chasm that's cracked into the walls of this selfish fort was widening every time either one of us opened our mouths. "Alright? Can you fucking drop it?"

"It's not your fault, Basil."

For the past few weeks, I have confined a hurricane in my clenched fists and closed lips, and used it as momentum to demolish other universes when my own pathetic world was crumbling at the borders. But when the tears in my eyes start to escape, so does the hurricane. As the dam I built completely disintegrated, and its rubble made room for the flood, I felt more like a storm than a crying boy, and the lightning and thunder seized me until there was nothing left to seize. However, this storm is worse than thunder and gray clouds; I am a man who was struck by lightning and survived, and yet, all I want is for the lightning to strike me, again.

"I didn't know," I said. "We always joked about dying, but I didn't know. He didn't - " I take a deep breath and try to ebb the desperation that's clawing against my gums. After a month of throwing words down my throat because I was too much of a coward to voice them, I cannot filter my words as they pour without any restraints or control. "He didn't even leave a fucking note. What a goddamned, selfish bastard. It's so Roland-esque. He always said he wanted to get out of the gutter, and I guess he finally did, didn't he?" My words were thick with a darkness I couldn't articulately express, but Mr. Holloway never stopped me.

"You know we've done everything together. Everything. God, there was just. . . just so little time. We could've done more." More graves we could've painted, more nights spent in the cemetery. Although, I suppose that's where he's spending all of his nights now.

"We used to fight over this one girl." She was in our art class. She sat by the window and held her brush in trembling hands. I could say her smile was crooked and that the sun cascaded through her hair - but words like that are used for people I'd only ever spend a cliché on (and what the hell is a 'crooked' smile, anyway?). No, she was beautiful in the same way golden and silver rings hide behind dusty counter tops - completely out of our grasp. "Neither of us ever talked to her. But, hell, did we fight over her. What a stupid thing to do, huh?" My voice lowered an octave, and the velocity of my words lost their momentum. My body was like a crumbled building, and my words were the debris. "We spent so many hours fighting over someone we never spoke to. Such a stupid thing. I wish. . . I wish I knew there was so little time left. There's a lot of things I would've said, then, and fighting over that girl wouldn't have been one of them."

"You can still say those things, now, kid. He'd listen."

I shook my head stubbornly. For a wise old man, he can sometimes say some pretty foolish things. "Mr. Holloway, I don't believe in an afterlife."

"You don't believe in much these days."

"Well, what do you want me to do? Talk to his grave?" My voice started to rise higher, and its volume would've washed over this room if I hadn't stopped it. He looked at me, anticipating more words to slip from my mouth. Instead, I hastily stood up, grabbed random paints and brushes from behind me, and walked out of his house without even an explanation, already knowing he'd trail after me.

For a while now, life has felt like a war and my feet trudged across cracked cement and sodden grass like the march of an obedient soldier. My entire life is nothing more than a military march through gray mornings and silvery fog. My battle scars are the images I bleed onto canvas, but Roland's are the purple scars that can no longer fade from around his neck. (There were more sober ways of killing himself, he could've downed a mouthful of pills and feel the blood drain away from his skull, but Roland was intoxicated with a life that eluded him - happiness was intangible, and always a grasp away from him. He was exhilarated with chasing it, with running a race with no finish line. But, when he realized that there were no winners in this game, when he knew everyone was a military strategy in this losing battle - well, he made damn sure everyone else knew, too.)

The graveyard feels like home to me, now. Ghosts belong with ghosts, and I know I'm nothing short of human, anymore. Artists are monsters, and I've become one that's tangled reality with sick delusions of salvation. This place used to be a kingdom to me, but I was a fool to believe I could've escaped it just because I ruled it. I've worn fading dirt paths onto these dry lawns, and the soles of my shoes used to run down these lands like they were made of stardust instead of corpses. I wanted to fly, but, until this moment, I've never felt heavier with gravity.

His tomb is in the un-kept part of the cemetery. His parents couldn't afford a slot where the grass was at least green, so everything around him is yellowed with age. Even in death, he could not escape the gutter.

Directly in front of his tomb, I drop to my knees, and read the inscription on his gravestone aloud. "Beloved son and friend. How did they forget to add asshole?" The words left a metallic taste on my mouth, and it was weird to know that six feet beneath where I was kneeling, the body of my best friend laid still in a wooden box.

Roland and I met in art class. He was this sixteen year-old kid who was beginning to see the world in colors other than black and white, and I was a fourteen year-old boy with protruding elbows and hand me down shoes. I worshipped him like a god; we both had troubles at home and in our heads, but he rammed through them all with stolen alcohol from his dad's liquor cabinet and cigarettes he bought from a man down the street. He had an iron skull and I was hell bent on making his life miserable, but he stuck around long enough for us to become friends. On nights we'd spend in the cemetery, I used to think that if I couldn't get out of the gutter, it would be bearable as long as I could smoke a pack a day with him. Although, back then, I didn't know that even gods could die.


I heard Mr. Holloway's approaching footsteps and ragged breaths somewhere a few yards behind me. It almost made me feel bad for making a seventy something year-old man chase after a seventeen year-old boy. "Kid, why do you always gotta take everything I say literally -"

"Mr. Holloway."

Exasperated, he sighed and took a seat next to me on the damp grass. We both looked ridiculous, a seventeen year-old boy with tears rimming his eyes, and a graying old man sitting on a mound of soil in his morning robe. The poor old man's chest heaved up and down until his lungs achieved something of normalcy. "Yeah, kid?" He said, still a bit out of breath.

With all of my paint supplies strewn above the ground, I could feel the harsh voice of my father prick against me. To him, artists weren't men, and if I was an artist, then he had no son. Usually, I'd run to Roland and he'd tell me to tell my dad to fuck off, but my options are particularly limited today.

"Do you think I'm a bad person?"

I almost wanted to claw my fingers into the soil for how vulnerable I sounded. For a moment of seven words, I returned to that tiny fourteen year-old kid who yearned approval from a god, when the gods he had back home already damned him. I craned my head to face Mr. Holloway, whose eyes now softened a bit.

"You're a real shit head," He began, teething at his words slowly, "but you're still better than the lot of them."

"Even if I was a crappy artist?"

"Are you trying to say you aren't?" He tried to give me a serious look, but a small smile broke out onto his face, and then I smiled, too. "I'm in it for you, kid, not for your art."

"Well, don't give up on me too soon."

On his tombstone, directly over the "Beloved son and friend" bullshit, I painted a rope that broke apart in the middle. Strands of stray thread unfurled across the slashed twine, but flowers also bloomed along the jagged edges. They spurted forth and budded across the borders of the ripped rope, until I felt that the sting of Roland's noose was unbound from my own hands. It was my last act as the graveyard graffiti artist.

"Now, that would sell."

When Mr. Holloway and I walked back home, the storm in my ribcage receded until the thunder in my veins dribbled away into a drizzle. There were still puddles in my eyes, and I knew the hurricane would eventually come back again, but (for the first time) I was a seventeen year-old boy seeing the world in colors other than black and white. So, by the time the hurricane does come back, I won't be clenching it with bruised fists, anymore.

For a while now, I wanted to get out of the gutter - even if it meant crawling on my hands and knees and dragging my weight across gravel floors. But who - in a hundred years - has ever thought about planting flowers in the gutter, instead of trying to escape it?

No one ever washed the painting off of Roland's tombstone, and I still wasn't okay until a while after that. But, Mr. Holloway, as always, was right again. That day did help.