The Veering
Longshadows in the slow fade of a late summer afternoon. Tristan’s body in the dirt. Memories. Brainshapes. Apparitions.
They awake together, bleary eyes meeting across the space between their beds as the window begins to glow. Stretching. Blinking. No words. Old bones of the house beginning to flex and creak as they warm in the sun’s rise. Creeping downstairs, reading comics in the morning paper that they spread on the kitchen table, a quiet intimacy to this, eyes moving in private patterns, but pointing out favourites to each other, tapping with a finger, smiling, giggling, slurping grainy sludge from the bottom of cereal bowls or licking butter from fingertips, tapping and pointing, yeah, I read that one already, but then reading it again anyway, together, and this makes it funnier than the first time.
Out the backdoor, the back fence, across the back alley, across the train tracks, then across the grass fields west of the house, morning mists ghosting skyward. Spenser hitting a dead sprint just as soon as he can. Running so hard he can taste hot needles of fizz at the back of his throat, running harder, pretending he has to run as fast as he can, right now, in this moment, as if his life is at stake, and the lives of his mom and dad and little brother. Legs churning concrete, lungs melting, running as if it is a kind of penance for all the bad things he has ever done, all the bad things to…
