Authors note:
Instead of waiting to hear back from the open call, I have decided to publish untitled so they might (if I want) get a proper title in a proper title some other time.
Love,
Andy Grace Hayes
I was stuck trailing them, in the fashion of a police officer, these two boys—likely brothers—both the same height with the same hair and matching jumpers, one blue with dark bands on the sleeve cuffs and collar, and the other exactly alike in green. The more timid of the two, Green, he kept grasping for his identical brother’s hand. Hoping with a uselessly baited hook. Blue evaded his reach with a taunting agility. Not a faggot, this brother—he knew what it meant to walk hand-in-hand with another boy. I passed the pair of them, saddened by the sight of them, my legs much longer than theirs and darted around easy fold strollers to the park’s entrance.
The light from a windshield struck us both white. A flash so bright, a split second dissuaded us from life. And all at once the scene resumed again, the smiling child stepped down from the photographer’s stool, the tartan blanket returned under us, buoying on thatched grass. Tins of beer, packages of unopened food laid discarded on the stripes of wool.
‘What? You think those kids were engaging in an incestuous homosexual romance?’
‘No.’ He was a fucking idiot. ‘I just think there’s something tragic about the way kids grow up.’ That boy’s hook was spoiled, tarnished somehow, unknowably rusted, incapable of catching the wanted attention of his brother. He couldn’t know how rotted he might be. Not everyone’s hooks fail, not all the same, there’s no telling what may or may not be fortunate, or admissible, what might be quietly devastating about them. The boy held out his hand for his brother and found nothing there, grasping in the dark for him unaware of what might have changed.
‘Tragic? Tragic that they’re not incestuous faggot brothers?’ He had a wiry smile drawn across his face. I had to decide if I was going to play his game or not, figure out a way if I wanted to get at whatever this feeling was I had looking at those brothers.
‘I actually think they were twins.’
‘Even worse.’
‘Worse to be incestuous with a twin?’
‘Yeah, there’s something more unnerving about it.’ There’s something unnerving about twins end of, their fucking each other only exacerbates an existing problem. Michael was already talking about some porn film he had seen, one I feigned ignorance of. I’d seen it. No matter my performed unawareness, he would explain the content regardless.
‘More often than not,’ he began.
‘More often than not? How many of these have you seen?’
‘Quiet. More often than not, the twins are sort of just plowing the same guy—or they’re not even twins, sometimes just lookalikes. Still, though, having sex in the same room as your brother—that is weird—but they’re not, you know.’
‘Actively fucking their brother?’
‘Yeah. I don’t think for a second you haven’t watched any of these.’ I didn’t protest. ‘Anyway, there was this set of twins that did,’ he mouthed the word fuck, ‘each other.’
I knew exactly who he was referring to, these colossal Eastern European identical tanned brick shithouses. ‘It was still controversial at the time, the studio didn’t really get away with it.’ Tripled the studio’s audience numbers, I remembered. ‘I remember it was in regular magazines, not even gay ones. Quite a wild spectacle, like I can imagine them at a—Ha! Ha! At an amusements! The circus? Right, step right up! Roll up, roll up, here, come bear witness to the barebacking twins!’ Michael hinged his neck back and laughed his booming big laugh with his eyes scrunched into assholes.
‘I wonder how they felt about it?’ I said, on second thought, way too sentimentally. Having meant the twins, I thought back to my twins, not these two grifters trying to make money on their good looks and indistinguishable cocks.
Michael was saying something about, ‘At the end of the day, it’s all mechanics.’ I thought to disagree with him. He was picking grapes off the vine and throwing them in the air. I watched them bounce off his mouth-gaped face, each one hitting his big teeth. ‘Good money probably.’
Michael came back round, he stopped tossing grapes and rolled over onto his side to face me; mine in his. The skin of a grape stuck against one incisor. ‘Twins are doomed,’ I said.
‘All of them? No matter their occupation or…’
‘Think about it, it’s classic; living within the shadow identity of another person, unable to carve out any kind of space for yourself. Always seen as part of a set, being mistaken for someone else, the only person to truly see you as distinct being a version—a mirror—of yourself.’ I shouted the words into his face, letting no air settle in between them. He turned over onto his back and averted another flash of light, once again souring my sight with milk.
Little flicks of spit erupted from his mouth like a fountain, landing on frosty-white framed glasses. ‘Freaky, more like. You ever seen Dead Ringers?’ I hadn’t. ‘Jeremy Irons plays these twin gynaecologists doing fertility treatments. One’s way more confident, the big shot, he gets with this patient, then convinces his brother to get with her, and then she finds out; throws like a glass of wine in his face, but stays, I dunno, with one of them?’ I didn’t care. I hadn’t seen the movie and my attention was waning. ‘Anyway, he—one of them—makes these fucking wild looking forceps and tools to use on his patients. It’s a Cronenberg film. Big medieval, alien-looking shit.’
I kept saying uh-huh. ‘Whatever, so they both die at the end from drug overdoses—or! No! One of them does. I think the other one just dies for no reason.’ He gets back up on one arm to look at me. ‘But that’s why twins are so freaky, they can just die for no reason.’ I thought to myself how anyone could die for no reason. ‘Like how a cat will die when its owner does, or a really old married couple. I think if you’re that psychically linked you just go out when they do.’
‘You’ll die when the last roach in your apartment goes,’ I said.
‘Yeah, so I’ll be living there forever then.’
‘Doomed,’ I said, working to suppress my smile into a frown. Michael got up on one knee to grab my head in his hands bringing it to the rip in his ugly G-Star RAW jeans.
‘D-shhh,’ making his own foley sounds, he play fought like a televised wrestler on *
Upon entering, after a kiss; Michael called back, ‘Don’t forget the door!’
I twisted the deadbolt and rehoused the chain’s end inside its slot. Every time I did, I invariably thought of his death. Burned alive in his apartment, choking while fiddling with a chain, twisting the twin mechanisms. I picture his dew-sweated hands and trembling fingers fumbling. Other times, there’s a home invader; someone with a gun or a knife, who's come down through a hatch into a crawl space above the ceiling. I had never checked to see if such a hatch even existed in the apartment. Akin to an urban legend, like dog-licked hands and puzzle piece murder scenes, the possibility was only ever an inch away from plausible.
He’s cooking, it was his turn. Tending the stovetop, idling a spoon through puttanesca sauce and watching with patience the many-eyed surface at the bottom of a pot filled with water. One or two eyes flitted up to the surface, let out in a puff of steam. He threw too much salt in, angering the little bubbles, growling, and satiated them with long thin spaghetti noodles.
We had sex not long after dinner. We were still naked on his bed, beneath the hatch I had willed into being, still sticking to the sweat, less worried about digesting pasta and upsetting the deal struck with my body two hours earlier.
‘She hasn’t got a leg to stand on,’ I could feel the hairs above my pubes begin to Pritt-Stick into place. ‘She’s a bully, you can't call your girlfriend a cunt in the middle of Whole Foods without everyone thinking you’re an asshole.’
‘Sara’s pretty quick to incite violence, if I’m not wrong,’ I dug my chin into the pillow, giving little thought on dirtying Michael's sheets. Far more soiled by the other tenants of his bedposts than the contribution I was making. ‘Sam said she doesn't feed their cat on purpose and throws it in their closet to starve.’
‘How would Sam know that?’
‘He didn’t say.’ Michael groaned and threw his body weight over mine. ‘The cat is thin.’ That cat, Misty, looked like a retired teddy bear strapped to the grill of an eight-wheel truck.
‘Maybe their cat’s on a diet, everyone’s pet seems to be on a diet. Everyone diets, even animals. I keep seeing people hydrating their dog’s kibble with bone broth. Do you know how expensive bone broth is? Dogs eat better than me.’
‘And that’s ‘cause dogs can’t have ramen.’ We stopped talking and the light by his side went out. We parted, unwilling to touch each other in the night, tautening the blanket between us.
The hatch opened and closed when my lids unstuck themselves to peer at it. Not knowing what was real. The street light brightened the room, never truly dark, giving the turn-latch-secured board an unsightly glow. I closed my eyes again to the sight of Elijah Peters dangling one leg through the hole in the ceiling and hoping to come down. His bright boyish eyes shining wet in the dim. He disappeared, not going anywhere, not exposing his perky ass to crawl back into the attic space. Michael was up there, looking down. I wasn’t in bed anymore. I was at the base of a great ladder, climbing each step with huge upwards strides, catching each rung with the bare pad of my feet.
I turned over and he was beside me again. I fell back asleep.
I was in Whole Foods trying to steal beers, I was watching the Peter’s twins have incestuous sex, I fell from the ladder that appeared again beneath their bed. I climbed to the hatch once more, away from their brick shithouse bodies slapping together. And at the summit, the light from a passing car hit my eye. I lurched forward, inside myself, awake again.
I was agitated, hard and sweating. Michael woke alongside my unrest, seismic movements pulling him out, gravity dragging me to his side. At the back of his breath, I could still smell the smoke he blew at me. Our instruments hinged at the jaw, knee and pelvis. Not knowing if the arousal that he groped for was his doing or my own, we had sex again. My mind cleared a moment, incapable of holding both him and the dreams at once. The hatch above his head above my own was closed. Sliver thin fingers fed through the gap around the board as he climaxed again.
I saw myself to the train station. The stink of his breath and the damp of his bed still lingering around well after the shower we shared. Never that romantic, standing in the cold watching a mottle-skinned partner warm beneath rising steam. ‘Ok, ok,’ he said, ‘go.’ And so I lathered, rinsed and left.
On the train home, I watched the grass move too quickly on the bank beside the track. The hazed metallic line of it turned to liquid silver and slid through my vision. Smoke got in my eyes, the mercury line jeered out from place in countless directions framed by too many eyelashes stuck together. ◾️