Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 13.

A monument to touch and tenderness.

Still here? Have you considered you might be trapped?

Chapter 13. A monument to touch and tenderness.

That party, the one from another lifetime when the possibility of holding Jamie’s hand was as far-fetched as finding community in a cult of women–before he even knew Beaver and loved him like a son, impossible–Marshall remembers the purpose in his step. Foot in front of foot, each stride carrying him toward Jamie. His hands in his pockets. Fingers, clenching in the shape he imagined they would take holding Jamie’s shoulders to pull him close. The mantra on loop in his head. I will kiss this man on the mouth. I will not nod at him like an idiot. I will kiss this man on the mouth. I am not scared. How the mantra devolved the closer he got. Down the stairs from the attic. I will kiss. On the mouth. Nod first, kiss after. Through the back door, onto the porch. No fucking nodding. I will kiss…someone. Scared idiot. Scared of what? Shut up. Not an idiot. Onto the lawn, grass and earth soft beneath his boots. What is there to lose? Kiss on the mouth. Kiss. Idiot. Shut up. Do or die. Do or die. Die die die, shut up. Losing momentum toward the treeline where the big group is smoking weed, music playing from someone’s tinny phone speaker. There he is. You’re not gonna do it. Shut up. You’ll never do it. Shut up. Go ahead, nod at him like a man. Big man, it’s all you can do. Marshall kill but can’t kiss. Shut up. Marshall kill but can’t kiss. Shut up. Marshall kill–and his hands then, grabbing the easiest thing to grab, Lana and her shoulders too small so she stumbles as he pulls her in, his lips too eager and off center. But she’s high, she’s always high and she’ll let Marshall do whatever so their lips slip and slide without pleasure, she laughs into his mouth tasting of whisky and rotting teeth.

And Jamie, over her shoulder, kind eyes sinking into his head. Hands digging into his pockets, hiding their shape. Lips parted like a question. What are you afraid of? And rather than answer the question, he takes Lana by the arm and drags them both toward displeasure. Jamie left behind, Jamie goes home, Jamie pretends nothing happened. And still, Jamie keeps asking the question, without words, What are you afraid of? Hasn’t stopped asking it. But he’ll never beg for an answer.

Jamie tugs on Marshall’s hand now and they walk together across the colony. Some of the women are standing around staring at things that appear unmoving. Some spin in circles together, lace twirling around their feet and kicking up dust. Some are crying and some are laughing and some are retching in the brush. Everything moves in intricate, kaleidoscopic patterns, shifting and beckoning closer inspection. The ground beneath Marshall’s feet is a mosaic of green and brown, the history of the physical earth and if he looks too closely, he can see everything that has ever happened. Jamie’s interlocking fingers keep him steady.

Jamie pulls him through the fields of corn that tower and sway, caught up in their own ritualistic dancing and singing, wispy little whispers of crinkly leaves kissing one another. The colors are vibrant and softly demanding. Green and yellow and brown melt in the air and fill Marshall’s lungs. His hand has been intertwined with Jamie’s for so long that they feel like a single, unbreakable entity.

The corn parts for them with a gracious bow and gives way to the forest and its bony, gnarled and welcoming arms. The trees don’t move like the stalks of corn but they breathe and observe with their own wisdom and they guard with the ancient armor of grainy, churning bark. They step carefully across the fallen leaves, avoiding the sprouting weeds and weeping wildflowers, color spilling into itself. Marshall can hear the stream before he sees it, the resonance of trickling water filling his ears with all the totality of internal thought. Jamie finds a low lying log by the water and its whispering and they sit with their feet in the stream and watch the dirt bleed from their skin and sink into the silt below. The sand and the pebbles are the only thing unmoving beneath the water’s pulse. This is where Marshall eats his lunch each day. For him, it is a safe and solitary place that knows him well. Jamie was smart to bring him here.

Marshall is capable of real breathing now, sitting upright, eyes open, in a safe place with a safe person. For a while, they do not speak. Their hands are fused together by comfort and necessity. Each and every thing demands his attention with its movement and vibrance and potential to reveal himself in an unsuspecting mirror, but it does not overwhelm him. Like the hallway and all of its doors, each thing presents a choice to be engaged with and in his safe place with a boy he loves, the choices do not threaten him. The shafts of light spilling through the crowns of trees and dripping like honey, the dragonflies and their zig-zagging across the water like the ancient beings that they are. The soft brown of Jamie’s eyes and the comfort that his silence speaks. Everything feels easier than before. 

It’s kind of crazy to be on shrooms, Marshall thinks.

Jamie speaks first. “You’re feeling better.”

Marshall nods. “Thank you. I needed this. Space. Quiet. You.”

He did not mean to say that out loud but he’s surprised to find that he’s not embarrassed.

“Thank you,” Jamie says. He looks down, blushing.

“For what?”

“Oh. I don’t know.” He speaks quietly but not without confidence, which is usual for him but Marshall can feel his solidity in their interconnected hands. “I just felt this big sense of gratitude spinning me all the way back through our history. Haha. For a second, I forgot we were here and now and grown. I felt like we were kids again. When we met and you went to the bathroom with me. I had a really hard time doing anything by myself back then. And you came without me having to ask at all. You didn’t even know me. It’s always meant a lot to me.”

Marshall has to gather his thoughts carefully so the humming love does not accidentally slip from his tongue. “I just wanted to be friends with you. I wanted you to like me. We didn’t talk very much after that, though.”

“I don’t talk very much in general.” Jamie laughs.

Marshall grins, his heart warm like good soup. “That’s true.”

And then Jamie looks up at the twisting, snaking branches and says, “My words mean a lot to me. I have five siblings and no one has ever really listened to me. They only cared about the words I had to say once I stopped talking. You were the first person to care for me without needing my words, Marshall. It scared me a bit.”

Marshall’s breath wavers in his throat. “It scared me too. It still does. But not like all those scary doors and their paths. I know this one is good, I just can’t suck up the courage to push it open.”

Jamie hums, low in his throat and Marshall can feel the vibration of him in their locked hands as though together they are made of pure, shimmering energy. All around them is dancing light and clean air and the forest seems to still, holding its breath for them. Jamie’s indistinct hum rises and then falls, wavers and then ends.

He says, “Sometimes a door can open silently.”

That feeling again, the one from beside the fire at Lana’s so long ago, a hovering question between their bodies but this time he knows the answer. Jamie swipes his thumb across the back of Marshall’s hand and so Marshall leans in to kiss him and finds that Jamie’s lips have been waiting for him from the very beginning of time.

Electricity. A jolt to the system like grabbing a live wire. Even with his eyes closed softly, Marshall can see through both their skins to the skeletons beneath illuminated white with cartoonish zig zags indicating they’ve both been struck, they are being struck, they are wrapped up in the being struck.

Marshall gasps into Jamie’s mouth. He’s surprised by himself.

Jamie holds tenderly the nape of his neck and all of his little hairs stand straight up. Their lips together taste rich and salty. Magic surrounds them like a gathering of drifting fireflies. The forest exhales.

When they pull away, they are different people than they were before. Jamie’s dark eyes shimmer like tidal pools. Sea creatures glide across his irises.

They don’t speak and they don’t have to. A silent language has always existed between them and it is erected now like a statue, a monument to touch and tenderness and patience.

Marshall rests his head on Jamie’s shoulder, letting himself be supported. Jamie’s breaths are steady and focused and as Marshall matches him they become one organism, rooted in the dirt and trickling water. Jamie traces his thumb across Marshall’s cheek and etches out a little message that says, So we’ve got each other now. It’s decided.

They sit by the stream kissing and breathing and smiling for what feels like hours but when they return it’s only been forty minutes. Time passes strangely on shrooms. It wraps around the body like a blanket over the shoulders. It expands and contracts, draws singular moments into a timeless portrait, unchanging for always.

Lana is on the roof of their cabin watching the sun pull the earth about its orbit. She looks down as they approach and her face looks fuller than when they arrived. There’s life inside of her where there wasn’t before. She was dead before and it was obvious but no one dared to say it. She narrows her eyes. “You guys kissed,” she decides.

“Yeah,” Marshall replies.

“Let me know when you fuck.” She looks back up at the clouds. “I’ve been jerking off to the thought of it for ages.”

“Where’s John Beaver?”

Lana hums. “He’s with Maya.”

They’re in her hut. Beaver’s head is in her lap and she’s rubbing her salve into his damaged skin. It probably won’t ever heal entirely but maybe he won’t have to cover it for the rest of his life. He’s crying too, lightly and tenderly with a nostalgic sort of smile on his face. The sweet and caring touch of a mother. Sage burns in a dish at Maya’s feet.

“Boys,” Maya says with a gaze so placid it is impossible to tell if she’s high or not. “John was just telling me what you did for him. You in particular, Marshall.”

He’s been holding Jamie’s hand for over an hour now and though his palms are hot and slick with sweat, neither wants to let go. They sit in front of Maya and sweet John Beaver on big floor pillows stained green and brown from the earth.

“Oh,” Marshall says. He wonders if he should feel scared or not but he can hardly feel anything besides giddiness and that deep, coursing electricity that makes his bones vibrate and his heart sigh every time he remembers. Lips, lips, lips. No please, no begging, just kissing and closeness and everything else washed away in the flood of newness.

“You’ve been a kind of steward for this boy, Marshall,” the Shepherd says and it’s a genuine thing and it strikes him then that she hasn’t always been genuine before but her kindness sings true now. “He has a kind and gentle soul. Your journeys are tied together. It is good that you brought him here.”

Emotion swells in Marshall’s chest violently and threatens to spill from his open mouth. “Thank you,” is all he can say.

Beaver twists his tiny body in her lap and looks at Marshall with a sort of admiration that he’d kept guarded and unsure up until then. “We’re not bad for what we did. I miss my ma and pa. But you are my brother. I love you.”

The word brother twists his guts like a rapturous hug. Jamie shakes like a wet dog.

Marshall says, “You are a good brother, John Beaver.”

Maya brushes his cheek softly and so suddenly, Beaver’s eyes flutter closed and he falls asleep in an instant. There is peace fluttering like fingertips across his face.

Lifting her head, Maya says, “When people think of beavers the connotation is often dams. Blockage, diversion, resistance. But in indigenous cultures, the beaver is a symbol of persistence. The amount of power required to stop a river from flowing, to hold a mass of water in place when its imperative is to move. There is a massive strength in that. This one here is strong.”

“He is,” Marshall agrees. “I can’t help but think that…maybe I’m not teaching him the way I should.”

Maya nods. “I hear your worry, but it’s not so black and white, my sweet light. Teaching is reciprocal. To give something is to get something else back. Perhaps young Beaver is teaching you as much as you teach him. Maybe you’re learning together. This is a gift I imagine your parents did not give you, Marshall. I imagine you might have learned some horrible things together. This is not your experience with Beaver.”

Marshall cannot bring himself to speak.

Maya continues. “If Beaver is showing you difficult reflections of yourself, it’s only that it’s in his nature. To build a dam–which is a home–requires some shaping. Let this boy shape you. And let the rest, the fear and indecision, float away.”

Jamie fiddles with the rings on Marshall’s finger, shakes his head in pleasant disbelief. “Shepherd Maya, what did you do before you came here?”

She laughs quietly. “I wanted to be a politician. I went to school for it. I even made it onto my town council. Which is where I realized just how broken this fabricated country is. How impossible it can be to create change unless done from the ground up.”

“Is that what you did?” Marshall asks. “Build yourself from the ground up?”

She strokes Beaver’s arm, thoughtfully. “In a way, yes. I’d been raised on the principles of my people and I love my people very much but they are working within the system that has oppressed them rather than against it. I had to create my own ideals, my own system. I reshaped myself to be a leader—it did not come naturally. I chose the Three Mothers to worship, a creation myth thought into existence. I built this place that exists in but without this country. It means the world to me. Nothing is more important than keeping my people safe. I would do anything, just like you, Marshall.”

The comparison makes him uneasy but he’s too high on shrooms and kisses to puzzle out why. “Do you ever want to…I don’t know, expand? Teach others outside of here your ways? If everyone lived like this…I don’t know. It would give me hope, I think.”

Maya sighs. “In an ideal world, of course. But this world is not ideal, it can’t be. I am just a woman. I cannot change the world—and no one person should carry that burden alone—but I can protect these people, the ones that came to me willingly, in need, ready for change and freedom. That is something I can control. And when the rest of the world burns, we will still be here with the Three Mothers to protect us.”

“Do you really believe that?” Marshall asks, not unkindly. “When the world comes to an end, you think you’ll be protected because you were kind to this one place, this tiny sliver of the planet?”

“There is no end to the world, Marshall. Someday, humanity will end, that is certain. And someday long after that, the sun will devour this planet too in a waves of fire. The end will not come in the way you imagine it. The end will not be swift or instant, or even slow and unnoticeable. It will be violent and obvious, and still we will ignore it. When islands are devoured by the rising tides and the vengeful ice, we will move inland. When the earth is drained of all it has left to give, we will eat the sand to pretend we aren’t starving. And yet no amount of ignorance will stop the world from reminding us we have taken and so it must take in return. The world is not just this place, it is everything. And the world does not forget. It will remember the evil and the overconsumption, the pilfering and degradation. But it will also remember the kindness, the sacrifices we here have made for this land, the care that my people showed it when the colonizers decided they could not extract profit from it. We help the land because it helps us back. Reciprocity. Sacrifice. Blood and dirt.

“Do I believe this colony will live forever to never confront death? No, but as long as it is here—and it will last longer than the rest—it will always be a safe haven for those who care and even when it is gone, this planet consumed by a dying star, its spirit will live on. The spirit of a thing cannot die, Marshall. Remember that. Your spirit will never die, it will simply nourish this land.”

Her words are fluid and hypnotic. Each syllable slides into the folds of his brain like a key unlocking some deep, ancient fear and setting it free, a bird uncaged. He’s always feared the end of the world, cradled its inevitability like a baby kitten, soft and delicate. He’s always feared the end of the world because he’s seen it creeping up slowly like Maya said. He sees it in the sputtering cars, the waste piling up on the sides of roads, the silent and loud genocides, the erosion of democracy, the hatred of the stranger. He’s always known that he would live to see it all end like he knows that Jamie is his twin heart.

But what is an end? Can anything ever really cease to be? Even when his spirit leaves his sexy body that he loves and then that body becomes food for the scavengers and his bones litter the earth and even when those bones turn to dust in an imploding, all-consuming sun, his spirit still remains. An ethereal thing that cannot be broken by physical means. If his spirit, the essence of him can live on, what does that mean for the people he’s killed? If they are not truly gone, if there is no real end to any thing, has he truly done something so wrong? It’s all just change, a shifting of energy from phase to phase, solid to liquid, gas to plasma, all of it expanding and breathing and never-ending. There is no end. There is no fear.

Marshall finally releases Jamie’s hand and wipes the sweat off on the fabric of his dress. He can feel it still. The connection, the touch, the comfort of someone who cares for him. It never ends, even if they must pull apart, even if the earth cleaves them in two, the spirit still binds them.

“Do you…” Marshall hesitates, feeling the call of an unnamed door. “Do you truly believe I am helpful here? That my spirit nourishes this place?”

Maya’s grin becomes hungry in a way it never has before, like the excitement of Marshall’s tough skin cracking open like an egg makes her ravenous for more.

“Oh, my dear Marshall,” she says. “You do not even know the ways in which your presence serves the colony, the Three Mothers too. What you have given and what you will give, it is immeasurable. I did not lie about the light inside of you. It burns brighter than most and I promise this land will thank you for it. We all will.”

we will coalesce our heaven and hell

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Reach out and touch someone. As a reminder, if you wanna skip the wait for chapters, you can grab your own digital copy of the whole book on my website or on amazon for your e-reader.. I leave that decision up to you.