Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 20.

To do something.

We could be a field of flowers, I really think we could.

Chapter 20. To do something.

It’s an unwelcome memory but it does not need a welcome to enter.

It went like this. Marshall had spent the afternoon in the art classroom, painting a boy who turns into a flower. He painted a flower that dreamed of someplace free. He painted a free thing that is free because it has never learned anything. It has never learned anything because it is alone. It is alone and so it can breathe. It can be. Marshall painted a boy who turned into a flower.

He spent hours painting, dutifully outlining the boy’s petals, his stem, his thorns, his anther and stigma, and he did not have to worry that his thorny body might hurt another because there was no one else to hurt. The flower boy was the color of a sprawling and unoccupied land. The flower boy was taller than he needed to be but he had nothing to compare himself to. He was the only flower boy and his beauty was all for himself. He spent hours painting a boy who turned into a red flower and he came home hungry. He did not have any lunch at school because he could not afford it. He went to school tired because Eddie needed the bed and Elaine needed the couch. He came home tired because he only slept for twenty minutes in the bathroom stall during lunch because he wasn’t using the time to eat anyway. Marshall is growing quickly and his clothes are too small for his body and this makes him a faggot in the eyes of the other boys at school. Boys like Truck call him a faggot because his shirt rides up over his stomach and the sight of his pubescent stomach hair overwhelms them. Marshall comes home tired, hungry, poor and a faggot. He spent hours that day painting a boy who turned into a flower.

Marshall is sixteen years old and he does not know what to do with all of these churning unmet needs trapping him in the pain of his big, unavoidable body. Marshall is sixteen years old and filled with a rage that he cannot direct. At God? He does not believe. At himself? He is circumstantial. At his parents? They are hapless. Marshall is sixteen years old and no one has taught him what to do with all of his needs and fears and pains so everyday he paints a boy who turns into a flower.

A flower is simple. A flower is beautiful for the sake of survival. Beautiful only to be observed as beautiful by another. Beautiful to entice someone inside. A flower cannot see the needle marks on his father’s arm or the bruises on his mother’s stomach. A boy who turns into a flower can sit in the sun and have his needs met. A boy who is a flower can breathe. And stretch. And grow without hindrance.

Every day, Marshall paints a boy who turns into a flower but it never happens. He is still a boy. And a boy is a pliant thing.

He heard the fight happening before he opened the door to the trailer. Three generations of wordless, correctly made men watched him stand outside his home and will his body to become a thick stem, his legs deep roots, his head a blooming bud, unfurling red pink petals, to relax into the shape of a flower and stop needing. The men sipped their beers and watched, knowing that this was no man but a hapless boy unequipped for the unforgiving world.

It was a loud fight. They had very few possessions but it sounded as though they were managing to smash the majority of them. The shouts were not discernible but the words were unimportant. It was the violence of the voice that mattered. The sound of a wet throat shredding itself to convey an internal turmoil like begging a dead god. In fact, Eddie and Elaine spoke no words at all. Elaine unleashed a private hell from the deep recesses of her body. It ripped up her chest and emptied her lungs. Eddie screamed like a dog. He meant nothing by it except to be loud and to show that he is man and there is a thing inside of him that tortures and requires him to torture.

Marshall went inside. Elaine’s face was dark and bloodied. Eddie’s face was red like the devil, his fists cracked and crimson. The air smelled of rot and poverty, plastic and TV tray dinners, need hanging like a body held up by a noose from the sunroof. Between the three of them, there was enough unspoken need to set a full kettle boiling.

He’d come home to this enough times now that he expected it to just go until it was over. But something had cracked in Elaine, he could see it in her animalistic huddling in the corner, the dire spread of her pupils, fear ripping open her face like a picked scab. Maybe Eddie’s fist knocked a memory loose. Or a feeling, like the first time she saw Eddie and thought ah, a thing I can control. Or maybe it was the hunger. Or the unchecked hatred. Or the television’s endless selling or the world’s constant expanding, the country’s pointed rule-writing. Or maybe it was Marshall, one day small, the next day large like a thing that bloomed overnight. One day a thing that she could not protect and the next day a thing with his own thoughts, his own rage and despair, his own private hell that threatened to rip apart his chest.

Whatever it was, and it could have been anything, it broke Elaine down to her most primal base. She became, beneath a tangled mess of hair and a methadone comedown, something that could think only of survival. No more hate or love or anything that could connect her to the people in this dirty room. Just a thing trying to survive and the shadow of something that might kill her.

Elaine turned to Marshall and his suddenly big and capable body and his strong arms holding on tight to the straps of his backpack. Her eyes were red and dry, her face gaunt and sharp like a feral cat. She turned to her son and saw a weapon or a bloodied dagger or something impressionable, something capable of saving.

She didn’t cry but her voice was caught in her throat as though choking back sobs. Her chest heaved with helplessness and she was very breathy as she said, “Mars. Baby, my sweet Mars. Please.”

Eddie was massive. He was bones and papery skin and burning anger but he was big like a sledgehammer. He turned his sights on his son or what might not be his son and saw the thread of time pulled in a thousand directions and every one of those directions better than this one. His worst possible life was in front of him and it looked like Marshall, a boy not a flower.

“Please, baby,” Elaine croaked. “Please just get rid of him. My strong Mars, get rid of him. Please, please, please.”

Of all the choices available, Marshall had been doing nothing for a long time now, possibly sixteen years of nothing. And here he was given permission to do something. To kill some evil. To make space for a flower? To make space for a flower. To remove something bad from the soil. To turn a boy into a flower.

It’s easier than he thought it would be because he doesn’t think very much about it and the lack of thought will make the contents of his stomach empty onto the forest floor later but in the moment it’s almost pleasant. The lack of thought, the absence of feeling, following a command is soothing.

Eddie pretends to fight the end but he lets it all happen, really. He’s on the worst possible end of time’s spindly thread. Maybe he’ll wake up somewhere else. Some place where a boy can turn into a flower.

The how isn’t important. The details of the violence, the red in Marshall’s eyes, the hauling of the body, the moment when the feeling all comes rushing back in and Marshall feels as though he might implode like a star above a shallow hole in the ground. The remorse is useless. The confusion surrounding why he did it and the following weeks of wondering who was in control and the horrible realization that it was him the whole time even without thought, none of that matters because he did it and though time moves in circles, it does not go backwards. What’s done is done.

And it changes nothing, really. That’s the worst part. The world churns on unaffected by the one greasy gear removed from the machine. Wars continue, plastic things are bought and discarded, people die horrible, pointless deaths. Elaine takes more drugs. They stay poor and Marshall stays unhappy. The world is still a terrifying place and there are thousands more bad men finding themselves on the wrong end of the thread. The boy forgets how to paint. He knows he cannot be a flower.

Eddie goes unmissed. He ran away or he died, it doesn’t matter. He was unloved and unwanted. His absence heals nothing.

It’s only a few months later when a flower approaches Marshall in the art room and says something like, “Please, Marshall, get rid of him,” and it’s like a blank slate. He will go where he is told. He will do what is asked of him. And maybe this time it’ll really fix something. Maybe this time, the thread can run backwards.

And every time Marshall kills, he is faced with the fact that it changes very little, he is entirely in control and it’s always Elaine’s voice saying, “Please, Mars, just get rid of him, please, please, please.”

Marshall does as he is told.

He wakes up in someone else’s bed. The room is dark, the curtains drawn tight and he is alone. There is a glass of water on the nightstand. It is lukewarm and Marshall drinks it down greedily.

He’s fully clothed but wearing someone else’s shirt. A Slipknot tee too small for him. His body is weak and his head throbs to a perfect sledgehammer rhythm. When he gathers the strength to stand, he finds himself in a small, neat apartment smelling of weed and boy smells like sweat and loneliness. There is a note on the round kitchen table beneath a salt shaker.

Hope it’s okay that I took you home. Couldn’t leave you sleeping on the bar floor. You threw up on yourself so I had to change your shirt. I didn’t do anything weird to your unconscious body. Stay as long as you’d like. I’m at the bar again if you need anything.

-Joy

Oh. His name is Joy, not Boy. That makes more sense. Marshall sticks the note in his backpack. Takes a correctly fitting shirt from there and pulls it on. He smells terrible but it’s whatever. It’s nice that somebody took care of him. Nice to remember that people can still be kind and for no reason.

Marshall misses his friends.

Marshall takes a moment to cry before leaving.

---

The apartment is situated directly over Clive’s bar. He stops in. It’s late morning but there are a dozen or so people drinking themselves back into the oblivion they escaped in sleep. Marshall knows now that he will not find what he is looking for in oblivion. He’s been pointed somewhere else like a needle on a broken compass attuned once more toward true North.

“Hey, he’s alive!” Joy says with a wide grin.

Marshall steps behind the bar and kisses Joy on his soft, dark cheek. “Thank you,” he says. “You are a very good person.”

Joy’s face flushes red. “Oh. Yeah, of course, no worries and stuff. You want a drink?”

Marshall beams. “No thanks. I’ve got some stuff to take care of.”

you yearn to be that dream you could never get to / ‘cause the person on the other side has always just been you

Previous chapter. Next chapter.

Table of Contents.

The end is near. I don’t know that I’m ready for it. 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.