Edgar and I. Me and Edgar. It wasn’t right for the two of us to love one another. It was impossibly irrational and imposingly unethical. We would go to H***, the two of us. We would dive into the fires that lick the permafrost of the world and surface once innocence has fallen. We would certainly, said the church and the town, carry the Devil in our condemned love to the Pearly Gates and God would look at us and he would sneer. He would look at our hands clasped together and push us from Heaven… we would fall into a world swarming with Demons and others like “us”. We were the moral issue that Smalltown, USA didn’t want to deal with. We were the unwritten story that families prayed their sons would never read. We were considered outsiders and we loved it as we did one another.


Edgar’s blue eyes swam into view as my father’s fist hit my disgustingly feminine face as he tried to remove the stain from my corrupted soul. My mother stopped talking to me all together and my grandma died of a heart attack. Her heart attack being natural and due to age, of course they blamed me. Edgar was to blame too... Tossing his beer aside, my father dipped into his recliner, the recliner he respected and loved more than he did me, and fell into a mental coma. His chin dipped and prodded at his sweat soaked chest as he fought the urge to fall victim to the alcohol coursing through his veins. He grasped the last breath of consciousness with a twitch of the muscle in his jaw and at once fell silent. I moved from the corner I had been occupying for the last hour and a half. I was no longer allowed to live among “the people” and “regular” populous of our world. Forced into a corner night and day, I waited for the ritual to end so I could listen intently as the sound of blue eyes and black hair sloshed below the window. I gazed out at the moonlit windowsill and there he sat: pearly smile winking from behind a swollen lip, ice radiating from his blizzard eyes, and a hand pressing against the glass. It promised warmth as I pressed my hand to his – separated only by glass. I lifted the heavy lid that enclosed over my eye and bore into my soul his gaze. He knew my pain and he understood me; he suffered the abuse just as I did and yet he still loved me as I loved him. We sat there staring, analyzing, and understanding under stolen moments afforded by the moon until dawn pressed the horizon. We thought we should stay. Let them see. Someday we’d be free of this town and be able to travel the world hand in hand without an air of worry soaking our healing faces. They would never keep us apart. Never again.


I sat on the floor in front of the window watching the sun graze the sky far after he had gone. Mother came gliding into the room like a ghost, regarded me as scum, and hurried to the liquor cabinet – she mustn’t sober up or she might be confronted with the reality of her darling son. She might actually have to hate him without blaming the alcohol but, certainly, if he came to his senses and married Susanne down the street she would hug him like she used to and blame her estrangement on the booze. I looked after her sadly. I wanted her embrace. I wanted so badly to confide in her that I knew what love felt like. I wanted her to accept me and hug me. I wanted to smell her freshly washed hair as the sun bathed the room. I wanted what she would never give me... She disappeared into the dungeon she inhabited and would not resurface until the following morning. I let slip a tear and quickly wiped my eyes. She left me in the room, scared and bleeding, with a maniac that was soon to rise baring his sharpened fangs and snakelike curses... No, this time he would rise to empty floor space in front of an open window.


Life beat within my lungs as my heart ached with every step forward. With every jolt around every corner I felt the life rise up within me and carry me forward. It was me who would greet Edgar at his window. It was me who would fly to the outside of his world and stare in. I would see how it felt to sit beneath the moonlight as I was the first to press my hand against the window. I would feel the transition from cold death to warm life… I ran as my lungs burst into the flames I had been promised to engulf me in the end… I ran as my legs tried to give way. I ran as my eyes pierced the sunlight that was filling my face with hope and I felt an embrace. Eyes closed, I held the embrace as a hand caressed my hair… as fingers found my swollen eye and lip… as my hand found a similar swollen lip. I opened my eyes to find brilliant blue emerging from below half open lids. He studied my face with his hands as I studied his… I hadn’t felt the new facial edges that a year had caused. As we pulled towards each other, closer than we had ever been, I felt his lips feel mine. I sought his lips with mine and I welcomed his breath into my mouth. I relished his love flowing into me as screams from the street warned us of aroused curiosity and anger. The town was preparing their pitchforks and machetes. We smiled at one another, finally free; we turned, hand-in-hand, and ran. We ran into the sunlight as two misunderstood monsters and disappeared.