armour falling down

[ [ armour falling down ] ]

[ [ a boy ] ]

The sweat on his skin acted like a thick coat of glue; his t-shirt stuck to him, and he stuck to the tangled sheets. This and the dense afternoon air made it impossible for him to sleep another minute. All for the better, he supposed. Shouldn’t be sleeping ‘til three p.m. anyway.

He had been hearing the familiar lawn mower noise all morning, the potent smell creeping up his nostrils into his dreams. His father was probably cursing him at that moment for being a lazy teenager with a worthless job. But what kind of jobs were teenagers supposed to have at seventeen? Walking dogs at the local pound was good enough for Kegan. There was a simple satisfaction in knowing that when he snapped the worn leash on the collars of the dogs, they wagged their tails, and yelped with a joy that shown in their sad eyes. Kegan relished in this time away from his so-called home. He’d bring along his second-hand manual camera – a scratch on the lens in the upper left corner put a trademark on his photographs. He’d get on his knees, try to see the world from the dog’s point of view; maybe they understood people and the world better than he did.

He moaned with desire at the thought of a cool shower. He moved slowly, the weight of the air pressing on every pore of his skin, making his muscles stick.

The tiles were clammy and cool on his feet. He peeled off his t-shirt, he peeled off his boxers; he felt like a fucking banana. He caught a glimpse of his boney body in the mirror as he turned the shower on. Cold, ice cold. He looked back at the reflection of his body, attempted a stance as if to make himself look manlier. He turned to the side, maybe a better angle. He felt sick.

The water fell on him, penetrating his gluey skin. He pretended he was under a waterfall in the middle of Brazil. He stood still like that for ten minutes, face tilted toward the shower head, breathing from the small pockets of air between the streams of water, letting the rushing sound echo throughout his mind, wiping clear his muggy thoughts.

He took the soap and slid it around his skin. He hated touching himself. He did it quick. There were days he didn’t mind. Days it felt good to touch himself. But today, today it felt like the heat had raped him.

He stayed underneath that Brazilian waterfall until his fingertips rippled like the ocean. Immediately the dense air haloed his body once again. A deep unsettling feeling dropped into his stomach and went straight up again hitting the back of his throat. He wanted to cry. Crouch down and sob until he didn’t have the strength to fill his lungs with air, until he didn’t have the strength to lift one eyelid.

And that’s when he heard his dad bang on the door with sweaty fists, kick at it with grass stained shoes. A low toned, inhuman growling pierced through the wood. It was the same bastard voice he’d been hearing for six years now, informing him he takes too long in the goddamn shower. He insistently banged the door, hurling his saturated, fat-encompassed body at it until the lock broke for the third time in two years.

“My turn,” his dad snarled as he aimlessly put his clammy hand on Kegan’s upper arm and literally flung him into the musty hall. Kegan laid naked on the smooth floor with the heavy air; both motionless. The floor creaked with the weight of his dad, grunting again as the shower turned on, pipes whining, Kegan wincing.

# # #

A week passed since that airless afternoon. Kegan laid on his rock in the woods behind his father’s house, his arm around his acoustic guitar next to him. The sun fluttered through the massive amounts of branches and leaves, once in a while shining on the boy’s shaggy brown hair, bringing into view the build up of grease. He hadn’t taken a shower since that day last week when his dad mowed the lawn. Spite. It was his way of revenge. Violence wasn’t in his vocabulary. Kegan knew any day now his dad would finally say something to him about taking a goddamn shower. And he would take one, and his dad would curse at him, and Kegan would be dirty for a week again.

There was a breeze today; the air wasn’t so thick on his skin, and for once anger and annoyance weren’t racing each other through his veins. There was no lawn mower noise, no fresh cut grass smell hanging onto the heavy air molecules; the leaves brushing against another and the coolness of the rock against his skin seemed to make him float. The corners of his mouth were actually turned up slightly, revealing the tiny dimple to the left of his mouth. He imagined himself in a world that was made of nothing but moments like these. Shades of green, deep blue, and soft yellow flickering between them. He took a deep breath of the moment as he closed his eyes to take a mental photograph.

He had taken only one other photograph with his mind; it was so vague it felt like a dream he had when he was a child. It was of a young woman sitting in the grass. The grass was so tall, it came to her shoulders; she amused herself with a strand of it, tickling her face with the end. The sun was strong and low; it gave incredible warmth to her dark skin and long silky hair that the wind played with. The smell drifted back to him; it was the same as what had been surrounding him for hours. Fresh and comforting. Just as the woman’s smile was, with the same faint dimple as Kegan’s. There was a tiny bird in a tree somewhere nearby; its graceful chirp was the perfect soundtrack to the perfect memory.

He was eleven when that picture was embedded among the mysteries of his head; when his mom loved white birch trees, and raging confusion wasn’t his common feeling.

He delicately picked up his guitar, like it would crack if he held it too tight. The photographs were still floating about his mind as he absent-mindedly plucked a few of the strings and hummed to the murmur of the cars from the highway.

He wondered what the people were like who drove the cars that murmured to him. If they had a father like his, if they had a mom like he used to have. If any of them, a boy or girl or young or old, took hold of the beauty in the world like he did.

# # #

(not finished)