A Lively Conversation Between Two Corpses (2)

Sorry it's taken so long! I'm lazy, so if you want the link to part one, it's above the post. ^_~

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(2)

He said, “Oh, yes you can.

Just hold my hand—

I think that that would help.”

When Miles awoke, the compartment was empty and there was an attendant shaking his shoulders, saying, “Your stop, sir, your stop!” Miles didn’t really care whose station it was; his eyelids were thick with sleep and the tips of his fingers were numb. He took his trunk and stumbled off the train and onto the station dock, where it was just beginning to snow. The place was strangely empty, and the flakes lumped into drifts where they willed. He shuffled past the turnstile down the steps out front in a lethargic daze, his eyes unfocused and unsure.

If Margot dreamt too little, Miles dreamt too much. He dreamt when he was sleeping and when he was awake; of sailboats and prophets and pretty boys, though he told no one of the latter. He knew that a boy who liked other boys was a dead boy.

It wasn’t as though it mattered. He could kiss every girl in the city and there wouldn’t be any more blood in his veins to show for it—what was running through the passageways was thick and black, pushed along by a bruised heart too tired to do its job any longer. Beating was an apt word for the pulsings of his ventricles, for the dull ache behind his ribs. When Margot’s tablet began to diffuse through his bloodstream, he didn’t dream. His mind was black and empty.

The last time he’d slept like that, he’d woken up tangled in his French teacher.

Alexei was confused and foreign; more Russian than French, though why he chose to teach en français more more of a mystery to him than anyone else. What was said in English was translated in his brain from English to French to Russian, and so it took him three times as long to respond. It was usually worth the wait. He exuded nothing but elegance and disillusioned grace—he did as the Romans did, questioned nothing, and smiled cheerfully throughout.

Miles knew nothing of love beyond the dictionary definition: (n) a deep, tender feeling of affection toward a person. He was one of those people who often forgot just how to loop the laces when he bent down to tie his shoes; let alone someone who actually knew what love was and whether or not he was submerged in it. He thought he might be in love with Alexei, but it seemed too vast, too devastating a statement to make without approval.

He’d asked for the necessary second opinion on a Tuesday, when Alexei came home early and brought him cookies from the bakery downstairs. After he had asked it and felt frustrated tears well in his eyes, Alexei had pulled him into his lap in one of the kitchen chairs. Miles pretended it was big enough for both of them and that the hinges didn't shriek in protest when they sat down. “I love you,” he said, slowly. “Is this enough?”

“Uhm. Maybe.”

Miles felt lips brush against his ear, a hand against his stomach. The chair groaned. Miles had a newfound appreciation for furniture and its clairvoyant properties. “You are not so sure?”

“I’m not so sure of anything.”

“You can be sure of this: I love you, you love me, hmm?”

Miles was sure of that for a long, long time. He’d been sure of that until one day he’d come home and found his French teacher tangled in someone else—a woman he didn’t know, a woman who looked filthy and dirty and didn’t appear to love Alexei at all.

But which of them was wrong?

Miles had shouted something he didn’t remember and run back out onto the street. He’d sat there for a long while, his elbows propped up on his knees. The snow was falling then, too, falling hard enough to begin to collect on his shoulders and down his back. It was the first time in his life that he’d been homeless. His father was into petroleum—even if they’d gone hungry, they’d have had warehouses upon warehouses of Vaseline to line their bellies. But there, sitting on the sidewalk, Miles felt a small growl of hunger for the first time in his life.

He couldn’t go back to his family’s house. Everyone knew he was a filthy dirty sodomite who didn't deserve to live—he’d nicked one of his mother’s Christmas letters from a stranger in a coffee shop, and he wasn’t mentioned. Not even He's growing so fast! like she always put for Robert, whom nobody loved. He couldn’t go back to the dormitories, because sleeping with your French teacher was worse than sleeping with your mother. Boys’ law. Miles had an all-consuming, petrifying fear of blood, especially if it was his own.

He could do nothing but sit and stare at the road.

When Miles got off of the train, it had been three months since the void. Alexei hadn’t spoken to him. It was as though they had never existed together—all that remained were lonesome artifacts; folded love notes and candy wrappers in his desk drawers, in his wallet.

He dipped his fingers in his pocket, just to see. There was nothing there.

Panic-stricken, he began to walk faster. His tickets back to the city were in there, stolen…by whom? Margot? Margot in the blue gown?

Given his record of sleeping pills, it wasn’t entirely impossible.

He’d go to Alexei’s, apologize, beg for a train ticket back to his hostel room, to his bank account. If Alexei wasn’t there, he would simply use his key and do a little stealing of his own. For all the grief inflicted, the least Alexei could do was let him take a little money and something to eat.

With slight panic rising in his throat, Miles shoved his hands into his empty pockets and half-walked, half-jogged the sixteen blocks to the apartment above the bakery, where Alexei lived next door to an old blind woman who rolled the dough for rolls in the morning. His boots clicked and the strangers on the sidewalk stared, at the school boy with his cheeks reddened with strain.

The knot in his stomach tightened as he looked up and saw the red brick, the planter-boxes out the window with the roses that he had leaned out over the sidewalk to plant. They were withered in the sun, now, but they were still there.

The roses were not the only thing in front of the bakery. There was a milkman, and an ambulance. The sirens were off and it simply sat open. A nurse in snagged pantyhose sat in the back with her legs dangling halfway down to the asphalt, waiting.

“Ma’am?” He cleared his throat. “Did something happen to…to Mrs. Feinstein?”

“Mrs. Feinstein?” She stepped down from the ambulance and looked him up and down, her eyes lazy and brown. Miles shifted uncomfortably—he was well aware he was skinny and ghastly sick and not much to look at. “Well, well. Alexei’s little boy-toy.”

He gulped. “What?”

She crossed her arms over the chest and looked into the back of the milk truck. “We were supposed to be married, you know. That pervert—I don’t know what my mother was thinking, marrying me off to some pedo. The marriage would have been next month.”

Miles’ head was spinning. He pressed his hand flat against the milk truck to steady himself. “What…what happened? Did you—“

“You killed him.”

“…what?”

She laughed. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know, darling. You tried to poison him. It didn’t work, so you stabbed him. You followed your word—you did what you said you’d do.”

“I haven’t said anything, I...I came back to—“

“The last thing you said to him was, ‘I’m going to kill!’ And you did, so. You’re a trustworthy boy—I’m sorry he wasn’t better to you.”

“That…that’s not true! I didn’t mean it. I don’t mean anything I say, I was just angry, I didn’t—“

There was a rattle as a gurney, carrying a figure wrapped in white, lurched over the bakery doors. The rubber on the wheels had worn away in places, and it made a loud scratching noise as it rolled down the concrete.

Miles stared, horrified, at the red stain spreading through the fabric. His heart started to palpitate, making sweat run through his palms like a sprinkler head.

“Your handiwork, hmm?” The nurse said, smiling. She said it deep and slightly nasal—just like Alexei.

Miles felt the last of the color drain from his cheeks as a policeman in a dark blue cap stepped from the bakery doors, a pistol in his holster and handcuffs swinging nonchalantly from his fingers. Miles’ fingers began to tremble. He dropped his trunk, and ran to the milk truck, hopping in through the open side and fumbling for the key in the ignition.

It was then, in his rush, that he realized he’d never learned to drive.