Release(7)

He hadn’t. Enzo noticed. At the end of the night, they kissed in a shadow outside. Enzo tasted of pretzels and warm, his lips as soft as a sleepy puppy. Adam had almost been literally dazed, like he’d never been so thirsty.

Angela ended up kissing Shelley Morgan, too, but said that she had smelled of grape. “It was like kissing a Care Bear.”

That had started Enzo and Adam, though. All seventeen months, one week, and three days of it.

Adam passed six miles where the path on the lakeside started a long curve back into the woods. His music still blasted in his ears, but it all somehow felt silent back here. The path was empty, the lake steadily disappearing behind thickening trees. His breath pulled one pattern over the slightly different one of his feet. He passed into some shadow and the sudden coolness made him realize how wet with sweat he was, his shirt soaked all the way down to the hem.

He checked his phone again. No wonder. The running app showed he was at top pace. One that, if he’d been able to keep it up over all these distances rather than so late into them, might have made him a competitive cross-country runner after all.

Maybe Angela’s joke, if that’s what it was, had been the problem with Enzo in the end. She was trying to be helpful, assuming Enzo was just as interested in Adam, but if he wasn’t, she had effectively handed over all of Adam’s power in one simple sentence.

“Do you really love me?” Enzo had asked, just before they kissed, a smile half disbelieving, half intrigued across that beautifully handsome face of his.

And why not? It was so much easier to be loved than to have to do any of the desperate work of loving.





A square slab of grey concrete abruptly ends the treeline. She almost falls into the empty air, as if a wall has been removed.

She stands, astonished.

I am here.

There are cuts on her feet from her walk through the forest. The ground was littered not only with the green detritus of a mature woodland but the garbage of humans. Broken glass, a rusted shopping cart, so very much plastic in a limitless array of colours, all of them ugly, and in one small clearing, a bed of used hypodermic needles that stabbed her feet as she walked over them, bite after bite, until she looked as if she’d been attacked by a porcupine.

Though she does not bleed. And the pain is so distant as to be in another room.

Ahead of her now, across the square of concrete, stands a closed-down convenience store, fading to dereliction.

I have thirst, she thinks.

“I have thirst,” she says aloud.

“You won’t find any help there, little lady,” a voice answers.

A man. His clothes, his skin, his hair, all the colour of camouflaging dust, hiding him as he sits in the shadow of an elderly dumpster along the side of the building.

She tries to answer, tries to ask him what he means, but her mouth struggles and all she is able to say is, “I have thirst” again, frowning at the effort.

The man leans out of the shadows to get a better look at her. His face is a mask of beard and sun-damaged wrinkles, but the concern there is plain. “Are you coming down off something?” His voice changes, as if he is talking to himself. “Probably meth, yeah, probably meth, all those labs out there in the trees, but the face, the face, meth melts your face, and that face ain’t melted, that face is the sun on water, man, the sun on water, the sun on the water.” He speaks up again. “Do you need a doctor?”

The word “meth” has turned a queer screw in her belly, a cold one, a fearful one, and words again come up from inside, floating like a choke of feathers, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t–

“I don’t,” she says.

“I look at her,” the man says, “and I don’t know if this is the truth she speaks, if these words are even the answer to my question, and the sun that hits my face is not, it is not, the same sun that hits her face, a sun cast through water, a sun dappled, moving, breathing.”

He stands, then seems surprised to find himself standing. His voice reaches out once more. “You have nothing to fear from me.” He stretches back into the shadow and picks up a black can, already opened. “I can help you with your thirst, though to be honest, you probably shouldn’t drink too much. Not in this heat. Not with the sun shining on you like that.”

He steps towards her. “Here, my lady, I don’t expect you to come to me. You can’t expect her to do that. You’ll have to go to her. You will. You must. But will she harm you?”

“I will not,” she says, discovering it is true as she says it.

The man crosses the grey concrete, his gait stiff, painful, but steady. He stops slightly more than arm’s length from her. He holds out the can, straining to reach her, as if he can come no closer.

She steps to him instead, taking the offering hand in both of hers, steadying it. He gasps, astonished at the physical contact. She can smell him now, a smudge of unwashed skin, poverty, extreme loneliness. She takes the can, still holding his hand, unrolling it, running a finger across its weathered palm.

“This hand,” she says. “This hand killed me.”

“Not this hand.”

“A hand like it.”

“All hands are alike. As alike as they are different.”

She releases his palm, finds herself still holding the can, a remarkable odour of yeast pressing from it, almost alive.