He used to sing until his jaw would crack and snap under the weight of his tongue and teeth. And his voice, when he did talk, was like a breaking record, soft and torn; the needle bent, the disc water-warped. His eyes swam in their sockets, sludge and mud that seeped over the white into his brain. The body he carried around with him was a small frame of bone, for he simply didn't wish to digest his food, and spat it up in the toilet after eating. His fingers always smelled like vomit, the coppery stench that rose to fill and clog your nostrils when he touched your face.

But he was lovely.

Lips he had, that you would love to play on your sex; to suck at the tender sweet places on your body, kissing the darkest parts of your soul. Stripping the dead cells from your body with that velvet-rough tongue, until he knew every edge of your flesh. His cheekbones were like daggers, cutting into his face. Things to trace with fingers when his head was below your stomach. Where fat-clogged cells could be was only spacious air and broken bone.

But he was lovely.

He still thought himself beautiful when he died. He at least always knew that I found him to be the most wonderful creature I had ever seen. If only he could remember what it was to love, if only he had known what the pleasure of flesh was like, and had not forsaken the act of self indulgence.

His mind was diseased. His brain sick with love lost and his heart cracked open like a broken shell. But he wore a smile when they found him, collapsed in his room. He always smiled despite everything around him. Even while crying and through the pain of starvation, he smiled.

When he died, he weighed only sixty pounds. It was of course the weakness that destroyed him. The weight of his skull, through the lack of food, couldn't protect his brain. They found him in his room, his parents had left for the night as they always do, and when they returned from a night of drinking, they found him. Sprawled on the floor, naked as a child, his body covered in a sticky brain fluid. It leaked from where his head had caught the corner of the desk, and in a puddle of red and white it lay on the floor.

They said, the police and coroner, that he had been alive for approximately two minutes and thirteen seconds after the initial collapse. And that he had flopped in his own ichor, straining to call out through a crushed windpipe, while his vision was blurred and his heart finally gave in.

He never listened to me, when I told him that he should eat something. He never listened to anyone, when it came to his health. Even his family who had although neglected him as a babe, had told him as a teenager that he should seek counsel in someone other than each other. But he never did, and they never made him.

So he had died, his body had given up, and the bones that he had worshiped, crushed him.

The funeral, which I can remember so clearly, was held in an old Gothic church, one of the many that had been saved from the war. Plush pews filled with lamenting men and women who knew nothing of this tragic tale, only that a child was lost due to over dramatization in media; that MTV was to blame, and Glamour magazine. Lilies were thrown down the aisle, petals dirtied by tar on one old mans shoe. And flowers in vases, the edges tipped in black ink, ran adjacent the rows, filling every place where a bible should have taken rest.

His coffin, open for all to see lay on a raise dais, in front of the podium and an open book. His face, still beautiful, tilted slightly to the left, his cheek sunken around bone. His hair immaculate, his clothes rich and smelling of embalms and mothballs - though god knows what kind of moths could reach his final resting-place.

I reached his coffin at the end of the procession, and said my farewells to his body, and touched, grazed his face with my hand. Even after I had wept, and broken down outside on the grass when they lowered my love into the ground, I knew not a worse pain. Even after I had drunken myself into a stupor, and cursed the world. After my sex grew weak and old, and shriveled up inside me, with no purpose left in the world, for not even I, in my current state, could conjure his naked form. And since my mind could not construct his beauty, I left the task to my hands.

I decided to write of him in exquisite detail. Of his blackened hair I wrote; pages on pages about his fingers and nails. I couldn't get enough, I knew it wasn't my fault, and that I shouldn't suffer; that I was as bad as him for thinking I was the only one in pain. But I am a simple thing, and couldn't help but sink into my work and forget time.

And time did pass, and my desk became inundated with paper, sketches of his bones, his lips, and sex. Beautiful curving E's and U's that made up his name. Anthony Qurtiz, written over and over and over, crossing his name back and forth until it made the paper appear either black or blue, depending on the day of the week. Blue for Sundays and Mondays and Fridays, black for the Tuesdays Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Bruised by ill neglect, my collection of papers grew.

I let the answering machine lie until I found the time to wander outside, and stand in the sun, let it bake my tissues until the melanin I could taste in my mouth. The words I had left on the dreaded machine construed my voice to sound deep and old, like a man almost.

I'm not here at the moment. Call back soo-on and try again later. I just need to be alone, everything is fine. Leave a message after the beep. Beep. The tape skips too, like his voice used to. I can hear it at night; whirling back until the tiny tape is full of familiar voices. Erasing and deleting, recreating their voices with new messages, desperate to reach me, I suppose. They bang on my door at times, but always leave in a silent stupor.

But I need to be alone, I can't stop thinking of his beautiful body, so frail that I wanted to hold it in my arms, so weak and fragile like a small twig, fallen from the tree. Cradling his head in my lap, stringing back his hair, and letting his body smoothly glide over my own.

We never did have sex. He died chaste, pure except for his sickened mind. And even I did nothing to stop his problems, I welcomed the sickness like death a plague. I wanted it around me, in me and on top of me. I needed him to make myself feel whole and safe and warm. I leeched off his body as a praying mantis her mate. If only… if only I had been brave.

All of things in the world, nothing could amount to the feeling I got when around him. The extreme beauty that he carried on his broken shoulders. His aura radiating from his body, tangible memories that seem to last days, even now, cause me pleasure.

The last time I saw him, he lay next to my chest. His arm tucked under my back, the other hand playing with the folds of flesh between my legs. His head lay on my naked stomach. I tucked a piece of hair behind his ear, and blew gently on his face - which caused him to wrinkle his nose and snort on my belly. I don't know why we never had sex, we were just around each other when the urges rose; I think we had something more, something deeper than flesh, and animalistic lust.

His fingers, when deep inside me, which I could never imagine - no matter how hard I tried, so small and weak were they - wriggled against my G-spot. Caressing its soft tender flesh, stroking back and forth. He would take his slicked fingers and trail them up my chest and near my mouth, where I would lick at them, tasting my own fluids, smelling his vomit.

He was beautiful and child-like, sitting on my floor at times while I typed away at the computer. Indian-style, legs tucked under each other, hands resting in lap. His head cocked at me in the strange angle it gets when curious. Smiling when I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. Eager and willing to do whatever pleased me, and teasing me when he knew I was looking; licking his lip slowly, rubbing the chapped flesh with silky wet tongue; tracing his jaw line with spider-like fingers, down his neck and over his chest. Rubbing the nipple through his shirt, slowly in hypnotic swirls.

Laughing from his beautiful lips when I grabbed him and thrust his weak body on the bed, his hands grasping at my breasts for dear life. Holding onto me with his legs around my back; so weightless when I spun him around and we fell onto the bed, laughing and kissing - sucking on the small chocolate slivers he had for dinner that had stuck in his teeth.

__________________________________

It's all gone though; and the memories that I have etched into the coral shape of my brain are all that remains. I'm another Aphelia drowning in sorrow; letting the tears clean the smell of his hair from my unwashed sheets when I lay down and sob. Everything reminds me of him. The coffee ring on the table, it's sticky substance rubs off easily onto my finger and putting it to my mouth, tasting the dull flavor which he had, only a week before, tasted himself. And again, the bathroom where we washed together, and lay in the dirty water together, and clung to each other, together. And the window where he sat forlorn, and watched the people on the street laughing.

My tears, the salty water erasing the beautiful E's and U's that I had written, smearing them together on the paper. Blue and black spreading out over the lines and through the holes; staining my desk beneath, another future reminder of my past.

I would have to throw it out, all of this. The places where we played, the things he touched and felt, and kissed with those plush lips of his. Burn my apartment maybe, burn the whole place, the neighborhood and the streets where he walked. The earth should burn, and mourn and suffer over such a wonderful lost creation.

But I know that the world doesn't care about one lost life, when so many are suffering the land over. On the streets even, the beggars who sleep on open vents for Christmas, and eat canned turkey for thanksgiving. Across rivulets of pavement they walk, that chips slowly the green from the earth so that we can pollute the air and strangle the clouds. Crying already over lost life; this is not the first time someone so close to another has died. I have to remember that, or something close to it.

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The apple is rotten. Cut in half, one piece devoured before his death, the other lay in the fridge. Frozen perfection, spoiled by frost, painted brown and yellow with fruit-sickness. It tastes like velvet on my tongue, soft and easy to break apart with my yellow teeth. I welcome the stale disease and pestilence, which wraps me in their arms.

Something for the pain, something to ease the burden of his death from my shoulders. Eating has always been a panacea for the pain, my stomach gurgling and tossing the bits of mush and absorbing it into my blood; it takes away the pain of the day. Nothing so harsh as drugs; heroine, cocaine, pot - my body could never handle anything such as that. I could never completely waste my body with something so chemical, something so completely manmade.

I toss it to the floor, the remains of the apple-half. It lands on the carpet, and bounces twice leaving sticky residue that glistens on the fibers of the carpet, and the old hairs that sparkle in the sun. I take pen in hand; my fingers know what to touch and how to move. They sketch his name again in blue, for today is a Sunday the almighty day of rest.

They sketch on.

The story, at age eight, of his life as I know it. Of his days in Corolla North Carolina, where he ran across the beaches on bleak winter days with the wind stinging his legs, burning sand into his skin. Where the background of his escapes were a deep, dark green ocean; one that pulled at you and beckoned you into its brace, where you could sink and sift with the sand and the slimy sea. Where his Mother stood at the dunes, near the path back to his home, and called unheard into the wind, as it whipped streaks of black hair across her face.

I remember his stories of playing in the dunes with a friend. A child named Abel, who played with him at school, and in the dunes where they huddled in the sand. Where they kissed and ground the sand between their lips, where they cuddled from the cold, hiding deep down in the dunes. Words buried under grains of sand. Sweet nothings and the ever adored "I Love You" whisked away by the Carolina breeze; forever lost to the grave.

Sometimes, he told me, it seemed the world was nothing but an endless gray and black, sleets of Sea and Sky. And gray motionless clouds hiding a sun that never reached his face and a sea which harshly called his name.

A cacophony of soil and worms and weeds that tangle in the earth's crust, and held down his whispered secrets; the story of his life. And in this silence that permeates my room, and curls through the colored holes of a forgotten apple and arches of tousled stale blankets, and breaks my heart to sit in, I spin around my pen a story of a dead child and his broken lover.

The waves of the beach were beautiful at night, aching to break upon the shore they stretch out long and thick with foam across the horizon. Nothing save a recording could perfect the noise a wave makes when dying. A sharp inhale of sea water, a sigh of release and a body bobs among the seaweed as the waves roll it over and over, wrapping it as a present. The sky is a slice of aged marble, gray and lifeless, unchanging, unmovable it rests on the shoulders of the world. Clouds like plumes of cigar smoke; thick and heavy hang high in the heavens. The wind is cold, like it is every December, and it kicks up tiny grains of sand and buries them in tender legs.

The footprints along the beach were both very small and very faint, one branch of prints heading into the coffee black water, the other stops short of the shoreline. A child, no younger than eight stands half cocked at the neck; lips parted and open for the sand that sticks to his face. The child's eyes have glazed over, and his body seems slack and drawn out, as if teetering on the edge of the world. His hair is unnaturally black, and his skin a paled white, from too many days under a sun perpetually flocked with clouds. He stares into the ocean depth, at the present that lays on the surface of the water.

The Carolina wind is sharp today, and it cuts across the body in the water, and tendrils of ribbon that twine around it. The wind strips away the outer garments and leaves the body bare, to drift along the waves. Inside is a small child, the flesh not yet blue, still fresh within the salty sea. The garden of water shifts and carries the body away, like so much trash to be disposed of. Into the depths it travels, where fish chew on his skin, and bite at his eyes; until nothing is left of the child in the water or the child on the beach.

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"You can't hold it all in," his voice caressed the deepest cortex of the child's mind. The Doctor sat in a red and white chair, the boy in a blue and black one; and together they stared at each other across a small plastic table, decorated with wooden blocks and old toys. The kiddy chairs squeaked under the Doctor's weight, and groaned when he shifted to his other side. He wore thin wire glasses, the perfect fit for his elongated face and light blue eyes, his tight lips and jagged cheekbones. His sandy hair combed over to hide premature balding, his youthful looks distorted through what he liked to call, his Doctor Face.

A small study turned office, located on the fourth floor of United Bank; with walls painted a light blue, which turned gray as the sun filtered through the clouds watchful gaze. Diplomas of various sizes cascaded down the blue, rocks in a frozen waterfall that hung precariously on bent nails. Windows took up the back wall, and peering through one could look on the urban city of Norfolk, and further out into the sea herself; who swallowed lovers and ate hearts. A desk of wood, red as any drop of blood, stood stationary against the glass, polished and shining.

The boy blankly returned his gaze. "I'm not hiding anything, I'm not holding anything in. I just want to go home now." He reached for a wooden block, the letter D; depressed, debauched, damaged, dead - he stacked it on the B block; Beginning, belated, boring, broken. He took his hands away, and stared into his lap under the Doctor's watchful eye.

"Let's review what happened. You believe your friend…" He waited, peered up from behind his thin glasses, and sat his eyes on the child. Anthony looked up, then down, and at the blocks again in quiet remorse. His little hands gripped his knees, white knuckled and tired.

"Abel CMfate." A choked whisper, but response for the kind Doctor.

"Yes, well explain to me what happened again. Anthony?"

Silence.

Dr. Leon sighed; the kind his mother made when disappointed. He set his clipboard on the ground behind him, and pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. "You mustn't blame yourself for Abel's actions. What he did to himself was his own doing; nothing can bring him back - and it wasn't your fault." He reached over the plastic table, knocking down the two stacked blocks, and took the child's hand into his own.

"Anthony," his voice calming, like the ocean at midnight, soothing and melodic. "Nothing is your fault. It couldn't be helped."

"No," his eyes traced up the doctor's arm, at the fine coat of blonde hair, at the stiff blue shirt he wore, and the checkered red and white tie. "He did it to hurt me. I didn't love him enough. He needed me and I let him down. He did it to… break me; he wants to see me dead as well. He wants to see me with him, wants me even now." He wiped the tears away with the back of his hand, and clutched his stomach with one arm.

"Oh my child," The good Doctor stood and pushed the little red and white chair to the ground. "My child."

He bent next to my Anthony and took his small head in his hands and pressed it against his chest. He massaged his back when the boy sobbed and cried into the starch of his shirt and cheap silk tie. He stroked and smoothed the fine black hairs on his head, and caressed his cheek like one does to a dog. His hands found the small premature nipples, and with spit healing fingers massaged them into readiness. A mouth like an ashtray, broken and cracked, an old tongue that licked at the boys tears while he suffered under the weight of the man's chest, and gasped under the weight of the man's sex.

The trip's back in his father's old blue Volvo were always the worst. The interior smelled of water-soaked leather, and it stuck to the back of his thigh, were the Good Doctor Leon's fluid still clung to his skin. His father, as always on such an occasion, was drunk and quick to anger; and the boy had learned long ago to keep his mouth shut around him, when it came to problems that needed a father's attention.

He had been as such, an alcoholic, since moving down from Upstate New York, where his mother's prestigious family business had supported them. When he injured himself in a boating accident while playing the fool with his buddies, he took up drinking to ease the pain. And it, like all drugs, only made the inevitable pain worse.

His face was a dark red from high blood pressure, his muscles had long since wasted away and all that remained was a flabby layer of skin. The mouth, which twitched as it did now when he was angry, was too small for such a large face, while his eyes were a dark green, and much too big. He had the grace of a mule, and suave of a pigeon during cardiac arrest. He stumbled at formal occasions and burped during funerals. He embarrassed not only the child, but his mother as well, who stayed with him out of love, and hope that one day he would see the error of his ways.

Anthony shifted in his seat, the sweat glistening, and rolling down his bruised skin. His father's gaze shifted from the road and onto the child, eyeing him as one would a thief.

"May I open a window please?" He whispered to the floor. His voice soft and throat stretched, he waited while his father took from the side compartment and swollen joint.

"No," came the response from his Father.

And that was all that was spoken, until they arrived at home.

Home was a large dwelling on water-stained stilts that sat next to the beach and echoed the dunes same remorseful plea's of self-mutilation. It swayed during high gusts, and was constructed in partnership with another town drunk; the goodly carpenter, who's only pain he wished to drown was the rotten skin between his wife's lips and legs. The outside of the house was a wood color, stained and glossed for perfection. Like icing fringe dripped from the roof in wooden slants, that curved around the ledges. Balconies hung from the sides of the house; small platforms that held old green plastic chairs nailed to the floor. From the front one could see a pool, the raised platform it lay on making it impossible to gaze into.

Two flights of stairs took up the main entrance, and joined with a small balcony and a front door the color of purple. Upon entering you found yourself looking up yet another flight of stairs that took you into the living room and kitchen. To the left stood a hallway that wound its way around the corner, and connected with the "Play" and bedrooms.

Under the house lay a small garage, which the Father parked the car under and staggered out? His eyes lay glazed and dead on his face, his hands using the wall as a crutch. Anthony followed slowly behind, closing the car door quietly, staying perpetual under his shadow, and to his back. When they reached the front both parted ways, the Father to climb the up, the boy to stay below.

He wandered to the back of the house, stepping on the wooden planks that served as a walkway through the sand, breathing deeply the salty air that clung to his clothes, and drifted around his face. In front of him lay a battered jungle gym, the wood sagging from the weight of two swings. A large wooden trough lay next to it, presumably a sandbox. To this the boy went. Stepping off of the planks and onto the sand, that seemed to catch and swallow his blue Nike tennis shoes.

He knelt on the ground next to the box, and allowed the small animals that lay beneath to crawl in his skin, and to partake in a feast. He stared into the box, at the small things inside, the blades of grass that struggled upward to the sky, and the shells he collected. His small hands touched each one, tracing the familiar contours of their exterior, until individual item inside of the large wooden box, lay covered in his sticky prints. He closed his eyes, and lay in the sand, too tired to curl into the fetal position.

Do you remember your dreams?

"If you ever loved me; if you ever cared about me, then you wouldn't leave me." His voice sounded sore, as if all the tiny hairs in his throat were scratching against the tender spots in his larynx.

The surrounding beach was empty of all other human life, except for the two boys. Their socks and shoes thrown to the dunes, where they waited to be worn again; their pants rolled up to their knees, their hair tossed and skin sand-worn.

Anthony's hands laced around Abel's neck, pulling the boy closer. They kissed, their bodies slipping together as one. Their chapped lips, the flesh hanging down like tiny velvet ribbons, met each other. Their tongues, not able to understand the concept of touching one another, hangs back in each boys mouth, as the torn skin of their lips slips into the bleeding cracks that make up each chapped lip.

"You know I have to do this Anthony. I have to see what death is."

"Anthony!"

He woke, shaking the sand from his face. His Mother stood on the southern balcony, looking down on him. "Dinner sweetie!" She called to him, and turned in a flitter of pink and baby blue back into the house. Her long hair, streaming behind her seemed to want to escape in the winds arms.

He came to his knees slowly, shaking from the still-tiredness of a short rest. His head felt heavy, and he fell against the side of the Sandbox when he tried to come to his feet. Picking his body up once again, his feet took him to the front of the house. They worked along the planks that served as a walkway, past the garage and up the steep wooden steps through the purple front door.