abalone i

excerpt one of many

“I think I forgot,” he says wetly, hiccuping on the red juice that he crashes into his mouth. The plastic crinkles in his trembling grip. He swipes a hand across his lips and crumples the empty cup, all the while never lifting his face. “It slipped away one day. On a Sunday. I remember it. When I opened the blinds and the heat crawled in. Something left, then. I felt it. I knew what it was. I let it go.”

“You forgot.”

Midwinter airs have chilled the railing to a temperature below freezing. The hand Norman has on the metal is the cold of a lonely corpse in a morgue.

“I did,” the Abalone Boy says, simply. “and I don’t think I’ll ever regret it.”

Norman thinks of cotton wool soaked in saltwater, the pressure settings of the washing machine back at the apartment, of pearlescent abalones. The bottle of ibuprofen sitting on his counter, waiting. “Never?”

“Never,” and he blinks disco glitter from the corner of his eyes because he can. Because that’s what he is: interplanetarily pretty; made of hyperluminiscent mirror shards. “They won’t take me again,” he says. “Not unless I let them. And I won’t ever.”

I think you’re an angel stranded on Earth, Norman wants to say. I think of you like I think of melted silver. I drink champagne on rare occasion and every time I do it’s with the hallucination of your lips on mine.

But because Norman is barely sober, and can hardly put two romantic words together even if he was, he says: “good for you, man.”