Boys Like Flowers Too

collagen cottages

VI
CILLIAN GLANCED TOWARDS the brown coat slung across one arm of his chair. It had smelt differently by the time Oliver returned it to him; lighter, and like lavender. It was oddly comforting, the floral scent was almost enough to assuage the throbbing of his head, to give way to the dreamless slumber he so desperately craved to succumb to. Yet tonight was one more night Cillian's mind—truly, as though it had a mind and will all of its own—would cling to the landscape of lucidity, even as Cillian's eyes grew tired and red with use. Said eyes drifted sluggishly to the painting propped against the chair across from him. It was a Levitan still-life, as imitated by his mother who, at the time, was infatuated with Russian mood scapes. Cillian's mother had always been beautiful with the paintbrush, but she never painted anything original in her life, perhaps with the exception of her doodles as a child (the mind of a child is one untrammelled by the footsteps of those before her, which could be followed back into infinity like the conveyor belt of time.) Despite this, his mother—her given name was Fumiko Ito—was an intelligent woman. She could have brought the world to its knees with her brush strokes alone, if she so wished; that was what Cillian convinced himself. But she knew no matter where she tread, or where she placed her paintbrush, she would not be the first to step foot into that intellectual property, nor would she be the last. Cillian's mother was enraptured by the history of man, their spectres before her; she would consume every memory, every portrait, every classic, like collecting seashells along a beach. And she would follow them, indefinitely, scouring that sandy terrain, one step at a time, into the sun. Fumiko would not bother to make original art, for she knew whatever she could come up with had been tried before, or it would be tried after.

      Cillian closed his eyes. He'd dug the painting of cornflowers out the day he mentioned the Russian painter Levitan to Oliver. He had felt triumphant when he first discovered it again. It had been sitting at the back of his closet quietly collecting dust, like a friend forgotten. And, like a friend forgotten, his feelings of triumph had melted into melancholy. The cornflowers—the real ones Oliver had given him—had now dried. Their heads sunken forward, the vibrancy of life drained from their pasty blue complexion. Cillian wondered how Oliver could like flowers so much. It didn't matter how pretty he made his arrangements; by the end of the week, all his flowers would die and nothing would be left to speak of their beauty. Oliver, perhaps unbeknownst to him, was constantly stood at the crossroad between life and death; it was perpetually fluttering past him, like pages of a flip-note. How Oliver could live like that completely evaded Cillian.

       When Oliver had dropped into the Bus Stop last Sunday, Cillian had been so affected he didn't even bother to cover up the fact that he'd already anticipated Oliver's sweet tooth—for he had brooded over the boy more than enough in the preceding week or so, what he liked and disliked. It had become like a pastime to Cillian, though a dangerous one, where he tried to guess at the types of things the blonde haired boy enjoyed. He envisioned him sat at a type writer in the apartment above his shop, forming poetic prose of his mind's volition, the sun setting in his window. Once, at another time, he saw in his mind's eye Oliver feeding the ducks at the pond, smiling when one came right up to him and took a slice of bread from his hand; melted snow dripped from long blades of grass while the midday sun cast a gleam across the water's beryl-green surface. The sun was always present in visions of Oliver, like the two were bound by tenets of diction, synonymous, and leashed together by a shiny golden thread. A fortnight passed, and Cillian hadn't seen Oliver since he dropped by to return his coat. Cillian almost wished Oliver had held onto the coat a bit longer, even though it was his only one and he needed it desperately. Now, he feared, there was almost nothing tying the two boys together. Until one Sunday—it always seemed to be a Sunday—Cillian saw Oliver, though it was only a glimpse. He was outside the Bus Stop, across the street waiting at the number two bus stop, thick novel in hand. He had on a navy blue sweater, brown leather satchel slung over one shoulder. Cillian only caught brief snatches of the other between the cars and big red buses that passed in front, blurring into insignificance; but it was enough to ensure Cillian would be plagued by more Oliver-related visions of the sort in the days following (now with hefty reading books thrown into the imaginary ensemble of props.) Cillian didn't mind; a little sunshine would be welcome in the coming winter months. Though he worried that there would come a point where he actively sought it out.