Travis Phelps is God's devotee. He will bleed out his sins through his wounds, suffer his punishments. He will repent until his knees bruise and his tongue is dry.
He will pray to god to cleanse him of his sins. Of himself.
And then he meets Sal Fi...
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𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐨𝐦 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐛𝐫𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐤𝐢𝐧
♱♱♱
Travis smokes. (He does not lie when he says he drowns in sin.)
He's never smoked weed or crack or...whatever hard drugs people can smoke. The former reminds him too much of Johnson and the latter...well, Travis is already a homosexual, being a drug addict on top of that feels too taxing.
No, he smokes cigarettes. Nicotine wrapped in paper. It burns his throat when he inhales the smoke, and his mind numbs a little with every exhale. It's calming, it's mitigating, and it's his only reprieve from everything.
Kenneth doesn't know, of course. No one does.
The memory of Travis as he inhaled his first bitter cigarette when he was seven, right before his mother left, is his only. He mimicked her, stole a matchbox and inhaled the way he'd seen her do it a thousand times before. He coughed out a lung, tears in his eyes as the taste of something bitter lingered in his mouth.
And then he brought it back up and took another drag. Took another and another until he stopped coughing. Until it felt...it felt okay.
(And then okay became good, and good became great, and great became solace.)
He goes to the shed his father long since forgot about, finding the rickety toolbox stripped of most of its blue paint and dented at the edges and clicking it open. He's greeted with packs on packs of Marlboro Gold and red, just what his mother smoked. He slips one into the pocket of his pants along with a half-empty lighter and hurries out, not forgetting to close the box shut and hide it among the other miscellaneous junk collecting dust.
Kenneth is never home on Fridays. Travis never bothered to ask why. He always leaves in the early morning to return on Saturday evening. As far as Travis is concerned, it's another blessing.
He grabs his bike, a dingy, painted green two-wheeler with bright orange handlebars and his initials carved into it, and kicks off. He pedals, lifting himself up and feeling the rushing wind pull his hair out of his face.
'Fall is the fucking best.'
He goes faster and faster, mindless of the bumps and rocks. He loves his bike, loves the way it feels like a moment of freedom, a moment where the unattainable is within reach. The paths are familiar to him, every groove and turn and corner. He brazenly pulls his bike off the road for a second, laughing as it hits the ground with two heavy clunks.
Joy's always felt like a foreign feeling.
He's feeling more alive today, more in tune with everything. He finds comfort in the sounds of leaves and cars and people out on the road. Travis keeps pedalling further.
