The Glittering World

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     He sees himself again, this time in his dreams. His unconscious, normally a dark pool, is now aglow with moonlight, and the mirror of the night forest appears to him once more. He faces his refractive self-image, and hears his call to himself: a choir of different selves in different voices, but all him. Struck by the same sense of longing he felt outside the ceilidh, he steeps in the fecund scent of his kindred, close by, so close.

       They call him Blue, his adopted name; they call him Michael, his given name; and they call him by another, older name, something altogether different, but also familiar. A dream name. Or a christening at last?

     His lips move, as if to repeat the word. But only a buzzing sound emerges, a hive of listless bees awakening to life, to be reborn.

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      Blue opened his eyes to the tartan room’s plaid bedding and matching walls. The name was gone. All that remained was a dull thud of sensation: that of being smothered and emerging, an escape from being buried alive, which was how he felt after most of his nightmares. More gloomy thoughts born of Saturn.

      He’d neglected to draw the curtains, the square of light from the window next to the bed diffuse but still painfully bright. He slumped back down, a momentary shuddering of trees across his vision before he sat up again, determined to meet the incipient challenges of wakefulness.

      Beyond the foot of the brass bed, someone stood in the doorway: Gabe, in a rumpled T-shirt and jeans that hung low over his narrow hips. They both started.

      “Oh—sorry,” Gabe said. He went to shut the door, appeared to collect himself, and peered back inside. “I was just—sorry. I heard you cry out.”

      “I was having a nightmare. Don’t sweat it. Really.” He didn’t want any strangeness between them; he had enough to deal with already. “I hurt,” Blue said, and rolled over. “What time is it?”

      “Noonish. A bit later maybe.”

      “I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”

     “I know what you mean.” Gabe shut the door and leaned against it. “A little too much schnapps, I guess.”

     The two had been in a holding pattern for a few weeks, since they’d drunkenly fallen into Blue’s bed together, an odd repetition of what transpired with Elisa a couple of months prior. It was the same night he had shown Gabe his old photographs, and nostalgia once again turned into abandon. Blue had done most of the work, Gabe largely passive, almost dutifully so, a ritual display of surrender as Blue hauled him from the bed and into his lap. Blue’s hands slid up Gabe’s spine, only to rest on a fibrous landscape of raised scar tissue along Gabe’s back in beaded threads. Another disturbing indication, along with the mottled scarring on his hand, that Gabe had suffered greatly in his youth.

      “What...” Blue said that night, but, “Don’t,” Gabe had replied, and moved Blue’s hands down to his waist. Gabe hadn’t wanted him to see, and so he wouldn’t look. The landscape of Gabe’s back remained fixed in his mind, however, an image of vestigial limbs or perhaps wings, shorn clean from muscle and bone.

      After they’d finished, Gabe had put his shirt back on and turned to Blue, traced his finger over the smidge of hair on Blue’s chest as if reading something there. Blue drifted off to sleep, and awoke the next morning to find him in the same position, inches away with his ice-blue eyes trained upon him, as if Gabe had remained awake all night doing just that. Searching, Blue had thought at the time. But for what, exactly?