#corsey. 002

[alulars]

@corsey continued from here.

The old stone walls of the cathedral are tall. Poised. Johnson matches and admires the building's perfect stature. Small packs of tourists scurry; their clumsy, cluttered steps as annoying as their prayers. And some do pray. Their whispered prayers knock into the high vault ceiling, dumb and dull, like bloated bats searching for the unseen body of God.

Each one is as easy for Johnson to hear as breathing. Rather, holding his breath. The act requires a temporary cessation of the self. Breath held—within that small, red caesura of his flap-flaring heart—he could hear. He does not hold his breath to listen. Their needs are always inseparably egocentric, banal: ugly. Stuck in them like fat in thighs.

He tries to forget about prayers, about the labor of breathing. Some prayers slip through (my mother is sick—, —this job—) as he stumbles back into a rhythmic respiration cycle. Johnson, almost glad for the focal point, concentrates on Elfgar. His entire head, his entire presence, is steered to him in one fluid movement. Johnson smiles; amused, first, by the voiced dissent. Then, by the fact that he so deeply agrees.

Openly, playfully public, only because he means it in every sense of the word: "I am not interested in possessing Mackenzie Knight. In truth, Elfgar, I seek the opposite. I believe you share this sentiment."

[alulars]

Appealing, deceiving—Johnson follows in Elfgar's steps.

Elfgar doesn't say follow. He assumes it; he desires it (the way children churn their arms back and forth, pretending they can move ocean waves). And he charts it (the way children dare and dance—dry, cuffed pants—along a permeable, shifting body that is always reaching back). Correctly. Elfgar desires and charts correctly. Like all humans, he feels desire first. But he directs—redirects—it well.

For the first time, Johnson submits to the want of a man.

It doesn't feel wrong.

It is effortless to match Elfgar's pace. His gait is the tempo and swing of a practiced hammer. Stern yet graceful and precise. Elfgar's coattail is absent of any superfluous sway; his body is not wasteful in its movement; neither is Johnson's.

The enclosed garden is nearly empty. Though, it takes Johnson's eyes several grating seconds to register and readjust to the stark shift of light. In this human body, colors strain into a small, fine range. There are colors Johnson has forgotten the appearance of. Certain spots, he knows, hold a grander scope that he can no longer recognize. He scrutinizes a bush: the pink leaves of acidic-tinged hydrangeas, for instance. Oxygenated blood: his gaze turns and traces a vein on Elfgar's temple. Deeper colors live there beyond the limited scope of three-coned eyes. Even, Johnson has long suspected and he looks there now, Elfgar's pupils are something darker than others'. A black more burnt than ash.

It's a fine garden.

But Johnson finds himself beholding Elfgar as they stroll conspiratorially about the green.

He stops in front of a bronze replica of Daniel and the Lion and regards it out of custom. There's a glob of old bird shit pooled between Daniel's fused-shut palms. Dry: "This is better."

He almost falters - there, in the eyelids as they close quickly to re-wet the pupils.

What is there left to want, in these slow-lapsing heaps of days?

His soul carries on; his stagnant, unalterable creating carries on. Like a TPS report pattern that these walls echo up, long after the public's declination of need, whilst the sublime ricochets, unseen, through each heart of this indiscriminately bored, or bent congregation.

Hearts and lives that pile like a thousand grains of sand inside his mind. An hourglass with both ends never empty, each face pressing and climbing and flying low over the next.

These fragments of other lives that are destined to complete themselves are, on their left: fresh, full, green matter. On their right, already dead. A dead look, a dead contour, a dead movement.

It's a revelation every time, to Elfgar. But for Johnson, he can see the perspective of an eye looking down. What must it mean to see the both ends at once?

And he knows, like the walls know:

to be a part of it is not to possess, but to bare the proof of it. To be a part of Mackenzie Knight is to bare the proof of Mackenzie Knight.

To blow the embers gently, and leans towards the glow, then the fumes, until sick with the strong drug of her victories and ecstasies and sensations.

They walk towards each other. Step matching step. A choreograph he did not know he would be so adept in demonstrating.

"This is a bad spot for this." He says quietly on the square-up so that the sound carries less. Their coat shoulders, but not their shoulders, make contact before Elfgar continues to the cloister gardens. Two parallel lines only ever almost intersecting.