#fuck i’m supposed to be pressing flowers and making dinner. got distracted by the siren song of fun fantasy picture books. it happens

[livvyofthelake]

it is of the upmost importance that children have a collection of fun little fantasy picture books written in the style of a field guide or manual.

[harringroveheart]

harringrove horror wip

promises to keep (and miles to go before I sleep) -- untitled sequel | follows on from [this]

:::

Billy drank so much chlorine. Bleach, when he could get it. Hydrofluoric acid, once. He felt sick all the time. Felt himself dissolving away out from under.

When the monster spears him through the chest, it’s a relief.

:::

Dying takes a long time. He can hear voices, feel Max shaking him. Crying. There are sirens too, just too late.

It hurts on and off. All over.

He twists in and out of worlds like overarm swimming – a breath on the surface and a stroke underwater. Light and nothingness. Pain, deep, sucking, all-encompassing, and then just—floating.

Time slips away.

:::

That fucking… beeping. Will someone please turn it off so he can sleep?

:::

His dad holds him, rocks with him.

“My boy, my boy, my boy,” he says, choked up on tears. His words are wet, rough, hot in Billy’s ear. “I’m going to make it right this time.”

Billy keeps rocking with him because he can’t stop.

It’s his first day back from the hospital, but he won’t know it for two more months.

:::

Max is shaking her head. “This one,” she says, putting the fork in his hand.

“I made your favorite,” Susan says, looking to Neil, eyes nervous. She puts the casserole down on the table.

Max shakes her head again: It’s not.

It tastes like crap.

It’s better than antifreeze.

:::

Home, Billy thinks. He keeps staring, forgetting how to blink, where he is, how he got here. His feet are cold past hurting.   

Harrington looks around and down the long stretch of asphalt disappearing into the woods, his eyes darting back to Billy, dark and knowing. The moonlight makes them look wet.

“That’s not your home,” he says. “Let me take you back.”

He’s cold everywhere except where Harrington’s palm presses against his chest.

:::

“Thanks,” he says a little while later, in the car.

“For what?” 

“For hitting me with your car.”

“Well…It wasn’t really mine.”

“Well. I wasn’t really me.”

“You’re you now, though,” Harrington says, more question than it should be. “You know that, right?” 

:::

He has to wait all day to see him. 

He finishes his shift late, when it’s already dark and the parking lot is still swarming with cars. People going to the movies. People picking up their kids. Harrington is too tired or too distracted to notice Billy at first. Does a double take.

When he sees that Billy isn’t there to chase him, he comes closer. Follows Billy into the dark corner behind the loading bay where the Chinese restaurant dumps its trash.

It’s just how he thought it would look: the sailor uniform. Billy feels something like a smile.

“What are you doing here?” Harrington asks, suspicious. Not as hard-toned as it could be. They’ve seen each other around. Eyes over headlights on the dark drive to the Byers’ house. Tense quiet shared in the locker room after practice when they’re both afraid of each other for different reasons.  

“Just felt like seeing a familiar face,” he says.

It’s the truth. It’s all he wants. Harrington’s face is familiar and new all at once, every damn time. He looks clean, rosy. If Billy touched his cheek it would leave a mark. If he touched his hair, he could never trust himself not to stop touching it.

“You okay in there, Hargrove?” Harrington asks. “You look a little…”

I’m okay, Harrington, he thinks.

It’s just sweat.

:::

They shaved his head, Max tells him, putting her hand over his on the gearshift. In, left, second, drive.

“Neil went apeshit,” she says. “No. In, left, second, drive. There. You got it.”

“Did I look stupid?”

“No. You still looked good. Not like you, though. Do you want me to cut it again?”

He laughs. “No way,” he says. “Harrington’d kill me.”

She’s looking at him funny. He stops. Looks down at his hands. Remembering and forgetting.

“Why would Steve kill you, Billy?”

The wheel is warm under his fingers like it remembers him just fine. 

:::

After dinner he washes dishes, quiet and careful, staring at his reflection caught and dulled in the opaque blackness of the window over the sink. The flower boxes outside are spilling over, heavy with big blowsy roses, petals soft and faded at the edges, their centres a vibrant rancid pink that makes his head spin.

It’s almost midnight; a year to the day. Neil bought sparkling wine and the birthday cake Billy liked when he was seven.

A dish clinks in the soapy water, the foam itching at his wrists. 

“It’s ok,” he says dully, Susan’s reflection beside his like a smear of pale oil paint, watching, fretful. “I don’t do that anymore.”

She watches him a moment longer anyway. And when he leaves he hears her putting the detergent away in the cupboard.

:::

Heather’s house. Fran’s house. Gary Kenwick’s house. The house at the end of Dearborn and the house on Randolph Lane. The house with the rose garden and the house with the deadbolt and the house with the fridge-door left open and the milk all over the floor and the house with boys’ rooms and their dinosaur nightlights.

These are places he has been.

:::

If he goes to the steelworks and goes down and down and lies on the concrete and breathes in the dust and closes his eyes he can dream again but it’s not the same.

:::

“I don’t want it to have my mom.”

“It needs her, for its work.”

“I want to go home.”

“We are.”

He is. They are.

“Why did you lie?”

He doesn’t answer. Breathe in, breathe out. He has so many heartbeats now. So many names.

“Billy.”

Billy?

“You said it would be over soon.”

:::

He likes Robin. She works at the video store with Harrington and she doesn’t remember Billy from either of his befores. She should be sick of seeing him, day in and day out, but she likes his jokes and the nasty smile he shares with her when Harrington does something stupid.

“He told Keith The Karate Kid is the only movie that ever made him cry.”

“He told me his favorite actor is the Terminator.”

“He thinks Gremlins is ‘a classic’.”

“He thinks Gremlins is a documentary.”

“Hey,” Harrington says. “Do you two assholes want to help me here, or am I supposed to unpack these all myself?” He waves an exacto knife around at the jumble of half opened boxes and scattered packing peanuts.

Billy smirks. “Who let you have a sharp tool?”

“It’s got a safety on it,” Robin says.

:::

Every now and then they get high out the back of the store. It’s Harrington’s weed. Sometimes it’s the pills the government doctors give Billy each month to stop him from turning back into jelly. Robin and Harrington are fearless. They don’t care what kind of trip they have so long as they’re together.

“I don’t feel anything,” Harrington says, pacing, running his hands through his hair over and over with neurotic focus.

Robin gives one of her honking laughs. “Oh, I think you’re feeling it Stevie.”

“I don’t feel good,” he whines.

“You feel fine. You feel fine,” Robin insists. She’s doing something to her shoelaces, tying them into some intricate knot of vital importance. Billy laughs. It’s only fair. They got him so high last week he let them paint his nails.

“Does this feel weird to you?” Harrington asks, suddenly in front of him, sucking up all his attention, shoving his head under Billy’s hand. Billy’s fingers slide through: muscle memory. It’s softer than he remembers, and lighter too. Blond, in parts.

So, the Mindflayer didn’t get his highlights right.

Harrington calms down under his stroking hand. When Billy finally looks up Robin’s finished her task, shoelaces of both shoes all knotted together, and she’s staring at him, at both of them, surprised and then sad. 

:::

“Does your family know you’re out here?” Harrington asks, tugging the bottle out of his hands and hopping up onto the bonnet beside him. “Fuck.” He shivers. “It’s fucking freezing out here. Aren’t you cold?” 

Billy shrugs. He’s drunk. He woke up thinking about rats. Rats don’t get cold. They can probably get drunk.

Harrington is wearing a jacket pulled tight over a thin t-shirt, warm all over from sleep. He looks great. He looks too good to be true. Billy watches him take a slug of the bourbon and give it back to Billy so he can blow on his hands. 

“So…” Harrington says, after a nice enough silence. “What are we doing here?”

“Watching fireworks,” Billy says.

He can feel Harrington’s eyes on him. Confused. Pitying maybe. From up here the forest looks like a toy forest and the town looks like a toy town with tiny fairy lights. The sky is cloudless, near and black. It’s empty tonight. It’s empty every night. There’re never any stars and there’re never any fireworks.

“Well, okay then,” Harrington says. “How’d you score such good seats?”

That makes him smile. “I dreamt them,” he says. 

“Well, thanks for the invite then.”

“I dreamt you too.”

Harrington laughs. “Okay. Well, thanks for the hair, and the big dick.”

“You always wanted me to kiss you.” 

Silence.

“Oh.”

Oh.

“Were we…”

“Yes,” Billy says.

:::

A party: a basement: a couch.

“Did it hurt you?”

“No,” Billy says.

Harrington is drunk, sloe-eyed. He has lipstick on him, just a smudge, so cruel, in the corner of his mouth, like a sore that Billy wants to scrub and scrub and scrub at. He drinks his beer instead and pretends he can taste it.

“Did it lie to you?”

“No.”

“What did it offer you?” he asks. He knows. He knows.

Billy can’t answer that. He’s not here. He’s not real. He’s a wave of tar and spare parts under thin skin.

“What did it offer you, Billy? Anything? Everything?”

Kingdoms, he wants to say. Worlds and stars and kingdoms. A road that only goes where his heart wishes it could live. 

“Less,” he says.

He looks at Harrington, at the perfect inimitable color of his eyes.

Enough.

:::