Summer Beetles

Summer Beetles

The neon and boom box dancing sprung up from the sidewalk as they crossed the concrete island above the BART station. The tenderloin had dug itself into despair, its roots running like mangled Banyan roots under the city's sewers. The eyes that had forgotten what sincerity was passed each other day and night like hungry wolves, unable to eat each other because of some primordial code, sparring and snarling but saving the blood for outsiders. As they walked closer to his apartment on Ellis St., the blocks changed from audacious gentrified restaurants to semi-cheap, semi-hip Indian joints to the smell of piss and anywhere from 15-30 crackheads swarming in front of his apartment like uprooted summer beetles.
They took the flimsy iron gate elevator to the fourth floor. The walls of the hallway were white and the corridor narrow as in a lucid nightmare. As he put the key in the door she had a sense of hearing a secret, of entering the inside of another's thoughts. She knew he had been cleaning for days, and the effort he had put into trying to make his apartment comfortable just for her made her feel as important as her Grandmother telling her she was proud of her when she had gone to graduate school. She set her moss green bag down on the floor at the foot of the neatly made bed and felt the softness of the blue blanket that lay on top without touching it. His place was like a museum; so many things carefully placed on shelves made of box crates he had mounted and on the tops of furniture and walls; birds, a card from his crazy, sincere mother, powdered sodium chloride and calcium phosphate from a science experiment kit he had found on the sidewalk, a gargoyle, a Pocahontas Pez, the etching print she had given him for Christmas, and the print he had given her called “The Bedroom” that she would forget to take home, that would remain there.
The years he had spend living on the streets of Portland doing speed and heroin had taken something from him. It had taken the purity that he'd had when he was born into the world like grass. She felt like sometimes he was already dead, and even though he said he thought he would live to be eight or nine hundred, she felt that he would never understand what it was like to really be alive again. She wanted to give him something to cure him, a colored liquid, a route to go back to the moment before his mother ever did anything that made no sense, that caused he and his brother to run into the bathroom, the moment before he had been locked in a trailer for days with nothing but twinkies to eat while his mother galloped off to do things that could only be labeled crazy by others because they were from some special type of dream or remembrance, from a nonsensical world that could only be accepted if it were portrayed in a painting or some form of art that illustrated the subconscious spilling out into the world like mud.
She lay her open wounds at his feet. She cried from being tired and from the feeling she got when they remembered things to each other because she felt him come back a little, the glimmer that came and went like rain.
They watched “Milk” and tried to forget who they were. They held each other like they used to before they came to this place, before they came and went to the wrong places at the wrong times. They listened to the yelling, to the sirens, wanting desperately to know why the things they did made them hunted.

Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Portland/Spring 2009