Forever Burning.

You were on the cusp of life, still dripping fresh from the womb of adulthood.

Your Bachelor of Arts diploma sat on your dresser next to your manuscript. It collected dust as you shed skin and sweat. Your collegiate self, sloughed off somewhere in between Washington and Lafayette. She gave you men and indecency, and you wandered into bars on backstreets, doused in cigarette smoke and pseudo artists trying to impress you on art that’s lost in the cracks of a dead city. You lost your virginity in a cold black way, with sloppy hands and mouths that tasted like gin coming back up. Regret was too late, betrayed in the imprints in the sheets your bodies left behind, linen marked by your blood there like ink blots. You wondered who this person was and why inky darkness lapped at your ankles like a polluted sea.

You ate indiscretion with your words. You cut your hair and dyed it the color of tar. Your eyes were ashy around the peripheries. Sometimes you didn’t bother to removes your makeup or brush your hair. You loved looking bed-ragged and tousled. You took up smoking again and bruised your skin, inside out stars on a flesh canvas. You met men from sharing cigarettes with the collar of your leather coat turned up. Your hair concealed your face but left your neck bare and pale. You smoked cigarettes and exhaled into abandonment. Somewhere you heard popping of rounds and remember someone told you that kids just like shooting their older siblings handguns at empty bottles.

The taste of you could be found on the thinnest pieces of flesh on your body. Places where the indigo veins ran in sinuosity. You wondered when it was that blood turned red because there was no oxygen here. Only smoke.

You pierced your nose, wore filmy black clothing that covered every inch of skin except your fingers, pale extremities gilded with silver. You discovered red lipstick in shades like Shanghai Express, Eros and What Once Was Yours. You downed Hendricks on the rocks moving your hips to drunken and drug induced rhythms. You watched the sun come up over a putrid green grey skyline, two bodies on either side of you, your conscious pounding in your temples. He gives you back your underwear that you left the night before in the basement at work. You all change in front of each other, into white button ups while the bodies of swine and goat and lamb hang from their feet in the walk in refrigerator. Next to the beer and the extra stock, they hang skinned, swaying above a puddle of their own blood.

*

There are more days that you are angry at nothing. You drive to work in your foreign car and take inventory of the random forgotten pieces left on the side of the road: a throw carpet, lazy-boy, a few couches, the cushions a little less than a mile ahead, decapitated baby dolls, diapers, shreds of tires, abandon cars with the windows smashed out, solid McDonalds bags. A dog tried to run a crossed the four lanes one day and somehow made it to the second. You could feel the terror there like and adrenaline needle before the front end of a Cavalier hurled its body into the air. You pulled over and threw up on the gravel. My father calls it America’s Wasteland. You are angry at a city that does nothing for itself. You are angry at its disillusion.

*

It was late. He was drunk and you were exhausted, and no matter how much you thrust in slow waves or pivoted your hips, you couldn’t satisfy him. Your knuckles ached from gripping the gritty hotel sheets near his shoulders. He smelled and tasted of stale beer and burned paper. The more you filled your mouth with him the harder you tried not to gag against the hardening muscle. Casino chips lay on the bureau next to a Holy Bible and a bowl, blackened glass like the irises of his eyes.

The darkness hid the bleeding circles of black spreading beneath the rims of your eyes and the dampness there took you by surprise. You became numb to emotion, turning it on and off like a switchboard. You cried and he never knew. Instead he turned away from you, his groans slurring into groggy snores. Sleep didn’t find you until his clammy fingers found your waistline before the sun found your eyes. And his touch was impatient and alarming. But the fight, the word “no” fled you.

His breath was charred, eyes burning as he crawled on top of you, wrapping his legs around yours so you couldn’t move. And you choked on your response and you wished he would just get it over with. Instead, he pulled you into the bathroom, white and stark, frigid, blinding. Your clit sore and abused from fucking him, you winced, failing again. He pounded the counter with his fist. So you took him full again into your mouth, outside of yourself, closed your eyes and you were back home to a scalding shower and warm cotton sheets. All the stale smells and briny putrid tastes either from your tears or from him coming quickly and hastily, selfishly on you until you couldn’t swallow anymore. That part of him ran down your chin. You found the edge of the toilette and vomited. He threw a towel at you, stained with beer that had been spilt on the counter, and told you to clean up.

There were men and boys. You pretended you wouldn’t have to see them at work. You mistook love for the backseats of cars and drunken gazes and sloppy hands. You made mistakes, took medication in little blue pills and cried silently in the shower before work. You blamed her. Life paused and so did you.

*

You sliced a chunk out of the tip of my thumb. It was Monday. You had no tables. You sliced bread until the serrated edge like razors found your skin and mistook it for the raw crust of multigrain. Your blood came in increasing drips of red, dotting the white cutting board, crumbs pooling with the liquid. You saw the flap of skin, the seeping of blood.

Then pain coming instantly, a heartbeat in your fingertip.

Part of you wonders if you let the knife slip, to give yourself a wound, a remembrance of this place and time, a scar to catch a glimpse of when you’re writing or driving or perhaps in the wake of a morning that has left you aching and worn. You look at that scar, put it to your teeth and pause there to bite the discolored, waxy skin.

*

Your hands are cracked around the edges, on the pads of your fingers, in white lines, like dusty strands of hair left in a corner. Pink fingers with scathed patches of skin. You hate how they feel, thirsty for sweat or oil. Something to penetrate those dried up lines like tiny parched tributaries, skin that feels as if your outgrowing it, stretching over the frame of your body, you can nearly hear it creek when you clench your fists, wrap your fingers around large plates, rubbing and burnishing silverware until its luster is unhindered of fingerprints and watermarks. It tightens until you can nearly feel it rip in the thinnest places, where your knuckles join and bend, you expected to see exposed bone. Water from kitchen faucets is deceptive. You flash your hands quickly there to rinse excess butter or foodstuff or ketchup and the temporary dampness reminds you of a burst of cool air on a humid, sticky afternoon.

But the relief vanishes.

Moments later, your hands even more chapped than before. The heat from the large porcelain plates, the heat lamps at the runner station sips and suckles ever last drop of moisture from your palm to fingertips. Yet passing by a window or glass door you see your face, sheen with a mist of its own oil and sweat. You’ve never felt so ugly in a place you call home.

*

You wake up to little headaches between your eyes, so intense in one small pinpoint that it feels like someone is driving a needle, slowly, with purpose through your skull. You feel older than you should, like old porcelain forgotten in an attic somewhere.

Your life has been whittled down to bone, down to ritual of tying the Chef Ware Apron, checking the side work list chart, memorizing your sections and grabbing a yellow polishing rag.

*

You read this poem in the Detroit newspapers. What is this city? What is this smog and smoke, this place like a room in a house that a dead girl once lived in. No one wants to confront what is there. She is dead and will never be resurrected. And if she were she would come back as something fake and synthetic, cast in its own dismembered parts t be stuffed into a casing like sausage.

*

You made me, what with steel garters and soiled underpinnings. You uprooted me.

She walks bare foot in the street, broken glass from crack vials glitter near the bus station under the mustard yellow street lamps, buzzing in her ear.

You are a hard woman, cast from the ore of the earth and a vixen you have made me.

You are a Jezebel stalking prey in on street corners, outside of liquor shops that stand a crossed from a deserted church. Those younger men are naïve and feel a little sorry for you but love the length of your legs and the sheen of your skin. Your fingers are blistered and callused over permanently from the flick of a lighter, heat of the pipe, and you reach out to touch his face but he pulls back, every time he pulls away when he sees what you are up close.

You used to be beautiful. Your veins have run dry.

*

You’ve stopped waiting up, wiping the makeup off your face, smearing black and red of blood and metal and sweat and carnage across your forehead and the bridge of your nose, blotting away the repentance left in burgeoning colors on a white cloth. You scrub until your skin is raw and void of this and you forget where you are when you look in the mirror. The fury burns in pink splotches on the peripheries of your face and neck.

*

The Collins glass was half empty, ice cubes dissipating from the mesh of body heat and a heavy summer night…the seasons became extremes, no in betweens, it always seemed to be an endless fervent summer, things melting off and dripping onto each other, unrecognizable, and winter stretched on gray and murky like the puddles of slush in the streets. The snow never seemed to be white, the wind cutting through the buildings like a cleaver, butchering the beams that barely hold up the decayed infrastructures that are supposed to protect you.

You wash down your shifts with gin and soda water, the effervescence clearing your conscious. The man in the seat next to you wheeled his bicycle in minutes after you sat down. His face is pocked in scars, one eye permanently sealed shut. He asks you for money and tries to explain himself, “You know, I’d understand if you said no…” He fingers one of the scars on his face, “cuz you know, helping the homeless is kinda taboo.” He doesn’t look at you but above you somewhere. And before you can answer the bartender yells for him to get the fuck out.

You wonder why this upsets you. But the bartender tells you this isn’t New York or D.C. People here who beg with $500 bicycles or Air Jordans have no business begging for money. He either stole the bike and the shoes or he has the money to afford them. Either way, he doesn’t deserve a handout. You turn to watch the man peddle off into the snow, teetering on the roads that are never cleared or salted. The sky, a purple gold pulsation, the signs of Motor City Casino. The cold draft breathes irony.

*

It’s past midnight and you’ve finished the last of the polishing. Your body aches and crunches and creaks as you throw on street clothes. When you pass through the kitchen you stop by Nick’s station where he scrubs down the grates of the grill, soot streaking the contours of his bare arms. You approach him and rub your nose on his shoulder. He reaches into his Chef Ware pants, and places the folding blade into your hand. You keep your hands tucked into the pockets of your leather jacket, where you keep your hand on the ridges of the handle as you pass down the backstreet that leads to the parking lot, fingering the ridges and smooth metal with callused fingertips. No one will try to rob you tonight, but a few men will sniff at you as you pass each other. Never turn around. Keep your focus ahead. They leave you in a frothing wake of gurgling, muttering obscenities, a foulness like cheap whiskey and Coney dogs coming back up, spewed on the side of a building. The blade rests there in your pocket and you stop, retrieve it and pull the blade forward with a click. And as you press the tip into the pad of your thumb, you wonder, if it came to it, would you be able to drive it through a man and into their vitality.

*

There are lost souls here that haunt the street. The walking dead. Sometimes I don’t believe there is a person there, that it’s just their shell wandering around displaced, wondering what happened to their lives, how the chunks of rock, the flame, the smoke, the rusty spoon left on the folding table that they used to call theirs. How did it get to this? The white plumes seeping out of eye sockets. I learned to have my keys in palm even before I hit the valet station. It was a pleasant day, buses going round in circles, the valet guys calling out to me to be good on my day off. I pay the attendant and there is a man standing in front of my car, pissing into a plastic bottle, his shriveled penis hanging there like some sickly serpent. I don’t move and he stares into me, and then I think no not into me, through me. This is what emptiness is. He wears a Detroit Tigers cap, frayed at the bill, stained flannel shirt, months, maybe years of bearded whiskers littered with bits of dirt or left over garbage from somewhere. He stands in front of my car filling the bottle full of dark yellow urine, then turns, dick still out, and launches the bottle into the dumpster two cars behind mine.

*

This is what emptiness looks like: stolen sneakers through a smashed car window

They tell you not to leave anything visible in your car. Bums go for lose change and sneakers. Anything they can grab to use or sell. And every time I walk to the parking lot with a different co-worker, when we approach, the fractures in the windowsill aren’t visible until you come right up to it. The streetlight ricocheted off the splinters of shards, gleaming, a wasted city’s jewelry.

They didn’t even take anything this time.

*

They preach greening, rebuilding, sustainability.

Build a greener city. Cover the buildings in romanticized tendrils of vines

Plant a tree save a junkie. Do they know their trees are fed from the decay of the street, roots draining up the nutrients from bodies forgotten in back alleys, bodies at the mercy of the barrel of a gun? How green will your trees be then?

*

We are doing something we are breathing life back into this city. Girls and boys at happy hour sit and preach how the arts can save lives, did you hear about this new band, her art is epic, we will change the world. Them in their Buddy Holly frames and flannel and beanies with their pompadours and red lipstick and army boots competing with themselves, competing to see who can better deny the status quo, the when they’ve already become the status quo.

*

There are new luxury lofts going in near Fox Theater. The have a beautiful view and two floors with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops and picture windows. I passed a man frozen to death on the bench a crossed the street from the hotel. The paradigm of renovation, its marbled floors and expensive lighting and celebrity chef restaurants. They film movies in the ballroom. And I share the elevator with two women, one crying silently into a bath towel with the hotel’s insignia stitched in. She was evicted that morning. She takes care of her daughter and her daughter’s child while the father tries to break his crack habit in their basement. An elevator ride 20 floors up tells the whole life of a person.

*

Houses burn to the ground on 7 mile. We breathe in the soot and Detroit becomes part of us whether we like it or not. What is this city. What with skeleton homes and dreams of disillusion. Houses burn into the air. I can smell it, the incineration of hope for miles past the city.

*

We rifle through 10 dishwashers a week like a deck of cards. Some no show, others steal leftover food put into the dish tank from the tables of people who can afford a meal every night. He was the only one who stayed consistently, worked in silence, called the men “sir” and me “miss” but never looked anyone in the face, like an abused animal who trusted no one but wanted so badly to. When he didn’t show up for the first time in his three months of working double shifts, they went searching for him. His bungalow caught fire in the middle of the night while he was out picking up groceries for his daughter. The only thing he has now are the Chef Ware pants and pack of t-shirts we gave him.

*

You were alone in this, alone with the rain, coming in random dots, ellipses on paper skin. You pedal through an atmosphere heavy in sultry dampness. You think of your new self as a peach just picked in morning dew, a bite taken out. You accompanied yourself with sake, burning down your esophagus, clear, honest, pure, cleansing. You chose to only believe in the present moment, only sure of what was in front of you: your journal with turned down corners, marking pages and pasts to come back to, a set of chopsticks, splintered down the middle and a glass half full of sake, stained by a half moon of red. You rubbed your thumb a crossed the print, rubbed out the skyline in front of you. Specks of condensation from the tease of summer roll down the bowl of the glass, over the smudge, dripping slow and remorseful like the contemplations in your brain. You run your fingertips over the wet glass, picking up those droplets and trace your bottom lip.

A sliver of an echo in a life you once knew.

Pose.

1:20 AM

He sets the camera on the bureau facing the edge of the mattress. It lies there on the floor, wrapped neatly with sheets, looking like some oversized parcel in the middle of the room. He positions himself behind the viewfinder, scrunches his face up and scans the room. He chooses three books of different thickness and tests them under the camera. When he’s satisfied he throws the other two under the bureau. He approaches you as you finish your watered down whiskey, murky in the glass. His body is a landmarked by slopes and muted angles, indentations in soft shapes when he moves this way and that. He is void of hair, except for a few tufts of pale blonde dispersed over his legs. He has the body of a man who will never know too many six packs do to a waistline. Hiking and biking through west coast terrain allows his muscles to age with agility. He has the kind of face you want to touch when he wants to be amusing. Untouched by California elements, there is a clay-like suppleness to him to him that you want to mold between your fingers.

He stops millimeters in front of your nose. You exhale and push your index finger into the center of his chest. He falls into the mattress below you. The camera flashes a red blip as you turn your back to him, nudging his legs open with your knees, taking your place between them. You let your fingers unfold from your palm coming to rest at his wrist. Against the dim light in the studio you swear the color of your veins deepens, branches of blue and purple under all that fluid and flesh. You imagined them lying just under the canopy of bones and tendon and muscle, quivering in shimmering liquid. His pinky traces the path of a single vessel starting at the back of your knee, working its way down your calf. The shutter clicks.

*

1:23AM

He takes your wrist and guides you closer to him, pirouetting you in a half moon as to face him, pivoting on your toes. Your small journey ends, his face at the space between your breasts. You’re hands free, tips of your fingers just at his knees, he maps out the lines of your body, the vessels, your bones that protrude in certain places. He likes the way he can feel the inside parts, the architecture that composed the lissome creature under his palms. The way he touches you, as if he drafted every limb and extremity, like some sculptor or architect now delving into creation, fixated. He hovers over the ridges that shape your body, over your clavicle and hipbones, scalloped between your groin and waist. Your hands come to hover above his. The shutter clicks.

*

1:25AM

He pulls you into him, continues over your slight wrists reaching around to your bulbous spine, little molehills down the center of your back when you arch and stretch. Your bones rise and fall under your breath, caging your vital parts and your bend to breath into his neck, his hands at your diaphragm, feeling you inhale. The shutter clicks.

~

He handles you as if you are a delicate piece of jewelry, a long, thin chain easily tangled or earrings susceptible to rough touch and permanent disfiguration. You were once his heirloom, his private little pretty piece he keeps tucked and locked away. The room is dark now but the computer is left on, soft pulses of light with the changing, silent pictures on the screen saver projects onto your skin so that your body shines an iridescence like the inside of a shell. You bring your face close to his, your mouths impending. If you were to say a single word, there would be contact. Neither of you move. The shutter clicks.

Part One on a Lesson on Growing Up: A Peter Pan Story

She does not remember how she ended up in her backyard. But the screen door is banging on its stubborn hinges, she is swaying aimlessly on the ancient wooden swing and he is there. She studies the man, who is perched on the tire swing adjacent to her. His thick muscles, like raw cuts of meat, diverge from his cherub features. Tufts of white gold hair dispersed with random, frizzed coils lingers at the peripheries of his face, accentuating his gray white whiskers, patchy across the angles of his defined jaw. Mischievous and fidgety, his manner is that of a child.

Dandelion seeds float through the air and stick to her cotton skirt. Peter is occupied with clapping the fluff between his palms. Wendy turns her face to the lukewarm sun that sits in the sky directly above her, so she knows it’s about noon; she liked these days where the orange ball melts the morning into the afternoon. The slap of his palms is replaced by the wind in her ears and she looks in Peter’s direction to see what he’s up to. Slender, sinewy legs stretched in front of him, he sits a cross from her on the ground. She swings forward, extending her calves engulfed by the swelling fabric. He wiggles his toes, the soles of his feet with blotches of stains from mud and grass. She wiggles hers back; her own curved feet knotted at joints. Her creased skin stretches with every movement, like paper mache over a wire frame. She rocks back and forth between the balls of her feet and heels.

They’ve been silent for some time, but he relocates to the tire swing. The tree branches creak under their weight and he begins to sway. She does the same. Peter taps his big toe on the torso of his shadow each time he swings forward. She glances at him, her white hair spilling over her bare shoulder. He catches her glance and halts mid swing, one heel to the ground, skidding to a stop. They hold their stares, frozen in a still frame but she can’t maintain it. Pulling up grass with her toes, she shifts her eyes to her feet.

“I can make you fly.” He taunts her. He hasn’t changed

Wendy’s eyes widen, then crinkle at the corners, narrowing into opal crescents behind her glass lenses. Her eyebrows and lashes are silver and fine and the skin of her forehead is like aged newspaper against her stark white hair. She doesn’t turn to address him.

“I told you, things are diff-,” but he does not let her finish.

“I’ll push you.” He nudges his fuzzy chin in the direction of her swing and she wonders what it would feel like against her forehead, or cheek, or eyelids. Her cheeks flush, blotchy. She examines her hands, folded in her lap. He slides through the opening of the tire swing and she grips the two ropes a bit tighter with her soft claylike fingers. Peter pushes the corners of the chipped wooden seat, his russet hand next to her skin that always reminds her of the inside of a shell. She sways back and forth a few times before he gives her another push, his forearms tensing, stretching the slack skin over his muscles. The apprehension in her stomach lessens and she churns the air with her legs on her way up, the skirt clinging to them on her way back, edges rippling just above her ankles.

His hair wafts like behind her from the slightest puff of air each time she returns from being high above the ground. He catches her on each wrist, and she notices his large hands could encircle them twice. The abrupt stop startles her with a nip at her temples. That always seemed to happen, like a minor electric shock.

“We could really fly.” Peter has to lean down, his scruffy face like brush bristles on her earlobe, breath like steam from a kettle. The nip turns into a dull ache at her temples, her heart pulsing in her head. Wendy’s back tenses, the sheer fabric of her lace shirt stretching a cross her shoulder blades. Her mouth is dry.

“No…we can’t.” She doesn’t turn to face him but rests her chin on her shoulder. Wendy doesn’t know if she can fall back into the whirlpool he pulled her into before. But she feels like the girl she was long ago. The one who was stuck between two places, being yanked into both directions, threatening to tear at the seams.

Peter pulls back on the seat of the swing as far as his arms let him and she hangs there for a moment, legs dangling. He releases her. Wendy had forgotten how much she loved skimming the air. She leaned back into the momentum of it, letting strands of her hair, like spider webs catch on the blades of grass. Back and forth, back and forth his sea glass eyes follow her. They slow as she slows. He stares at her in the way that making her squirm. It is happening again, that stirring she got when she tried to give Peter the thimble. She wants him to know what she’s feeling. No, she wants him to feel what she’s feeling. But nothing could predict whether he would understand or not. And if he does understand and doesn’t accept it, Wendy feared the outcome would be similar to Tinkerbelle’s, except no one would be there to clap for her.

Wendy begins pumping her legs steadily, prodding off the earth with her right foot. She watches for his reaction. His lips quiver then curve into a smile that almost isn’t there. But it is. She almost wants to tell him not to laugh just so he would. He studies his shadow.

“Why did we grow up, Wendy?” This time he does not look at her but touches the elongated silhouette of her legs with the toe of his other foot.

Wendy does not stop, nor respond, but pumps her legs more swiftly. She had to get higher, have the sky swallow her.

“I don’t know. But I already had begun when you found me. And I think you had too.” She can’t make herself look at him. When she is able to, his expression stirs, like a few burnt out bulbs on a string of lights, something amiss. It is the first time since his return that he looks his age; reddish, sagging eyes, tired, drooping skin, hunched spine. He opens his mouth but is muted. She swings higher still, focused on flying on her own, without him.

“I can beat you,” he challenges. She feels her eyes dart to where he is standing, leaned up again the trunk of the tree, broad, like his shoulders. Why did he always make everything a competition? It was so childish. Peter, she realized, is unaware of the fact that he has grown up just like her. A hint of annoyance pokes at her side. She feels as if she cannot not trust herself with him, as if she’s moving backwards, becoming younger. “Did you hear me Wendy? I said I’m going to win!”

She lets her legs hang for a moment, freefalls from her upward swing, and studies Peter. Kick starting off the carpet of grass once again, driving her legs forward, rapidly this time she fixes her gaze towards the blue composition of the sky and clouds. She never declined a challenge. He tugs at the waist of his brown linen shorts snug around his hips, preparing, thrusting his arms back, crouching. He was incredibly predictable, cheating to win. It could be that he knew he had grown up, but just didn’t care. She calls down to him.

“No cheating! We are going to do this my way.” The boy does not protest her demand, but mounts the swing beside her and beings to pump his legs like hers. She is ahead but he propels his legs more rapidly and closes in. He has the same energy she did so long ago. This perplexes her; He is wrinkled like wet paper towels yet he has vigor, bulging limbs, a ruddy forehead and nose, and cocky sarcasm; an adolescent jostling him from the inside.

He is back while she is forth, her long stems pump twice, out and under, out and under, for his one pump, out and under. Wendy does this with her granddaughter too, compares the size of limbs, and fingers and ears to hers. Now Peter, the boy who is never supposed to grow up, has in once sense, and she marvels at the largeness of his body as if she could completely engulf her. He catches up, but Wendy pulls ahead. She wants to fly and feel the wind under her arms and in the spaces of her fingers. She frees the swing of her hands, gradually spreading her arms out beyond the confines of the ropes, keeping her poise. She soars, her eyes closed. Wisps of hair swirl around her face and catch in the corners of her mouth. Her fingers twiddle in the air, wrists flexing and straightening. She keeps her eyes closed except for two slivers that let just enough light in to make out a few shapes to the world outside her eyelids.

Peter levitates from the seat of his swing. She can see a blurry shape drifting through the air, as if someone spilled water on a painting. He approaches her, pausing just in front of the swing, close enough to collide with her as she pitches forward. But Wendy knows better. He floats back just enough before she becomes too close. He hovers, taking her in. Her eyes are shut to the world. Just before she slows to a stop he poises himself just above her lap, toes barely grazing the tips of her knees.

“I don’t think we ever grew up. Not completely.” Slow motion sets in, the rise and fall of her chest, her toes scrunching the grass, the breeze, heavy on her shoulders, and her muscles stiffen as it settles in. He may be right. But something else sighs in her ear that she is not wrong. Removing her glasses, she inspects the lenses and wipes them with the scalloped edge of her skirt. She looks at the thin metal frames between her fingers as Peter floats downward so she is nearly inches from his sea glass eyes. Wendy places the glasses on his face. They teeter for a moment but she balances them on his nose. “Does the world seem any different?” she questions. The woman glances just beyond his shoulder. The glasses catch the sun and rays of needle thin light radiates over her neck, cheeks and forehead. He is shaking his head reluctantly, the sun hides behind a cloud and the kaleidoscope light disappears.

She draws the flimsy frames from the bridge of his nose and flips them so the sides hook back behind her ears. Pausing, she nudges the glasses up onto the top of her head, pushing some of the thick tendrils back from her brow. Wendy takes a deep, shaken breath before she can speak, “But things are different. My life is different. I am different.” Wendy noticed a slight edge to her voice that was not there before and begins swaying again, slower, less rhythmic, to and fro, left to right, swiveling. “You can’t show up after all of this time and expect me to be ecstatic to see you. You left me waiting every year since I went to Neverland with you. You promised to come back and you never did. Not once. Now you are hear and you’re…this…” she sweeps her hand up and down through the air, motioning to his grown body. She fidgets with her feet in hopes to let the subject drop. He loses his balance on her knees and ascends. “Just because nothing has changed for you does not mean the same for me.” She kicks off the ground more forcefully with every few words. Frustration ferments inside of her. Why had he returned now so close to the end of her life? Decades she has waited for him and he left her abandon with a smeared face and hot cheeks. Wendy can still remember grabbing the fist full of sewing tools and throwing them into the special drawer, yanking the key from around her neck and flinging it in after. A red streak had remained on the skin where the string was ripped from around it.

Her swing jerks her from the past, leaves shutter, and she looks up to find him straddling a branch.

“Right. You grow up, go to school, get a job, and responsibilities. Then bad…things…happen, Wendy.” She notices eeriness in his tone. Peter plucks a few leaves from the branch and lets them pirouette downward. One lands in Wendy’s hair. Its vibrant orange contours resemble painted streaks on a canvas of her hair. The pressure building up inside of her threatens implode. She can’t make him understand.

“That’s right, bad things happen, and you learn, grow, and change. You are the boring one Peter. You want to be the same forever.” She’s cautious. “But you can’t be the same forever. You’re changing too. Remember when I told you about fear?” Familiarity sputters over his face. “And sadness?” He turns away from her and drops his head. “You felt those emotions, and you questioned them. That means you were changing because they were new to you. You were growing and you still are. And so am I.” He peeks at her over his shoulder, his smooth back curving and wrinkling. “You should have come with me. We should have grown together.” Her voice is a murmur, nearly lost in the hiss of blowing leaves in the trees around them. His eyes twitch as he bites his lip and he looks like a little boy once again.

His cherub face now reveals deflated cheeks and lips bent into a scribble of a frown. His eyes are unblinking on his depressed brow.

“You don’t mean that.” But he doesn’t yell. She sits up a bit straighter, pulling the leaf from her nest of loose curls, twisting to face the tree he is settled in.

“No, you wish I didn’t mean it. But somewhere in that callow soul of yours, you know I’m right. You wish you did as well more than that you wish that I didn’t mean it.” The woman twirls the leaf’s stem between her pinched fingers. The current picks up, mussing her hair upward, into knots. She holds the leaf out in front of her. Letting go it’s carried upward towards him. He seizes it in his fist, folding its edges inward like origami paper. His face mimics its crumbled shape. Neither speaks but Peter, now gazing up into the canopy of leaves, sniffs, swipes the back of his hand across his nose and stubbly cheek and begins climbing upward.

“I can climb like a normal boy!” he mocks as he climbs. His voice is choked, dense like fog. She pivots more and looks up, shading her eyes with her hand, but remains sitting. Wendy’s heart picks up speed as he climbs higher, his movement becoming less fluid and more erratic, jerking the branches. She bobs on her swing. And then it’s silent and she sees his face peek down through a cluster of leaves. His face of dirty rivers, swollen lips and a flooded nose, coating his beard, stringy in places. “But I’d rather fly!” Wendy startles backward almost falling off her swing. She’d never heard Peter yell before. She’d never seen him angry before. It terrified her. And then she realized what he was about to do. But before she could scream a plead up to him, the branches creak suddenly and the leaves tremble. She wobbles violently on her swing.

Wendy knows he can fly and she prays that he will. But she can feel her face pinch with helplessness as he begins to plummet, his useless arms thrashing, a rectangular blur in the air. His usual streamlined form is replaced by a tumbling mass, a bird caught in a line of fire. Wendy feels as if she’s watching it happen on fast-forward, except his face is perfectly clear. His eyes seem to take up his entire forehead, pleading with her in sadness, with terror, in confusion. Then, a blur of color, a thud, a crack, like eggs against cement and the woman startles and turns slowly to face the source. Her eyes make a fleeting search, the rest of her body stagnant. They land on the patch of grass just beyond the swing she occupied. Gathering her skirt in her fists she trips on the material, and attempts to trot to the spot where the he in a heap of unnatural angles.

He doesn’t move. His hair wafts from the jolts of air that blow past. The woman reaches him, lowering herself down to his motionless body. Her skirt mushrooms, enveloping both of them. She hovers over him, her hands trembling above his brawny frame, her eyes flitting back and forth, wide, wet. With one arm slid beneath him, the other draped across his shuttering chest, she struggles to turn him over, brushing his matted hair off of his forehead. Her nose leaks, dripping on to his forehead, she wipes it with her thumb leaving a dirty streak. Scooping his torso awkwardly into her lap, she can’t think of what to do but cradle him like a rag doll. He doesn’t move, but wheezes, a faulty engine. The woman rocks back and on her knees, nestling him, humming into his ear.