Hazelthorn

All he says, his voice soft and reverent and broken all the way through, is, "God was stronger than me when he made Adam and didn’t fall in love with him.

Who tells you to be quiet all the time?” Laurie’s words are a low, thickened spill of warm honey. “Pain is meant to take up space or else we wouldn’t know how to scream. Fuck making your agony silent to avoid disturbing others. Maybe they should be disturbed.

There is nothing else to me but the hollow spaces I've carved out for you. I knew I'd cut myself to pieces on you if we ever had the chance to touch, but I wanted to.' His voice unravels, massacred on yearning. 'Let me ruin myself on you.

Words have always sat like dead moths and dried flowers in his mouth, unheard because no one is ever interested in what he has to say. He is not clever; he is not poetry. He is just a boy who speaks too bluntly when what he wants most is to figure out which pretty, magical words will finally make him understood.

You look nice. Shall we frolic to our dinner of torment?

He wishes he wasn’t like this, wishes he could stand even parallel to normal and be someone who fits next to those his age, who goes to school and kisses an appropriate amount of pretty people and isn’t bothered by things like an odd seam in his clothes or the very existence of socks. He wishes his brain moved in one direction, not a dozen all at the same time, and that he didn’t pull apart in a panic if even one thing goes wrong.

He tries, but somehow even trying means he's failed.

For those who have been made to feel monstrous

If he could dig fingernails into the sides of Laurie’s face and peel back the mask, he would. He would core him like a pear and throw away the soft, rotted skin until he saw him as he really is: horrible and beautiful and real.

He would core him like a pear and throw away the soft, rotted skin until he saw him as he really is: horrible and beautiful and real.

Lies have been placed like delicacies on his tongue for so long he can’t recognize anything else; he is a cobwebbed collection of pretty untruths and made-up stories, and if all of that is cut away, there is nothing left. He is just a boy who was once buried alive on an estate full of monsters.

It’s a rough, uneven sound, his tears cut from wild seas and broken skies, all the usual apathy and sardonic quips stripped. This is a moment so raw and skeletal it feels wrong to see. Evander doesn’t leave. He drinks it in. He eats it. He wants to watch.

If you start unlocking doors, you might find things you don’t want to see. Or worse, you might wake up.” “I’m not asleep,” Evander says, but heat prickles along his skin. “Whatever you say,” Laurie says.

What is love if not devouring?

He is Icarus with wings of swan feathers, who chose to fly into the sun because it looked like a pretty boy.

What does it feel like, anyway, to die with the garden in your mouth?

Back in the study, Laurie had been split apart with anger, his neck flushed, his voice rising. Now that fury is gone, wholly and utterly gone. Anyone who can turn off their emotions like that has to be placing them somewhere dark to grow even more brittle and toxic.

His bedroom is a decaying tooth in this sprawling monstrosity of a mansion, and it turns out the rest of the skeleton is unknown to him.

He knows what it is to be buried alive, the feeling of dirt in his mouth and the quiet fitting around him like a well-tailored grave. Sometimes Evander still tastes it under his tongue, that rich earth clotting between his molars. He should have grown out of the memory by now, but he belongs to it, and not in a gentle way.

To scream is to believe there is someone out there who cares.

There is nothing else to me but the hollow spaces I’ve carved out for you. I knew I’d cut myself to pieces on you if we ever had the chance to touch

If pain is a language of bruises

This is what it is to be awake: pain that eats.

He is a hollowed-out gourd of a boy-shaped thing, pawing at the soil as he drags himself away.

It walks two fingers down his spine, this feeling he’s never been allowed: curiosity.

If Evander gathers information, puts it down in bold ink, and fits the pieces together, it will make sense. This is all that’s keeping him from letting grief slip through the fissures of his broken heart. He will find a way to make death make sense.

Evander isn’t used to it, this devouring thrill of defiance. He has no idea what he’s doing, proven by the fact he’s running to the place he fears most. Although this feels less like a decision driven by mutiny and more an animal instinct to go to ground, to burrow, to slip out of this skin and into another so he doesn’t have to face the truths hounding his heels.

Agreement is on the tip of Evander’s tongue, because his reward for compliance is always a fond smile.

Under the light of a moon curved like the back of a silver spoon, the garden looks like a thing from a fairy tale. Fireflies glow like pixie dust and the thrumming hum of a thousand cicadas and frogs sweetens to a cadence that feels like a song. Flowers turn to opal stones in the shadows and fungi lines garden walls like bioluminescent plates. His fingers brush them as he passes and come away powdered in spores, and he has an odd urge to lick them.