****
Ancel
He was sitting out in the field again— that strange boy with the blood-red hair.
He was scribbling in his notepad. The sight alone brought a small smile to my face. He hadn’t changed after all these years. Well, perhaps the way he looked. His hair seemed almost impossibly deeper and redder, like the color of an old Bordeaux wine. Freckles covered every inch of his face, mapping each patch of his skin into a mosaic. The years that had passed since I last saw him gave him a few inches of height, but not much. He was still thin and small, like some breakable, soft twig that had all the bark torn off.
The years looked like they’d been kind to him— well, kinder than they’d been to me, at least. He still retained that ease about him, that air that floated around him seeming lighter than the air the rest of us breathed. He still barely noticed anything or anyone outside of that pad of paper, or the ears of the wheat in the field. A time or two, when I’d caught myself staring at him, I ran my fingers against the tall, smooth blades of grass and wondered if that was what his hair felt like.
I noticed I was frowning.
Interesting as he may be, he didn’t belong in the same world I did.
I latched the gate shut tightly behind me. I wouldn’t want my dad to get pissed over something like that. Subconsciously, I rubbed my collarbone when I felt it flare up with a tinge of pain. I had no idea when exactly I’d broken my collarbone, or how. My money was on the night a few years ago my dad smacked me into the living room wall. He’d had his friends over for a poker night and accused me of making too much noise. To be fair, I was. And I was doing it solely to piss him off.
Or it could’ve been the second time I’d been in the juvenile detention center. I’d been in too many fights to count while I was there.
“Why didn’t you go to the nurse sooner?” the doctor at the emergency room had asked me.
I hadn’t wanted to report any of those fights I’d been in because I was the one who’d started each and every one. If my dad found out, all those fights would’ve been the least of my problems. So I kept my mouth shut and broke the cycle.
I looked over my shoulder.
He was still there, nose buried in his notebook. What was he writing? Even in the years I’d been away from Heaven, dragged around from town to town by my dad, I had always wondered what had been written on all those pieces of paper.
Without knowing why, I began walking over to him. The closer I got, the less he was shielded by the tree branches, the tall grass, and the distance.
I paused.
He was sitting under the tree, shoeless, with his jeans rolled up at the bottoms, and a crown on top of his head formed from antlers. The antlers were painted white, the tips colored pastel greens, blues, and yellows. Each antler was strung together by thick, black cords of string. Strands of his red hair intertwined with the crown, contrasting heavily against the starkness of the colors he had painted. His eyelashes were dark and long, casting heavy shadows on his freckled cheeks. Biting on his rosy lips, he continued to jot things down on the lined paper on his lap.
A crow was sitting on his shoulder, barely moving, cawing softly as it guarded its perch. When the crow noticed me it cawed loudly, jolting the red-haired boy out of his trance.
Our eyes locked, and his lips formed a wicked little jester of a grin.
“You,” he said softly, setting the notebook on the ground. He stood and looked up at me, his haunting bird still clinging tightly to him.
The wind whipped through the field— whipped through me— and took my breath away with it.
He wasn’t from this world, this blood-haired boy. He was from a fantasy where faeries and pixies danced through the woods and slept in dewy beds of twigs and petals. He was a creature unlike anything poets or philosophers could conjure up. He was born from alchemy, created by twisting storm clouds and rays of sunshine together.
He wasn’t from here. And he didn’t belong here. Certainly not with me.
“Do you remember me?” he asked sweetly, his dark-brown eyes dancing.
“How could I forget you?” I whispered quietly. “What’s your name?”
“Rust.”
The look on my face must’ve given me away, because he laughed.
“Would you believe me if I told you that the hair color is a coincidence?” he asked.
“No.” I couldn’t help the smile that spread across my face.
“Neither would I.”
“Why do you have a bird on your shoulder?”
“Oh,” Rust said, turning his head a little toward the crow. “Because he can’t fly, but he likes to be outside in the field.”
“Is it your pet?”
The bird took that opportunity to spread its wings and make a chirping noise. One of its wings was mangled and didn’t look as full of feathers as the other.
“I wouldn’t call him a pet,” Rust said. “More of a friend.”
“You’re friends with the crow?” I asked skeptically.
He grinned and closed his eyes. “Yes. And the field mice, and the owls, and the gophers, and the wind, and the trees, and the clouds in the sky, and the pebbles in the dirt, and the light in your eyes.”
Something inside my stomach sank. “How can you be friends with things like that?”
“Easily. Unconditionally.”
As I stared down at him, I began to feel sicker and sicker. Some kind of unease was settling over me, some awareness prickling at the back of my mind. Something was screaming at me to run, to close my eyes from a boy named Rust who spoke in riddles and made friends with flightless birds.
“Do you want to walk with me through the field?” Rust asked. I remained silent, so he went on. “There’s a small stream about a mile to the north. I go there sometimes to collect rocks or leaves.”
That feeling kept growing. Voices in the back of my mind kept yelling at me.
But still, I nodded.
Rust grabbed my hand without a moment’s thought. Together, we walked through the endless pastures until we came upon the stream. Rust talked about the colors of the leaves, the smell of the grass, the feeling of the wind through this crown of antlers as it brushed against his hair. He told me that he’d found his crow with a broken wing, and his father helped him nurse it back to health. He told me that the crow’s name was No, and No was Rust’s best friend.
“Is your best friend Daisy?” he asked me.
My throat was dry, but I managed to say, “Yes.”
“I remember seeing you playing in the field with her when we were younger,” Rust explained.
I remembered too. I remembered leaving the house for hours in the evenings, hoping that my dad wouldn’t notice I was gone. I remembered having to hide in my closet or the laundry room when my dad got too drunk and wanted to start picking fights with me. He still liked to blame his drinking habits and sour attitude on Mom leaving us, but he was like this long before she left. It’s probably why she left. I just wished that she had taken me with her.
“Do you and your dad still fight?” Rust asked as though he’d been reading my mind.
“Yes.” There was no use lying about it.
“Why?”
I shrugged. I had no idea. It didn’t take much to set him off, but it took a lot to stop him when he was on one of his tantrums. I wasn’t sure if it was me my dad hated so much, or himself. Either way, that didn’t stop him from taking it out on me.
“You should tell my mom,” Rust persisted. “She’s a good listener. And she can help.”
“No one can help.” I stared down at the ground. “He drinks too much.”
“My mom can. And my dad, too. They helped No.” As if recognizing its own name, the bird cawed and fluffed up the feathers around its neck. Rust smiled and pet its tiny head.
“Your mom’s a teacher at the school, right?” I asked.
Rust perked up. “Right. She’s a great teacher— or so I’ve heard. She’s never taught me.”
&n
bsp; Which, I thought to myself, was probably a good thing. Rust didn’t really need another reason for the kids at school to pick on him. They had enough as it was.
“And your dad,” I went on. “He’s the butcher, right?”
He looked pleased that I knew these fine details of his life. Heaven was a small town and everyone talked. Hell, I was sure half the population of Heaven knew my dad was a drunk. There’s no such thing as privacy when you live somewhere as small as this.
Rust stopped when we reached the edge of the stream. A stick he picked up along the way served as an extra limb that he used to turn over rocks and run through the clear, blue water as we walked along the edge of the bank.
“Will you leave again?” His voice was quieter than the gentle trickle of the stream.
“I don’t know,” I replied honestly.
He furrowed his brow and turned so he was facing me. “If you do, can I come?”
The look on his face was so serious, I could’ve laughed. But I had a feeling that that would’ve chipped away at something deep down inside him. So, instead, I said, “Don’t you love Heaven? And if you leave, who will look after your mom and dad? And No?”
He bit the corner of his lip with his teeth. I couldn’t help but stare.
“Don’t you like Heaven?” he asked, eyes downward.
“It’s the same as every place. There are people who talk too much, small houses that all look the same. Eventually, everyone’s faces start to blend together.”
But not yours, I wanted to tell him. But even the thought of that brought the sick feeling in my stomach back boiling at the surface. I squelched whatever desire I had to tell him that he would never be like everyone else.
We walked together in comfortable silence up the stream. There were trees on all sides of us, some just starting to bring new leaves with them. Piles of dead branches near the trunks were inhabited by chirping birds and squirrels. The rocks we walked along were wet from the river, and, a time or two, Rust had almost slipped and tumbled into the water. But I grabbed his arm and straightened him up. He just laughed and went back to walking along the slippery rocks.
The sun, in the far distance, was hanging low, but big and bright. Colors like those from a kaleidoscope were painted across the sky. With a smile on his face, Rust watched the sun set. I watched him.
But as the late evening came upon us, I told Rust I needed to go home. No, he told me, was looking quite tired himself. Much as we had along the bank of the river, we walked together in silence back to the field between our houses. It was a comfortable silence, like the way old trees stood tall next to one another, their roots twining into one, over time, and never having to speak.
Rust watched me out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes, when I’d turn to look at him, his eyes would lock with mine, and those voices in the back of my mind began screaming again.
We parted ways— Rust to his house in the east, and mine in the west. I walked through the back door of the house as quietly as I could, but I thought if anything at all, my dad would be able to hear the sound of my heart beating wildly.
“Ancel?” my dad called in his usual brisk tone. “Where the hell have you been?”
I could hear the television in the background on low, and from where I was in the kitchen, I could see the glow of it through the living room door. “Out for a walk.”
“Come here,” he commanded. So I did. I stood in the doorway to the living room and stared down at his socked feet.
My dad and I looked nothing alike. I looked just like my mom, and I often wondered if that was another reason my dad hated me so much. He was taller than me, bigger, and he liked to throw his weight around. He had a cruel-looking face, but maybe I just thought so because he was cruel to me. His unshaven face wasn’t anything unfamiliar, and he constantly had a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.
“A walk, huh?” he questioned.
I nodded, but he was staring at me, that same skeptical look on his face that I was used to.
“With who?” he went on.
“No one.”
He snorted. “No one. Don’t lie to me, Ancel. I looked out the back window and saw you talking to that red-haired queer kid. Now, why would you be outside talking to him?”
“We were just talking, Dad.” My skin was beginning to crawl.
“No son of mine is going to be hanging around queers. You hear me, Ancel?”
“Yes, sir.” I kept my head down.
“And no son of mine is going to grow up to be a fag.”
I felt like throwing up, much like I did every time we had this conversation. “I’m not gay, Dad.”
My dad’s skeptical once-over did little to calm my nerves. His cold stare bore into me like he was slowly picking me apart, piece by piece. Maybe he was.
“Get out of my sight,” he snapped. I didn’t have to be told twice.
Quickly, I walked down the naked hallway of our house and went into my bedroom, shutting the door quietly.
A few more weeks, I told myself. A few more weeks and you’ll have saved up enough money, and you’ll never have to see his face again.
I flicked the lights off in my room, unzipped my hoodie, and tossed it on the chair. Fully clothed, I lay down on my small bed and looked up at the ceiling fan. I watched the blades circle round and round until eventually my eyes began to grow heavy. I fell asleep looking above my head at the shadows cast on the ceiling, the slow turning blades of the fan, and the necklace made of painted teeth and a hawk feather that hung from the cord of the fan.