Stuart Douglas

“I am in flames, yet I do not burn,”

Shuggie flicked the brittle heads of the bulrush reeds and wondered whether the sadness would get her today. The frozen reeds were bone dry, and when he tapped the heads their seeds took to the air like little parachutists. They floated up and back to the scheme like a parade of little ghosts. He made a game of telling the ghosts that he loved her, and with a flick he sent them her way.

He wanted to crush her with his secrets the way she had once done him with hers.

It wasn’t fair, the way everyone could up and leave as they pleased.

But they twisted together, brow to brow, mouth on mouth, and everything was like peeping through a crack in a door: an eyeful of alabaster and rose, the glacial blue of inner arms with their veins like violet rivers, the chafing at James’s elbows that Mungo wanted to kiss so badly, and the fields of fevered carnations blooming high on his pale collarbone. The boy was all growing bones and unblemished skin; a paint chart of the softest whites.

“I listened to your mixtape. I stand in the dark at my window and listen to it every night. I thought you said it was all top forty but it’s only one song over and over.”

“I felt embarrassed. I lied.”

“I love the Smiths.”

“Not everything good goes bad.”

Mungo wanted to believe that

His outsides looked as dead as his insides felt. It seemed only right.