Don't ~
Call For Silence

Stones

I knelt down, and ran my fingers along the dark stain that coated the floor of the hall and ran in erratic patterns across the wall. Whatever it was had been dried a long time now. A shudder fell down my spine.

Lifting my fingers from the stain I brought them to my lips. This felt familiar and I couldn’t deny that my senses instinctively knew what it was. A thing like that you don’t forget, and again my hand felt drenched in it. I wiped my finger on my pants, but the sensation lingered.

“Lucas?” I called. The word didn’t even echo against the walls of the house. The only sound was the scuttle of mice and termites that had made their homes in the soft, decrepit wood.

“Lucas?” I tried again, louder this time. Light came from the doorway, where the moon was peering in behind me. Glass shards glittered on the ground, stuck to the floor by the great black stain. I stepped carefully over both of these and made my way back out to the open door.

I refused to think what might have happened to him; why he wouldn’t be waiting for me here, sitting outside beneath the gaping window like he had been one year before. I refused to think what the staining on the floor meant.

It was this time, one year earlier, and we met for the first time. Both of us bound to that place by our own dark choice of fate.

“Are you an angel?” he’d asked me.

He was sitting outside against the wall of the shack, concealed in the nightly shadows of the half waned moon. I leaned back against the closest tree and turned my face to the sky.

            “No,” I replied.

            “My mom used to tell me about angels,” he said. His voice was soft and still like the air, “She said that they’re beautiful.”

            I squinted, allowing my eyes to adjust from the brilliance of the starlit sky to the contours of his dark form. Even from a distance he looked and spoke as though he’d been dead several months, now just a skeletal form.

“What’re you doing out here?” I asked, “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

            He shook his head and pulled his feet in so that his toes remained unreached by the moon’s light. “Daddy’s home tonight and I don’t go inside when he’s there.”

            “Why not? Are you scared of him?” I asked.

            “Have you ever seen an angel?” he changed the subject.

            Had the air been thicker or the moon brighter I might not have let him alter topics so abruptly, but instead I let him lead me on, relaxing against the stiff bark of the tree.

“Yes, I have.”

            “Was she beautiful?” He turned his head towards me. His eyes were sunken in so that all I saw were the deep hollows of a skull gazing at me through the darkness. I tilted my head to the side and leaned forward to get a better look at him.

            “What makes you think the angel was a woman?”

            “My mom’s an angel now. Maybe you met her.” His voice was soft.

I shook my head. “I didn’t meet your mother.”

            He didn’t reply, and for a moment I considered simply walking away, removing myself from this place and leaving him alone. However, I had only to assume this is where I was supposed to be, so I stayed there against the tree while the silence crept along, filling up the night.

After a few moments he spoke again. “What are you doing here?”

            “What do you mean?” I asked.

            He shifted again and the sound of his frail body moving was pitiful. “No one lives out here but me and Daddy.”

            “I was just going for a walk,” I told him. “Why? Do you think I’m going to hurt you?”

            He didn’t reply at first, but when he did it was soft, “No. No one can hurt me now.”

            His words touched something in my memory that stung. I left the shade of my tree and crossed the moonlit gap to set myself down beside him against the wall, suddenly wanting, rather  than feeling obligated, to stay with him that night. As I crossed over, his frail body pulled away from me and his wide eyes watched me with a fear that I could almost have called fascination.

            “What makes you say that?” I asked him, but he didn’t answer me. Close up, he was even thinner than he’d looked through the curtain of moonlight.

             “Where are you from?” he asked me.

            I looked around, but there wasn’t any landmark besides the trees that would give me an alibi. “I don’t know. What’s nearby?”

            He smiled, and then he leaned toward me as though he were a child telling me some special secret, “The church is the closest place to here.”

            “The church?” I considered it while he nodded and smiled to himself, “I came here from the church then. Does that suit you?”

            He shrugged, placed his head atop his knees and wrapped his arms around himself. “What were you doing there? The church is closed this time of night.”

            I smiled, and he grinned back at me, having trapped me in a lie. “I was only going for a walk,” I repeated. “It’s nice outside.”

            He shifted again, reached out a bony hand and poked my shoulder firmly as though checking that I was indeed flesh and bone. He frowned and looked back out past our little shadowed bank, a summer breeze rustled the leaves of the trees and sent ripples across the pool of light. He picked up a stone and flicked it into the dark shore of trees. “You say you came from the church, but you’re not an angel, and you’re not a ghost either. What does that make you?”

            “I don’t know. What does that make me?”

            He was quiet again, so I watched a sliver of the moon peak over the crumbling roof of the shack. The air was so warm though the sun had been down a long time now. I missed the summer weather; back where I was born the ocean tides would be low this time of year.

            “What’s your name?” I asked him after a moment.

            “Lucas. What’s yours?”

            “My name’s Ansen,”

He looked back at me with his big eyes. “It’s what?”

            The shadow of our bank was quickly disappearing as we sat there. I pulled my feet in tighter so that we were both sitting with our knees in our chests, careful not to touch the light.

“It’s Ansen,” I said again.

“Spell it,” he asked, so I did, and he repeated, “A-N-S-E-N.”

            “That’s a strange name. What are you, Indian?”

“Indian?” I laughed, “Do I look Indian to you?”

“Sort of. Like an India Indian, not an American Indian. Where else would your name have come from?”

I shrugged, and he accepted it as an answer.

“How old are you?” he asked.

            My first instinct was to shrug again, and it made him laugh. It seemed like such a simple question but I wasn’t entirely sure what to say. “I’m still seventeen,” I decided.

            “You’re really tall,” he said, and I smiled.

            “Well thank you. You’re very small.”

            “I’m only thirteen,” he said, and his voice got softer again. His bony hand had been picking at a place on the thin grass as though trying to dislodge a stone from somewhere beneath the earth’s surface. I reached down and placed my hand on top of his to stop its constant scraping.

            “Thirteen’s a good age.”

            “You’re hand’s cold,” he said, looking up at me.

            “Yours is bony. Don’t you ever eat?” He smiled and pulled his hand away.

            The moonlight reached my feet and he scooted back so that his small body was still entirely drenched in the shadows.

“Sometimes,” he said. “We don’t have much money and Daddy drinks a lot, but we have a waffle iron, so when I can I buy a mix and make waffles.”

            “Waffles?” I asked. He nodded earnestly, so I laughed. “No wonder you’re small. You have to eat more than just waffles to grow tall.”

            He turned his head away from me, “What do you eat?”

            I wrapped my arms around my knees and stared up at the sky again. You could see so many stars from here, but fewer than I remembered being there. I said nothing, and after a while he leaned his head back against the wall of the house, knocking off a chunk of paint which caught itself up in his thin hair.

            “You don’t come from anywhere and you don’t even have a favorite food. You’re pretty weird for someone who doesn’t think he’s an angel.”

            I shook my head and laughed, “Do you really think I look like an angel?”

            Now he became serious, carefully scrutinizing my appearance. The moonlight had crept up onto our legs and it caught in his eyes. Pale and thin as he was, his eyes were still strong and beautiful; a deep grey-blue mirror of the moon.

            “You’re beautiful, like an angel. You’re really beautiful, and you’re nice too. Isn’t that how angels are supposed to be?”

            The moon was watching me carefully now from over the corner of the house. I could feel its glow against my hands, so I pulled them back to my sides, leaning my head against the wall. “You think a guy is beautiful? You’re a strange kid.”

            “Not as strange as you,” he reminded me, “And you are beautiful. Even if you are a guy, and even if your eyes are all weird and red like that, your face is like an angel’s, and your hair’s long… you kind of look like my mom.”

            “You’re too white to have an Indian mom.” I retorted.

            “I thought you weren’t Indian,” Lucas asked, looking at me even more carefully now.

            “I never said that. I said I wasn’t an angel. And that I’m not your mother.”

Now we were neck deep in the pool of moonlight. His skin was so gaunt and pale that he looked more like a skeleton in the light than he did in the dark. Seeing that the light had reached him, he recoiled and stuffed his bare arms beneath his folded knees.

            “I know that,” he mumbled.

            “Besides,” I continued, “Aren’t angels supposed to dress in white?”

            He looked me up and down. Even bathed in moonbeams I was clearly dressed in black. “I guess so. But how should I know? I’ve never seen one before.”

            “I have,” I reminded him, “And he was dressed in white, with these big white wings.” I gestured their size for emphasis.

            His eyes were big and brimmed with longing. “Really?” he asked.

            I nodded. The moon had taken over the entire wall by now so it was no use leaning back to hide from it any longer. I stretched out my legs.

            “You could still be an angel,” he whispered, placing his chin upon his knees again.

            He was so small. I felt as though I was very attached to him, though I couldn’t rationalize why. Moving closer, I wrapped my arm around his shoulders, and pulled him slightly toward me. “What would you do if I was an angel?”

            He stiffened, but let himself be pulled closer till his head touched my shoulder. “I’d ask you to take me with you.”

            The trees rustled again and a few leaves dropped off, joining the moonlit ocean that we’d become a part of.

“What if there was no heaven? Or what if it weren’t so great?” I asked.

            “I don’t care. It would be better than here,” he decided, shifting so that he was leaning into me more, his skull firmly settled against my upper left arm.

            “There aren’t any waffles in Heaven.”

            He laughed at my mocking, his whole body shaking from the effort. The air began to stir around us again as he giggled, but some soft movement inside the house made him gasp and the air calmed suddenly with his laughter. I waited until all movement, outside and in, ceased, then I leaned my head down on top of his.

            “Don’t you have to die to get to Heaven?” I asked, lowering my voice to just below a whisper, “Dying is really painful.”

            “But only for a minute, right?” he asked softly. A cloud caught up with the moon at that moment and swept across its surface, casting another drift of shadow across us and sending a shiver down my spine.

            “That depends on how you die,” I said.

I squeezed his shoulder with one hand, and with the other I picked up a stone from the grass. It was sharp and jagged on one side, but smooth on the other. I ran my thumb across each side one after the other, enjoying the contrasting sensation before skipping it into the deep darkness under the shade of the trees. The moonlight began to slide back down upon us from the other side of its veil. I could remember skipping rocks across the ocean waves when I was very little. You had to go a long way to get to the shore line because the cliffs that the town was built on here high and sheer, but it was worth the distance to play in the cool salt waters.

            “I was going to go down to the train tracks tonight.” I hadn’t realized he had been crying until I heard the tremor in his voice. “I was going to stay there and wait for the train to come by.”

            The moonlight shoved aside the cloud and I closed my eyes against the sudden brightness. “That would have been painful,” I whispered.

            He nodded and turned his face into my sleeve. I let him cling to my arm as he cried.

“I just don’t know how it can get any worse,” he gasped after a while.

            “As long as you’re alive, things can get better,” I said, “Once you’re dead you can’t fix anything. You just get a big rock with your name on it and then everyone forgets about you.”

            “Ansen?” he asked as he gasped for breath through tears, “What was it like when you died?”

            The moon suddenly wasn’t watching us anymore. It was spilling all about, drowning us slowly in a wave of silver light, but its eye had turned away, and we were completely alone there in the night. I squeezed his shoulder, and brought my right arm around to hold him tighter.

            “What makes you think I died? How could I even be here if I were dead?”

            “Yeah but,” he’d calmed down some and the hitch in his voice was even again, “Is there a tombstone somewhere with your name on it? Do people remember you?”

            I shook him lightly. “There’s no stone like that anywhere. How could there be? Besides, no one remembers me. No one even knows my name,” I leaned my head back against the wall and it creaked under the weight of my head. “Nobody cares about boys who go off and kill themselves in stupid ways.”

            He moved again. He seemed even thinner, having cried off whatever weight he might have had padding his bones. “But if I died, would you remember me?”

            I shook my head. “You want more people than just me to remember you.”

            “No one else will remember me,” he insisted.

            “Your father will.”

            He shook his head, rubbing it against my arm. “He doesn’t even remember Mom. He won’t remember me. He probably doesn’t know I’m alive anymore.”

            The moon was leaving completely now, off in search of more a deserving couple to cast its ocean of light upon. Morning was coming.

            I moved, pushing him off of me as gently as I could while I made to stand up.

            “Where’re you going?” he asked, curling himself back up against the wall as I moved away.

            “Your father will remember you,” I told him, running my fingers through my hair to knock off any pieces of dried paint, and then reaching down to pick the large chunk from his head. “I promise I’ll remember you too, but I can’t stay any longer tonight.”

            He looked to the east and then smirked, “What’re you now? A vampire? Have to leave before sunrise?”

            I laughed, “I thought you said I was an angel. And I do have to go before the sun rises today.”

            He sighed, and then stood up as well, “Will you be coming back?”

            I smiled. “I will, but I might not be back for a long time. Will you wait for me, and not try to kill yourself again before then?”

            He let out a sarcastic laugh and looked east again, “I guess I ended up missing that train, huh?”

            “Hopefully.”

            “When you come back again, you’ll take me with you, won’t you? Where ever it is that you’re going?”

            I stepped toward him, and wrapped an arm around his thin shoulders, squeezing him into me briefly, “When I come back I’ll take you away from here, anywhere you want to go. I promise. So wait for me, okay?”

            He hugged me back and then I left him, headed into the dark shadows of the trees, waving goodbye.

“You’re a terrible liar, Ansen.” Was the last thing I heard him say.

But I didn’t lie. It was the same time, one year later, and I stood outside. Too afraid to search deeper inside the house, too afraid of what I might find. The whole area felt contaminated. I walked along the outside, circumnavigating the house, my fist clenched at my side to try to numb the twinge still remained upon my finger tips. I stopped just where I’d seen him sitting the summer before.

The window gaped at me; the darkest space on the moonlit wall. Allowing my eyes to wander hopelessly, I noticed something beneath the ledge.

Stuck beside a patch of grass under the window were what appeared to be two large eggs. I knelt by these, and turned one over with my still-clean hand.

I recognized what they were as soon as the first one touched my fingertips. A pair of stones, each about the size of a fist, carefully rounded and polished. I picked up the first and ran my fingers over it. On one side it was perfectly smooth, but on the other there were ridges that had been scraped in. I held it up and turned it so that the moonlight would catch in the crevasses. Scratched shallowly into the stone was the word “LUCAS” in choppy capital letters.

I smiled and placed this stone back down beside the tuft of grass where it had been nestled. “Maybe you got turned into a rock,” I mused aloud to myself, and picked up the second one.

This one was slightly larger than the first and of a darker color. I turned it carefully between my fingers. Both sides had ridges scratched in, and they were deeper than those scratched into the other stone.

Holding this one up to the light, I found that my name had been scrawled upon one side, “ANSEN” scraped over and over, deep into the stone. I ran my thumb across the word and then turned it over.

I WILL REMEMBER YOU ANGEL

was carved into the back.

Unsure of what it meant, I clutched it to my chest. What could it be? A tombstone? Is that what he really believed then? I couldn’t throw him off that scent? I picked up the first stone with my free hand and held it too, realizing now that it was too late. My chest ached and the splatter of dark, dried blood in the inside hall came back in a cruelly vivid flash.

“Why’d you leave without me, Lucas? I thought you were going to wait,” I whispered, and I let myself slide back against the wall. “I can’t go there. Not now. And I was looking forward to seeing you again”

I allowed myself to cry for him, although no tears would fall. The moonlight left without me, passing over the treetops before the morning came. I let myself fade away until the sun began to light the eastern sky, then I pocketed the stones, and was on my feet.

I wandered until I found my way to the churchyard he mentioned, which was much farther from his house than I’d expected it to be. I passed through an iron archway into a garden where graves flourished and flowers only came to die. There, among the rows and rows of cut limestone I found a rock that held his name.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him, and was surprised when a response came.

“Were you a friend of his?”

Turning my head, I saw a priest walking toward me, carrying a basin half filled with water.

“Yes.”

The priest nodded, “I’m sorry for your loss. It’s a real tragedy. It’s been three months already. I’m sorry you weren’t notified. They didn’t know who to call, I hear he didn’t have many friends.”

I bent my head and squeezed the stones that were sitting in my pocket. Three months of blood drying on the floor? He would have been fourteen, I realized. Now only three years younger than me.

“It was in all the papers though. His father was a drunk. Beat him to death one night, God rest their souls. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it.”

“I’ve been very, very far away,” I whispered.

He nodded, “This must be quite a shock.”

I forced myself not to move, not to answer.

“Well, if you need anything,” he said, “The church is open twenty four hours, and I’ll be here whenever you need a prayer.” Then he excused himself and wandered back to the church, sloshing water from his basin along the path.

I smiled. Open twenty four hours. That liar had told me it was closed at night.

“What else did you lie to me about, Lucas?” I knelt down beside his grave.

The red sunlight spilled upon the tombs, chasing away the cool air of the night. I took the stones from my pocket and laid them in the soft earth beneath his headstone so that they were side by side, with one leaning against the other.

“I guess you’re the angel now,” I whispered, and leaned forward to kiss the stone that would forever mark his grave. “You didn’t even need me to come back for you.”

I stood up after several moments and tried to shake the regret from my mind. Turning my face to the west where night was not quite lost, I wondered if maybe, even after all I’d seen, I might believe in reincarnation, or in a better life after death for those who are good. The light reached down and illuminated the face of his grave, casting his name in golden light.

“I guess it was really me who needed you to take me away,” I whispered, and his tombstone smiled back at me with a cool blue glow that imitated the moon, but which sparkled with the promise of its own light.