AVIARY
Michael Agresta
They say there’s no future for us. They’re right. Which is fine with us.
We lie in the grass behind his parents’ house until the middle of the night, telling each other stories. I couldn’t say what any of them were about. The country they came from, where they got the wood to build a house. Global political trends. His first girlfriend. Acrobats.
He says when he’s a man he wants to own a company. He wants to dress like he does now, long hair and T-shirts, but be on the other side of the suit-wearers, above them. He’ll fuck girls like the ones in the comedy movies, the ones who are too pretty for the pornos but not sad-looking like the ones in dramas. He’ll live a life that doesn’t have a drop of hate in it. I’ll be allowed to visit any time.
The light is on downstairs until midnight. It’s his mother washing things. I think that women wash more things than need washing, that some of those things would be fine left as they are. He doesn’t hear anything you say about his mother.
I know that if I start to talk about the stars, he’ll go away. I’ll have to walk home. The night will crease and startle me. As for him, he’ll never fall asleep. It’s like he only sleeps when I’m talking. I don’t know if he’s bored or if interest wearies him.
My knuckles. My knees. His spine. His jaw. The roofs of the houses. Then clouds and damp, grassy ground. But we somehow feel suspended. Our lives are destined for greatness, or for each other.
His soul is from somewhere else. I want to go there, without him. Then maybe he can meet up with me.
We’ll fuck girls who know who we are but we don’t know who they are. Then they’ll tell people all their lives about us and we’ll never think of them again. They’ll be ghosts who came between us. Sad faces, asses, sad eyes.
He says that in Alaska, time is different. People don’t worry about doing something different every day. But what does he know about Alaska? I sometimes feel eternity at night, and sometimes in the day. Also sometimes in the time between night and day. Mostly then I feel much older than I am, and I never want to talk so everything I say is such that no more language will be necessary, no more thought.
I don’t understand him. His mother could be at one of those windows in the upstairs, in the dark. I think he grew up always being watched. I think he’s given up on secrets, but that only makes him so mysterious. He wears his own skin like a shroud. I can see why he gets tired of me trying to know him better.
All night I think about it. My knuckles, and the distance to Alaska. The women from his mother’s television shows. Acrobats. There’s no use trying to talk about where I come from. It’s like he’s already been there, and he’d rather not go back.
Michael Agresta grew up in the suburbs but now lives in Brooklyn.
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Lindsay at Twenty
Haley Mattox, born and raised in Arkansas, studied art and photography at Hendrix College. She recently relocated to Brooklyn, New York and is pursuing documentary and portrait photography, as well as documentary film. Future projects include portraits of her neighbors in the historic Crown Heights, Brooklyn and a documentary on Methodist Revival camps in Arkansas. Haley makes photographs using a vintage Pentax K1000, a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, and a Holga Toy Camera.
