throat secrets

This is part of 18ft Leash: Scout’s Honor but it stands alone too. picture by evan.

✦

When your parents adopted, you finally had someone to share your secrets with. Two boys whispering in the nooks of a big, sterile house that still seemed like no one lived there, transplanted whole from civilization to this diseased atoll and sealed up with air conditioning.

Cancer wasn’t some piece of snot you grew up with, already tired of you, desensitized to your specialness. He was a brother gift-wrapped and opened on xmas day. Eager as a puppy, so impressed by everything you showed him. He didn’t know how to use a microwave, and it made you feel superior, and you knew he wouldn’t make fun of anything you said because he didn’t know better. But it was the weak stomach that really brought you together.

✦

The son of an important man can’t look like a pig, has to fit into his tight uniform, has to weigh in and run track and lead the hike and be an example. Trembleuse ate a whole box of chocolates and knew he couldn’t survive it.

Did he hope Cancer would hear him, so he wouldn’t have to tell him?

Cancer came in when everyone else was asleep.

Are you okay?

I get sick too.

Trembleuse isn’t sick. He’s in control. It’s a neat trick, he says, trying not to sound like he’s been making a sloppy mess of his own throat. Scout’s honor, two fingers up the gullet, and you get to eat whatever you want.

Cancer adores this. The elimination of the more disgusting regions from the equation…this is exactly angel knowledge. I ate too much too, he says. He kneels across from his blond brother, clear water cold between them, their nervous breaths reverberating in the bowl. Trembleuse’s shirt hangs open, damp chest as pearly as his buttons, ribs fluted as seashells. The lavatory is dim and dreamlike, a spacious night light suffusing the room with candle glow, the bathroom of a haunted ocean liner. Their voices echo and blur together, angelic acoustics.

I can’t do it, Trembleuse says. It’s like I get more nauseous each time. Every time I get close…

Cancer has an angel idea of his own, shy smile glimmering like the porcelain around them. I’ll do you. And you do me!

It is the kind of freak notion his undersocialized foster brother would have. That’s the tragedy, how badly Cancer wants to please but always misses these little rules. It’s why he can never replace you. Or maybe he’s just braver than you?

You don’t have time. A million calories of disgusting chocolate is about to drain from your stomach into your guts and irreversibly absorb into your body.

Okay.

Cancer’s fingers taste like toothpaste. The leather straps of his backpack. Pencil eraser. Rubbing his nose, biting his nails.

Trembleuse’s fingers taste like chocolate and sweaty pig guilt. Wrong. They taste like divinity. They taste like soap, neatly-trimmed nails, and civilization. They taste like the true son in the mouth of a foster freak. The closest you’ll ever get to being part of this family.

Trembleuse shuts his eyes and imagines he’s at the dentist. Cancer’s eyes are open but misty. He’s just happy that a piece of something so clean and beautiful is inside his mouth. The boy he aspires to be. But he can’t smile because that boy is pushing really hard at the back of his mouth and making it stupid and horror-spread and his eyes roll up and he gags all over his brother’s hand, coating it from fingernails to wrist.

The gold braces scrape Trembleuse’s knuckles. He is fascinated and disgusted by the hole in the roof of Cancer’s mouth, that wheezing congenital leak. Then he hits the soft palate and finds Cancer’s uvula and punches the flushed ball as it slaps his nails like a pendulum. Cancer’s fingers are more hesitant, but desperate to please, licking the back of his brother’s throat like a brain-damaged puppy, annoyingly shy pressure that keeps getting him to the edge and no further, and he’s about to say, okay, cut it out, when Cancer’s fingers sink into his throat, into the subvocal loosening of that first vowel, O, oh, and their wet pink oral muscles suck at each other, a mirrored sensation that builds until their eyes run with tears and their guts drop from the top of a skyscraper, heads sticking together in sublime dread at the inevitable cascade that just triggered, throats caught like traps around each other’s fingers, and their puberty-swollen cartilage leaps at each other like beaks stabbing for fish and their bellies suck in—

Cancer pukes first, with his weak stomach, and how forcefully his brother’s fingers are stabbing the back of his throat. The sound is so revolting and the smell so shocking that the bile creeping up Trembleuse’s neck explodes, and the sickly sweet load of liquefied chocolate-acid-saliva is so electrically awful that Cancer is forced to throw up another helping of half-digested dinner, streams of puke spraying and sloshing until they’re emptied out and gasping in each other’s faces.

We did it. We’re clean, in our secret world. Slumped around this water hole like wounded animals, smelling the deep truths of each other’s hollows.

Their fingers hang over the bowl, one hand tanned, the other pale, drawing gossamer from each other’s mouths. Their fingers hurt in different ways, crushed by braces and teeth and throat pressure, a map of each other’s dental histories and mouth panics. Below the clear quivering strands, Trembleuse’s big brown chocolate mess mixes with his brother’s yellow-white dinner of creamed corn. Their stomachs joined as one. Cancer dreamily reaches for it, then his dark hair flutters around his face as the primordial sludge shoots down the drain, high-powered plumbing eliminating it like it never existed.