Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

in the high quiet.   i must be careful not to shake / anything in too wild an elation.
-Ed Roberson, be careful

THE FARM is deserted. The neat black angles of the farmhouse, the pure white pallor of the snaking dirt lane under the moon, remind Tom of an abandoned set: the play done, the players gone.

He kills the engine. Dismounts into the silvered dark.

The front door is ajar. A rectangle of void.

TOM

            Agathe! Agathe, Francis!

*

The light changes. He makes an illegal U-turn. The ensuing eruption of honking seems to blast him out of his skin. He yelps, swears, grips the wheel. He shakes—full-body tremors, icy sweat—until he merges onto the expressway. Then it is night. Real night, the thick all-encompassing swaddling of time-before-creation, interrupted here and there by the large golden eyes of an eighteen-wheeler in the opposite lane, bearing down on Montreal. The city in his mirrors contracts to a pinpoint and disappears. The city: the lights, the traffic, the trendy young people in leather jackets just like his. The city: its halo of light pollution, its sirens. The city: karaoke, Sarah, un soir de pluie, on se quitte, Guillaume, gone.

*

Dull glow of moonlight on the kitchen tile. On the pendant lights, which hang like cut white flowers on smooth stalks. On the white gauze of Agathe’s curtains. On her countertops. Her knives.

I don’t sleep much, Agathe said, I read, but no light shines behind her bedroom door. When Tom pushes it open (Agathe), the wood crunches over something like glass.

The fragments of a china shepherdess. The fragments of an angel at prayer.

The cold soaks Tom’s bones. He is a ghost who rattles: not chains but teeth. He wraps his arms around himself and squeezes, holds himself, a basket of ribs, a basket of organs heaped high and bloody, a tangle of sinews and strings—but the chatter persists. The chatter accompanies him up the farmhouse stairs.

*

The sight of Francis: a blow. A fist, a knee, to the solar plexus. Tom doubles over. Expects to spit blood, but when he straightens and wipes his mouth, what smears away on the back of his hand is only saliva, cooling rapidly in the pitch-black air.

TOM

            Francis?

Francis is a torso lying across their two beds. A quilt bisects him. A pillow covers his face.

The smell of cigarettes. The smell of dung and sweat.

TOM

            Francis?

The torso shifts—pushes air through its pipes—sighs, muffled, into the cold.

Tom kneels. Remembers Agathe’s angel, smashed into powder: I too fall to the ground to pray.

Cheek to groin. Nose to groin. Mouth to groin. Inhaling and inhaling. Cotton thickening under his lips and tongue. Fibers swelling, saturating, clinging gel-like to the shape of the man underneath. Squelching mouthful of cloth and testicle. The sound of his breath. The sound of his heart. A cock hardening against the rim of his eye.

Hands on Francis’s hipbones. Hands on Francis’s waistband. Hands on Francis: hands and mouth, heat and salt.

A hand in Tom’s hair.

FRANCIS

            Good evening, Tom.

            Good evening, honey.

            Good evening, pissant!

*

The aftermath of a fatal motorcycle accident on Saint-Laurent: a man lying dead on concrete, faceless, scalped. Tom is carrying flowers, which he does not drop. The flowers are white lilies and have no scent. The man is too far away—on the other side of the street—and too freshly dead to smell, but there is a smell, nevertheless, of asphalt, armpits, and gasoline. It is the middle of summer, there are people all around, their mouths are open and screaming. Tom remembers a noise like the buzz of a cicada, then nothing.

*

Francis holds Tom by the back of the neck. Presses his cock into the socket of Tom’s left eye. Thick and veiny, fleshy, hot—pulsating, faintly, stickily, between the bones of Tom’s cheek and brow. Horrific pressure. Static. The flood of precome into the jelly of his eye.

TOM

            Ow, Christ!

FRANCIS

            Sorry.

Blinking, teary-bleary-pearly, as Francis’s cockhead drags over his eyelid, flattens a nostril, smears over his philtrum, his lips.

FRANCIS

            Let me in, okay, Tom, baby? Let me in, okay?

Dull scraping pain at the base of his skull: Francis’s calluses burning the skin at his nape. Ouch, he says, not so tight. Pretty baby, Francis murmurs, gripping him hard, baby, sweetheart. The cock prods, jabs, grinds his lips against his teeth.

TOM

            I know about him.

FRANCIS

            Open the fuck up.

TOM

            The boy you hurt. I know. I saw him. His scars look terrible.

            Don’t hurt me like that. Don’t rip my face open.

            Wait! Don’t hit me! Don’t break my neck!

FRANCIS

            Whore! Open your fucking mouth!

TOM

            Gagging.

FRANCIS

            Get me with your teeth one more time and I’ll pull them out with pliers.

*

FRANCIS

            I thought I was dreaming.

TOM

            Gagging.

FRANCIS

            But there you were. In the flesh. Kissing my cock.

            Were you going to rape me, Tom?

TOM

            Gagging, moaning.

FRANCIS

            You’re a drama queen, eh, Tom? Gossiping with people behind my back! Taking off like that over a silly misunderstanding!

            That’s all it was: a misunderstanding.

            You didn’t even give me a chance to explain!

            Stupid bitch!

            Fucking thief!

            Slut!

TOM

            Gagging.

FRANCIS

            It’s a good thing you came to your senses. Now you can work on earning my forgiveness. Mending my trust.

            It won’t happen overnight. It might never happen completely.

            What’s important is that you try.

TOM

            Moaning, gagging.

*

Eyes rolling back—

Tom sees inside himself: inside his skull, a rich and shadowed red interrupted now and then by a dim fluttering, the spasmodic movement of his eyelids as he chokes on Francis’s cock. He sways inside the broken corridor of his throat, gazing at the wreckage while a wave, foaming, white, powerful, inexorable, sweeps toward his feet.

FRANCIS

            Waste not, want not.

            Spit.

*

There is a bleached quality to the light seeping through the windows. We are hours away from dawn. The air is soggy, damp, and still.

The moon dangles, small and leaden, a flake of paint peeling from a white-washed wall.

FRANCIS

            Listen.

TOM

            Fuck! Fuck!

FRANCIS

            What’s that sound?

TOM

            Fuck!

FRANCIS

            It’s the sound of your greedy ass begging for the rest of my hand.

TOM

            No!

Francis: sprawling, gloating. Tom: leaking. His cock drools between their stomachs. Francis’s come squishes inside him. Francis’s knuckles bulge inside him like stones.

FRANCIS

            Are you pissing yourself, Tom? Are you pissing the bed, cocksucker?

TOM

            Oh!

FRANCIS

            Are you coming again?

TOM

            I’m coming! Fuck! I’m coming!

FRANCIS

            Keep squealing, Bitch-Ass! By sunrise I’ll be wearing you like a glove!

TOM

            Francis! Oh! Oh!

*

Forget the gentle sounds of morning at the farmhouse: the birds, the wind, the rusted knocking of an unlatched gate. The creak of bed springs announcing Francis’s departure and the silence he leaves behind, soon filled—a motor, a tractor, the faded lowing of a distant cow. Forget Agathe downstairs, the splash of the faucet, the clanging of pans, the sizzle, the solid clip of her sensible, low-heeled shoes: rigid, industrious Agathe who never wears slippers.

Morning is the barnyard, bleak and dank. Morning is bovine bellowing. Morning is the slow and thoughtful tread of Francis’s boots. Morning is the slamming of the barn door; it is the knot of tools on Francis’s work table and his tiny floral box of cocaine. It is the smell of hay. It is a drip in the bloodstained sink. It is the corpse of a rat.

Morning is Tom’s hair in his eyes and the pulse throbbing in his temples. It is the hardness of Francis’s shoulder in his gut, the spike of Francis’s fingers at his waist. It is the sore wet clench behind his balls. It is the frozen mouth of impending winter on his buttocks and the soles of his feet. It is the swipe of fleecy sweatpants against his cheek. It is pink and upside-down and the heat of Francis’s cock through cloth.

*

Francis shows him the fist. A pursing of the fingers in twisted imitation of a bird. A sinuous movement of arm and wrist. The shine of animal lubricant like the shell of a candy apple. He enters Tom with the ease of long practice, then opens his hand.

TOM

            Screaming.

FRANCIS

            This is how I confirm pregnancy in my heifers.

TOM

            Screaming.

FRANCIS

            I feel around for the cervix and the uterine horns.

TOM

            Grunting, groaning.

FRANCIS

            You’re hollow, Tom.

            There’s nothing inside you, my boy, except this cute little organ that makes your cock spew.

TOM

            Grunting, gasping.

FRANCIS

            You need me, Tom!

            That’s why you came crawling back!

            You’re empty!

            You’re hungry!

            You need me to fill you up!

*

Last night, Tom drove over the suitcase he abandoned on the asphalt. Crushed Guillaume’s things the way Francis is now crushing his guts. Book, journal, clothing: smeared into shit beneath Francis’s wheels. At a bend in the road he noticed something drifting and white—Agathe in her nightgown, a sleepwalker, a madwoman, a ghost in the corn.

FRANCIS

            I tore up that bitch of Guillaume’s to set him free.

            But you, Tom…

The hand inside him is a seed. Each finger a root, each root taking hold. Rooted, he wets the rotting earth.

Chapter Text

I hear wolf behind me / the foot steps of hunger / I am coming back…
-John Allman, “Return”

FRANCIS

            Where are you? Where are you? I’m sorry! I’m sorry, okay? Don’t go!

            I won’t hurt you, Tom, okay?

            What about me? Tom, don’t you fucking do this to me! I need you, okay? I fucking need you here!

            I’m really disappointed, Tom! I’d never do this to you! Never!

            I’m trying to be a better person, okay? Fuck! Tom! Fuck! Wait until I find you!

*

FRANCIS

            I can hear you.

*

THE FOREST bursts. Mud, muck, a fist at his collar, clawing. Tom, dragged forward, stumbles and falls. Another eruption: pain that slices from his sinuses to his brain. The smell of soil—clean, wet, somehow purifying—is polluted with iron. Blood runs like hot water into the leaf-litter. He lifts his head: his hand in the dark of the wood, glowingly white, splayed, Francis’ boot set over it like a shadow, Francis himself a shadow, a body swallowed up by nightfall. His helpless wrist below the shovel blade, which turns his stomach as it touches his skin: the pantomime sawing, the blade so horribly dull.

The evening speaks to him in Francis’ hoarse and gloating voice: they used to punish thieves like this.

The road, not so distant, is silent. Under the black awning of the trees, Tom hears the relentless drumming of his heart and the sound of his breath, like sobbing. There is mud in his mouth. The ground beneath him is gouged from the struggle, trenches long and deep in the fading light, wounds in the earth. His nose is bleeding, stinging, possibly broken.

Francis chuckles above him.

Let me up, Tom whispers.

Francis laughs and throws the shovel away.

TOM

            I didn’t take anything that didn’t belong to me.

FRANCIS

            How about my heart, eh?

            My brother’s things, did they belong to you? And the shovel, it was yours all along? My mistake.

            Poor boy, you’re bleeding.

            You look good in red.

*

Francis lifts him by the collar and slaps him. Francis holds him and puts his hands on his throat. It is full dark now. The edges of the world grow darker still. An impossible darkness. Tom ponders as he vanishes: how about my heart.

*

FRANCIS

            Good evening. You were twitching like a dying animal.

TOM

            Ahh, fuck! Ahh!

FRANCIS

            Like a deer pierced by an arrow.

            My little doe.

*

Night clots in his eyes. He feels the folding of his body: his feet overhead, his knees at his ribs. The weight of Francis, bending him in half, the force of him, sliding him back and forth in the mud. The drag of his cock like a sawblade. The pale flash of a hip, an eye, a tooth. Do you like that, my man, asks Francis.

He gurgles in answer. Blood puddles in his throat, thickening, nowhere to go. At the slightest brush of his fingers over Francis’s knuckles, the big hands start to squeeze, tighter and tighter until the night forest disintegrates into black dissociated atoms and his body begins to dissolve: extremities first, the tips of toes, fingers, and hair. The cock, the strangling, his sadness, he will soon leave it behind. Then Francis relents. Thumbprints on his windpipe. A pressure no heavier than a caress. But still no way to swallow. To call out. The pain returns and builds. He lies under Francis and listens: to the silence of the road, the grunting, and the wind. To Francis, who is beginning to moan.  

The darkness has changed. The moon is rising. He sees the outline of the man above him; and stars.

*

FRANCIS

            Ready to cum, Bitch-Ass?

TOM

            Can’t breathe.

FRANCIS

            Speak up.

TOM

            Can’t breathe.

FRANCIS

            Better?

TOM

            Oh, ah, oh.

FRANCIS

            I have a nice prick, don’t I?

            You love my prick, don’t you?

TOM

            Oh—oh!

FRANCIS

            Bitch! Tell me.

TOM

            Don’t hit me…I’m sorry…

            Yes, I love it.

FRANCIS

            Yeah?

TOM

            I love it. I love it, Francis. I swear I love it.

FRANCIS

            You love it.

TOM

            It’s perfect. It’s all I want.

FRANCIS

            Where do you want it?

TOM

            Here.

FRANCIS

            Deep?

TOM

            Yes. Yes. Like that, yes.

FRANCIS

            That’s it, slut. Tighten up.

TOM

            It’s good. It’s good. Deep like that.

            I love your prick, I love—

            Oh!

            Oh fuck! Oh fuck! Oh fuck!

FRANCIS

            Fuck, you did it! You actually did it!

            You crazy slut!

            Untouched!

            Christ!

            My, what a wonderful cunt you have!

TOM

            Please! Please!

            Unh! Oh! Please!

*

He lies in a seep, in the soft, overturned, oozing earth. A clink of metal, the tinny purring of a zipper: Francis tucking his cock away.

FRANCIS

            I can make any bitch cum her brains out.

He feels something below the balls. A blunt, wood-slick prodding.

FRANCIS

            Since you liked it enough to steal it.

*

Francis keeps a blanket in his truck, lately used to keep the body of a diseased calf from contacting his truck-bed. He wraps Tom in it and helps him into the passenger seat. The engine has been running all this time. It’s nine o’clock. Two hours since he left the farm and Francis came looking for him. Two hours since the sun set unnoticed behind a bank of cloud and Francis raped him under the trees. Now the clouds have blown away, and the sky beyond the windshield is void-black and speckled as if with milk. Night overwhelms a landscape without a city to keep it at bay. He thinks of his apartment, the things inside it, the golden grid outside. He opens his mouth: Francis is kissing him, thick-tongued and insistent, gripping him by the hair. Spit drips. His anus aches.

The passenger door slams. Francis saunters around the truck and takes his seat. And looks at him: long and hard.

Good boy, Francis says eventually, satisfied.

*

FRANCIS

           I’m no monster. You know that.

           You know that, Tom.

           Look at me, you know that.

           I’m the dog that nips you to keep you in line.

*

A silhouette in the farmhouse window: Agathe, elongated. Is she looking out or in? Does she hear the truck rolling up the drive?

The light goes out.

FRANCIS

            Let’s get our stories straight.

            You went for a walk to clear your head.

TOM

            I lost my way.

FRANCIS

            You’re an idiot from the city.

            You don’t know right from left.

            Your eyes are bad.

            There aren’t many signs.

TOM

            It was dark. I got turned around.

FRANCIS

            You got scared.

TOM

            You saved me. You brought me home.

FRANCIS

            Exactly. Go in.

            What’s the matter?

TOM

            My face…

FRANCIS

            What about it?

            Had another fall, didn’t you? A bad one. Poor boy.

            Now what?

TOM

            But my clothes…

            Guillaume’s clothes, his journal, his…ow, ah!

            Ah! I’m sorry.

FRANCIS

            What clothes? What journal?

            Get your dirty ass inside.

            I won’t tell you again.

*

Agathe in the dining room. Agathe in moonlight. And in her hand a knife.

I went for a walk, Tom says. To clear my head. I lost my way. Francis found me.

There is a milkiness to the moonlit shine in Agathe’s eyes, fixed upon the window. The knife dangles.

Francis found me, Tom repeats. It was dark, I couldn’t read the signs.

Agathe nods vacantly: is that so?

TOM

            I was scared, I fell…

AGATHE

            I wasn’t sure about supper.

TOM

            We…we ate in town.

AGATHE

            Did you, Tom? That’s nice.

            Look at you in your little cape.

            Well, good night.

*

He stands in front of the bathroom mirror, his little cape drawn to his chin. The face in the mirror belongs to someone else. A slit of an eye, marooned inside a seeping black bruise, a bloodied, ballooning nose. Split lips that twitch when Tom’s lips twitch, but this, surely, is coincidence. The face in the mirror ends at the chest, but Tom’s body, his hollow, ringing, gaping body, goes all the way to the cold tiled floor. Slowly, he lets the blanket fall.

Voices below. Agathe a dreamy murmur, Francis belligerent.

FRANCIS

            Christ, Agathe, you gave me a fucking turn.

            Standing in the dark like a fucking scarecrow.

            What do you care about what I’ve been doing?

            Yes, a fire. Yes, at this hour.

            Nothing. Trash.

            You’re tired, Agathe, you’re imagining things.

            Guillaume’s bitch must have taken them after all.

            Christ! Put that down!

A crash. A cry. Then footsteps: Francis’s heavy tread on the stairs.

FRANCIS

            Crazy bitch.

            Tom?

            Where are you, Tom?

            I’ll wring your fucking neck.

            I’m not in the mood for more hide and seek.

            It’s time to clean up and go to bed.

            Where are you, esti?

TOM

            Here, Francis. I’m here.

*

Francis in the bathroom, bright-eyed, blood on his hands.

FRANCIS

            Women and their knives.

TOM

            Are you bleeding? Are you hurt?

FRANCIS

            You’re sweet. Come here and give me a smile.

TOM

            Uhh!

FRANCIS

            Wider.

*

The stranger in the mirror grins at Tom with a mouth torn from ear to ear. On the other side of the glass, Francis gathers Tom’s hair at his nape and pulls—what, still smiling, Bitch-Ass?

In the shower he slips his cock into Tom’s palm. I’ll fuck your hungry cunt tomorrow, he promises, meet me in the soy field at noon and I’ll give it to you twice as hard as I did tonight, I’ll really make you scream. Christ, the shovel, you loose fucking slut, oh fuck, shitting fuck. Guillaume thought you were pure as snow. I know better. I’ll bring a bull home for you someday. Tom, speechless, rubs him until he comes: hot white spurts that lose their color in the water and disappear down the drain.

Chapter Text

I was relieved, as an adult, when I learned that the slipper was not of verre, but of vair: which is to say, ermine. The prince and his agents were ranging the kingdom with a tiny female organ in hand, his ideal bride in miniature. Never mind her face: he had not raised his eyes so far. All he knew was that the fit was tight.

-Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost

A mouse in the kitchen. The old woman in bed. The barn redolent with manure. The brother rotting in Cimetière Saint-Blaise. The farmer at the bus depot, the farmer at Berri-UQAM. The boy asleep in the Mile-End, having nightmares.

*

A weight on his chest, a body in the window: the body of a hanged man, or of Guillaume, whose face he can no longer see clearly in his mind. The glint of a pair of eyes that surely belong to Francis: Francis whose face is as clear as morning, Francis whose white truck rolls into him as gentle as a dog nosing at his palm. He knows he is dreaming even as he lies on the empty country road. He hears, through the fog of the dream, the glassy patter of sleet.

*

The city before dawn is beautifully arranged, a body in a casket. Pale light and the scent of autumn. A helpless stillness. Gray and slushy to the touch.

*

His brother built his nest on the first floor of a narrow house on a quiet street. The garden, overgrown, appears to have died overnight. No thorns. No iron staircase slick with ice. Every window unbarred: so, he thinks, Guillaume felt he was a free man. His pocket knife makes quick work of the latch.

Why now? Why today of all days? There is no one left alive to put questions to him. But the answer is that winter is on his doorstep. In winter, you come home.

In winter the farm disappears under white drifts. Picture Francis and Agathe in their warren, their sullenness, her stitching, her bitching, his snow-damp boots and the moonlit glow of puddling meltwater. The dull slam of the door. The fog of his breath. The steam of the cows. The vast silence: this milky landscape as distant from human life as a satellite of Jupiter.

The pink of the horizon like a slapped cheek.

Tom awakens as though breaking the surface of the Richelieu, gasping, eyes streaming. Francis has a smile for him but slaps him again and again, until the horizon darkens, until that sweet pink turns blotched and red. Tom looks at him with a face like the spring thaw, rivulets of crystalline snot and saliva and behind the glassiness of his eyes a boot-sucking man-drowning darkness. And the birds chirping in the rattling cage between his ears, no doubt. When Agathe was taller and Francis smaller she would knock him around, leaving him reeling and pinioned by robin-song.

FRANCIS

            You think I couldn’t leave the farm, me?

                     TOM

                                  Please—

FRANCIS

            Me, the man who takes his cows to auction in Ottawa?

                       TOM

                                  Please—

FRANCIS

           You think I wouldn’t come after you?

                       TOM

                                  I’m sorry—

FRANCIS

            You think this city sits on sanctified ground that will burn my feet?

                       TOM

                                  You’re going to kill me!

To the river of tears he adds a wad of spit. It falls beautifully, a syrupy slide, it makes him think of Guillaume, a line in a notebook—not lyrics, Guillaume explained, not words anyone had ever strung together before, but a poem of Guillaume’s own making.

TOM

           Francis—Francis—

That was Guillaume: bright and crafty. Hiding things in plain sight. C’est une metaphore, tsé?

Who’s smiling now, you little prick?

He hits Tom again—again—again. Filling the page.

*

There’s leeway in the forecast, a day between them and the arrival of the storm. He eats Guillaume’s bird-food, Tom’s bird-food. What is this shit? Granola, comes Tom’s thin voice from the bedroom. The windows are latched again, the curtains drawn. Tom crawls over the floor.

FRANCIS

            And where’s my truck?

TOM

            Boulevard Robert-Bourassa…

FRANCIS

            Good. I’ll pick it up in the afternoon.

TOM

            It’s been towed…

            By now…

            I’m sure…

FRANCIS

            You’ll make it up to me.

            I’m sure.

*

Tom in Guillaume’s bed, his hair pulled, his face slapped tender: now the color of wine, the color of plums. Francis thinks of the girls who go crazy for a slap or two on the flank, the girls with their ripe tits, their areolas the size of his mother’s doilies, their nipples the size of raspberries—meanwhile, beneath him, this hopeless little bird-breast, thin like a wire ornament—the girls with their soft gushing cunts, their bodies for which his cock and balls form a natural stopper, not this dry and seemingly infinite void that drags and pinches at his foreskin, but Tom will soften, Francis will soften him, bite him, juice him—the girls turning his stomach with their hanging teats and bovine lowing—meanwhile, beneath him, Tom making no sound at all—beneath him, Tom choking, Tom dying, Tom squeezing his cock; Tom the color of, the sweetness of, plums.

*

FRANCIS

            You think I worship the city? You think I want this, this life in two rooms? This life for cockroaches—

            This life for rats soaked in piss—

            Well? Answer me.

TOM

            You said…you’d sell…

            When…she died…you said…

FRANCIS

            For Saint-Jean, hôstie. For fishing and hunting and a house in the trees.

            Not to come here and live among the fags.

            What in the name of Christ did you think I meant?

            What were you imagining?

            Francis in the city, don’t make me laugh!

*

FRANCIS

            Of course I fucked her, why shouldn’t I fuck her?

            Tell me, Tom.

            Go on.

            Go on!

            Why shouldn’t I screw whoever I want to screw?

TOM

            You’re right, Francis…I’m sorry…

FRANCIS

            Go ahead and cry.

            Grief makes you hysterical.

            It makes you do stupid things, like run away from home.

            When you left, Agathe went downhill.

            Yes, I blame you for everything.

            But here I am all the same.

TOM

            Please…

FRANCIS

            So this is the place where you talked about Ajaccio.

TOM

            Please, I’ll be good…

*

He holds Tom by his dry yellow hair. Delivers him a slap that knocks his swollen face to the side. The hairs stay behind in his hand. These strands like corn silk during a time of drought. He opens his hand to watch them fall.

*

Guillaume’s girl after the farm: sobering up, drawing her jacket tighter around her shoulders. Guillaume’s girl after the depot—pussy fingered, ass slapped, titties groped. Her face a kaleidoscope of clown colors. Her stare vacant under oily blue eyelids, her eyes dazed, a look of disbelief. I’m cumming, she had lied while Guillaume’s brother chewed her lips and scored her insides, ooh baby I’m cumming, yes, I’m cumming, yes, baby, yes, yes, yes—with his fingers sharp in her cunt and his cock limp and dribbling onto her underwear and her jeans.

The bus slips into a night as deep as the ocean. Disbelief eases into blankness. Her body eases into sleep. The farm a strange dream. The farmer already fading.

*

The clothes in the closet cut to pieces. The cell phone snapped. The shoes destroyed. The front door locked, the keys pocketed, the truck retrieved from the impound.

The boy in his brother’s kitchen: his collar of bruises, his cold naked feet. Behind him, the wild arrangement of the garden in early winter, the scratching of bare branches on glass. From the knife in his hand comes an unsteady knocking. From between his buttocks drips a trail, a pale shining streak.

FRANCIS

            So the boy can cook!

            We’ll go after supper.

TOM

            Okay, Francis.

*

Snow on the autoroute. Flurries like specks at first, then the white-out. The vanishing of reflective lines beneath a coating of something like gray dust. The land emptying. Tom’s teeth chattering. The radio blowing into static.

*

Tom at midnight: carried over the threshold with his head lolling. Put to bed and fucked there, warmed there, against the flannel, slow irrhythmic strokes to disguise the creaking. His frozen eyes half-open, the gleam of his irises like rosary beads in the dark—staring at the window, at the white world beyond. The slug of Francis’s tongue in his ear. The hot slither of his cock. The pinch of his fingers on sore nipples, the weight of him. More pinching; then Francis comes and rolls off.

TOM

            Unh, aah.

            What should I tell Agathe?

FRANCIS

            You went back to settle things.

            Now they’re settled.

*

In the morning, he washes, dresses, empties his bowels, sweeps snow from the front step. The fields are white in every direction, the roads erased.

THE FUTURE is a blank sheet, onto which Tom will write nothing.