Page 45 of Dark Ink

I climbed the stairs to my apartment (ex-apartment) and caught the edges of the boxes on the final post in the railing. I stumbled, let go of everything to catch my fall, and watched as the boxes went sliding all the way down. For a moment I was saddened, remembering fashioning such slides with Stewart as kids. Screaming gleefully as we bounced down the stairs in the rare times when my father left the house.

But Stewart wasn’t my big brother anymore, my protector, my comfort in the night, always there with a flashlight and a story for beneath the covers.

He was an addict. He was in need of help. And I was all he had.

I let out a tired sigh. Noah, the owner of The Jar, had been kind enough to give me the boxes, unused after deliveries of liquor and limes. I needed them. Before I could take my first step, I heard a strange noise from inside the apartment. I paused. Fingertips light on the railing. Ready to run. Ready to call for help. I listened more closely. I frowned.

It was singing.

The words came to me faintly through the blare of a car alarm down the street. It was like reading a poem with half the words blacked out. I grasped at meaning I was sure was there. I struggled to find it, the message. I picked up words like petals from a dying flower; I held them in my palm, small and fragile.

Raglan Road… and knew… dark hair… snare that… rue…

I mounted the stairs slowly this time. A strip of flickering yellow light extended over the top two stairs. The front door was cracked open. Candlelight inside. How strange, I thought, unsure if I was truly awake. Candlelight and music. It sounded like the scene from a distant story, a life that wasn’t mine. Not in time. And not in place.

I pressed my fingertips against the peeling paint of the front door. I closed one eye and aligned the other with the crack.

I saw Rian. Rian at an easel. Rian painting. Rian singing. The sight of it filled me with a sense of belonging. A sense of place. A sense of comfort. I imagined coming home to this every night. Music, art, a tomato sauce simmering gently on the stove. Two glasses of wine. Two sets of toes pressed against one another as the candlelight shimmered in our eyes.

I couldn’t see the destruction of the apartment. Not in that soft, forgiving light. The punches through the wall were out of sight. The carpet, stained and torn, appeared as lush as a meadow in the dew of the morning. The cardboard boxes I was supposed to be packing were out of mind.

Rian filled my vision. He had pushed his sleeves up to above his elbow. I could see him doing it; eyes fixed on a blank canvas, lips set in a determined frown, long pale fingers pushing up the charcoal cable-knit of his sleeve to reveal the muscled ink-stained canvas of his tattooed forearms.

It was an art form, painting, but it was hard work, too, drawing something from deep inside of you. My one open eye drifted down his body. I watched the flick of his brush even though he was blocking the canvas from view. His singing was relaxed, but there was a strain in his biceps, his thighs. A tension. A need almost, driving him forward. A compulsion. He dominated the canvas the way I imagined he might dominate a woman, the length of his body over the length of hers.

I could see myself as that woman, face to face with his intoxicating blue eyes. My pleasure there for him to see, to drink in, to amplify with a flick of his hips. I could see myself with those lean, muscular arms on either side of me, could see myself prone beneath him as his hips pressed against mine. I could see myself laid so bare before him, so unrelenting and eager to receive as that canvas. But that woman could never be me.

I could see Rian.

But where was Stewart?

A tightness clenched my chest as I pushed the creaking door open. Rian didn’t turn at my presence. He was too lost in his painting. Gone somewhere far away, unreachable, incapable of even wanting to be reached. The sight of him which just moments before had made me sink into a warm fantasy, an impossible future, now made my stomach turn. It filled me with more rage than I could ever remember feeling.

Stewart was on the couch, or what was left of it. His fingers tore impulsively at the white fluff on the shredded armrest. There was an urgency that scared me, a compulsion, much like Rian’s, that made my heart stop. It was the only thing about Stewart that moved. The only thing at all. His open eyes stared blankly ahead of him. At the drywall he’d kicked through. At the cheap bookshelf he’d knocked over. At the little life I’d built for years and he’d destroyed in minutes. I wasn’t even sure he was breathing. His chest fluttered like a hummingbird’s, but I saw no contraction of his ribs, no exhale of breath. His lips hung open, chapped and pale. His other arm hung limply beside him, the skin clammy, the bones prominent. A joint was burning a hole in the fabric of the couch cushion.

I ran to Stewart, because it was what I always did. It was my duty. My responsibility. He’d taken care of me and now it was my turn. I ran to him because it never crossed my mind to run the other way. To run out the door. Down the stairs. Across the street. Across the city. Across the world. I ran to my older brother because I was frightened for him and that was a much easier thing to be than angry. Bitter. Tired.

“Stewart,” I called to him as I huddled beside him on the couch and slapped his cheek. Gently at first. Then not so gently. “Stewart!”

Rian still didn’t turn to me. I don’t think he even flinched. He kept singing that damned song. Kept painting with a sweat-inducing intensity. Stayed in his own fucking world with no idea about the realities of mine.

Stewart responded dimly when I shook his shoulders. A low groan. A curling of his lips, more of the natural curling of a dead spider’s legs than a smile. My fingers felt for his pulse at his wrist. His skin was hot. Wet. I gathered the fingers that were impulsively tearing at the couch’s fluff into my hands. I smelled the joint, afraid it was more than just weed.

I’d never felt more alone. Stewart, gone. Rian, gone. Both of them there. And not. And wasn’t that even worse? Worse than being truly alone. I felt my whole world collapsing around me. It was all there: a brother I loved, a degree in art I cared about, a man who wanted me. And yet I had none of that. My brother was in shambles. My heart was hollow for the art I was pursuing. And the man who wanted me couldn’t even bother to realise I was in the bleedin’ room, that he’d done me harm, that he was making things harder when they were already so fucking hard.

It was with clenched teeth that I threw a disembowelled cushion at Rian’s back. It caught Rian between the shoulder blades and he startled like he’d been deep asleep, lost in a dream. Well, he could fucking wake up. I knew I had. His gaze was unfocused, distant even as he turned around, even as he saw me.

So he was high, too. He was somewhere else. No one was here with me. I tried to remember this. It was supposed to be a lesson I learned a long time ago. No one sticks around for the slut. They’re there for a night and then gone. That’s how it worked.

“What have you done?” I asked in a trembling voice, tears in my eyes and heat in my cheeks.

“Eithne,” Rian gasped like I was the dream he was awaking to. “come. Come and look at this.”

He didn’t even seem to notice Stewart. Not his shallow breathing. Not his sickly skin. Not the joint smouldering on the couch that could have easily burned the whole fecking place down.

“Did you give my brother drugs?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

There were a million questions I didn’t know the answer to: What are you doing here? How did you know where I live? What in God’s name gave you the right to come here? To stalk me? To invade my privacy?

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