CANON

It’s his eighteenth birthday, they scold us. We should’ve brought the good tequila, the Cuervo. We trekked across the town from my house on the hill— over the river to the hidden campsite filled with drunks. She told me she was wearing the good panties, and brought condoms for me, just in case. I want to scoff at that. I brought a sweater, and an extra scarf. I have college tomorrow, and an essay to write. But tonight it’s time to scale the muddy dike by the woods and splay to the most flattering reflection.

The bonfire and cigar thicken smoky remainders in my hair as I eat a hotdog self-consciously. I'm wary, because her short piece of Adam moves around the fire with me. This is still a source of some light shock. She hogs the vodka cheerfully until I steal it away and offer it to our hosts, courteously. As the freshness of the buzz and, by proxy, the hope of him inside her fades, so does any faint shade of dignity.

She begins to withdraw into precious selfish memory—she swears she didn’t mean to bite the apple! She's remembering the space between the Tigris and Euphrates, like pale skinny legs, where it never got cold. She runs off towards the bridge as his affection to me grows more obvious.

She must justify her struggle, articulate her pain, and thus show this is not attrition but true guilt. Suicide seems straight-forward enough. So with me behind cautiously pleading for her to wear a jacket, and with him on my heels dancing in his shameless attraction we set off. She ran past the armory, through the piles of glass and rocks. Her shoes got stuck in the muddy ditch. I ran to collect them and told her to stop and replace them. I slapped her across the face, but it was so muted, so pointless. She only wears them reluctantly—they are just another layer between her and her demonstrable agony. You can't wear shoes on hot coals, or what's the attraction?

But at least I hit her once.

She keeps telling me Adam was the only one who knew her. He popped vessels in his eyes from crying about her. He was perfect, but still loved her. She saw a rib or two of Adam's displaced in this other boy, who at this point finally stopped following us. He was enchanted with the open fields by the school and danced out of the light.

She says she knows where Adam is now, right now, and the bridge is forgotten. What's the use of suicide if he isn't there to see it, and jump after? I beg her to turn back, just to go home and sleep until she's moving through time in the right direction. But she throws a fit. How could I compare in suffering when a decent facsimile of her past is willing to redeem me into his future?

She throws herself at the door: a wretch ready to be pitied. He receives her, his thin tenuous frame haloed by the living room lamp, and she asks so hopefully, “Is there any chance?”

"No," and then the door shuts.

Huddled on the wet moss by his driveway she pulls herself into a fetal position because she's sure it looks sad. I am still standing beside rubbing the bridge of my nose.

Eventually, the others find us. We force her into a car and drive her home and she cries in my bed for hours about the necessary indifference in happiness. Explaining, whimpering to me how no one cares: “They will just go home and shrug at my misbehavior....laugh at it!”

I want to say that when a saint gets ripped apart by lions he doesn't do it with any set aesthetic. I want to mention that the goldleafed icons come much, much later. The way they pose their hands in the Books of Hours was not the way they clung to the dust under their nails as life was torn from them; their only comfort in the knowledge their soul was infinite. I want to say that it is not that no one cares. Rather, one can only afford to care so much about a would-be martyr too consciously photogenic to be ungrudgingly canonized.

But instead I sigh in resignation and turn out the light.