[ i ]
They first met when they were young. Not so young as their first memories bled into a continuous haze, but young enough where each acknowledgement of childhood anecdotes was an accompaniment of a languid yearn for knowing each other earlier. They met when they were young, in the timescapes of gods.
Kazimir remembers the first time he saw Ezra, in a cramped classroom of a strange, selective school. He remembers the first time Ezra failed a test; the first time he got into a fight; the third time Ezra climbed through Kazimir’s dorm window to play video games, disc tucked neatly in his pocket (“Scooch over. My mum wants me to ruin someone’s life, again.”)
Kazimir welcomes this, of course. He’s been lonely his entire life. Sickened by the people in his hometown who whisper and stare and gawk at him like a rusted museum artefact. Body and skin, marred by the eyes of the hungry. Kazimir ran to the furthest place from home, and yet still found a void for a companion. He’s tired of being a stranger; a supparte leech in the system of the constellations. To him, Ezra is a reprieve to his abnormality, for somehow, Ezra is stranger than he is.
Kazimir remembers their first conversation. The scraping of wood on wood flung across the empty classroom. Ezra, chin propped up on his palm, had said he was going to run away from home (“Just so I don’t inherit the family business—y’know, my mother’s claim of status.”) He said after the school term ended he was going to light the campus on fire (“Starting with the library—but don’t let the principal hear that.”) He says this with such flippancy; a flyaway comment that Kazimir barely catches his laugh with his hand. “You think I’m lying?” Ezra says, tongue rolling over a lollipop. Kazimir nods his head; Ezra shoves him with his free arm. But Kazimir consumes Ezra’s lies with such vivacity. He truly is a strange boy.
___
They’re fast friends, after that.
___
One memory that really pokes Kazimir is sometime after the year they met, at a festival. The sky beads and the sun pounds hard, and despite the murk sleeping on the river Kazimir quells the urge to jump in, clothes and all. Beside him, he can hear the glazed sugar crushing under Ezra’s jaw. Their breaths bask in a stifling, sweating silence.
Somehow, Kazimir loses Ezra to the crowd. He cranes his neck up; scouring for a towering, bean-pole boy, peeking out like a peacock in a chicken’s nest. But before he knows it, his world skews to a dimly lit den, a woman draped in pearls sitting in front of him. He finds the air has been knocked out of his lungs.
“You lookin’ for your fortunes to be read?” The woman’s voice crawls over moss-stained rocks and under ashen skies.
Kazimir shakes his head. Still, she preens his palm over and traces a long fingernail down his palm, up his palm, down his palm. He is keenly aware of the low clicks emanating from her throat, her hum gargling into strange murmurs. He asks her, sluggish, what her words mean. He hears his voice as if his head was submerged in tar.
She opens her mouth, and her gaze flicks to behind him.
“These things are scams.” Ezra's lean frame hugs the doorway. “C’mon, let’s go. The fireworks are about to start.”
The woman closes her mouth. “Of course not,” she says, palm over her mouth. “But a boy of the gods does not need to be concerned with the affairs of the earth.”
Kazimir watches as the smoke morphs into something acrid, sinister; the bridled wrath of the boy now gripping his wrist. “Let’s go.”
Kazimir obliges, but not before catching the final, departing words of a coy smile. “There is beauty in breaking conventions; in the absence of an apodictic constant. A strange shock value that exists in truancy and broken calculations.” When their eyes meet, Kazimir shivers under her scrutiny; a wet tongue down his back. “Careful, Kaz. He may not be what you think he is.”
Ezra doesn’t hear it; he’s just about morphed into the crowd. But Kazimir does, and it follows him.
___
Later, he realises he never gave her his name.
___
Under the blanket of constellations, Kazimir asks Ezra what that was about.
Ezra gazes at the smoke-torn sky. “‘S’none of your business.”
___
[ ii ]
Kazimir’s well aware of his insatiable curiosity; the hunger that tugs on his stomach, aching to grasp some semblance of understanding of the strange boy sitting in front of him. To pick apart his every waking thought, his dreaming nightmares.
Ezra is a walking contradiction, Kazimir finally decides. An expressive enigma to which he craves to place a nomenclature on. Two years pass, then three, and Ezra is still shrouded behind lazy smiles.
A lot can change in three years; Kazimir is well aware that if he was to see his father again, he would not recognise him. The growing distance between the boy they left at the peak of a mountain, who stared at valleys with blank daze; and the boy of slender intrigue, running through heavens to chase his friend. He sees change when the bathroom mirror whispers the things he left behind. But Kazimir watches as Ezra hides; behind the circular sunglasses he’s begun to don during second year, behind easy lies. An acrid pool churns in his stomach; does Kazimir even know who Ezra is?
Like a weed caving through pavements, the memory of the fortune teller crawls from the clandestine crevasses of Kazimir’s mind. Change is subtle, and it has led to cracks.
___
Kazimir struggles. Struggles with the thoughts that grow legs and clamber over his mind; struggles with the doubt that has anchored in the chamber of his heart. But Ezra stares at him the same, and somehow, Kazimir holds on.
___
The nights are longer, the sky is hotter, and the cicadas break into song earlier. Perhaps, it's the heat that gets to him; a paradoxical infection, a parasite of paranoia. The bags under his eyes grow every day.
It’s days like these where the crawl of Ezra’s gaze becomes oppressive and consuming; a festering wound that will certainly leave behind a scar.
Ezra’s mouth wraps around the rice pudding. “Have you been eating?”
Kazimir pauses, and nods, slightly. The lie slips as easily as breathing.
[ ii ]
Kazimir’s become familiar with what his mind looks and feels like. He has spent the last few years building an altar of worship in his bathroom sink in hopes it would leave him alone. The gods have yet to be satisfied, and so his thoughts live in the mould under the tap. His mind speaks; it is alive. On a Sunday, he finds it has finally spread behind the bathroom mirror.
The following Thursday, Kazimir finally breaks.
Ezra disappears the next day. Kazimir wanders the halls for any semblance of the boy. He returns to his dorm, and is greeted by fluorescent lights, crooning glass shards in dappled dance. As Kazimir tapes up his fingers; red and stiff, he finds a message.
It’s all your fault.
___
Kazimir’s mind nestles at the bottom of a silt-swamped pond. The corridors collapse into dizzying dances, and in the emptiness of the classrooms he feels the static drum of his chest. One afternoon Kazimir musters the courage to ask the headmaster of Ezra’s absence; he is met with tightly shrugged shoulders. He is with his mother, Kazimir realises. He deduces this as his knuckles drain white clutching the bathroom sink, reflection frowning back. A week later, any semblance of home he trades in for a small backpack, and under a snow-blanketed evening he melts into the sable sky.
He soon learns to discern danger like bloodhounds discern blood on trails, like canaries discern half-brewed death underground. He learns the law of the streets, learns to look both ways and wait, learns it the day he stumbles into a cobbled alleyway after walking blindly into a setup with nothing but a dislocated shoulder, bruised chest, and split knuckles.
And Kazimir searches. He searches until rest becomes a foreign friend.
___
There next meeting will go like this:
It’s dark. Kazimir’s palm flames white, candle entwined in his hand. His breath curls; sung by the creaking door. The body in the room rolls over.
“Kazimir.” It is Ezra, wide-eyed and rosy cheeked. “You came.”
Kazimir’s breath hitches. He’s rehearsed this moment in his head. Ezra, he will want to say. I’m sorry. He wants to get down and beg for any verisimilitude of forgiveness; a slimmer of grace to numb his glass-sculpted bones. He will draw a breath, and finds his tongue rolls stiffly, as if running through motions long outdated. “Ezra,” Kazimir will finally whisper. “How could I not?”
Ezra’s eyes crinkle, and Kazimir lets out a shaky, breathy exhale. They smile.
___
In a withering, blue room, two gods fall out of constellation.
Words inspired by His True Face (2022) by May Moe. A watercolour and acrylic painting based on the Greek myth of Eros and Psyche.
