FIC: The Fire Sermon (Novels of William Faulkner, NC-17)

[greekhoop.livejournal.com]

Title: The Fire Sermon
Author: Greekhoop
Fandom: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying
Pairing: Quentin Compson/Jewel Bundren
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Quentin tries to end his life in a curious way. Jewel foils his plans in a way that's more curious still.
Words: 7000

Crossposted from rarelitslash.



Decoration Day

Quentin

I cannot say the hour for certain, but it is already well into twilight when the notion steals in that perhaps he will not come today. Out in the garden, the shadows are long and so too are the shadows of the bars across the floor. The floor is white tile, and polished so that even in this blue and waning light it could not be taken for any other color. The bars are black, though they might appear gray or green, and from them sprout small feather-shaped leaves and flowers which are fashioned after no particular kind.

I think that these ornaments are meant to ease the mind, but never could the bars be mistook for anything but what they are: the sinister lines that bisect the floor, straight as rows of black ants. They have begun by now to creep up the opposite wall, and I am staring at them dumbly, as if I could pull meaning from the lines of light and shadow like an archaeologist could from a tablet written in a forgotten language.

I can decipher only that it is sometime between the supper and the dinner hour. I know that it is Decoration Day, and that is always the day he comes. For there is no other reason to come here than to pay tribute to the dead. Here, where we are all the dead, only we have not the sense to lie down and accept it. On this account, we are to be pitied all the more, or loathed.

In his way, he understands this too, or else he would not come the way he does, with a small and hasty brown package under one arm, like an offering to his ancestors, the way they do in the East.

There, they worship the dead, or so I have been told. It is not so different, then, from here. Only the names have changed, and some of the semantics, so we might not be accused of Orientalism.

If I knew the time, then at least I would know if it is still worth waiting, but here I have no watch. It was taken from me when they took my necktie and my belt. My shoelaces, my razor, the studs I wore in my cuffs, for fear of the harm I might do myself. Here, all is gray and soft from many washings, and without form. My hours have become defined by mealtimes, reveille, and sleep. My weeks have bled into seasons, and my years are the span from one Decoration Day to the next, so I keep it sacred like Christmas, Thanksgiving, St. Valentines, Palm Sunday, and Easter all at once.

And I think that if he does not come today then it is because he has been waylaid or detained. If he does not come today, then he will come tomorrow, but I will not watch for him because he would not be the same man, and I would be waiting for a stranger, with whom I share nothing in common.

On a windy day, I can sometimes hear the bell in the steeple strike the hour, but today there is no wind and the sound of the bell falls straight down like a stone. I cannot say the time for certain.

This is the way that I am free. This is the way I am enslaved.

Out at the far end of the courtyard, I see a shadow move between the shadows of the fence. Vance comes out from his shack beside the gate. He is dressed in white and built like a terracotta warrior. His ring of keys is like an extension of his fist.

Vance unlocks the gate, and opens it a little and he lets him in from the street side. As he enters, he does not touch the gate at all, but it swings open before him like people would move to step out of his way on a city street. Even into a gutter, because that is the sort of presence he is. Vance takes his arm with the hand that does not hold the keys. He shakes it off. They argue out there by the gate, but the shadows are hooded over them and I cannot see their faces.

I know already what the outcome will be, and so after a minute has passed and Vance steps aside and lets him up the walk that leads to the front door, I am not surprised. It’s late, but he has come, and I have been lifted out of bondage.

My eyes follow them as they come up the walk, and then I lose them for a moment just before they get to the door. And then there is the sound of a key rattling in a lock like a handful of loose bones in a coffer. They come into the hallway, and Vance gives me the sly side of his eye. Then he says a few words to him that I cannot hear, and then he is gone.

We are alone, he and I. Before, he would come during the day, and there would be others around: The efficient Sisters, patients and orderlies. He did not notice me then, and he has no cause to notice me now that all is quiet, either. I think that I should be to him as a chair, or a desk, or the twilight slanting across the floor. That he should take all these things in at a glance, and be unmoved by them.

Then his eyes land on mine, and they linger. I do not move, so as not to betray my inanimate nature, but he comes closer. I hear the click of his boots on the tile like the second hand on a watch. Tick tick tick, his boots say to me, and my soul chimes in reply.

He stops in front of me. I do not rise to meet him, and so I have to crane my head back to see his face. I have to look along his body, starting with his hips, where his pants are stretched a little too tight, as if he has outgrown them. I see that at his thighs they have been patched with loving care, but that the job is none to clean. I see that the cuffs of his chambray shirt are frayed, and that the package he holds under one arm is streaked with grease and sweat. I see that the hollow of his throat is pitted with dirt from the road, and that his hair might be blond, or brown, or even red, though that last seems somehow unlikely.

“Damn this place,” he says. His face is like unpainted architecture. “How I hate this goddamn place.”

I do not have a mirror, and I am permitted one only during my weekly visits to the barber, but I know that my own face is white as the inside of a seashell, and resembles a cliff that his been worn smooth by the wind.

“You would know, though. I don’t have to tell you. What’s your name?”

“Quentin.”

He echoes it. And then there is a flicker of recognition in his eyes, and he says, “Oh.”

I can see then that he knows what he knows. That even a man like him, untroubled by much knowing, knows. And I could tell him it’s not what he thinks, but I am no judge of truth and lies. I am not one to be arbiter of knowledge.

“Yes,” I say.

“If you really wanted to,” he says, “then there must be a hundred ways to do it. A thousand ways, right here in this room.”

“Yes,” I say. “I know.”

“But here you are.”

“Here,” I say.

“So why don’t they let you go?”

“I am sick.”

“Bad sick?”

“Very bad.”

“Are you catching?”

“Yes. It’s highly contagious.”

His expression does not change, but the balustrades and columns and arches that compose his face for a moment give the impression of movement. “Guess you’ll be dead soon, then.”

“Maybe,” I tell him. “It’s a strange sickness. No one has ever studied its symptoms before.”

“Don’t cough on me none,” he says.

“I don’t think you’re in any danger. Some people catch it easily, but others never do. You look like you have a strong constitution.”

“I’m Jewel,” he says, too quickly, so his words are right on the heels of mine, almost tumbling over them.

“I like that name.”

“I hate it.”

“You remind me…” I say. But then the memory is gone, and nothing rises to take it place. He reminds me of nothing from the past, and he makes me no promises for the future, save that at some point I will be dead. But he is here, now.

“I’m here for my brother,” he says.

“Who is he?”

“You probably don’t know him,” he tells me quickly. “Probably.”

“I’ve been here for five years. I know most people.”

“He’s hard to get to know. Hard to keep knowing. You probably don’t.”

“Fine,” I say.

And he says, “Fine.”

And I want us to speak no more. For it to be only this, for as long as we can hold it. But his eyes flick up, away from mine, and I see that his grip is tight on the package under his arm. “I don’t even like him. I don’t care hardly nothin for him at all.”

“Your brother,” I say. It isn’t quite a question.

“I guess he’s not. Not really.”

“That’s why you come on Decoration Day.”

“It’s as good a day as any,” he says. “Better than most. Roads ain’t too wet, and”

He does not trail off so much as stop speaking entirely, as if he has reached a quota, or run out of words entirely. His eyes come back to mine. At this moment, the architecture of his face is distinctly Ionian.

There are footsteps down at the end of the hallway. I’ve just now become aware of them, though Vance is near enough that surely he can see that we have been talking. I look up at him, Jewel, and I know that he scented out his approach long before I did.

“Well,” he says. “I suppose that’s all there is.”

“Yes. But next year…”

He is gone before I can finish. His boots say tick, tick, tick on the tile floor, and the way his waist tapers down gives me a secret stolen hot thrill.

Jewel

It’s because of what he did in the North that he is here now. I don’t know how I learned of it because it’s like the fact has always been there, for as long as I can recollect, like the land has been.

To see him there, you wouldn’t know it. He is still like that water up there in the North would have been if he had been allowed to go under the last time.

They fished him out, the story says, wet and shivering like a cat, and then he sicked up on himself and he laid back down on the bank and he fell asleep and he didn’t wake up for three days. And by then he was back home again, and he could not say why he had done it. When I heard that, I was surprised, because when you’re in the water then it’s harder to sink than it is to swim, and when you’re in bed then it is harder to sleep than it is to stay up.

When Darl heard it, he laughed and he said, now that is funny. But I didn’t understand the joke. I suspect there wasn’t one really and he only said there was for the same reason he would look sad sometimes when there was nothing worth being sad over. Maybe for just the attention it brung him.

Since the war, that’s how long he’s been the way he is, smiling at things that don’t call for happiness, and crying where there isn’t anything so very bad. Since the war, I realized one day, and it was like having had two pieces all along and just then noticing how they fit. But I don’t even know what a war is, exactly.

I’d rather be here than with Darl, but I can’t stay with him. I know that I’m being watched as I go, and I don’t mind it much. I know that he watches me every time I’m here but that he is no trouble and he means no harm. If it was me who were him and even if it was because I was sick, but I had to be still all day and not disturb myself, then I would want someone to talk to me so that I wouldn’t have to spend all my time in thinking thoughts. I don’t like to be that far outside of myself.

And he’s not here because he means any hurt. He’s not like Darl.

He takes me down a hallway, the one who is the jailer or the guard or whatever they call them here. In the hallway there is a room, and in the room there is my brother. And in my brother there is only rot and sickness and death.

As he unfastens the door for me, I see that he’s getting ready to say to me that it’s late and I can’t stay for long. Before he gets the chance, I tell him I won’t be but a minute. He opens the door and tries to follow me, but I shut it in his face because he can wait just as well in the hall or down by the gate or in hell for me to finish.

Darl is there. I have not interrupted him doing anything in particular.

“You surprised I’m here?”

“No,” he says. “Are you?”

I set down the package in his bed. “The womenfolk packed it up for you. But they couldn’t come to bring it. And Cash couldn’t come, and pa couldn’t come, and Vardaman couldn’t come, and the baby couldn’t come. But I could come. So I came.”

His lips part. They look dry to me, and his skin is white, like maybe he doesn’t see the sun enough. “Why?”

He says it in a certain way, so that I know he already knows the answer but he wants to hear me say it or maybe just watch me squirm and try to think of something I ain’t thought of yet.

“Would have gone to waste otherwise,” I tell him.

He stands up, and for a minute it’s like there are two of him there. Darl in his chair, and Darl on his feet. Both of them looking at me like I done something wrong that maybe I didn’t know about at the time. Like I did it sleepwalking, or under a spell. But I don’t even know what sleepwalking is exactly.

Darl sets his hand on the package. “What’s in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there a letter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Last time, I said for them to send a needle and some thread.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Do you think that I belong here?” he asks me.

“I don’t know that, either. But you did wrong.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe if it had just been to us that would have been one thing. But it wasn’t. But hell you know, they’ll lock a man up here for not wanting to do harm to anyone but himself. Did you know that?”

“So you met him,” Darl says. “I figured he’d be your kind.”

“You’re always thinking you’re so goddamn smart,” I tell him. “You’re always thinking you’re smarter than me. But you’re in here now, and I ain’t.”

“Yes, you are free now. Do you like being free, Jewel?”

“Damn you…”

“He doesn’t have much money. Not as much as he lets on. But he has some. You could do worse than a man with some money, Jewel.”

“I wouldn’t buy you out of here. Not if I had a hundred dollars.”

He laughs suddenly. It’s a sound that would spook you something bad if you didn’t know what it was already.

“It ain’t funny.”

“No,” he says. “It’s not.”

Is this my blood? I think it sudden. Is this blood mine? Or is it blood than ran out in Meuse and became stagnant in Argonne, until no one could tell to which each belonged, and when he came back he was patched together from loose pieces, with loose parts rattling around inside. But I don’t even know where Europe is exactly.

I start to leave then, but he says, “Wait.”

“What do you want?”

“You would never have any quiet with him, Jewel.”

“Why do you want to talk about him so bad? He’s just crazy, like you are. Only not so spooky as you because there’s no such thing as that.”

“Good,” he says soothingly, and then he laughs again. “You should go, Jewel. Before he gets impatient, you should go.”

But hell, I’m already gone.

Darl

I have forgotten the color of his eyes already, and before he has been gone long I cannot even recall whether they were light or dark, only that the color was striking. I hold myself still in his absence, and try to keep the image of his face in my mind for as long as I can, but already his features have become indistinct. I use the uncertain frame to hang faces I saw on statues of generals and heroes and kings, but none seem to fit him right and besides the statues are dingy from smoke and ash, and only a few have survived the bombs anyway.

I touch the package he brought. I prod it with my fingers and find it hard in places and soft elsewhere. I lift it off the bed and it is neither heavy nor light. I cannot guess what is inside. I do not care what it contains. I bring it to my face and inhale the salt sweet sulfurous smell where the sweat from his body stained the brown paper dark. The twine is still damp, and I think that if I touched it with my tongue I would taste all the hate that he holds inside for he is all out of ways to expend it.

Jewel does not know that he has aged. He has lost flesh from his cheeks, and his eyes have retreated into their sockets. He is no longer young, and age has made the angles of his face sharp and square, like the corners of a church or the edges of a leaf of paper. He is of no particular color. His skin and his eyes and his hair are not shades but gradients, like a continuum between bright and darkness.

He does not remember when he was small and he killed a snake out behind the house. Even as he took the rock in both hands, and weighted it, and even as he let it fall he did not think that it would happen like it happened. He cried for the rest of the afternoon.

By now, Jewel has gone out the front gate, and he feels very aware of the wooden sidewalk beneath his feet and his boots are saying tick tick tick in the last of the twilight¬ as he walks back to the store where he left the wagon and the team. He would like it if they could buy a Ford but money is tight and there are as many mouths to feed as there were three years ago, even though she is dead and Darl has gone to Jackson now. Darl has gone, and there are fewer hands and there is more work. And he is weary more than he is tired, which is something new that he had not thought of before.

Jewel is unhitching the wagon and thinking of a river that runs through some place in the North with a name that he can’t remember. He doesn’t know what is at the bottom of that river. No one does, nor ever will. When they try to go down down down down down down but someone always pulls them back at the last second.

And he knows that some things he will not know.

Darl is like an ox that has slipped the yoke and gone to pasture, but he does not look happy. Jewel thinks that should please him, but it only makes him anxious. Because he used to think that if he were only free of them, then it would be easy for him to be happy. And he sees now that is no more likely than descending to the bottom of the river and finding there a secret city, or a mythological bestiary, or oblivion and silence and sleep and all that would be waiting are stones and broken glass, and a skeleton, picked clean.

And by now, Quentin has gone back to his room and he wishes that he hadn’t watched him leave because then he could tell himself that he is close, and keep the lie for a long time. He is thinking his name, and saying it over and over to himself, until it doesn’t sound like a name at all. Then he presses it against his heart and he is unsurprised that it burns him because he knows that it passed through Hell before it got to him.

He is glad for this new sin, because he is not sure that his previous transgressions were enough. Soon, soon, he will be with her in the fire, but he knows that only if he follows close on her heels, in the scorched footsteps she has left behind, can he be entirely sure.

Equal accounts and equal measures. Two equal lists side by side on the ledger. But in truth, Quentin hardly knows his sister’s face anymore.

In truth, he hardly recognizes his brother’s face.

He has a nervous longing, for what he does not know. Only his body knows, but he does not hear, or he does not listen, for Quentin loves but three things, and the last of these is deception. He thinks he knows love, but he knows only abstraction, and in his mind it is tied irrevocably to the finalizing thud of an act of senseless violence and the subsequent blossoming of blood on white sheets or the dirty ground.

It is precisely because Jewel strikes him as being proud without being vain. It is precisely because he would not be swayed, not even by money. That’s why he thinks it would work.

He must stop there, because he has agitated himself. Hot tears come into his eyes, for he knows at that moment that he has been betrayed. Not by the ones he trusts, and not by the ones to whom he is close. But by his own body, which is like a stranger to him. Then he feels a sharp pang of injustice when he remembers that they have taken his belt and his sundries, for he would like, if he were able, to bind his wrists to the bedposts before he sleeps, like a saint would.



The Feast of All Souls



The next time Quentin saw him, Jewel was sitting on the concrete block beneath the statue of the Confederate soldier. His hat was off, and he held it in one hand and made motions as if he were fanning himself.

It was early November, and most of the hot weather was over. Stocks were down again, but Quentin couldn’t bring himself to give a damn about any of that. He was supposed to keep himself untroubled, his mind unburdened, and these were the particular tasks which occupied much of his days. It was more difficult for him to remain carefree than he had ever anticipated, and often he wondered if it was worth all this effort for something he did not want in the first place. However, these were the kinds of questions he was expressly forbidden to ask.

He had written a review of a Sinclair Lewis novel, in which Harper’s had expressed some interest. Quentin wrote under a pseudonym so as not to attract undo attention, and in his letters of solicitation he called himself former attendee of Harvard, which was true in word, if not in spirit.

Quentin knew that he did not have any great talent, but he did have perseverance, which usually served as a sufficient replacement. It wasn’t as if anyone knew talent anymore. They only understood credentials, of which his happening to be born at some point below the Mason-Dixon Line was indisputably one.

He was hesitantly pessimistic, for he had registered each recent development in his favor as a mark against him, and it seemed to him that some great misfortune was long overdo. It had come at last, swept down from the hills in the wake of this man whom Quentin had seen but three times before, and whose full name he had never learned.

Quentin’s heart was like lead in his breast, but where once he had tried to rush with too much haste and insufficient forethought, he could not now shrink from or evade.

His head had gone light from the heat and Quentin feared he might swoon, but he rallied himself and pushed forward, one step at a time, across the square and into the soldier’s shadow. He felt Jewel’s presence then, like a small intense source of heat, but Jewel did not look up. Quentin passed out of the shade and into the sun again, unheeded.

He was flustered briefly, and faltered in the middle of a stride. But Quentin did not dare glance back; he could only push forward, again around the square.

He circled twice more in front of Jewel, and twice more went unnoticed. The shadow of the soldier had grown longer by degrees, and by this way did he know that half of an hour had passed. He couldn’t wait forever. On his next pass, Quentin stopped beneath the long veil the soldier cast, and he turned on his heel with military precision.

Quentin walked the length of the shadow, which seemed to him a dark road that began and ended at Jewel’s feet. Their boots saluted each other in the red dust, though still Jewel was slow to lift his eyes. Quentin shifted, mute and nervous. Though he opened his mouth several times, he found no words within.

It seemed an interminable wait before Jewel looked up and noticed him there. When he did, his smooth expression was marred briefly by wrinkles of stubborn un-recognition. Quentin’s heart went into his throat. Then, Jewel’s face changed again, with a profundity that recalled the splitting of glaciers and the migration of dunes.

“Oh,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking it would be you.”

Quentin sighed. The tension that he had kept in his shoulders flowed out of them, and flowed down through his chest, and his bowels, and his legs. He wavered on his feet, and Jewel moved to the side, though hardly enough, and motioned with his hat for Quentin to sit.

“They turned me out,” he said. Breathing; feeling his breath rush back into his lungs as he sat on the edge of the granite slab. Jewel’s knee was near his, and it seemed hotter for the coolness of the stone.

“Guess you got better.”

“No, it was not that. There were budgetary constraints. Issues with funding…”

“Ah,” Jewel said, sagely, uncomprehendingly.

“They didn’t have enough to feed me.”

“That seems like a hell of a thing to do to a man while he’s sick,” Jewel said.

“Yes. It was unkind. You wouldn’t be that inhospitable, would you?”

Jewel shrugged.

Quentin turned, and took in his profile, which was sharp and savage and bespoke a lineage which was not entirely pure, as if he might have had an ancestor who was Negro or Indian, but far enough back that it didn’t show much anymore. He stared for long enough that Jewel became curious, and when he looked Quentin full in the face he saw that his eyes were bright and feverish and birdlike.

“I will give you ten dollars,” Quentin said. His voice was a gasp.

Jewel’s head went back and he snorted like a startled horse.

“I’ll give you twenty,” Quentin said. And when Jewel did not answer right away he went on, “You need the money, don’t you?”

The straw hat in Jewel’s hand had stopped moving, but now it flicked to life again. A draught of cool air passed over him, and Quentin felt sweat drying on his brow.

“I suspect you can quit now, if you’ve said your piece.”

Quentin felt a dawning dread: He was not angry.

“I have wanted it since I first saw you, and that was five years ago.” Quentin tilted his chin back, bearing his throat. But no rough hands came to encircle it, nor canine teeth to tear it out. “Do you think that I’m insincere? Or that I don’t have the money?”

“No,” Jewel said. He stood up, his legs unfolding. His shadow stretched across the square, beside the shadow of the soldier, and by the time they reached the far side, it was difficult to tell them apart.

“Come, if you’re coming.”

He set his hat on his head. The brim drooped brokenly over his brow. He set off across the square, and he did not look back.

Quentin watched him go, numb with terror. He felt eyes cleaving to him, knowing at a glance what had transpired, and then he understood that Jewel would not do it right away. He meant to lead Quentin somewhere more secluded, where he could be sure his work would not be interrupted.

He sprang to his feet. Jewel was already halfway across the square, and Quentin scurried after him, straining to keep up with Jewel’s long-strided pace. Jewel did not look at him as he stepped up onto the sidewalk. He led Quentin into the narrow gap between two houses.

He would do it here, Quentin thought. There was privacy enough, and he would at least have the presence of mind not to scream right away.

But Jewel went on, and the houses fell away and the gap opened up again into an unfenced yard. Jewel glanced at the back porch and, finding it empty, went on across the grass, towards a crumbling stable that crouched on the back quarter.

Quentin followed him, stumbling a little on the uneven ground. The grass was littered with fallen magnolia flowers, and with each step Quentin ground them underfoot. It was late for the trees to be blooming, but most things had come late this year and he was assailed still by the sweet bitter smell of honeysuckle. It seemed right that he would smell it now.

Jewel had to stoop a little at the door of the stable, and he bent without breaking stride. Once he was inside, the shadows closed behind him and swallowed him. Quentin went on towards the darkness, only when he had passed through the door of the stable, without having to bend at all, he saw that it was not so dark inside after all. It was shaded and cool, and the smell was a combination of old moldering straw and new fresh grass, strong enough that the honeysuckle could hardly taint it.

A hand came down on his shoulder from behind, and Quentin didn’t flinch.

“This is a good place for it,” he admitted.

“Yeah,” Jewel said, and he bent down. Quentin felt the crush of his body, the wave of humid air driven before him. He squeezed his eyes closed as Jewel descended, but they flew open again when he felt the press of lips on the side of his throat.

Quentin gasped, and tried to speak but his voice caught like a stone in his throat. He only made a small noise, of no particular or significant meaning. Jewel took him by the shoulders and turned him around. Quentin clasped both hands to his breast and threw his head back to look skyward, but Jewel only took it as an invitation to kiss him again.

“Wait…” Quentin managed. It was so small a protest, at first he was afraid Jewel had not heard it at all.

“Don’t get yourself all worked up. I won’t kiss you if it’s not how you do it.” His hands were steady at Quentin’s belt, tugging it open. “You like things a certain way, and that’s that, I suppose.”

Quentin could not reply, could not even think straight. For all it had obsessed him, he had not even once imagined the scenario would play out in exactly this way. All time and fate had played parts in the conspiracy again him, but he had not suspected that his own body might eventually betray him as well. As Jewel pulled at the front of Quentin’s trousers, unhooking the buttons, Quentin set a hand on his hair, not to push him away, but to pull him down.

He watched his cock disappear into Jewel’s mouth. At first, he felt nothing different. Then his body was drawn in, all his muscles suddenly snapped taut, like a bullwhip at the apex of its swing. He hung there, suspended, like a still photograph which captured not only the moment it was taken, but all the dark hallways and chambers which were behind it.

Jewel’s hand moved up the back of his leg and curled around his ass. Quentin could feel his fingers in the gap where his trousers had slid down and his shirt ridden up. They were rough, like laying on gravel. Jewel stood up fast, and Quentin felt himself lifted so that his feet only brushed the ground. He was half carried, half dragged into the back of the stable where a cart with a broken axel slouched against a row of stalls. Once Jewel had set him down, his knees unhinged and he tumbled back onto a pile of straw. His hat fell off and rolled away.

Quentin whimpered quietly and tried to hitch his trousers back up, but his cock was hard and he couldn’t make the buttons close. Jewel looked down at him with mild curious while he unbuttoned his shirt. Slowly, Quentin lifted his hands from his waistband and flung them out at his sides in the attitude of crucifixion. As he watched Jewel undress, his expression was calm, save for his eyes which darted, detached, behind his spectacles, as if the lenses were windows upon a different face, a different man.

“I reckon you’d better relax some,” Jewel said. He toed out of his boots and let his dirty jeans fall to the floor. His legs were long and muscled, the lines from his shoulders to his waist tapered, like two rails as they approached the horizon. A line of fine hair ran up his abdomen to his navel. It was darker than the hair on the rest of his body, but just as confoundingly bereft of color.

He was not wearing underwear. Quentin recoiled, as if the filthy indecorousness of it had dealt him a physical blow.

Jewel noticed the direction of his gaze.

“It’s near come up on wash day,” he said. “But it’s not come, yet.”

He looked Quentin over critically. “You relax now. Or will I have to make you relax? I don’t like it much, you sitting there and looking at me like I’m something you ain’t never seen before.”

Quentin swallowed hard. He would not tell him the truth, but there was no need to. He had no more veils left, no more curtains to pull. Soon Jewel would know, but that, at least, he could foresee and make provisions for.

Jewel knelt down. When he reached for him, Quentin squeezed his eyes tightly closed but didn’t pull away. Jewel’s hand landed on his hair.

“Now,” Jewel said. “Now…”

He stroked Quentin’s hair back from his brow. His curls had started to unravel, and Jewel tucked them back into place as best he could. Finally, Quentin opened one eye a slit and looked up at him. Jewel took off his glasses for him, folded them and slipped them into the breast pocket of Quentin’s suit. Jewel’s face blurred into an impressionistic tableau. In this dim light he seemed washed of hue and shade entirely, a collection of shadows of varying weights.

Quentin felt his breathing beginning too slow to a more reasonable speed and the tension beginning to dissolve from around his eyes. Then Jewel’s hand clenched into a fist in his hair, and he jerked Quentin upright. He was shocked enough to cry out, but before he could Jewel’s mouth landed over his in a bruising kiss.

He struggled weakly and without direction, like a cat struggles when it does not want to be held. Jewel pushed him down again, pinning Quentin’s wrists to wall behind them. The straw scratched at the small of his back, his ass, the underside of his balls.

“You son of a bitch,” Jewel said, not without tenderness. He brought Quentin’s wrists together so hard that they made a cracking sound when they met. He wrapped one hand around them, and it was enough to hold them both. The other he put to work pushing Quentin’s trousers down to his knees and raking his rumpled shirt and waistcoat up over his navel.

Quentin gasped, squirming under Jewel’s body, but it did not once occur to him to protest. Jewel’s teeth clicked closed around his lower lip; they cut in but did not draw blood. Quentin worked one hand free and struck Jewel across the cheek. It was a weak slap, with no force behind it. It didn’t even make a satisfactory sound.

Jewel jerked away and gave him a sharp look. He drew back his hand and brought it down across Quentin’s face hard enough to make his ears ring. His head snapped to the side, and he tasted straw.

“That’s how you want it, then,” Jewel said. He took Quentin by the waist, flipping him over onto his stomach. Quentin pressed his face into the straw and listened to Jewel shift so he was kneeling over him, listened to him spit into his hand, a sound declarative and final like a punctuation mark.

He drew his hand over his cock, making it slick, and then seized Quentin around the waist again, pulling him up onto his knees. Quentin tried to turn, but Jewel’s hand came down on the back of his neck, forcing him to look straight ahead. He shifted forward, and the head of his cock pressed against the back of Quentin’s thigh, leaving a damp, upward trail.

Quentin moaned, as if he had surrendered all hope, and even hopelessness. He braced his hands against the stall, leaning on them as Jewel shifted forward. He felt, not pain, but a sort of inescapable pressure, like he felt in his ears when he dove into deep water. Jewel pushed in without slowing or faltering or showing any indication of mercy, until Quentin could feel the bony points of his lean and angled farmboy’s hips.

He breathed a string of curses into Quentin’s ear, to which he could respond with only a stifled murmur.

“That a yes?” Jewel said. He may have smiled then, for Quentin could feel the ivory edges of his bared teeth.

“No,” he gasped.

“Was it a no?”

“No.”

Jewel drew back, and then drove into him again, harder than before. Quentin yelped as he was flung forward against the stable door. And then Jewel was above him, bearing down like a terrible and sudden storm.

Quentin sobbed without tears, sobbed just as a way of taking in air, as the breath was ripped from his lungs time and time again, carried out of him by Jewel’s savage thrusts. He felt moving through him all the old violences, and all the old lusts, of a time that existed before history began, and outside of time, as if he had accessed a primal intelligence which they had tried to breed out but had only succeeded in tenuously, temporarily domesticating.

He felt himself driven on towards understanding, felt himself hovering on the edge of a precipice, at the bottom of which waited a revelation, his reward. Jewel’s face was buried in his hair, and he was gasping, spitting intermittent curses, urging him on. Quentin closed his eyes and saw the abyss open before him like a warm, wet, dripping maw, and he plunged in.

Quentin came with a cry. His semen splattered the stable door, dripped down and was absorbed by the straw. His head fell back against Jewel’s shoulder, and he felt it ripple with effort as he continued to move against him.

He heard him say, “Yes, yes.” And then heat flooded into him.

Jewel was panting, his breath hot and heavy like a horse’s against Quentin’s throat. Quentin was panting too, and the sounds they made mingled in bad harmony.

There was a strange weight on his stomach. Quentin reached down blindly to seek its source, and found Jewel’s arm there, draped casually around his waist. Was he being held, he wondered. Or was it only a coincidence, or accident. He stroked Jewel’s wrist with two fingers, and Jewel pulled his hand away.

He stood up suddenly, and Quentin collapsed on his side. He turned his face against the straw and breathed it in, but its sweetness was tainted by sweat. He listened to Jewel shake out his clothes, listened to him pull them back on, then he looked up again.

Without his glasses on, Jewel’s eyes blurred into a single line of lighter color across his face; gray, like Athena’s.

“Clean yourself up before you go,” Jewel said. “You’ll want to dust yourself off some.”

Quentin couldn’t make out his expression. Even the shape of him, which he had once found so enticing, was indistinct. Without another word, Jewel turned and left him there, baffled, thwarted, and conquered.

~End