Topic: and we put our ghosts to bed, you and I

Madison Rye

Date: 2016-05-27 09:22 EST
On some nights, an owl would sit off in the darkness of the yard somewhere and comment on the world. It wasn't often but it was there that night, repeating its melancholic assertion on the way that things went. The two lay panting and covered in perspiration in a house that was so still and so quiet that the sound of the bird and their uneven breaths seemed over-loud; rarely was their life punctuated by stretches of quiet with two children. Ame had not woken once and they had taken advantage of it for an uninterrupted intimacy in their own bed. Mostly, since the birth of their son, their need had had to be sated in brief and scalding opportunities presented by their surroundings away from their charges, such as the private, small, cerulean haunt of her office upstairs at the bar.

As it was often between them, the act of sex was borne of a certain fury. There was the incessant feeling of lost time and chasing missing hours with one another from all the years before this, so that when the time was free to lose themselves in one another, it was filled with their passion and in it, an urgency and an impatience, a characteristic which had come to define the physical aspect of their relationship more and more. Clothes and sheets were tossed seas around the bed as they lay staring at the ceiling, waiting for their racing hearts to fall back into their chests. Madison inhaled and smiled and looked over to Tag, who was intently focusing above with his arm resting against his forehead. She rolled onto her side and rested her cheek on a hand watching him.

"...Is it the carrots again?"

He smiled in that way that he did these days. It was a slow progression that went all the way instead of stopping just short, as it had when they were new to one another, unsure and he had been burdened with indecision. But though he smiled, his brows were still knit with thought.

"I was thinking.... about Fin."

"Right now, right after screwing me senseless?" There was a lazy tease of a smile from her. "Not what I expected."

He made a sound in his throat as he faced her, rolling to sit up in a fluid and straight-backed motion so that his chest was forward and his shoulders were straight. He reached out to touch her just beneath the chin. "No, not during. I was... thinking about the moment. On the porch. What we discussed and how..." The star-pricked dark of his night-time eyes looked perturbed, worried, confused.

"You were goin' to react like that. We.... you... never discuss it. Kind of like my gun. They're parts of our lives we've put away. At least until such a time...." She shifted to sit up, legs curled to the side, raking a hand through the sleepless tangle of her hair, still damp and wild from their lovemaking. "Until such a time we could. We've been chasin' after kids, renovatin' a bar, dealing with the every day. Bringing our life forward. You and I don't stop until we make love... and even then..." she pursed her mischievous mouth. "I'm just surprised you're thinking..."

"I'm sorry." He took his hand from her chin and placed it on the bed flat, his fingers splaying. Each nail was trimmed down short and his hands with calloused fingers spoke of hours of wood and labor and sun, as much as they did a good coin trick. "It has been on my mind behind the other thoughts. Looking at the ceiling it came to me what was there. How I.. felt. How I still feel."

With the air through the open window touching her bare, sweat-cooling skin, she drew her robe from the end of the bed around her and moved to the window to close it. Tying its belt, she lifted a brow and walked around to his side to sit down. "Then, it is comin' out baby. If not now, then tomorrow, or the next day. It's inevitable." Her voice was low so not to awaken the children and soft, creased with emotion like those indentations in the silk of the deep, blue robe that concealed her.

"Porch?"

She smiled at him and placed a hand on his knee. Like she did, when she was about to suggest they head home. It was always a gesture of concern or want when she did that, want for him or for their old boots to meet the road. Or now, to sit with her on their porch with the crickets and talk. "Come."

Tag Sentry

Date: 2016-05-27 22:20 EST
His nod is the indicator of agreement, the little yes that didn't often get a voice. Drawing up to his feet he leaned down, plucking his pajama bottoms off of the floor from where they had been tugged off and tossed aside. The elastic made a muffled snap against his stomach when he fitted them into place. His steps are a slightly held breath, barefeet halting at Ame's crib to check on him. His hand slid down, daring to adjust the blanket before he turned, catching Madison's palm, giving it a small squeeze before he walked past.

There was a ritual to it, one that he normally wasn't observed doing from beginning to end. At least, he hadn't thought so even if Madi and Penny were more than aware of him and usually politely smiled, said little or behaved as if nothing had happened. They gave him that space, the wounded little section of unresolved time he tried to work with. The place where he was getting cigarettes "hidden" at the top of the refrigerator. Testing the lighter that rattled inside the paper and plastic shell and then stepping outside. The moment had the weight of gasoline being poured. What did that mean and did he want to spark? Was the fire a release or a threat?

The packet of stale white cylinders was set at the top of the railing as he held one filter between his lips and brought it into life in a pinch of orange. Beyond the nights where the garden was restless with upset carrots or indignant tomatoes, he rarely smoked. It was something he did to try to sooth himself, to give his hand and mouth something to do. To have that little burning fire count the minutes, keeping him aware that time was passing, that the heat of the fire was getting closer and threatening to singe him if he did not pay attention. Otherwise moments like that had a way of being all-consuming.

Second part of the ritual was played out as he moved down the porch and to the left where the small garden was. Being Spring, fresh green stalks had pushed their way up from the soil. They felt new, delicate and with promise. The garden was less tended to, the scars of time and cries of a child having taken the minutes that used to use to make it weed-free. He pinched at the base of several, tugging the entirety of the weed out and then tossing them aside with their roots turning up in the air like frustrated, skinny fingers.

He liked to garden barefoot and without a shirt. The air could rinse him off that way. A shirt might otherwise trap the tension and keep it close to his skin where he would never be free of it. The knotwork of scars on his back broke up the tattooed text of Kanji which went down his back like a page from a book. His book. He had shoulders which carried the promise of strength and the weight of those tattooed words. His skin was still scented with Madison, echoing the memory of how their bodies had tried to claw past surface boundaries and fine more.

Eventually, when the cigarette was done and he held it, crushed between his fingertips, he sat on the porch bench with her. He had tried to think of how to put any of it into words, how to express something so monumental with a few choice sounds. A forward lean and his elbows dig into his knees, searching for a bone-to-bone connection. Black eyes shifted, going over his shoulder to the spot beside him where she was wrapped in a blue robe so dark that it looked like a part of the evening was peeled open and offering up the pale punch of her skin and warm-cold of her blue eyes from nowhere.

"Why did you take to the road?"

Madison Rye

Date: 2016-05-29 11:08 EST
Madison was a thoughtful, quiet presence on the bench, watching him sort his thoughts while pulling weeds. When he joined her and asked her the question about her own life, she found herself surprised at it, when she had been intent on asking him about his own choices. For all the discussions they had, and for all the elements of their histories which didn't seem to warrant mention in the glare of the present, there were aspects of their pasts that were undisclosed. Whether it be ex-husbands or ex-fiances, reasons for being alone for years or reasons for choosing to live in a fortress of a house by choice, cut off from the world. That was, until recently, when they had started gently peeling away the bandages with careful hands.

However intuitive they were for one another's gearing and thoughts there was no complete way to understanding certain teethmarks of time without it being expressed with an open clarity with no detail obscured. To be able to comprehend the scale of what it was that had made them who they were, even though, they were both in the process of change again, as new parents and old friends who fell in love.


The story of why she took to the road was always told the same way. That her husband had been presumed dead and that she had had nothing else to stay in Lofton for. That there were no local opportunities she desired to foster for herself and the sheriff at the time had seen all of it and capitalised on her emptiness. That was the first story and the story the friends who had asked knew, though it had been years since it had been told aloud. And it had, until now, not been a story that Tag had enquired after. Not even on Sparrow Foot when she had been newly separated from the not-so-dead husband.

"On the surface, as you know, I went lookin' for Elijah. And to do some odd jobs for the county at the time; takin' out the trash. Not my finest hour, but I don't regret who I was then.

But, underneath all of that, why I took to the road was out of ... out of hunger, I suppose. I liked being alone on horseback in the middle of nowhere. It's that simple and that complicated, that I needed distance from what I had known, maybe out of a kind of.... of desperation... a desperation to be free, to be myself.. to.. to know who I could be, removed from the only ... context I had ever known.

I think, that is the truest reason that I can give you and yet I've always felt a kind of shame about it. That in the end, it wasn't .. " she heaved with a breath and the subtle action of it parted the loosely tied night of her robe; it displayed the locket, the side of a milk-full tear drop breast, the dip at her sternum and below that, the shapely curve of a thigh where the material fell away to gather on the seat with the bend of her knee. She didn't move to adjust; she was focused on the telling and there was little reason to hide anything of herself.

"It wasn't all about findin' Eli. Because other things happened, life moved on and I... I did find myself, even if I never found him."

There was a weak smile from her, her pale eyes catching what scarce light there was as she turned her gaze to him and away from the silhouette of the yard and the fence-line.

"Early on, I had my heart in a certain place. I mean, I wanted him. I wanted to find him, to touch him, to see he was alive. But I think, three years in, I had started to believe that the likelihood of him bein' alive was so, so slim.... and in three years I wasn't the woman who had left Lofton. I was someone.... I was someone very different.

The road changes us, if we let it. I like to think it honed me, it shaped my weakest parts, my softest edges, where I needed it most to be tended to."

She reached out to touch his back bared to her. Nails skimming the taut, risen skin where scars shouted of brutality and resilience. The ink that covered it all, that had held her eye in a moment where she had seen the man in a way that provoked her, that thinking back to the moment, still had the capacity to startle her with its flare of heat and the voracious need to know him better. Deeper. Like no one else had.

"Is there anything in what I tell you that... what's the word.. that.. that resonates with you?"

Her throat felt thick with emotion as she looked across at him. As if anxious for an answer and insight. As if guilty at her own admission.

The owl cried in the darkness, somewhere it had landed in a tree near and it drew her attention to the darkness, to the knots of weeds scattered in moonlight. They reminded her of infection. Of the things that took root when you weren't paying attention.

Tag Sentry

Date: 2016-05-30 16:15 EST
He listened to the story of her journey unfurl from her mouth and thought that they had the same feeling thrumming in their hearts. Some of what she said came in perfectly executed sentences, as if they had been observations of him that methodically flayed open pieces beneath his skin. He could feel her fingertips haunt down his back. With scars sometimes the way skin healed, the nerves could displace sensations. He felt her fingers scratch along his skin in one place as well as the phantom tingle of it lower on the opposite side of his back near the hip. It caused him to draw his lips in, wetting them as she mentioned shame. A shame that it wasn?t?

His hand moved, brushing the ground to set the filter of his cigarette on the face of the porch. When he looked at her he thinks she looks exposed, peeling out of the evening more and more, her eyes carrying an earnest passion. Her mouth is searching him for more, he can feel it even though she hadn?t used her teeth yet.

?a desperation to be free, to be myself.. to.. to know who I could be, removed from the only ... context I had ever known.

?It resonates.?

Tag sat up slowly, giving her hand time to disappear before his back pressed against the bench swing. On his face is the familiar look he carried so much, of concerned focus. The look of someone arduously solving a math problem and having never quite been sure that the answer was right. This was not a riddle, though. The details of his thoughts, the implications of them, had a clearly understood meaning. The riddle wasn?t in knowing the answer, but in stating it. Boiling down an experience he hadn?t even been coherent of at the time and still profoundly affected.

?I was Ame?s age when my mother was killed.? The ripple of discomfort in him appeared with the flexing of his jaw muscle, the glance over his shoulder towards the garden. He looked as though he?d said too much, that he needed to step back into weeding to ease his tension. His toes curled and relaxed against the floorboards. He stayed. The pressure in him swelled because he could not seem to prevent his mind from overlapping the brunette with blue eyes in the photograph with Madison and Ame.

?It was? because she was white. At the time they did not think that they could impregnate a white woman because? they felt they were too superior. Too different for it to be possible. After I was born she had to pay for?? there was a pause as his eyes searched, pinning down the words and then gazing at Madison?s face, ?being insolent enough to become pregnant.? There is something else to him, an edge to his lips that was rarely present. So few things in the world transformed him like that, becoming a weight in his mouth and affecting his voice. He was still angry.

It was increasingly difficult not to want to check on the demeanor of the carrots. To not let the uncomfortable sensation, coupled with a shame which was kin to the one that lived in her, drive him to another quiet moment in the garden. How many nights could a sleep deprived mother of his children stir to hear stories that would begin to repeat themselves and hang in the air like a flipped coin at the top of its spinning arc? Or was that just the story, the reason he gave himself to refrain, because peeling himself out of the night ached?

Madison Rye

Date: 2016-05-30 22:23 EST
Tag looked inexpressibly mournful. His face and eyes revealing the immense weight of what he had been carrying for years and what she had, like many others upon meeting him and getting to know him, first assumed to be a sadness from something else. She could not possibly say there nor back in the early days what it was she imagined that nameless feeling to be, only that it was there in him.

The difference however, was that he did not carry the pain like some did. It was not on display in an obvious way or a way to make others uncomfortable (at least, Madison had never felt that way..) and it was not like the change to his walk that a bear-trap bite had inflicted. It was a quieter affliction, something that his reserved, public face could meld with so that it seemed he was perhaps only melancholy in the same way she was.

Madison wondered if perhaps she had been remiss in not digging sooner. In not pulling out the weeds. How far had it spread in him, that white-knuckled anger?


"Was she raped? Or was it a consensual relationship your father had with her? The way you speak... it sounds .. tragic, on every single level."

It was like unearthing only there was no tomb, the artefact she reached for to examine with a fine-tooth comb was his pain; preserved to a hard rock within him. It gave that weight to his words as they trickled softly to her ear.

The symmetry between them, though their afflictions were different, was stark. She inhaled deeply and paused in her caress of his back. "Some say, that we are doomed to repeat what we do not face. You are not on trial, you are not meant to live out this sentence you were given... it's not somethin' you should expect to have to live with, Tag.

You can't go back to a time that has passed and places and people that are no longer. But you can live your hell all over again, here, and later on, if you don't start..." she looked again to the weeds, prone and pale in the garden, "start pullin' that horror out of you. You are not doomed to feel that anger for ever, but you must begin to feel it at all."

She leaned over to rest her cheek against his shoulder, her arm slung around his back where her hand fell over his opposite arm. "I love you and I'll face whatever it is you need to, at your side. It has to be done."

Madison Rye

Date: 2016-06-12 10:45 EST
"No, it wasn't rape she was... ehh... concubine? Like prostitute but a little... more." Tag tilted his head to the side, trying to think of what the equivalent might have been. "Escort? Like eh... more than just sex?" There were prostitutes and there were concubines. Women whose job it was to entertain and, for all intensive purposes, be that all encompassing 'girlfriend' whose job was not to complain or be an equal. A sexual servant entertainer. Most would say that they were treated well.

There was a pause after she told him about hell, about facing something over and over. He could not think of how to explain himself to that end, except to say, "I'm angry that she... had to die. I wonder... how much of me is her and not my father and... what having a mother would have been like." It was, perhaps, one of the reasons h accepted his solitude so readily. Tag hadn't been raised with the idea of a permanent female figure in his life. They came, they went. They died.

"It's not fair.... Tag. That she had to. That you were denied a chance to know her. But, for all wrongs there is a way to make it right... even if it.. even if the thing you end up doin' doesn't correspond with where the action started." She let that hang in the air between them, with all the focus and attention and suspense of an arcing coin and its fortunes. Her nails began moving up and down his back, not to detract from her words but in a nurturing gesture. "I think, for someone who has been through what you have, that you're even a father.. " she shook her head, "you're incredible with the children, baby. What I am tryin' to say is.... you haven't let your own pain deny your children love. That's important, that's makin' somethin' right, don't you think?"

"I just wonder cause there is only the picture..." and in that wondering there was anger that there was also only the picture. An entire person, everything they were and all that was left was that one photo. He wondered if anyone realized or thought about how important their photos would be? That they would be at their funeral, the lasting impression people saw as they grieved. That their friends, their children, would hold onto those images because the likeness was just right. His body shifted, scooting closer into her until the outside of is thigh was against her leg, "I'm lucky, because of you and Penny. It took me so long to find the family I was looking for."

Behind her closed mouth there was a deep, inward sigh. A flat palm down his back in a whisper of a touch and she brought her arm over his head to fall on his knee. The owl made another comment. The weeds just stared a hole into the sky. "But you did. And you didn't have to.. and if you weren't how you are, it wouldn't have." She sat forward, closer, and smiled. The lazy-sexy of her face from not half an hour ago disappeared as the cool of the air sobered her up, as did the conversation.

"I think you made a lot right in your life, considerin' the past. Not everyone has the strength to do it. But us three adore you, Tag. I love you more than I have truly loved anyone before; it wasn't like this. You're .... a beautiful man. And would she still be alive, your mama would be so proud." A kiss pressed to his shoulder.

"She's a mystery, one I can't... figure out." A mona lisa smile in a photograph that seemed to promise him the answers to everything, if only he could find her. There's the wet press of her lips on his shoulder and he turns, leaning in to catch the petals of her mouth with his own. The kiss subsides, quickly and he adds, "I would have waited for you, as long as you needed." He was earnest. What was five or six years for her? Nothing. A wait he could blink away and drown in the rhythm of a day.

One of his hands is under her chin, holding her noble, wind licked face that still tasted like sun and sand, "Ame will know you. What you think about the rain and whether red or white wine is preferred even though... it's whiskey."

"It's my job to ensure the kid drinks good whiskey when he's of age." There came the mischief in her with a quip to lighten the mood, changing her face again, as she sighed into his kiss and caught him by the back of the neck with a gentle clasp of hand. Nails through his hair there at the nape, not with desire, but tenderness. "It's the best we can give them.. all the things we did not. I don't even see my folks. They don't even know I had a baby. When Eli and I ended... I was as good as dead to them. I was never gonna be what they wanted in a daughter, and my daddy tried to.... to love me, to understand... but... I was a disappointment. So.. I know in myself it's also my job to ensure my babies never feel like that. Penny wants to learn swords or ballet... i's alright by me." Her voice soft but determined in its way, throaty and emphatic. She kissed his jaw, a string of small cool-mouth pecks. "I'm a lucky girl you did wait...." at last, her eyes moving down as if she could not stand the look in his eyes. As if the intensity wrought some achingly wonderful feeling in her heart. "I don't deserve the good you give me. But I believe you."


"I can't imagine anyone knowing you and feeling disappointed." Madison was a poem, something impossible to chase and catch completely. Nor did he want to. He liked that she was wild, that his role was only to lay out some tempting tid-bits for her to chew on and if she liked, she would come by and stay for a while. His arm slipped over her shoulders, drawing in her and the part of night that held her in closer to his side, "You don't have to be lucky, just... you." Lips press to her temple and then he shuts his eyes as if picking up the fragments of a nightmare, "I know of no one from my country. From what happened. I think.. I believed that one day they would come. One day I would know. But it has only ever been me and that is... I suppose... the answer."

"Don't speak too soon, son." She replied, but mostly, it was in jest. She'd felt like her just being was a disappointment, it had, outright been called so, by important people to her. And, maybe that was because she had responded to the howling, crying, westling wind more than she should have. But if you believe, that you're doing something right, and it's right for you but wrong for someone else.... where does the crossover happen? Was there another version to her explanation to Tag about doing something right. She pondered it until he spoke again. "Just me, huh..." a sidelong musing smirk, as he pulled her near she stitched in closer, wrapping her arms around him, the cold night of her robe chill against his bare skin. "What about.... that fella? That... that man I seem to recall before I asked you to Lofton, those years again? Li--... Liang? How did you know him? I'm guessin' for you... there's no goin' back to the East."

There was some consideration of Liang. She was right, he was of his country but... "He wasn't a rebel, he didn't serve with me but against me. He was my brother and should have been my father's first born."

Liang, despite being his brother, was not someone he had curiosity for. Was the difference that important? To him, yes. It was not his friend, the one that inspired him and planted the seeds in his skull. The mona lisa smile of his mother. Liang was the repeated doctrine of the emperor which felt like it lacked soul. He supposed what he really wanted to know was what happened to his friend. Did he, and all his charisma and forethought, survive? His meeting with Liang had been short and violent... more than he had hoped for. It felt like a continuation of what he'd already known and no further development, "I suppose they are all still here... serving and going through the motions. But... all empires fall." Had that one fallen? Did he really want to know about the present or did he wish he could have followed the past just a little more carefully. His dark eyes fall down on her face, on the cupid bow of her lips.

Eyes as rhapsodic as the blue of a clear, country sky or that blue of her office, pan up to him. Her attention is fixated, her brows furrowed in concern, following after the past he paints with his mouth. She thought of roads, of falling .... empires, of falling towers, of the way the past had the power to loom and the powder to be reduced to nothing. Would they ever recover from what they had run from, or would the shadow of history loom tall always, never truly dying in the light but simply dwindling for a time? His expression is one she becomes aware oh, and she smiles broadly. "What are you thinkin, dark man?" There was the look of sudden laughter in her eyes, as if he hadn't told her all he just had because of the gravity of the gaze he bestowed on her. Her hand at his nape loosens, and she tilts her head with enquiry. Her mouth parts like she's about to speak, but nothing comes. Instead, a set of knuckles follow the shape of his pronounced cheekbones, towards the shell of his ear. Her eyes going serious again as she breaks their stare to follow the movement.

If his empire did fall, would it ease his mind. If he remained without family his first family, even Liang, would it always be a peaceful distance? These thoughts crossed her mind. Fingertips drawn down the side of his throat.

"I'm thinking... that it all seems so far away. Put your hands on it." He gripped her by the backside, his hands holding her firmly and pulling her to his lap. Her legs spread to wrangle his knees between his hips, but his dark eyes are up at her, his head tilted back because of how she had to perch upon his lap. Softly, he says, "Take your hands to my back, love. To my left side where there is ink and trace your fingers down." His gaze is so intent upon her face, more than just seeing it but peeling beyond the white-tan of the west so that there would be bones. Softly, like a secret, "Do you feel the words?" The ink and the scars, far left of his back.

Looking down at him, one brow inches high, as if he's asked her to injure him. To carve something from him that was not hers to own. To read something not for her eyes. Why does it hurt, what he asks? Shifting against his lap to reach, she does as he asks, her face still shadowed with her questioning. He asks her, if she feels the words, as the pads of her fingers walk down the skin, where it becomes scar, only one is raised and the other is a portrait. It is watching a film in foreign language and somehow, somehow, understanding. That some emotions go beyond language, understood in another sense altogether. Her hand pauses, reaching mid-way down his back, and she swallows hard, realising she has been holding her breath. Her right hand on his shoulder grips. It has been resting there against him to steady herself in her straddle and her reach. "....I do. But the... the scars, they make ... they make me feel sad, Tag."

There was the close of her eyes, fingertips running slowly all the way down where the story stops abruptly, and her fingers curl.


"Each one is a rule I don't follow," his voice is soft, one of his hands pressing at her lower back to keep her hips tucked in close to his, "Move over, three columns and trace down." Their lips are impossibly close. Intimate and far away as he looks at her, his eyelids lowered because he is watching her lips, "Do you feel it?" It's like braille but worse. Different. It's a tattoo given personality and a warped existence because of the scars. He can smell the salt of the prairie and tries to ignore it.

Closed lidscrease. She follows his direction and her fingers move across, following the pageless book and the verses he is reciting to her. Three columns... and down. Middle and index fingers graze down to the edge, pause. Her eyes open. "I do." Her breath is deep and slow. He might feel that her hand against his back is shaking. A rule I don't follow. Madison swallowed again, nose to nose. "And if you did follow?" His hand at her back may as well be a brand for the way it burns. Or a stone for the weight it gives the moment, his admission, the way she is so rapt she is still. Only the blink of her eyes and the rise and fall of her shoulders with the ocean-bottom breaths she makes.

His lips find her neck, the vulnerable portion half offered to him now that she's on his lap. He says it like it is fact, like it isn't a dirty secret to be shared, "It says I am nothing without my master. That I have nothing and what I want is nothing." Tag had been told, from as earlier as he could recall, just how unimportant and disposable he would be. Maybe that was part of his distance, the part that made him a shadow. It said... you will throw me away, and that is fine. His lips ended up beneath her earlobe, pressing against the flesh.

Her body tenses at the kiss. Then, the shift forward of her hips. There is a shiver and she stills. "Well, those bastards were wrong on all goddamn accounts, now weren't they", she whispers in a voice edged with fire. The anger in the woman wasn't often but when it was that it flared within her, it was not a small, behaved flame. Fingertips stroke back across the pageless book, re-reading sections, noting words and instructions with detest. At once sorrowful at what it was that lived on his back, something she had once seen as a thing of beauty, and for that sorrow to be paired with the desire he was quickly folding into her heart like clever, deliciously cruel origami. She gasped where he reached just beneath her ear, tender as that spot was. She pressed forward, angling her neck to take his lips. Her hand traveled beneath herself to the belt of his pants. The rest of his confession known only by that porch and the blank stare of the late-night sky.

The potency of the past dwindled. Change cat-crept passed again as the door closed softly behind them as they re-entered the house.