A dog barked blood as we ran the alleyways and screamed faggot galore. We were popping ones into a clear, blue sky just to release some smoke and what we called dark noise, hoping it would relentlessly spark the fear of Kevin. We had caught him kissing another guy in the second month of highschool. Now we were on a manhunt for him.

This type of thing my friends and I did regularly, but it was usually just to provoke, never to actually harm. We usually got into some type of fight- wild, teenage fun. The worst that usually happened was that someone walked away with a scraped side or black eyes. I wasn’t so sure it would be the same routine this time. We were newly fifteen and purely fueled with testosterone, and now we had an incentive that could turn us all into bloodhounds. The gun, also. A buddy of mine had began bringing one annually at the beginning of the grade ten year, his father’s. We had began hiding it in our friend’s backpack, because we all knew well no one of authority ever paid much attention to that sort of thing; for there were better things to spend time on.

Kevin had been in many gangs- particularly notable ones- and was very strong in track and field. A funny person, too. He was the first boy to befriend me in the first grade of high school, and like his other boys he used to make me beat up kids who hadn’t paid his drug money, or the scummy ones who had made a move on girls he had befriended. He treated them with such an odd respect, even if it was unfounded. He had a reputation among the neighbourhood nobody could taint. It didn’t change the fact that he was a strange specimen of the projects, and he could get away with it despite presenting himself that open to the public.

I hated him.   

It was hard for any of us to fathom that he was gay. The only concept we could grasp in that moment was that it was a disgusting trait and required immediate punishment.

I was tangled in my own head again.

Strangers peeked out of their windows for the first time in what seemed like months. Shadows upon shadows of heads spread upon us, chanting on. It was the same sounds I heard when my dad used to take to me to Winston’s, the ones at two in the morning when the men in the room slowly sobered and began to hate one another. This was entertainment. Tony listened to the cheers of the people like a chorus and began popping bullets one by one on the ground, reloading and reloading again. It was a symphony of guns, anger shouting its wretched slurs, and screams. He had reloaded six times since we had begun, and I began wondering if he could ever run out.

Waving his gun around as if it was a simple thing, Tony caught Kevin’s heel. There were curses and the petty crying of boy echoing down the alleyways as he realized that death was a dog from hell that was fueled by the subconscious, becoming conscious lust for violence. Also by people.

Astoundingly, Kevin kept running. It was significantly slower than before, but he was still running. At this, Tony cried coward and sped up.

I saw Kevin fall seconds later, landing flat on his chin. He had yelped loud at the impact, and I stopped. I watched him, a man who was bloodied, screaming and crying as he clutched onto his right foot. He cursed at us all and pulled a knife, to which none of us did as much as flinch. I took a long look again and realized it simply wasn’t real.

Tony kicked the blade out of Kevin’s hand. He only began screaming louder.

Taking a step forward, Sam yelled, “Jesus Christ!” back at an equal volume, silencing all. He fired shots. It still wasn’t real, and I couldn’t see now. I just heard slur after slur and saw the blurs of men slowly destroying one another and felt the warm sensation of blood slowly dripping down my leg and felt the chilling waters wash that away as I ran ahead.

I felt my own fist press against the cold and wet sensation of human flesh, again and again. My boots crushed rib after rib. That was when I lost my hearing too, but it was fine because I knew it wasn’t real. Nothing was real. Nothing was real until we heard the distant sound of sirens singing. I hadn’t noticed until Tony had pushed me forward saying something of blood and sprinting. My hearing and sight had returned, the quiet and thundering sound of rain coming back to me in a fiery embrace.

Looking up, there were no trace of the familiar faces that once chanted for us above. All windows had shut aside from one, a woman’s. Her silhouetted face looked down at the bleeding boy, the whites of her brown eyes narrow and tear filled. She screamed at the the policeman in desperation, begging them not to touch the wounded boy, to let him move on his own. I couldn’t recall his name.

Tony grabbed my wrist and flung me forward. We all ran.

I returned to room ninety-seven in burning tears, guilt crawling up and tearing my throat into entire, absolute shreds. Halli, a close friend of mine, was quick to wrap his arms around me. There was this unwritten rule that men were and were always cold hearted bastards with an incapacity for emotion, holding the power to silence and transform us all. That rule could be momentarily escaped with Halli, because he was the kid that didn’t go to school anymore. People knew of him, but never knew him. A paler kid, he was sensitive and knew nothing of what happened after you graduated elementary school. He was a haven.

In spite of this, what he did have was marijuana, though he never smoked it himself as it was for his mother. I asked for a blunt. Rolling one, he began asking questions.

“Do you have your ID on you, the fake one?” He handed the blunt to me.

Inhaling, I asked why.

“There’s been rumours of the family workers around, and I wanna be safe. I just heard guys talking ‘bout it outside my room though.” he answered.

“I do.”

Halli took a seat next to me on his couch. The atmosphere melted together then, the fumes of weed and easy noodles becoming one.

Halli’s eyes met my own. “I won’t ask what you did like specifically. Was it a gang fight?” His hands wiped away what was left of my tears.

“It was.”

Halli only nodded. “Do you want to wash up?”

I took a glimpse and saw my fists were wet with the fluids, more than just blood. Halli’s eyes had met them also with an almost worried, but nevertheless oddly tranquil expression. I nodded.

Halli erased all with a simple few gentle strokes and the residue the rain hadn’t already washed away ceased to exist. Reluctantly, I thanked him.

He caught my eye for a brief moment and as soon as he had, he told me, “You can exhale, Oscar.”

White smoke flared from my nostrils. I hadn’t understood.

“Was the blood Kevin’s, or your own?”

I didn’t answer to that, and Halli hadn’t asked it either.

“Stop smoking now. You’ve had enough.” he said, beginning to remove the blunt from what I hadn’t realized were grinded teeth. Once he had pried it out, he nearly chuckled. “Don’t chew; it’s bitter.”

I smiled at his comment as Halli began laughing hard. “What were you trying to do, eat the weed? Just taking a bite of a ball of marijuana?” he said.

“How do you know it’s bitter?” I asked.

“My mum’s done it accidentally a few times. It takes like, what, ten beers to wash the taste?” he laughed.

“Why are you laughing still? Are you high off the fumes?” I chuckled and gave him a small punch.

Halli took a hit of the blunt himself, his shoulders bouncing up and down in an effort not to drop the damn thing from the sheer humour of the situation. It was the first I had ever seen him smoke, much less let loose.

“Enough, enough.” Halli said, still grinning ear to ear. “I wanna ask you stuff now. So what happened?” he asked, puffing and passing.

“Didn’t you say you wouldn’t ask?”

“I said I wouldn’t ask what you did specifically, remember?” He flicked my cheek.

“Oh,” I exhaled and passed his way, “well we got into a fight with one of- one of the bigger gang members. We ended up going on some sort of witch hunt for him.”

“Did you catch them?”

“We did. He got a bad beating.”

Halli gave a small smirk, oblivious to it all. He breathed and looked me dead in the eye. “I’ll never understand why you and your friends do that. I’m just so content right now, sitting here and smoking, shielded from the world and not harming anyone. It’s a sanctuary.”

I was hurt.

Halli clearly was able to tell as he always was. “I don’t blame you; it’s you and the rest of the world who do stuff like that.”

“I didn’t want to, I don’t think.” I told him, genuinely. “I just did. And I saw this woman, and she looked at me and then the guy. I felt guilty.”

Halli smiled as though nothing was wrong, nothing at all. Indeed, the world was everything but a prison of prejudice, a jester’s mask covering everything that genuinely mattered because it was just too hard to think about. “Was she pretty?” he asked me.

I thought on that. “I don’t know. I could only really see her eyes. They were crying.”

A pause. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

Something within the earth had shifted then. We both felt it.

Hours upon hours went onward like this, but the hours were naught but time, and time was naught but an excuse to move forward with our aimless plans that lead nowhere worth visiting. In that moment, the ignorance in the bliss and the bliss in the ignorance was nothing but a murder song, slowly killing our minds just to bring the best of it out. It didn’t matter though, because it all at least felt worth it.

At one point in it all, I remember that we had both smiled at one another, pure ecstasy rising within the both of us. Shamelessly, I asked, “Halli, do you- do you remember that- that promise we made when we were like ten or somewhere near?”

“Which one?”

“The- I don’t know, the… the marriage one.”

Halli nearly coughed up a lung laughing, happy tears dribbling from his eyes. “Yeah, yeah I do.”

“Does that still stand?”

A genuine grin. “Yeah. Of course it does.”

Hesitant in my movement, I reached for his cheek. His eyes had met mine, and time ceased. Leaning forward, I planted a small kiss on his eye, then his cheek, then his lips. From two different worlds we were, yet I was him and he was me.   

A mutual silence between us lingered as we removed ourselves from one another. A few seconds and, “Sorry.” trailed its way out of my mouth.

“What for?”

Halli grabbed me by the hand and pulled me upward.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Going out,” he said, “to the bigger city. We can go to Church and steal the bread like a pack of martyrs.”

To this, I cracked a small and agreed. As always, I took his hand, and my eyes began to water.

I cried then, collapsing, unable to take a mere step outside of that sanctuary, and I couldn’t remember a time that it had hurt that much.