Poly Philtatos

By Malena Colón

We lie awake, shivering despite the sunlight, eyes squinting as if we are just born. I look at you; you turn away and draw the curtain. Darkness, like shame, envelopes us. I fall back asleep and dream.

I dream of water so blue it looks drawn in crayon. This is the setting for my dream: I am a child in crayon-blue water. But I haven’t learned to swim. Sunlight dapples the surface, growing faint. Who will my wife be? my mother asks, as I draw a square house with a triangle roof and blue swimming pool. As a child it seems like my destiny is a straight arrow pointed toward the crayon picture.

But now we are tangled in the sheets together, my body is well expired, and I am dreaming of drowning.

I was ten years old when I nearly drowned at your beach house. I am ten again in this dream. A bright blue sea and pebbled shore. Summer beating down hot. Water pressing me further and further into its depths, until you have pulled me up, half-laughing, half-screaming, mad at the thought of losing me. Shame, age old shame, dusts my cheeks. I believed I could swim in the deepest water. I wanted you to believe that I could. You and I like two beached whales, panting, hearts racing, hands clasped together, full of gratitude and relief—and just that, completely full. And I, with my newness of what it meant to be alive.

If this dream was any indication at all, I would know that it meant living was only about being with you.

You: my savior, my conqueror, my killer. You, who I cannot lie nor confess to, as I sink perilously into the water, awaiting your hand to reach out to me.

***

Your father thinks there is something unnatural in you. I want to ask if he believes in the supernatural. That there is a ghost in you, who tells you things, and that is why you are far wiser than you should be at your age. But your father is a man of reason. A father whose father before him, and his father before him, ever after in the eternity of forefathers, know the weight of a strike, the value of a fist.

I wonder if your fascination with me has something to do with wanting, continuously wanting, to disappoint your father. “It’s unnatural,” he says, “for a son to cling to a mother so much.” She is your haven; she is your solace; but she is blind when the father’s rage rears its ugly head. He believes he can beat the unnaturalness out of you. Like you are a piece of metal that can be dented into shape.

We are fifteen when we smoke our first cigarette. Stolen from your father and shared in your garden: a single cigarette. That, in our primal fear, is all we can muster. I bend over with the cigarette in hand; you take the lighter and light it. I pass the cigarette to you, and you bring it to your mouth. You choke and cough. I smile.

It is over this cigarette that you confess to me what you saw: a stash of pills locked in your mother’s cabinet. We thought she had given up pills. Three weeks later, your mother is gone, and your father says nothing. A letter arrives from a rehabilitation facility. Your mother is a liar, and a skilled one. She visits you periodically, after she’s let out of rehab but not back into your home, or perhaps she refuses to come back home, and she pleads with you for cash. This is the nightmare of betrayal as the only possible act of love. No, I will not give you cash, mother, why don’t you just come home? And her cries are horrific, like the sounds of a dying animal, and you feel like you are injuring her in some way, like she is a prisoner of war and you’ve brought the barrel of a gun to her forehead and pulled the trigger right when you said “no,” all the while she accuses you of being just like your father. Something is irreparably torn apart between you two. But days later, the father gloats: you no longer cling to her skirts.

At fifteen, you tell me your ghost is your unborn baby brother. Your mother was pregnant years ago, but the drugs killed whatever was growing inside her womb. “It’s his soul that speaks to me,” you say. I do not deny that this is the case, but I find myself jealous. If I could open my own body to the possession of your brother’s ghost—then I would.

We are sixteen when I stop visiting you. We are wrestling in the pebbly sand in our swim trunks. Your father sees. He declares that I am no longer welcome. A stark line has been drawn, and I will find myself an intruder in enemy territory. So I do not invade. I only wait. You visit me once, but something dark shifts, as I feel your brother watching. I wonder if he is a spy for the father. You insist that this is nonsense. I see what the shadow really is: your facial hair has started to grow in the same pattern as his.

Perhaps a worse nightmare you’d witnessed, at only age fourteen: the mother and father in the kitchen, unaware you’d be returning home—and the father has his hands around the mother’s throat, and oh dear god it looks like sex, but those screams are actually your mother’s and not yours, and she is pleading stop, please, don’t do this to me, and you think of this three years later as you turn her away in the parking lot, once again, after she’s requested to meet for your favorite fast-food and says she needs just a bit of cash before grabbing your burger, and your refusal awakens those dying-animal cries: stop, please, don’t do this to me.

We smoke our second cigarette at seventeen. When did my mother become a junkie? you ask me. And the question is valid. I remember on that day I was drowning, your mother lay on the pebbly beach, blonde and tanning, draped in luxury on that reclining chair, her bare feet glistening with oil, her teeth white and her smiles generous. She was like a cut out image from a magazine catalogue. She was reading a book. She saw us in the water and waved.

It is the last day I will speak to you for a number of years. Your father will move you away, somewhere down south. We have not reached eighteen yet.

You forget to take your ghost with you.

He does not give me the wisdom he gives you. He makes me feel stupid about the entire world, but perhaps that is wisdom too. He says you are afraid that you will grow addicted just like your mother—or worse, you will enact the vengeance of the father. What is it you are afraid of being addicted to? Your baby brother says it is me. That you are afraid of what I will do to you if you have too much of me.

You’ve grown a habit of smoking cigarettes by the time you leave high school.

***

There is a memory, frozen in time:

Two summers after the summer I nearly drowned, I visit you again. I am twelve. You teach me how to swim. We feel on top of the world. Our spring-fresh limbs stretch over the ocean, stronger than anything, stronger than even your father, than the pull of the water, your house now far away, only a hazy silhouette, as if I’ve drawn it with a crayon and given it a triangle roof.

As we float away, the distance obscures it to nothing.

***

I am terminally ill when we encounter each other again.

Your office is in the same city as my hospital. We pass by each other on the street. It happens naturally, this coincidence. Eyes locked, brief disbelief, then memories flooding within milliseconds: a natural scene in the landscape of lost friendships. You reach out your hand to shake mine, as if we have somehow reset ourselves, but it only feels as intimate as when you once pulled me from the deep. There is nothing natural between us, I know your father remembers, and I hope you remember it, too.

You say that I look well, but you do not know that my body is dying and my blood is poison. You do not know the anger I’ve buried, all these years, unearthed just as I’ve seen you once more. I do not tell you these things. Your unborn brother floats between us. Can you no longer see him? You are distracted, obscured. You light cigarettes on our way to the bar. We enjoy a natural catch up over a few natural beers.

But you see the pallor in my skin, the lack of vigor to my step. You ask and I do not tell you about my illness. So many years later, and lies still drift so wide between us. I have become the sting of your mother. You sense this, but say nothing. We drink more.

Your brother floats, but he is silent, too. Beer after beer, and he begins to fade away.

We revive a decade-old tradition: we share a single cigarette. But there is nothing so satisfying in it anymore. You want another, and I begin to want you.

How easy for you to capture me again. I must feign tiredness. Obligations and duties tomorrow. It is like a war that we are on opposite sides of. I will retreat rather than advance. But you know the truth of me. I am forever the loser. My hands shake when I put out the last cigarette, and you look at me, and you grab my hand, and you ask if I want to come home with you. And how will I respond?

I will only say the same to you always: yes, yes, and yes.

***

There is nothing to say about that night we spend together except it is all I have ever dreamed of.

***

The morning after: sunlight, too bright, uneasy sensation, my assuredness contrasted by your shame. The light thrum of a headache. Curtains drawn. The unborn brother lost now. I wonder where he has gone. A newness between us exposed to the light of day. A dawn, a separation, a stitch of a newly made limb. The unnatural made natural. A discovery. A second life for you, perhaps—and the point at which mine will end.

We are just born. We are Adam and Eve finding our shame. But isn’t this what we’ve always wished for? Look away, look away, look away…

And then I am sick. Coughing up blood, raucous with pain, and you are worried. I push you away when you try to console. I am trembling.

You confess to me then: “I think I used to love you.”

And I am not sure what this means.

“But my love turned to hating you when I realized how bad I wanted you. You were like an object to me. But I cannot possess you.”

You turn toward the sunlight, statuesque and beautiful. There are trees outside your window, trees with falling leaves.

“But what is love if not possession?” I say.

And there is nothing more to be said after that. We dress and eat before we part.

“Well,” I say to you as I linger, “at least we know now.”

Just as I leave your building, thinking about the pill bottle at the corner of my bathtub that awaits the ending I’ve chosen, I notice how many trees are outside. Trees with autumn leaves, from red to orange to gold.

But there is another ending I like to believe exists:

Of course I love you, I confess. Wasn’t there always a straight arrow pointed there, since that day you saved me in the ocean?

And you grab my hand just before I step through the door. When you pull me, I tell you that I am sick and planning to die by the end of the day. Hiding this from you seems like a meaningless, ridiculous joke. You convince me to want to live, at least until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, you will convince me to live the day after that. The fight will continue, one day at a time.

Then I imagine the rest goes like this:

We laugh and take each other hand in hand, laugh with newborn lightness because my suicide has been stalled for another day, and when we look out the window in the apartment where we first slept together we see, in the garden, the leaves falling from the trees. Bright autumn leaves, from red to orange to gold, brilliant just as they are fading for the next season.

The sight arrests us for a long, long while.

THE END

Author Bio: Malena Colón is a writer and recent graduate from the University of Cambridge with her master's in English. Currently living in New Jersey, she is planning a move to London. Though she has yet to publish her short fiction, she has previously won the 2022 Feldman Prize in Fiction for a short story and the 2024 Levin-Hokin Premium in Screenwriting for her undergraduate thesis.

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