HEY EVERYONE, GUESS WHAT! Zakuyoe is cool. :P I'd been joking about a submission war, but now that you've accepted my challenge...(grin)
Is this starting from zero?
style-xx: 1
Zakuyoe: 0
Run-on sentences will be numerous and intentional.
Disclaimed.
Dante Never Warned You
...about this. Kenny should have been the first person to know what Hell really is, but it took him eleven years to finally have an answer. KennyKyle
Dante Never Warned You
traintracks
When Kyle first asks you about Hell, you will be half-asleep under the starless sky.
Kyle will be going along the traintracks near your shoddy home, and you'll want to warn him about the nowhere-ness they lead to. You'll catch him while he is in deep thought and he'll surprise you with that question.
You'll have no real idea of how best to answer him, but you will tell him it isn't nearly as bad as people have most likely been describing it. He will smile in relief and you will marvel at how easily mere words can help.
You will sit together on your porch and share a cigarette, though neither one of you really likes smoking. You'll know it's just the most acceptable way for boys of your age to connect; nothing more. When his hand brushes against yours, you'll know he's only saying that he'd like to take his turn with the cigarette.
After a time, he will begin to spout absurd theories he'd picked up here-and-there about the nature of Hell, which you will aptly deem to be 'fucking bullshit' as you flick a spider off your leg.
He will touch your hand again and you will hear foreboding thunder in the back of your mind as you glance warily upward. You will look contemplative as you pass the cigarette to Kyle, knowing ahead of time that the wooden porch roof above you is about to snap and come crashing down on your head. When it does, you won't be surprised.
Everything will have felt the slightest bit sentimental up until that point, but as you lie dying, you'll hear Kyle declaring them to be bastards, whoever 'they' are, and you will know that it hasn't been that remarkable of a day, after all.
constellations
When Kyle and Stan first share with you their childish fascination with the stars, you will be wide awake under the star-littered sky.
Kyle and Stan will be lying in the snow by the pond as you walk by, on your way to buy cigarettes because you will truly be a smoker by this time. They will call you over and invite you to join them in spotting constellations.
You will inform them of how 'fuckin gay that is' but join them on the snowy, moonlit ground, anyway.
They will chatter blithely and point out pattern after pattern while you lie there in silence, wishing you had a cigarette.
After a while, Stan will have to leave to meet his girlfriend before curfew: there will be silence for a time, and then Kyle will roll over and prop his head up on his elbows, looking down at you from above. You will always remember that painful, numbing, brilliant image of innocence hanging overhead.
He'll ask your opinion on constellations and you will turn over so you're facing the ground and joke with him that the only constellations you ever see are down there; the linear streetlamps set along the highway to Hell.
He will be silent for a long time, and then he will ask if the ones up above are then the streetlamps leading to Heaven. You will look up at him and dream, and then tell him that he's looking for Heaven in the wrong place; that Heaven is supposed to be 'up,' and those stars aren't 'up' as much as 'out.'
He will laugh and then ask you where you think 'up' is, if not in the sky. You'll want to kiss the mouth of an innocent idiot hanging above your face, thinking that if ignorance is bliss then Kyle's lips must taste good.
You'll be overcome by what you'll later realize was the last remaining bit of your childhood. Much of the tension that will have been building inside you, starting from the time your father first hit your 4-year-old self, will disappear in a cloud of dirt and flying snow as you tackle Kyle off yourself with playful, barking laughter and start running, his angry shouts flying not 'up' and not 'out,' but after you.
You will trip on a tree root and crash down, and, just as Kyle launches himself at you and throws his arms around your torso, sending you both sliding across the pond ice, you will wonder what sick force out there was responsible for the fact that you escaped the fiasco alive.
You will then laugh again and feel the ice burning your back and Kyle's arms still tight around you and you will breathe on his face when you realize he has moved his head over yours and is staring down at you.
You will be too involved with the fact that he has started kissing you to wonder how the hell the ice beneath you hasn't cracked and no sharp objects have yet to come flying at your head.
Later that night, with the taste of ice and Kyle on your lips, you will be sitting at home alone, disturbed by the fact that you're still conscious. You'll get antsy and decide it would be in Nature's best interest for you to cut your wrist.
Impatient as you are, you'll wait two minutes at most and then stick that part of your arm in the toiled, flushing it enough times to speed the draining of blood from the cut fairly quickly.
A few minutes later, in Hell, Stan will only have to greet you with a strange look and a disappointed grunt for you to realize that it had all been rather unnecessary. You will feel heavy and exhausted.
engagements
When Kyle first publicly announces his engagement to Bebe Stevens, his girlfriend of six and a half years, you will be too buzzed to care, but you'll later comprehend that this means much more than just Kyle getting married. It will mean the end of your secret meetings and the stolen kisses that have been going on for eight years, and, granted, nothing much more than a 'fuck me' and 'you're adorable' have been shared between you and him, but you would have thought your real feelings had been clear to him anyway and that those eight years of escaping your friends' scrutiny during high school and his dodging his girlfriend and University classes and you ditching your menial jobs so you could meet each other at the motel every week or two had meant something to him.
But you will realize, like a slap to the face, that he must never have acknowledged how very much more you loved him than did his girlfriend of one and a half years less than you will have been his lover.
You will congratulate him numbly and he will smile at you as a friend and nothing more; as if he didn't own you, mind, body, and soul right now and certainly hadn't for the eight years leading up to that point. You will find yourself unable to decide whether he's cruel or merely stupid.
When he's up at the altar, smiling nervously at his bride, you won't be able to ignore how much happier he looks up there with her than you'll ever be able to remember seeing him when he was with you, and you'll desperately want to believe that it's only an act; that, inside, he is breaking at the thought of never tasting your mouth again, though you're not sure if you'd even let him at this point because there has been a gross and bitter taste in your mouth all day.
You won't cry, because you know that, the moment your tears hit the ground, your constellation-streetlamps will be doused, and then how will you find your way back to Hell? The concern will be valid because, as everyone shuffles out to go to the reception, you are hit by the thundering feeling of recognition you always get in the back of your head when you're about to die.
In the hallway leading to the reception, one of the assistant chefs, in a hurry to bring the knife for the cake, will trip over the wildly running little flower girl's dress and accidentally land the utensil in your gut.
You will sigh in relief as the world spins out of your reach, glad to know there are still things in the world that you can rely on. Sad but true that your own demise is one of those things, and that Kyle yelling at the 'bastards' (whom you will have yet to find out the identities of) is not. Kyle won't be there to yell anything at all, really; he'll already be with his friends and family and new wife in the reception, unwittingly having left you to lie there on the red carpet with nothing but the blood leaking out around the knife jammed into your stomach and the vomit your murderer so kindly left on your shoe.
hell
When Kyle is first pronounced dead at the meager age of 27, you will feel both turmoil and gladness.
Everyone else will be devastated by his sudden, unexpected death, and, though you'll certainly be surprised, you'll hardly feel much beyond that. You will never have sympathized with death, which is unfortunate but understandable.
You will still have kept that irrational hope inside you that he really had loved you all along and had been thinking of you – not his wife of three years or his infant daughter, but you – when he died. A few minutes after receiving the phone call, as you are leaving your apartment in a daze, you will slip on the ice sidewalk and crack your skull, and another hour or so later you are back in Hell and see that Kyle isn't there and isn't going to be.
You won't know whether to be happy that the man you love has gone to the better afterlife, or angry that you won't be seeing him ever again, or stiff and cold to be forced to acknowledge that the mere fact that he's gone to Heaven means he never really loved you at all.
You will wonder what paradox you were born under. You have the gift of unending resurrection, but only to a stagnant life that you don't enjoy at all. The most innocent and pious emotion you've ever felt is also what has damned you the most. You'll see now that Hell is not a place – it is that feeling of damnation; knowing that the one good feeling you will have had in your life, something as virtuous as love for another person, is the very thing which has consumed you in sin.
As that happens, you will wonder if someone who is in a place as perfect as Heaven is supposed to be is even allowed to be informed of a reality this unsettling. Because, you see: even after all the happened; despite the role he will have had played in your destruction, you – confused, hellish, freakish you – will still feel the need to find Kyle and tell him you've finally found the Hell he'd been asking about all those years ago.
--