It is raining when he opens the window. He looks up and the space above him is an angry expanse: barren and stilted. A flash of lightening ghosts his peripheral vision and he watches as, on the grass below him, the light bounces back violently and is flung off, strings of color returning to the sky at a dizzying speed.
Outside: the grass is lush and wet; he sinks down to his shins in the mud, and the heavy hand of the universe once, centuries ago, a man named Narcissus knelt in the grass by the bed of a river is pushing down on him with a fierceness that forces the breath from his lungs. It floats into the vacant space above his head in soft, white petals and he frees his legs from the soil.
Against the tree, stark and pathetic as its exterior had been stripped away and sat on the ground in a sludge of mud and ash, a shard of what had once been the sky is upright and swaying dangerously from the wind. He walks over to steady it, his hand uncurling like the blooming petals of a Narcissus and he sets his hand of the wet-slick surface. It is quick, the muted click of a reset bone, and the storm halts. His reflection is wet and there is a grass stain on the knee of his left right pant leg. He has grown to accommodate the man beneath his skin, but if one were to look closely they would see the outline of another ankle right above the boy's own. He is staring, but for how long he can not determine: the sun and moon have fallen with the rest of the sky and are lying at the bottom of his pool and this makes telling the hours from morning to midnight impossible.
Now: Narcissus is urging him to take some kind of action, the man growing antsy from decades upon decades of sitting motionless by a riverbed. The boy begins as he always has: his hand reaching out to touch where his hair is mirrored back, gasping when it is not stopped by the glassy surface, but rather becomes entangled in the rain slicked strands. He takes a step closer to the sky-shard and shutters when his reflection mimics the action, the tips of their shoes brushing against each other before the boy takes a harried, timid step back.
"Peculiar," he states, his voice clinical as his reflection takes a step toward him, the shard breaking apart under the stress of an emerging body, "it is Zeus who has dominion over the skies, correct Narcissus?" He is whispering now, from fear or excitement he does not know, but Narcissus is strangely silent other than a chuckle and a quirk of cupid-bow lips. His tongue is immense in his mouth and he opens it to pant lightly when his reflection's hand delivers a fleeting stroke to the boy's cheekbones – the same ones the boy is staring at on the man across from him – before returning to brush a chunk of flaxen hair behind the boy's ear. His eyes shut for a moment as his reflection leans forward, it's flushed face
so like his own with their high, high cheekbones and the curve of his lips and the thin lines below their eyes that gather ancient dust and spice before time kisses them away whispering, whispering
coming closer until their noses are pressed against each other so harshly that there is a slight pain, but the boy knows of pain, of pressure, so he is quiet. It bites his lip and the boy's eyes snap open, moss green eyes growing murky as his pupil grows large and dark like fat, black coal. They are nearly symmetrical: nose to nose, toe to toe and the space between them catches the whimpers of the boy and Narcissus stretching, cat-like and sleek in the dying rays of the afternoon sun and his reflection chanting, reciting the epics in a language that the boy does not understand, but knows, in the very meat of him. The only difference between them is a slight crack, like the thin strands of a spider's web, on the reflection's cheek, where a piece of the shard had cracked during it's descent to earth.
He smells of jasmine and hyacinth and green leaves budding on the shaking branches of trees. When his reflection presses his lips, plump with green blood and swirling traces of gold, against the boy's, he tastes of the water-worn stones lying at the bottom of a pond and the rippling image of the moon glowing in a pond and the poisonous bulbs of –
"The fools," Narcissus crowed, "used it medicinally, to treat the sick and hysterical!"
a hand on the back of his head and the lips are hard, hard, hard on his own
It is not so much a kiss as a meeting of skin, the boy leaning in fervently, eyes open and gaping as he stares at his own face, calls out his own name into the sky
"Say it!" Narcissus is screaming now and the boy is screaming and the sky would be crashing down on them again, again if it weren't for the fact that it was already cracked and crushed beneath their feet, "say it!"
as it leads the boy back and pushes him flush against the tree, enveloping him and biting down on the scar on his collarbone.
His mother is laying in the grass and he draws the blood from her wound, small and pulsing and red. It stains the grass and the next day he throws her with the other beast on the pyre.
Lightening is crashing above their heads and illuminates the darkness of his backyard and a girl, old-young and very ugly, is crying. Her mouth is wide and complete and when she bellows at him it is the sudden booming of thunder. "It is forbidden," she says and he is sinking further and further into the mud, nearly knee deep in it now, "for to love one's own reflection is to insult the gods, child." She is writing in the muck now, crude symbols in Latin or Greek or maybe English – maybe. She is nude and there is mud streaking the flat surface of her stomach, her fingers scratching his name across her budding breasts. Her lips are chapped and breaking, brown-blue water pouring out and making trails down her neck until it is obscuring his name.
His reflection is smirking against his neck now and it bites down hard, tearing the boy's shirt from him with a clean tear,
he has burned his imagine into their eyes and they are bowing at his feet like animals as Narcissus begs him to kiss them again, begs him "kiss them until their lips are broken and bleeding that red that the mortals favor so"
but now his skin is rubbing harshly against the too smooth surface of the tree and he is crying out in pain or pleasure or some sick combination of the two. He can't tear his eyes away from his reflection though, can't help arching into it whenever it returns his calls in that voice. From the corner of his eye he can see the grass is stained with red and when he calls out to Narcissus he can not feel the man, the body being folded and compressed so tightly into his own that one would never know, unless they looked down at his ankles, of course.
Lightening crashes again and his reflection is screaming in a primal, naked language that is older than time
slowly the lines on his face deepen.
He is screaming and the girl is screaming and the blood on the grass is stained red, red.
The prophets open their mouths wide and empty and massive like a gash in the earth and somewhere a nymph had lain with a river god, not from love, but necessity – the gods would never allow a mortal such perfect misery.
He is being torn asunder, but as he gazes at his own reflection he can do nothing but arch into the touch and stare up at his own moss green eyes and high, high cheekbones and sigh against the pale column of his own neck, the scar brushing against his lips.
His history is his curse. He sat by the edge of the river, desperate, oh so desperate to embrace the man below him until he withered away from thirst and hunger and a longing for something unattainable. From the ground where he sat in his distress sprung a flower of plain white, pure and simplistic in its natural beauty.
It is forbidden to worship one's own reflection and to do so is to insult the gods. Where the boy had stood the earth is charred and barren.