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Mais tu ne dois pas l'oublier. Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé. _________ Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

The Eckerd College campus, with its vaguely Brutalist attempt to conjure up Floridian dreams of a sci-fi Atlantis, is tucked in an out-of-the-way turn facing the water in Saint Pete, but even there the stars are obscured by the febrile skyglow that covers Tampa Bay - a shroud, a delirium, impenetrable and obscuring. Stephen Lightfoot stood under it, watching, waiting for the acid to kick in. He'd driven the brand new Escalade his Pa had bought him all the way down here to Eckerd, to Florida, a crawling gargantuan behemoth of a vehicle that swallowed him when he sat inside it - as he was driving, sometimes, in the gaps between towns in the big mountain country of North Carolina, and where the wiregrass and pines started to rise in Georgia, on down to the state line in that vast, wasteland-expanse between Tallahassee and Jacksonville, he saw skies that reminded him of West Virginia...of home. But here, the satiny velvet of urban photopollution mixed with the clouds, and only a few stars remained. Somewhere in the far distance he could hear people laughing - a dog barking, and his heart felt the familiar chill as he could make out the phonemes of its language, translating them in his head. His head was full of haints - even far away from where haints lived. But in Florida, in Tampa, there were still pieces of West Virginia left - what he had been chasing, why and how he ended up here. A lifetime ago - three weeks, something like that - Bligh, the second-most important person in Stephen's life, had told Stephen to keep quiet about what he planned to do. It was desperate and reckless and a little crazy: Bligh was going to drive down to Tampa and lay out all the cards on all the tables and tell Drewseph - Andrew, Stephen's brother, whatever - the truth: that he loved him, he had always loved him, those twenty years of blood-brotherhood could mean something and they_could mean something, Bligh and Drewseph and Drewseph's boyfriend, Dakota. Bligh told Stephen to keep quiet, so Stephen did - because Stephen loved Bligh, they used to be together, boyfriends, passionate and a little gross, but Stephen being Stephen he knew that Bligh wanted his brother, _the one that got away like one of his fishing stories, most of all...and he, Stephen, was not about to be a silver medal or, worse, payload for someone else's drama-bomb. About a year and a half ago, he broke it off, he shut down he and Bligh dating - but they remained friends, best friends, enough for Bligh to tell Stephen to keep his grandfather's death, his despair of their hometown, and his stupid, desperate plan all a secret. So Stephen did - but he kept a secret, secrets, of his own. Earlier that evening he, his roommate Nathan Vela, and Nathan's girlfriend Tanesha Freeman all had dinner at a barbecue place out near - somewhere - Stephen couldn't remember, he was numb and blank but comfortable from the Xanax, and really it didn't matter, the food wasn't that good, even with him being wasted like he was. Tanesha had invited him because they'd been studying together near what the Eckerd Campus called South Beach, reading Mencius for their Autumn Term class, and he had told a joke at Nathan's expense behind his back - how he stayed up late getting high all the time and looked terrible, goddam, the TSA gonna check them bags under his eyes! At first he thought he had accidentally offended Tanesha talking about her boyfriend like that - a hesitance, a strange expression - but then she burst out laughing. "You're so smart, Stevie - and funny. You always seem to be! It's great." And she flicked those enormous brown eyes with a gentle admonition: "A mean kind of funny." And she giggled. "But what's barbeque--" Now she rose, with a grand gesture, facing blue-shimmering Frenchman Creek as it flowed into Tampa Bay, her back turned to him, perfect brown hair spilling down sculpted goddess-shoulders. "--without pepper?" And another grand gesture, she spun to look back at him with a gracious smile, which he returned sheepishly. She was beautiful with her long curly hair that fell past her shoulders, the oval face with the ever-smiling mouth, her tolerance of him as a strange little Hillbilly creep...but she was dating Nathan, who didn't deserve her, like it mattered, Stephen was more into guys, the taste of Bligh never left him and he still wanted to be some guy's bitch, he wanted to get knocked around, punched in the jaw and owned, by someone older, someone like Bligh or - his - brother... Back there he was staring at the sky - he caught his breath at his thoughts, smashed them back into his subconscious, they were too weird to exist. ...then again, everything about him was fucking weird but, hey - what of it? Like Lovecraft said in the only story of his Stephen could stand, queerer prejudices than this. Stephen had let a respectful silence hang between he and Tanesha as the Sun glittered aquamarine in the waters before them: "What exactly are you saying?" "Barbecue," Tanesha answered, as though it was obvious. "Do you like barbeque?" "It's alright." "Well I love it." "I'll remember that," Stephen said. "We're getting to know each other better." He smiled his demure smile. "Getting to know yooou!" she sang, before cracking up. "Show your tits, Anna," Stephen teased, in his languid, only half-serious way, inducting Tanesha fully to his cruel sense of humor. "Topless scene, shake them milkbags, make that problematic imperialist shit ready for the Twenty-First Century." "Oh them Siamese better make it rain!" Tanesha tugged on her shirt just enough to show paler flesh that the Sun had not darkened - they laughed together. "Anyway--" she went on, catching a breath. "There's a place not far from here we should try - you, me, Nathan." "Why me too?" "You're his roomie, silly!" She beamed. "And - I feel like we're friends, already!" Stephen wanted to answer - some way to thank her for being so kind, and actually mean it, because so few people had been kind to him his whole fucking life, but...she thrust Mencius around her arm and beckoned with her hand. "Then let's go, you Spicy!" The beckoning hand now pointed to the book. "I'm done with this dude." "Me too," Stephen had said, and then, as they began to walk: "It's all Chinese to me!" Tanesha threw back her head in laughter, pinching his cheek, jerking his face into a genuine, happy grin... That was earlier - a brief moment of connecting with someone followed by a whole dinner of disconnecting, disassociating, being inside himself and not letting anyone in, pretending the food was decent and the conversation not dull. At least - this way, he could quiet the haints that lived inside his head. But whether he liked it or not he was a magnet for morbid conversation and before they could decide on whether the Key lime pie was worth getting the talk turned to how the world would end - climate change, deforestation, mass extinction, all the issues the panicked environmentalists of the Eckerd faculty, which was to say every last one of them, breathlessly parroted to the incoming freshmen. It was this that roused Stephen from his waking torpor enough to quote that Frost poem that all three of them had read at one time or another: "Some say the world will end in fire - some, say in ice - from what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire--" There passed a moment of profundity, a closeness between the three of them that he, Stephen, almost instinctually had to ruin. "Fire," he repeated. "Get North Korea on the phone, I'm ready to fry."

Nathan and Tanesha had exchanged significant looks. Tanesha went first: "Uhh - hey Spicy, you know Tampa's a nuclear target, right?" "Do what now?" "Because of McDill--" Nathan muttered with that oddly deep baritone voice of his. "McWhat?" "McDill," Nathan repeated. "The air force base." He glanced to Tanesha again, back to Stephen. "That's where my dad works, he's - staff sergeant--" "Huh," Stephen had said back, shifting in his seat. "That's, uh, that's - kinda fucked up--" He smiled bitterly at him. "Hope Obama don't slip up, huh?" As much as he enjoyed making Nathan uncomfortable - they'd barely known each other but Stephen had decided he reminded him too much of all the taller, handsomer boys that used to bully him once his brother moved away and Bligh graduated - he was slowly getting cottonmouth from something he had taken earlier, and he leapt at his glass of tea in a seizing, jerking motion to go headfirst slurping it up. His roommate was properly startled like Stephen knew he would be, but he heard Tanesha let out a surprised laugh that was close to being embarrassed, yet before either of them could comment on his behavior he slammed the plastic cup down on the table with a fresh mouthful of ice, and then, slurring: "Funny - uh, not funny, kinda fucked up, but - where I'm from is a nuke target, too - Greenbrier, the hotel, yanno, s'where the Presidents hide when there's an attack? Yeah - like thirty minutes from my house." "Damn dude," Nathan offered. "Glad you're in Florida!" Tanesha said with a kind smile. Stephen tried to smile back - but then, he heard it: What's that?! Can't see what that is! Don't like it, don't like it! He knew what it was and he froze, uncomfortable, staring down at his tea as though it were suddenly the most interesting thing in the world. "Hey, you okay, Spicy?" he heard Tanesha say, with a tap on his wrist. "Look like you seen a ghost--" "Uh--" From behind him a middle-aged woman was scolding her dog: "Lucy, stop that! Quit barking, there's nothing there!" Something there! Something really there! Doesn't smell right! "Damn, wish that dog'd shut up--" Tanesha glared at him. "Nathan, hush!" "I'm just saying--" "It's a dog-friendly restaurant," Tanesha hissed. "She can be here, she's not hurting anybody!" The dog kept up its barking staccato, her owner starting to scold her even harder - finally, Stephen decided his companions' irritation was ruining what had been a nice, mild night. It was time to make use of his deepest, most lethal secret: "Hey - hey, dog," he called out, his eyes trained on his two friends, never turning around. "Ain't nuthin over there, darlin. You can relax, okay?" The loud, harsh barking stopped, replaced with a low series of final growls. _ Well - if you say so - still don't smell right_... Now - Stephen tried to tune out the requisite serious of confused whines that came, he knew, from being understood, really understood for the first time: _ Wait! You - can - hear - me?!_ Stephen said nothing back, stirring the ice in his glass, smashed in with a sudden disquiet that he shouldn't have done what he just did - he was consumed with a hideous notion the dog's owner would come and thank him or ask him how he did it, or something that would draw even more attention to him than he already had. He waited for several excruciating seconds before the dog, Lucy, eventually gave up, she and her owner probably thinking the whole thing was a fluke - though Stephen couldn't see it he was sure she was resting her head between her paws, waiting for her owner to sneak some food. Now Stephen relaxed, but still without turning around, drink still in hand, he murmured to Tanesha, whose mouth was now agape in frank amazement: "Was that a foxhound?" Now Tanesha glanced, still dumbstruck by what had just happened, as though to make sure. "Yeaaah? Yeah! I think so?" She laughed. "How - how did you know and how - did you do that?" Stephen hardened his mouth shrugging: "Just, um, a talent - living in - uh, West Virginia, you - you know dogs pretty good." He flashed a humble smile, letting the thunderous irony of his words get lost on the two Florida natives across the table from him. "That is fucking amazing!" Tanesha said. "Spicy - you are fucking amazing,." Stephen was caught off-guard by the compliment, chortling in his glass. "Thanks - I know." Nathan, who seemed to despise not being the center of his girlfriend's constant attention, changed the subject: "Yo, so do you miss where you're from?" "Whattya mean?" "You moved here - to Florida--" "Yeah," Tanesha added, "I've never met someone from West Virginia." "Wait, so, y'all are asking--" Stephen took another sip of tea. "If Florida - makes me miss West Virginia?" "Yeah, like, me and Nate, we're from here," Tanesha said. "But where you're from - it's a lot different, right?" "It's..." Stephen let his answer trail off into nothing. Florida was different from West Virginia, the palm trees and the salty tang that rode in on the seabreeze over the endless flatness of the land - but it was all too new for him, the transition too jarring, the sights and the feelings and the smells altogether too much, a sensory overload, for him to yet compare where he was from to where he was now.

It crept in, slowly, slowly yet. "I mean - sometimes I get - a little homesick, but--"

He didn't want to tell them, he didn't want to say much more, about the small, inscrutable things he missed, like the way he stank of Reds after hanging out with Bligh, or how there were any only crickets, endless swirls of crickets, no jarflies, no katydids...

"You're bro's here, right?" Nathan asked. "Heard you say that." "He's in Tampa, yeah." "So it's not that bad," Tanesha said. "Well, uh, that's the thing--" His eyes darted from Tanesha, to Nathan, to the table. "He doesn't know I moved to Florida." He smiled his demure smile. "He doesn't know - I'm at Eckerd - like a half-hour away from him." "Holy shit, what?" Nathan balked. Tanesha gaped at him, hitting him in the arm. "Are you serious? You haven't told him?" "Nope." "But he lives in Tampa!" she exclaimed. This, this was the secret - the hot, burning secret that branded Stephen's heart, the secret of his own that he had told no one, not a soul about, until now, because now it was far too late for anyone involved to do anything about it. And yet - he had shared it so casually, the same offhanded way that Nathan talked about his uncle overdosing in his Cutlass or how Tanesha's sister, Trina, had to raise her baby with her parents because her ex-boyfriend had tried to kill her: the shocks of growing up and having your innocence forcefully drained from you, each person has it, never talks about it, but as college freshmen, with that instant intimacy foisted upon them, oversharing seemed so natural...shadows, to haunt behind the exquisiteness of Eckerd's youth. "Wait, wait--" Nathan cut in. "Like, hold on, wouldn't your parents--" "Tell him? Nah, see, he ain't have social media anymore, and uh--" Stephen chortled again, a little darkly, the humor of the situation unavoidable. "My folks pretty much hate him." "Oh, shit," Nathan said. "It's true," said Stephen. "Pa always, like - he never, uh--" He found himself searching for words in his half-drugged haze. "He pretty much just tolerated_my brother, okay, but then after he came out as bi or whatever and had his boyfriend move in, my Pa was like--" He made a flinging motion with his arms. "That was that." "Damn," Tanesha added, recoiling. "_Damn." "Pretty sure he knows about me being bi, yanno--" Stephen continued. "But he - just doesn't care, cuz--" He rolled his eyes, sighing. "I'm the favorite." "That's crazy, dude," Nathan added. "Yeah but I - I ain't talked to him - um, my brother, I mean - since my birthday, actually, in February - and since he don't have Snapchat, Instagram..." He left the sentence unfinished with another demure smile, to let it linger for the other two. "I thought my family was fucked up," Tanesha said with a cautious laugh. Stephen shrugged. "I mean, but like, they were cool with me moving to Florida, too, cuz uh, Pa is cool with whatever I do, yanno?" He paused: an uncomfortable, painful realization hit him, fully-formed, all at once. "But - I think my Mama - was really okay with it, without - telling Pa, cuz--" "She'd thought you'd talk to your brother in Tampa." Stephen wasn't sure who said it - the thought so deeply pressed upon him he lost the narrative of the night right after that, he quit talking for the most part except the small little unseemly jokes Tanesha loved him for, forkfuls of Key lime pie between the three of them... ...the whole time, unable to concentrate at all, thinking too painfully on what one of them, whichever one it was, had said. Bligh had, the last time they were together in person, at the funeral of Bligh's grandfather - Pappy, everyone called him - been under the assumption that he was still going to be a Hokie down in Blacksburg, and this fast one he was going to pull on them was meant to be, like Bligh's plan, a hoodwink so complete that the shock was meant to affect a huge change... ...making them a family again. But what if it did really, actually, holy shit do that? Do just that? Bring Drewseph back within talking distance of at least their Mama, if never their Pa ever again? That - all of that, all the stuff he'd have to think about later - was only a few hours ago. Now he was here, staring up at the sky. He was thinking about his brother. Drewseph - Andrew - was the one, the only one, who really understood how his head was full of haints, how he seemed to dwell in another world of beasts outside the dim pale of everyone else...how, on the patio of a barbecue restaurant, he could hear a dog utter words only he could hear. He'd kissed his brother's cheek, the last person to tell him bye, the day he moved to Florida, the least fucking thing he could do - because, that same year, weeks before, Drewseph had ruined his own senior prom to stay with him when his own dog, Walker, the Beagle that had been with him since he was a year old, breathed his last and died. He reached for Walker's tooth, bound in silver, dangling at his heart on the necklace he always wore and never took off. Walker had been everything to him - the only thing he talked to until he was nine years old, because it was Walker, not humans, who made him understand the basic phonemes of speech. _ _ And so he remembered, because he thought of it every day, the last words of the dog who taught him how to talk: _ Brother, Brother, never let me go, Brother - never let me go._ He never did. None of his brothers - not Walker, not Drewseph. He loved Drewseph, desperately, incestuously, he could not help how he felt because he felt that way so fragilely about anyone, anyone at all, who was as nice to him as his brother was - as Bligh was - maybe, though he would never consider it, as Tanesha was. And because of this he wanted to tell Drewseph the secret that he kept for himself, and the secret that he kept for Bligh - he wanted to show them both the secrets he kept from everyone, the weird, frightening things he wouldn't dare tell anybody else, how he wasn't just making stuff up as a kid when he said he could talk to dogs, or how... ...Stephen shook his head. No, not now - they'd see that in person. It wasn't the time for any of this, he'd have to wait, he'd have to pause and think and go over everything that happened before, during, after today. He'd have to pay attention to things his brother used to tell him, for his own good, or what he felt was his own good, all those years ago. Because Drewseph said - Drewseph said a lot of things, they are were all wise, they all had this cartouche around them because they were meant to be the final words on something, whatever it was - Drewseph said that he, Stephen, Little Stevie who was now Grown Drunk Angry Stevie, did not fully understand what it meant to have their last name, what it meant to be a Lightfoot.

There was such a disgust in the way he said it, too, like they were all diseased, or deformed, a single glance at them and oh, the horror, the shudders. And here - here, Drewseph should have known, should have taken more care with his words and known that Little Stevie knew exactly what it was to be a Lightfoot, what it meant to have their last name.

Under the Tampa sky, so close to raging at the heavens - shirtless, just like Bligh, his surrogate dad, his greatest lover, always used to be. They'd all see his scrawny, bony body, they'd see West Virginia in Florida even if they'd never seen the Milky Way, they'd see his centuries of Virginian aristocratic inbreeding in pale but erstwhile imitation of the Habsburgs, his body that was wracked with seizures and that convulsed with asthma and creaked with autism all his life that he only recently outgrew, save for the last one, just in time to have they who were basically his parents leave him behind.

Being a Lightfoot was suffering under the years, the history that preceded them...being a Lightfoot was heavy, their heads, wearing imaginary crowns. That was how Drewseph felt, without ever knowing - not yet, not yet - how much Stephen knew it to be true, the last of them, the final patrilineal descendant into Hell, the one who talked to dogs, the one who could never... ...he stopped the thought before it could finish. He shut his eyes. He was bigger, he had to tell himself, he was bigger than the puny, scrawny, pallid boy's body he was born into - he was bigger than the freak who only talked to dogs and had dogs talk to him...he was bigger than being just Bligh's ex, than being just Andrew Lightfoot's little brother. He opened his eyes. The looming city far away shook in his sight, it expanded, up, upward, excelsior, until it was a city in the clouds, the red and blue and white and yellow lights replacing the stars in the sky, a dream, a terror. He blinked. The city was back to normal - he smiled to himself, pleased with the trickery of the acid on his tired brain. Stephen felt - a certainty, not a certainty of dread, or resolve, just, simply - a certainty. He was meant to be here, he didn't have a choice - and that was the best thing for him, right then, right now. His head was full of haints, but tonight, tonight of all nights, he realized he could learn to dwell with them, not against them. For a moment - a tearing, a ripping, an allotment of selfishness that, as much as he demanded of the world, still hurt him to make - he gritted his teeth, he sighed, harsh, an arrow into the pleasant breeze. He wanted his brother back - he wanted Bligh back - he did not want to be far from them, not anymore, he wanted to be a family again, if not in West Virginia then here, now, Florida. They would understood him - the boy who really could talk to dogs - the boy who... ...who couldn't ever die, no matter how hard he tried... They would understood him, when he knew that Nathan, Tanesha, anyone at Eckerd never could, never would - and maybe then he wouldn't have to take so many drugs, he wouldn't have to act so demure and so guarded, he wouldn't have to feel so alone in a crowded room. Maybe. The skyglow, the clouds, they obscured the stars above him - they hid the future. From somewhere nearby he heard Nathan and Tanesha approach him. His jaw went slack and he sighed again, quieter now - he turned to them and smiled his sly, cruel smile, the one that hid the truth, the one that made them think he was still in control. "Y'all ready?" he slurred. "Somebody mentioned a party tonight, right? Am I - like, just now remembering that?" "Yo!" Tanesha called out. "I'm ready as fuck! Let's do some shots!" "Shots!" Nathan agreed, jumping. "Buddy of mine got some good shit in Omega, let's go." "That sounds amazing," Tanesha said. "You coming, Spicy?" "Catch up in a moment, y'all--" Stephen said, the smile never revealing a thing. Tanesha and Nathan joined hands and strolled off toward the Omega dorm, leaving Stephen alone once more. Now - now Stephen would need to borrow the words of others for this: how his pain was sharp, that he wanted a better world for nobody, and that, in fact, should the end come, fire or ice, flash and heat or dazzle and obliteration, as long as he and his big brother and Bligh and that boyfriend of his big brother's too...as long he, and they, were okay, everybody else could fucking fry or fucking freeze, he didn't care. But, just like the quote he wanted to use, the confession itself meant nothing. It was the beginning of August and even shirtless he was sweltering in the heat, but from whence he was born the seasons would judder and rustle and move and things would change, change profoundly. Even in Florida where there are no seasons, he could feel things aching, things inside his head he could faintly detect but which he had no words for. The lights of Tampa blinked drunkenly - like he was about to be - in the distance...in that distance was Drewseph, Bligh, in the distance was his family, so close and yet so far. Would Bligh succeed with his plan, the one he swore Stephen to absolute secrecy about? If he didn't - then he, Stephen, the spare to Drewseph's heir, would act, he would bring them all together, it didn't matter if it was West Virginia or Florida or Confucian China, they were meant to be together - even that kid, Dakota, Stephen felt it, somehow he felt it, even when he didn't understand it. "I'm coming for you, Brother," he whispered - to the skyline, to the skyglow, as if it could hear, as if it could listen. "We'll be a family again." It felt like all the stars in the obscured Florida sky were staring right at him, and in the moment he felt important, infinite - but then, so like he was for ruining moments, he turned and sprinted back to rejoin his friends.