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Forty-seven
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House of Sighs Forty-six
FORTY-SIXThe ferry.Some of the people around Aiden stood, some sat, but all watched the water and the fish snatching low-flying dragonflies from the air. They swam amid the bags, those plastic river ghosts. Next to him a boy wore headphones; the two of them swayed with the ebb and flow of the Chao Phraya’s current. Aiden broke down against this young man’s shoulder, buckling, despite this being his weight to carry. After all, Bangkok hadn’t called to Aiden alone, though it may have seemed that way at first. Aiden came to Thailand for his boyfriend.Even after all he’s done, I still love the bastard.What a crime it is to think Danny’s worth saving. Well, fuck me then. Fuck it all.No stop, mate. Thinking that way will do you in, too.The boy with the headphones was, of course, awkward about Aiden’s tears but relented. He patted the older man’s arm, kind and tender and non-judgmental. In English, the boy lied and said everything would be okay. “Tell me what is wrong.”They drew
House of Sighs PART ONE - Forty-five
PART ONEFORTY-FIVEDecember 29, 2017The taxi screeched into a U-turn as today teetered into tomorrow, slowing at the last possible second. It mounted the curb in a scrape of metal against cement. The two men in the pub’s open bar across the street glanced up from the matching pints of ale they were downing.Neither Aiden nor Danny realized how drunk he was until they leapt from their stools. The small Australian city spun around them.“Woah. What’s going on over there, you reckon?” Aiden said.“No idea, babe.”It was unusual for them to have imbibed quite so much—they were lightweights, after all. Hangovers in your early forties were harder to wrestle than those in your early twenties. “But it’s Christmas,” they said, a free-for-all excuse if there ever was one. They didn’t have to show their faces at their respective workplaces until after the New Year shutdown period. As far as they were concerned, whatever hangovers
House of Sighs Forty-four
FORTY-FOURFebruary 30, 2018“You okay in there?” called Sue, the receptionist, over torrents of pounding rain.Her voice filtered from the door leading to the men’s bathroom. Danny didn’t think she would come any further but she did. He lifted his head from the toilet bowl, listening to her tip-toe approach, reminded then of the billy goats Gruff in the old tale from his childhood, as one by one, they journeyed up the hillside to make themselves fat, disrupting a troll in the process. Clip-clop. Clip-clop. Clip-clop. Who’s that trapping over my bridge?“I’m f-f-f-fine,” he said.Only Danny wasn’t fine. Sue’s shoes emerged under his door; flats, sensible and comfortable looking. Perfume crept into the cubicle with him. Such a foreign smell in this place.“Maybe it was too soon to come back to work, Danny.”He shifted around to sit on the porcelain seat, face in hands that refused to stop shaking. Danny contemplated using one of the mindfulness apps on his phone, breathing prompt
House of Sighs Forty-three
FORTY-THREEThey were in bed together that afternoon, still wearing their work shirts, trousers intertwined on the carpet. Aiden spooned Danny this time. He exhaled, soft tummy pressing against his partner’s spine. Summer sun on his back from the window as he studied the rear of Danny’s head—heat from behind, chill in front—wondering what it must be like to exist within it.That thought retreated, a little afraid.Squeezed. “Endolphins,” Aiden said, coy and cutesy. Their old joke. A play on endorphins, the rush their touch once evoked. No laugh this time.A thick sludge of hush.“I’ve got something to tell you,” Aiden said. Lips against Danny’s neck now, stubble scratching skin. “Well, something I want to run by you, more like it.”“Y-yeah?”“I’ve been offered a posting. An embassy consulate position.”“O-o-o-okay.”Danny’s stutter was awful today. He hated seeing him trip over words that used to come with ease. It was hard to listen to and even harder to watch, sentences turn
House of Sighs Forty-two
FORTY-TWOApril 2, 2018A cloudless day. Towns resembled spilled salt on a checkered tablecloth of green and ochre. It was beautiful down there through the Boeing’s window, and it didn’t seem real, and as they flew over the gulf into the great wide blue, it was soon all of it gone.The journey to Thailand began, fates sealed air-tight as their breaths within the plane.Spilled salt, as Aiden’s mother used to say, brought with it bad luck. Later, when their lives came unsewn, he would hate himself for not heeding such warnings sooner.Aiden flicked through the old movies on offer, settling on It’s A Wonderful Life. He’d never seen it before and didn’t realize it was a Christmas story until it began. He sat through the whole thing though, almost in defiance. It was an okay flick, sentimental and very, very white. He did, however, enjoy the scene where Jimmy Stewart offered to lasso the moon for the girl he was crushing on, the ultimate gift. Yeah, that made him smile. Given the chan
House of Sighs PART TWO - Forty-one
FORTY-ONEJune 1, 2018Baskets of fruit and meat in the hulls of canoes, manned by proprietors tapping wares with fresh Baht notes, shouted, ‘First sale of the day!’ They did this because tried-and-maybe-true tradition implied it brought good luck. In places like these, where the skillful prospered and the lazy went hungry, good luck was a currency that mattered.Men and women, buyers and sellers both, contorted themselves to reach for that perfect durian, to shoo away flies. Tourists laid down their earnings after a volley of intense and often inappropriate bartering. Back, forth, back, forth, relent, feast.This was Damnoen Saduak, the famous floating market west of Bangkok, a spattering of colors spanning the river’s girth from bank to bank.Or to be more precise, this was a photograph of those markets, one clipped and mounted within a nice bamboo frame, purchased by the Australian government with taxpayer coin. The remnants of the price tag could
House of Sighs Forty
FORTYDanny marched through Bangkok’s crooked street-veins like a bubble of oxygen seeking out a heart to stop, listening to a playlist on his phone as he went. He wasn’t moved by what he saw and gained pleasure only in those moments when the world tripped into rhythm with one of his songs. These little synchronicities turned everything Technicolor. Streets came to life, clouds parted. Now there were smiles on the faces passing him by, food smells that cut through the humid sewer fog.These moments didn’t last.Either the world shrugged off the song or the song shrugged off the world, and then all that Technicolor bled to black and white again, leaving Danny to settle into his strides and walk those uneven streets alone, dodging cars and tuk-tuks, sky spitting. He didn’t know where he was going or why he’d left the apartment in the first place. He never did.Dogs scurried between buildings, each minute of their lives spent fearful of beatings. Food scraps everywhere. Meat-stripped
House of Sighs Thirty-nine
THIRTY-NINEAiden came home to find their apartment empty. This would happen many times over in the months to come.“Babe?”A faint echo off the walls.The dial tone as he called, and called, and called.Aiden sat on the edge of the bed he shared with a man he’d dragged across the world because he thought ‘getting away’ might be healing. Sure, healing may very well be a part of what was happening here, but he couldn’t help questioning why it had to hurt so damn much along the way.Danny’s suit was laid out on the mattress, a shadow freed of its master.
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