DEATH IN FOUR ACTS // spring one-shot contest, au

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Fingers in the dirt, the brown gilding the creases of his hands, the kiss of moist wetness with every clod of earth that made contact with his skin, the earth was a glorious thing, its form softened by the warmth, its breath released with the early spring rain, smelling of complex musty rot--it was good earth, good soil and he cupped a handful of it, bringing it to his face as his exhalations mingled with the product of its aspirations. A tender kiss, an intimate moment shared for barely a few seconds before it was broken and the soil was returned to the earth, embracing the pale tulip bulb with its voluptuous curves barely clothed in a the papery brown cover, like silk over a courtesan's thigh.

In a few weeks, good weather willing, they would bloom to a riot of colors in the front lawn, heavy heads swaying to the warm spring breeze. As he covered the bulb with another handful of dirt, he pulled another one out of the bag, removing the newspaper that cradled it gently before scooping out another depression in the dark soil. Another one went in, before he mechanically moved to the next area, and the only interruption to the work was occasionally shuffling on his knees to move to the right as he worked his way down the strip of earth.

As he finished, he knelt there for a few more moments and glanced down the row, noting the areas where the earth had been disturbed, each generally equidistant from each other. On a whim, he reached down with a hand again, picking up a clump of dirt and pressing it between thumb and forefinger, watching the way it crumbled to pieces and smeared brown across the pad of his fingers. Perhaps he was a little bit old to be playing in the dirt, but that was what he was doing right now, he realized, with a chuckle. There was an amused exhale from him as he brushed his hands against each other, shaking off loose soil from his fingers, and then he raised himself onto one knee, as if still a little bit hesitant to leave.

Playing with dirt. It brought back memories of roaming the woods after a rain, their feet splashing in the pools as they wandered through the trails, fingers skimming over the tops of the long grass. In the trees, the moisture seemed to hang in the air, heavy with the incense of damp earth, and they would stand underneath the trees, hoping to catch droplets falling from the branches disturbed by the wind above them, their tongues out to taste the lingering memory of a rainfall a few hours past. A remembrance, twenty years old, but still fresh in his mind as he could still feel dirt-smeared fingers around his own, pulling him onwards deeper into the mists of the forests. Life had been easier then and they did not care about what tomorrow had--all they cared about was that moment and living in the present, no thought of the future.

Of course, those moments couldn't last. Inseparable, they had thought, hands linked in the womb, so must they be linked in life and they lived that way in their youth, never more than a few steps away from each other. But that idyllic thought of life came to an end, as everything came to an end with the gift of forethought as they grew older. They thought of the future. With sober realization, he knew that what they thought was the truth was not likely to be. School, a small school, but still, they were put in different classes, surrounded by children who were unknowing strangers, their faces fleeting like petals clinging to a wet black bough always threatened by the wind that wanted to pull them away out of sight.

Stranger children who wondered at why he preferred to spend every ounce of free time with him when they were allowed to on their own. Best friends? Most of the classmates that they had through the years never thought, until learning their names, that they were twins on account of their differing appearances--while his brother had brown hair and warm brown eyes and was skinny, he himself was black haired with pale eyes and was sturdier--and these differences became more striking as they grew older. Of course, there was the thought that one of them must've been adopted and when he had voiced it, his brother had answered with a laugh saying that the other was probably the adopted one and they had laughed it off and continued on but there was still the thought in his head that they were not brothers which would have made leaving each other so much easier in the future.

The thought of separation became more real on the onset of their senior year in high school. Colleges promised freedom, but to them, they spelled the possible death of what they had. We should apply to the same places, he remembered telling him as they scanned the website, searching for institutes that suited their tastes. They both knew the reason--they should stay together and neither brother wanted to leave the other for some far off alien place, surrounded by strangers whose faces were fleeting, just like the ones before, too. As winter set in that year, the teeth of the cold pressed against their throats, they were sitting in the living room, at their laptops, both ticking the same college off their lists as they sent in their applications, hot cups of cocoa on the table, whisking the air with their decadent aroma.

They'd sent them in and hoped to forget about them until the spring and they spent the winter like what they were living could not end even with the threat of the end looming before them. They had gone back to the same woods they had spent their childhood in and wandered between the trees, their feet crunching through the layer of snow that had fallen the night before, their breaths mist as they rose in the cold clean air, and though they said nothing, both knew that the other was reminiscing when everything had been easier. The silence was absolute, almost heavy, and the air was cold enough to send fire into their lungs, even through the filter of the scarves they wore, and it was only shattered when one of them, he didn't remember if it was him or his brother, grabbed a fistful of snow and shoved it at the other so there, the woods filled with their laughter, empty and hollow because as the year ended, so would this.

When the warmer winds came again, so did the summer storms. Both of them did not have the thought of touring their colleges before they applied, and when they had gotten the results of their applications back on the eve of winter, they had found that they had been accepted to the same place. Plans were made and summer was the time to meet this foreign place, so different from their suburban town. It was the city and though they were no stranger to the city, they had never lived among its gleaming steel towers, monuments to capitalism, or walked as one of its many inhabitants, crowding the gray concrete pavement like the pigeons that flooded the skies above. They'd visited before but the thought of living there was new--a new beginning of their old life, perhaps.

They'd gone together with their parents, followed through on the offered tours, and made the right motions to get through all of it. The family decided to have lunch at a small cafe and while their parents happily drowsed with their coffees, enjoying the warmth of summer, the boys had decided to head out to explore the campus on their own terms without the gaggle of parents and prospective students crowding around them. In their own eagerness, they'd forgotten the umbrellas that they had brought on account of the low gray clouds that threatened rain hanging on the horizon and when the front finally advanced so frighteningly fast, the storm broke over them with flashes of lightning and the roar of thunder and drenched them until their clothing clung to skin and they had stumbled underneath the eaves of one of the college's many libraries to wait it out, panting and gasping and breathless. His brother was a cross country runner and made it there first, he remembered, and he had joined his brother a few more moments behind, black hair drenched and raindrops like tears on his cheeks.

While waiting, they had talked about what they thought of the experience: the classes they were going to take, what they were hoping to major in, the things they wanted to see in the city, the events they wanted to experience--together, hopefully, but that was unspoken between them and was a given in their conversation. Soon, they had exhausted their talk and they stared back out at the falling sheets of rain that blurred out the world in a monochrome amalgam of featurelessness, the only flits of color the pedestrians going by, in and out of their view like all the strangers in the past who went by and didn't matter--apparitions of faces in the crowd. He had resisted the urge to take a few steps out so that he was out from underneath the shelter and raise his head up and open his mouth to catch the raindrops with his tongue, but still then, he wondered if the rain tasted the same as the storms that broke over the forests.

It's not the end of the world. But it was--four years after he had first stepped on the old stones of the university he was now graduated from. It was the end of the era and they both had chosen it so that their paths diverged. Their chosen interests, their majors were different, and they both found what they wanted in different places. Sure, they visited each other often, but it was not the same as when they could see each other whenever they wanted on a daily basis. It's not the end of the world, but it was and they had both known it for the longest time, since they were children playing catch the raindrops in the woods, fingers brushing against the tops of the wet blades of grass and breathing in the humid, earthy air and their feet splashing through the puddles on the ground, never more than a few steps away from the other--always. Being adults meant something else than that existence. Being adults meant independence, others said, but to them, it meant separation.

It wasn't all that bad. Independence wasn't painful and the more he spent time away from his brother, the more he realized he could live without his constant presence in his life. His first interview for an internship he was hoping to secure--the room was so starkly white, he remembered, and the white shirt the interviewer was wearing seemed to blend into the background. He'd survived that, alone, for every weekend after that, he spent a good day or working there--alone. He remembered his first kiss underneath the shade of a spreading Japanese maple on the campus, fingers entwined and their breath mingling for a few moments before they chastely broke it off. There was a certain way the sunlight filtering through the red leaves of the tree had danced on the black hair in a manner that he remembered so distinctly--petals on a wet black bough--and he remembered reaching up to touch it, enjoying the silkiness brushing against his fingers before leaning forward again.

Despite the fact that the distance between them was bigger, he'd moved to the suburbs, sick of the incessant hectic nature of the city, and didn't mind the commute in to his job. The city, after a few years of living there, had become dull and loud. The only colors in that world seemed to be black and white and gray, all varying shades of it, and the air was constantly filled with the humming of a thousand tongues, the shrieking of a thousand cars, and the chatter of a thousand pairs of feet on the hard ground. The perpetual rush was enough to drive him insane. Even the rain wasn't right in the city--every time there was a downpour, it washed the streets of its filth, gray water running into the sewage drains, carrying all the trash of humanity, and the air didn't carry the musty odor of wet soil but the harsh acrid stench of something else. Here, at least, it was quiet and life was slow and easy-going and casual and he could at least see something green. As he slid into this life, he found himself enjoying the solitude, though there was still a quiet part of him that longed for the halcyon days of his youth, when life had been easy and good and it was only him and his brother that mattered.

What pulled him out from the clear waters of the past was the sensation of rain on his bare arm. How long had he knelt there? He glanced up at the sky and realized that it was grayed over, such a shocking difference from the clear blue he remembered when he had first headed outside with his bag of chilled tulip bulbs that he had fetched from the refrigerator. It's cold. The raindrop was soon joined by another but he didn't move to find shelter, even as the dull rumble of thunder sounded from the horizon, instead staying outside as he felt the gentle tapping against his shoulders, the rain beginning to soak his shirt. He turned his palm up so that it faced the sky and the rain washed away the smears and creases of dirt on his hands as he stood there, exposed to the elements. The rain fell--stirring memory and desire--and the next crackle of thunder reminded him that it was cold and lonely standing outside in the rain.

// quotations are taken from the Waste Land, by TS Eliot and in text refernces to In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound
// this is the first draft and there might be some errors since i typed it super late rip
// wordcount -- 2519