In these non-linear memories, I remember us running to the water’s edge. I’m trying to find you Billy. What city are you in, what continent? Forever indulging in the luxury of being away from me. Nathaniel has come because he has nowhere else to go. He’s a wanderer, much like my brother though he hardly possesses the same opulence. He arrived on my doorstep with $9 and a Greyhound ticket stub, clothes reeking and bottomless brown eyes full of the unknown. As we attempt to beat the burning sunrise to the ocean, Nathaniel begs for me to quiet the war inside, digs white-tipped fingers into the sand to find the happy center of the universe. It’s a race against time and nature, both of us wrapped tighter than any gift Billy has ever given me. Soft winds and foam spit on his shoreline. I hold him hostage against tiny pieces of glass. I can’t breathe, as deep as he’s pushing, stealing air from his wilted insides, seconds before I suffocate. I demand he find the places inside me I’ve kept hidden all this time, an exorcism to rid me of memories and need. This beach has given me the answer to Nathaniel’s puzzle: exhibitionism. I solve him and discard the spent rubber coating to a cheap clock ticking in his second-hand heart—moans instead of words, the dull ache of desire, the bone marrow, deep longing to die in the wake, the clenching of fists, the sweat in the eyes, the sure smoldering remainder of ashes in the wake. We litter our grainy stage with cigarette butts as heathens in heaven’s face, the slow sear of cyanide when I inhale like embers in the night, the shallow inflation of the lungs, grasping for clean air, but finding none; Only Nathaniel’s scent, which I attack and devour—a sick girl sucking her sick boy dry. We exhale chemical mixed afterglows of carbon monoxide, letting it fall over our skin like a velvet curtain at the end of a school play. This cancer tastes like romance and the color red—like meat, menstruation and him. The sun rises and casts its voyeuristic eye on the planet; painting the water like one of those layered snow cones: strawberry, blue coconut and grape, from left to right. You can watch me from an airplane, brother. I hate the word periwinkle, but it’s the word for the horizon and the same color as the bra I was wearing before our frenzy. Yellowed fingertips trail down his thin ribs that stand witness to the slow deterioration of this heat and my heart. It started the day you left me to myself, to our mother, with no one at all. The clouds are huge cotton candy spools that resemble his hair; they mutate from their soft blue-grey to an awakened early-morning, baby’s tongue pink, shaken from their night-time shells by the vigor of 6 a.m. Nathaniel and I dance and touch beneath skies the color of hollowed out cheeks and make enemies with our time apart. He won’t orphan me as you have, Billy. I don’t need you anymore.

To read Part V, see Billy – Part V