The Rainbow Connection

Now, Jack swears he’s straight, but five years of isolation in a post-apocalyptic world can really change a man. Perhaps it was five years. Jack stopped counting after two weeks.  What importance was time any more, when the luscious natural world had overflowed man's archaic inventions, turning the Earth into one big dump.  The picture was really the most hilarious joke Jack had ever heard. No surprise there, for Nature itself was telling it. 

Jack ate his daily breakfast at sunrise sprawled out on a tattered picnic blanket in Summerset Park, decked out in an old school girl's skirt and his old boy's polo shirt—neither of which fit right—both of which felt right.  This particular morning had marked a special day for Jack; he decided it should be his birthday.

“Sun." He announced to the sun. "It’s my birthday today.” And his eyes watered up.

Jack took out a tupperware container with one side melted off.  He extracted a slice of moldy chocolate cake and devoured it, throwing the tupperware to nearby pigeons.  The animals remained practically unaffected by the disappearance of the humans.  The proportions were thrown off, sure, and many of the most common species during the time of man went extinct, but that did not really matter. Many animals could still be found to exist, like squirrels.  The plant situation was very different.  Overgrown roots overcrowded fields and streets.  Trees stretched their limbs into houses; and flowers, more numerous and more diverse than ever before, covered the ground like colorful specks on a grass blanket.

"Sun, where are the people?"

Jack blushed at such a ridiculous question. Squirrel and Leaf and Centipede never took his questions seriously, but Sun never judged him like the others. He listened with overbearing attention, with a reserved stance that showed respect and interest.  After a moment of awkward silence between the two, Jack finally broke it and said:

“I do not miss humans. What was there to miss? We must have been no more than nothing, for all that's left of us is ethereal, dreamlike matter floating in my memories. Would we have Daffodilians if they still existed? Or Lillipeds? No, Sun, there are too many beautiful wonders of this world that would not exist if humanity's meddling got in the way. We must have been terrible…I was not one, Sun… not like the others… for look at me now, how can I be like them if I am here now, alone, and they, elsewhere, together?”

Jack continued his incessant rambling, and Sun continued listening intently.  Overhearing the conversation, Pigeon fled from the scene, and Wind took Leaf away. His thoughts were too languid for them. Pigeon stole some crumbs of choco-cake before he left.

"All people seemed to do back then was talk to each other.  And all they talked about seemed to be about each other.  But, now, all I can remember is petty actions. One time, I don't remember who I was with, but I was staying in the park well past the gates closed. And it's a shame I can't remember who else hid behind the maintenance shack with me, because we really did have a nice time. Who were they, Sun? You must have seen us before the Moon took your place… You cannot tell me anything. You can only look.  You are the opposite of humans, which could not look at anything, and could only tell. It is rather ironic… My family knew I was at the park… one of them cared, but another one did not want any of them to care, so none of them ended up caring about it all that much.  I was received the next morning at the breakfast table as always, as if what I had done the day before belonged to a different person, a different time…"

---

Jack met Ryan days before his ump-teenth birthday.  Ryan was dead, Jack knew that, but a video existed of him alive.  On the day before the power went out, Jack found said video—which struck him as so important that he must hold onto it. Nervous that the digital world would soon corrode itself into oblivion, he downloaded it onto a USB drive and carried around a stack of fully-charged computers with him whose batteries would last him many, many lifetimes. The video lasted six minutes and forty-three seconds, but what importance was time any more? The video was found while Jack scrolled through PornHub on the day before the power went out.  Through thousands of useless videos he came across one entitled, “Very real, twink, to Jack.” He clicked on it with urgency bubbling in his fingertips. 

Ryan's bed took up most of the camera's frame, which was positioned horizontal to and slightly higher than the mattress. In a mid-shot, the man whose video was under the username Ryan lay, showing off his abs and testing the lining in his jockstrap.  Jack immediately felt weird, because he had never ever watched the gay media which worshiped the intricacies of the male physique. But it was the way Ryan was looking into the camera—harshly and suggestively—which suggested a new type of sexuality altogether.

“Gorgeous.” Ryan called him, flexing his weak excuse for a bicep.  He was an amateur, obviously, but he had a nice enough body.  Should Jack have investigated the man's history, he may have found that the man's primary preoccupation was working out in his sublet apartment kept in rotten condition, hiding his personal life from anyone remotely affiliated with him, and scrolling through unfulfilled ego's in his mind's eye before exhausting himself to sleep. The thought did cross Jack once that such a person may have existed. But, what importance did that have? Ryan's desperation was more endearing than embarrassing. He paused for a second to look at the camera, almost as if he was listening to someone.  “Of course I know your name, Josh.”  Should Josh have watched more of this username's Ryan's videos, he would have found that Ryan kept a regular series of posts in which he referred to random men's names as he danced his globs of flesh back-and-forth.  Then, Ryan put his face in front of the camera and spoke directly to the camera.  His juicy lips bounced as he spoke.  HIs eyes fluttered and glistened.  He spoke with various moans and whispers inserted to his speech, creating something choreographed yet enticing. “...Spark…”

The attraction began simply out of curiosity—there was no conscious sexual desire.  Hearing Ryan speak to him in such a personal way felt reassuring that he wasn’t alone.  Whenever the trees whispered their existential crises or the clouds lamented on their continual suicide, Josh opened up that video of Ryan and watched it for hours.  One day, when he got stuck inside a treehouse because of the flooding from the third hurricane, he randomly got a boner, just thinking about it.  He was so frightened that he jumped backwards and fell into the river below.  After that, he never told anyone of the boner. He termed it a freak accident.

But it happened again.  Seven times.

---

“Sun, man, I was straight. There's something in the way that man looks at me. My feelings of disgust mix with my feelings of pity to create a weird shade of awe—before I know it… he's in me somehow, in my bloodstream. What would you know? Face it: you're a sun! You don't get anything, you only revolve around me without end. What is any rational person supposed to make of a glorified, distant sun? Ryan treats me correctly. I see the TV poking into the background of his camera. It looks more like a monitor, and there's a light-up keyboard in front of it.  LED lights line the wall. Imagine being there? Well, you could not, because you are a sun.  But I imagine that even if I was a sun, or even the moon, I would still be able to imagine being there in that room which probably smells like his underwear which he leaves out. I imagine… therefore I am whole.  And it is all because of the image—the image. Love has nothing to do with it. Sex has nothing to do with it. It's nothing a wife or child can provide. Only the faint promise of a gorgeous man who's miles away from me… you really think that if I woke up tomorrow in his room, I'd be sad? Well, I say you do not know anything other than the lofty sky you constantly run from. I wake up in that room every hour of the day, and I am utterly happy because of it."

Josh paused and considered his emotions. 

"There’s just a spark.  Haha! Kinda like you! You wouldn’t be anything without that spark.  Like, would you...hmm…. If you lost it, what would you do? You’d look for it right? Anywhere.”

---

Josh paced back and forth going through possible ideas for his encounter with Ryan. He tripped over a log because he was so focused.

“Hey, oh yeah, no you go first.”

A squirrel ran pat his feet and joined her squirrel family.

“Hey, you come here often?”

Hehe.  Josh climbed a tree and sat and watched the sunrise.  The colors in the sky blended together to create a wash of purples and pinks and reds and oranges.  It reminded Josh of a nasty bruise he got when he fought a bear trying to take his can of tuna.  Josh lost, of course, but the joke was on the bear.  The tunas were rotten and moldy.  They had mushed and melded together like a block over the previous two years or so.  Even though the sunset reminded him of the pain, Josh admired the beauty of it all.  He remembered admiring beauty in his wife.

“Nothing.  You’re just easy to look at.”

“It means you have beauty on you.”

He could almost see Ryan smile in the curve of the light on the horizon.  There were no clouds to be seen; then again, there hadn’t been any for a long time.  Josh had been bombarded with constant, burning sun.

Josh could almost hear Ryan talking. “You know, Josh.” His lips bounced innocently like a child in a light meadow filled with peonies and roses. “I think you’re gorgeous, too.”

Josh let out an audible, soft moan, like a hiccup in his nose.

---

After the sunset, when the stars were clearer than ever in the sky, like tiny white pieces of popcorn, Josh opened up his battered laptop.  He plugged it into his power source and opened his downloaded videos.  He was so excited, but not in a sexual way.  He just wanted to see Ryan again, stuck forever in that pure, inextinguishable moment that they shared together in the sunset.

First Ryan let out a moan.  Like he had just been penetrated by a ghost.  “Ow.”  He said.  He started grabbing at the blankets on his bed.  He clenched them hard and twisted, breathing heavily.  He stuck out his chin and opened his mouth slightly.  He squinted his eyes and looked up at the perfect angle towards the ceiling, so the camera captured his jawline and nose almost heavenly.

Josh found himself disturbed.  This wasn’t like the moment they had together sitting on the tree branch. Even still, he was still hard.  Maybe I really am gay.  He thought.  Guess I’ll give it a shot.  But something still wasn’t fitting right.  The memory on the tree branch faded, and images of Miranda and Ryan started mixing together.  In a moment he saw a shadow of Miranda approaching him, but it disappeared a moment later.  How can there be a shadow in the night? Crazy.

“I’m gonna come.” Ryan moaned.  Then he did, and the thick droplets squirted over the sheets.

Shortly thereafter Josh did the same.  The grass in front of him tilted to the side at the weight of it all.

Everything stopped.  The video ended, and Josh sat there in silence, almost. The unseen squirrel noises permeating the walls of trees and cement around him.  But to Josh, it was more silent than silence itself.  All he could hear was the sound of his thoughts, which were empty yet filled with shame.  After a few seconds, he shut the laptop forcefully and pulled his pants up frantically.  He wiped his hands in the ferns and soil.  The grass rustled.

---

It was the next morning.

“Sun, I really don’t know now.  Like maybe I like guys.  I don’t know.  But I just feel, so… weird!  I should want Miranda back.”

“Yes I deleted it earlier this morning.  He was just a kid.  In his bedroom. What have I done?”

“Alright fuck you! You don’t get anything do you? Shut up and leave me alone! Stop looking at me! You’re always looking at me I can’t escape you MOTHERFUCKING FUCKING SUN JUST GO AWAY JUST GO AWAY YOU FUCKING SUN JUST GO AWAY.”

Josh jumped and punched the sky so forcefully his shoulder left his socket.  He slammed the ground and kicked the air.  Everything stayed uncomfortably still against his outrage.

“YOU FUCKING SUN YOU FUCKING -”

---

Josh hid in the shadow of the tree.  It was night, but he could swear there was a patch of darkness within the darkness.  So he sat there.  The grass below him seemed to be deader than the rest.  He watched the fixed world around him stay still like a picture.  No human in sight he thought. He squatted on the ground.  Tears fell down his cheek like a squirrel falling out of a tree.  They hit the grass and disappeared.  Josh grabbed some grass and picked at its blades.  He kissed the tree and the dirt, practically begging for its love.

Miranda’s shadow appeared again.

“Hi Miranda.”

It disappeared.

Josh tears fell more forcefully, like a squirrel being pushed out a tree.  Electrified by shock his body convulsed softly.  He wept and moaned.  His voice paused and bounced and jumped high and low.

—-

The world was fixed that day, as it was everyday.  The stars didn’t move. Josh’s dead body was now two feet below the ground.  The grass above his corpse was strong and tall and blended in with the world around it. No one looking at that painting would ever know there was a dead body below.