Big Dump

Corn Field

The water inside the bottle smells stale, but I don’t care. I open it up and raise it to my mouth.

“Oi,” Thom yells at me, taking the jug and spilling it on the ground, “Are you daft? Want to spent the rest of the day with your knickers down?”

He can be quite rude sometimes. I scowl at him and hug myself, trying to rip off my dry tongue off the roof of my mouth to answer him.

“Wanker,” I whisper hoarsely, moving my tongue slowly, “Waaaanker.”

“That’s what I get for taking care of you,” he rolls his eyes in the way that makes me the child. I frown, wondering how he achieved that.

Colin comes around the car and watches us for a second before settling his eyes on Thom. “You might want to take a look at that, mate,” he says and they both walk off. I’m left alone and thirsty once again, so I lean against the car, then raise myself a bit to sit on the edge, and then go even further and lean against the warm glass, sprawled like that under the sky.

Ed and Phil rub their chins and stare underneath the raised hood, where the smoke comes out. I hear Phil saying, “Don’t touch that” quietly a couple of times.

Thom and Colin are sitting in the field, a little off the road. Talking. I feel that the sun is burning through the skin on my cheeks just to leave a bit of burnt muscle on top of white teeth and bones.

There’s a burst of laughter on my left, in the middle of the insect buzzing and the few cars that pass by with a whoosh. I turn my head to see Colin shoving Thom onto the ground playfully, receiving a slap on his cheek. They laugh and roll around in the grass, and I see that Colin’s puckered his lips comically and is trying to kiss Thom’s cheek. Thom fights him off with a smile in his eyes.

If it weren’t Colin, the bloke would be lying unconscious right now, I think, just to calm my nerves. Get myself in check. Tuck the loose threads of jealousy in. Belly in, chest out – there’s a good boy.

If Colin weren’t my brother, he’d be kept far away from Thom, I think with my eyes half-closed. To the left there’s grunting and laughs and sounds of punches. Ed and Phil watch them instead of the car now. And I ignore them, of course.

Sometimes I can’t though. A couple of months ago I suggested that Thom and I get out of the town for a week, “nothing special, just far away, you and me, what’d you think?”, and the bugger asked me, scratching his head, “Ummm, is Colin coming?”

And I said, “No, I’ve booked the last hotel room for us.”

If Colin weren’t my brother, Thom and I would argue about him more.

From the way Thom shouts I understand that Colin’s won and there’s a bit of saliva on Thom’s face. I turn my head just in time to see Thom tickling and trying to bite Colin. Just earlier today he was doing the same thing to me, only I didn’t escape from his teeth as successfully as Colin is.

“How does that not get to you?” I asked him once while he was making us tea.

“What?”

“Well…playing with Colin. I mean…we do it. And you are much affected by it.”

It scares me how he doesn’t need any more explanations to understand what I’m talking about.

“Oh, that,” he said, sitting opposite me and sliding a cup to me, “Well, you two are different. And have different effects on me. That is that.”

“You mean, you’ve never even thought about it?”

“I did, of course,” he said, smiling, “I think it’s quite disgusting when you put it that way. He’s my friend, I’ve got boundaries.”

“I think it’s okay now,” Ed says, frowning at the car. It’s not smoking anymore and Phil is holding an empty bottle of distilled water. Thom and Colin pick their heads up from the grass and try to race to the car, giggling. When they climb back to the road Colin climbs inside and Thom faces me, smiling. I sit up and remove the twigs from his hair. Then I try to clean the smears of dirt on his skin with my shirt.

“I could’ve used that water you spilled,” I murmur, cradling his face, escaping his smiling blue eyes.

“You were watching us, I saw,” he says, taking my face in his dirt-smeared hands, so that our arms are criss-crossed like ropes in the children’s game.

“No, I wasn’t,” I say half-heartedly, running my thumbs over his cheekbones.

“Yes, you were,” he says, biting his lip, leaning in to push his forehead against mine, “You know, Jon, it would be infinitely sad if one of us didn’t love the other back. The kind of sad I don’t even want to think about. I don’t know how you bear it. I wouldn’t.”