Mab and Burke

—My name’s Burke. Mab spat in Burke’s eye. In the field the other boys played soccer.

—My name’s Burke, he told Mab, putting the tissue back in his pocket.

—I’m Mab. They chased each other until Mab had Burke pinned under his knees. Rain spat on their backs and faces. Laughing, they were dragged to the office of the hockey-faced principal.

—Hey, look. A dead rabbit.

—We should bury it.

—Fuck that, Burke. Find a stick.

Burke came out of the operating room feeling like the minister of arachnids. Each hand now waved just two broad fingers over the thumb. Each digit lined with sticky pads for climbing walls like a fly. He sat in the waiting room ripping ads out of Time while Mab’s operation finished. Now and again Burke heard a drill whine, a saw growl through bone, a sharp pnk! of steel thread getting snipped.

Mab came out into the waiting room, and Burke went blind for five years.

In Burke’s most embarrassing dream, his dad coached him in sex lessons with his mom in a drab, shabby motel room. In Mab’s most embarrassing dream, he sucked his own cock. This is also Mab’s favourite dream.

One night at Mab’s house they played Thriller over and over and became captains of warring star fleets. For no mere mortal can resist. After annihilating galaxies and each other’s alien hordes, they got bored. What pubescent boy hasn’t puppeted his penis to make its little lips ape speech? Mab’s mother shouted down at them from upstairs. Burke smothered Mab in the sofa, the funk of forty thousand years sighing from its crevasses.

Mab rose up. Under the black branches of an ash tree Burke has been Cained. The arrow in his eye bites the trunk behind his head. Burke’s head is a gyroscopic puddle.

They’d been shooting at crows in the park. A park employee drove up in a golf cart and told them they couldn’t practice archery in a public park. So they went away until he drove off. Mab is a good archer. But now Burke must teach the alligators of penitence to dance faster.

The first crow Mab shot burst into blue flames and dropped to the field. The grass smoulders. The second crow Mab shot got pinned through its wing to a passing cloud. The third crow Mab shot was hiding behind Burke’s optic nerve. Now he sees only charcoal feathers.