Escape is Fleeting

Hybrid/Experimental, Armaan Kapur

The risk was always known to him. 

It was attached to the augury like a latent tumor underneath the abdomen of a horse, speeding to its grandiloquent finish on the track: the safe bet with a big secret, just waiting. 

His father’s and mother’s voices meshed and slapped a hard whip on his cheek even as he walked into the clearing, past the locked forest. The openness was a sudden breach and the sun was greater in this space, which in his glittering dark eyes was a symbolic thing: I went through the woods and undid the fears, it was seamless how the chiding noise that was his usual wind transfigured into a sporting breeze, how the sound of that afternoon swept in rhythms, down where the vista was answering. 

The second boy was more confident and had broken the sacred circle with his feet lashing into the ground. He was sonorous and joyous to have ventured into what had previously been considered a mythical ground. The clearing had been folkloric, and the zameendars who stomped their authority over it in some earlier century had dwindled into ash or fuel, tires rolling to the highway to better prospects. This was now a disused and forgotten land. 

There was, across the clearing, some inkling of a barricade, a fence. But there would be no venturing so far; neither boy could stretch their imaginations to comprehend what was beyond the rusting and possibly hypothetical fence. While the first followed into the center, the other boy surveyed the space, hands on hips. It wasn’t a happy lesson: the lackadaisical nature of a fantasy realized. He burrowed his foot into the ground that was more barren than green, twigs and serpent leftovers, and his mind attempted to architect some alternative to the present. 

“If there was some grass here,” he said, “we might have laid a blanket and rested for a while.” 

The first was already speechless at this point. By entering into this forbidden terrain, a zone of intimacy he only dreamed of, he’d forgotten how to be himself. He’d known in his bones the parasitic nature of his desire: it was to him ungodly to want something so intensely, where the color of everything in his surviving life ached and brittled from the lack of a particular aspect. His bed was empty of warmth, his lips dry of passion, skin shedding youth without anyone’s touch to graze it and note the passage of time. To speak in that moment was overpoweringly obtuse – he was a universe of forgotten impulses suddenly remembered. His hand moved to the other’s waist, and his head fell directly into the cocoon between neck and shoulder. 

“Did you forget how to breathe?” the second asked, teasing. He sensed the shudder of response, and so created a brief span of distance between them, forcing them to confront eyes. The fear was apparent and contagious, and though his heart too was momentarily struck with doubt, he reached for the first boy’s belt and began unfastening the buckle. 

Quickly, was his only thought. 

- the shadows are longer, my body is cold as ice 

- I lost him somewhere. My shirt 

- where is he? 

- the fence is real 

- they’re going to kill me 

- my family will find out 

- did they kill him?

- why can’t I speak? 

The solitary sputter was only the word, “Why?” 

- they know what I am 

- I deserve this

- I put everyone in danger

- mama on the daybed outside the house, reading 

- my sister brings the chai

- papa on the bike

- his moustache in the breeze

- such light 

- the lash on my skin

- I have no body 

- only pain 

- it’s quiet now 

- my blood is raining 

- who is standing in the distance?

- my skull cracks the ground 

- this. 

- is the longest silence. I don’t know where my feet are. When did I become so light? My body is heavy. 

- There was a moment, when I was seven. We stopped on the side of a road going up the mountain. The breeze of that day, that was my life. Do we become the breeze when we die? I only cursed myself. God will never forgive me. I became passion for a moment, then I burned. They won’t cremate me. My limbs are missing. My eyes. I will never speak my silence into action. If I ever confessed, they’d have killed me themselves. There is no language for me in this life. There are no words. I step from the road’s edge onto a cloud, it goes into the sky, across the tops of trees and houses and schools. I enter into the next plane. My feet float on the deserted ground of my own home. I knock on the door. “This is who I am.” They turn me away. They kill me again. I rise up into another cloud. I am reborn. I am a seed. I am the germ of nutrition for the ant crawling across my cheek. I know words I never did. The sensations are beyond human. I am no longer being. Why would I die for my humanity? I never breathed when I was alive. There is no living for me. I pull the curtain of the woods and stand in the center of the clearing, by myself. Who will answer for me?

From behind, the floorboard creaks, and I lift both hands off the keyboard. A presence is standing over my shoulder. 

One day I’ll face my fear, but at this moment I don’t acquiesce to the sound. 

Instead, I beg the silence with my shuddering breath. 

Please…

It thrills the darkness. 

- Don’t take me yet.

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Armaan Kapur (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist and clothing designer from India. His prose appears in Cutleaf Journal, The Reader Berlin, Chestnut Review, Foglifter, Bulb Culture Collective, Helter Skelter Magazine, and elsewhere. Armaan's debut novel is represented in the Indian subcontinent by A Suitable Agency, and revisits his time as a queer entrepreneur in the New Delhi fashion circuit. Find his work at armaankapur.com.