Date: Tue, 29 May 2007 09:43:54 +0000
From: Timothy Stillman <menovember@hotmail.com>
Subject: He Was Quiet Tonight

		      He Was Quiet Tonight, And Frail
				    By
			       Tim Stillman

Long and longing. Eyes weakly straining. Tough in many ways. Ceding nothing.
His hair stringy dirty needed to wash blonde, touching past his shoulders.
Not a lithe boy, but one who was of little concern to the world. Not a
cessation. Not a breath. He was kneeling on the bed of white sheets. It was
hot and he was perspiring. He braved it up with a smile that showed ragged
teeth, more yellowish than whitish. He was thin in the extreme. And he had
long legs and long arms and he was naked. Subtle fever in a hot room in a
hot night. Something that would excel at nothing, but himself. There, in
photograph seeming pose. Here in person. Salvation in the form of totally
mortal.

His penis uncut. His foreskin pulled back. He was ten or so. He reveled in
his own interior way at being naked. Perhaps one day, the world would devour
him. Or he would come begging to the world and it would kneel to him. His
penis was straight out and his balls were loose in their sac. He had no
pubic hair. Only the friendless hair on his head. He prodded the penis at me
and his mouth was shaped like a question meant to be asked, but then
deciding against it, he swallowing the question.

There was a foreign-ness to his milky skin. There was a sort of suggestion
in his bony body. The need to paste something worthwhile and worshipping on
his tiny nipples and his gaining no weight ever. He was all a sexuality. He
had by passed childhood though he was clearly a child. Though he would
become an adult, he would somehow never attain it. His eyes looked at times
as though he had grains of sand in them and this caused the eyes to hurt. He
had stood sideways before getting on the bed and had looked over his
shoulder at me. He had had a pouting pride on his face. He was artful and
artificial at the same time. He was an independent boy. He brought himself
wherever he went, and seeming slight encumbrance, that was enough.

His name was Nicky. He was living in Denmark with his family. He had fallen
in lust. He had followed his own nightly dreams. His world was pinkish
colored and he never knew because he knew far too much of the horizon. And
his world was sexuality and he was the emperor of it as he turned on the bed
and his back to me. Flattened little hips. Straight-backed spine. As his
hard boned little hands went to his penis and he began to masturbate. I
whispered "no" and he turned round again. Facing me. Still on his knees,
turning. His words were words I could not speak or understand. He looked at
me with a cocked eyebrow, as he straightened one leg, the left one, out, and
leaned further back, making his ribs and abdomen doors to climb onto and the
climb up to himself, that ribbon thin of lips, that face that would
foreshorten never. And would never give up its secrets. Not one single one.

I came to him. I knelt on the bed with him. I put my hands on his stomach
and I bent down and kissed him there. I felt the heated wrath of his body. I
felt his cold somehow cold hands go to the top of my head and caress me
there on the top of my hair. I looked up at him and saw the nerves of his
body, blue and thin nerves. I saw more than a suggestion. I saw someone who
knew the lay of a multi-pede of land and make that land boys and lands of
boys with long penises or short ones, of pubic hair small or none at all,
and he smiled at me, like with crinkled aluminum in the smile on a stormy
day. A smile that was almost a wince. A smile that was almost a thing of
bees that he lowered to me. The buzzing of his body. The buzzing of cortege.
As if there was a princely thing here. A thing of royalty.

As he reached down past my face on his abdomen and pulled his penis up to
me. Little stick of a penis and there was his piss hole that I licked with
my tongue and them that head so minute that I touched my lips to. As he
sighed, as though he was happy being a colloquial and an addendum, as he had
waited, it seemed, in many sad bus stations or train stations all his life.
As if this was something to shelter no more. As he in his supreme mortality
placed his penis and balls all at once in my mouth and I held the full warm
milky taste and smell of him in me as I bathed them with my tongue. I looked
at his face, way up there. And I knew he was not from this century at least.
But something of faces the way they used to make them.

Before modern washrooms and TV sets and satellites. As though he was a key
to a rougher time but one that filled me with envy. A world of not better
but more abrupt, of more blunt and no suggestions were to be made. You saw a
boy on the side of the road or at the side of a closed shop late at night
and you both knew what you and he were there for. The spaces in his teeth
looked hollow. As though something in his heart was taking him from himself
and tomorrow morning there would be something else missing from him. He was
a picture puzzle boy. And he sighed. As I sucked him and as I put my hands
on his hot groin and on his butt as I pulled him in and out in and out and
he put his hands to the side of my face and said something that I misheard
as "darling." I held those legs. Those long boned legs. I rubbed my hands up
and down them.

In being unwrinkled, the wrinkle of his lips and mouth were more noticeable.
As though a ghost had come back to earth and had decided it wished to live
here again, thus removing him from his own body, this boy here, and taking
his place. There was no wisdom in the smile of boy and/or ghost. There was a
curling of the upper lip as I accidentally hit the sweet spot of his penis.
And I put one hand to my own and touched it tentatively, for I wanted it to
be about him, my Nicky, and then he would cum in dry clicks. And he would
bend over my head with his body and he would scratch my back with his long
dirty fingernails, for it would be a sign of passion, a sign of hurt and
moratorium and a place of feelings of pure sexuality, before the dirty night
ate us up again.

I held him in my mouth and thought for a moment I had just made love to the
most beautiful butterfly in the existence of butterflies. I captured his
penis and balls, warm and cuddly, sweet and hard and springy and bouncy, and
then I unforgivingly released them. And I lay beside him. I saw the blue
pulsing lines in his forehead. I saw his face a tracery of veins. I saw his
eyes that were curiously cut, the eye skin, I mean, at the upper right
quadrants, just enough to give him an odd, otherworldly look, and I rubbed
my hands down his long long smooth chest and abdomen. Slowly. As though I
wanted the entire world to spin round fifty or sixty million years before I
got to his boyhood there still up and waiting, always waiting.

He was a boy of poses. One time, before we had this sex, he was lying on the
bed, with one hand round his left ankle. Or standing with his hard on, to
the side, and his face to me, saying without words, aren't I desirable? It
was in a grimy room on a grimier bed that we came together. He sometimes had
a monkey-ish look to his expressions. His smile was sometimes smeared in a
way that made him look hawkish, that made him look^×what is the old
word^×priggish^×yes, that's it. As though he was a bundle of sexuality that
would heed his call forever and was off-putting. But now, we lay together
under the harsh ceiling light ion this hot room in this hot summer and I put
my arms around his bones with just enough skin on them, and the memory of
his smeared monkey-ish smile, as though he hadn't gotten the seduction down
right just yet, but now he cuddled into me.

A child. And I wished to protect him. I wished to protect him all of his
life. His stomach gurgled. He giggled in his sleep. His head against my
chest. Tadzio. Joel. Randy. Ricky. Grant. Joshua. Spencer. Mark. Jack.
Bobby. And Nicky. Nicky with the boy baggage he would keep all his days. I
put my arms more tightly around him. I was a number. He was a number too.
And he would have sex all his days. And he would never be loved. I found
that rather sad. And I began to weep silently against him. He was deeply
asleep and did not notice.

It would not have mattered if he had. He would have taken the money and
dressed and left sooner. We can't have emotions in this thing after all. Who
would dare such intimacy?