Excerpt from TWOS: A Novel

by Matt Runkle

Two.

In which Amber and Beauty, two pubescent girls who have taken acid, converse in the rose garden and encounter a strange little boy

“Is that why your hair’s so thin?” asks Amber. “Because you’re an alcohol baby?” She smolders among the drooping roses—yellow, apricot, wilt-brown—the wax of their petals gives way to the papery substance beneath. A flower brushes her cheek, and its last lonely pollen dusts her skin bright.

Beauty plucks the rose and tears it in half. “Mind your own beeswax.”

“It’s just when the light’s like this,” says Amber. She blinks heavily. “I’m probably retarded too. I was premature, and I had to leave the hospital early cuz my dad gambled away all our money.”

Beauty looks away, down the long brick path and toward the gazebo above the park. Amber squints to see if her mother’s coming, but instead sees somebody smaller, a boy swerving up the gazebo stairs. The boy reaches the platform and starts to twirl, like a roughly painted lady in a music box. “It’s why I’m like this,” Amber says.

“Like what?”

“You know. Too weird to be Christian.”

“My hair’s thin cuz I pull it out,” says Beauty. “I have trichotilomania. And it’s not cuz I’m retarded, it’s caused by stress. My grandma says it’s cuz I’ve had an unstable upbringing. She’s the one who cut my hair like this. So it’s too short to pull out.”

“I thought lesbians cut your hair.”

Beauty is shredding the rose to bits. “I don’t have it any easier than you do.”

The boy is still spinning, coming closer now, no longer in the gazebo, but twirling down the path. Amber watches him approach, spinning and almost floating, his sporadic movements at odds with the park’s geometry. He passes the wading fountain, the sound of its water like a sandstorm. The smell of rose-rot is heavy. The park is breathless but mossy, endless and filled with smoke, sun-baked but dancing with mist. Heavenly but hellish. Like the pictures from the pamphlets she found today: halfway between the crumbling cities and the pastures that lay ahead. She feels blood gather between her legs. She clamps them shut, and everything looks one shade redder.

The boy approaches. She sees that it’s not a boy, but a fairy. It floats with its feet splayed, and she swears they never touch the path. Its face is muddled with charcoal and blush. Points of light haunt its torso. It’s wingless; it moves like something that aches for wings.

“Get out of my bedroom,” it says.

Amber sneezes, tickled by stale pollen. She feels gooeyness at her mouth now, as well as her crotch, a panicky feeling that brings her to her feet. She’s relieved to find her head rising into logic, like the sun moving behind clouds.

“Let’s go back to my house,” she says. She looks again at the fairy, and reaches back for Beauty. Their hands clamp, Amber pulls Beauty to her feet, and they head for the stairs out of the park. Beauty asks, tensely, if everything’s all right.

“It’s just hot,” Amber says. “My mom’s probably gone now. Let’s go home.” Her thighs are sticking together, and she turns to see if the fairy’s gone.

It’s following them.

“Do not disturb,” it says. “Can’t you read?”

Amber quickens the pace, wants to ask Beauty about the fairy, but knows she should play it cool. She promises herself to keep looking ahead till they get to the end of the block. If she doesn’t pay attention to it, it will go away.

“There’s a funny painting by my house,” she tells Beauty. “All these monsters with gross penises. I bet it will look weird on acid.”

Beauty’s teeth are set. She looks at the fairy wildly. “Stop following us,” she says, an unfamiliar shrillness in her voice.

“Stop kidnapping me,” it replies, and it sounds just as sticky as snot and blood.