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## bluebells in the late december

|| Larry, after the corpse boxes.

Before he built his relationship with the Spirit up like fragile intricate sandcastles, debrided the disease from their shared body, he thought he was cursed. You feel the weight of loneliness in every bruise when you grow up outside of the narrow choking confinement of “normalcy” -- at least, despite the cycle of torment within him, he had Rita, then Jane, Cliff and eventually Vic. They were - not family. The word “family” implies happiness and harmony, the word family reminds him of his children, their shaky crayon drawings of him and Sheryl holding hands underneath a bright sun — the same sun that would ruin and become him later. He knows it is similar for the rest of them. They’d all reject the term family.

To Larry, they’re more like blood, solely in the literal sense — someone is always bleeding out and someone else is always there to cut themselves open and complete the transfusion, save the day like a real hero, and someone is always healing and someone is always stumbling, always cracking the wound back open. It’s like fucked up symbiosis — codependency is a more apt word, the kind that forms when a group of fucked up people live so close to another for eternity, but it does work, usually.

The Spirit left him. He stopped feeling alone when he realized he was never alone, his endless companion burrowing into his chest and pulling the covers over their head — five more minutes! let me sleep for five more minutes. do you ever rest? do you ever get tired? do you ever get tired of me? — and wearing his skin around its soul until the lines are burned beyond recognition. He stopped feeling alone and then he became alone. That’s what you get, he supposes, when you allow someone else in. When every moment with them is both satiating and famishing, when its home in your breastbone twists in a rhythm too fast for your condition. When they ask you to run away with them, and you run away from them, and they run away from you.

They had reached out for him, before they faded into vapor. The Spirit so full of life and their future full of so much potential that it has become sick and nauseous and Larry so touched by their gesture that he touches them and he remembers how it was all for nothing, how this is the inevitable dead end road at every passage to progress, and how not even the constant presence watching from inside him like a guardian could love him.

He feels sick. But they’ve got mail, and he has a job to do here - besides, he thinks, he can always tell Rita about it. She will - maybe not help or understand, but she’ll provide warmth and a comforting hand, and all he really wants right now is to be comforted.

His bandages rub against the cardboard as he opens the boxes. Packing material with—

It feels like hair?

It’s auburn hair, so soft despite his inability to touch it. It is perfectly clean and composed. He knows this—

He—

H--

And every organ inside of him stops clinging to life and falls into the vast canyon depths, and every sadness in him multiplies and multiplies until they’re breaking the walls down because there are too many sadnesses in the building, no one can breathe in here, it’s not safe, you’ve got to call an ambulance before these sadnesses suffocate and smarter sadnesses evolve from them. Like a viral infection. Like life itself got sick and Larry touched it with a tenderness that he could never have given it years ago, with shock and adoration and Lo—

Like life itself got sick and it seeped into Larry and now he’s in a constant spar with life just to keep himself going. It wants to spread the infection and Larry wants to cut the infection out, because it’s in our nature to keep fighting off pain, our bodies work carefully on the inside to fight off what harms us without our consciousness ever knowing while we sit still, strapped to our chairs, as the water around us slowly fills the room.

He stayed around for Rita, mainly, and because the Spirit kept him alive. Now he has no reasons to live left in his hand, and he has to fold.

He doesn’t know what to do, so he does the logical thing that anyone would do in this situation; he wraps his friends up with care, each bandage tight around flesh that carries more death than even his own. This will keep them safe. This will keep him safe until he figures out what to do. There has to be a way to bring them back; this isn’t natural, someone did this, they were supposed to live forever and ever and ever and ever and ever foolish to think you could ever have something so ubiquitous and picturesque and ever and ever even immortality has abandoned its shell and ever, and even if he can’t bring them back, maybe he can find justice. But -- but he has to -- he has to bring them back

because if the Spirit is gone and his friends are gone and Dorothy is gone and Niles is gone and his children want him gone then everything every variable in the wholewideuniverse is just

gone.

Larry is:

alone. He always has been. This was a mere illusion, a distraction from reality which is suffering which is always eventually fatal which is the one thing he yearns for more than justice, to be released from this world and its microtears, to -- well. To die.

He’s kind of mad at them for getting there first.

He arranges their bodies at the dining room table, each of them in a position that would be natural for their personality if they weren’t frozen and dead. He chooses the positions in the same way you put together a flower arrangement; all the beauty -- and there is so much of it -- resting perfectly on the surface, composed and artificial, every petal preserved for its future lover as the stems collapse underneath.