dear dante
i miss you like you're my right leg
Dante comes round every summer and I hate him for it. I hate him because his teeth are always white and he has more sneakers than I have friends.
When the strawberries taste best, that’s when you know he’s coming. Every year the car drops him off and for a few weeks we crash shopping carts and yell at the moon and everything’s perfect. Then he leaves again.
I try not to think of him when he is away. I’m sure he does not think of me.
—
Life goes on without him the same as it does before he came. The garden grows strong and green. I keep waiting for the ivy to crawl up the side of the house like in a storybook; it doesn’t.
Women flit in and around and out of the house the way hummingbirds do. I learn their names and they learn mine, and the screen door never stops swinging.
A dog comes; I feed it. It’s gray and mangy, coat all matted, with golden half-moon eyes steady like a rock in the wind. I feel the way it looks: weary.
Spring ends and I walk my thoughts around him. I tell the dog I don’t care, but it doesn’t believe me, and I look every time the door swings.
The strawberries turn the perfect shade of deep red and three days later his bike is leaning up against the front porch.
I go out the back door instead but he knows me and he’s waiting there on the railing, casual, looking for all the world like he couldn’t care less where he is or who’s in front of him.
His jeans are cuffed. He looks up, nonchalant.
Hey.
Hi.
Do you want to go to the pond, he asks.
I say, sure.
—
Nobody else walks like he does. Here, we walk slow — give our feet a chance to feel the earth beneath us. Dante walks like the ground won’t wait for him.
He doesn’t mind that I take longer. He doubles back and does circles around me, and I tell myself it means nothing that he never gets impatient.
They must fall for it where he comes from, the lightness in his eyes. They must think he’s happy.
I know better. He likes it here.
—
By the water, he tells me about his bruises. Fistfight. Gym class. Sleepwalking. He doesn’t look over to see if I think they make him cool; I don’t.
When he stops talking, I really look at him. Every year he looks so much better and so much worse. Beautiful, and afraid, like he’s waiting for someone to hurt him. Like he’s waiting to get caught.
What about you, he asks, so I tell him about the women and the ivy and the dog and how I got so sick that winter I couldn’t get out of bed for a week.
When Dante listens it looks like he’s asleep. It’s one of the things I like best about him.
—
We stay by the water until the hunger hurts our stomachs. He swims, I watch; he floats, I lay on the grass. He stays underwater too long every time.
On the walk back he’s just as slow as I am. Don’t your feet hurt, he asks, but he doesn’t put his shoes on either.
He’s like the dog, I think, flea-bitten and sored, fur all matted down. I wonder why either of them would think I’m good enough to trail behind.
He sleeps on the sofa in the parlor. Dante, not the dog.
—
In the morning we make pancakes. He makes a mess of the counter and spills batter all over the floor. We argue about toppings. Him: whipped cream and strawberries. Me: syrup and butter.
The dog takes to him. The women do, too; they don’t seem to mind him at all as long as he listens to their stories and smiles like that.
I’ve been here long enough that the house and I share the same bones. People come here to feel the peace for themselves. Dante feels it stronger than the others. He feels it ‘cause he shares our bones, too.
—
As the days go by I see the deepness set into him. The way his eyes settle; he talks less and breathes more. Soft around the edges.
All year it took me to claw my way out. By the end of the week I’m in love with him.
—
In June, the heat reaches every corner of the house. I show Dante how to tend the garden, and he teaches the dog to come when he whistles.
How much longer, I wonder, but I don’t ask, and he doesn’t say
When it gets too hot to breathe we go to the pond. He dares me to touch the bottom. I swim down and down but I never reach it.
When the dog jumps in and lands on me, he laughs so hard that I feel it in my stomach, too.
He follows me to the roof at night. Dante's the only one who’s ever noticed where I disappear to.
We’ve known each other six years, he says.
I say, No. Six summers. He shoves me.
Since the Big Bang, he says, and somehow it sounds like less of a lie than mine did.
My foot nudges his. He says, I don’t want to go back.
We watch the sun go down.
—
It ends just as it begins. The car comes for him Sunday morning.
Dante sits on my bed and waits for me to tell him what he already knows. That he belongs here. That this is the only place he feels like he can breathe. That I love him. That he loves me, too.
I won’t say it. He begs me with his eyes: make me stay.
I could. There are a thousand ways I could do it. Guilt him. Reason with him. Cry, yell, beg, kiss him, break his leg. Tell him the truth.
I don’t do any of it. I won’t. My eyes tell him: You decide. You.
He doesn’t know how to handle it. His hands twist together again and again.
—
Outside, the driver lays on the horn. Dante looks at me, pleading. I look away because if I look at him much longer, I won’t be able to stop myself.
His jaw clenches.
As the car drives away, I feel nothing, nothing.
Autumn comes, like it always does. Winter, spring, and summer again.
I keep waiting for the bike. For the sound of his sneakers. Anything.
Autumn comes.
—
The dog gets its leg caught in a briar bush. I cut it out with clippers and clean the wound. By the time it’s done I’m so angry that I have to run to get it out of me.
I end up at the pond. It’s dusk and it’s quiet and I want to scream until my throat bleeds the same color stained on the dog’s fur. He’s not coming back. I know it like you know a blood moon or the coming of snow.
The sky is blue. He was meant to stay here. He was meant to stay here, with me.
They took him. The school and the city and the world. People who could care less about who he is and what he feels inside. They took him and made him into what they wanted him to be, and he just let them.
He let them, just like he would’ve let me make him stay.
I know how their God felt. The agonizing gift of free will.
—
Ivy begins to grow on the wall. In November, the dog gets arthritis. New women come and go from the house. One of them hangs a crucifix on the wall. I take it down.
That winter I study tarot. I take up knitting. I read. By the time spring comes, I am almost whole.
A letter comes in the mail. Chicken-scratch. My name in his hand. I lock my door and sit at the desk.
Dante writes about school and sports. It’s a real good school, he says. He plays lacrosse now; it’s fun. All of his teammates are really nice.
The letter is short. He asks about me and the dog and doesn’t say a whole lot else. I try to throw it out but can’t; it ends up in a drawer by my bed.
—
The garden grows big that summer. In June, I cut my hair with a kitchen knife. A fae circle grows out back. We get more barn swallows than ever before.
I’m drying the dog off from a bath when all of a sudden I miss him so much I can’t breathe. I miss him like he’s my right leg or both my eyes. I miss him so much that for a second, I think I might not be able to stop myself from showing up at his door and begging.
I write him a letter.
Dante, I miss you like you are my right leg. I think I have made you bigger in my mind than you ever were in person, but I don’t care, because half of you would be more than enough. You are the best friend I have ever had, and ever will.
I hope you will be happy where you are. I hope you get a job, and a house, and a family, and a garden. I am not mad at you for not coming back. There is not much for you to do here anyway, and I think we are too much alike. After all, we have already known each other since the beginning of time.
I stop writing because there is nothing else to say.
this is the first fiction piece i’ve posted anywhere but i thought i’d try something new :) i have no idea where this story came from. i wrote it six or seven years ago without any plan; the first draft just flowed out like a memory. lmk what you think!