Rain pools in the valleys of his neck, slick down his face, arrogant on his lips. It tastes transparent against my mouth like a sponge bloated from its fill. The umbrella bounces with the raindrops. It is red, like a mother's womb resounding with the tap-tap of curious fingers. It doesn't protect him from the rain. His hair sits a mess on his head flaxen and soft. Silk on a good day, hay on a bad.
The clouds growl with thunder.
He looks at me with his teary blue eyes, the kind that looks like they cry everyday. I hear a question on the tip of his tongue pushing to get out. He purses his lips, cold and clammy and red like the umbrella.
I wait for it to burst out in a clap to join the storm overhead. It never does. He stands a moment holding his umbrella like a switch to the sky before he turns and heads back to his house. His house across the street from my parked car and a city away from my city. A city without red umbrellas and eyes that cry.
“Coward,” I say before I get into my car as another roll of thunder tears the sky and lightening spiders the clouds.

The rain stops at the border, trickling until it doesn't exist. Ahead of me is my home, my residence, my cage. Behind me is Paul.
I stop my car and turn it around.

It has been a week since I've stayed here.
It's just me and Paul.
Paul never brings up the storm, never looks at me with his rainy eyes, his umbrella-red lips. Instead he plays his video games and watches his shows. I try to catch his attention. I sit in front of his T.V. I sit in front of his bed. I sit in front of him, silently waiting for him to notice me.
Finally, one day; “What do you want?”
Paul is on his stomach, reading a comic book on his bed. He stares hard at the pages like words will escape their neon boxes if he doesn't. I look up from my own book. I look at him hard as I tear my mind away from the cloud of fiction. I forget what he says, words swimming in my head like a dream.
“Excuse me?” I try.
Paul still doesn't look at me when he asks again, “I said, what do you want?” The question is so vague I almost yell at him for it but instead I answer him honestly, “I want you to tell me about your dad, about my dad.” I wait for him to say something. Paul doesn't, just glances at his comic. He is concentrating on it so hard I know he isn't reading it anymore, his mind is elsewhere. When he opens his mouth again he glances at me for a second, “they were twins, but you already knew that.”
I shrug, “everyone knows that.”
“Everyone also knew that your dad was a creep,” Paul says.
He doesn't look at me still but buries his face deeper into the comic, still on the same page, always on the same page.
I sit straighter.
“But he is a good man,” I add, “and a good father.”
“Was a good uncle too,” he confesses.

When my mother calls it breaks the smothering privacy blanketed over the house. The wails of the phone bounce off the walls like they are irritated. Irritating.
“Honey, when will you come home?”
Desperation oozes out of the receiver like a thick odorous pus, reaching inside my ears, inside my veins. The crackle of the phone dots like noise on a television, there to fill the space where nothing else is.
“Honey...,” she tries again, “I don't- I can't let you stay there for long. Not without my permission. You are going to come back tomorrow, you understand me?”
I shrug. She can't see it, but she hears it in my voice.
“Don't worry,” I say, “Don't worry...”

It is in the middle of the night when my aunt finally realizes I'm here.
“Angel Amyrillis, what the hell are you doing here?”
She flicks on the lights, blinding me. Unforgiving, she ushers me out of bed. “Downstairs,” she barks “now.” Sluggishly my feet drags my body along. I lean all my weight to the right and hit something warm and human. Paul loses balance and hits the wall with a smack. He pushes back at me. Hard.
The bed banister bites into my side, round and painless until a raw biting starts to infest my ribs. My legs give as my arms grab desperately for my side. “Paul!” tuts his mother as she tries to lift me from the carpet. It smells like dog food the lower I curl over my side. I'm almost kissing the carpet with my breath. My aunt splays an arm across my chest and hooks the other through my armpit, breath hitching stubbornly as she tries to lift me. Paul is exasperated.
“Mom, lemme do it.”
“Paul, I can handle Angel fine on my own.”
“Mom-”
“No, Paul. I-”
“Mom.”
I'm sniffing tears back through my eye sockets, angry that I can't stop. It leaks out like a sink flooding from a clog. “Angel, are you okay, what's wrong?” My aunt tries to prise my arms away from my sides, “you didn't break a rib did you? Paul, you have to watch you're strength!” Her fingers stop weaving themselves in my hair, stop comforting me. Instead, I feel the carpet rumble underneath her angry feet.
“He's really hurt now, what have I told you about roughhousing?”
“Mom, if he's hurt we can't waste time arguing.”
I hear him walk over to my side, I look up, everything is a blur. Paul is huge and dark, but his eyes are watery like mine. He bends down and piles me into his arms. His breath hitches as he lifts me, like a weightlifter prepping his lungs. He is leaning back like a tree bent by the wind, using the resistance to keep me above ground. My aunt worriedly sticks close to Paul, far from me.
My side throbs sorely. The hiss of the comforter is wet as my tears chew into it.
“'m not hurt,” I manage to squeeze through my teeth, my tongue catches salt. It tastes sickening.
“Paul, what should we do?”
“Mom, lemme handle him, it'll be fine.”
Her hesitance stains the room but she leaves silently, slowly.
Paul does nothing for a moment before he closes the light, closes the door, closes the window.
“Ange,” he pats my head, “it'll be alright.”
The bed dips as he climbs into it, pulling a blanket over us both.
I'm still crying, still blinded, even with someone at my side.
But I sleep and dream.
About nothing.

My side feels tender when I wake.
Paul is still asleep. The clock behind him blinks an angry 4:25. Twenty blinks later I pull myself out of bed, leaving the warmth for the biting tiles of the washroom. The lights hum a nasty brightness and my reflection stares disdainfully back at me. Even with the blur of sleep I can see my hair shooting in all directions and my eyes still red and puffy from crying.
Paul stirs in his bed and I realize I left the washroom door open.
“Come back to sleep,” he mumbles, throwing his arms weakly over his eyes, “it's fuckin' 5 AM.”
I glance at the clock, it's only 4:31, but I don't argue with him.
I close the light and climb back into my still warm spot.
I lie awake listening to Paul breathing.
A couple hours pass and birds start to chirp outside, fluttering by the window, tapping on the window panes. Paul feeds them every morning.
As he wakes up and stretches I close my eyes, hoping he doesn't notice the brief flutter of my lids like my father used to. As the seconds tick by I feel like a child again, playing video games late into the night and hopping into bed when my father gets up for work. He'd walk lightly into my room and kiss me good morning on the forehead before he leaves. He'd scolded me once or twice for not sleeping but never told my mother, it was our little secret.
My thoughts almost lull me to sleep but then the bed jumps up. I open my eyes slightly and see Paul walking over to his window, pulling it open to the excited birds. I smile as he dusts seeds onto the sill whistling along with the bright chirps of the birds.
I close my eyes and let their song sing me to sleep.
In my dreams my father kisses me good morning.

They're arguing, my mother and my aunt.
“You can't keep him here, he's my son!”
“He's a grown boy, he can very well do whatever he likes.”
“You, you're... ugh! You're impossible, just like that stupid husband of y-”
From a floor up, still in Paul's bed I hear the sting of a slap. Flesh on flesh in a rush of collision.
“You, get out of my house. Right. Now.”
My cheek tingles as I hear the stomp of footsteps and the slam of a door from below. The engine revs from outside but is slow to leave. My stomach flip flops as my mother leaves, I feel anxious to stop her. I almost leap out of bed to yell out the window.
Almost, and then her car drove away.

Black, everywhere. Like a storm of crows, a murder of crows.
“Suicide, such a pity.”
The old women stand out like sore thumbs, their glee evident in spite of all the sorrow. They ants around the casket, small and plump, licking their lips like they're ready for a feast. Gluttonous, for God, for righteousness, for misery. They watch me with hungry eyes, kissing my mother's hands ferociously, wrinkled red lips on dead blue skin. The colours mix together sickeningly. I can almost see her life passing through their lips, into their lungs. Killing her, if she weren't dead already.
Paul stands beside me, his mother beside him. I can't say that my aunt ever liked my mother, but she is still respectful. When she kisses her hand, there's a tenderness that my father never showed my mother. It feels surreal.
Nobody says anything to me the entire time, just look at me with sad eyes. I feel like I'm suffocating in a sea. Mouths gaping, like fish, their eyes never closing. Always open. Drowning me with their pity.
It's true what they say about drowning. It's painful, at first. You can't breathe and you forget what it was like when you did. You thrash and fight, your body tells you to inhale but you just fill your lungs with water. It's so very painful. Like a burning tong reaching into your throat, splitting in every direction, acid in every corner. And then, there's nothing. Just a numbness, a calm spreading through you, like every nerve has been removed from your body. Like you never drowned, like you were always sleeping awake. And everyday, you drown again.