SoMa Literary Review

Puppy Love

By Hayden Thorne

He promised me the moon and the stars, and I laughed. “Show me,” I demanded, and he pointed at the sky—though it was daytime still—and declared that somewhere out there the moon lurked as did the stars. If I were to wait for the night to fall, I’d have them securely in my hands. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I laughed and then called him a cheat, and his journal burst with pages of desperation in smeared ink and a crude scrawl.

He told me stories of long-gone civilizations with all the stuttering eloquence of a neophyte suitor. Those favored by the gods, he added, were blessed with configurations in the heavens. “I don’t see anyone,” I said then he pointed at this hemisphere and that, a thick, ungainly hand tracing shapes that only he could see. I shook my head and shrugged him off, and his writing-desk suffered scars from his ballpoint pen.

He made me listen to songs that he claimed were the voices of immortals, and I fell asleep in my attempts at catching divine forces in violins and pianos. “I can’t hear anything,” I yawned after being shaken awake. He said immortals sang of love. I heard dull strings of endless notes. He said the gods lamented. I heard scale after scale that left me puzzled and restless. What soon followed was silence.

He showed me verses from poets who wrote about strange, cosmic things, and I rolled my eyes. “That’s stupid,” I sniffed, and he insisted that poets knew best, that only they could understand the universe and its more elusive secrets. He even went so far as to assure me that with a perfectly chosen word or two, a poet could have the moon and the stars in his grasp because Venus wished it.

“Then show me,” I said with smug assurance, and my writing-desk was soon home to sheets of binder paper and endless lines of words inspired by the cosmos and captured by his pen. Here, a word or an entire line was scratched out. There, afterthoughts were crammed between evenly ruled spaces. Where was the sentiment, I wondered? How did one pull it out of the heavens and confine it to ink and paper? Obviously it was a task unfit for mortals, given the ugly chicken scratch attempt that was handed to me. I turned the sheets of paper left and right, flipped them back and forth, held them close and pulled them away.

“Where’s Venus in all these?” I complained, and he swore to bring the goddess down for me. Then he did just that. In his parents’ attic, the highest room in their house, that which was closest to the sky, he flung a rope up and up, watching it shoot through the clouds and into the airless expanse beyond, taking him with it, embraced by a knot he’d learned as a Boy Scout. He held the goddess in his hands, his family said, but they showed me nothing, only the note that was found resting under his weightless feet, written in a familiar ungainly hand: “My dear David…” The cosmos in chicken scratch, all meant for me alone.

Also by Hayden Thorne on SoMa Literary Review :

The Penitent & Heroes

Hayden Thorne is a writer of gay YA novels and flash fiction. Her debut novel is set to be released in 2008 from Prism Books. More information on her works can be found at her blog (http://haydenthorne.wordpress.com/). She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and three cats.