Short Stories (bxb)

The Art of Feeling Small Pt. 5: Payne's Grey

I found it easier to stare at the grass than watch his lips curve upward at the discovery, so I did just that.

"Why do you wanna stay out here so bad, anyway?"

My shoulder nudged Ezra's when I shrugged. "It's nice out."

"It most certainly is not."

I snickered at the exaggerated show he made of shivering. Ezra didn't mind the cold as much as he liked to let on. I'd seen him more-or-less happy in worse than tonight's twenty-eight degrees. "Reminds me of when I was younger, I guess," I answered more honestly. I wasn't surprised when Ezra turned onto his side, leaning onto an elbow to face me directly and resting patiently on his palm. This was what he did -- encouraged me to continue when I wasn't intending to. It was probably the only way he'd learned anything about me.

I might have balked at the invitation once, but it was commonplace by now, and so endearing. I would admit that Ezra was the more mature of us any day, but there was a childishness to the "tell me a story" look on his face now. "My grandparents live in the countryside. We always visit for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and my cousins and I used to lay out in the yard and look at the sky at night. They're older now, busy with jobs and kids and the like, so we haven't done it in a few years. And, I don't know. Something about the weather is making me miss them, I guess."

I looked up at Ezra, maybe just to see the fond smile he wore every time he unlocked another one of my doors, no matter how boring and beige the room behind it. Then I turned onto my back, because this, too, was hard to look at for long. "Your cousins?"

I mulled it over with eyes trained above. The moon hovered in solitude, a perfect circle if you didn't look too hard. "The stars."

In the seconds that followed, my eyes shot wide. "Oh my god, that was so insensitive, I just meant-- 'cause the lights-- but obviously--"

I shut up, because Ezra was laughing under his breath in that way he did sometimes, the way that made it hard to tell whether he was laughing with me or at me, even after knowing him all this time.

"Alexander," he said, still smiling -- smiling around my name. "I miss them, too." He rolled onto his back, blinking into the sky above. "But I can't say I ever knew them the way you do. Cared the way you do, I mean. I think I regret that."

He sat up then, palms flat in the grass behind him. "I'd like to see them again, though," he added, easy like an afterthought. His beanie had been left behind in the grass, and the tilt of his head sent mussed-up hair falling back over his shoulders, leaving his cheeks exposed to the chilly air. "You're right. It's nice out."

And then he said, "Look at the stars with me?"

I sat up, slower than he had, searching for hints, but his face was lax and unassuming. Closed eyes and parted lips, so calm I could almost believe he was dozing off. So different from the figure slumped over a counter a half-hour before, looking about ready to stab his pencil through his sketchbook. "I don't understand."

"I'm asking you to show me."

I stumbled on an inhale, then stumbled over my words. "I don't think I can."

"Just a few of them? I know you know your constellations. My imagination can fill in the rest. I told you, I'm good with mental images."

"You want me to show you the stars."

"Well, it sounds ridiculously poetic when you put it that way."

"Everything about you is ridiculously poetic."