About The Secret Language of Curls

by Mallory Path
21 pages / 10000 words
Available file types - html. lit, pdf, prc

Nick wants Danny and Laurent, but he doesn't want to admit it. When they offer to give him what he wants, Nick makes a run for it, which hurts both Danny and Laurent, emotionally, and maybe even physically.

This art-house style story leads us through the secret language of shapes and bodies, where Danny and Laurent try to help Nick learn to face his emotions. Can Nick learn to let go and love?

Sample

Nick is crashing.

Not the crashing of glass, of breaking, broken glass; crashed glass, shards splayed out across the floor like – well, fucked if he knows what they're splayed like, but it's not like fingers across skin, no. They look so pretty, those shards, but dangerous, too. Treacherous. They could hurt you, those pretty shards, if you stepped on them with your bare foot. Nick thinks he should probably go tell Danny to be careful, if Danny comes in here. If Danny gets off the sofa and comes in here, where Nick is, where the shards are, Danny could get hurt. Nick wonders if he should tell Danny to be careful with his naked, pretty feet if Danny ever gets off that sofa...

Not all glass hurts, though; not all glass cuts. There's glass they make for illusions, for stunts in Hollywood movies; glass you can fly through and not hardly feel a thing; glass that breaks and splays out pretty and doesn't make you bleed. Glass made from sugar, not sand; sugarglass, it crashes so nice.

Nick isn't crashing nice. Nick is having a bad sugar crash. It's too late to stop the crash now, to fly high again on sugar. Too late to stop the crash, but he's eating more chocolate anyhow, like he has been all night. He doesn't even really want to eat the amaretto balls – he's not the one who likes amaretto, that's Daniel – but he's eating them anyhow, like he has been all evening. Amaretto balls, rum balls, straight-up chocolate balls. Balls, balls, balls. That's what it's been all night long – balls and sugar. He feels like he's been mainlining unrefined sugar cane, and now he's coming down, and no amount of amaretto balls can stop the crash.

Now that the glass has slipped from his fingers and is splayed out, crashed on the kitchen floor, Nick is drinking straight from the bottle. The amaretto balls are gone, and he's eating straight chocolate now, drinking amaretto straight from the bottle, even though he doesn't like amaretto; it's Danny who likes the taste of amaretto, Daniel who tastes like amaretto...

He pops another chocolate ball in his mouth, practically inhales it, swallows it without savoring it, washing it down with amaretto when it sticks in his throat, keeps swigging after it’s gone. Alcohol can't stop the sugar crash, but maybe it can drown it. Or maybe not, because isn't there sugar in alcohol? Or your body makes sugar from alcohol? One of those. Maybe both.

Nick looks at the bottle for a clue, tries to read the label but there’s not enough light in here. He remembers that there is "good" cholesterol and "bad" cholesterol. He wonders if it's that way for sugar, too. He wonders what the good sugar might be. He's pretty sure it's not the sugar in chocolate, which is rotting a hole in his tooth. And he's pretty sure it's not the sugar in amaretto, which is rotting a hole in his liver.

He's for damn sure certain that it's not in Daniel's sweet laugh when he points sweetly at the chocolate smudge, or in Daniel's sweet fingertip trying to brush it off, smearing it sweetly instead, or in the sweet tip of Daniel's sweet tongue licking sweetly the smear from the corner of Laurent's mouth; Nick is pretty sure the good sugar is not in any of that, which is rotting a hole in his heart.