Page:Jay Little - Maybe—Tomorrow.pdf/350

, out upon the road. I'm like that cigarette, thought Gaylord. I've been thrown away too.

Within him a wound was bleeding but even in his distress all his senses converged and focused on Blake, his young Prince out of the Arabian Nights. He would always remember every detail of that exposed body which moved with such precision charm. He sat dreamily, watching the rhythmic ripples of the arms, thighs, the grinning face and the swinging of the genitals as his Prince waved at him. It made him feel a little better even though it was only a vision of the impossible.

What now? What was the solution, he asked himself and the pounding of his heart made a desolate tangle in front of him; a rectangular pit like a huge sunken grave, swarming with weeds so thick and tall that he could not see the base of their axises. Was the only answer death? Was this why he was seeing this! He had a strange frown as he studied the grave. He lay beneath this earth, flesh, hair seared off by decay, the same decay that touched him now. But it was peaceful … alone … His only solace, the realization that he had tasted the object of his hungry searching, as if it sought to drive him off, there were happy memories that nothing could take from him. It was something he had desired passionately, like a parched plant in dry soil. He had begun to believe that he might clutch at the edge of something like real love and happiness here in this small, dingy and uninteresting town, about which he felt a stranger, but before which he humbly lived and hoped. But that security had been short. And beneath his failure in all these, moved the mysterious dreams of his profound longing. Longing not because of the things he was without but for the things that he could not accomplish. He sensed almost a hatred in him as though he had only himself to blame for his feminine ways, and questioned himself desperately about the reason.

It seemed to him that he had suddenly assembled here the pages of a myth of himself but where was the answer in putting them together? Where was he? In what space and time, this strange young man, desiring manhood … It was as if suddenly a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadows must come to light. He must change. The nervousness, softness and tenderness must