The Glittering World Read Online Free PDF

land up there. When he wasn’t looking, the lost boys and girls had all grown up.
    Beyond the cove, a thin zipper of dawn opened on the horizonover Kelly’s Mountain. “Look,” he said. “Here comes the sun.”
    “Please don’t sing,” she said, and he busted out laughing. Elisa could always do that, penetrate to his core and alleviate the sense of alienation he’d harbored as long as he could remember. What could he say? She still got him. It didn’t help that she was as beautiful as ever; that would never change, not to him. He would always love her, if only in regret. Except for that one night in May, right after he’d gotten the call about his grandmother and her house, when he and Elisa found their lips thrust together in need of both consuming and being consumed. Hands fumbling in the dark to remove each other’s clothing, the heat of her warm flesh on his, skin on skin. That night regret was a stranger.
    Blue slid his hand along the rough wood of the porch swing and interlaced his fingers with hers. Across the cove the distant light strengthened until it sparkled above the water like a disco ball, like glitter thrown from a rafter high above a cavernous and smoke-filled dance floor.
    “Glittering,” she said softly, as if she’d plucked the word from his mind.
    “What’s that?” he asked, but she didn’t respond, only squeezed his hand before loosening her grip. It was a word he’d long kept close to his heart, one that described a place that didn’t exist. A land of belonging he had once searched for across the skin of lovers, at the bottom of liquor bottles, in clouds of pot smoke and granulated powders and pills. His magical home, always just out of reach. She was the only thing left of that world, and already she was fading.
    “Elisa,” he said, her very name in his voice its own charge ofurgency. “If there’s something going on, you know you can tell me, right?”
    “Sure,” she said. “Of course.”
    “If things with Jason aren’t—”
    Her breath caught in her throat. “Don’t,” she said, and moved her hand from his. “I can’t. Forget it. I’m sorry.”
    She stood and went inside the house, Blue left on the jangling porch swing, alone.

Chapter Two
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    He sees himself again, this time in his dreams. His unconscious, normally a dark pool, is now aglow with moonlight, and the mirror of the night forest appears to him once more. He faces his refractive self-image, and hears his call to himself: a choir of different selves in different voices, but all him. Struck by the same sense of longing he felt outside the ceilidh, he steeps in the fecund scent of his kindred, close by, so close.
    They call him Blue, his adopted name; they call him Michael, his given name; and they call him by another, older name, something altogether different, but also familiar. A dream name. Or a christening at last?
    His lips move, as if to repeat the word. But only a buzzing sound emerges, a hive of listless bees awakening to life, to be reborn.

    Blue opened his eyes to the tartan room’s plaid bedding and matching walls. The name was gone. All that remained was a dull thud of sensation: that of being smothered and emerging, an escape from being buried alive, which was how he felt after most of his nightmares. More gloomy thoughts born of Saturn.
    He’d neglected to draw the curtains, the square of light from the window next to the bed diffuse but still painfully bright. Heslumped back down, a momentary shuddering of trees across his vision before he sat up again, determined to meet the incipient challenges of wakefulness.
    Beyond the foot of the brass bed, someone stood in the doorway: Gabe, in a rumpled T-shirt and jeans that hung low over his narrow hips. They both started.
    “Oh—sorry,” Gabe said. He went to shut the door, appeared to collect himself, and peered back inside. “I was just—sorry. I heard you cry out.”
    “I was having a nightmare. Don’t sweat it. Really.” He