Ando watched the sun plunge behind the mountains, behind the trees, flashing orange through windy branches and lighting the fogged pane afire. God bided his time beyond that crag, he was certain, crouched like the hungriest animal that ever walked or flew or crawled or swam, and when finally purple night turned deep blue, God would get up off his blood soaked haunches, swing a red leg over the snowpeaks of Ararat, and stomp a drooling path to Ando.
He prayed.
“God wants to eat me. He took my little brother and he ate him all up and I heard Mama and Papa say it was God’s will and now I believe he wants to eat me.”
Ando opened his eyes and looked around the cozy room he once shared with Deron, a vacated corner still occupied by the dead boy’s straw mattress. The chiaroscuro apparition of sunset sank lower, lower, lower, down the cottage walls, down with Ando’s invocations.
“Please protect me from God.”
The door swung knockless and fast fear gave way to fresh frustration, for this sovereign barging was a habit of his parents that Ando had begun to detest.
“Supper’s ready,” his mother said. She still wore black from scalp to sole. Ando doubted she would ever wear anything else.
“What are you doing, son?”
Ando was kneebound yet before his window, fingers laced tight and manacled between knuckles like some shivering spider. He released himself from himself and felt a tingle run along the length of his hairless arms.
“Nothing, Mama.”
She eyed him, perhaps, Ando pondered, trying to imagine the face of her baby.
“What did you make?”
“Can’t you smell it?” She smiled, a little, and her golden incisor glinted in the final vestige of fading day.
“Yes, now I can. I’ll be out soon.”
Mama turned on her stockings and shut Ando in once more with his privacy. He swiveled his neck back to the window and saw a grinning face on the other side. Ando clapped the scream sliding out of his mouth but couldn’t contain the urine flooding his breaches. It was God come to feast, God come to finish, God come to f-
“I am the furthest thing from God, tiny fellow. I am merely whom you’ve called.”
Ando could see the face’s lips move, could see its tongue throw out the words, but he could source them only to the center of his forehead rather than the split of his ears, and as Ando witnessed this silent speaking, the lean figure stepped inside his room as if neither wall nor plank nor glass were in any way obstructive, in any way even there.
“Hullo! I seem to not have severely injured my suit, and shall we tally that as a fantastic triumph? Oh, gracious, let’s remedy this wee mishap, my lad.” With a snap of a longnailed finger, Ando’s soiled trousers dried and the puddle of piss at his sodden feet evaporated. “Preferable, wouldn’t you say?”
Ando tried to respond but just then none of his faculties seemed to function.
“It is, it is, I know it is. Micturition can often be an unintended consequence of my sudden surfacings.”
The figure surveyed its surroundings as Ando surveyed the figure. A crisscross of hair curled around a rocky jaw. Precious jewels embedded upon the nose’s bridge. Eyebrows arched, thin, intelligent. Toes bare and sooty.
“So this is home.” A sweep of its loose sleeve.
“Y- yes.”
“And I’m to understand that your brother died in this very place?”
Ando cut a glance at the dark mountains, the blazing corona silhouetting its apex like a receding crimson wave.
“God took him and God ate him.”
“Aye, he tends to do that.”
“While I was asleep.”
“That gluttonous fiend.”
“Do you know him?”
“Your brother?”
“God.”
The figure sucked in a slow draught of air and exhaled through whistling nostrils.
“Alas and alack, sweet sprout, we know each other well, and I wouldn’t wipe the hole of my ass- the hole of my bum, pardon me, with his knotted lousy beard.”
“Is that why they baptize us?”
The figure squatted to meet Ando directly and the faintest plume of scarlet smoke followed in its wake. The chirps of chicks floated in from the yard and mingled with the pressured creak of old wood.
“How do you mean, dear?”
“They baptize us so that God knows who to eat?”
“Whom to eat, Ando. Whom. We must ameliorate our grammar, hmm?”
The figure placed his warm palms square on Ando’s shoulders, who flinched.
“Oh, mayn’t I?”
“You… you may.”
“Fine! And aye anent the baptism. That is indeed why his footmen anoint you with his backwash, the spit of a million meals. So that he might sniff you out like a bloodhound.”
“I knew it!”
“Smart. Even smarter for entreating yours truly. Speaking of, is that trout cooking on the coal? A lovely aroma!”
Ando nodded, feeling better already. Safer.
“The trout from Sevan are ancient and delicious. Noah himself scaled and barbecued them a time or two.”
“I don’t care for fish very much but my brother sure did.”
“Count me in with him then!”
Ando had no yen to cry in front of his conjuration but he suspected he could so he did.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Ando chuckled as he mopped tears from his blushing skin. A final pearl dangled from the tip of his nose and the figure gleaned it onto the pad of its thumb like a leaf accepting dew.
“Are you ready?”
Ando considered the question.
“What’s your name?”
“My name will be your name.”
“And you would really protect me?”
“I would help you protect yourself.”
“For how long?”
Now the figure considered the question.
“That is dependent entirely upon your… determination. Just as I intend to shield you, so too must you shield me.”
“One hand cannot clap.”
“Aye, one hand cannot clap.”
“Mama said that about me and Deron, how we ought to stick together.”
An immaculate gloom draped itself over the things in Ando’s room, yet the figure’s eyes gleamed like those of roaming lions he and his brother had spied in a twilit age gone by.
“Are you ready?”
When Ando sat at the dinner table, two hearts beat in his vibrating chest. Colors flowered from the steaming dishes, rising and falling in slow circles like elfin rainbows, countless covenants. The guttering candles were robust torches illuminating the entirety of that space as might a summer’s dawn. Ando’s immature loins threatened a different sort of spillage, while languages from every compass point unfurled in his fizzing mind, merging into a second nature long understood, and by the time Ando’s father took up the head chair, the exclusive rhythms of human and demon were synced into a comfortable throb. The plated fish stared at Ando, hot death, and as it gawped he discerned the smallest voice peeping from the core of his skull.
please please eat
Hunger such as he’d never known sucked audibly at Ando’s insides, a gaping whirl in which his guts possibly could be vortexed for sustenance.
you will grow to like it trust in me
The famine! He could endure no more. Ando seized fork and knife and sliced through the trout’s neck, the serrated blade clacking across its spine.
yes
Ando scooped a chunk of the fish’s face and raised it quivering to his mouth.
delectable
He bit into the morsel of head and cheek and rode an eyeball on the jagged track of his molars and fangs. Ando would be picking bones from his teeth all night, wondering if there was any difference between him and God.
difference is that was just a fucking trout
Ando swallowed and understood: he was guardian and he was ward, possessed but also possessor, one hand cannot cla-
“Ando?”
He blinked and licked the tangy sponge of his gums.
“Yes, Papa?”
“We ain’t yet said grace, young man. Ten years old and already you forgettin your manners.”
“Amen.”
Ando’s father choked on his son’s foreign impudence.
“Husband, take off your vestment. It will stink of fish.”
“It already stinks. Do you not hear your s-”
“Maybe your parishioners don’t wish to know what you had for dinner-”
“Then maybe you can wash my vestment, eh, woman?”
“Hey.”
They both of them looked at Ando.
“Don’t talk to her like that.”
Stunned peace.
ever
“Ever.”
Ando observed his papa as his papa observed Ando. He wanted the old man, another of God’s blind valets, to see and see well.
Though Ando was fused with a curative and desired force, he was still a child, hardly more than a toddler, far from grown, so when his boiling father lashed out like a viper and caught his wrist in a vicelike grip, Ando had no recourse.
“Emil, leave him be, you’re hurting him! Ando, my lamb, do not worry-”
“Lamb! Ain’t no lamb, Maral. I see in him another resident, an invader.”
“Oof, Emil, we are not at church! Spare us your-”
“Lord have mercy, Maral, but Satana has took him.”
“Better than God doing it, Papa!”
Ando repeated himself several times, raising the vicious volume of his voice with each spittled declaration. His mother shouted, and the fact that he’d scared her wounded him. But it was true, what he said. Better than God doing it like he did Deron.
“Hold him, Maral, hold him hard!”
They were on him then, bearing down like hunters trussing a feral hog.
“I done lost one boy, I ain’t losin another! We will expel this evil from your spiritual flesh, as Jesus the Christ exorcized all those unfortunate fallen.”
Ando wrestled with clamping arms as his papa intoned the spells of a voracious deity, the selfsame adversary who devoured Deron and gorged on the kid’s dying gargles scant inches from Ando’s dormant body. He bucked against his parents’ straining sinews like a Nisean horse fixed on freedom from the gelding knife. Trickles of water hexed holy stung Ando, a liquid legion of berserking bees, but instead of tranquilizing him, these parlor tricks strengthened his novel resolve. Ando scaled his lofted soul and therein saw futures manifold. He knew without doubt that should his parents succeed in their severing, he would be diminished. His life would be diminished. And how much sadder.
Lonelier.
Rapt by the most potent divinatory mourning, Ando raged without quarter. He had lost enough, had been robbed enough. Emil and Maral sweated over their son for hours, but Ando’s relentless resistance won out.
He clung to his newness and his newness clung back.
good lad
The toiling trio had inexplicably ended up in their den, beside the unlit hearth, dinner a cold abortion. After a hushed intermission, Ando helped to replace the disturbed furniture and found that he did not require assistance when lifting the unshipped settee.
“You’re getting bigger,” remarked Ando’s mother.
“I guess I am,” he admitted. “Seriously, though, Mama. Don’t let Papa talk to you like that. Understand?”
She swept away a lock of his brown hair.
“I understand.”
“But what I don’t understand is,” puffed his father, “for who are you acting like this, huh? Without a little brother to impress anymore-”
“For whom, for whom! You’re a priest, man, better that grammar.”
Ando’s father set about stammering again.
“And I do it for me, Papa, because that’s right, I don’t have a little brother anymore, which seems to be perfectly fine by you.”
“It’s what… it’s what God wanted.”
“He wanted too much.”
Ando held ground until the perspiring man averted his imperious glare. Mama touched Ando’s elbow.
“I bet you’re hungry.”
“Starving.”
Ando ate the rest of the trout in his room, flabbergasted at his initial reticence. This entire world teemed with pleasures and passions, his to experience and behold. His expanding appetite satisfied, he put his plate on the floor and stripped. Ando peered out across the highlands of Armenia and toward the veiled mountain which cached a killer. He turned, bent, and waggled his olive ass at the enemy God. From his vantage point, Deron’s cot was a moonlit tableau empty these forty days.
“That’s for my brother, you son of a bitch.”
Ando heard a jingle of rapturous laughter, but it was only himself. He slipped into bed and let the cool blanket ease him into beatific sleep, full in ways old and new.
About the Author
Robert Nazar Arjoyan was born into the Armenian diaspora of Los Angeles. Aside from an arguably ill-advised foray into rock n roll bandery, literature and movies were the vying forces of his life. Naz graduated from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and now works as an author and filmmaker. Find him at www.arjoyan.com and on Twitter @RobertArjoyan.
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