Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2007 18:03:01 -0800 (PST) From: Tim Stillman Subject: Christmas at Eleven (incest, young-friends) Christmas at Eleven By Timothy Stillman (To Jordan, who asked for more of Chad and Key) Their names were Chad and Key. They were eleven this Christmas. They were twins. They had no one but each other. They had not seen each other since they were eight. They wrote letters to each other. The letters were long and involved as only letters from introspective children can be. Their letters were torn up and never mailed. The boys secretly knew, but it would have killed their hearts to know for sure, so they never asked, any mail for me today? The answer already given. Their parents had separated two weeks after their eighth Christmas. They had not seen each other in all that time. They had had only each other. They had been moved to their grandparents' houses to live. Chad with his maternal grandparents. Key with his paternal ones. They each lived at the opposite end of the country. Their grandparents were getting elderly and had no need for computers. Phone calls cost a fortune. There was a custody fight. It was quite terrible and scary for the twins. They thought of their parents seldom. They thought of each other endlessly. Chad was writing a long story about a vampire boy. He and his vampire families had wiped out all life on the earth^so they thought---but there was a human enclave hiding in a cave. And in that enclave was a boy-mostly boy, one-tenth werewolf^named Key. In the story, when Key found himself with Chad, the vampire boy and the one-tenth-werewolf boy, had made love. And had made each other both more and less than what they had been, all at the same time. As Chad and Key in real life had made love too. That last Christmas when they were eight, with two weeks of life left with each other in their lives. In the story, Chad made them older, made them stronger, made them brave, made them both so very very lonely. This Christmas, they were finally going home^somewhat. Dad was flying to the Coast tomorrow. Chad and Key were to meet him at the Sheraton Inn in L.A., not the greatest place for Christmas. Snow and cold were Chad's domain and the part of the country he lived in gave him multitude of it. Key lived in Florida where it was always so depressingly hot and humid and sunny, even when it rained, you could still see that damn sun shining. Sometimes at night too, so it seemed. It was relentless. Chad had cold and snowstorms and clothes not warm enough that caused him to shiver. Tonight was the final night before he got to fly to L.A. all on his own. He would be met by his brother, name of Key, at LAX, and their father. Mr. Somebody or something, would be with them and hug them and take them to lunch and dinner and to the hotel room where he would give them presents and then a good night's sleep, till he had to leave for a job appointment, and his sons had to get on the plane the next day^that very next day after they met each other at LAX and be apart again again again^. And they, Key and Chad, refused to think of that. The going away day would not exist again. Not ever. So that night, Chad, in his drafty house, wrote of Chad the vampire and Key the werewolf boy and how they made love that first time in the snow. How it turned Chad from being a vampire to being human. How it turned the part-werewolf boy into full human as well. That eighth Christmas, they had been in bed Christmas Eve night, and they had been fooling round as usual. Only this time, there was an edge to it. An urgency to it. A sadness they had felt often when being apart from each other even for a few hours. Now, they were being split apart like conjoined twins. Which in many emotional ways they were. They had held each other that night, in their warm jammies and had played with each other's penises against the material and outside of it, touching feeling pressing finding it so warm and so alive. As they had in the past. But this time, Chad let Key rub his penis, Chad's, all the way, making Chad shiver and cry out a little. And Key looked at his brother's penis throbbing, with great wide eyes and great wide wonder. Then Chad did him. And it was like Christmas inside Key^candles, Christmas tree lights, and wonderful presents giggling down way deep in him like in a long tunnel of forever boy. Chad was rubbing himself here in his little room, writing the fantasy of himself and his brother. What made them so terribly vulnerable, what made them that final Christmas in the world, take off their clothes and lie one atop the other, then reverse order, was all the sad and happy and already going things of childhood^the feel of a winter night's first kiss^the love of a mom and dad holding you for no reason other than they loved you and wanted you to know^that was what was in the story and in reality of the final Christmas of the world Chad and Key had been doing^holding each other because they loved each other and wanted, each in kind, to know it. For sure and forever. The terrible thought now^had they forgotten each other? Would they be awkward in each other's presence? Would that dream be made a travesty too? When you're ten, you say don't think it, and you do not, in that powerful way children have to protect themselves and their very beings. Chad made the little human tribe in the story, almost gone, because the remaining humans were weak with hunger and torn apart by vampires who hunted them down on the run. The vampires were eating all their kills. They were not content now with just sucking their little herd's anemic blood, but had them outright, needing meat, finding little anymore. Vampires die of hunger also, especially when the blood supply is also used up. So the vampires began to feast on each other. And sometimes, if it came to that, on their own bodies as well. Chad and Key did not need clothing though it was cold and snow deep. They had found, each in turn, the key to turn on the heat in themselves, in their tummies, the same heat that they had found when they played with each other that final night and how safe they felt^smiles and giggles softly and whisper bats of word wings and touching each other everywhere there was to touch, and since they were identical twins, how much fun it was making sex, making love with each other, as well as the image of the other and the same as well, different but still and all... The Blue Horse notebook was filled now with Chad's pointy, spidery handwriting. It was a lurid story, lots about Chad and Key just doing all these wonderful outlaw things..finding an old motorcycle..that Chad was, of course, smart enough to make run, though he had never seen one ever before in real life^no key?^presto chango^here's the key^and off they go naked in the winter, Key behind him, holding on tighter than necessary, to a place of nothing but happiness..nothing but blue warm swimming pools in the middle of all the chalk winter white^of diving in and holding each other and feeling each other under water and sticking their penises in each other's mouths and playing with their smooth balls and their dicks and their groins and tickling and pinching their tits and holding tightly because they loved each other and wanted the other to know. Every science fiction book and movie about the almost end of life on Earth was^well^about ultimately, repopulating^that was always the after WW III theme or the vampire plague theme^but Chad thought, why not let the world end? Why not be the last two gatekeepers of Earth? Chad loved Key. He never masturbated without thinking of his brother. Key loved Chad and always thought of him naked and longed to touch him so. Why not let that be the former vampire and the former almost all but partly werewolf boy's last legacy of Earth. To say here we are, the children everybody said they cared so about, that everybody bleated about so much and made such a big to-do about, so they could impress themselves and each other, we standing for all the brutalized, abandoned, murdered, uncared for, dying of sickness and starvation and not one loving had to ever touch us, while you were spouting off at your oh so moral mouths, and here we are young and identical twins and we love having sex with each other and we are kind and gentle and we care for one another like you never did. When one or the other of us grows a slight mini-inch on our dick, we don't see it as competition, but celebrate familiar pride. When some down grows on Key's groin before it does on Chad's, then fine and good and congrats bro. And when Chad wrote about being fucked by Chad, in the story, he made it feel just filling and happy and good and sexy. It wasn't about pain or something horrible. Something horrible had killed all life. Something horrible was bowed down to. Well, all that stuff was gone now^Chad and Key had survived to live in a new fresh world. And when they grew old enough and tired enough and they died in each other's arms^because they would die together as they breathed, ate, slept, had sex, sucked each other, fucked each other^together, that would be brother and brother still and true and faithful of heart. They would think together and they would stop thinking together. And, to Chad, having jacked himself off twice in the last half hour, writing this and then reading it over, getting sleepy, night wearing on, it seemed fair and right and equitable and very beautiful that he and Key would never be parted. Not ever again. And they would make love, have sex, all the time and never get tired or bored or achy or not interested or not having stuff to talk about and fall into these awkward silences adults did, like when trying to explain the facts of life to you; you knowing infinitely more than they, and the explainers so embarrassed and so silent at long times, you wanting to laugh your ass off, but being respectful nonetheless. Till you were alone. Then you laughed your ass off. To your heart's and to your ass' content. Chad lay his head down on his notebook, his pen falling to the floor. A few hours more till he took the plane ride^and truthfully, he was scared about it for lots of reasons^he had never been alone before, but without Key, he was always alone. But he would see Key soon and he was excited beyond words, and they would run away into L.A. and they would get jobs of some sort, find a place of some sort to live, be together for always-Chad might get this novel published^they would become famous^they would be together^and the exact same time Chad thought together and fell profoundly asleep^dreaming of seeing his brother, his twin mirror, his love^and all the changes and all the love to grow still further^"Together" said Chad in a special mirror-placed dream, "Together." Key said at the other end of the country, "Together," at the exact same time..and "Together" again..and then fell profoundly asleep in his bed, the knees he had had pulled up, falling slack, on which he supported his Blue Horse notebook and pencil had been propped, said notebook and pencil falling to the side of his little bed. He was so happy he would see Chad. His other self. His love and true. And they would explore each other. See how each had changed. Who had developed any pube hair, whose penis was bigger-who was shooting yet and who wasn't?^and in his sleep, Key giggled and snuggled in deeper under the light covers in the too hot night and slept profoundly. They would discover tomorrow morning at eleven fifteen a.m. each the other. And they would hold each other in the airport and look at each other and laugh and celebrate life and the joy of breathing oh God it would be wonderful.. while that irritating shadow of some man or other, their father^yeah, right, sure-- stood there totally ignored then and there and the rest of the time together and the rest of his life, if his sons had anything to say about it. And that night, when Dad went out to a meeting, the boys alone in their hotel room, one would bring out a Blue Horse notebook and the other would do the same..from their suitcases at the same time^ And stunned, they would look at the notebooks and each other as blue eyes stared into blue eyes and dark raven hair was the perfect image each the other, as they would almost tear the notebooks out of each other's hands, riffling through the pages feverishly, stopping to read sentences, saying them aloud, before reading them here and now-the words, the plot, the sentences, the characters, the feelings, the end of the world getting it right thanks to a former werewolf in part boy and a former vampire boy^and the twins threw the notebooks on the carpeting and all but hopped in each other's arms and they kissed and laughed and tickled each other and they fell on one of the beds and started taking off their clothes and began playing with each other, each, the other, having much time to make up for, and made each other harder in their new longer penises and sucked each other off and put their heads on the other's chest and felt heart beats still in rhythm, one with the other. When the man who had the audacity to call himself their Dad showed up late that night, three sheets to the wind, he found his two sons, that word "sons" in his lexicon at least, not theirs, asleep and innocent, while in their dreams they were united together forever, naked and fucking and sexy and spurting, as twin hand held out to twin hand---and touched. It was winter love. And winter love is the very best kind there is. For it never lets you go.