All We Want Is Everything by Andrew F. Sullivan Page A

say anything about my Dad? What did my Mom say? Did she say it was a good idea? She knows that we own this house right? And that you and I are trying to get rid of all these things?”
    I don’t want to say anything. I try to make eye contact with the birds around us. They are gathered on the branches, but they aren’t saying much. I want to crush them in my hands.
    “He said he has a house… and I mean, well your Mom wasn’t happy, but Orlando kind of had a point. Like, who else goes outside besides us? No one is out there on the street at all.”
    “That stupid pale fucker,” Jimmy says. His face goes red and I can see foam rising in his mouth. He spits onto the ground and I remember when Rachel Henderson shot him down in the fourth grade. He took all her pencil crayons and ran each one through the sharpener at recess until only shavings remained. Jimmy pulls his Dad’s motorcycle helmet and slams the visor shut.
    “Nobody wants to fucking help. They’re all too busy planning with each other.”
    Jimmy takes off into the woods and I’m left sitting on the lawn mower. The birds begin to cackle around me. I fire up the mower and try to ride it out of the woods. I want to follow him and explain this was all a mistake. We can still finish this project. We can still burn out the sky.
    The mower gets stuck in the mud again and I am forced to walk.
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    Eventually, I catch up to Jimmy at Orlando’s gas station. He has smashed all the glass and is tearing down the pictures when I arrive. White sand beaches and Jimmy Buffett’s moustache flutter away into the wind past my face. The birds circle above the destruction, but refuse to swoop down for a closer look. Jimmy tears apart every image as I approach. He is still wearing his helmet and it is splotched with white arcs of shit. He turns and spots me riding toward him with the gas can dangling from my handlebars. He raises two middle fingers in my direction and runs toward his bike. I drop the gas can and keep pedalling. My lungs are filled with phlegm.
    “We aren’t finished yet!” I scream through my bandanna. “We aren’t done! Come back! You can stay with me, man! You can stay, alright?”
    Jimmy keeps pedalling away from me. His legs have always been stronger than mine. He thinks he can outrun this cloud. I scream after him as my muscles begin to surrender. They burn and burn and eventually I have to stop before I throw up or pass out into a ditch. Jimmy tosses up a tail of dust behind him as he hits the road out of town. He passes the sign welcoming everyone to Hudson. He passes the graveyard where they put his father and all our grandparents. He thinks he can beat them, that he can escape the cloud lingering above us all. Jimmy passes the final corner toward the highway. I can only see the glint of his black helmet now. He thinks he’s gone.
    I look up into the sky above me. Everything is black and the wings go on forever.

God Is a Place
    Caleb takes the baby while Twink is at work. He bundles it up in sweaters and wraps it in a bath towel. He doesn’t trust the baby, and he doesn’t believe it’s his child. It burps and squeals while he tries to sleep in the other room. It drains the life out of Twink from her tits, sapping all that warm rich life away into piss and shit and other fluids. Twink’s night shifts stretch out into the early hours before dawn, where the old men ask her if she’s queer and ponder aloud why she was named after a pastry in the first place. Twink is nowhere to be found in those early hours and so Caleb is the one sitting at home, listening to the squealing mass, the baby she says is his, but it does not have his eyes, it does not have his long, bony hands and it never shuts up. It squeals for milk that is too warm, too cold, too much. There is always too much.
    Caleb can’t get the prescription he needs and his left knee is still broken somewhere deep inside, somewhere deep and unknowable, according to the doctors who hold