Work Text:
School field trips are strange. Liminal spaces in the same way that museum texts change with the season.
Ritsu has been on dozens on field trips. Each one has a didactic lesson, and very occasionally he cares to pay attention. They’re not on tests mostly.
“Frozen in flight,” the homeroom teacher says, enraptures as she points at the thick glass, “birds. Two of them, mouths open as if alive, searching for seed. Amazing, isn’t it?”
The hall is dark. The museum is quiet. Tomb-like. Ritsu feels comfortable here; all the academic labels and taxidermy posed in action.
“It’s amazing,” he says along with a dozen of his classmates. How amazing, how spectacular, how peculiar; but also, how familiar.
*
In the cafeteria, they sit and enjoy their lunches. Brown paper bags provided by the institution. Ritsu thinks of Shigeo and how much he’d enjoy the dim exhibits.
Someone chokes on their chips and then the chef starts to choke for no reason.
Everyone rushes to the tray line and Ritsu stays where he is; if only Shigeo could be here, to enjoy the mediocre meal and the taxidermied doves in flight. He’d like it so much. He loves birds, animals. He’d appreciate this.
*
Shigeo is a raven, hair afloat when he flies, terrible in his animosity.
Ritsu reviles and regales rubble as he feels his powers reach a percentage only his brother can understand; wasted and regaled and understood only by demons and energy zombies.
Birds along powerlines, crows waiting to be caught, waiting to be pigeons made into pie.
Food is the universal language of love: macabre, morbid, mulch. Rotten in dreams.
There’s been an orange in Shigeo’s bag for weeks. It’s begun to smell and people ask, but Ritsu doesn’t comment. He wishes it to stay there, to be unnoticed yet noticed.
He thinks sometimes about powerlines and how he is not immune to their charge, how he is not a crow that can avoid destruction by sitting above the masses. And as much as he sits above the masses and watches as they scatter with each passing storm, with each fear of the future, he still wishes he could be electrocuted by the wires, by the clouds, by anything at all.
Because he is not right. He is at the table and no one is with him. He is an orange rotting in a bag, rotting at the bottom of pages of homework, paper filled with Shigeo’s handwriting where ink streams into ruin if left too long.
*
Field trip. Art museum.
They see paintings, and this time, Ritsu is as still a as a taxidermied dove.
The table in a Dutch oil painting like formaldehyde: rotten fruit, preserved, in oil, with cups preserved in oil with knocked over liquid, with tablecloths and silverware and everything preserved in oil for one hundred years.
His classmates snicker. Who would want to eat that? Weird.” More words, more derisive commentary.
Ritsu murmurs, “How beautiful.”
And Ritsu’s teacher murmurs: “Strange. But you’re bound for greater things, a great future in a great company. Mind your manners, Kageyama.”
*
There’s a park behind Salt Middle School that Ritsu goes to. He asks his brother to meet him one unassuming weekday afternoon.
Shigeo has club. He declines, but says he’ll see Ritsu at home later. And Ritsu says: Of course nii-san. Of course.
He lies back amongst the clover at six o’clock on a Friday and knows he really hopes not to see the same time in morning or evening the following day.
All of this will be fine.
He tilts his head back toward the sky and lets grass and weeds caress his neck and cheeks; the middle school uniform is a tease against his collarbones.
Is this love?
If he were an orange, his brother would peel him apart; and he were ripe enough, his brother would eat him.
How would he look as a table?
He’d be oranges, fruit, flowers, something that looks good until getting closer; until realizing the flowers are wilting and the fruit is rotten. The apples are ravaged by worms and the oranges are dark and brown; the bananas are spotted and the peaches are decayed to the pit.
A ruined cornucopia, and yet he lays still.