I stick shut scissors in the doorhandle’s cavity and twist. He’s on his bed on his knees. Pressing bamboo forest, manna-gum forest, seaweed forest, to the wall. Peel-and-stick, like book contact. One idea is that living in a partial wilderness will centre him. Which do I like? The promontory water iron stained the ochre of dead fir needles at the river mouth this weekend, where the sea told me it was acceptable to love him as fascination. As hunger. Lemons for ash. Black glass for sun. Feverish cat for bottlebrush. His room bare save for a bed and a nightstand. Nothing on the nightstand but the nice cologne he stole from me ten years ago. It’s unused. Go back: my hand trembles the doorhandle, and he and his mates laugh as he denies stealing it, everyone looking at it. A dozen lungs stained sweet with it. How meth smoke smells of aniseed. How I backed out of the room into a monsoonal waiting. Why has he kept it? One idea is that he’s kept an unsigned note. But now, invisible as the best poisons, it’s a forest. Centre lost in the edges. Had he worn it until it ran dry, every day, a teen chaining a carton of menthols while Mum bones fish, I’d have said, That’s your penance. That’s my cowardice lost in patience. It’s time to admit that at the river mouth, beneath seaweed, gulls lay dead, hundreds, agape, gum-pink, and I reached through one to his hair.

Anders Villani