Manicorn

Squinting behind himself as he trudged forward through the swirling snow, Shylo caught a glimpse of a nearly camouflaged silver car – still there.  The vehicle had been following him for nearly half an hour.  There was no other explanation; he was walking beside the highway, where the cars should have been going 70, not four. It wasn’t unusual, really.  After all, he was the one who habitually donned his sister’s clothing and went looking for things a boy his age shouldn’t have been.  Still, it made him uneasy.  Usually, the type of creeps who picked him up didn’t follow so much as roll up beside him and call him in

His face screamed drugs and heartbreak. Even through the cacophony of car horns and shouts, Noah could hear the boy’s eyes screaming. He was balanced precariously on the bridge’s guard rail, the toes of his small feet curled delicately around its edge.  With his knees curled to his chest, he glared balefully at the mass of stopped traffic before him—one car had stopped to coax him from his perch had stopped another had stopped the rest. He wore his sister’s best yellow dress, the straps falling from narrow shoulders to loop around scantly muscled arms carved deep with the scars of agony and confusion.  The gossamer wave

Noah wants to write songs.  He wants to set to music all the things that he sees, all the crazy things that he thinks; those impossible thoughts swirling around in his brain.  He wants to make them simple, make them rhyme; make them make sense for once in his life. And he wants more than anything to write a song for Shylo.  He wants Shylo to know how much he loves him, the things he can’t say but that the strings of a guitar can, and he wishes he could play the violin as beautifully as Shylo did for him, once, before he cried and threw his violin on the floor, where it splintered into a billion pieces, just like Noah’s heart when h

Shylo is a boy who likes to look at the moon, to contemplate the stars so insignificant in its wake.  Planes flicker by with lights blinking on and off, their passengers asleep in flight across the universe; but he pretends they are shooting stars, wishes his hopes and dreams on their unlikely wings.’ He has blonde hair that’s just a little too long, almost-white strands falling into and stinging his too-blue mismatched eyes where he wishes someone would brush them away with gentle fingertips, but he leaves them there because it’s nothing at all to the pain in his heart. His nose is too small beneath too big eyes, but his lon