Strange is the Night Read Online Free

Robert saw the fire and described it to him.
    In its flickering glow, he got down on one knee and asked William to marry him. The firelight gilded William, sliding over his skin and Robert thought he had never looked as handsome as he did when he said yes. He pulled Robert up from the sidewalk and kissed him in the wind that was cold and damp from the north; hot and dry from the window. Robert felt like he was in Heaven even as Eden burned.
     

IV
    Robert graduated college with a degree in philosophy. His favorite aunt’s asshole husband gave him a gift box wrapped in shiny silver foil paper. Something that looked like a cross between a frog and a scorpion but walked like a crab and had eyes on stalks sticking out from the sides of its head scuttled into view from one side of the box and out of view on the other. In hot pursuit was a thing like a cat but with two heads, six eyes and a row of spines that oozed what Robert guessed was poison. He could hear the poison sizzle where it hit the ground, shaken free by the cat-thing’s bounding steps. It leapt and its tailless rear-end was still in view when he heard a shriek from out of frame.
    He ripped the paper open, aware that he was getting lost in his world again and that people were staring. When he lifted the lid from the box, he saw an application for a fast food restaurant inside. His uncle bellowed laughter and Robert glared at him, counting to ten in his head before he dared speak. William beat him to it though because one of the great things about William was that he didn’t care about counting to ten or minding his manners.
    Robert smiled to himself and turned a piece of the foil paper over to see how things were going there. The cat-thing was eating the frog-scorpion even as something else crept up on it, something big and hulking and rippling with muscles and scales. It was one of those things Robert desperately did not want to see, like the thing that had been in the village field that day, so he wadded the paper up and dropped it on the floor. He looked up in time to see William punch his uncle in the face. Robert’s first and only reaction was to laugh and cheer; even his mother’s scolding look couldn’t make him stop.
    He took William home to their crappy apartment that night and iced his knuckles and kissed his mouth and took out his shard of mirror to tell him what he saw while they passed a bottle of cheap vodka back and forth. It was snowing in the region he could see from their couch by the window and something with huge leathery wings that glittered with frost walked through the snow.
    Robert described to William the sound of its taloned feet breaking through the crust of the ice. He told William how the cold must be truly brutal because the skin was coming off the bat-winged creature’s feet and it left bloody prints in its wake. It made no sound to indicate that it was in pain though and Robert watched it for over an hour, moving from place to place in the apartment to keep up with it. William was worried for it, but Robert didn’t know how to tell him that everything in his world lived solely to die, at least as far as he could tell.
    Then the thing stopped and turned and stared right back at Robert. It met his eyes and he saw its pain then. He saw far more than that though; he saw its rage, rage at its situation, rage at its helplessness no matter its size, rage at having been seen by the likes of some boy barely become a man. It opened its mouth, a jagged slice through its left cheek, and screamed at Robert before he could throw the mirror. He clapped his hands over his ears and screamed, too.
    William got down on the floor with him and took the mirror from his scarred hands. Robert had cut himself on its edges when he squeezed instead of throwing it. Robert clung to William and sobbed into his t-shirt, soaking the cloth with blood and wishing he had never seen the place to begin with. He wanted to go back to that long ago day of his childhood