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Eugene couldn’t quite find the words. Words were not his specialty.
It was this: myrmecomorphy.
An arthropod acting an unpalatable ant. It was fuzzy ends, the hair standing to attention along the nape, beguiled under the excuse: “sorry, static.”
It was this: twilight, dusk, dawn, liminality. A thing that wanted to be dark but was light.
It was: Pugsley Addams.
In all the words he could not find there was the white space of feeling, and with it, the abstraction of what it was.
Their first encounter had not meant much at the time; only now, for lack of better words, it pressed against paper, a botanical heart beating in black and white.
It was unimportant what it was or how it came to be.
It was so unimportant, Eugene thought, because here was his friend.
A boy in sepia rather than noir, a boy who smiled like a circuit doing its rounds, at happenstance and everything in between: twilight, dusk, dawn and liminality. A boy that wanted to be dark but was light. A boy pretending to be dead with a chest that rose and fell like sunlight.
“You didn’t eat any of them?” Eugene was asking in disbelief. He was buzzing and trying to appear solidly planted on the ground simultaneously. It gave the distinct resemblance of an exclamation point. Dotted feet, a jumping soul confined to a line. “Why?” Was his next question.
Pugsley lay on his bed, head elevated by his elbow, as he watched Eugene inspecting the tank on the dresser. It was the kind of bed that looked as if it had been welded from a dream of discomfort—its uneven frame warped into a sly, rickety smile (and so did Pugsley).
“I was going to,” Pugsley said sheepishly, “but then I realized I wasn’t going to see you for a while and…”
It was tremulous—that was the word, surely—how Pugsley concluded, “And I’d rather hold onto them as a reminder. Of you.” He wasn’t looking at Eugene, though he was. He looked at the absences, the hollows between glances, as though his gaze might haunt the places Eugene’s would not go.
Eugene realized, with a jolt, that he was just as guilty of the same. To look Pugsley in the eyes felt like touching a live wire, as if combustion was an inevitability in Puglsey’s presence—his lingering gaze.
“That’s…” Eugene began, but he was struck again by the sensation that it was indescribable.
It was: carrying electricity in the ball of your fist, reaching for metal, one moment pressing into another. There wasn’t a word for it he knew, except alive.
He moved to sit by the Addams boy, who did not shift from his reclined sprawl—except to leave just enough space that when Eugene sat down their skin brushed, and the contact sent a jolt through both of them.
“Sorry,” Pugsley said, head tilted, big, big, big brown eyes swallowing the gulp his throat could not. “Static.”
“You’re… you’re fine,” Eugene said breathlessly. “You know, sometimes it’s hard to think you’re Wednesday’s brother.”
The other boy did not respond at once. He drew in air, swallowed it like a stone, let it drag into his lungs. Then he said, very woefully: “Yeah… I’m not Wednesday. I’m just Pugsley.” He folded his arms across himself and collapsed flat on the bed. It groaned in protest, like something alive.
Hurriedly, Eugene added, “No, Pugsley, I don’t mean it that way. I just mean… I like that you’re different.”
He did not say I like you—though at that moment, those were the right words, or near enough. Instead, by some pure, unadulterated urge, he laid his hand on Pugsley’s thigh and turned, leaning into the boy’s saturating stare. Every hair on Eugene’s arm strained toward him, quivering, and his head rang with silence—white space exploding into a full spectrum of color. It felt as if he didn’t need to say the words at all; they ran through his body from deeper chasms of knowing, straight into Pugsley’s head. Electromagnetic waves, spooling and splashing. The world tuned itself in, turned full volume—then stopped.
Eugene’s eyes closed. His grip tightened. His lips parted.
There was a kiss. Slow, unsure, curving against his mouth like the tongue of a question mark. The bed’s foundation creaked. Eugene thought to himself: falling—yes, falling. That’s what I am. Falling. The mattress beneath them sank deeper.
“Sorry,” Pugsley was saying, licking his lips and flicking his eyes every direction, but there it was: Eugene’s hands moving from thigh to cheek. And there it was: in the corner of the room, a makeshift tank, bugs threading in a zigzag, a lightning bolt, chewing tiny, inscrutable heart-shapes into foliage. And there it was: the perfect kind of word—a word that rolled between lips and not ears. Liminality. Lightning. Light.
Outside, the sun and moon wrestled. Odds, tightly embraced.