coma white
by Daniel Sheen
IT WERE A SATURDAY when we first found the key. Just some beat-up piece of tarnished silver that might’ve come from any hardware store in three counties. So when Dylan turned to me and said, “Someday, Danny, this key’s gonna open a door,” I near about spit out my lunch tryin’ not to laugh at how serious he looked. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer, pushin’ the key down into my palm, leavin’ a red mark that hung in the air for hours. Talkin’ all excited like he knew somethin’ I didn’t.
Life was different before Dylan. Twelve years old, scrawny as a half-starved dog, intense darkness coiled inside. Trapped behind dry lips, pale skin and shaky hands. A redacted child. But I guess some folks just happen, ‘specially at that age, so when Dylan first happened—emergin’ fully formed outta some milky pocket of memory—for the first time since Mama died, I felt witnessed, illuminated, like I were spotlit under the restless beam of a distant lighthouse. Lookin’ at Dylan was like starin’ down the midday sun in August. You knew it’d blind you but you just couldn’t help yourself—like he had the kinda pretty that hurt to look at. Plus he had this way about him when he talked, and so I knew in those first few moments that if he offered me anythin’ at all, I wouldn’t be able to resist, I knew it from the look in his eye to the way his mouth moved like he were chewin’ on somethin’ much too big to swallow. That boy was a miracle wrapped in fairy dust and Sweet Jesus if I weren’t ready to snort him up and become a dream. Because finally, here was someone who saw the world through the same cracked lens. Which of course only poured more fuel on the already ragin’ fire, our newly shared madness burnin’ bright enough to shame the Holy Ghost.
It was a madness that quickly became all consuming.
Dylan’s past was grimmer than a German fairy tale at midnight. You could feel it crawlin’ under your skin sometimes, an odd static hum that burrowed deep inside, kinda like when there’s a big storm coming and all the power lines are buzzing. And that kinda sadness ain’t natural in a boy his age—the way it leaked outta him, poisoning everythin’ he touched, same as when my daddy’s tractor oil got into the well one summer and we all had the stomach-sick runs somethin’ fierce. I don’t know. I guess even the prettiest things can turn mean if you hurt ‘em enough. And yet this was the thing we never much talked about, ‘cause we were so young back then—Dumb as posts and green as spring corn, like Mama used to say—and my feelings were forever confused by the way his lips tasted of home.
But now, whenever I think about the map of his skin, I feel an echo of his scars across my fingertips. The texture. The weight of their meanin’. No wonder he was forever runnin’ away. From school. From his daddy’s leather belt. From anythin’ that tried to rope him down. And so we made ourselves outlaws, the way boys do when they’re tryna act tough. Just us against the world—blood and spray paint and knives and guitars, ragin’ against the sickness of a dyin’ earth, so afraid to belong we’d do almost anythin’ to avoid it. Including getting liquored up and skatin’ down the off ramp at night, playin’ chicken with the oncoming traffic on the freeway.
In the darkness, we must’ve been little more than shadows smeared in fog. Sound of steel hitting flesh. Biting stink of rubber on the highway, the whisper of broken wings overhead. The sound of Dylan screaming my name. The key humming soft against my thigh as I hit the ground.
*********
SOMETIMES, I HAVE MEMORIES from before my body was made, which is weird. They fill me with dread, for when I wake it reminds me that everythin’ is at an end.
Only solitary animals survive now. Starvin’ cats. Emaciated wolves. Hidin’ from the ash, the dust, the forest fires. Even the spectral crows have fled, and I miss their spiky silhouettes all up against the pale sky, like some foreign haunting of darkness and vulnerability.
This place is like the space between dreams, a kingdom of shadows, a sense of depth and age and vastness all at once. A dampening of the awful shock of life. A land where you aren’t quite human, where you don’t got no endings or beginnings, where the light behind your eyelids is silent, where your mind is flat and still and the air tastes like the sun’s gone quiet. Even the trees here are merely skeletal ghosts of what they once were—shade will soon become a memory in this place—the grass long since having turned the colour of burnin’ clouds. Smoke eats at my lungs, the scent of it recalling wildfire and funeral pyres. It goes hand-in-hand with loneliness. Meanwhile, the river rises careful, edgin’ towards menace, the sly toxic runoff fillin’ the paw prints of the last few remaining wolves with rainbow-slick water.
And I feel I should know what’s happening, but most days here my mind is like a broke-down chicken coop after a tornado, just a mess of splintered dreams and rusty wire. And in the background, constant and unending, is the music—sounds like it’s comin’ from the sky—long, shimmering drones, deep as a whale’s belly, yet also faint and ethereal, like some broke-down pipe organ, or a trumpet a heavy-set angel done stepped on. This is how I know I’m dreaming. The drones. Although on some days they feel less like music and more like a jittery feelin’ runnin’ down your spine, or maybe the sensation of cold air rushin’ through an unsealed crack deep inside of you. It feels like the end of the world. But whisper-quiet. Less like catastrophic thunder and more like a slow unravelling, like an old sweater comin’ apart at the seams.
Occasionally, I even remember the pain, from when that car caught me on the highway. Was it a car? And what happened next? Where did the pain go? Because it must’ve gone somewhere—pain that big oughta leave a forwarding address. Especially seein’ as the last thing I remember was the sound of my skull cracking open. Dull crunch of bone against the highway. Trouble is, after that first lightning strike of hurt, the quiet washed over me, and the pale sky, and the slow crumbling of the world around me. The dreaming. The place beyond the red-stained sky. A world of hazy silken light falling through the cloud-damp-soft of melting frost.
*********
TIME PASSES AND IT’S like there ain’t nothin’ inside me anymore. And if I am still here, then I’m slowed way down, the days sinkin’ into a vast blank emptiness, ash fallin’ from the sky like snow. And yet everythin’ is beautiful in a profound way—like how a forest fire is beautiful. The risin’ moon, the last light of the engorged sun, the sound of Dylan’s laughter echoing through the rot of my nostalgia.
This is now a pure sense memory, grief so thick you could spread it on toast, the kinda hurt I’d love to hide in the attic of some long abandoned farmhouse, hoping to Christ I’d forget where I put it. But even so, I let the scene play out until the end, because it feels like missin’ Dylan is all I got left in this world. Because everythin’ of me misses everythin’ of him. The way he was growin’ into his skin. The way his eyelashes fluttered in his sleep. The way he held my name in his mouth, like it was somethin’ precious, the way I knew then that I was not such a wicked thing.
Do I still skateboard?
I used to love that somethin’ fierce, I remember that much, for the flashbacks are vivid, albeit fleeting now, frequently concealed behind a confusion of treacherous winds and sparklin’ light.
I swear even the music is getting quieter.
And so I walk this desert like a rain cloud—aimless, heavy to the point of bursting—while up above, the one driftin’ star howls its bright, lonely song against the coal-black sky. Makes me wonder how long I been stuck in this place. Because I reckon I got shipwrecked here by accident. A boy lost in time, like a fly caught in amber, trapped in this strange half-world of cotton-wool clouds and saffron light, hidden within the soft, anaemic fog like a shy, sickly ghost.
But then I blink, and I rest my head in the echo of the forest where I used to play hide and seek as a child, where once upon a time, two small boys found an old silver key. And now it makes sense, for if you look real careful-like between the trees, there’s this big white door, with a super bright light coming through the keyhole, like a fissure in time, a split-second snapshot of an uncertain future. There’s a sound too, a familiar sound, if you put your ear right up close. It’s Dylan, reading to me—but with a much deeper voice than I remember—reading me stories. And for a moment, it’s like I can almost feel it. His love. The static hum of his sadness. My long body all sharp angles strung together with tubes and wire.
And so I sit by the door and listen to the flow of his words, the lilting pitch of his voice caressing my lightheaded paleness, my grief-fed thinness. All them busted pieces of the boy I used to be. And sometimes, I even dare to dream. And I dream about a beat-up silver key, the one sittin’ heavy in my pocket, the one I’ve yet to try in this mysterious door, ‘cause even a breathless half-life in this dyin’ world feels safer than whatever awful truth might be lyin’ in wait behind that bright and terrible door.
But maybe it’s time.
To wake up.
To go home.
Because I reckon I’ve been gone a while now. Years perhaps. And I feel real bad about that, like how Mama felt before the cancer took her. I feel bad at how I left that other world behind. How I left that boy alone with nothin’ but his daddy’s rage. But the truth of it is, I ain’t really been gone. I’ve been here all along, drinkin’ up his every word, his every story, and when I think about the space between his words and my skin, his touch and my thoughts, his future and my past, I reckon that in some ways we ain’t never been so close.
Like a scar to the knife that made it.
Meanwhile, my world is bleeding all over itself. The forest is on fire. All the wolves are dead. The music is fading.
Maybe it’s time.
I reach into my pocket.
Photo of Daniel Sheen
BIO: Daniel Sheen is a queer artist and writer. He's been nominated for the 2023 Pushcart Awards, Longlisted for the 2024 Voyage YA Award, and Longlisted for the 2025 Caledonian First Novel award. He's currently editing a zine, curating a gallery show, and writing his debut trilogy of novels. Find him at: www.danielsheen.net as well as @DanielSheenUK on Twitter and disaffected.youth on Instagram