HERE IS EVERYTHING//FERGUS SINNOTT

Here is everything you need to know about the boy. The boy is on the other side of a plate glass window. The boy is under the table. He is underwater. He is water. By moving through the water you are moving through the boy. You are parting the waves. The boy is waving. The boy, the boy is leaving. The boy is here, but now the boy is leaving you alone, he is leaving you with a vague impression of a brighter day, a day somewhere further down the line. The boy is a line you draw in the sand. The boy has had enough.

Before you. Behind you. Laid out before you. Before you, the boy had more than he’d need in order to be happy. He’d be happy to be alone in a room with just a book and someone to explain it to, someone to keep the end of the story a secret from. The boy is in the middle. He is standing in the middle of the room and he is spinning in a circle. The boy, he doesn’t know. The boy is no one else, like no one else you know or ever will. The boy is nothing. He is zero. He is hardly even here. He is half of everything that makes up what you see on a screen, the screen, the one right in front of you. You see? You hardly even looked. Look. The boy is being cut in half. He is too big for the frame. The frame is unable to contain a boy with a heart of such a size.

The boy is a gun. The boy is in someone else’s hands. He doesn’t know, and so he’s leaving it up to you to follow through. Here. The boy is handing you the gun. How far away he needs to stand. Here? OK. Here is good. The boy is turned away from you. He wants a clean shot. He wants to feel the bullet moving through him like a cool, cool breeze, like the water. The boy is swaying, this way, that way, and you are weighing the gun in your hands.

The boy is finally here. Everyone is here. The boy, he comes into the arms of the other boy he used to know. The boy he used to know is the gun, and the boy is holding him. Everything is different here, now.

The boy is standing here, out in front of the house where everyone is, where everyone said they would be, today, tonight, some time tomorrow. In the arms of the boy, the other says I never got the chance to tell you this.

Just because you never told me doesn’t mean I didn’t know, the boy says, holding him, out in front of the house. Everything is quiet for another hundred years. A hundred years of being turned away from one another, of being cut in half by a silence of such a size. Here is everything you need to know. Here, let me lay it out for you.

The boy. The other boy. The gun. The sun and the water and the cool, cool
breeze. Everything. Everything is still here, waiting.

Fergus Sinnott is an emerging writer from Melbourne. He is currently completing his BA in English & Theatre Studies at The University of Melbourne. You can find him on Instagram @fsinnott451.