Beyond Queer Words 2022 - Short Stories

Beyond Queer Words

3rd Edition, J uly 2022

a collection of short stories

Bey on d Q u eer W or d s - A Col l ecti on of Sh or t St or i es 3 r d Ed i t i on , Ju ly 20 22

Ed i tor : Gal Sl on i m Cover ar t w or k by L i al l L i n z Ed i tor i al B oar d : Em m a M cN am ar a, Br i an Sk i l l m an , Ed w ar d M . Coh en an d Pey ton Fu l tz

Em m a M cN am ar a, au t h or of Of M y M any Years of Youth (a n ovel ) an d A T ruth or a Gift? (a n ovel et te), bot h avai l abl e on A m azon , i s a 20 - y ear - ol d n ati on al aw ar d - w i n n i n g w r i ter f r om H op k i n ton , M assach u setts. H er w r i t i n g h as been p u bl i sh ed i n Sch ol asti c A r t an d W r i ti n g, W i l d Roof Jou r n al , Bey on d W or d s, Em ber ? A Jou r n al of L u m i n ou s T h i n gs, D ef en est r ati on M agazi n e, an d el sew h er e. Em m a?s p assi on s i n cl u d e m en t al h eal th aw ar en ess, d i sabi l i ty ad vocacy, an d L GBT Q + i ssu es. Fol l ow h er on I n stagr am at @au t h or _ em m a.

B r i an Sk i l l m an i s a d ata an aly st an d r esear ch er i n ed u cati on f or th e I n d i an a U n i ver si t y Sch ool of M ed i ci n e. O n ce an En gl i sh teach er , B r i an con ti n u es to ex p l or e h i s l ove of w r i t i n g th r ou gh h i s cr eati ve n on - f i cti on an d p oetr y.

H e cu r r en t ly r esi d es i n I n d i an ap ol i s, I n d i an a, w i t h h i s h u sban d an d f ai t h f u l d og, L u cy.

Ed w ar d M . C o h en 's stor y col l ect i on , Before Stonewall, w as p u bl i sh ed by Aw st Pr ess; h i s n ovel , $250 ,0 0 0, by G.P. Pu t n am 's Son s; h i s n ovel l a, A Visit to my Father with my Son, by Ru n n i n g W i l d Pr ess. H i s ch ap book , Grim Gay Tales, i s f or t h com i n g f r om Fjor d s Rev i ew. H i s stor y, Peroxide Blonde, w on th e 20 20 Ten n essee W i l l i am s Pr i ze.

Pey t o n Fu l t z i s an ed i t or , w r i ter , an d p ai n t er f r om Pool esv i l l e, M ar y l an d .

Sh e gr ad u at ed f r om T h e U n i ver si t y of N or th Car ol i n a at W i l m i n gton w i th a BFA i n cr eat i ve w r i t i n g. H er w r i ti n g h as ap p ear ed i n FI V E:2:O N E M agazi n e an d Scr i bbl e L i t .

Cop y r i gh t © B ey on d W or d s Pu bl i sh i n g H ou se, B er l i n , Ger m an y

Fi r st p r i n t i n g, Ju ly 20 22 I SBN 978- 3- 948977- 42- 9 h ttp s:// w w w.bey on d qu eer w or d s.com

Trevor Eichenberger, P ride

How Have You Been?

Hugo Scheubel A few days ago, the first boy I had sex with called me. I was on my way back from this café near my apartment where I go to almost every day, because the coffee there is good but also because I cannot stand to write at my desk anymore. I blame it on the numerous days I have spent inside in the past year, but I know there is something bigger bothering me. I just cannot work from home. Solace and inspiration are therefore found on walls covered with cute artworks, clever quotes, and a barista who knows my order by heart. I had sat there for a few hours that day, attempting to finish an article for my internship but mainly scrolling mindlessly on my phone.

“Hey. It’s been a long time. How have you been?”

What surprised me was that his voice was exactly the one I remembered, even after ten years. I subsequently acknowledged that I did not realize I had an image of him stuck in my head. I did not even have his number saved. So much time had passed since we met through common friends at that house-party, since our first messy kiss hidden in the back garden, holding our cheap beers and what must have been some of our first cigarettes. We had locked ourselves in one of the rooms upstairs, scared to be spotted by anyone. Where I come from, queer desires are dangerous—they permanently separate you from others and, as much as you would like to believe otherwise, from yourself. In the schools we went to, teachers would say how they would tolerate the homosexual, but how they would never condone such a thing as homosexuality. As strong as I believed myself to be, when our naked bodies lay next to each other in that anonymous room, I felt like a sinner, and I am sure he did, too. I had left that rural part of France just a few years after, moving in between different capital cities and hence experiencing both my body and my sexuality in new and liberating ways, leaving all of that behind me. The sound of his voice brought back all these images at once, and oddly reminded me of how well and precisely I still remembered him.

I replied I was fine. He asked me what I was doing with my life, and I said I was trying to write as much as I could in Berlin, half-jokingly admitting how tough it was to do so in between hangovers, fifty-minute U-Bahn rides and inconclusive German lessons. “That’s very cool,” he said. He added that he was still living in the town where we grew up, and was now about to complete his final year of studies to become a real estate agent. He wondered what living in a big city must be like—for a while he had thought about moving to Paris to finish his degree, but never acted on it. Did I remember Alice from the bar we all went to despite being evidently underage? They have been dating for a while now and are thriving as a couple. This made me happy for him. I congratulated him.

He asked me what I had been writing. “I still remember the stories you showed me, with that girl who solves mysteries or some shit.” I laughed. Back then, I 1

had shared with him a series of short stories I was working on, about a teenage detective who investigates very gory and detailed murders of other teenagers across our hometown. I told him I had long given up on her, probably because I have made peace with that violent part of myself. For a very long time, there was a rage going through me in such a vivid way that I convinced myself to be completely mad. This was gone, too. Nowadays, I wrote mainly about the self, and the dynamics shaping queer loves and sexualities.

“Very interesting”, he said with pointed indifference.

“The emotion I have been having trouble with now is melancholia,” I however admitted.

“How so?”

“I am very, very scared of only being capable of writing sad books,” I said.

I have learned to reconcile myself with silence, which is essential regarding the profession I aspire to have and the life I want to lead. The awkwardness of the silence that fell between us was highly palpable. Why was he calling me, after all this time?

As if he could hear my thoughts—maybe some people really can, after all— he cleared his throat and confessed he had started therapy a few months ago. He said he had not known how to properly deal with the aftermath of what happened between us, what it revealed about himself—then, and now. I became a subject of hate for him the second after we both came together in each other’s arms because my young body pressed against his was nothing but the consequence of his actions and desires. There was, after that night, that hour, no way he could remain the same person; no matter how hard he would try, he had to dress a new portrait of himself according to what he had done. In other words, he would now always be a man who fucked another man.

I acknowledge the violence of this dynamic, understanding how easier it must have been to hate me than to look at himself through the eyes of everyone we had grown up with. I also spent most of my teenage years on the run from my own desires, scared about what they revealed about me, about the truths that were alive in my body and desperately trying to come out. “I get how hard that must have been for you,” I therefore said. I asked if, after me, he had had other sexual or romantic experiences with men. Only from time to time on Grindr. Always anonymous. I said that I understood that, too. For me, our night together had been a crystallization of what I had always known about myself. It was a first and concrete step toward fully deciding to act my desires out. In many ways, I believed this to explain why I was now talking to him from the German capital. In that regard, I could not have been further away from him.

“You know,” he finally said, “I’m actually calling to say sorry. With all this talk with my therapist I’ve been doing lately, this kept coming back. I did not do you good, and I am sorry”. The eternal conflict between the self and the self that observes the self. I forgave him, long ago. I said that, in all honesty, what had pained me to a 2

point I could not even fathom—the insults, laughter, the lies, the social media posts, the way everyone looked at me in the schoolyard for weeks—was something I rarely thought about today. I also have done a lot of work on myself, as a matter of both maturity and survival. A life centered on pain and violence does not appeal to me anymore. I let go of the resentment a long time ago for what I now believe to be this very reason. This might also explain why I almost completely forgot about him. I did not tell him that.

“I’m glad that you picked up,” he replied. “I feel better about telling you this.” I was glad he did as well. “I should probably go now. Good luck with your stories… and with your German!”

I felt a certain warmth going through me as I reached my door and walked up the five floors leading to my apartment. The parts of our lives that are suffocating are so often the parts that are projections from other people’s desires and beliefs. I had written criminal stories for so long and I suddenly realized that I might have killed the first boy I ever had sex with. I wondered if this is what queerness is all about.

I sat at my desk, where my favourite quote from Etel Adnan stands messily on a piece of paper stuck on the wall: “They were involved in a ceremonial dance to which no one had ever been invited.” I took my notebook from my bag and laid it in front of me. Reader, I convinced myself to be completely mad for so long. The only thing I have left is conversations—the ones I write and the ones I believe in.

A few days ago, the man I killed called me. I have decided to try and see what is there, in front of my eyes, without asking myself whether or not I am expecting to see it. Strangely, since then, I do not find it so hard to work from home anymore.

3

First Kiss Dani Soto “Why can’t we be sisters instead? We don’t always have to be a mom and dad.” She rolls her eyes, not bothering to respond. She doesn’t need to. At ten, we know how this dynamic goes; her domination over me always cleverly masked as an adoring friendship. I often imagine pushing her down the slide, the maple copters coating the green surface sticking to the bruises she’d get.

“Maybe I can be the mom this time?” She glares at me in answer and I quickly go back to the script ingrained in me, designed to keep Alana happy. Head up, lips smiling, mouth shut tight. Satisfied, she leads me over to the dirty lawn chair and dominoes table acting as our “dining room”.

“Here you go, honey! Some breakfast before work,” she says, setting down plastic waffles and fruit, which I touch to my lips under her watchful eyes. These were the only moments she was nice to me without our parents’ supervision. I relished the fake compliments she showered over me, like the good, complacent wives she sees on TV, so opposite her own mother.

Sometimes I wondered whether I was her best friend because she actually enjoyed my company or because it was simply too much trouble to break in a new dog.

“Okay, now tell me how yummy it was.” She smiles at me and waits. I once watched her mother throw a pot of spaghetti in the trash because her dad didn’t come home for dinner again. If he doesn’t want it now, he can’t have it later.

Ungrateful bastard.

“So yummy,” I say, resisting the urge to throw the plastic food. I crave to hear the dull, hollow sound of them hitting the splintered wood, and watch the shock I knew would appear on her face. Ungrateful bastard.

She packs up my toy meal, and stands by the door of her tree house. When I join her, she grabs my hands, her fingers soft, her nails embedding themselves into my palms.

“Now kiss me goodbye,” she demands. I expect her to turn her head so I can reach her cheek, like we’ve done so many times before, but all she does is close her eyes and tilt her head, acting like she didn’t just change the script on me with that minor movement.

I’ve never been good at improvising.

I tell her I don’t want to, we don’t have to, let’s not play anymore. I don’t remember a time when she ever listened to what I said. My opinions were as important to her as the dirt she kicked in my face. Eyes wide open, I press my lips to hers, soft and quick. The taboo thrill of it shocks me. When she rips her face away and starts to laugh, I can do nothing but concentrate on keeping my hands from shaking and swallowing the heart beating in my throat.

4

“I—I wasn’t ready,” I say, using my dress to wipe the sweat off my hands before reaching for her again. She steps back and slaps them away. “Let me try again.”

“That was a kiss goodbye, stupid. Moms and dads only say bye,” she giggles, turns from me, and throws herself down the slide, head first, calling for me to follow her.

I never hated her more than in this moment. I’m not sure if the heat in my cheeks is from anger or embarrassment, but I’m lightheaded with the intensity of it.

She’s still calling after me, getting more impatient as I stay rooted to the spot she left me in. I wonder if this is how her mom feels every time her dad is around and then isn’t. Every time he says he cares about her and doesn’t prove it.

My feet unglue themselves from the floor and suddenly I’m running after her in this game of tag that she ordered we play next. I know our parents can hear her laugh from inside, where they’re drinking wine and gossiping about the neighbors.

The only rule of every game is to let her win. Except this time, the cruelty of the kiss runs through my mind on repeat, faster than her little legs can carry her away from me. To her surprise, I catch up with her long enough to tackle her to the ground.

Her face turns red with her screaming as I turn her over and grab a handful of the dirt beside her head. Quick, before she can push me off, I stuff the dirt into her gaping mouth, a few blades of grass spilling over the lips that have already forgotten mine.

Leaning down so that our watering eyes connect, I whisper, “Isn’t that yummy?”

5

Car Alarm Justin F. Robinette Previously published in The Winnow Magazine In the EZ-Park pay lot adjacent to my apartment, a car alarm went off accidentally without anyone near it. I heard it on the seventh floor when it woke me after 1 AM. It went for five minutes, stopped, then started again. It continued like that, on and off—five-minute reprieve—and again, on and off, into the morning. I thought at first it was the hood of the car being so close to the building. However, the next weekend, I saw from my window that the car was parked in the center of the lot, yet the alarm still went off at all hours indiscriminately. When it wouldn’t stop, I went downstairs. Another tenant was in the lot already.

“It’s been going on last night and all day today,” he said to me. “Last week, too.” He pointed to the car, a silver hatchback, its alarm sounding and flashers blinking. A Ford Focus, I noticed, with junk loaded into the backseat nearly blocking the driver’s line of sight. “I know,” I said. Later that afternoon, the car was gone from the lot, but I hadn’t caught a glimpse of the owner in time.

It woke me up at night the following weekend. It was hot, I was fully awake and agitated, nothing to do past midnight really, and nobody to call for any purpose at that hour either. I downloaded a sex app, Fluid, and started jacking myself off. It was the only thing I could think to do, to rub one out, to blow off steam. I used the app mostly for chat; real-time, interactive porn. Bi guys, mostly masc, used it to look for sex with similar men. Although technically marketed to both genders, women rarely used it. It was largely for bi or discreet gay men seeking other men. I was masc enough to use it. I chatted until about 6 AM, and once the damned car alarm stopped, I made myself come, then finally went to sleep.

On Monday morning I noticed the car was gone. I had work, but I felt drained. On my way out, I explained the situation to the desk agent at my apartment building, but the part-time girl working the reception wasn’t useful. They changed out every day, multiple times a day, at any rate. She wrote down my complaint and said she would speak with her supervisor once he arrived. Before I left for work, on a half-piece of paper that I left under a windshield wiper, I wrote: “Hello, the alarm on this car has been going off all night and this morning. This happened last week as well. Please get it fixed.” Later that evening, I checked the lot again and the car was gone. I looked for the note. It wasn’t on the ground. The owner of the car must have found it.

The next weekend was a holiday weekend, the Fourth of July. It was almost ninety degrees and humid so, unfortunately, I had to open each of the windows of my apartment. The car still parked in the same spot facing the building, its alarm hadn’t been fixed. Honking throughout Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Too much.

Outside, a shirtless man in a pair of American-flag swimming trunks, who had set up 6

his possessions on the sidewalk across from my apartment, could be heard screaming back at it.

The lot was unattended by a parking attendant on weekends and on holidays. On Tuesday, I tried calling the EZ-Park headquarters, but it wasn’t a supervised phone line. I left a message and my phone number, but nobody called me back during the week.

The following weekend, when it went off again, I called the 911 dispatch, who transferred me to the Philadelphia Police Department. I gave the location and the information I had on the vehicle. I said, “This is absurd. Call the person or have it towed before I take apart the fucking battery or take a crowbar to it. I bet they’ll get it fixed then.”

“Sir, you’re on a recorded line,” the cop said. I wasn’t going to do it. There were cameras (I had checked). “We’ll send someone out,” the cop said.

“I recommend you do,” I replied.

“We’ll send someone out,” the cop simply repeated gruffly.

By the time the police arrived, the alarm had stopped. The cop car circled the lot and paused by the silver hatchback. The policeman drove away.

The alarm started again, and I called the police again. “You hear that? I live in The Sterling at 2030 Market Street. There’s a car alarm that’s going off in the EZPark lot at 20th and Market. I’m going to be calling back every time it happens. I’m calling you back every time it happens.”

“Do you have information on the vehicle?”

“Gray, well, silverish, smallish hatchback. License plate, DTH 1087.”

“What’s the state?”

“New Jersey plate,” I responded. “I’ve given all this information before. How about you call this person? How about you have it towed? I’ve explained this to you before but you don’t seem very interested in my suggestions.”

“We’ll let them know the alarm’s still going off. We’ll send someone out.”

Once again, a police car showed up, surveyed the lot, and drove away. It had stopped, but once the cop left, the honking continued into the afternoon. I checked when it finally stopped again. The car was still there. I left another note under one of the windshield wipers: “Hello again, asshole, your car alarm goes off randomly in the middle of the night, all night, all day long, all night, all day long. 24/7. I’ve already explained that you need to get it fixed. Multiple tenants have now lodged complaints.

Get the problem fixed or else next time it’s getting towed.” But the second note didn’t solve the problem either.

I could get used to it like a church bell, but from Hell or else, how do I stop this from happening to me every single weekend? I hated weekends and learned to love midweek when the car wouldn’t be around. The owner once moved it to the back of the lot, although it was unclear whether this was an attempt at actually fixing 7

the problem, but the lot wasn’t big, and the sound still reached all the way up to the seventh floor. Before long, the owner moved the car back to its original spot.

When the horn started again at night, again past midnight, I started chatting on Fluid, to jack myself off for a few hours. I lived alone. I had questioned my sexuality before being assaulted, but to be honest, now, I guess, I should really say I’m gay. I think that’s probably more accurate anyway. I still struggle with the definitional structure. I called myself bi before it happened the first time. It was oral.

I was surprised when it happened because he didn’t seem straight, he seemed pretty gay actually, a little too gay to be using Fluid, I had thought. Now, I’ve come to expect it from really every gay guy on the apps. They don’t have sex any other way. I came across him again on Fluid, the guy that did it the first time, and we chatted a little.

“How’s that mouth?” he asked me.

“You didn’t seem to care LOL,” I wrote. I always had balls from behind a screen so I told him he should probably ask before he made guys swallow.

“Aren’t you 6’3?” he asked me.

I put on a real masc vibe when I chatted now. I told guys I was a “top” or a “vers top.” Similarly, I wanted the most masc man I could find. It wasn’t hard to find.

I set my preferences to “Discreet,” “Jock,” and “Daddy.” The hardest task was finding someone who wouldn’t reject me. I used fake pics, another guy’s face I had once received on the app, someone hotter than me. I sent an expiring pic of his face to another guy on the app.

The guy who I was chatting with had a faceless profile himself, and only used a photograph of his torso, but not shirtless, instead wearing a tank top with the Greek letters, “ΣΝ,” which read, “If I drove three hours to get there, there better be fucking beer.” The profile was titled, “Ex-Frat,” and said, “If you’ve shit your pants no less than once, but no more than five times, we should go on a date.” I also sent him a pic of my torso and of my dick. He asked, “More pics?” which was really a gay guy’s way of asking if I bottomed.

“Only want head. No recip,” I wrote.

“How big?” he asked.

“8,” I lied. “DL here, have a gf,” I lied again. Yet, after I told him those three things, that was exactly what he needed to know to determine, yes, he wanted to suck me off right then.

“Now?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Host?” he asked.

“Travel.”

“Can’t host,” he said. “You?” “Me either. Car?” “Wya?” 8

I dropped my location. “Go to the parking lot at 20th and Market,” I told him. “I live with my girlfriend so wait at my car.” I gave a description: silver hatchback, Ford Focus, license plate DTH 1087. “I’ll come out,” I told him. “ETA?” “Coming now, fifteen minutes,” he said. “On my bike.”

“Cool, let me know when you’re here. Where you coming from?”

“I live in South Philly.”

When it said he was fifteen feet away, I blocked him. Once I disappeared, I heard him scream, “Fuck!” from the parking lot at the top of his lungs. I watched from the window as he took his shirt off, wrapped it around his hand, and removed the chain from his bicycle with it. He swung the bike chain and cracked the windshield of the car, damaging each of the windows, even smashing one of the rear ones all the way through. He tossed all the shit from the backseat onto the lot and keyed the car up and down the sides, with “Fag” keyed into the driver’s side and “Pussy” into the passenger’s. The alarm started blaring.

9

Elizabeth Lax, I t Wasn't M y Choice

LBD Katherine Hsu The first time Beth and I slept together, she said afterwards, “That whole campaign achieved nothing.” I must have looked at her quizzically, so she added, “I don’t know a single lesbian who practises safe sex.”

Lying on the bed, a white curtain ineffectual against the Queensland sun, it felt strange to have her in my room. For years we had hung out in the living room and kitchen, cooking, walking down Latrobe Terrace for an ice cream and deconstructing Thomas Hardy, George Orwell and Margaret Atwood.

She made it clear I wasn’t to call her baby or honey. Instead, I called her by her name, which felt oddly formal. It took me a while to unlearn the verbal tics that I had used to express affection with other partners, but I mostly managed to stop myself from saying them out loud. On one occasion, though, when I hadn’t slept, I let a baby slip out. She told me later that it gave her bad dreams. I finally settled on calling her my love.

Under Beth’s influence, I stopped flying, learned what a B Corp was and started recycling my soft plastic. I also learned the location of every op shop and second-hand book seller within 100km of home. She hadn’t had a one-night stand since her twenties. She had an entire shelf of reference books and the most comprehensive lesbian collection I had ever seen. I had got rid of my hard copy dictionary when I had discovered smartphone apps, a fact that elicited a look of horror from her. I didn’t wash cans in order to recycle them as I had once cut my finger doing so. I had a Facebook account. I owned a car.

She told me about her overprotected childhood, and I told her about my childhood: my mother in and out of jail, home schooling for part of high school and being out on my own by fifteen. She told me she had picked someone up to get rid of her virginity when she was nineteen and I soberly kept quiet about the fact that I had done the same, at thirteen. The first time she collapsed into giggles as she approached orgasm, I was thrown.

“What are you laughing at? I’m not trying to be funny!”

“I’m not laughing,” she said. “It’s just what happens sometimes.”

We took holidays around Southern Queensland and climbed mountains, assembling a lunch of falafels in wraps at the summit, pouring tea into keep cups, then walking back down to flake out at the Airbnb. One day, while walking home from op shopping, we found a bookcase on the curb that was the perfect fit for my living room. I ran home and got the car and we womanhandled it into the hatchback from which it protruded dangerously. I crawled the hundred metres back to my house while she held onto the item.

10

That weekend, I showed her Widow Wilberforce and the Lyrebird. I had first read the Nadia Wheatley story as a twelve-year-old and had come back to it every few years since then. The story of a woman who gradually lets go of the straight world and embraces her lesbian self, had resonated differently with each reading, as life grew and changed me.

After six months we stopped having sex. Lesbian bed death, we joked and continued with the bushwalks and the op shops and the home cooked dinners. One morning I woke, dripping, from a feverish pornographic dream and brought her hand gently down between my legs. We fucked for the first time in weeks, and afterwards she muttered something about, “Whatever dreams you were having last night.”

Thankfully, she didn’t ask any questions. How could I tell Snow White that dreaming about a gangbang had got me wet when for so long her efforts had been failing?

One day, out of the blue, a chapter of my childhood that had fallen clean out of my conscious memory slid back into place. It was the fifth time my mother had been to jail. I had spent three weeks alone at our rural property as an elevenyear-old, after we had run out of options for people to look after me and there was still a month left until her release date. As the memory crystalised, I pieced together how she had subtly directed my thoughts away from the experience, referring regularly to the people I’d stayed with that year but never to where I was living when she finally got out of jail so that the episode had slipped through the cracks of my growing mind. I told Beth I had something to share with her. “I don’t want you to tell me anything about this,” I said, mindful of the dogmatism that is so often the response to stories of childhood trauma; an instinctive reach for platitudes out of a sense that one must say something in response to disclosures. I have always found this response unhelpful, so I said, “I just want you to listen.” She graciously acceded to my demand and let me spool out a story that I had never shared with anyone, without interruption or judgement.

Every now and then, we tried to have sex. I would make love to her, and she would respond with delighted giggles but when she would touch me, she would have to hide her disappointment, realising I was not aroused. I’m not sure when she first told me that she thought I needed therapy. Not just therapy in general, but therapy to change the way I responded—or failed to respond—sexually. The thought was mildly horrifying to me. Counselling to alter patterns of desire. It sounded like conversion therapy.

“I respect her opinion, so I’m willing to try it,” I told a friend. The problem was that it was so hard to assess. I felt like I was being asked to step outside of my own personhood to look at the situation and it broke my brain trying. My friend was taken aback. “Therapy about why you’re not attracted to her?” she said. “Sounds a bit manipulative.” Another friend shared that she and her partner only had sex a few times a year and that they were happy with that. “We’re nearly forty, after all,” she said with a cheerful shrug. If my mother were around, I knew she would say that my 11

lack of arousal proved I wasn’t really gay, something she had been telling me for years, and that I should start dating men.

I made an appointment to see a sex therapist. She reassured me there was nothing wrong with enjoying sex only as a giver. “There are plenty of people who would like to be with someone like that”, she told me. “I know. I speak to them.

Clients in their 80s and 90s sometimes say they’re not having sex anymore and it doesn’t really bother them. But you’re only 38.” She gestured to the map of the world that was mounted on the wall behind her. “There are billions of people in the world.

You just need to find one that suits you.”

I weighed up those words against Beth’s. I had enjoyed sex in the past, so her idea that the problem stemmed from my childhood didn’t ring true. Before her, I’d been seeing a younger woman whom I’d met online. She’d invited me to her house, and we’d had a beer in her back yard, then retreated to her bedroom where I’d made her come seven times. “You’re a lot of fun,” she’d said afterwards, but the liaison had petered out after a few months. I could make myself come while going down on her, moaning softly into her, so that we both reached climax at once, which she thought was hot. But the closest she came to literary talk was pointing to a Sarah Waters novel on the shelf and saying, “she’s got the same last name as me.”

Lying next to Beth, I sometimes considered telling her that I did still get turned on, when I was alone. I thought about finding a way to draw her into my fantasies. I could suggest a game: she had to try to keep her clothes on while I had to try to get them off. But then I imagined her looking at me over the rims of those librarian glasses and realise how foolish I’d feel.

I thought about telling her how I liked to imagine someone (or two or three someones) teasing a woman till she was begging for it. A curvy woman lying beside a hotel pool (onlookers would be a plus, sipping cocktails as they gawked). A woman who was already starved for sex after months or years of deprivation, being driven crazy as she was stroked, kissed, peeled out of her skimpy bikini and told in detail by the trio what they intended to do to her. I liked to think of a horny teenage girl being told by the principal of her new school how the punishment for sexual behaviour was a public spanking.

God, what would she think of me?

I’d have to explain that my fantasies were usually in the third person, with me as the invisible stage manager rather than a participant. While she had been discovering Jane Austen at twelve, I had been reading Portnoy’s Complaint and Fear of Flying and discovering the debauched eroticism of gothic fiction in the endless solitary time warp that is home schooling. I came into my sexuality, not in response to other people, but in response to the sex scenes that came alive in the pages of books. Beth looked up from the book she was reading and interrupted my thoughts to express horror at the practice of erotic asphyxiation.

“It’s meant to be very enjoyable, though,” I suggested.

“Yeah, if you don’t die!”

12

Maybe because my sexuality began in books, I have always responded better to words than to touch. Early on, I had explained to Beth that it was unlikely she would ever make me come. The only person who had ever done so was a horrible man (almost fifty to my almost twenty) who had been possessed of the gift of seamless dirty talk which comes easily only to those who don’t have to get into character to play the role of an asshole. She didn’t know what to do with that.

“You could try telling me verbally how you’re feeling or what you want to do.” Despite my fetish, words failed me. “I’ll try,” she said, but the subject never came up again.

When we broke up, it felt both unexpected and inevitable.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she said. “I’ve done everything I can to make you feel safe.”

I tried to explain that what I needed wasn’t safety, but she started talking about therapy again. My heart and body were split, she believed, because of the things that had happened to me as a child.

When we parted I felt that for all the words we’d spoken, no real communication had occurred.

I swam.

I read.

I walked up Mount Cootha.

I thought I might start seeing other people—women, men, couples—the possibilities were endless! But the thought of sleeping with strangers depressed me.

Instead, I started drawing. Maybe images could show her what words had failed to. I liked the versatility of charcoal, the smoothness of a line describing a breast or a thigh, the tactile ease of blending the values with a finger. I drew a breast with a piece of ice poised above the nipple. A slender, androgynous woman wearing a strap-on. A man grasping a woman by the buttocks. A shirt being lifted up to reveal the breasts below. When I stepped back to look at my drawings, I wondered what story the images would tell.

13

Dust, Rain, Mud, Sun, Dust Todd Wellman Clarence wasn’t like the other cowboys I met at Aunt Rita’s horsehair and training ranch the summer after high school. When I said hi and shook his hand, he re-gripped as I readied to let go. From then, I wanted to unbutton his shirt to see what his chest was like, but I was an untested eighteen-year-old who added a nice to meet you as I waited for a hello that finally arrived as a nod.

He spoke to me after my first two weeks on the rare contained five hundred acres surrounded by dust and road. He said he could see I wasn’t too busy and told me I’d help find a horse. I said he was right, thankful for something genuine to write to friends back home. He said we’d ride on one horse together until we found the Appaloosa. “Just think snow leopard,” he said, “and she’ll be easy to spot.” Since the plan was for each of us to ride a horse back after finding her, and I didn’t yet know horses too well, I hoped I learned all I needed on the way out. He saw my hands creep in and out of fists, so he said, “Don’t worry. She’s a wanderer but broken.”

We mounted the horse, shirt-to-shirt. I kept my hands tight on the bulb of the saddle, though with Clarence behind me, I couldn’t’ve fallen if I tried. The step of the ride was fast until Clarence said, “Don’t worry; I’ll keep us this slow.” After that, I noticed the way his scent of mint cut through the dirt. Clarence spotted the horse within fifteen minutes, and I rode it back just fine.

At dinner, Aunt Rita insisted I never bother Clarence again. She scratched her always-red face and assigned me to wash horses for the rest of the summer. That way I wouldn’t be idle and end up chasing after a scrub again. Whether she meant the horse or Clarence, I forgot to ask. The assigned chore grew into a germ of importance, and helped me feel like I guaranteed something.

For washing, there was a wooden open-air pavilion, reminiscent of a farmer’s market back home in Wisconsin. Aunt Rita said she liked the washing done there, not in the horse barn: “It drains better.”

On a rare night, I was allowed a beer to match Aunt Rita’s three, and she told me Clarence had a wife, Regina, though I’d never see her. She’d disappeared the month before I arrived. She’d been walking, sad again after drinks at the main house, set for the old house. “Clouds must’ve darted away and the glinting wide sky adopted her right up into the night for a new star,” my aunt said. I asked if she’d really lost her way, was maybe still lost out on the land, and Aunt Rita told me to take care, that I should continue giving Clarence space.

Throughout the rest of June, I listened for talk about Regina. No workers mentioned her, but there was the radio, though, and the waitress at the truck stop where I took the pickup for afternoons away. In mid-July, the newspaper ran an article about Clarence’s previous, overlooked conviction for assault, and the café was abuzz.

After that, a woman who showed up for riding lessons left when she heard Clarence was the instructor.

14

By then, my skin had settled under the dry touch of the sun, and I was well into conversations with Clarence beyond his washing requests. Whatever I asked, he shared. To the assault conviction, he said bar fight was the better description. I pushed him to tell me if he was doing all right in life, but he mussed my hair and asked me what I’d come to think of The West. I said I asked my question because he always seemed so work-focused, dedicated and steady for someone without his wife.

He stepped away, said, “I’ll be back for her by four,” of the horse he’d dropped off for washing.

I patted the mane and tried, “Where do you go first each day?”

“You might have too many questions.”

“You always head toward the original house. Just wondering what’s there for you.”

He pinched the brim of his hat and said, “So, you are settling in, feeling familiar.”

I nodded.

“Well, some rocks are there. I sit.”

“OK.” “To meditate, to be truthful,” he said. I expected him to wince as this betrayal, but he opened his eyes beyond slits for the first time.

At four, he returned, and we rode to the rocks, sharing a saddle for the second time. His mouth settled at my left ear, but he couldn’t have thought I could hear his low phrases. His nose grazed my pinna and he traced a curve there. The sky spread thick with a kind of blue I haven’t seen since, interrupted only by downy ribbons trailing overhead, evidence of playful jets. Plenty of small stones skipped up at our legs from the cheddar loam, and in the rush of air, we tightened as our haste became an unspoken dare. The drag coaxed me to angle back, but he leaned forward, forcing us into the shape of a drop of rain, keeping the horse crisp longer by our forward-wrenching oval: leg and hand pressure charming the horse to keep its head down, its legs bounding while it thought us lighter and lighter, willing gravity to lift itself from our backs and shoulders.

As we stood in front of the rocks, I said I would'nt’ve otherwise learned they were there. They sat after the land dipped and the area had always seemed like nothing to see that way but fence. After that, I kept quiet, finding no words between small talk and honesty, no acceptable thing to echo. All I had was that I was alone with him, with one horse, though one more button than usual was released from his shirt.

Why was I there? To learn that bodies press into each other for different reasons? To see his face in mine, his parted lips, his teeth moving from calm to bared?

To watch as his hands seized my arms, to hear me sputter something about being sorry his wife was missing? To catch a flicker in his eyes, to feel a grip change from tight to firm? To see—but not hear—sudden laughter? To be kissed?

15

A few weeks later, we started staying at the old house. Near the close of August, I sat up in bed having learned which series of breaths meant he was awake.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about their visit?” I said.

Some investigators had stopped by to say that the momentum of Regina’s case had stuttered. That her sister had finally admitted that Regina had always hated horses and prayed to run away to California to find her high school sweetheart. They said maybe the best scenario would play out one day, that she’d call, her voice liquid from whatever town, easing everyone to rest.

“No, I don’t want to talk about it,” Clarence said.

“But she’s your wife,” I said in my careful voice.

I feared he would have been right to at least throw me out for butting in, but he said, “They are letting me annul the marriage, assuming she’s run away. I want you to stay here.”

He rolled toward me. I pressed two fingers to his sternum before sliding them up. I pictured the cats I’d seen that summer, three dark brown ones, one black, strolling the ranch and taking scraps from dogs.

He put his hand on mine.

Did he count me among the cats?

He played with my knuckles.

Was that all I was?

“I have just one request,” he said, “though it’s not like you could move the rocks all on your own.”

After that, no more rumblings as town stopped recycling Regina’s story, though at Aunt Rita’s for our next Tuesday morning coffee, I planned to say I was ready to head back home. As I watched her take the mugs down, I first asked if she thought someone could ever shift Clarence’s meditation rocks on their own. Adding cream, Aunt Rita said she didn’t know anyone who could manage it alone.

“So it would take two.”

She set my coffee before me and said, “Even when a horse goes wild and does something fool enough that ends its own life, it surely takes at least two to get around the dense stasis of mourning and the implications of neglect.”

I said I knew Clarence didn’t know anyone any different than she knew. She nodded.

In the lull of the visit, I said I felt something of Clarence when I wasn’t holding him, that any lingering doubt about staying on the ranch had withered away just that morning, that when breath bridged his mouth to my ear, I had no need to know anything more, if there ever could be anything else to know.

16

Texas Johnathan Mars Quinn and I are curled into each other, lying on our sides in bed until he rolls over, halfway on top of me, the next arrangement of limbs in a random sequence of spooning, unfurling, retying our knots in a sleepy dance until there’s this: the inside edge of his shoulder blade pressed directly along the ridgeline of my nose, the entire weight of him seeming to balance off this one point of contact. It’s a funny proposition, these stacks of bone on top of each other, the pressure of him on my face, not hurting, not even uncomfortable. With my arm wrapped around him, I’m nestled into the back of a bird, holding on as it navigates the gusting of our breath.

It is an awkward bird that shits aggressively on your judgment of its form, but it is lovely in its way, and it has the cutest thatch of chest hair swirling over two tender nipples that make him cry out when I pinch them. You know the bird. I smile gently at the knowledge I am awakened into this perfect sun-bathed moment so I can soak him into my flesh, so I can summon it over and over again, and I ask my lungs to fill and empty with his, letting all his warmth seep in when we inhale and saying goodbye to him with every exhale. We’ll only hold each other this way so many more times, it’s simple math, inevitable. As my fingers curl into his and the pads of our fingertips mesh, I know that letting go at the same time I’m holding him is a strength I’ve found for myself, but it’s not at his expense. I can hold him here, with my heart open, for as long as he needs me, and I can welcome him back as many times as it takes until he’s strong enough to do it for someone else. I don’t even think it’s crazy to imagine that death couldn’t stop me: I’ll embed so deeply in this meshing of skin and breath, he’ll never know I’m there and he’ll never know I’m gone, and he’ll always know I’m gone, and he’ll always know I’m there.

17

Giulio Secondo, A nother Connection

Gay Neighbor M.N. Chikwendu “You know how my neighbor acts gay sometimes?” the first boy asks from the backseat of the car. The second boy beside him snorts so loudly that juice almost comes out of his nose. The third boy, in the front passenger seat, turns around to look at the two boys in the back. The third boy’s mom is driving the car. It's the summer before seventh grade and the boys are going swimming at the local YMCA. The first boy continues, giggling, “Well he does, my neighbor, the kid acts gay, like, all the time.” The mom throws an alarmed glance at her son in the front seat, trying to catch his eye. He doesn’t notice. He’s still turned around facing backwards.

“So, we,” the first boy gestures to himself and the second boy, “started making fun of him yesterday and we were, like, pretending to be gay, too. Like, towards each other.”

The third boy chuckles and nods.

“Yeah,” laughs the second boy. “So we were, like, teasing him and stuff and then he got mad and went inside his house.”

“He slammed the door so hard it almost fell off!” wheezes the first boy.

The second boy carries on, “So then he gets home and sends us this long text about how we were probably gay and trying to turn him gay, too. And then he said that we’re probably going to get each other pregnant.”

The three boys break out into a fit of giggles. The mom almost rear ends the car in front of her. She slams the brakes hard and the car lurches. This cracks the boys up even more and their giggles turn into full, loud belly laughs.

The mom watches her son laugh with his friends. The break-up last year had been hard on him. Her ex-girlfriend had been like a second mother to him. After the break-up he withdrew. He had difficulty making friends. The past few months have been better. He’s been making friends again. The mom is hesitant to intrude.

Between snickers the first boy continues his story about the neighbour.

“And there was this one other time when my sister put makeup on him.”

“Oh my gosh,” the second boy cackles.

The third boy, the son, is fiddling with his swim goggles in the front seat and smiling.

“Yeah, my sister put makeup on him and he, like, let her. And then afterwards, she had makeup wipes, but for some reason she told him she didn’t have any, that she had run out and then he, like, ran to the bathroom and started crying and started saying that he can’t wear makeup or else his parents will kick him out.”

The mom finally manages to catch her son's eye. He shrugs. She tries to hold his gaze but he turns his head to face the backseat again.

“He’s always breaking into my house, too,” the first boy weaves his tale.

“Like, if the door is unlocked he’ll just walk right in. I could call the cops, probably.”

18

“Probably,” echoes the second boy.

“And what if he came in and I thought it was an intruder and I, like, killed him or something, in self defense?” asks the first boy. This sets off a new round of guffaws.

The mom, doing her best impersonation of a statue, tries to remember every interaction she’s had with the first boy’s parents. They never struck her as homophobic or close-minded or like people who have deadly weapons in their house. Then again, she never asked. They saw each other in passing, the kind of people you make small talk with at parent-teacher night, or at little league games, or in driveways after play dates. The kind of people with no immediately apparent red flags.

The boys have calmed down. The son is talking now. “One day, his neighbor rode my bike without asking,” he shares. “I was over at his house,” he points to the first boy, “and I left my bike in the driveway. Then, when we came out again, it was just gone, but then we saw it in front of his neighbor’s garage.”

“Oh, and you know my friend Lucas?” asks the first boy.

The second boy and the son look at each other in confusion.

“Well, my friend Lucas, he’s like my best friend but he lives in Maryland.

Lucas is bi and trans and my neighbor was, like, asking me all these questions about Lucas, like, about his whole life? And I was, like, I’m not going to tell you his life, that’s not your business and also, how did you get into my house?”

They boys all convulse into shrieks and howls.

The mom turns into the parking lot of the Y, pulls into a parking spot, and cuts the engine. “We’re here!” she announces. “Free swim begins in five minutes.”

The three boys jump out of the car and run for the entrance. The mom takes her time gathering their towels and water bottles into her bag before following the boys inside where it’s hot and stuffy and the thick chlorinated air will clog the back of her throat.

19

In the Cradle of the Nave Sunshine Caseñas I I meet her for the first time at the end of the nave, flicking holy water from her unpainted nails. I watch her from my place in the pew as she draws her fingers up to her forehead before sweeping them down to her chest and straight across her collar bones in the sign of the cross. She then steeples her hands together flush against her lips as she whispers a silent amen. I shiver in my seat. Her short blonde hair glows like a halo under the church’s fluorescent lights, and I am in love.

The church smells of a dizzying amount of incense. I can practically see it clouding around the altar, just below the statue of an angel nailed precariously to the wall above the priest. Rich green cloth covers the priest and the altar, the edges hemmed in gold. Light shines through the stained glass windows, painting everyone’s faces in hues of blue, red, and yellow.

I try to catch the woman’s eye during the homily, but her eyes never waver from the front of the church. I find my own eyes focused on her dirty jeans and untucked shirt. I look down at my white dress, lacy and lacking. It’s something my mother would have picked out for me. I don’t know why I still insist on following her will even after moving halfway across the country. I don’t even remember the last time we spoke.

“Body of Christ, Marisol,” the priest tells me. I open my mouth and let him place the wafer on my tongue. I walk back to my place in the pew, waiting to hear the blonde woman’s name when she appears for the Eucharist, but she never does. I search for her in the crowd, but she is gone.

When I go home that night, I dream of her. We are front in the church standing together below the altar and the angel. Harsh white light spills over our faces. It feels cool on my skin, and cuts sharply across the planes of the blonde woman’s face, segmenting it. Her sloping cheek bones are cold against my hands as I cup her face.

“Body of Christ,” I tell her, and press my lips to hers.

II “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been three years since my last confession.” The words feel dry in my mouth. I kneel, and I kneel, and I kneel, but I can’t find anything to say to the empty confessional booth. I’m not sure what I’m apologizing for, only that I feel that I must.

There is no priest here to tell me how many Hail Mary’s and Glory Be’s I ought to say for my penance. There is only the judging silence of God. I think I should feel something about this holy quiet of the church, but I don’t. All I feel is the ache of my knees. I still stay kneeling for another ten minutes before giving up and walking out of the booth.

20

When I exit, I realize the church is not as empty as I thought. The pews are completely bare except for— “You,” I breathe. And this is how we meet for the second time.

The blonde woman pauses in her prayer, rosary held loosely in her grip.

“Pardon?” she asks.

“Sorry,” I say, cheeks burning under her gaze. Her eyes are so dark they may as well be black. They are captivating. She has a different t-shirt on today, but the same dirty jeans. This too catches my heart. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” I say instead.

“It’s alright,” she says softly, as if I am the one needing to be soothed. “I was just finishing up here.” She stands, and I can think of nothing to say to stop her.

So I follow her instead. Together we walk down the aisle, hands nearly brushing as we make our way towards the church doorsteps. The angel watches us from above the altar as I draw near the blonde woman. The statue’s gaze is heavy.

Just before the exit, the blonde woman turns to me, neat brows pinched together. “Was it worth it?” she asks. “Whatever it was that you confessed?”

“I confessed nothing,” I say, “so nothing was forgiven.” But it was worth it, I think, to have been able to speak with you. I watch the lines on her face ease as she leans back with a snort. It is unladylike in the most wonderful way. My mother would have hated it.

“You’ve kept all your trespasses,” she notes wryly. “What will you do with them now?”

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “What do you do with yours?”

“I live with them,” she says. “What else is there to do?”

I don’t have an answer for that. When she walks out the door, I am left alone again with no company but a plaster angel floating in the belly of the church.

III I meet her for the third time fiddling with a lighter outside of the church during the sermon, an unlit cigarette in her mouth. I am late for church. I didn’t sleep in so much as I just couldn't get out of bed. Untangling myself from my sweaty sheets seemed impossible, and so I laid there, limp and listless, for over an hour. I thought of my mother and the disdain she would feel for me if only she was here to see me.

I resolved once again not to visit for the holidays.

So I am late for church. And I have never been more grateful to miss a sermon.

“Do you need a light?” I ask.

“Seems like it,” she sighs. “I think my zippo’s out of fluid.”

“I’ve got you,” I say, pulling out a cheap gas station lighter. My fingers burn from her touch as she takes the lighter from my grip. I swallow hard.

Her eyes crinkle. “Thank you. I owe you one.”

21

I flush. “You don’t owe me anything,” I say. Still, I ask, “Why aren’t you in church?”

She frowns around her cigarette. “Recently I’ve realized that church might not always be the best place to find God.” “Where else would He be?” I ask, confused.

“Among His people, I suppose,” she says, taking a drag. “But I’ve never been that good with people. I don’t know where to start.”

“Start with me,” I say, heart in my throat. “Find something holy in me, and make something of it.”

“And what would you have me make?” she asks, and Christ, she is so beautiful.

“Anything you like,” I say, and I mean it. “Be your own God, and shape me to your will.” She pauses, cigarette raised halfway to her lips. “You really believe I could, don’t you?”

“I do.”

She smiles, and it is brighter and sadder than any star in the sky. “You shouldn’t. I’m no miracle worker, not anymore.” She sighs, eyes flicking away. “I’m just looking for an explanation. That’s all.”

“For what?”

“For all of this,” she says, making a vague gesture with her cigarette. “I don’t understand any of it even though I fell for wanting it.”

“Fell?”

She smiles sadly again, and I am reminded of the angel hung just inside the church, her wings pinned to the wall like a common butterfly. “I have asked for grace, and I have asked guidance, but there has been no answer. And I’m growing tired of asking,” she says, taking another drag.

“Then ask another question,” I find myself saying.

She tilts her head. “Okay then. What's your name?”

“Marisol,” I say. “My name is Marisol.”

“My name is Liezel,” she says, and suddenly there is no more need for me to go to church anymore for I have found someone new to worship, some other name to end all my prayers with.

“Liezel,” I say, wanting to taste the shape of it in my mouth. “Liezel. That’s a wonderful name.” This time her smile isn’t nearly as sad as she tucks her free hand into her perpetually dirty jeans. I look at her, all chapped lips and stubby eyelashes, and decide to dedicate myself to her. I want to see her face first thing every Sunday morning, to kneel at her altar, to feast on her body and her blood. I would be her first disciple if only she’d let me.

And it seems that she shall.

“Come to church with me,” she says, and pulls gently at my wrist. I let her lead me down the stairs and onto the street, our backs to the chapel and the world at our feet.

22

Joe What's-His-Face Andrew Sarewitz Caroline’s is a New York City comedy club located on Broadway in midtown Manhattan. Now, it’s a pretty famous venue for well-established comics. Her original space was on the east side of 8th Avenue, near 26th Street. My friend Joe worked there back in the early 80s, when Caroline’s first opened their doors. I don’t know how they defined themselves within the entertainment stages back then—or if they were initially feeling their way to see what stuck and was profit-making—but Joe offered me two back-to-back weeknights to perform as a singer. Which I did. It wasn’t great—I wasn’t great. But it was the beginning of my very short-lived career as a cabaret performer.

Joe. I’d met him at the end of the 70s, under 57th Street, at a gay dance club, Ice Palace. He lied about his age to almost everyone, as far as I know, saying he was 18—in the period before the legal age for drinking was raised to 21. In truth, he was 16, but looked older. Whatever that means. There are a few things I don’t remember. One is whether Joe worked for Ice Palace when we met, or if, at the time, he was coming there to dance and meet men. The second is his last name. It is either Salvatore or Kennedy. I realize they sound nothing alike, but that’s not my memory playing old age tricks on me. Joe told me both.

These were the early days in my Manhattan citizenship. For me, it was a fantastic time to be in New York City. It was grungy but glamorous and somewhat dangerous. It was also the pre-AIDS era where bars and night clubs reigned supreme.

My being a skinny white boy wearing skin-tight, size 28 waist Fiorucci jeans (which were well above my budget to be buying), placed me among a trend I fell into without trying very hard. At that age, I could drink multiple milkshakes and eat a couple of donuts and not gain a pound. If you can imagine, Häagen-Dazs was the new and best ice cream that you could buy, hand-scooped, from their many parlor locations. My stomach was so flat, I practically had an “outie” belly button. The person I spent the most time with was my dance floor buddy, Brian. He lived on the second floor of an apartment building on West 56th Street. There were four apartments on each floor. Brian and two of his second floor neighbors, Jon and Kenny, were gay and had known each other prior to moving to New York City. The forth was a woman named Deborah, who was part of the not very successful girl group, “The Flirts.” I don’t know where she is now or what happened to her. Brian and the other two neighbors all died from AIDS. In these free expression and irresponsible days, Brian had been working for 20th Century Fox during the time of the original three Star Wars franchise releases.

When the powers at Fox changed hands, Brian and his public relations team were all fired. Suing the company (which made news in the industry trades), though not hired back, he was paid a small but healthy amount of money as compensation. Brian would later make his living writing for a greeting card company called TNT. When 23

the owner of that corporation died (from a heart attack), Brian took over, naming his own brand of greeting cards, Kaboom, under the TNT umbrella. To this day I think he wrote the most hilarious sentiments. My favorite (which my mother didn’t find amusing at all): On the front of the card it read, “I don’t usually send Christmas cards...” and when you opened it, the message read, “to Jews.”

Somewhere in my apartment, I still have a couple of boxes of those holiday cards.

Joe hung out with Brian and me a great deal. He was the age-fusion of boy and man. Handsome enough to model. Tall, dark, extremely good looking. I don’t know what happened that made him leave his childhood home at 16, but he was not living at his family’s place in New Jersey when we met. I don’t know where he was staying.

One big difference between Brian and I is that Brian slept with any and every subjectively sexy man whom he could get his hands on. Almost one every night. No argument: Brian was very handsome and frankly, seductively masculine. Full head of blonde hair, blue eyes, deep voice. Sounds as if he would have been my type, but I never saw him that way. I was no blushing flower mind you, but at that age of relative innocence I tended to sleep with guys I thought had the potential of being lifelong partners. Another behavioral difference is that Brian loved to “trip” on acid. He no longer drank hard liquor—only beer—but he loved his drugs. For a while, our nightly ritual was my stopping by his place before we went out. Then I would walk him to Ice Palace as or before the drugs kicked in. What he and I had most in common, besides music, was a parallel sense of humor. God, we made each other laugh to the point of spit takes and tears.

Joe became like a younger brother to us both. Though Brian was four years older than me, our friendship was not based on age or maturity. Brian and Joe did sleep together one time, when Joe needed a place to stay one night, which to my knowledge, was the extent of their sexual relationship. Joe told me he thought of both of us as older brother figures. He also said he was “kinda in love” with both Brian and me. I never had sex with Joe. I was very attracted to him, but for me, once someone had slept with Brian, I lost interest. But it didn’t influence my love or affection for Joe. When Joe and I first talked about my performing at Caroline’s, we discussed taking disco hits and turning them into acoustic songs. I remember him and I discussing re-inventing the song Queen of Fools, recorded by Jessica Williams, into a slow, guitar accompanied song I would sing as a ballad. Relatively quickly, we abandoned the idea.

Though my relationship with Brian was often volatile, I would stay friends with him until the end of his life. The definition of the friendship would shift, but we stayed connected until the very end of his time on earth. But Joe drifted out of both 24

our lives. Not just from us, but from most who knew him during those disco and smoke filled nights.

Before it all came to its inevitable finale, at Blue Jay Diner on West 57th Street, Joe confessed why he had given me two different surnames. He had been in gay pornographic movies and didn’t want me to know (he thought I might recognize the last name he used when doing porn). I never questioned the circumstances— whether he did it to survive or if it was something he wanted to try. Whatever negative press you hear or read concerning the porn industry—particularly straight porn—there was (and I assume still is) a percentage of performers who liked doing it. Decent money, and an odd celebrity label, particularly gay porn “stars.” This era introduced a new, questionably talented, group of men to fame. Bartenders, porn performers, male strippers and even hustlers. Porn in particular came out of the shadows and found a legitimacy launched by the out of reach glamour of night life.

At least that’s my opinion. Places like Studio 54 and Ice Palace, where the CV blueprint for bartenders was to be a steroid injected muscle man with movie star looks, changed the socio-dynamic from being “looked down upon” to “stared at with envy.”

Years later, I heard through the gossip mill that Joe moved to the shores of New Jersey—Asbury Park area, I believe—and married a woman. I don’t know a thing about it, other than that it was apparently true. I don’t know if it was a real marriage or something he thought he needed to do for some reason. I would like to say I wouldn’t judge such a decision, but if it was identity denial on his part, I would be harsh. I don’t have the answer.

A few years back I started to look for some of (if there is more than one) Joe’s porn movies. Though I’m not a big pornography viewer, I found a vintage porn movie starring Joe, during my process of watching numerous movies. Oh, the hardships of research. It was a young Joe—who either hadn’t grown hair on his chest yet or had shaved it all off. I used my iPhone to snap a few stills, so I’d have something to remember him by.

Joe died more than 20 years ago. A drug overdose. Kennedy or Salvatore, I keep the only photos I have of him—stills from his short-lived role as a porn performer—copied black and white photographs captured from aged celluloid, of a sweet and elusive friend in character. A vague mystery to me, I never completely let go of this man who was a genuine mix of innocence and jade, sweetness and grit, love and secrecy. Joe Kennedy Salvatore.

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A lmir Ulises M estre León, H ombre A lado Series V

RuPaul, Circa 199...?

James Callan I always love that first episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I love the whole show, throughout. But most of all, I cherish that introduction to a dozen or so queens, each one more loud and campy, more outrageous and gorgeous, more crude and obscene than the last. I like to survey them during those infantile stages of what I know will be a long-haul contest. I relish studying the ladies’ variant styles, the eclectic looks, the wild, theatrical entrances. I savor those snap decisions, that unfounded discernment, the conclusions I jump to before I can make any solid judgements on their character, before I get to know my queens, free from bias, watching them size each other up, measuring up who’s the real threat in the competition. They’d admire, fearful, the bitch most likely to send them home, or to be watched sent home, by themself, the hopeful winner, on that triumphant moment they take the crown, become America’s or the UK’s next drag superstar.

I love to watch them dole out the sass; that “all in good fun, actually, I’m out for blood, no, but seriously, it’s all in good fun… or is it?” Boisterous laughter.

Over the top, head cocked backward, over animated, eyes wide, volatile laughter.

Hysteria. Then that serious face. Then maybe laughter again, always loud. Always explosive. There was something in that rhythm of conflicting messages, each one sincere, neither one serious, that backstage, out-of-drag, these-are-my-realthoughts interviewed and edited throughout that lulled me into a sort of trance.

RuPaul’s Drag Race is like that. It’s a trip to heaven.

As the queens sized each other up on that first episode, I’d be doing the same. I’d be missing some of the nuance to that quick wit and rapid humor, the frantic delivery and exchange of playful insult, a bit preoccupied while deciding which gurl I’d like best to suck my dick, pretending that the competition was some sort of gauntlet to sifting out the queens that were not fated for my intimate future. I’d have my favorites. The ones I’d want to win. But part of the thrill, the anxiety that fed the exhilaration, was not knowing.

It had always been like that. That gravitation towards the unknowing.

I had my first crush when I was maybe ten or eleven. Not a crush like the ones before. The ones that were based on some forgotten assessment of what makes someone crush-worthy when you are so young a crush itself is just an idea to play out, make pretend. But my first real crush, my first sexual attraction, I’ll never forget.

It was for RuPaul. Back in 199… Not sure. Back when MTV was about music. When it played music videos all day long, then Beavis and Butthead or Daria at night. Back when Home Alone was never far from the VCR. I’d watch RuPaul on VH1 and drink in her red hot splendor, go to the bathroom where I’d pretend to get a handjob from pretty hands I knew were a man’s.

It would always be real PG stuff. My fantasies. I mean, PG as an eleven or twelve year old’s sexual fantasy could expect to be. When you’re eleven or twelve 26

anything more than a kiss is X-rated, so it excited me plenty. But it was PG, certainty, looking back on it now, as a 37 year old. Ru would always be fully clothed, offering a hand or a mouth, always pleasing me, but always after a measure of coercion, or promises I’ll like it. Me being hard while being coerced, taking that as a sign it was meant to be. That coercion may not be necessary.

Apart from my own, genitals never entered into it. That would make crystal clear what I preferred to remain muddy. Even in knowing what was there, up under that stunning skirt, even if immaculately tucked with supreme professionalism and by de facto not there, I needed that unknowing. I fed off the confusion. The eleven or twelve year old guilt that made me think it was wrong. But liking that it was.

I’m not gay. I just like knowing that that hot girl is actually a man.

“I’m not gay.” My old mantra.

And even today, although the mantra has been long forgotten, I still prefer it that way. Not a man in a dress. Not the sculpturesque gym build, sweat-slick, perfect male body on the cover of a romance novel, not a man of any type at all, except that type that looks so extravagant as a woman they could almost be confused for a parrot. That’s the kind of man that makes me return to my PG fantasies of a fully clothed encounter that leaves me gloriously, thoroughly confused and fully pleased.

I’ve always had a thing for older women. Maybe it stemmed from Ru. Back when she was 35 and I was eleven or twelve. Maybe that’s why now, at 35, she’s still the older woman of my fantasies, or could be. Her, or Michelle Visage. That one is all woman but with her repertoire I’m sure there’d be room for plenty of confusion. Me, with my PG tendencies and Michelle with her bag of tricks, all of them dirty, or so the panel judges are always eluding to. Maybe it’s all a joke. Maybe Michelle is a saint. Though I’ve always preferred a good sinner.

I like the “look” queens. The ones that really had you guessing when they walked down the runway. The ones that couldn’t possibly be a man, but were. I loved how makeup from five yards out was more convincing than plastic surgery, more convincing than the real thing. I get a kick out the incredible fashion, the divine talents that would whip something together in a sewing challenge out of plastic bags and dollar-shop knickknacks under the pressure of limited time with ridiculous resources, all the while routinely cajoling each other, always clever, always over the top, before gathering themselves, just in time, to somehow, some way, present themselves, near perfect, and regale the judges and millions on their couches with majestic grace or comic spectacle or drop dead sexy waltzing; a truly bedazzling showcase.

In the end the winner would become my shower time daydream. But soon it would become the runner-up, or the queen that got booted by Ru early on. The one that made me cry when she sashayed away. The one I thought was so damned sexy, even if she couldn’t dance worth shit, even if her wig was askew and her lip sync was half-assed. Even now, two seasons later, I still think Ru was being a little harsh, 27

maybe even a little political, by voting off the white girl when I think most of us can agree she out shown the black girl, who is presently my shower time daydream.

But in the end, between seasons, it always comes back to Ru. My own hand in the shower becomes hers in my mind. I’ll always have Ru. Shantay, you stay. Then it’s just waiting it out until the next season comes. Sometimes looking back to get a bit more Gigi Good, who I often find I need real bad. Then more waiting. More shower time with Ru. But it’s never too long. Not these days. Not with how popular the show has become. Not with the new crop of look queens that hone their stuff over their teenage years and by nineteen are Instagram goddesses with adoring fans and fervent haters.

I’m not gay. It’s just my type of woman happens to be a man. It’s complicated. Okay, so maybe I am gay. But no, that’s too clear cut. Too revealed.

Those genitals, bulging, three dimensional giveaways; let’s not forget those are never part of the picture. It’s always PG. PG13, when things get frisky, or maybe in my case, PG11 or 12.

I can’t be gay. It’s just too damn crystal clear. I like the waters muddy. Like a tasty Frappucinno. I don’t want to see through the guise. I want to close my eyes to what’s real, but keep my eyes open while I’m doing it cause that makeup and padding is so damned beautiful and hides what I know is there but that’s enough. I like the confusion. And you can probably tell, I’m a confused sort of person.

But even knowing, pretending I’m doubting, I go back to the coercion that is unnecessary cause I’m already hard as a rock with my own fantasy and just don’t need that whispering promise that I’ll like it. I know that I’ll like it. If anything is clear, it’s that! It’s Ru, wild platinum hair and sultry eyes, cherry red lips, looking up at me even though she is eight inches taller than me and the one between the two of us that is in heels. It is Miss RuPaul, RusePaul, but come on, really… it’s no ruse, it’s just pretty and what you want.

Doesn't make it a ruse at all. Just makes it all a bit confusing. Even if it’s clear. Crystal clear, like Crystal Method, or Krystal Versace, like being at the end of The Crystal Maze you were once lost within, now no longer. You come out into daylight. Everything revealed. Everything so very clear.

But I don’t feel like splashing around in a glacier-fed lake where I can see the bottom as if looking through polished glass. I want to drown in that thick Frappucinno. I don’t even want to see my arms flailing about around me as I try to stay afloat. I want my eyes to be open while I still am not seeing.

Let’s just let that ruse go on a little longer. For old time’s sake.

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Liz H arvey, Collage #1

Equabet Z. Hanna Mahon I joined the Feminists United Contra Kyriarchical Universities because I wanted friends. I assumed that was why all liberal arts girls became feminists—to feel less alone.

I met one of the leaders of the group at the free-for-all Club Fair my first week of school. She had bright blue bangs and was standing at the entrance to Social Space— a room that felt a lot like my high school’s gym, only shiny and full of preppy people— handing out pink and brown straws with plastic penises on the end. She passed me a penis, shouted “Learn more about sex positivity—join FUCKU!” and immediately looked through me to the next piece of fresh meat.

I made a few laps around the room after that, noticing my blood, how red it felt, how much it was moving around inside me. In my pocket I traced the veiny end of my new gift with each of my fingers. By the end of the event I had accidentally signed up for a coding collective, some animal rights thing, and skeet shooting, but really I just wanted to know more about the girl with all the dicks.

Feminism wasn’t a foreign word to me, but it also didn’t fit quite right, a little too tight around the collar. I knew from my mom it was a good thing for us girls to care about but I also knew that one could become a feminazi if one took it too far. My middle school history teacher, for example—Nazi. The screens on all of the computers in our classroom read, IT IS ALSO IMPORTANT TO STUDY ‘HER’ STORY, in rainbow Microsoft letters that moved, inch by inch, into the beyond. The boy I liked would point at it behind my teacher’s back and roll his eyes—and I’d roll mine back.

After the club fair, I started attending FUCKU’s weekly meetings. At first, I didn’t understand anything they talked about, but Marge, the blue-banged doughy senior, took me under her wing. After our Monday meetings, she would smoke a cigarette and I would smoke her smoke and she would show me all of the tattoos in her hidden places and talk about growing up as a punk kid in the suburbs. Marge gave me lots of advice while drawing new tat ideas on herself with black sharpie.

“Ditch psych, it’s all about blaming women for our problems instead of the patriarchy,” she told me once as a thorny flower emerged on her left thigh. “You need to understand that we all have PTSD from being raped by capitalism.” I wasn’t sure how capitalism had raped me, but I liked that Marge felt comfortable pulling her shorts up so high I could see her pubic hair.

“That’s really pretty,” I said, tracing the fresh petals on her thigh.

“You’re cute,” she said back, and smoke spilled out of her mouth with each word.

“I think I’ll keep you.”

I wanted Marge to keep me, so no matter what book she gave me or link she texted me, I ate it up. I learned that in this new world there were very clear ideas about good and bad, it was sometimes just a little scrambled. Like, colonialism was bad and postcolonialism was good, but racism was bad and postracism—also bad.

I learned things about myself, too. I was femme and upper middle class. Femme was sometimes good, but upper middle class was always bad. Or, if I talked about the upper middle class thing I should pair it with the single mom thing. Also good: the way

29

my uncle touched me when I was little, the way my brain didn’t work right and I would sometimes feel really sad and wet for no reason at all. Marge gave me lots of stuff about mad pride and I ordered a series of buttons from a store online that said things like PROUD TO BE CRAY-CRAY. She laughed when she saw it—right there, in the middle of my chest—and that gave me the opposite of the wet feeling.

FUCKU had a lot of campaigns and I was working on those, too. We went from preaching sex positivity to sex neutrality and back again. We built a big menstrual cup, filled it with red paint, and snuck it on stage at one of the acapella events full of boys in striped suits. Then we wheatpasted apology letters about excluding trans women with the menstrual cup thing.

We covered our faces in black ski masks and walked around at parties with heavy flashlights, shining our lights on drunk men with grabby hands, keeping our sisters safe.

The two brown girls stopped coming to meetings after that because they said anonymity didn’t work the same for them, holding their bare arms out in front of them as they said it, but they didn’t want to have a healing circle about it (Marge even went to their dorm rooms to ask), so we added “Intersectionality” to every meeting agenda to make sure it stayed on our minds.

One day in late winter Marge said it was time to start being more intentional about how we used language. I was taking minutes for the FUCKU meeting that day and we were around two hours in. Time limits were phallogocentric so we were letting our meetings go for as long as they needed to go, as women in matriarchal societies had done in the past.

We were on agenda item #12, furthering our campaign for the replacement of “you guys” with “you gux” in all campus communications, having seen what the Chicanx Club was doing and deciding we wanted in.

Just as we started talking poster design, Marge stood up from her seat and held her hand up high.

“I think it’s time to go bigger, you gux,” she said. “Way bigger.” She was excited and breathy and suddenly I was excited and breathy, too.

“I’m not talking about words anymore,” she said. “I’m talking about the letters themselves. Ever notice how soft and cunt-like the curvy ones feel, while the linear ones are there trying to dominate you—trying to fuck you—every time they show up on a page?”

“Yes!” I said, isolating the sharp letters in the notes I had taken on my phone, feeling the warmth of violation move through me like a wave. “Yes!” A few other girls piped in before the conversation reached a boiling point and we simmered there, with additions like, “Fuck the letter l—its just a line, y’all! It’s just a phallus!” i and v were also trashed for being rapey. Those were definitely out. Next came z, w, y, k, and t. Too linear, too pompous. All capital letters were cancelled, too, for obvious reasons.

Most of the group trickled out by midnight, but those of us committed to this new cause kept going. Replacing violent letters with their curvy counterparts was hard but doable, all except for x. Marge suggested we form a subcommittee for that one, given our

30

high-profile “gux” campaign and the important legacy of the letter in the Black Power movement. After the subcommittee was formed (Marge didn’t join so I didn’t join), I raised my hand to share an idea.

“No need to raise your hand, cutie, but go ahead,” Marge said and winked my way.

“Why don’t we call this the Equabet instead of Alphabet since, you know, we don’t believe in a hierarchy?”

“Equabet,” Marge said, tasting it in her mouth. “I like it.”

This was our new campaign.

We talked to the gender studies faculty about it over the next few weeks and they were oddly squirrely.

“Oh, so you can support our sexual assault speak-outs but you can’t support this?” spat Marge, when we finally arranged a meeting with the one full-time faculty member and three adjuncts. “Aren’t you the ones always telling us to look at the root cause?” As she said it, Marge got up from her seat and I quickly followed suit.

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” I said, quoting Marge quoting someone else, and we walked out.

A month later me and Marge were the only ones left in the campaign committee. FUCKU had moved on but we couldn’t. We just couldn’t. We stopped going to the meetings and formed our own group we called “equabe(cc)”—the two c’s like the curvy lines of a deconstructed t—and worked on our manifesto, our magnum opus. Those daily meetings with Marge, the way our bodies scrunched up over our computers like the curves of a lowercase m, becoming one thing, one beautiful thing, it was the happiest I’d ever been.

After spring break, though, Marge stopped showing up to the dining hall for our meetings. I would find her in her dorm room with a sophomore girl named Jen or else smoking cigarettes outside the library.

“I can’t flunk out, cutie,” she’d say, and tap the toe of her black boot against mine. “Some of us can’t rely on our networks when we get out of here.” This seemed related to the upper middle class thing, so I didn’t say anything back. I kept going to our spot in the hidden corner of the dining hall, though, 5PM every weekday, noon on Saturday and Sunday, jerking my head up whenever I thought I glimpsed a flash of blue bang.

I didn’t stop working on the manifesto—that year, or the year after that. I was certain that as soon as I stopped the sad wet feeling would come back. Instead, I started smoking, sometimes not sleeping for days, sometimes weeks. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote until the new language became a part of me, un(cc)(j)(c) marge (uu)as a(c)so a par(cc) of me, un(cc)(j)(c) (j) cou(c)d appro(x*)(j)ma(cc)e (uu)ha(cc) (j)’d (c)os(cc) and (j) no (c)onger fe(c)(cc) so goddamn a(c)one.

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That Hunger: Sense Memories of My First Year On Testosterone Oliver Rose Brown Self-betrayal is exquisite and I am glutted on the stuff.

Know this is about more than the two pumps of topical testosterone applied nightly in lateral swirls over my decolletage and shoulders—more than its alcoholic sting could ever account for. As soon as its cold translucence meets my skin I see why people want it shot into their blood.

I get hooked on THC and oxytocin. I run from the feeling of my prescribed mirtazapine; a dumbfounded fog like a cattle-prod to the head. I blink through redflags like I’ve never seen one before.

A week after I start T I am full of strange dreams. I cut my tongue to ribbons on a diamond clit. I claw myself out of a mangrove swamp all mud-clad and sulphurreeking and start ripping up roots and stacking them in higher branches.

The waking world starts to come with new conditions, new observations: as long as you don't go growing facial hair and you look like you could be sixteen or forty years old all at once and you are a bashful/ wise old /young boy/ girl and I’m not the type of girl who could love you and dysphoria raising its head again. I can’t watch Robert De Niro in all his Casino handsome crispness put his arm around a woman's waist without wanting to yank off my own skin, without wanting to be anyone anything other than this and a sharper eye for other butches, butches with grey hair and laugh lines and butches with piercings and keys clipped deliciously, pendulously, at the belt and me turning to butter for them and we don’t bulk bill here, sorry, you really should have checked your account and you’re a dude, Oli. I know you are. If I left you, you would die. and you need to get out of there your eyes look so hurt and lost and ah, there’s that puppy dog look and sorry we can’t give you anymore shifts. You seem really shy with the whole transition thing, and I become Handsome. I am shocked that being Handsome and powerful are not the same, especially if you're not used to it. For me Handsome is seeming to never be in the right place, and people supposing the right place is me in their pocket, me high as a kite, me making them glow. Dating while on T goes only two 32

ways: I am either subsumed or held at arm's length and I take it all, either flavour. I get hooked on grandstanding and being seen as wild rough tough hard thing or as dainty subby hungry thing; I become a deft little ego project for any femme who gives me a damn and you are so fucking delicious and you really shouldn't be smoking so many cigarettes and you’re fragile and you can’t handle it and Is this the wrong bathroom? Did I come into the wrong one? and you really shouldn't take your hormones like that and your butch cock is getting bigger I sometimes wear my binder while running, while swimming, while fucking.

I know it's bad, I know. And yet. Vice grip thing of freedom. Sweat-drenched rank cloth. Fraying. Mine.

Stubble begins to grow under my jaw, leaving angry little patches near my collar bones when I sleep with my chin tipped. I keep pace of its growth not in the mirror but in the roughness it leaves on thighs and faces that eat me up in their false mirroring. you fuck like you’re trying to prove something and that hungry daze you fall into and all the while Pot makes bright squares of the passing days that I can easily jump through. When I’m high I giggle when the telly tells me to. I’m all agog in the big lights. Let me have this with my gut out, my head thumping. And, [behind my back through the walls] “Is she a she? What’s up with the face fluff? I can hear her vibrator through the walls. She’s weird but I’d fuck her.” and [to my face] you’re one of the lads now, Oli I need to sort my life out, get away from these people, but more than that I need to taste everything that makes me feel like a cowboy in snakeskin boots.

Mum, is that a lady? Mum, why can’t I point at the lady? and that's okay I’m sort of a boy and a girl at once and get away get away get away dagger look and I stop hungering for those older butches and start burning with questions for them 33

does it normally feel so hard and bitter? and when did you learn to stop clenching your jaw through the night? and why is there still that pull to be held when dreams make their leap? and You have to spend most of your life sober and alone dude and We aren’t disappointed in you, we are worried about you and Trauma bonds are quick-toothed things snap-down gotcha-before-youknow-it type things and lots of big bright futures can get pasted over your own behaviour before you realize how thin the glue is and No neuronal misfiring can account for this, boy There the chip there's the shoulder and I think you like being the underdog I realize that I have been betraying myself for some time now. I size up my jaw, my moustache, my squared-out shoulders, hum deep and low and feel a thrill at my new voice. I stop smoking, stop fucking, stop dating and getting on and getting blitzed. I learn that no matter how far you feel from all those sunrisen people with purpose in their step, there is always a way back. There is always a path home to yourself, and it begins with blind animal faith. Faith in your voice wearing its new baritone, saying darling, darling, I have been here all along I have loved you all the while.

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Tamara's Deposition Maria Carrera My name is Tamara Woodson. I strangled Poppy in my living room, August 15.

It was after dinner, about seven. Jane sent a frantic text that Poppy was on her way over.

I opened the door slowly, looking for a weapon, in case she wanted to kill me with something besides her fists. She barged in screaming. Jane hung in the doorway, with a glint in her eyes that made me want to kill them both. I swung around behind Poppy, slid my arm across her throat and pulled tight. She tried to throw me, but I had the adrenaline lock on her. I held and squeezed until she went unconscious and fell to the floor. So that’s it.

Sure I knew her before. She took Jane away from me, you know. She came to my house once, all bent out of shape when their romance was not quite as rosy as she expected. She knew Jane was The One, but she didn’t know what she needed. She wanted me to tell her. Poor Poppy. Jane brought her out of the closet, you know, late bloomer, strict Greek family. Jane likes those right-way military types, tight smile, tight curls, devoted. Guess I’m a little like that, too, not military, but corporate. She likes to unbutton all those tight buttons. I remember feeling her antennae go up the first time she spotted Poppy at a party. It was the beginning of the end for me, but I stayed friends with them both.

Poppy thought I was a mind-reader when I asked if Jane made her jealous by wedging my name between them. You know, like Tamara would always do this, or Tamara would never do that. I know that needling first-hand, it’s the way Jane works. She pouts at you with those dewy brown eyes and dangles her past lover in front of you for comparison. You get mad, she cocks her head so her hair falls across her cheek, and looks down like she might cry. Then she turns away, and you fall in line. Next she leaves a little love note on your pillow. You are My Special One, she says, and strokes your hair. You feel sheepish and grateful.

She’s brilliant. I hated to break it to Poppy, but everybody thinks Jane is The One. She knows what you want, and makes you believe you found it. You think, how did I ever get so lucky? Poppy looked a little pale when she left.

Okay, back to August 15. When Jane warned me that Poppy was coming for me, I knew they must have been fighting and Jane used me against her. I thought maybe I could talk Poppy down. But like I said, she barged in and Jane stood there waiting for the big dogfight, and I lost it. I jumped Poppy, but I was strangling Jane.

Then I called the cops, and here I am. I admit everything. If Poppy presses charges against me, okay. But I bet she doesn’t. When she dropped to the floor unconscious, I let go. She didn’t move, and for a second, I thought I killed her, but then she opened her eyes. What she saw was me in shock, and Jane slipping her arm around my waist and melting against me. My hero. One long, slow kiss, while Poppy watched.

She set up that fight to pick the winner, and I won. I know I’m a fool, but I got a second chance. Yeah, we’re together again. I’ll enjoy the fantasy while it lasts. The thing about Jane is, you get twisted up around her. I hope I don’t kill anybody.

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Jake's Jock Michael McGuire When I was 14 in 1967, no longer trusting my parents to respect the privacy of my bedroom desk, I kept my pot buried in the backyard in a hermetically sealed silly putty capsule under a magnolia tree where no one would ever find it. But sometimes I took my chances, risking my parent’s snooping by thinking I had cleverly concealed other less controversial items, which as it turned out I hadn’t been so clever at hiding. They found a cornucopia of contraband in their sweeps of my desk, including rolling papers, roach clips, a red plastic tin joint roller, Zippo lighters, a jar of Vaseline, a male physique magazine called Adonis I had shoplifted from Johnny’s Smoke Shop, a paperback of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and a handful of psilocybin mushrooms. I couldn’t keep anything sacrosanct, so who knows what compelled me to think my newest bootleg treasure would remain unmolested in the back of the bottom drawer inside a manila envelope inside a Popular Mechanics Magazine. I remember thinking that magazine choice was inspired, that it would throw them off the scent if they had dug that far, the scent in this case being a used jock strap belonging to Jake, the older brother of my friend Ken, who lived across the street, and from whom I had stolen it in his room while he and Ken were busy watching Bewitched in the living room.

I was frequently summoned to my parent’s bedroom for various transgressions and violations endemic to the teenage male, and I’d never know what misdeed or moral lapse I’d committed until I walked that lonely plank down to their bedroom where my doom awaited and whatever punitive measure I‘d be sentenced to by my judge and jury. This time when I was taken into custody and hauled into their room I didn’t have to wonder what my infraction had been because there it was in all its masculine tattered glory, laid out on their bed on a flattened brown paper bag. The jock was clearly a used one, frayed from multiple washings, and (hopefully) multiple sweaty football games. My father picked it up using the bag to prevent his hands from touching it, held it up and shook it, thundering “Where did this come from?” like he was Moses on the mount with the tablets, while my mother withered in the corner, wearing one of her tormented what did we do to deserve this? looks.

My brain clicked into super computer mode, processing data faster than the Stanford linear accelerator, weighing all possible answers against the one I couldn’t possibly offer up, that I had stolen my friend’s hunky muscular older brother’s jock strap to use as a fetishistic masturbation tool. “I found it,” I shrugged. My mother stared at me uncomprehending, “You what? Where?” she asked, flinching, clearly not wanting to hear the answer. “In some bushes,” I shrugged again. “IN SOME BUSHES?” she cried, aghast, still very much uncomprehending. The rest of the interrogation devolved into me wearing them out, answering “I dunno” every single time they asked “Why?”.

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I was in a pickle inside a conundrum. Of course I would never have picked up some disgusting jock strap discarded in some old bushes. That idea grossed me out as much as it apparently did my parents. But how could I tell them that Jake, the brawny football hero across the street, was now starring in my latest jack-off fantasies while I was wearing his athletic supporter? Telling the truth was impossible, fearing they’d make me march across the street to return it in apology, which clearly wasn’t necessary as the drawer I had stolen it from had at least 50 others in it. I could only stick to my story and claim amnesia for my motives. But as the minutes ticked gruellingly by, my mortification was quickly overshadowed by my anger at the degree to which my privacy and dignity were being violated. I felt like a fish gutted and filleted, my entrails spread out to pick over. I wanted to scream at my father as if it were the McCarthy hearings, “Have you no decency, sir?” This act of trespass caused me such an injurious sense of personal violation, I vowed on the spot to never forgive these people their illegal search and seizure, their desecration of what I considered consecrated ground, my desk. When I was finally released, knowing they thought I was truly a freak of nature, I sought the safety of the room I was forced to share with my bully of an older brother, only to find him waiting in ambush to spit “fag,” “fem” and “sissy” slurs at me from across the room where he sat with the gleam of malice in his eyes.

37

David Dasharath K alal, A venue H Waltz

Hey Boy Dustin Hendrick I didn’t even know someone could be black and Norwegian. That’s an American mind for you, assuming with no second thought that everyone in Norway was a giant blonde Viking. But Black Norwegian Will was dark as night. His teeth and the whites of his eyes were luminous and his skin was soft and smooth all over. I never learned his last name or where he lived.

He delivered plastic jugs of water to the breakroom of the bookstore where I worked part time, on a hand truck with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle stickers on each wheel and a red bead strand wrapped around the grip. Whenever he saw me he’d half smile and say hey boy, even though he was only twenty and I was twenty-two. He was a foot shorter than me—but he didn’t seem like it, and he didn’t act like it. He smiled often at nothing I could see, and I liked that, because I could barely be bothered to smile even when I was happy.

His accent was confusing. A collection of accents, it sounded like. Nigerian by way of Norway, he told me one night. An orphan, but not like everyone thinks, he said, and then he put his hand in my pants.

He had come to California on a student visa and decided to stay, though he never told me why or how. I wondered if he was secretly married to some friend, some acquaintance, some woman who’d decided to help him out. He never said a word about it, though, and I never told him I was adopted by my mom’s cousins after her final overdose or that the scar running down my left side was from falling off a barn roof and not from some surgery.

Like a lightning bolt, he said the first time he saw me with my shirt off, and never mentioned it again. But our meetups were really about sex first and then chit chat maybe after.

He seemed embarrassed by the size of his penis. It was the biggest I’d ever seen.

I told him that early on and he just shrugged. I asked him if anyone else had told him that, and he said “probably,” in a way that meant he didn’t want to talk about it. I told him it didn’t really matter, but I don’t know if that was the right thing to say.

I was only just out of the closet and I’d never had sex with a black man before.

It felt important, like I had crossed some cultural barrier that I probably just made up to seem cool and to make me feel like I had escaped my small-town past— livestock, log trucks, bleak factories, grown men with mouthfuls of tobacco saying fag and fairy, the reek of potential violence—but that feeling seemed shameful, like something I should keep to myself, so I did.

I almost asked him to be my boyfriend after the first few times he came over to my apartment, but he always kept himself just out of reach. Maybe I did too. He’d come to my apartment, then one of us would fuck the other and he’d say, “I’m so tired tonight,” before I could even stand up, and he’d be gone in an instant. We met for drinks once at the bar across the street, and I got too drunk too fast. We barely said anything to each other and either he left without saying goodbye or I was too drunk to remember it.

But he kissed me on the back of the neck one night in the dark of my kitchen.

He had to stand up on the tips of his toes to do it, but it felt really comfortable, really

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normal, and I said so. He said, “good,” and went back to my bedroom with a mason jar full of water and fell asleep. He left before I woke up the next morning. I never knew what that good was code for, if anything.

He disappeared in October of that year. He didn’t tell me he was leaving or where he was going, and he didn’t return my calls that whole time. I finally saw him in the book store sometime in November and he told me he’d been on vacation with an old friend, as he called them. I felt so alone and empty when he was gone but I didn’t tell him.

I didn’t want to admit it, not even to myself. He asked to come over that night like nothing had happened. I said I was busy with school, and I could tell he knew it was a lie.

He wasn’t my boyfriend; I didn’t have a right to feel lonely or hurt or whatever I was. I was jealous of the friend who’d stolen him so easily. The image of his secret wife flickered up again, over and over though I had no proof she was real. It could just as easily have been a secret boyfriend or a secret something else but what I saw was that pretty white girl I invented, in tight jeans and makeup like she’d just gotten ready for a party, the same girl who’d stolen the boy I wanted so many times in my past, the female specter forever reminding me with her presence alone of what I could never have.

I started sleeping with another guy I didn’t like nearly as much. Will got a new job and I stopped seeing him at work. I graduated from college the following June and got a new job too, moved into a better place, made better friends. I wanted to call him so many times to apologize and admit I was hurt when he had vanished, but I didn’t. I was still too proud and still kind of hurt and embarrassed by my overreaction and I didn’t know if he’d understand even if I tried to explain.

I was driving on Washington Boulevard one afternoon and the light turned red and there he was, walking down the street in the sunset in a white tank top and black jeans, and I felt so relieved I almost cried. He looked so good and familiar that I wanted to jump out of my car and leave it running in the street, run over to him, hold onto him, but the light turned green and I had to keep going. The sun blocked my view of him in the mirror and he melted into the city. One drunk night a few weeks later I finally broke and called but someone else answered. His number had changed.

I keep trying to push all thoughts of skin color away, but I can’t help wondering if I dismissed him too easily because of it, because of some residual bigotry from life in a little white shit town I thought I’d left behind. I wonder if he’s found someone else now, someone as dark as him, as willing to smile, as wonderfully different. I wonder if he’s happier now—and I wonder if I will be too, someday.

I drive down the boulevard every weekday now, home to work and back again the same way every time. I look on every balcony of every apartment and on the front porch of every house, in as many windows as I can without crashing, in hope of finding him. Who fucking does this, I think, followed by something about how probably everyone does in some fashion, all through their lives, all of us silently desperate for someone we didn’t love enough when they were ours, though the word love never entered our equation.

Why didn’t you learn his last name, I say to myself. Like that would be enough to track him down in this endless hot labyrinth of a city. Here’s me regretting, I think as loud as I can, hoping he’ll hear it and know it’s from me.

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The Decade of Disco Sally Douglas Moser “We’re not going to make it,” Chris points at the green dashboard clock.

Speeding north on I-95, the sliver of the moon looks like a capsized boat plunging into Long Island Sound. The night is crisp, the highway empty. As fast as we’re going, we still won’t get to the club for the big countdown. In our rush to get away from the party of drunken farts at our own theatre, we’ve ended up racing to nowhere.

We’re anxious to get to Albert and the gang at Kurt’s, the big gay dance club in New Haven.

Albert and I haven’t missed a New Year’s Eve together in 8 years. Now we are out of sync, our lives speeding ahead, our relationship stuttering one beat behind. Passing ships. Messages on voice mail. Hurried meals at diners. Exhausted pizza in front of the TV. Falling into bed, one of us asleep, waking to new days where we whiz by in separate directions. I steer my rudderless non-profit through stormy seas; Albert soars high with his kids theatre.

Chris is our connection. He stage manages my plays and appears in Albert’s kids’ shows. We see more of him than we do each other.

The new decade promises change. The victim of magical thinking, I believe things will turn around in 1990. I’ll be able to cash my checks, get that big new grant.

I’ll strike out on my own; we’ll move to New York. I turn on the tape deck; we seat dance to George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex.” Chris’s shoulder bops, blue eyes glowing in the dashboard light, fingers drumming on knees. Several years my junior, he has matured by adopting a premature scowl, a jaded outlook. “Did you hear from Paul?” I ask, knowing the answer. “Naahh,” Chris says, as if it’s nothing. “He’s busy.”

Paul, his boyfriend of several years, has moved to Orlando to work as an actor in the Ghost Busters show at Disney. Their relationship evaporated. Phhht.

Gone.

“Is that clock right?” Our eyes watch the blocky green numbers click from 11:58 to 11:59.

“Close enough,” I say.

Everyone in the world is at home or parties, dancing, singing, watching the ball drop, listening to Dick Clark, drinking champagne, nursing hopes, fears, worries for the 90s.

Chris begins: “10-9-8-7-6” I join in “5-4-3-2-1!”

We roll down the windows and yell “Happy New Year!”, the cold air whipping through the car. A lone driver on the other side of the highway flashes his lights, beeps his horn. We follow suit. Then quiet. The humming of the car on the highway. George Michael singing.

“Happy 1990, friend,” I say.

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“Happy 1990.” He pats my shoulder. “Christ, I could use a drink!”. He slams the dashboard.

By the time we arrive at the club, the front bar is still, the crowd paltry. We order drinks, no waiting, make our way toward the main room. We snake through warrens and lounges, past pre-coital revelers who huddle and snog. The whole place stinks of stale cigarette smoke and rancid beer, with a wafting undercurrent of Drakar.

At the brink of the deserted dance floor I feel like a survivor on the S.S. Poseidon, the once lavish ocean liner upside down and in tatters. Streamers hang from overhead. The floor is littered with confetti, champagne corks, soggy garlands, clinging to the shoes of the dwindling dancers. One joker drags the mess around, stomping like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, trailing radioactive seaweed.

I look around for anyone I might know. A few clutches of people, boys with boys and the occasional fag hag, step and twirl. Most use the dance floor as one would a back alley: to mingle and flirt, laugh and grope. Screens throughout the hall play mindless MTV videos, the thump of the bass and drums, the primordial echo of a pagan ritual.

Someone taps my shoulder; I turn around. Albert, peeking from behind a column. He wears happy clothes in yummy colors, a stark contrast to my standard costume: black on black with black, and because it’s a special day, a few black accents. “Happy 1990!” he says, reaching in for a quick peck.

“Happy 1990,” I look behind him. “Where’s the gang?”

“They all had other shindigs. I waited for you.” He blows into a party horn, its paper tube unfurling like a serpent’s tongue.

“Cute.”

He gives me that coy smile, like he’s getting away with something.

“Good night?” I lean on the other side of the pillar. We continue chatting around it, looking more at the scene than each other.

“Party was a blast—you should have seen the go-go boys. Ten minutes after midnight, everyone cleared out.”

“Lucky them!” Chris says. I almost forgot he was there. He has a way of making himself invisible. “Who wants another drink?”

I hold up my glass. “I’m still finishing mine.”

A Pet Shop Boys riff spins around the speakers in the vast room. The video screens burst into life with an over-sized image of Liza Minnelli singing a techno rendition of a show tune. At times she pouts, looks wistful, vulnerable… her gamut.

“Let’s dance!” Albert splays jazz hands in front of his face, pulls them away, imitates Liza’s trademark gosh-gee laugh. “A hah!”

I nod to the heavy coat slung over my shoulder. “Anyway, I got this.” He moves to grab it. “Just throw it over there!”

I look at the carpeted bench, at my nice wool overcoat, and hold onto it. “I can’t put it there. We don’t know where it’s been!”

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Albert steps back, quiet. He pulls his mouth into a tight button. I’ve upset him.

“Anyway,” I say, hoping to make a detour around this. “I like this video.”

Albert smiles at Liza’s yearning face, sings along, breaks his silence. “When the DJ plays Sondheim, you know it’s almost last call.”

A drunken wraith stumbles onto the other side of the dance floor. Her hair, fried yellow like hepatitis, sticks out from her head like she’s been electrocuted.

Make-up courtesy Tammy Faye Bakker. She clambers on top of the speaker and begins a herky-jerky touch-step, shouting out lyrics of the song to anyone and no one. “You said you loved me, or were you just being kind?”

“Oh Jesus.” I point to the old hag. “How did Disco Sally get here? I thought she was dead.”

“Like mold on a toilet seat.” Albert says, his eyes still trained on Liza’s huge image sulking above.

“I have a back story about Disco Sally,” I shout over the building music. “That she used to come to the bars with her gay son, and then he died of AIDS. She still comes, all by herself. Night after night. Just to dance. Maybe it’s all about the people who aren’t here tonight.” I look around, recalling our wild crazy nights here, in the late 70s, when the future held promise, excitement. Now it’s hard to know if the bar is isolated because it's the end of the night, or the fact that so many of its patrons have been picked off, one-by-one, by the horrible plague.

Albert glares. I’ve gone too far bringing that up. Just by saying the “A” word, I’m conjuring the ghosts of people we’ve known and lost. We’ve put them away in their own little compartments in our mind, the unfortunate few, the warnings of what could or might—or maybe probably will—happen. They are not us, we tell ourselves.

That is not our end.

“Nice,” Albert says, abruptly turning away from Sally. “I’ve been here for a couple hours, and if you’re not going to dance, we should just go.”

“What’s the rush?” I say, crunching my ice.

“The place is dead.”

I look around, the stragglers now gathering their things.

“Well, we got two cars. I’ll meet you at home.”

“Okay.” He kisses me on the cheek and smiles. “I’m going home to Pooki.”

Pooki is a stuffed animal that I’d bought him for Christmas so many years ago. He never let me have a cat, as I so desperately wanted, so Pooki had become a substitute for a pet. This scruffy stuffed monkey is our substitute child, our object of affection, the voice who could tell us what we were really feeling. I once found it cute, how we could project our love through this loved-up toy. Now I find it embarrassing.

I wish it would stop.

“Yeah,” I say. “Kiss Pooki for me. I’ll be home.”

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He disappears into the smoky air. Albert gone, I feel around in my coat for a Parliament—a habit I’d recently picked up for dreary tech rehearsals. I pop the cigarette into my mouth and fish around for a lighter.

Chris appears, strikes a match and holds it out for me. “Such a good stage manager, always looking out for your producer.”

I take a satisfying drag and watch the smoke disperse, giving form to the roving lights. “Paul said happy New Year.”

“You called?”

“Message on the machine.” Chris leans against the wall, his coat draped over his folded arms. “Happy whatever. Yippee. You gonna stick around?”

“Just watching the floorshow.”

Disco Sally is cranked up all the way live, sloshing her syllables like an overfilled drink, bleating “I dim the lights and think about you. Spend sleepless nights to think about you.”

We both laugh when she slips and lands on her ass. She keeps up the routine, flinging her legs in the air, her skirt hiked up to expose thick girdle lines beneath support hose. “Or am I losing my GODDAMNED MIND!” She continues to dance on her back, a turtle trying desperately to upend itself.

“Albert said he’d meet us at home,” I take a drag on my cigarette.

“Yeah, I saw him on the way out,” Chris puts on his coat. “I’m going to meet up with some friends. You’re on your own.”

I stand up. “Let me walk out with you.”

Disco Sally climbs back to her feet, now clomping around with one shoe off, one shoe on. “You said you loved me, or were you just being kind?” She screeches.

Two bouncers emerge from the shadows and approach the large speaker where she flounces.

I turn to follow Mark to the front of the club, but can’t resist the eleven o’clock number.

“I’m dancing up here!” Sally yells at the two men as they help her down.

I watch her frail legs collapse beneath her, and something catches in the back of my throat, something I’ve been ignoring, pushing down. But it’s there. A tear has metastasized like a tumor and I can’t breathe. I have a sudden urge to reach out to Sally. She’s bobbing alone in the icy waters and the survivors just point and laugh.

Isn’t there anyone to rescue her? I rewrite my story for her. I will myself to see something good and positive. Her son shows up, pats her poor tired head. They spin around the dance floor. She’s Ginger Rogers.

I stomp out my cigarette, force myself to look away. I put on my coat and hurry to catch up. Chris opens the huge metal exit door, a remnant of the old factor that has since been converted. A blast of cold air slashes at our faces as we walk into our new decade. From deep in the recesses of the club, I hear the music thrum, a distant Disco Sally wailing: “Or am I losing my fucking mind? My GODAMMNED FUCKING MIND?!!!” and then abrupt silence as the heavy door slams shut behind us.

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J ack J acques, Chair

The Art Show Alexandria Goodson Quiet at first, soft-spoken. Until you get to know her. Fine brown hair, cheeky cheeks, a small mouth. Freckles. So many freckles. Brown eyes. Her Dad died when she was in the 5th grade. A drunk driver crashed into his car on St. Patrick’s Day. When she got home from school that brilliantly blue afternoon, her Mom Kathy told her and her sister what happened. Then Kathy got up, went to her bedroom, and didn’t come out for a while. When Haleigh talks about her dad’s death, which isn’t often, she tells the story like she’s talking about putting down her first dog. That’s not to say she isn’t sad, or upset, or that it didn’t affect her profoundly, rather, telling the story of her Dad getting crushed in his truck by a drunk 22-year-old over and over to everyone who asks whether or not she’s close with her parents can be corrosive. She cannot dive inside herself and dismantle that ball of yarn, with its tangled, wiry strings of anger and sadness and depression and anxiety and messy dread, she can only mention her before and after with practiced detachment.

She grew up in a house of acute creativity. Her sister designs costumes by hand for the New York City ballet. Her mother sings and plays 7 different instruments.

From the time she could hold a pencil, Haleigh was an insultingly talented artist. One of those people whose natural gift makes you feel jealous, even angry, knowing that you could work for years, a lifetime, and never achieve that simple genius. Their home quivered with that hummmm feeling you get when surrounded by people who put the most vulnerable parts of themselves out on display for all to see.

When we met, it had been a while since she picked up a paint brush. In her room there were nearly naked sketchbooks, timid ideas barely etched out, and halffinished canvases, abandoned mid-stroke like when someone changes the topic in a conversation. She thinks they are terrible but they are exquisite. Even when she talks about the flaws she sees, if you look closely enough, you can see the way her eyes follow the painstrokes with stratospheric tenderness, and then, the nearly impossible-to-see curve of her small mouth, and then you know, you know that the part of her that understands how truly talented she is, is hiding in a closet underneath the stairs behind her heart, alone yet fiercely mighty, waiting to summon the courage to come out.

Haleigh finally finished a painting and entered it in a local art gallery a few towns over in Glens Falls for their September showcase. Sometimes I would walk into her apartment and find her crouched over the canvas, paint splattered on the old blanket she was sitting on, earth tones of beige and lavender and taupe under her fingernails. Her hair in a loose ballerina bun, baby wisps of fine hair planning their escape, the paint finding its way behind a kneecap, an ear, or above one of her light brown eyebrows. When she finished, I was the first person she showed, and that quiet moment was the greatest gift she ever gave me.

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This painting was equally light and dark, of a young woman sitting wrapped in a sheet, her back to the viewer, her face’s profile blurred and undetailed to the point where it could have been anyone’s. But her body’s outline under the cloth, a dividing border between continents. Her back was delicate and strong, like cursive, her shoulders safeguarding a secret, one that seemed to frighten her. It was so painfully intimate and bare, it made you feel like you shouldn’t be looking at what you were looking at, but here’s this beautiful piece of art made by another human being—and one you happen to be in love with—and you can’t look away, and you can’t help but think what she would look like under a thin sheet, and you want to tell her it’s gorgeous just like her, but you stop yourself because that would be too much for this moment, and you don’t want to scare her away, and it kind of feels like you’re holding a broken bird in your hands, so instead all you do is step back and say, it’s incredible.

When it was time for the showcase, she asked if I wanted to go see it with her. It had already been on display for several days but she didn’t want to go alone.

In the car, the windows were down and Mine Would Be You by Blake Shelton was oozing out of the radio and into the space between us. Sometimes we would drive and not talk at all. As I looked out the window at the pine trees lining the I-87 thruway, I closed my eyes and pretended we were a couple, and that we were going to this art show like any other couple in the world. I pretended that I was holding her hand as we drove too fast, and that I could lean over and kiss the side of her face. I pretended that I could say this song reminds me of you, do you think it should be our song? I pretended that when we got there she would introduce me as her girlfriend, and that afterwards we would go to a sticky, dark bar, and have a celebratory cheap beer while holding hands under the counter. I pretended I was her world as much as she was mine right now. And then I opened my eyes and found myself in the same place I was 30 seconds ago.

“My Grandfather is going to be there too,” she said. “I’m excited for you to meet him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Eddie. He’s sweet. He’s always been the most supportive of my art. I told him all about you and us.”

Every once in a while she would drop mind-bending bombs from thirty thousand feet, exploding any notion of normalcy around our amorphous friendship.

I usually said nothing or shrugged, a lifeless, worn out sweatshirt tossed onto a chair.

Sometimes it felt like I was trying to learn another language in an instant, feeling grateful for the crumbs of crumbs she was leaving for me, never knowing what was an illusion, what was real. I replayed these moments over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, strung together in a blurry supercut.

We got to the art show before her Grandfather did. It was a hot Saturday afternoon, a welcomed yet rare encore of summer in Upstate New York, and the rush of air conditioning in the gallery felt like jumping in a pool. She brought me over to 45

a big wall in the back, with several small and determined spotlights illuminating the canvases. One of them was hers. Seeing it there among the other pieces, and not on her living room floor, was striking. It was so official and profound. I stole a glance of her standing next to me, looking at her own art on display. She was quietly proud, her eyes staring straight at the thing she had once abandoned, now alive, thrust into the world. She took a few steps forward and looked at her name card.

Haleigh Lawton, The Dancer, Oil on Canvas.

I wondered if there was a parallel universe that existed where a version of us was standing in this same spot, but in that version I could wrap my arms around her from behind and kiss the top of her shoulder and tell her how very proud of her I was. But instead, I stood next to her and told her how fucking cool it was.

Her Grandfather showed up. A soft spoken older man with a tucked-in checkered shirt and an uncomplicated sweater. Fine, wispy hair, laugh lines, good teeth. She had his eyes, kind and a touch timid, with a determined sparkle. It felt important to meet her Grandfather. She was like a doll house, so many rooms and doors and windows and hidden spaces and every time we did something meaningful it felt like she was opening up one of those rooms or doors or windows or hidden spaces and letting me in to see what no one else did, giving oxygen to this indescribable chemical reaction between us. At least that’s how it felt.

He gave me a pocket sized, sincere smile with a nod, and didn’t stop walking as he went right up to Haleigh with his arms spread wide, bringing her in for one of those wrap around, delightfully bone crushing hugs that can make you burst into tears. I was on the surface of the sun, and once again, adjacent to an extraordinarily intimate moment where I felt more like an awkward bystander who forgot their lines.

“Wow, wow, wow, Haleigh-girl, this is really something,” sang Eddie, taking in the rest of the gallery.

“Did you meet Jordan?”

Eddie walked over to me with that disarming, sunny smile, his hand outstretched for a shake. “Hales has told me so much about you, what a pleasure to finally put a beautiful face to the name.”

The three of us walked up to the canvas, and as we stood there looking at The Dancer, I couldn’t help but think of all the future memories my entire soul wanted to have, of us going for beers together at Desperate Annie’s, of me and Haleigh bringing her Grandfather lunch from Spring Street, and playing cards while we ate the famous Man O’ War sandwich with some sweating Coronas, the stories he would tell me about Haleigh growing up, what I would learn about his own life. I wanted normal, beautiful, boring, normal. He was a living scrapbook, a time capsule, an extension of her. He made her real, because up until this point I had to keep asking myself if she really existed. When you meet someone’s family, whether chosen, blood, or somewhere in between, they do this awesome magic thing where they show you another version of the person you love, another side, another reflection, and in a way, even cement their existence in your universe, because for a while, it 46

really felt like Haleigh was this distant, nebulous cloud, real, but untouchable, a lone heart, with no emergency contacts. And then here comes her Grandfather, opening a door to a new chapter, and it felt precious and vulnerable and important. At least to me.

When I look back now, there are times where I try to will my past-self to do something differently. To have the courage to speak up. To say something. To reach out. To jump with the intention of flying and not falling. But to wish those things now would be to change the story entirely. And aren’t we all products of every decision, every moment, every conversation and thought leading up to this very exact moment, of me writing this, which has turned from “now” to “then” before the sentence is even over, to you reading this. When I think about what I could have said or what I could have done, there is a hasty pang of regret, even now, years later. But I know this is the way it had to happen. Because even if one minor thing had gone differently, if we had turned left instead of right, if we had started our day an hour later, chosen something different to eat at lunch, this story could be different, wildly different. And maybe I wouldn’t be here writing this and maybe you wouldn’t be where you are reading this. We are a sum of our parts and to wish your past something different, is to wish change on the very being you are in this exact moment. At least that’s what I tell myself.

47

The First Known Lesbians of Glen Ridge, New Jersey Elizabeth Crowell As I rang the bell, Mrs. Crane came to the side window, pulled the eyelet curtain and waved at me frantically, as if I had come to rescue her. When she opened the door, I could smell the warm, spicy air behind her. She was wearing black pants with a deep, red turtleneck and lipstick that matched. “Now, Clara!” she exclaimed. “Cookie time again! Why do they make you wear that stupid Girl Scout cap? It’s so nice, Clara, to have a girl in the house.” She kicked a hockey stick out of the way as she talked.

“Come back to the kitchen!”

I followed her through a swinging door. She pointed out a plastic, big machine by the phone. “Malcolm just got me that answering machine. Apparently, he thinks we’re missing calls. What, is he having an affair? Which one of my horrible boys is in your class again?”

“Barry,” I said. “We’re juniors.”

“Maybe you could invite him to the Candy Cane,” she suggested. The Candy Cane was a Valentine’s Girl-Asks-Boy dance for the Women’s Club scholarship. I had never gone.

“It would be an honor to go with Barry,” I said.

“You’re a hoot,” she said. “I’m surprised you aren’t more popular,” she said.

“So am I," I said. This made her laugh again. She put her arms around me and spread her hand right over my breast. I felt some odd relief that my guard had been down as if I understood that for anything to happen, it would have to be. My mother had warned me about fathers walking or driving me home after babysitting, planting sloppy kisses, but not about women. I looked at Mrs. Crane sideways, the curl of her ear, the auburn hair cupped behind it, the red turtleneck rolled up, as she opened the cookie order booklet. “Now what did I order last year?”

“Thin mints. Everyone likes the Thin Mints,” I stuttered.

“I love the thin mints,” she went on. “If the wolves don’t get them first. Do you ever put them in your freezer?” I shook my head. “Clara, you should. You really should.

They get so cool… and then, in the middle of the summer, take them back out and they do something in your mouth I cannot describe.”

“You also like the Tagalongs,” I remembered. “Those are the peanut butter ones covered in chocolate.”

“I love those. You are smart to remember what I want. You ought to get a job at a store. Customers like to be remembered.”

“I already have a job. I work at the library.”

She dropped her pen to the floor. The phone rang.

“The library,” she said. “Do you know Mrs. Jackson?” The phone rang again.

“Oh, this is fun.” She took me by the arm. “Let’s let the machine get it.” We listened to the ring, to the click, and then watched the cassette tape roll. There was a solemn

48

message recorded by Mr. Crane. “Greetings. You have reached the Cranes, home of Malcolm, Priscilla, Peter, Jon, William, Barry, and… Ashford.”

Mrs. Crane wrapped her arms in mine. “He can’t even remember the name of his children.” I put my arm around hers. Now, I felt like a conspirator. Poor, stupid Malcolm.

“If you would like, please leave a message after the beep.”

There was a deep breath and a girl’s voice. “Hi, this is Katie. Could you have John call me back?”

Mrs. Crane pressed a finger to rewind the tape. “I won’t tell him that. Katie is a slut. Now, the library? You must know Mrs. Jackson.” She scooped up the pen.

“She’s the head librarian.”

“Isn’t she nice?” she asked. “She’s always so helpful.”

“Yes, she is nice,” I said dispassionately.

“Oh, she is!” Mrs. Crane insisted. “I hope you hit Mrs. Jackson up for some cookies.” Mrs. Crane picked up the order form again and ordered twenty boxes.

Mrs. Jackson let me run the Children’s Room by myself in the afternoon.

The day after I had visited Mrs. Crane, she entered the Children’s Room and looked all around. She wore a dark polyester dress with poodles on it. “I hear you are selling cookies,” she whispered.

There was a Mr. Jackson—or had been. He was in a hospital or a home or had already died; reports were various. “What did Priscilla Crane order?”

I pulled the sheet out of my backpack, and she grabbed it quickly, scanning down to Mrs. Crane’s order and putting her fingers on it. She stared at it for a moment. She plucked a pen from her pocket, wrote her own name, and ordered the same twenty boxes. “That ought to be enough!” she said.

Mrs. Jackson’s flushed face looked straight at me. I nodded in assurance.

Her pantyhose rustled as she left, like long grass in a windy field.

Every time I worked, Mrs. Jackson would find me where I was—standing on a stepstool, reaching to the dusty top of the stacks, filing picture books in the tight shelves—and ask me if the cookies had come in yet. “Not yet,” I said.

“I saw Mrs. Crane at the Women About Town Luncheon and she told me she has to hide her cookies from the boys!”

“Well, she has a lot of boys.”

“Do let me know when the cookies come in.”

I had begun to notice everything about Mrs. Jackson. She often sang to herself choruses from Broadway shows. She took a break at 3:45 with a plaid thermos of coffee and cookies. She followed Dynasty religiously. She went to the movies every Saturday by herself. Sometimes she would stare out the large window and sigh.

When the cookies came, I helped to carry them out to her car in the slippery 49

snow. “I’ll tell you a trick,” she said. “Put the thin mints in the freezer. They are delicious that way.”

The next week, a late winter snow had fallen. The stately houses look like country manors, set back from the slick black street with ashy trees. Mrs. Jackson and I left work together. When she turned left on Bloomfield Ave, I found myself following her past the Royal Movie Theater and onto the Garden State Parkway. At the tolls, she pulled off and parked at a hotel that had a seafood restaurant and cocktail lounge. I parked on the other side of the hotel. I watched Mrs. Jackson lift herself from the car, holding onto the door. She seemed transformed—weaker, more delicate. In the corner of the lot, near the dumpster, I saw the Crane’s wood-paneled Crane wagon.

Mrs. Jackson got into the elevator and the light said third floor. She did not see me as I got in the other elevator. When I stepped out, Mrs. Jackson was knocking on a door down the hall. The door opened and Mrs. Jackson got sucked in, as if by a great vortex. I noted the room number.

In the lobby, I asked for the room next to theirs, which seemed luxurious to me—the satiny, red bedspread folded out, a terrycloth robe that I put on over my clothes. In the mirror, with the white thick robe on me, me holding the belt like a whip, I whispered, who are you?

I listened to their voices; the words were indistinguishable. Then, I heard a slight moan, the shuffle of clothing, and a caress that seemed to have its own soft sound that I only really understood later, in my own love-making. There was a slap of flesh on flesh, uttered words, no words at all, and a cry so out of the ordinary, one gasping completion and then, another, like a howl, that I believed was Mrs. Jackson.

I lay on the bed for a long time, vaguely aroused, terrified by what I had just heard. I tried to understand that this was what I wanted, what I desired. I snuck out before I could be seen.

That summer, Mrs. Jackson and I were both at the front counter. Mrs. Jackson was reading an article in the town paper spread on the marble counter.

There was a tribute to Mrs. Crane because the Cranes were moving to Chicago for Malcolm’s work. “It’s too bad,” Mrs. Jackson said. She leaned her round elbow on the counter. It was quiet enough to hear the old grandfather clock tick.

Just then, there was a bang at the door, and Mrs. Crane entered with an old thick chair. She carried it up to the old marble steps by half-bouncing it on her knee as Mrs. Jackson stared at her from the counter. Mrs. Crane was wearing a floral summer shift, her hair matted with sweat. “The movers are coming,” she said. “And I thought we might donate this chair to the library. It belonged to Malcolm’s mother.”

Mrs. Jackson did not move at all.

“Oh, Clara,” Mrs. Crane dropped the chair and came right up to me, pulling me sideways into a hug. Mrs. Crane let go of me and spun around to Mrs. Jackson.

“Do you think you can used the chair?” she said.

50

Mrs. Jackson stamped due date cards. Aug 11, 1982. “I don’t think so, Priscilla, though it’s nice of you to offer.” She continued to stamp the cards. `Mrs. Crane was surprised. “It’s a Stickley. If you don’t want it for the library, you could sell it to raise money for the new research room.”

“I don’t want the chair,” Mrs. Jackson said. “And I am the director of the library.”

“What pithy authority we have in the end. And how it works.” Mrs. Crane said nothing else. She picked the chair up and marched down the stairs, banging her knees against the heavy wood.

I ran out the door, my flip flops slamming on the pavement. Mrs. Crane was struggling with the chair, dancing with it on her hip. The wild summer light blinked through the tall oaks.

"Mrs. Crane!" I called. "Can I have the chair?"

I imagined taking it with me to college. Girls would ask where it came from, and I would have a story.

She put the chair down on the sidewalk and sat right in it, spread her cotton dress around her lap.

"You want this chair?"

"Yes." “It wasn’t my choice. She thinks I agreed—it’s just we have to go for Malcolm’s job.”

"Does Malcolm know?" I asked.

She rubbed her face as she looked up at me. "No one knows. That's how it works. I don't know how you got in the picture," she added.

So there I was. In it. Not outside it. I took the chair back in and put it in the children’s room. When I went to leave at the end of my shift, Mrs. Jackson stopped when she saw me with it. We were in the echoic foyer, with the chandelier, the plaque of donors, a first edition of Little Women in a glass case. “What are you doing with that chair?” asked Mrs. Jackson. She put her hands to her hips.

“Mrs. Crane said I could have it,” I said.

Mrs. Jackson crossed her large arms across her body. “Take care of that,” was all she said. “It’s a Stickley. It’s worth something.” She held the heavy door open as I lifted the chair out into the summer afternoon.

When I got home, I left the chair in the driveway. I went inside and got a pack of thin mints that I had stored in the freezer, and went back outside. I sat in the chair and pulled open the foil pack of thin mints. I popped one in my mouth; it was so tingly and cold. I ate them one after another.

51

K ris Lodu, Water Under the Bridge

Trans Story Lael Cassidy The story of how my daughter came out as trans has felt like a story that didn't belong to me, that was only hers to tell. When I told her about the memoir I was writing, I mentioned to her that I had left her transition out. See, I said proudly, you are always Hannah in my book. She was visiting, twenty-three, stood in the middle of the living room, looked at me intently, and asked: Why? I mumbled something about the problems with pronouns and tenses, how I didn't want to mention her dead name. By her request, we had erased it from the record books so that even her birth certificate shows no sign of it. Hearing my reasoning, she smiled, turned, balanced on one leg, and slid on her sock across the smooth wood floor.

You should tell the story, she said. Besides, I want to see what you write about me.

Later I realized that I didn't want to tell her story because I was protecting myself. Something of me hides in Hannah's story. But stories have a way of coming out, and it's better that they do. So, here's how it starts. Before the first night my husband was dying in the hospital, Hannah had a different name, and everyone thought she was a boy.

She wasn't always a boy in my mind. Long before I was pregnant, I painted a picture to represent the first child I hoped to have. I set the image down on deer skin in the backyard, my brush loaded with barely mixed blue and white. It was an angel symbol, a simple circle with wings coming off the sides like feathery ears. I didn't imagine what gender she would be.

When I was pregnant with her, I had a dream about the child I was about to have. A horse came to me, giant, white, and fanciful against a blue background, a vision in the style of Chagall. The spirit found me, floated in the air, observed me with a whimsical smile. Later I wrote a song for her, reaching over my bulging belly to compose it on piano; three chords and simple words, looking down from up above, I'm seeing this one love... One Love was a name I had for her—one I sang, but never spoke.

Then, the moment she was born, my first thought was: what is between the baby's legs? There I was, my own legs spread wide, my genitalia on display, my breasts so comically large and heavy that they rested as though exhausted on the rising curve of my belly. I was, quintessentially female, naked but for an open robe having just pushed a baby out of my swollen body.

"It's a boy!" the midwife said, and the baby cried.

Then the baby flew away, traveled through hands in the air, and landed, wrapped and in Evan's arms, still crying. The distance made me ache, but, because I thought she was a boy, I let her belong more to Evan than to me.

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Hannah was pre-term, a scant four pounds, not an ounce of fat on her, her skin yellow with jaundice. There were the kinds of signs you see afterwards. She had hypospadias: a condition common to 25% of male babies. The urologist offered no choice but to correct it, to intercede to make hers a working penis. He needed to free the tethered down organ, move the pee hole, and replace the missing foreskin underneath with the excess from the other side. The testes had not descended into their sacks; the two bags of flesh were as empty and stretched as the loose skin on an old woman's arm. She had two surgeries before she was three years old and another when she was nine. The first one was the most extreme, and the doctor wanted her to have it early because that way it would be less psychologically damaging. If we did it before she was one, he said, she would barely know where the pain was.

After the surgery, she was fully aware of where the problem was. In the tub she cried, panicked, and alarmed when, looking down in the water, she saw the tube that came out of her penis. I blocked it with a waterproof book, laid it across a floating tray; I said look, look at this, and sounded out the word in every picture. See? BOAT. For those two weeks the tube was in, Evan came home from work to help with big diaper changes so that there could be one of us to distract her from the confusion of what was happening between her legs.

At the Christmas tree, when she was two, she said HUM to the colored lights, greeted each of them as though they were dear to her. Her voice was so pure, like a waterfall or a bird. There was no breaking it apart, no breaking it down, it was not a male or a female thing, it was a child thing, an undamaged thing. The onesies weren't blue or pink but white and sometimes green, there were no trucks on them but maybe bunnies, the occasional teddy bear. This was the kind boy we felt we had; but because we didn't think she was a girl, there were no polka dots or flowers or ribbons in her hair, no pigtails, dresses or skirts, no dolls or tea sets.

I didn't know a thing until the words were out. Not until she was seventeen, and her father lay dying. That night, I had already said goodnight; my phone was on and next to my bed, the ringer turned up because the hospital would call if anything changed. I was about to turn out the light when Hannah came in.

Can I talk to you? she asked.

I said yes. Always.

She flopped down on the dog's bed. Hugo shifted, annoyed and wanting to sleep, and I sat up to look at her. Here was the boy I loved: the short hair, the stubbly cheeks, the fit of the boy jeans, the muscular shoulders. She began to cry and wiped her face with the edge of her sweatshirt. I handed her a tissue, and she blew into it, folded the paper in a tight wad, and asked for another. The next one came apart in her hands, flecks of paper shredding into her lap.

I need to tell you something, she said.

I thought she would be wanting to talk about her fears concerning her father, an alarm and worry that matched my own. Only part of me could listen; so 53

much of me had been used that day. Evan's eyes closed that afternoon; a machine was breathing for him. He was out of ear shot; we were already in a world where he wasn't.

You can talk to me, I said.

I reassured myself that I would be able to comfort her. But I could see that it was something else, that the fear about losing her father was pushing something else out.

I'm a girl.

She described how she had been thinking about it for months, how she'd first come upon the idea, and how the idea grew into a realization. It was helping her unravel many strong, painful feelings.

I want to cut off my penis, she said.

In the beginning, it was disaster control. We made a plan to get help, and she agreed not to hurt herself. In therapy, she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a term for the painful condition of living in a body that doesn't match a person's rightful identity. She was a girl now, so I fit her into that polarity. My focus, rather than supporting her as trans, was to help her pass as female. I helped her get the hormones, suggested she pierce her ears, bought her girl clothes emphasizing girl styles and girl colors. I meant this as support, but I was missing the point. This was more subtle: she was a boyish girl. She wasn't interested in fitting into anyone's idea of what she was supposed to be. She still wore her boy clothing, though her hair was long. She wore tennis shoes, not heels. She didn't carry a purse but had a wallet in the back pocket of her jeans. I resisted this middle ground. Some of it was my worries about how the world would see her; I wanted her to be easily definable and therefore safe. But as I turn my gaze inward, I see my own resistance to the androgyny within myself.

In my twenties, I spent many hours in voice lessons. My teacher believed that singing was about freeing the voice from its restraint. She had me jump up and down so that the jolt would break my voice loose; she had me imitate a monkey, loud hoots and hollers; I sang Send in the Clowns so slowly that what came out were tiny modulations that made me cry. Only for seconds did sounds come out that weren't premade, pre-considered, wrought. When I did let loose, the sound that came through was strangely male. In my truest voice, I wasn't a woman at all, but a female impersonator, a man pretending to be a woman. It struck me as deplorable— and even though, there by the piano, my teacher saying yes, yes that's it! and the large empty room echoing with support—let it out! A moment later, I hid it away again, deeper than before. No one would hear this voice—not even for a joke.

A similar thing happened when I put on lipstick. It was not a woman I saw in the mirror but a man pretending to be a woman—always around my lips; I saw my father in my face, this shape of his nose his general block of a jaw, and I saw the familiar darkness of him, the way in which he was more blockade than man. My 54

intersection of male and female lived in secret places in my imagination, places I didn't want anyone to see.

When I was a kid, I kept my room tidy, but the inside of the closet was a natural disaster of exploded items: headless Barbie dolls, dirty dresses, tap shoes, ballet shoes, old sandals, a pillow with a cat face and green buttons for eyes, my brother's baseball cards that I stole and wrote my name on believing that made them mine, butterscotch candies pilfered from my father's stash, journals half written in, rejected stuffed animals. It was a graveyard of items; I had killed them and left them there to rot. Slowly the grave would rise, with this or that item poking up, until it jutted against the hanging clothes. Maybe this hidden pile were the pieces of me that didn't fit the mold. The only roles that my father had for women had to do with what he thought they could do for him. We had to be one of three things: sex object, concubine, or therapist. Boys had more choices.

I read these musings to Hannah, and she smiles. You're like me, she says in her sing-song upper register. You're ashamed of the maleness in you too.

I look at the light brown, almost orange freckles on her face, and admire her high cheekbones.

I don't want to see maleness when I look in the mirror, either, she says.

I feel the ghost of my father haunting us, that crushing maleness in the room, a maleness that she and I equally must escape. Perhaps she has escaped it already, more effectively than me.

55

J oel A ngel, N uros under V enus

Last Kiss Stephen Watson Burlington High, transistor radios, school dances, singing songs on the bus to football games or field trips. When we got our licenses, we blasted rock and roll from our car radios, taking full advantage of our shiny new pink slips. Music was such a part of those days for me and my friends.

Music in the 1950s and 60s was fun, upbeat, and danceable. Sure, there were those sad, morbid songs: lost love, lost lovers. The Leader of the Pack, rejected, speeds away and smashes his motorcycle; the rich guy’s dad forbids him dating shanty-town girl, Patches, and the next day she’s floating face down in the river; and every day in America, Billy Joe McAllister jumps off the Tallahatchie Bridge. There was Last Kiss. On a rainy night, a stalled car appears in the road and our hero crashes into it. His girl is thrown from the car. When he finds her, she asks him to hold her close one last time, and he says good-bye through his tears, losing the love of his life.

Those songs, so melodramatic, so exquisitely sad, almost enviable.

Do not be fooled. It is not like that. It can be an auto accident or an insidious disease, one that singles out gay men. It is shame and fear trolling a wrecked body.

It is clear plastic bags of medicine and hydration traveling through lengths of clear tubing hung from thin aluminum poles to bruised, black and blue arms. It is the “beep, beep” of machines and labored breathing of the one you love. It is the visible, touchable, breathable sadness that fills the room like carbon monoxide from a ‘57 Studebaker running in a closed garage—those 1950s now 30 years in my rear view mirror.

A morphine drip leaves him alive, for now. There is breath and a pulse, but all else is uncertain. Can he still hear me? Is he in there thinking and feeling? Is he at peace? Or is he scared? Can he hear me say, “I love you”? Does he know who I am?

Can those Texas ears still catch the Boston accent in my voice? I pray so. I no longer practice but I pray. I no longer even believe but I pray. I pray my agnostic ass off. A sharp voice in the back of my head says, Pull your shit together. If he can see me, he is not delighted. We talked about this, I’m not supposed to be like this—I need to be strong. I am a rock. In the end, the last kiss is chapped, cool, and heart-rending. It is dry, but for my eyes draining onto my cheeks.

It still happened. We talked about that, too. He asked me to play Elton John and Donna Summer, maybe some gospel music at his celebration; make sure everyone is laughing and dancing; no tears, seriously. Be gay, celebrate my life welllived (ended far too soon). Live on for both of us. Please.

I try. I try to celebrate. Success is sporadic.

56

Train Track Tales Shana Reed I’ve never lived out of earshot of a railroad track. We used to make the short hike up the overgrown path near my grandparents’ place with pockets full of pennies and place them carefully on the tracks. We’d make a game of it. My grandma would dish out ten pennies to each cousin, we would lay them down, and the next day, after the train had come and crushed them, we’d march back up, spilling over with gusto to see who could find the most shiny, flattened pennies. Not once did any of us find all ten of our pennies. Despite our deficit, we cherished our treasure. We loved the way the train transformed them—made the old tarnished pennies shine again when they stretched and flattened. It was on these tracks I came to love the transformative way of things.

In late summer, we would run through the poplar trees along the tracks looking for bite marks of webworm caterpillars in the leaves. Webworm moths lay a few hundred eggs in one nest—we would look up at the branches, small child fingers over our eyes as little makeshift visors, and guess how many caterpillars we thought were in the nest, like a game of how many jellybeans in the jar. It only takes a week for them to turn from webworm to tent moth, and we got good at creeping slow and low in the brush, thrusting our arms in the sky, cupping our hands gently enough as not to crush them, trapping them in a mason jar with a tin foil lid pricked with air holes. Usually, we tried to trap a male tent moth (spotted) and a female moth (larger, no spots) together with hopes they would mate and give us our own army of webworms. One summer, one cousin, the middle cousin, learned the word gay at school. She said someone in her homeroom had gay uncles, so that summer, we started jarring some of the male moths with other male moths, “in case they’re gay!” we explained to our nan, “like Sarah Brown’s uncles!”

She told us, “well, you won’t get your worm army that way!” She said it was time to tell us about the birds and the bees. “But nan,” we said, “these aren’t birds or bees- they’re webworms.” It didn’t matter anyhow because every night, she would release the moths after we went to bed, and in the morning, she would tell us that tent moths are master escape artists. So we tried taping down the tin foil lid, then rubber banding it, but nothing worked. We never got our webworm army. But we still loved to watch them, hands cupped over our eyes, bewildered and dazzled by their magic.

The boys who lived across the street used to come over to my grandparents and swim in the pool or play basketball in the driveway, or lay pennies on the tracks with us. They were a couple years older and one summer, when I was thirteen, one of the boys took note of my new post pubescent figure. I went from a 34A to a 34DD in only a month. The sales lady at Victoria’s Secret even let me exchange the first bra for a new bra for free because I had had it less than their thirty day return policy. I 57

traded in the tiny pink satin bra for a black bra with padding and underwire—a real woman’s bra, I thought. Everyone was impressed. Especially Caleb, the younger of the two neighbor boys, all farmers tan and freckles, and barely-there muscles who told me I “didn’t look like a little girl anymore.” I’m not. I assured him. He wanted me to prove it by meeting him at the train tracks for a kiss. A real kiss, he said, on the lips, “like in the movies.” Said he would “make me a woman.”

When it came time, I didn’t sneak away to the train tracks.

I let the sun go down and slid a note in his mailbox the next morning that just said, I’m sorry.

I stayed a girl for three more summers.

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Tenant Jessica Mendoza The droopy-eyed landlord that showed Rudy around the rental mentioned something about “pests upstairs”, waving a knobby hand at the ceiling. She says that she’ll send someone to take care of it as soon as possible, but after he signs the lease agreement and watches her peel away from the curb, he knows in his gut that those pests aren’t leaving anytime soon.

There’s dusty old furniture up there, she told him; termite-eaten wood, swollen floors. It’s inhospitable for a tenant, but not to worry—the first floor has everything Rudy might need to live comfortably, save working carbon monoxide detectors. It’s no big deal, he thinks. He’d rather live in a dank little hole like a squatter than go crawling back home on his belly, begging for love he’d never receive.

The “pests” upstairs make themselves known on the first night. At first, Rudy thinks it’s just drafty air and rats, but no—those are footprints, heavy and human. He sits up in bed and listens to them shuffle, as if unsure. There’s scratching at the wall.

Another set of footsteps—no, hands, crawling on all fours. A shaky breath. Crying.

Rudy doesn’t sleep that first night. The next morning, he lingers over his boxes of things, considering leaving. The rent is so cheap; the deli where he works pays a pittance. Most of his earnings are being stowed away for his top surgery. Rudy stays.

The person upstairs wanders back and forth, seems to have feet for days, seems to have rasping breath and too many teeth. They don’t speak; they never utter anything that could reasonably be considered words. Rudy quickly grows accustomed to their dragging and heaving. They stop scaring him around the second week.

He plays his music out loud, and takes note of which songs the person upstairs reacts to. They like banda music, so Rudy blasts Julio Preciado while he does dishes at two in the morning. The person upstairs stills, then begins stomping rhythmically. Rudy sings along quietly and misses home, just a little. Not enough to go back, of course. But enough to remember warm summers and early morning church. Fresh conchas. Conditional love.

A friend of Rudy’s from his support group gets him to try baking sourdough.

He leaves his first attempt at the top of the stairs before he goes to work. It’s pale and caved in, but the person upstairs doesn’t strike him as particularly picky.

Tips that day were scant. A customer threw a drink on the ground when he accidentally put peppers on her sub. His boss chewed him out, and he took the abuse the way he always did—silently, complacently. Rudy returns home browbeaten and worn, but when he goes to retrieve the plate, it’s been completely licked clean. He smiles, tilts his head up, and promises the person upstairs another loaf.

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He hangs ferns and succulents around the staircase. He sits at the top stair and prattles on about his day. The person upstairs stops shuffling, stops dragging their mass about like a dead, weightless thing, and listens. The inky darkness of the top floor swallows his words, but Rudy can feel them. They have a presence like a person standing over the bed while its occupant pretends to sleep. They are paralyzing, unknowable, inscrutable.

The next week when he makes them pasta, the shadows suck the plate in.

There’s a moan, a chitter. They are thankful, and that’s all that Rudy needs.

Months pass by. Rudy’s mother calls one night, and in a moment of weakness, he answers the phone. She doesn’t seem to have a particular goal in mind.

At the end of the day, it’s the same bullshit—the same deadname, the same passiveaggressive finger pointing, the same Catholic guilt. He’s not sure why he picked up.

Maybe just to hear the desperation in her voice, just to know that she was still thinking about him. He wanted to be alive in her memories. The desire to still be someone to his family was a vulnerability that no amount of therapy could excise.

He curls up in his bed, downing in beer and self-loathing. Staring at the peeling wall. There’s a shuffle, a thump—something making their way downstairs, curling and undulating and roiling over the banister. The shadows coalesce in the doorway, and Rudy watches as the person upstairs approaches. He smiles, laughs; they are nothing the way he pictured they’d be. They are ethereal.

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Matinee Barbara Ivusic I skipped class every Tuesday to go to the movie theatre on Oxford Street.

A woman stood in front of me waiting to purchase her ticket, exposing the tattoo on her arm: Colin for Evar. I wanted her name to be Evar because it sounded foreign.

Scandinavian perhaps. We already had so much in common. Colin was the name of my first boyfriend. He took me to a drive-in and stuck his face between the crevice of my neck and shoulder as I sat on his lap. He let out a sigh as the glass chillies that hung from the rear-view mirror stopped clanking together. When he took a sip from the warm beer that was sitting between the chocolate wrappers in the cup holder, he let me wipe the foam from his beard with the tips of my fingers. The thinness of his bristles reminded me of the hair on my legs, and I couldn’t help but think about him whenever I shaved.

Evar threw her bag on the counter waiting for her ticket to be printed as her Chipmunks Playland keyring fell on the popcorn-peppered rug. I tried to return it to her, but she didn’t seem interested in taking it back. She was more focused on scraping her fingernails against her ten-dollar note, hoping to find its twin. The woman behind the counter picked and peeled at something on her chin, until I walked over and handed them the missing money. I loved the look of Evar’s teeth when she smiled. She had two jagged lateral incisors on both sides of her palate. She had an uncanny resemblance to the poster of a windswept Kate Moss I had above my bed. The freckles on her arms, her streaky golden hair, gave me the impression that she was someone who was happy to sacrifice her skin just to feel warm.

“Thanks,” she said with the confidence of old friends as we walked into the cinema where there were at least ten people seated separately, some shuffling with chip bags and leaky ice-cream tissues. It was the premiere of a film that the forums had bragged about on the internet. Even though I tried not to frequent those sites, they offered a nice distraction between studying for my finals and picking glass up off the floor after my mum had a few too many.

Evar seated herself close to the front, and from the glow of the screen, I could see that she was sucking on a Crunchie bar. I imagined its hard yellow middle melting in her mouth when the room went black.

On the screen, two women were cooped up in the back of an old sedan which overlooked Sydney’s night sky. The camera made its way inside the car with a flashlight effect. Evar’s eyes widened at the extreme close-ups. Her shoulders relaxed when the moaning started, when the soft glow distorted the women’s faces and the music began. It sounded like the opening credits of Downton Abbey that my mum fell asleep to. Was this what the forums had talked about? The perfect blend of sensuality and prudishness.

The drizzle of the projector showered the room and Evar looked around, wiping her face with the back of her hand. When the women on the screen made 61

small talk over whisky, people started moving around. I got up from my seat to give the illusion that I was going to the toilet. But I just stood there, in front of the black padded doors watching the security guard texting on his phone. I brushed my hair with my fingers and loitered around like someone late for a film. I walked back and sat two seats away from Evar. I was close enough to see the ring on her finger as she tied her hair up into a messy bun. Small drops of sweat had gathered on her neck. I was sure she lived near a beach. I could smell the dried-up salt left over from her morning swim. She dived her hand into a bag of candy then licked the remains of the sour coke bottles from the tips of her fingers. I lifted my armrest up and down a few times, pretending that there was something wrong with my seat. When the women on the screen started to lather sunscreen on one another, Evar’s phone rang and I used the opportunity to close the gap between us. A child’s voice, squeamish, high-pitched and irregular, escaped through the slits of her old Motorola. She negotiated a time to return wherever she needed to be, then hung up. The sun on the screen lit up the room and Evar used it to trace the outline of my face with the back of her hand. The softness of her skin matched mine. It was the kind of memory I could recall at any time.

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Subtext Maranda Greenwood Episode 13 Season 2: The Quest 2, Feb. 3rd, 1997 The episode opens with a puffy-eyed Gabrielle crying over Xena’s sarcophagus, talking to no one, searching for Xena in the wind, trying to make good on a promise and hauling her body home to her village to be buried next to her brother in Amphipolis. The road is long—the theme song starts.

(Subtext: Gabrielle has lost her home, I never had a best friend who I compared to home, rumors fly about the nature of their relationship and the intent of the show, and when they will cancel it for lesbian undertones) My grandmother hustles in her nightgown from the kitchen, hands me a bowl of popcorn and cracks open a Diet Pepsi as she falls into the mauve recliner.

This was our Monday ritual, I would sneak out of bed and bannister slide bypass the stair creaks and watch TV late into the night.

(Subtext: In a freshly married display of authority my step-dad would set my TV sleep timer even though I couldn’t sleep without noise, my thoughts obsessive and endless over nothing of importance, my grandmother wasn’t fond of him) The Amazons convince Gabrielle to be queen, and insist on giving Xena an Amazon burial, funeral pyre. While muscled warrior women build the structure, Xena’s spirit enters Autolycus, The King of Theives’ body. She makes him dumbfumble all over himself until he agrees to steal her body— my grandmother shouts Ambrosia! and she is right. The food of the gods can fix nearly anything, if they can locate that red Jell-O wobble that litters all Greek myths then they can bring Xena back to life. It’s only season two, of course they save Xena. My grandmother slaps her knee when they mention ambrosia— during commercials she says that Xena and Gabrielle aren’t finished learning from each other and the ratings are high so they will definitely find the ambrosia, then she asks if we should make Jell-O for tomorrow, I nod. The burner on high, grandmother whisking, she mentions how best friends are usually opposites, for growth and balance.

(Subtext: My grandmother and her church friends think Xena and Gabby are best friends, despite longing looks, arm touching and campfire closeness. I hadn’t thought about it beyond wanting a relationship like that, challenging. I liked the adventure.)

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Autolycus (who let me mention is Bruce Campbell) is caught in the Amazon camp dressed as a woman in a coconut bra trying to steal Xena’s body to prevent it from being burned up. To prove to Gabrielle that Xena’s spirit is guiding him he lets Xena take over his body momentarily. Xena tells Gabrielle to close her eyes, the picture blurs and Xena stands before her, calling to her. Gabrielle opens her eyes overcome by emotion, reaches for Xena and asks her why she left her. The music begins to swell and my grandmother throws a box of tissues to me even though I never cry. Xena’s face twists into pressed-lipped-eyebrows-arched-bewildered forgive me.

(Subtext: I think the symbol of me with tissues was soothing to my grandmother—it created a more well-adjusted picture, a girl who cries when others cry, can’t withstand music swell and tight shots on glassy eyes and doesn’t measure everything against the pain of death.)

Xena says she is always with her and leans down so slow that it steals my breath, the camera pulls in tight, Gabby tilts her head up, their lips millimeters apart, my heart pounds. I look at my grandmother almost like I’m going to be in trouble.

She is nodding and crying and I can’t make sense of anything.

The camera pulls away to reveal Autolycus’ lips pressed over Gabrielle’s.

And I want to be pissed but I can’t, because now it’s not subtext. He comes to in the middle of the kiss, eyebrows high, hand on Gabby’s ass, confused and only able to say: I hope you two worked things out. I check for the red blink of the record light on the VCR. It’s there.

(Subtext: I’d never seen two women kiss and it nearly stopped my heart, my grandmother showing no signs of religious outburst. I felt a small warm streak down my cheek, I touched it in shock like it was blood—what did it make me.)

Of course, they find the ambrosia and push it into Xena’s mouth as she lays in the sarcophagus, Gabrielle holding her hand, time is frozen as they wait, my grandmother and I stop chewing, and she finally opens her eyes, and wearily says “Gabrielle,” but can’t continue. Gabrielle looks at her and says, “I know.”

(Subtext: “Gabrielle, I love you, like fucking romantically.” “Xena, I know, do you think they’ll ever let us acknowledge that on screen?”)

I watched the tape twice on mute, and when my alarm went off I woke up wondering if my grandmother would nod and cry if I kissed a woman because she would be happy I had finally connected like a normal person.

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and also with you Payton Polanco When the priest raised his hands and said, “May the Lord be with you,” I was always the one person still saying, “And also with you.” Every time, it felt like the echoes of, “And with your spirit” was just god using a hundred voices to scold me.

My mother would shoot me the same slanted side-eye each time. I would continue to stare straight at the large wooden cross behind the priest’s shoulder as if none of it had happened. When we got outside, she’d ask me why I never put on a dress for Sunday mass anymore, tone a cross between suggestion and requirement. She’d follow it by muttering something under her breath about college and corruption just loud enough for me to accidentally hear. I would want to say, “The only reason I ever did was because you made me,” or, “god has seen me in sweatpants and a fifteenyear-old Ramones t-shirt. Why would he care about this?” But it was never really about the dress, so I would smile and say, “Maybe next week.” We would both act like we didn’t know I was lying.

It was a Saturday. The way the sunbeams curled around Her smile made me wonder if I was seeing an angel for the first time. When She turned it my way, I felt ethereal.

My father always said grace before family dinners. He’d sit himself down at the head of the table, my mother situated adoringly at his right. He’d clasp his hands and wait for the inevitable silence. In those moments between our voices stopping and his beginning, I found myself believing he must have been descended from some saint; the weight of his stare pressed on my chest almost hard enough to fracture my ribs. When he prayed, his words always had this weird echo. Gratitude and threat wove through the air, one on top of the other. He would say, “God, thank you for putting food on our table.” I always found that funny. He’d thank god for our food, but scoff at the workers who spent hours in the sun, picking our wine from the vines.

When I was little, I used to think they were the Gods we prayed to. It was so much more magical when God was the people I waved to from my car window and not some immaterial approximation of an absentee father. I stopped going to family dinners. No one asked me to return.

I fell in love with Her laughter before I knew Her last name, tasted Her skin before I gave Her my eternity. We did things out of order. That was always okay.

The first pieces of scripture my mother taught me were, “love thy neighbor” and “God loves all His children.” Every time I waddled into the cathedral, I’d see the stained glass and think that was what they meant, how beautiful god’s love is. Then, on my fourth day of first grade, I told my mom I was going to marry Clarissa, my new 65

girlfriend. Her smile got tight, and she told me, “You can only marry boys.” I asked her why. She said, “Because that’s what God says.” I asked her why. She snapped, “God won’t love you if you marry a girl.” She didn’t apologize for yelling, just harnessed her anger into empty eyes and a cold smile. I fell asleep crying. I never told her about Emily or Maria or Lissa. I wouldn’t have to tell her about Kasey or Nora. By the time I got to high school, the stained-glass mosaics seemed to ask me, “Who are you less of? God’s child, or your mother’s neighbor?”

She loved me without a checklist of commandments. I loved Her without the looming threat of hellfire. I taught Her that love wouldn’t always end in pain. She taught me that love wasn’t born out of fear. Our Words held more truth than any sermon I’d ever heard.

A few days ago, I passed my old cathedral. I said it was by accident. It was really a morbid sort of curiosity. It was sunny, and birds chirped in the trees. For the first time in years, I could almost see my mother, her smile radiant as she talked to familiar faces whose names I’d forgotten as soon as they walked away. I could see my father, eyes regal, back rigid, daily missal in hand like a royal scepter. I could see myself, folded and small under the judgement of hostile angels and a thousand lies I forced myself to believe. I didn’t miss them. I didn’t stop, either. Just kept walking as the graveyard of my broken faith where I buried the corpse of a god I never really worshipped grew smaller in my wake.

If their “god” is real, this figure of almighty iron and brimstone, then let him smite me. Because here… this tangle of sweat and tongues and ecstasy and Her… is more of a Paradise than he could ever give me.

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All of the Dulness in the Heavens Charles Stephens I was 7, at the skating rink. My sisters brought me there and shooed me into the center with the other children. A glittering ball hovered above us like a miniature planet, projecting tiny stars onto the floor. I tried to catch the stars before they landed onto the floor, but I failed.

I made a new friend who was also skating alone in the center. We both had the same He-Man skates with the stopper in the front. Unlike me, he did not try to catch the stars. He just stood in place following them with his eyes. “That’s the milky way,” he said, looking up. I did know what he was talking about, but I looked up anyway, wanting to be as in awe as he was.

Off in another corner, three teen boys around the age of my sisters stood to the side trying to get the attention of the girls skating around them.

A song came on. Push it by Salt-n-Pepa, a song I remembered my sisters dancing to at home. Their long braids would swing wildly in front of the television set in our den. When they danced, I would dance along with them, and they would laugh and cheer. So when the song came on at the skating rink, I started dancing like my sisters, as freely as I was with them at home. But when I looked at my friend, waiting for him to smile, he froze. Eventually his face broke into a smile, and I reached toward him, wanting to touch his smile with my fingers, but he snatched his body away and started pointing.

“Did you hear what they just called you? Them over there.”

“No,” I replied. How could I? I was in a trance.

Pointing to the group of teenage boys, he whispered the word that they said, a word that I’ve heard before, just never applied to me.

I turned around to see them laughing. “Hell naah,” they said, “oh hell naah.”

The three of them were barely able to hold themselves up, laughing so hard. I did not want to look at my friend, so instead I looked up at the miniature planet. But there were no more shooting stars. It just spun around and around.

I heard my oldest sister before I saw her. I turned around and she and my middle sister skated toward us. She then looked at me and my friend.

“We saw you over here getting down,” my middle sister said laughing.

“Surprised you didn’t fall on your butt.”

“Boy, what's wrong with you? Why you looking like that?” my oldest sister said.

They examined me carefully.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”

“Since you don’t want to tell us nothing,” my middle sister said. “Little boy,” she said addressing my friend, “what's wrong with him?”

“They called him a faggot,” he said, pointing over to the group boys still standing near the steps.

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I pushed him, wanting to smash the look of concern off his face. He was the only witness to my shame, and I wanted to destroy him for it. He stumbled on his skates, my oldest sister by instinct reached toward him, but he caught his balance before he fell.

“We should go.” My oldest sister said, looking at me and my friend.

“No, I’mma go over there and confront they ass.” my middle sister said as she skated off.

I watched her talking to them, but the music was too loud and they were too far away to hear anything. They looked toward me. My sister was right up in the face of the one that was laughing the hardest. He smiled at her. Her hand was on her hip.

Then I skated over to them. Not sure what I would do when I got over there.

No time to think. My sister was defending me and I needed to bear witness to that.

My middle sister, her back was to me before, but now I could see her face.

I searched for the anger that I expected to see: lips pursed together, eyes narrowed and red, nose crunched up. But that was not what I saw at all. She was smiling. They were laughing, together. He called me that word, and she was with him laughing.

“Hey little man, I’m sorry. No hard feelings,” he slid his hand out, his fingers dangling out of the holes in his glove, the zippers on his leather jacket shimmered in the light.

I slapped his hand and he slapped my hand back.

“See, we cool now,” he said to my middle sister.

“Better had.”

“Now that we made good, you gonna give me your number?”

She slid a slip of paper to him with her curvy loopy writing on it.

“Come on big head.” she said to me. “Let‘s go.”

We walked toward the exit, my two sisters ahead of me, but before I stepped outside, I turned back one last time to see if the stars had started back shooting out of the miniature planet. But there were none.

68

M Anna Kathleen Little About six months after Alina had left and before a string of lovers, the last of which would eventually make me her wife, I met M. Just M. No other letters.

Somewhere along the undulating upswing of post-breakup self-loathing, I attended some downtown gayer-than-thou gallery event with Lynne, who insisted that I should “get back out there”. While Lynne flirted for herself with the too-young heiress-come-gallerist in the cocktail dress that showed almost every inch of her 22year-old thighs, I hung back. I sipped my free art opening wine and there was M. Like some James Dean pinup queen in a black leather jacket that looked like she’d seen some shit and could take care of it. She made me feel small. Later, she lit my cigarette.

Despite my heartbreak when I met M, I hadn’t yet become so intimately acquainted with the basement floor of my own soul. And though later on down the line M would leave me too, on my knees and begging, there at the beginning we were just trying things out, exploring. Dipping toes in. On nights we didn’t go to hers or to Henrietta where she’d put her hand wide across my back and order me a drink, I was still floundering. Trying to figure out where I’d fucked up. With Alina, or the one before, or the one before, and maybe it was me after all. Let’s go to yours tomorrow, M had said to me. OK. I texted her that morning, “Do you have a craving for dinner tonight?” and she had promptly and simply replied, “Paella.” and I thanked God. I’d never made paella before, but it relieved the unbearable weight of having to choose something—something that would be delicious and impressive. It saved me having to wade through the depths of my own mind and all the signs of what one choice or another might say to M about me, or what she might read that I was trying to say to her. Paella. I went to the bourgeois bodega ten blocks uptown to find saffron threads and bought muscles and scallops packed on ice.

She was nine minutes late. The wax on the candles I had optimistically, perhaps foolishly lit was dripping down the brass. Everything was clean. The small dinner table was set; straight, just so. I had cued up some rainy day jazz in the hopes of setting a mood and that M would find me cultivated and charming despite my utterly typical apartment and my beige furniture. That night I still wanted to appear painlessly elegant for M, but later I would realize that I did want her to see my efforts; I wanted her to appreciate how hard I tried to please her. From my living room you could see the edge of The Ansonia through my open curtains, other little lives as lit up rectangles in the navy night. Their glow reflected off the dark and shining hardwood and I stood in my kitchen sipping wine; the stove simmered and wafted the tangy spice through the stillness. Finally, the door.

I opened it, short of breath, swimming. Saying nothing, she surveyed me.

My hands clasped behind my back. I was afraid to speak but I smiled softly and hoped that she liked what she saw. M stepped inside with her heavy black boots. I was so nervous but I held my ground so that as she entered the apartment, the distance 69

closed between us. She tossed her jacket on the back of a chair and I waited. She looked around, saw the window, my mediocre house plants, the candles, the stove. I watched. One finger slipped into the concave hollow of my throat and hooked my silver chain. This is nice. At that moment and for years later I would feel a little rush of warmth at her attention. My frosted mind thawed and my posture swelled. Even after M would leave me, I would still wear that choker. Thanks. Then she walked past me to the kitchen and said nothing more. I followed and lifted the top of the pot on the stove; steam rushed me. The purple shells of the muscles were opening up. M reached and, saying nothing, stopped the music. Then it was only the sounds of her eyes on me, the stove, silver, and the clip and scuff of my heels on the hardwood.

They pinched, but. Can I pour you a glass of wine? echoed through the quiet kitchen.

Oh, whiskey actually. Uh, sure—yes—of course. I gestured to the cabinet behind M’s legs and asked permission with my eyes to open it. M moved to the left. I knelt down to find the scotch and felt my knees on the hardwood floor. From above me: Stay just like that, you’re perfect. A warm rush and whatever anxiety was left wafted. My bare knees kneaded into the hardwood as I rose, looking up to M: Yes, Mistress.

The echo.

I hadn’t meant to say it, not exactly. I had certainly never said anything like that before. It just sort of happened, it just sort of fell out of my mouth and the sounds reverberated; I could feel the soft s’s still tingle on my tongue. M held me in her stare. Had she stiffened when she’d heard it? I stayed. I felt my kneeling knees grow pink then red and I realized that I liked it. There was something comforting, a punctum in that little pain so tangible, so simple. Just by kneeling there I could stay and be perfect. How satisfying. My kneecaps ground into the wood, all my weight was leveled there; what a sure thing. For that moment I could abandon any worry and what felt like the ceaseless parade, that performance of a self I thought I ought to be—ought to have become, certainly to have been by then but I was still faking it—and simply sink into the floor. My total physical presence was filtered through my kneecaps and I knew then that there was nothing false in that feeling nor any need to be anything but kneeling. That was my first taste of a sensation I would roll around in my mouth for years, sipping, trying to refine, but then I had no language for it.

Down there, before M for that first time I felt, fleetingly, peaceful.

And M—had she held her breath to hear that Mistress? Had she hitched, just a little? Or maybe it was just me, still unsure and on the brink there as I was. The simmer of little bubbles bursting, a drop of wax dripping, brass, the traffic far below but otherwise: silence. She breathed out long and low through her nose. I might have detected the slightest tremble, a tremor in the air that she exhaled. She held me fast, frozen, in her gaze. The intimacy of her eye contact—all it offered and withheld— terrified me. I dared not move but I did revel: in that bubble, swirling, which surrounded us, on the tightrope of her stare. I wouldn’t break, not for anything. I wanted so badly to be perfect for her.

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Stillness, the space between. Nothing happened. Her jaw tightened. That olive angle rippled and clenched, that time I could be certain. Was I doing it wrong?

Maybe I shouldn’t have risen when she told me to stay just like that, maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut. Or maybe all she wanted was a glass of whiskey and there I was, some idiot frozen on the floor playing out some fantasy in my mind, initiating a game I had no idea how to play. I searched her and she was stone. The slightest quiver in her bottom lip, her eyelids sank infinitesimally. I don’t know what I thought I wanted—for her to kiss me or to take me by the throat or to instigate some leather-clad cliché there on my shabby pre-war kitchen floor? I guess that would have made me feel special. Foolish. I suppose what I wanted, what I was just then realizing that I wanted, was for M to have—for me to give— for her to take from me—what she wanted. Whatever it was. There on my knees I found the treasure in the space between the pleasure and the pleasing, but held captive in uncertainty.

Did she want me?

My knees again, thank God. My patent-clad toes were starting to tingle— something to hold on to—as my grip, her gaze, grew tenuous. Teetering, I glimpsed again that newfound tunnel opening inside me, the one that I would fear for years exploring, excavating till I could finally see the bottom. I wanted M to see it. I still do.

But then I just breathed in and took my strange solace in submission to her simple request: I stayed. Nothing. I breathed into my knees. Soon, I thought, I ought to stand up. Just a little longer, just to be sure. Maybe she would make a move, maybe she was testing me. I didn’t want to disappoint her. Just a little longer. I waited, she watched me. I tried to tell her with my eyes that I was fine, that I was ready, that down there I was hers but it was sprawling and slippery and I guess I didn’t yet know how to say it, with my eyes or otherwise. She blinked.

The top on the pot on the stove began to quiver to contain the steam. M shifted, a floorboard groaned, she looked back over her shoulder. I rose from my knees then, quickly, smoothly as I could. I poured the whiskey, shaky, into a glass and served it to her. Maybe I’d imagined it. I walked past her to attend the stove. Burners were clicked off, a serving spoon was found, the red and tangy seafood stirred; I hoped to God I hadn’t fucked that up too. From behind me, I could feel M sigh and lean and sip and then: No one’s ever said that to me before. I liked it. Revelation. I turned to her and there we were, new.

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Trampoline Dreams Charis Young The night sky felt low and heavy over the trampoline, the light pollution barely allowing the stars to peek through like curious children peeking from underneath their blankets into the dark. The trampoline itself was cool under Maya’s back, the mesh chilling without the heat of the sun to warm it. Lynn sat quietly next to her. Laughter poured from the windows, the sound of wild teenagers barely denting the oppressive quiet of the night. The party was in full swing.

“It was a good idea to come outside.” Maya glanced over at Lynn, whose head had dropped backwards so she could stare into the sky. She’d followed quietly when Maya had left the house to escape the stifling warmth and people.

“I guess,” she nodded and brushed some hair back before allowing her hand to rest on the mesh. “It was getting too loud inside.”

Lynn nodded as well. The silence grew again. Comfortable silence. Maya allowed her eyes to fall shut, allowing the soft midsummer breeze to caress her face.

There was a ripple under Maya’s back and she opened an eye. She looked over, feeling like a spider resting in the center of its web, to see Lynn standing up and adjusting her crumpled capris. She then balanced on her toes for a moment, poised for flight, before settling back on her heels. Then with a start, she began to bound, flailing her arms as if it were impossible to remain straight in the air or land on her feet.

“I think I can make you fly.”

Maya laughed and turned her head so one cheek rested on the trampoline as she watched. Lynn bounced, coming closer as slowly as one can on a trampoline.

A wide grin parting her face and her body coiling its lanky self before each jump.

Bouncing higher and closer.

Maya let herself laugh as her body was propelled off the surface and into the air. And then again, as she wildly flailed, trying to right herself mid-air to land on her feet. By then, both of the girls were laughing, cycling around the trampoline and trying to throw the other higher into the air. The sounds of the party fading to the background as little more than the crickets that sang into the darkness.

Finally, after a playful eternity, they both came to a stop. Dropping to the mesh in giggling heaps, the cool surface contrast to their overheating bodies. Maya fell back, her shoulders bouncing again for a moment before she settled. Lynn just sat, a strange look on her face as she gazed down at Maya.

After a moment Maya looked over. “What’s up?” The question was quieter than intended, barely more than a whisper on the wind.

“I’m tired, I think,” the answer half-hearted as Lynn drew her legs closer and curled her thin arms around them, looking away. Maya’s mouth pinched, and her pianist’s fingers tapped away at the tramp, sending minute vibrations around them.

Lynn turned back and caught Maya’s eyes. “Why?” 72

“I’ve been thinking.”

“Must’ve been difficult,” Lynn nodded consolingly.

“Oh, shut up,” Maya reached over and pushed Lynn lightly. “I’ve been thinking about stars.”

“Oh? And what have they told you?”

“They don’t tell me anything, you brat.” Maya shook her head again, looking up into the sky. “Everyone’s always going on about how ‘you’re a star’ or how celebrities are stars, so on and on.”

“Mhmm, and?”

Maya turned to look over at Lynn, “Well, it’s lonely, isn’t it? Being a star?

They’re all billions of light-years apart and if they get too close they tear each other up. Why is that something to achieve to be?”

“Maya, you’re overthinking this. They’re only meaning the ‘light in the darkness’ kind of stars, not the more scientific version.”

“But even Celebrities seem so distanced from everything. They can’t even go to the grocery without being swarmed. Why is that anything to aspire to?”

Lynn looked up to the stars, “I don’t really know, ya know. It’s just longing to be known I guess. Nobody wants to be lonely or forgotten.”

The two girls looked at each other again, lapsing into silence. The night settled onto their shoulders, crickets creating a natural symphony in the dry bush surrounding the yard.

“Hey, Lynn?”

“Yeah, Maya?”

“I think I’m known.”

Lynn looked over and met her eyes. She nodded slightly, softly, and leaned over and onto Maya’s shoulder.

“I think so too.”

The echoing of the party cocooned around them. Maya shifted her hand over, weaving her fingers softly with Lynn’s. Nothing was said as the night remained close and light.

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M atty H eimgartner, Sweet Dreams

Parting the Veil J. Michael Norris At 4 AM, Brennan Gallagher sat transfixed to his computer screen, scrolling through pages of quotes plastered over pretty pictures, searching out something, anything, to stir his fancy. The get-together with his ex-boyfriend Eddie was tomorrow, and he needed to impress. Eddie had been everything Brennan always wanted to be: intelligent, quick-witted, handsome. Brennan finished the last sip of his third glass of Booker’s, neat, the woody liquid sliding over his tongue and concentrating in his stomach for a moment before radiating warm confidence through his body. His eyes scanned picture after picture, each one overlaid with some borrowed wisdom; one finally caught his attention. It was a quote from the sage Anonymous, who always had so much to say. The words shone from the screen in an elaborate, golden text, looping delicately over a photograph of a woman crying.

Life is a veil of tears.

Brennan laughed aloud to the empty room, triumphant. He’d found his weapon. He snapped closed his laptop and tossed it over onto a pile of dirty clothes next to the bed.

The next morning, Brennan hurried across the French Quarter’s cracked bluestone sidewalks, determined not to be late. Turning the corner of Royal and Toulouse, he noticed his translucent reflection in a window, so he stopped to make sure his hair looked alright. He licked a stubby finger and bent down, polishing a small scuff off the front of his new chukkas. St. Louis Cathedral’s chimes sounded the hour. He broke into a jog down Royal, coming to CC’s Coffee as the final bell clanged.

Letting his panting subside, Brennan gazed through the window at Eddie, who sat at the same corner table they’d shared most Saturdays during their time at Tulane. Back then, they’d start here with coffee, then take a cab up to City Park and go to the museum. Eddie would morbidly obsess over Martinelli’s Memento Mori for far too long before heading upstairs to look over the glass collection. After that, they’d walk the sculpture garden, talking about school. That had been almost five years ago, back before Eddie met Kevin and decided he need “some space” from Brennan. Yet now, partially hidden behind a newspaper, Eddie looked exactly the same, all big hands and blond hair. Brennan took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

“Bren!” Eddie flashed a too-white smile, looking up from the paper. His tight T-shirt strained across his chest as he straightened himself. “Sit! Sit! I’ve got your usual.” He nodded to an iced mocha across the table.

A jerk of Brennan’s head dismissed the coffee. “Sorry, no, I’ve given up caffeine.” A lie, but he hated Eddie always being so right. “I’ll get some water in a minute.”

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“More coffee for me then.” Eddie folded the newspaper, slapped it across his knee, and tossed it on the table. “So, then why’d you want to meet here?”

“Why here?” Brennan echoed.

“Since you’re not drinking caffeine, and this is a coffee shop?”

“Old time’s sake, you know.” Brennan plopped into the chair across from Eddie and forced his face into a frown. Sweat dotted his forehead. “I’m sorry to hear about you and Kevin.”

“You’re sorry?” Eddie laughed in a dismissive way Brennan detested.

“Yeah. I mean, I know how much you loved him.” Brennan wondered at the sound of his words, the way his voice sounded suddenly shrill.

“I did. I did. Once. But it was time.” Eddie’s knee bounced up and down, shaking the small table. “We grew apart. And so—” His knee stopped, and he smiled his too-white smile again.

“Well, like they say,” Brennan said, summoning the quote from the night before, “life is a veil of tears.”

Eddie nodded at this. “That is what they say.”

Brennan felt relieved, sure he’d found his way in. He decided to go deeper.

“I’ve always thought moments when we can part the veil and see the truth are the only moments that really matter.”

“Part the veil?” Eddie asked, picking up the newspaper from the table and casually rolling it into a shaft.

“Yeah… part the veil of tears and see the beauty of life.”

“I don’t think it’s that kind of ‘veil,’ Bren.”

“What do you mean?” Nervous sweat thickened on Brennan’s forehead.

“I think it’s ‘vale.’ V-A-L-E. As in ‘valley.’” Eddie lightly drummed the newspaper on the table’s edge. “If I remember correctly, it’s from Psalms 84. ‘In the vale of tears He hath set.’”

Brennan felt his ears flush hot and pinpricks scatter over the back of his neck. Eddie smiled again. “People get that one wrong all the time.” He unrolled the paper, opening it to a random page. “You’ve gone white. Sure you don’t want that coffee?”

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Possessing Apple Pie Xen Virtue Being dead isn't the worst thing I've ever experienced. Of course, the worst was how I died, but there are proximate moments. Like when a boy laughed at me for wanting to be the mommy when we played house. Or when mom told me I couldn’t grow curves like my sister. Or when a stranger shoved me against the back wall of a dirty club, his fingers tightening around my throat as he spit into my face that I had “tricked” him.

The wonderful thing about being alive is the way moments can be transformed. Like how a friend pushed that boy to the dirt and said she’d play “mommies” with me. How my sister gave me an old training bra and let me wear her dresses when mom and dad were away. Or how Danielle Wong gave the meanest right hook I’ve ever seen, before grabbing my hand with hers and whisking me to a pizza joint across town; she paid for my slice, gave me her number, and bestowed upon me the most dizzying smile I’d ever seen.

That luster dulls when you’re dead. Now I spend my time haunting Dani’s apartment.

Danielle Wong readjusted the strap of her tote bag over her shoulder, keeping the folded copy of the newspaper and fresh apples from the Farmer’s Market close. As she walked down the sidewalk, passing apartment building jack-o’-lanterns, three kids skipped by her, giggling as they clutched pillowcases weighed down by the first few handfuls of candy of the night. Together they made a trio of witches, their black dresses highlighted by purple ribbons and pointy black hats.

Dani smiled at the sight. They reminded her of last year’s All Hollow’s Eve party, when she and Ariel did Hocus Pocus drag. She had spent hours styling a red wig to recreate Bette Midler’s iconic look as Winifred Sanderson. They had done each other’s makeup in the bathroom twice, exaggerating red puckered lips and rosy cheeks after they had ruined their first draft by kissing all the way down underneath corseted bodices.

It had been Ariel’s idea. They had been dating almost a year, and she had laughed for weeks at the idea of Dani strutting around in a caricature witch costume, given she already was a practicing Wiccan. After vetoing couple costumes as Elphaba and Galinda, they settled on Winifred and Sarah Sanderson for peak camp. Plus, Ariel’s singing voice made her a perfect Sarah—even if she didn’t have Sarah Jessica Parker’s complexion—and after a few drinks with their friends, she was crooning in Dani’s ear, tempting her to play in her garden of magic.

Dani choked down rage that Ariel had been taken from her almost six months ago. She gripped her tote tighter and focused on getting home before sunset.

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When Dani pushed open the door to her third-story apartment, Tabatha curled around her legs, meowing as her black tail flicked against her shins. Dani gave her a scratch around the ears as she closed the door. Ritually, she picked up a small tin can and poured the remaining water into a vervain plant hanging by the entrance.

She flicked the lights on and placed her tote onto the kitchen counter, the newspaper flopping over the apples. After sating a drooling Tabatha with another helping of homemade cat food (a ground-up and baked mixture of chicken meat, bones, eggs, and vitamins that Dani laboured over every six weeks), Dani pulled out a vinyl record of Whitney Houston’s best hits from the collection on the bookshelf.

When Whitney’s voice filled the apartment, Dani closed her eyes and swayed, imagining Ariel’s arms around her, her voice in her ear, echoing the lyrics as she sang I’m saving all my love for you.

Dani moved to the kitchen and pulled a charcoal tablet and lighter out of the herb cabinet. She lit the tablet and placed it inside an iron jar out of Tabatha’s reach. Carefully, she deposited a blend of incense (featuring marjoram) until a gentle haze of smoke drifted out.

She breathed in the herbs, feeling a calm soothe her pulse. She dumped the apples into the sink and grabbed a peeler. The newspaper was left on the counter, the cover story detailing the recently declared life sentence for the man who murdered Ariel Jones.

My haunting of Dani’s apartment consists of staring contests with Tabatha I’ll never win, blowing gentle wind on Dani’s face when she hits snooze too many times, and pretending I can feel the warmth of the sun. I couldn’t bear to haunt anyone else without feeling like an emotional voyeur; especially my parents—who continue to set out a placemat at dinner for me—or my sister. The tender way she rocks her newborn to sleep makes my essence tremble and screech like TV static.

Moments come and go like flashbulb bursts for me, but Whitney Houston’s voice pulls me from my reminiscing. When I turn, Dani is home. She stands in front of the vinyl player I got her, playing one of my records even though she prefers twangy country. I reach out to touch her, but like always, I pass through. Everything feels like ice until she walks away.

According to the meticulously managed kitchen calendar, it’s All Hollow’s Eve. I wish the veil between the living and dead was thin enough for us to touch.

Even if I couldn’t speak, I wanted to hold her in a way that said that I’m alright.

Instead of pulling out leftovers to watch old episodes of Charmed or getting ready for a party I know she must have been invited to, Dani turns the oven on and pulls a pie crust out of the fridge. It’s homemade, but I can’t remember watching her make it. In another flashbulb burst, she’s pulling a steaming apple pie out of the oven. The buttery smell makes my spirit yearn, tugging me towards it.

I follow as she takes the pie into her room. Dani closes the door, her hand sliding through me to do so. A shiver draws goosebumps over her arm. She sets the 77

pie on the antique trunk at the foot of the bed to close the windows and purify the space with a mixture of herbs. The pie draws me closer, the crust a wonderful golden brown with hints of nutmeg and cinnamon.

When Dani returns to the bed, several blue flame candles around the room are lit. Beside the pie, she lays out an array of polaroid pictures we had taken with my sister’s hand-me-down camera. There’s one of us laughing from last year’s All Hallows’ Eve Party, our makeup smudged around our mouths and Dani’s wig sagging. Another from my last birthday where Dani had smeared cupcake icing across my nose. Boudoir portraits that would have made me blush when I was alive, dates we’d been on, visits with our families. But what draws my attention is the open page of a newspaper.

As I read the headline, I start to feel like my whole body had gone numb and was just awakening to sensation—and it’s unfamiliar after so many months being incorporeal. Dani’s muttering words under her breath, but I can’t hear. Her fingers dip into a bowl of liquid that smells vaguely of liqueur. From her lips, I catch a single word, “Beloved.”

I’m vibrating.

Dani spreads her arms open, hands resting on her knees, droplets dripping from her fingertips. I feel a pull—stronger than the apple pie; a desire so fierce it’s tangible in the air, electric and obsessively drawing me closer. She’s inviting me inside her.

I hardly notice how close I’ve gotten until my hand is on her knee, pressing onto her knee and not through it, and I’m off balanced, tumbling forward into her.

Dani sucked in a sharp, shivering breath as her entire body suddenly felt twice as heavy. The room flickered before her eyes as she felt something worming inside her, trying to stretch to fill every crevice of her nerves. Sweat formed along her brow line, but her heart warmed. It felt like the first step home after a long trip.

Ariel. A low breath escaped her lips as she smiled.

“I’m yours,” she whispered to the empty room as she undid the buttons of her high-waisted jeans, pushing them over her hips to bare her legs, making sure not to disturb the pie, pictures, or candles. “Ariel.”

I feel her mouth, my mouth, say my name, but I hear Dani’s voice. The room flickers and I snap my eyes closed as I adjust to being weighed down with a physical form. I’m expanding, filling Dani’s body. I wriggle her (my) toes, and delight in the soft silk of the bedsheets against my skin. The moisture on my fingers feels wet, and I rub them together. Most of all, I feel Dani inside me, outside me, all around. I can feel the blood rushing through her veins and the throbbing coming from between her legs as she whispers my name.

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As my name falls off her tongue, Dani’s body feels lighter; surrendered. And I want to please her. I want to thank her for this moment of reality, of grounding, for reaching through the veil and allowing me to touch her, to love her one more time.

My fingers slide beneath Dani’s boxers, and the sigh that leaves my lips when I touch her clit is all hers. As I dip into her wetness, spreading it around to cause her toes to curl, I also touch her stomach. I run my free hand over the rolls of her belly and the gentle slope of her breasts. I can’t resist sliding up the back of her neck and digging my fingers into her thick black hair, dragging my fingernails along her scalp and tugging backwards just enough that her mouth parts and I can hear her sigh again.

When I press my fingers to her lips, I can’t tell whether she licks my fingertips, or I do. I can feel heat building in the pit of our stomach, and I’ve never felt my heart beat this fast before. We’re no longer sitting; our legs outstretched as we lie back, and I bury my face in the blanket. The smell of her vanilla shampoo mixed with the musk of her sweat makes me groan as I slip her fingers inside us, my thumb rubbing soft circles into her clit.

I grip her shoulder, squeezing and drawing my fingertips over every inch of our body as I press deeper, faster, my breath hot against my face where the blanket reflects it back to me.

“Dani, Dani,” I pant, hearing my own voice from Dani’s lips, and tears spill from the eyes I haven’t opened because I’m too lost in the sensation of being alive again. Her heart aches in my chest and I soothe her, pulling her spirit up against mine inside this body we’re sharing, wrapping her up and holding her one more time.

“I love you.”

It doesn’t matter who said it. We hold each other tightly as our fingers let loose an orgasm that knocks the air out of our lungs and the vision from our eyes.

When I come to, I’m lying on Dani’s bed. The room smells of apple pie and the smokiness of blown out candles. Dani lies beside me, her parted lips in sharp focus. I take a deep breath in and pause when my ribs pull up with the movement. I see my real, physical chest lower with an exhale. My eyes snap up to Dani’s and her face splits into her trademark smile.

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M atty H eimgartner, H airy F airy

My Favorite Flower TQ Sims This bed was once a garden where his skin smelled of jasmine. The first time we laid in this bed, this garden, his scent reminded me of New Orleans in spring, where I could easily come across a blooming growth of jasmine covering a wrought iron fence and lose myself in the ecstasy of breathing my favorite flower.

Tonight was not a night for having him bloom. After the argument, the same one we’ve come back to again and again, we went to bed without the familiar acceptance of non-resolution. We both turned our backs to each other, pulling tight the bedding that covered us and the distance between us. I clutched the blanket until my own clinging reminded me of his. I let go, and I let him greedily pull the cover to him. He curled his body tight like a seed buried under the covers. The sickly-sweet smell of compost came up from the bed of dead leaves, the rot in our relationship. Each rotting leaf was a reminder of all we had shed, all we had said.

I laid there curled on my side, aware of the tension in my body, his body, the room. His breath was unchanging and sharp, a light rustle of leaves. He too wasn’t sleeping.

Sympathy arose in me. It grew upwards as I told myself that it wasn’t his fault that he was so clingy, that he couldn’t handle my wandering eye, my own neediness which he feared would lead me away from him. Before self-blame or any need to repair him could again swell in me, I hardened. My sympathy withered, but it was too late.

I told myself that he really does need me. That it’s not entirely a bad thing to be needed. The whirlwind of my mind took me farther from sleep. What is the difference between being wanted and needed? I wanted. I regretted telling him how much I wanted. I regretted seeming needy, like him. Questions and considerations, things said and unsaid sprouted and grew as I wondered how to tend to him, to myself.

I told myself that there was nowhere to go. Where could I crawl off to—some sunless spot that I cannot afford? This garden I have tended is us, less me, but I cannot grow here. His undergrowth has woven into every aspect of my life. I’m entangled. I surrendered too much ground, too long ago. It’s too late to uproot.

Under the thin veil of something like sleep, I half-dreamt, but awoke as dawn came through the sheer curtains. I should have gotten up, should have saved myself. His creeping vines wrapped around me. His needy roots sank deep into my flesh to suck the nourishment from my body. I wonder how much need, how much surrender is healthy, but the answer is irrelevant. The garden is beyond repair, overgrown, and taken over by what we’ve become. Us. My only means of escape is anger. I imagine myself becoming toxic so that what he draws from me will eventually poison him, causing his flowerless vines to wither. He has become a mass of strangling vines, and I have become a monster.

He sat on the edge of the bed, and the vines digging into me pulled painfully at what I hadn’t felt in years, a loss of me. He looked back over his shoulder, and in his cold stare, I realized, he would never again bloom for me.

This is no longer a garden. This is a well, and I am trapped at the bottom.

80

A Metaphysical Critique of Underwear Deco De Velasco I hear around the neighborhood that maricones roam the bushes in the park at night, behind the baseball field, Cuba’s national sport. So I go cruising for sex for the first time. Last week I was too young to consent, but magically, and legally, this week I’m not. I expect cruising will be similar to when my father drags me hunting rabbits so that I “man up”: I walk and walk in the crepuscular semidarkness, until I see a small mammal creeping in the understory, then I shoot. I am an inexperienced hunter, but I am voracious. At 16, I’m at the peak of my hormonal awakening, but on weekdays I have zero privacy at my boarding high school for the academically gifted.

So, when I go home on weekends, I need to shoot.

I walk towards the park for what seems an eternity. While it is only eight direct blocks away, I zigzag through the city to avoid the street blocks where people may know me: friends of my parents, old teachers, my dentist, my own friends. It is easier to avoid them than to make up an unlikely story for where I’m going and what I’m doing, told in stutters. To lie naturally is a survival skill I don’t have yet. I even avoid making eye contact with the strangers who pass me on the narrow sidewalks.

I fear they will be able to sense where I’m going: there goes another one for the darkness; the monsters can’t control themselves. The walk is uphill too, which may explain why it feels long. But it can also be that a boy of 16 can’t properly weigh desire, time, distance, and risk.

I arrive at the park as the sun vanishes behind the communist buildings that surround the older, pre-revolution part of the city. People say that when the sun fully sets, a green light floods the sky so fast it is invisible to the human eye. I worry that it may be too dark or not dark enough. I want to see who I’m hooking up with, let him be ugly, or a friend of my father. But I don’t want him to see me, let me be ugly, or a friend of his son. The ability to see and not be seen can be a matter of life and death in the wild.

I ramble several loops around the park before entering the trails that lead to the baseball field. If there’s anyone on the block, I keep walking. I don’t want to be seen entering the park, but to keep walking to and from the same four blocks is even more suspicious. The communist party neighborhood watch—called the CDR— should be starting their rounds soon, and those fuckers don’t miss a thing. I see a man at the end of the block as I approach the trailhead closest to the field, but he bends over to tie his shoes. Bend over. This is my chance: I run inside.

My rambling isn’t over inside the park. I roam aimlessly through shrubs and trees, unsure what I should be doing; it is still dinner time and there is no one in sight. The only thing I spot moving is a rabbit. Is there a secret gay sign that I’m not giving, like scratching my eye in a particular way? If I give the sign, will a bunch of hot men pop out from hidden lairs, cocks hanging out? I’m not even sure if I am at the right spot. A baseball field is broad. This one is surrounded by trees and bushes 81

on all sides except for the home base. Pitchers and Catchers. If I knew David Hume at the time, I would tell myself that because nothing has happened yet, it doesn’t mean that nothing will happen next. But they don’t teach us Hume here, only Marx.

Ten years later, as a grad student at an Ivy League, this night will come to mind often while reading Kant’s distinction between the transcendental and practical concepts of freedom.

Most of the time, I feel like I’m suffocating in this tiny city on this tiny island.

Even at 16, the Iron Curtain fits me like a sweater a few sizes too small. People say that scorpions sting themselves when encircled by fire. Is that why I’m cruising? But in these bushes, I am boundless. This mystical forest promises hidden treasures.

Fairies. Here, I hope. I hope therefore I am. The I is the archenemy of the communist revolution. Here, I. I turn at the end of a row of Butterfly Jasmine, Cuba’s national flower, and head towards the Poinciana trees, Framboyán in Spanish. Flamboyant? That’s when I see him: slim, hairy legs, wearing shorts too short to be moral, flipflops, and an insolent yellow shirt unbuttoned down to show his gold chain and wooly chest. Did he really walk here wearing that? Man-up my ass. It takes real balls to be maricón in this town. I turn directly towards him.

Fifteen years later, in therapy, I will grapple with the fact that he is 20 plus years my senior, but I don’t want to learn how to have sex from boys my age.

We pass each other, barely touching eyes, but we get it. Gay men have evolved to communicate without words. There is that look, a fire in the pupils.

Pheromones travel faster than light, through vast distances. A pink light too fast for the human eye to see, but the dick gets it. Silence can be a matter of life and death in the wild, so silently we say yes. He fakes looking at his watch and looks back at me. Is that the right sign? I fake stretching my legs and look back at him. He fakes walking away, but very slowly, and looks back at me. I follow him, not too fast, not too slow. The mating dance of the Pajarracus Cubanus.

I have no idea what else to do. I fake stretching my shoulders, so I can casually lift my shirt. I want him to see the dark trail of curls that has recently colonized my navel. I feel hairy too; I am proud. I fumble myself to readjust because my erection is pulling my pubes; and like that, THE SIGN! He heads my way. I head towards a low retaining wall behind some shrubs.

Head. I sit on the wall facing forward but leaning back, so my erection is more obvious. I am so close to ejaculating; this is going to be embarrassing. I light a cigarette. I want to look older and more confident, but I am visibly shaking. My head feels like a pressure cooker with a clogged release valve. I’m sweating a river, but my hands are freezing.

When he reaches the wall, I am in full boasting mode: cigarette hanging out of the right corner of my lips, half smiling. I can finally see him, and he is not that handsome; his nose is small and piggish. He is balding and has sad eyes. He looks… nice? I want to ask him for help. Tell him that I don’t know what I’m doing, that I have 82

only fooled around with boys my age from school, that I have never seen a grownup’s dick, that I’m going to cum too quickly. But his hairy legs are delicious, and he is already here. So, I nod and give him a smirk. Man up.

Twenty plus years later, living in the Northeast United States, summer will become my favorite season because of the humid heat and hairy-legged boys in flipflops.

He flips one leg over the wall and sits with wide-opened legs facing me.

Butch. He says something, but all I can hear is a waterfall—my blood—and irregular explosions—my arrhythmia. He is not wearing underwear, and his shorts are too short for containment. I can’t stop staring at his dick sitting heavily on the concrete next to his inner thigh; a thin strand of precum dripping down. He says you can touch it (I hear that!), and I do.

While I clumsily handle his dick in the dark, he effortlessly maneuvers my zipper, unbuttons my shorts, and loosens my belt. He has done this before; I can tell.

A second man appears unexpectedly from behind the jasmine shrubs and walks towards us. The first man has enough time to cover himself, but I struggle pulling up my underwear. The second man finds me fully on display, pale, cold, and rigid, like a marble sculpture of a man and his sword at a second-class museum.

The second man is hot: shirtless, muscular, his smooth sweaty skin glistening in the dancing moonlight that filters through the leaves above. Also glistening is the broken beer bottle in his hands. He thrusts the emerald shard against my lower left eyelid. It doesn’t cut skin, but I can’t move. He has done this before; I can tell. He calls me a faggot and takes my lunch money for the week and the first man’s gold chain.

A few weeks later, at a different cruising spot, I will run into the first man.

He will tell me that, after I left, he will suck off the second man, but won’t get his gold chain back.

Time flies on my walk back home, my eyes wide open: I must never wear underwear when cruising. I don’t zigzag or delay. I run straight home so I can masturbate before his smell dissipates off my fingers. If you’re wondering why I’m not more upset about my lunch money; let’s face it, I was going to spend it on cigarettes.

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Elizabeth Lax, H ung Up

WRITERS Hugo Scheubel is a 22-year-old French boy living in Berlin. Studying International Affairs, he finds himself passionate about the exploration of identities and desires, especially among his generation. His area of interest lies within queerness, friendships and family ties.

Dani Soto (she/her) is a young queer writer based in New York. She is currently attending Stony Brook University while she pursues her BA in Creative Writing. When not working on her magic-realism thesis, her passions include reading, knitting, and exploring the diverse cuisine in Manhattan with her toy poodle, Magenta.

Justin F. Robinette has published short fiction in places like The Winnow, where he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for prose in 2021, as well as in Literary Heist, Misery Tourism, Rhodora, RFD Magazine, Angel Rust, Apocalypse Confidential, Danse Macabre, Datura Literary Journal, and Horror Sleaze Trash. Work is forthcoming in Sledgehammer Lit and Drunk Monkeys. He has also published short fiction in the Erotic Review magazine, and in HauntedMTL’s horror anthology, Queer as Hell.

Katherine Hsu is a queer writer and artist who lives in Brisbane, Australia.

A 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow, Todd Wellman received his MA in writing from UW-Milwaukee and volunteers with cream city review and Newfound.

His work has appeared in The James Franco Review, Lunch Ticket, Indie Next Lists, Lambda Literary Review, Emerge Anthology, and more. twitter.com/toddwe Johnathan Mars is a writer, podcaster and storyteller from Portland, Oregon. He is working on his first novel and his short story “Todd Knows” will be published in the upcoming anthology Suicidaliens by Gutslut Press.

His storytelling podcast “The First Michael” was a hit on the Apple Podcast charts this summer, affirming that, like many writers, he is good at his craft and terrible at monetizing it. You can find him on Twitter @BuonocoreMars or in bed sulking with his cat.

M.N. Chikwendu is an emerging writer who lives in New Jersey with her nephews and Pitbull mix.

Sunshine Caseñas is an unpublished queer university student from Kentucky. They are currently pursuing a sociology degree in Boston, MA. Andrew Sarewitz has written several short stories (published work: www.andrewsarewitz.com) as well as scripts for various media. Mr. Sarewitz is a recipient of the 2021 City Artists Corp Grant for Writing. His play,

Madame Andrèe (based on the life of Nancy Wake, The White Mouse) garnered First Prize from Stage to Screen New Playwrights in San Jose, CA; produced with a multicultural cast and crew.

James Callan tried his hand at drag for a while but spent way too much money on makeup way too fast and looked ridiculous for all of his efforts.

He likes toads and frogs and polliwogs, but LOVES cats. He lives on the Kapiti Coast, New Zealand with his wife, Rachel, and his little boy, Finn.

Z. Hanna Mahon is a writer living in Washington, DC. Hanna was a Finalist in Breakwater Review’s 2021 Fiction contest for their story “One-Person Tent,” and was nominated for the 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. They have an MFA in Creative Writing from California Institute of the Arts and are a reader for Ruminate literary magazine.

Oliver Rose Brown is a transmasculine poet and prose writer living in Australia. Their work has appeared in Aniko Press, Bareknuckle Poet, Baby Teeth Arts and more.

Maria Carrera was born in Washington, D.C. After earning a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature, she went into theatre. Most recently, she stage managed at the Old Globe and taught Alexander Technique to actors in conservatory training. She retired in San Diego and took up writing again.

Michael McGuire is a retired California based writer who is interested in charting the distance between who we were then, and who we are today.

The road that connects those points is his subject matter.

Dustin Hendrick is the author of The Endless M (Rose Books), an autobiographical essay collection. By day he is a script supervisor and by night he is at work on the dreaded novel. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his husband Nathan, a filmmaker.

Douglas Moser is a Connecticut-based author and director. Memoir pieces published in Echo, Peculiar, and the Good Men Project and in the book Dating & Sex: The Theory of Mutual Self-Destruction, Volume 1. His short story “Boxing Day” was recently published in the Martian Chronicles magazine, and “That One Time” was published in the anthology One Night Stand. Winner of the Connecticut Critics' Circle award for his adaptation A Christmas Carol at the Westport Country Playhouse. Opera debut directing the groundbreaking lesbian folk opera, Patience & Sarah at Lincoln Center.

He also directed the award-winning short film, Glacier Bay. Moser's novel, James & Jim, a comic thriller, was workshopped at the Writers Hotel. He is also developing a YA novel, Pussy Boy, developed at Westport Writers’ Workshop and Yale Summer Writers’ Program.

Alexandria Goodson is a 30-year-old Gay (with a capital G!) woman who loves wearing loud jumpsuits, drinking Death Wish Coffee, and biting her nails too much (maybe there’s a connection there with the coffee, but, she digresses). Her main food groups are writing, reading, cooking, and cocktails. When we get hit by a planet-killing asteroid, she hopes that at the moment of impact, she is in her kitchen, with her dog, Bucatini, a glass of wine, “Take Me Home” by Cher at full volume, stirring her favorite porcini mushroom risotto.

Elizabeth Crowell grew up in northern New Jersey and has a B.A. from Smith College in English Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. She taught college and high school English for many years. She lives outside of Boston with her wife and teenage children.

Lael Cassidy writes poems, stories, and essays, and her work has appeared in Headline Poetry and Press, Silver Birch, Underwood Press, and Beyond Words. She has also written sixteen nonfiction children's books. She lives in Seattle and is currently at work on a memoir.

Stephen Watson is a Bostonian living in Northampton, western Massachusetts with his husband, together 26 years, married 18 years. They share their old house with 3 rescue dogs from Tennessee and Florida, and a rescue cat from Provincetown. Stephen belongs to several writing groups in the Pioneer Valley.

Shana Reed is a native Appalachian storyteller currently serving as a 20212023 Writer-in-residence at Writer's House PGH, in association with Carnegie Mellon. She is a poet and essayist working on finishing a collection of personal memoir-style essays detailing a coming-of-age and comingout story as a repressed lesbian growing up in a small rural town in West Virginia.

Jessica Mendoza is a young up-and-coming writer, tutor, and teacher born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She holds a B.A. in Screenwriting and is looking towards getting her M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She can be found on Twitter @JessMProse.

Barbara Ivusic is a writer and editor from Sydney, Australia, currently residing in Berlin. Her work has appeared in several print magazines. 2020: “Thirst” – Tears in the Fence Print Magazine, Issue 72; 2021: “Evelyn’s Dolls” Cheat River Review Print Magazine, Issue 14; 2021: “Pedigree Dolls & Toys” Glitter Queer Print Magazine, Issue 5.

Maranda Greenwood is a Vermont poet. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Arcadia University. Her work can be found in Slaughterhouse Magazine, White Stag Journal, Sundog Lit other journals and She was a recent runner

up on the Poetry Society of Vermont National Poetry Contest. In her free time she collects Zoltar tickets.

Payton Polanco (she/her) loves coffee, sunrises she always seem to miss, and traveling to places that she forever wants to go back to. She is an emerging writer just trying to get her words into this world.

Charles Stephens is an emerging Black gay writer based in Atlanta, GA. He has published nonfiction in various publications including Atlanta Magazine, The Advocate, AJC, and Georgia Voice. Over the past year, he has taken creative writing courses at the Gotham Writers Workshop and Catapult. Most recently he attended the 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop.

Anna Kathleen Little is a graduate of The Gallatin School at New York University and Brooklyn based designer, artist, and writer who grew up on a ranch in the Rocky Mountains. This is her first published piece.

Charis Young is a 3rd year Create writing student. She has lived in BC her whole life and loves the ability to go out into nature at almost any time.

Writing has been one of her consistent passions and has been a part of who she is since she was little.

J. Michael Norris has had short fiction published in Prometheus Dreaming, Screen Door Review, Louisiana Words, the Saints and Sinners 2018 Anthology of Fiction, and others. He lives in the French Quarter with his husband, Bruce, and their cat, Mali. An English Instructor at Southern University and A&M College, his work centers around loss, tragedy, and the beauty in those things.

Xen Virtue (he/him) is an MA student in English and Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. He studies queer YA literature and its representations of HIV/AIDS. His upcoming MA creative thesis is a YA novel about an Albertan teen who finds out he is HIV+ while organizing the guestlist for his uncle’s AIDS memorial.

TQ Sims writes primarily sci-fi/fantasy that centers Queer characters. He is a finalist in the 2022 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literature Festival's very short story competition. He lives in New Orleans with his partner and a growing number of cats. He is currently editing his first novel, Godspeed, Lovers.

Deco De Velasco is a hippy goth and lover who grew up in Cuba, from where he escaped by boat as a teenager. He lives in Maryland with his husband, three cats, and the best dog. He studied law and bioethics.

ARTISTS COVER ART by Liall Linz. Liall is a Sydney-based artist. His work covers both analog and digital media, often combining the two. Of late, he has been increasing his focus on LGBTQI art.

Trevor Eichenberger, Pride. Nebraska-based artist Trevor Eichenberger (They/them) uses the vibrancy of color to accentuate the subjects of their paintings. They graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 2020 with an English degree and applies their knowledge of storytelling to every canvas to evoke a narrative. Most of their work is dedicated to Queer experience, which allows for them to create honest renderings of an often-stigmatized identity.

Eichenberger’s artistic influences include Haring, Hockney, and Matisse.

Elizabeth Lax, It Wasn’t My Choice; Hung Up. Cleveland-based oil painter Elizabeth Lax focuses primarily on human form. After being raised in a restrictive environment, painting has become a way for her to express what has been silenced. Her subjects typically have obscured identities or are presented without clothing. She aims to expose the subjects while keeping them hidden. The content of these paintings are a way of rebelling against the puritanical beliefs she was indoctrinated with. She believes that in order to break cycles of generational trauma we must quiet our hearts and raise our voices. In 2019 she received her BA in Studio Arts from Kent State University with a primary focus on painting. Her mission is to continue to uncover the identity she was forced to hide, and use her talents to encourage others to do the same.

Giulio Secondo, Another Connection. Jacopo Bosio aka Giulio Secondo is an Italian artist, born in Rome and based in Berlin where he works as an illustrator. His name is inspired by the figure of the Italian pope who commissioned the Sistine chapel.

The focus of his work is the expression of physicality and interpersonal relationships and a journey through the complexity of their boundaries.

Almir Ulises Mestre León, Hombre alado series V. Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1992, Almir has been passionate about drawing since a young age, but it was only in 2018, when he opened his Instagram account, that he started to see it as a way to express himself and his interests. When it comes to creating his pieces the medium he feels more comfortable with is digital because of the infinite possibilities it offers.

Liz Harvey, Collage #1. Liz is a queer artist who makes textile-based works, including mixed media, collage, and performance, in ways that disorient and reorient viewers while pointing towards queer and environmental liberatory futures. Along with making objects, she engages in performance projects in deep collaboration with choreographers and scientists. Most recently, her work has been featured in Feral Fabric Journal and has been shown at Plan-d Gallery in Los Angeles, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, and the Terrain Biennial in Alameda, CA.

David Dasharath Kalal, Avenue H Waltz. Questions of pastiche and transformation run throughout the work—part of an ongoing engagement with reconfiguration, weaving together pop culture moments, historical sampling, halfreworked images, and accidental abstractions. Kalal has been exhibited internationally including at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, the National Gallery of Canada, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, in Trikone Magazine, at the Microwave Festival-Hong Kong, Inside/Out Vienna, Allmänna Galleriet, eKsperim[E]nto Manila, Frameline Festival, Mix Festival, 3LD Art & Technology Center and Blue Heron Arts Center in New York, the Siddarth Gautam Festival and Nature Morte Gallery.

Jack Jacques, Chair. Jack (b. 1998) uses photography to explore critical themes in the gay community, such as isolation, loneliness, male body image and the problems of modern-life through a romantic lens. His work continues in the spirit of the late writer and photographer Hervé Guibert, who sadly died of AIDS in 1991.

Jack's first work was published by Pilot Press in 2020.

Kris Lodu, Water Under the Bridge. Kris (They/Them) is a queer visual artist based in Toronto who works with acrylic/gauche paint and digital art. Their art focuses on the human form in its many representations and explores themes of vulnerability, identity, gender, and sexuality as they relate to self-image. One of the main purposes of their art is to create a warm and inviting community where people can see themselves represented. Website: www.krislodu.com Instagram: @krislodu_art Joel Angel, Nuros Under Venus, acrylic on canvas, 2020. More publicly known as Le Joe, Joel began pencil illustrations at age 7 in Sacramento, California. After childhood experiences with an unstable home, questioning his orientation, and difficult issues with self-esteem, he became determined to overcome trauma and shape himself into a self-aware and caring adolescent using illustration as a medium of development. His art reflects his philosophy capturing vibrant colors with stimulating visuals creating an atmosphere that is larger than life engaging viewers of diverse tastes.

Matty Heimgartner, Sweet Dreams, 11”X14”, watercolor on paper, 2020; Hairy Fairy, 14”x11”, watercolor on paper, 2020. Matty is a California artist and writer whose surreal paintings and personal essays tend toward the introspective and reflective. Heimgartner often participates in art shows around the San Francisco Bay Area, and his art has been featured in the magazine Creativpaper, Beyond Words, Content, and Artist Portfolio. His nonfiction appears in Reed Magazine, Thanks Hun, The Romp, and Beyond Queer Words. Matty holds a BA in art and is currently earning an MFA in creative writing. MattyHeimgartner.com / @fabulousmatty

1 H ugo Scheubel 4 Dani Soto 6 J ustin F . Robinette 10 K atherine H su 14 Todd Wellman 17 J onhathan M ars 18 M .N . Chikwendu 20 Sunshine Caseñas 23 A ndrew Sarewitz 26 J ames Callan 29 Z. H anna M ahon 32 Oliver Rose Brown 35 M aria Carrera 36 M ichael M cGuire 38 Dustin H endrick 40 Douglas M oser 44 A lexandria Goodson 48 Elizabeth Crowell 52 Lael Cassidy 56 Stephen Watson 57 Shana Reed 59 J essica M endoza 61 Barbara I vusic 63 M aranda Greenwood 65 Payton Polanco 67 Charles Stephens 69 A nna K athleen Little 72 Charis Young 74 J . M ichael N orris 76 X en V irtue 80 TQ Sims 81 Deco De V elasco Edited by Gal Slonim Editorial Board: Edward Cohen, Emma M cN amara, Brian Skillman and Peyton F ultz Cover art: Liall Linz V isual artists: Trevor Eichenberger, Elizabeth Lax, Giulio Secondo, A lmir Ulises M estre León, Liz H arvey, David Dasharath K alal, J ack J acques, K ris Lodu, J oel A ngel ("Le J oe") and M atty H eimgartner

I SBN 978-3-948977-42-9

Beyond Words P ublishing H ouse, Berlin, Germany