Creative Writing Honors Thesis

Matthew Pimley 915328152

With special thanks to Professor Pamela Houston

Spring 2021 Table of Contents

The Gleaners ...... 3

The Visitor ...... 18

Little Red Shorts ...... 41

The Taste of Silt ...... 62

The Perfect Man: An Essay ...... 82

The Gleaners

You’re driving alone on a highway, on the edge of the edge of the earth. It’s dark beyond the cast of your headlights, as black as it must be for an unconceived child. Starless and moonless, the trees on either of your sides lay flat against the sky, and you’re sure as ever that there is nothing beyond the road—that should you veer too close to the shoulder, you might fall in like a ship on the western sea. There hasn’t been oncoming traffic in miles so you pull the wheel with your thumb and move into the center of the road where it’s safer.

The windshield is slaughtered with insects along the track of your wipers, and ever growing darker as your headlamps draw in moths and dragonflies from the fields. Those caught in the blur of light but missing the glass whiz by your field of vision like stars might on a spaceship; with the dashboard lights turned all the way down you imagine it really is space travel, and the fantasy is good.

It—the fantasy—is broken by a splay of feathers that alights on the road in front of you.

From the heavens, or somewhere adjacent, a great bird descends, taking position on the pavement in the deadly way of your tires and bends its neck in half. Preening itself with a sickle beak it mocks you, dares you to run it down. All the while those tires are screaming, responding to a white knuckled order of deceleration that is in itself out of character to you. You never stop for the wildlife on country roads.

Birds always fly away just in time, and to spare your brakes you’ve grown used to ignoring them. Tonight shouldn’t have been different—but then, birds shouldn’t drop down in front of speeding vehicles. You come to a jarring halt and slam backward into your seat. The bird, with its stick legs, spreads its wings like an omen and settles again. You rub your face and glance at the fuel gauge.

You press the heel of your hand into the steering wheel where the horn should be, but nothing happens. You slam it again, just to be sure. Nothing. It’s just you and the sound of your idling engine. The bird cocks its head.

There’s no time for this, you reckon, although it’s only fuel you’re running short of.

There’s always time on the way home—too much in fact—to sit alone and drive.

Your heart softens to the bird and you lower your window. Pounding the outside of your car door through the opening, you call out, begging it to fly away. It cocks its head the other way now, and spreads its wings again. You exhale, waiting for the ascent. Instead it approaches you.

Bending and rocking, stiff and unbalanced, it comes to your window, cubit by cubit.

Your arm, still hanging outside, stretches out to meet the iridescent creature. You want so badly to feel it, to lay your fingers upon the green black body. With a powerful clap of its wings, it rises from the earth to perch on your driver side mirror. Your greedy fingers tense up to its breast where you manage to just brush against it before it takes to the air.

Captivating. God if you could just cage it, you would never look away. And then, as if it desired such notice, it dives through your window like a kamikaze pilot to settle on the passenger seat, grazing your face with its shiny dark feathers.

It’s majestic, sure, but what overwhelms you is how big it seems, up close. You stare for a minute as it presses that long curved beak into its breast like a dagger. You close your eyes and try to remember where you’ve seen that beak before.

“An ibis.” You grin because you got it right. Didn’t you read a story about an ibis in grammar school? “You symbolize wisdom. Right?” You press the gas. Muggy air flows in across the sticky sweat of your skin, feigning some sort of cool.

It shivers, feathers standing like the hairs on the back of your neck. You reach across the center console and place your hand upon it.

For a moment you close your eyes again, and picture the ibis feeding. There it stands, in the mud, sweeping its beak through the brackish water, probing for leeches and insects and scraps. “Not really Thoth. Less of a god and more of a gleaner huh?”

It closes its eyes and nests into the seat, humming gently.

“Am I also?”

The ibis says you’re more likely gleaned than the other way around. And that, you decide, seems reasonable. You continue down the highway without asking anything more, and wondering if the ibis really does symbolize wisdom.

Every so often as you drive, the smell of the motel hand soap finds its way up to your face, at which you crinkle your nose and wince. More than anything you hate the smell of unfamiliar soap. It’s strong and it lingers, and it’s never spring rain or jasmine or citrus, it’s always just soap. To avoid it you usually rinse off with just water, but tonight you absentmindedly grabbed the bar of soap from its tray after he left, and passed it from one hand to the other under the lukewarm water until it was the only smell left on your fingers.

What’s worse than the smell of soap is the gentle—and sometimes not so gentle—throb that settles in afterward to remind you of the penetration. The feeling is a guest so polite it doesn’t demand your attention, but just loud enough that you can’t ignore it. At least the throbbing, though unwelcome, also reminds you of the hundred and forty dollars in your pocket.

Even you sometimes forget what an hour can yield. Sliding your hand into your pocket, you finger the paper bills.

Don’t forget, you tell yourself. And you don’t forget, lest the smell of hand soap should consume you.

Unfortunately you did forget to stop for fuel, and when the gaslight chimes by the speedometer, you have no choice but to take the next exit, where a blue sign conveniently depicts a pump. You hold your breath as you pull off, half expecting to fall into the emptiness after all, but soon you’re safely speeding down a straight narrow road with a dotted yellow line.

The road is long with no bends or corners. The ibis cranes its neck to peer into the darkness. There are rows and rows of dead sunflowers to the left and right of your headlights.

Their skeletal heads are all turned downwards, like a classical depiction of purgatory, or hell.

You can’t determine which as you near the poorly lit station promised in the road sign, but you’re sure it’s either one, or the other. The ibis says it doesn’t look that way at all but then, you remember, it’s just one of your gleaners. You don’t have to agree with it.

Next to the uncovered pumps is a diner with a long wooden porch. Inside two women in yellow uniform dresses and aprons lean against the counter; you can see them through the wide windows. One is wiping the stainless steel with a rag while the other one watches, jaw smacking a piece of gum.

The gum chewer comes to the door and squints at you through the window. She taps on the glass. You raise your eyebrow, pointing at yourself to confirm she’s really looking at you, and not the great glossy ibis sitting in your car. She nods and waves you on in.

“Ibis?” you ask, pumping your gas with one hand and opening the passenger door with the other. Its beak emerges, swaying gently, but it stays inside. “I’m going to eat something.” You replace the pump to its handle and screw on the gas cap. Staring at the bird you clear your throat. “I don’t really want to leave this open, are you gonna stay?”

The bird says it isn’t hungry.

“Suit yourself, I suppose.” But as you move to shut the car door it hops down and stretches its wide wings, sauntering toward the diner. It says it’ll get lonely, and of course you know how that feels. You must bring it with you now.

The gravel crunches under your shoes as you come to the porch. The nearer you get, the cooler it feels. A shiver crawls along your back with the sudden change of the air. It’s as if the darkness that surrounds this constructed oasis has never felt the warmth of the sun, ever.

You hurry down the creaking porch boards, hugging yourself in the cold. A bell rings as you fight the heavy wooden door open, but the waitress from before blocks your entry.

“You can’t bring your bird in the diner, sir,” she says in a sort of Brooklyn way that sort of isn’t a Brooklyn way. The other waitress doesn’t look up from the register.

“Well, it isn’t really my bird,” you bite your lip for a second, then add with a smile, “it’s an ibis.”

She glances down at it, lips curling back to reveal the fat pink gum still squished between her teeth. “I’m sorry sir, but rules are rules, you know.”

“He’s tame,” you offer, “I think…”

“Oh would you please let the man in?” The waitress at the counter slams her palms down and rolls her eyes. “There ain’t a soul in here. So what if he’s got a damn bird?” She turns back down to the register and mumbles, “Hell I’ll even serve it a burger.”

The other waitress steps back to let you in, crossing her arms. The ibis says thank you as it walks past and takes a seat at one of the booths near the register. The one with the Brooklyn accent disappears into the kitchen so you look toward the other waitress. Her thick dark body sways a little, like the ibis as it sits at the table. Her name tag reads Zinnia.

“Can you pay up front? I’m tryna count this till up for the night,” she asks.

“Sure, that’s no problem.”

“Okay what do you want then? I’ll ring it up.”

“I’m sorry but, I don’t see a menu?” You catch a whiff of the hand soap. Clearing your throat, you hope she can’t smell it.

She narrows her gaze and says, “Use your imagination,” in a low voice.

You stammer. “You said a burger before, you serve burgers?”

“I said it didn’t I? You want fries?” she asks, furiously jamming the register with her ring finger.

“Yeah, a burger and fries would do it for me right now.” Your chuckle melts when she stops typing to look you up and down.

Placing one hand high up on her hip she says, “I think you’ve done it enough for one night.”

You feel a wave of sticky hot self-consciousness swarm your body. Your underarms dampen as the throbbing you’ve nearly forgotten picks up, displeased at being neglected. Like a drunken burp, or rather, a cough, you feel the afterbirth come oozing out. It’s lube and cum and blood and shit and all the things you flush away before looking down. It comes dripping down your scrotum and soaks into your briefs where you can feel it smearing against your inner thigh.

Those briefs aren’t so sexy now, although it doesn’t matter when he rips your pants and underwear off together. You cup your back end with one hand and dig into your pocket with the other, where that hundred forty is still folded, whispering don’t forget, as a bundle of bills ought to whisper.

“How much is it?”

“Five,” she says plainly.

“That’s all? That’s a deal for sure!”

“You gonna let go of your ass or am I ever getting paid tonight?” Zinnia starts squeezing her own shoulder, arm bent across her face but not covering her eyes, dark narrow eyes that live somewhere between suspicion and resentment. The ibis makes a low, croaking sound from the booth where it watches you closely.

You place a twenty-dollar bill on the counter—now there is only a hundred and twenty in your pocket. Andrew Jackson blinks up at you from the stainless steel, then he grins, remembering the eight and a half minutes you spent earning him.

Zinnia blinks back at the bill, making no motion to accept it.

“What the hell is that?” She asks.

“It’s a twenty,” your eyebrows clasp together while you try and make sure you heard her correctly. Then you add, “to be fair it doesn’t usually smirk like that.”

A cackling laugh breaks through the woman’s fat dry lips. It’s high pitched like an exotic bird, or something close. “We don’t take—” She gasps for air, “we don’t take paper money here child.”

“Well I have a debit card.” You snatch up the twenty and go for your wallet.

She looks you dead in the face, leaning against the counter on her elbow, “I don’t take cards neither, I take five.”

“Five what?” you beg. “Fingers!” she says as if it were obvious.

“Fingers?” Your eyes fly wide, “You want my fingers?”

“Unless you see someone else’s lying around?” She reaches across the counter and pops you on the temple, “Of course I want your fingers!”

Mouth open, and blinking, you force the words to sit down in a row so you can say, “I think my fingers are worth more than a burger and fries Zinnia.” Immediately you regret saying it.

“And just why is that,” she snaps back at you, crossing her arms across plump, heavy breasts.

“Well because,” you falter, “I use them for so many things, I—”

“I know exactly how you use ‘em,” she purses her lips, hands returning to her hips as she says “and if they were worth so much there’d be more than a twenty in your pocket.”

“There is!” You toss the bundle of bills onto the counter; sweat drips down your hairline like the slick wet between your legs.

“I don’t care if you gave me a five-dollar gold piece that says ‘In Zinnia we trust!’ It’s five fingers or nothing.”

A twinge in your stomach heralds a low, hungry, groan. “How much if I just get fries?”

Apparently it’s only two fingers then, and you’re left trying to think of a task you couldn’t do with three fingers. The ibis offers finger knitting and piano, but since you don’t finger knit or play piano you decide you can live without them. Coming up short otherwise, you nod your head.

“How do I get them off?” you ask, clasping the pinky and its neighbor on your left hand.

“Most people trim the dotted line,” she says, handing you a pair of scissors. Looking down you find that there is indeed a dotted line tattooed around the base of each finger and thumb.

“I guess that makes sense,” you whisper, taking the scissors with your right hand and holding your left out in front of you. The cold metal blades rest lightly against the skin of your pinky as you align it with the tattoo. Just as you tense to snip it clean off you gasp. Suddenly your vision blurs; the scissors look crooked and no matter how you turn them they won’t behave.

In fact, those hands don’t even feel like yours as they quiver in front of you, the way legs don’t feel like yours after getting off a bicycle. It’s around then you realize that you don’t really want to cut your fingers off—although you can’t place why exactly—and drop the scissors back onto the counter.

“What if it hurts?” you ask.

“What if it doesn’t?” The blond waitress calls in her sort-of-Brooklyn accent as she bursts through the swinging door to the kitchen. She’s still working that fat piece of pink chewing gum as you steady yourself against the counter.

“I’m not sure I can. What if we can’t get the bleeding to stop?”

“What if you stop wasting my time? Ever thought of that?” Zinnia slams the total button, which chimes in response like an old typewriter.

“I think I need to use the bathroom first.” The afterbirth comes sliding down your thigh.

It tickles as it catches in your leg hair.

“For the love of god!” Zinnia’s hand flashes across your field of vision, distorted as it may be. Like a drunkard whose room spins beneath him you watch the waitress grasp her pinky and snap it off in one quick movement. It’s a sickening snap-crackle-pop followed by the metallic cha-ching of the drawer flying open in front her. The till is alive with appendages, wriggling and writhing in a bloody orgy where the dollars and cents should be. She drops her finger into the mess and reaches for another.

“God don’t do it!” But your protest doesn’t stop her from taking hold of the ring finger and snap-crackle-popping it off.

She tosses the second finger into the drawer and jabs it shut with her hip. She wipes her hands across her pristine white apron, smearing one side of it. “The bathroom’s that way.” She points with her good hand. You stare at her, eyes wide. “Are you gonna shit on the floor? Let’s go!” She claps her hands out in front of her, casting little red droplets across the counter.

Stumbling through the haze to the bathroom, you half-fall into a green stall door.

Whatever you’ve seen takes a backseat to the absolute priority of cleaning the afterbirth out of your briefs. You wad up the tissue and pull your pants down the knee, sitting on the toilet to get a closer look.

By a miracle without explanation, your briefs are completely dry. Hurriedly you shove the ball of toilet paper between your legs and give it a wipe, but it comes up clean. Wide eyed you reach down there with a bare hand. Nothing. Just you and the gentle—and indeed it has settled back into a gentle—throb.

The fog has lifted almost entirely by the time you return to the booth where the ibis has been sitting patiently over a glass of water, the lemon wedge carefully placed on a napkin to the side. Zinnia and the other waitress are somewhere behind the swinging kitchen door, so you lean over the table and whisper.

“Did she really break off her fingers, or am I imagining something?” The bird preens for a moment, and then remarks that thanklessness is an unattractive quality. Again, you decide that what the bird has said seems reasonable, so you don’t press further.

After the hunger pains have grown to be almost unbearable, the sort-of-Brooklyn waitress emerges from the back. Held out in front of her on flat palms, like a small bird to be released, is a thick diner-plate upon which a burger and fries sit on display.

The grease lands on your tongue before the plate even meets the table; your mouth fills with saliva. The only thing stopping you from shoving your face into the burger is the waitress's name tag that crosses your line of vision while you try not to see her cleavage. It reads Slut.

Without thinking, the question half tumbles from your mouth on a drop of spit: “Why would you wear that?”

She looks down at her name tag, as if she forgot what it says, and laughs. “Well we all choose our labels, don’t we?” she asks, wiping her hands on a rag from her apron pocket. Only then do you notice the smears of blood. The haze rolls back in as you gaze at the sockets, all ten of them, void of fingers.

“Look at your hands, holy!”

She looks down at them, holding them out like a fresh set of nails. “Eh, I didn’t really like that pair anyway.”

“You’re bleeding though!”

“Don’t worry about it! I know what I’m doing back there.” She winks and grins, with that fat piece of gum still hanging from her molars. She asks the ibis if he’s doing alright and as she’s talking you notice the gum is running back into her throat. In fact, it isn’t gum at all, but a long quivering tongue—her own tongue—that she can’t seem to stop chewing, naturally. Her teeth leave the pink flesh covered in red and purple bruises.

As she turns to leave, you realize there’s been a mistake so you call out to her, despite how fragmented your field of vision has become.

“I’m sorry, but I only ordered fries.”

The ibis shakes its head and mumbles something about a gift horse.

“You know what, handsome, I put the order in on the house. If we’re giving parts of our bodies away, we might as well get some meat out of it huh?” She strides back into the kitchen, hips swaying over a blood-drop trail.

With your stomach folding in on itself, you can’t stand to wait any longer. You clasp your hands around the burger and take an ambitious bite. The flavors rub up against each other on your tongue, and something animalistic, something primal is released in you. You’re powerless against it as you shove mouthful after mouthful of food into your stomach, quenching an ancient and preeminent thirst: a need to be anything but empty.

Despite the throb against the booth cushion, and the money in your pocket, you’re sure that you’ve never not been empty.

You eat the entire sandwich, stopping to gasp for air now and then. When you’re finished you start in on the fries, suckling the salt and grease from each little wedge until there’s nothing left but a pickle spear on your plate. You hate pickles, but for some reason you can’t control the urge to shove it into your mouth. Now there are only crumbs on the plate, and juicy condiments running down your chin and arms. For a moment you’re satisfied, more than you ever thought you could be. Leaning back in the booth you rest your hands upon your stomach and take a deep breath. The ibis watches you, cocking its head from side to side. Then, as always, the clarity sets in. It tastes a lot like guilt.

You go back to the bathroom, relieved that the haze has lifted once again. Perhaps you were just hungry. All the same you press the soap pump, releasing a drop or two of the thick pink stuff they use in gas station minimarts. As you scrub the grease from your hands and wipe your face with a brown paper towel, you catch another horrible whiff of soap. You are tasked now with determining whether this is the soap from before, or the new stuff.

They smell the same.

At last, you return to the table. You’ve already paid, and you’ve already eaten—the memories of which make you cringe—so you decide there’s nothing left but to head home.

Slut is mopping up the trail of blood next to a sloppy yellow bucket, and Zinnia is wiping down the counter, passing over and over the same spot where her new pretty sockets are still bleeding.

“Ibis,” you say, “I think I’m going home now, are you coming?”

The bird soft-foots its way up to the counter and with a powerful spread of its wings, lands upon the stainless steel. You suppose the ibis means to say that it isn’t leaving with you. It hands the loneliness back to you like a baton.

“Before you leave, hunny, grab yourself a name tag.” Zinnia throws a thumb over her shoulder to a cardboard box near the register.

Cautiously, you approach the box to find an assortment of blue and yellow name tags just like Zinnia’s. There are many to choose from: Whore, Fag, Sextoy. You spend a long moment considering the tag that reads Used before turning around to ask. “If we choose our own labels, why can’t I have my name?”

Zinnia throws her head back in a nasty laugh. “Those are your names. Can you even think of a better one?”

You close your eyes, trying to find your true name, your given name, the name on your birth certificate. You can’t even remember it.

Eyes wide, you whisper, “No.” But the heat of embarrassment in your cheeks flushes quickly into accusation: “Why do you get to wear Zinnia then? Where’s your slutty name tag?”

“I don’t measure myself by the number of times I can make a man say fuck yeah. Maybe your value comes from how far back his eyes roll in his head, but I’m my own woman.” She purses her lips.

“You mean to say you don’t have sex?”

“Hell no!” She twists her face in disgust. “I have plenty, I just don’t have it ‘cause I’m empty. I’m full, baby.”

A low groan from your belly reminds you how heavy your stomach is now that you’ve eaten. It is its own kind of throbbing.

“Well I don’t need your name tags, I’m full too.”

Zinnia laughs as you pull open the heavy door to dive into the chill of the darkness that surrounds the diner. Your car is waiting for you. It’s time to go home.

The lights above the gas pumps flicker. You turn the key and pull onto the road. For a moment you glance back at the diner, to peer through those wide windows. Inside there are three glossy ibises sitting in a row upon the counter. The gleaners watch you drive away. They have some of you now, as all your lovers past: a shared ownership of something you can’t really name. As you drive, you glance over to see that the box of name tags is on the passenger seat where the ibis had been. The yellow letters taunt you. You can’t imagine how they got there, but you mull them over just the same. Testing them on your lips, there are so many options. It would be easier to choose if each word didn’t suit you so well. On top of the rest, dead center, one of them reads Empty. Even now, stomach full but feeling more gleaned than ever, you decide that is reasonable.

Perhaps you could choose something else; perhaps you can’t change it. Either way you turn the radio on and stop thinking for the night. There are still bugs on your windshield, there are still a hundred and forty dollars in your pocket, there are still ten fingers wrapped around the steering wheel as you tear down that freeway on the edge of the edge of the earth.

The Visitor

“I’m in town,” she says over the phone.

“Laura?” I stop short on the sidewalk when I hear her voice. “I didn’t realize you’d be back so soon.”

Someone looking at their phone walks right into me, but doesn’t stop long enough for me to apologize. I step off to stand in the shade. There are heat waves curling off the August pavement as the clocktower begins to chime. Three o’clock at the university and I’m going to be late to the lecture hall. The people walking by and biking by and driving by don’t notice me standing there on the grass.

“Hello?” she asks. Wind crackles through the speaker.

“Yeah. I’m here.” I dab my forehead, smooth back my hair, and check my watch.

“Can I stay with you awhile?” She asks the way a mother might, gently but in such a way that there is only one right answer.

“I wasn’t prepared for guests.” Not the right answer.

“I’m hardly a guest, I’m family.” She waits. “Right?”

“How long will you stay?”

“Aren’t you even happy, Michael? Just a little?” She sighs on the other end of the line, but I can picture her smirking.

I bite my lip, watching the flow of bodies down the sidewalk.

“Yes,” I whisper, and I think I mean it despite everything.

“I’ll see you when you get home,” she says. And she will.

I’m chopping veggies on a wooden cutting board, peeling potatoes and slicing carrots.

It’s the little things like this that carry me from day to day. Little things like the sound of the dryer tumbling in my clean, cool apartment, or the smell of the cupboard when I open it because it smells just like grandma’s pantry and—

“Michael.”

Laura doesn’t care for little things.

“Michael I think I’m going to put on some music,” she says, rising from her seat on the couch.

“There’s a speaker over there.” I point with the knife. “Just hook it up to your phone.”

She doesn’t say anything, but in a moment the speaker chimes to tell us it’s connected.

Please Come to Boston by Dave Loggins. Everything comfortable changes then, like someone slipping freezing fingers under my shirt, startling but welcome.

“I like this song,” I say, sliding a glass dish into the oven.

“It reminds you of your dad, doesn’t it?” Laura sifts across the hardwood to the cupboard above the refrigerator.

“He used to play it on the guitar.”

“Have you talked to your dad lately?”

“Not since that fight.”

“God which one? He’ll never see eye to eye with you, will he?” She opens the cupboard and pulls out a bottle of cabernet.

“I don’t think so.” I turn to the sink and start scrubbing the cutting board, setting it to dry against the wall. Tidy as I go, tidy as I am. “Well I think you’re right.” She starts digging through the drawers.

“It’s right here.” I open the drawer where the corkscrew lives for her.

“You moved it.” She drives the screw into the bottle.

“I think,” pause because I can only find the words one at a time, “I’m realizing, now, that he’s never going to understand me the way I need him to. He thinks he knows, but he has no idea who I am.” I slump down on the couch and let my head back.

Pop.

“You’re probably right about that.” Laura pours a glass and brings it over.

“I understand him. Better than he knows,” I snap my fingers at the speaker, a few minutes into The Reach. “Like this song! You know he cried when Dan Folgelberg died? Do you think he knows who’d make me cry?”

“Regina Spektor.” She says, curling up next to me with her glass. “But it’s not just your father. No one is ever going to understand you. Not the way I do at least.”

“Well tell me what I want to hear then, if you know me so well.” The dryness of the wine curls up my sinuses.

“I tell you what you need to hear, Michael.”

After dinner, Laura pours the last of the wine into my glass, my third.

“I think I’m okay,” I say, holding up a hand while collecting the plates from the table.

“Michael, come now. We have a tradition, no? One to cook, one to eat,” she grins and extends the drink to me.

I hesitate, then accept it. “And one to clean.” She smiles, sitting. The dryer chimes to announce the sheets are ready. It was one of the most expensive apartments on the west side. Laura didn’t like how far away it was, but relationships are full of compromise. Washer/dryer in unit, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances and a balcony. The windows alone are worth two jobs and student loans, or at least they are to me. Floor to ceiling, the entire wall opposite the door. They let in the most wonderful light, and at night they open up like doors onto the balcony, where the stars are just visible over the edge of the city. By the end of September, the planet Mars will begin to cross over every night, landing a little closer to the horizon each day until it disappears for the winter.

Sometimes I’m so happy to get home at the end of the day I could cry for the vacuum lines in the rug, cabinets full of stacked dishes, and paintings hung perfectly level. Laura says I should go with the flow, that I try too hard. I say, if everyone tried hard, we’d all have cleaner houses. I always had an eye for grandeur, even if I had to work twice as hard. Once Laura laughed that my tastes would be my downfall. She wasn’t laughing when I came out to her on our second anniversary.

“Your dramatic timing astounds me, Michael,” she’d said, mascara running down her cheeks. “You’ve ruined my favorite restaurant.”

I remember pushing the bowl of breadsticks toward her. “I guess this means we have to split?”

“Break up? You’re breaking up with me too?” She made little choking sounds.

“I just told you I’m gay.”

“I know! And I hate you for it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.” She pulls both palms across her face, smearing makeup everywhere.

“You want to stay with me then?” “You are a wretched, manipulative son of a bitch, Michael. But I’ll be damned before

I leave.”

“God,” I grabbed her hand then, “I’m so glad. I can’t do this without you.”

“And you won’t.” She smiled over linen napkins and pasta, she never looked so beautiful.

“But I’m not happy about it,” she said, yanking her hand back.

That was almost three years ago, and she’s still unhappy.

For almost a year afterward we tried to make it work—tried to love each other for what we were, and forgive the parts that hurt. Sometimes we would scroll through Google images of male models together and score them from 1 to 10, and I always saved my 10s for her. We used to paint each other’s toenails and watch romantic comedies. The first time she slapped me across the face was when she found gay porn on my computer, and that’s when I started spitting in her food. At first our fights were loud, and then they were quiet. A mausoleum silence fell across our lives, across our room. I was seeing a boy named Austin, but he left me because I never took him to my place.

“It feels like you’re hiding something from me,” he said. He was right.

I asked Laura to move out after that. I packed her suitcase neatly, folded shirts and pants, lacey underwear in the side pocket. The first time she showed up unannounced I asked her why.

“You never changed the locks,” is all she said.

“I should have known you were back last night, honestly,” I say, packing the tri-tip and mashed potatoes into plastic tupperware.

Laura curls her feet up under her, leaning on the arm of the couch as she swirls the red around her glass. “Why’s that?” “Because I cried at the movies.”

“You went by yourself?”

“Usually.” I begin to reset the apartment, to disappear the dinner stains and make the counters shine again. “It was a movie about four boys, best friends.”

“Did someone die or something?” She blinks once.

“Yes, but that’s not why. I should have known you were coming because I cried during the happy parts too.”

“What parts?”

“When they were young, running through the streets.” My hand passes over the granite, spot after spot erased. “Maybe I’m jealous.” And when I finish, I wipe it down again.

“Mmhm. What else?”

“When he married his sweetheart.” A sheen is forming on my forehead. I start laughing just to take up space, but Laura cocks her head.

“I know how much it hurts you, but I won’t have an open marriage. You have to choose, me or them.” She sighs, joining me at the counter where she starts to rub my back. It makes me ooze like clay. It’s the sort of touching I seek out risky sex to find. Skin to human contact.

“Suppose I marry a man then?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, why not? I don’t want to do this,” I step away from her, gesturing toward the space between us, “anymore.”

“That’s insanity. Just stop.” She slams her glass down on the counter. “You can’t marry a man. The only reason men are monogamous is for women.” I start scrubbing the stove with fervor, it rattles under my hand. She sighs and helps me tuck in the stools. I tell her to stop because she isn’t doing it right. I can’t tuck the chairs in until I finish sweeping the floor, I can’t sweep the floor until I finish the dishes, and I can’t finish the dishes when she’s making me nervous by tucking in the chairs too early.

“You’re going to make your fingers bleed, give it up and come sit down.”

I turn my back to her, letting the water scald me as I run the sponge around and around the pot I’m washing. Dry my hands and step outside onto the balcony, where a breeze has just begun to stir the muggy air.

“Accept it, Michael.” She follows me. “It’s okay to regret what could have been.”

We listen to the sounds of the evening together.

“Maybe I don’t regret anything.”

“It’s okay to be afraid, just be honest with me.” She turns my head toward her with a gentle palm to my cheek.

“I am not afraid.” I turn away and press my lips into the opposite shoulder.

“You’re terrified. Like a little bird. Remember last time I was here? Remember what you told me?”

“My therapist and I have been working so hard. She said I shouldn’t feel guilty for what happened between us.” I still can’t face her.

“Maybe you should.” I feel the hairs stand up on my arms.

“Can we change the subject?” I wrap myself around her and kiss her neck, smell her hair.

She rocks me back and forth. Inside, my favorite song is playing.

“Did you queue Regina?” I wipe my eyes.

“I did, for you.” She smiles and leads me back into the living room. Laura hates Regina Spektor, and I don’t know what love would look like if it wasn’t her.

I curl my knees up beneath me and stare at the almost empty wine glass. She rests her head in my lap and looks up at me with her wet, gray eyes like liquid mercury. I stroke her hair and wonder how many of Laura’s tears would be a lethal dose.

“There are easier ways.” she says.

“I know.”

Laura tries to help me make the bed, but she doesn’t do it right. The sheets aren’t tight enough, the folds aren’t clean enough. She watches me finish, watches me smooth the fabric with my hands just to undo it all and climb in, inviting her to join me. She sleeps in my bed, and swaddles me in sisterly love. She smells like chloroform and I breathe it in, deeply, until unconsciousness becomes me.

The bed is empty when I wake up. When I stumble into the living room, Laura is there, reading a book on the couch.

“What are you going to do while I’m at work?” I ask.

“I don’t know, I’ll be around. I was planning to ride with you and wait in the car.”

“Eight hours in the car? I’m working a full shift today.” I rub my face, double checking that I heard her correctly.

“So?” She holds her book up. “I’ll be fine.”

“It’s going to be like ninety-five out? You should stay here.” I walk to the kitchen counter to put away the artifacts of last night. An empty bottle, the corkscrew, the cork. One empty wine glass covered in my fingerprints.

“I want to go with you,” she says. “I don’t really want you to. Can I just get through my day and see you at home?” I ask.

She narrows her eyes before leaving me alone in the kitchen. Sometimes Laura was the parent; sometimes the child, unbearable. I have never wanted children.

When I finish getting dressed for work she’s nowhere in the apartment. I don’t have time to fight about it. I open the little drawer in the nightstand and start gearing up. Wallet, check.

Headphones, check. Chapstick, check. Wristwatch, on. Nametag, clipped. Keys… keys?

It’s a Friday morning. With eastbound traffic I calculate that to get to the store and clock in on time, I have to leave no later than 9:47. If I take the early exit and speed through the neighborhoods, I should get to the parking lot with two minutes to spare. As much as I hate doing it, I’m not above running through the store to get to the timeclock. I’m usually so punctual, but I never feel like myself when she’s around.

It’s already 9:46, the sheets on the floor, the drawers are hanging open, and I still haven’t found my keys. My hair is a mess, I’ve broken a sweat, and the only place I can think of is that I locked them in my car.

“No fucking way.”

Laura is waiting in the passenger seat, keys in hand.

“Laura I said stay home!” I slam my door shut and buckle my seatbelt. “Give me the keys!”

“Take me with you,” Laura says, dangling them out of my reach.

“I’m going to be late!”

“Then I guess you don’t have time to argue about it.” We speed onto the exit and through the neighborhoods in silence. I might still make it if I hit the green light at Lillard. Instead, I hit the yellow just before it changes. An entire iteration later, I get stuck behind the bus.

I enter the parking lot at 10:04, late to work.

A couple hours into my shift, I’m sweeping the aisles. I’ve been able to forget Laura so far, but now with nothing but the dust mop to distract me, she creeps back into my head. What was she thinking? Why is everything so hard when Laura visits?

I hold the broom firm, just close enough to the shelving that the fibers pick up everything without snagging. At the end of the aisle my mind turns left when my body turns right, and I can barely feel myself. The arms are still holding, the legs are still walking, but it doesn’t feel like me. Whose life is this?

Whenever this happens, I wonder if I’m watching a movie. I try to imagine myself from someone else’s view, someone who can’t hear how much I’m thinking. Do I like myself from their perspective?

I was probably five or six the first time I watched myself from the ceiling.

“Goddammit Michael!” my father yelled, “You’d be perfect if you would just listen, if it wasn’t for this one thing.”

The problem was, every time my father yelled, the one thing between me and perfection was different. I waved at myself from where I hovered by the ceiling fan, but I didn’t look up or wave back. The top of my father’s head was already balding then. I’d never seen the top of his head before.

“I know you’re not stupid, are you?” “I just forgot.” I said.

“You’d be perfect if it wasn’t for this one thing.”

And that’s exactly what Laura said the night I came out to her.

“Michael.” She waves from the corner of a display.

“What the hell are you doing in here? Go back outside.” I lean the broom against the shelf. It slides straight down and claps upon the floor.

“I just wanted to see if your job was important or not.” She smiles.

“You can’t be in here, they can’t see you.” I snatch up the broom.

“They already saw. Do you really think you hide me so well? You practically wear it on your sleeve when I’m here.”

“Customers can’t go to the back, just wait here.” I shove my way past the swinging doors. Instead of facing her again, I head into the milk box. Sit on the damp concrete and I feel the cold creep through my pants. In the corner, between the wall and stacks of 1% half gallons, I pull my knees up to my chest and hide my face.

I forgot how she is. Blow a puff of air in front of me, watch the warm little cloud dissipate against the refrigerator fans. The lights overhead switch off, I guess I haven’t moved in a while. The intercom crackles to life.

Well hello there, it’s so lovely that you’re here. My name is Sharon, and I just wanted to invite you back here to the deli where we’re offering samples of our in-house prepared quinoa salad. It’s earthy, it’s balanced, it’s just delicious! So come on back, give it a try. Why not?

Don’t miss out and as always, thank you for being our guest.

Whose life is this? The next two weeks pass a lot like this, a little less convenient, a little more exhausting.

Sometimes Laura stays home while I’m at work, sometimes she follows me there. She usually lets me go to class alone, but sometimes she’s right there next to me in the lecture hall, elbow leaning across my notebook where I’m supposed to be writing down what they’re teaching me.

It’s always like this. She’s all-consuming.

I try and come up with things for us to do when we’re home together, but almost nothing sounds fun to her. Once I pulled out all my paints and brushes, and laid them out on the counter.

Laura stared at the pretty colors for some time before getting up to go lay down.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s too much work to be creative,” she said, so I lay beside her and we stare out the window together.

Shortly before I came out to Laura, I came out to my father. It was a dark evening on the porch of my parent’s house, I couldn’t see his face.

“Just because you don’t want to jump Laura’s bones doesn’t mean you’re gay,” he said.

I said nothing.

“I mean you don’t want to jump in bed with a guy do you?”

I said nothing.

“Well maybe this is farther along than I thought.”

I said nothing and I stayed with Laura for another year.

I read an article the other day that said there is no archeological evidence that a massive population of Jewish slaves ever existed in Egypt. The writer spent a long time explaining the differences between myth, legend, and history.

Is the Bible true?

“None of it’s true except the part that says you go to hell for being gay.” Laura says very matter-of-fact. She’s still reading that same book that she’s been reading since the beginning of her stay. The title reads God vs. Gay.

“Who wins?” I ask, pointing at the cover.

Laura grins. “Not you sweetie.”

I start to feel claustrophobic, but all the time. Most days Laura just wants to stare out the window while the music plays. Only the sad songs. Or the happy songs that make me sad.

“Why is this song on your sad playlist?” Laura asks, tapping at my phone. San Francisco by Scott Mackenzie plays on the speaker.

“It reminds me of Austin.” I say without turning from the window.

“I bet he’s loving the city.” Laura sighs. “What makes it long distance? It’s only like an hour by train to get there. You could see him today if you wanted.”

“It’s long distance because he said it is.” I snap, because I do want to see him.

“Okay, okay.” She lays down on the couch. The clouds move across the sky in front of us. Austin had a mole on the right side of his chest, right near his armpit. Of all the moles on his body, I think that one was my favorite.

“You know, I have this idea for a book I want to write, about Austin. I’d put this song on the soundtrack to the movie,” I say.

“You won’t write that book.” “Why not?”

“Because,” she said sitting up, “you can’t do it. You’re just not a good enough writer.”

I turn to her, stare. Don’t shoot the messenger.

“I’d still use this song in the movie.” I start it over. “Do you think Austin remembers my moles?”

“Your moles?” She smiles. “I imagine he’s already forgotten you, Michael. Let alone your moles.”

“How often have you been bothered by feeling down, depressed, irritable, or hopeless over the last two weeks? Not at all, several days, more than half the days, or nearly every day?”

My therapist asks, reading from a large floppy book in her lap.

Nearly every day. “Not at all.” Laura says.

Her profile says she specializes in LGBT issues, but she asks a lot of questions that make me second guess that. Once she asked me if I’ve tried dating in the next city over, if I was having trouble with the gay community here. I told her they are the same communities. I told her they’re small enough that put together they equal the forty-seven men I’ve already slept with. Then I felt her judging me, and I asked her not to in my head.

“Okay, and how often have you been bothered that you have little interest or pleasure in doing things?” she asks.

Nearly every day. Laura smiles, “Oh we do lots of things for fun. No loss of interest here.”

I notice the box of tissues on the side table is crooked, I line it up parallel with the edge of the table, and fold my hands again. Laura’s always mad because I notice everything. I notice the spot where the paint of the baseboard got onto the wall, the crack in the ceiling. I notice my therapist’s socks, one of which is pulled up higher than the other. I notice that the door has a wider gap on the side by the knob than on the side by the hinges. I notice all the little imperfections in the environment. Sometimes they pile up on top of me until I can’t even breathe. That’s usually when I start cleaning. This is what I want to talk about, but Laura presses her thumb into my knee, signaling that I need to stop bouncing my leg.

“And how often have you been bothered by trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or sleeping too much?” My therapist pushes her glasses back up her nose.

“I have been taking naps in the afternoon, I’m so tired lately.” I yawn.

“Not more than usual, just the usual amount of tired actually.” Laura adds.

“Okay… how often have you had the feeling that you are a failure, or that you have let yourself or your family down over the last two weeks?”

Every day. “We all feel insecure sometimes right? I’d say it’s barely an issue.”

“How many days in the last two weeks have you felt insecure, Michael?”

“Not at all.” Laura says and pats my leg.

“Are you telling me the truth?” She closes the book and crosses her legs.

“I didn’t lie.” I say. I let Laura do the talking because she knows what people want to hear. When someone asks you how you’re doing, they expect you to say “good.” Laura understands all this, so it’s easier to let her talk.

As I’m leaving the room at the end of the session, my therapist places a hand on my shoulder. “Michael, think about the questions I asked you today. If you find that at some point your answers have changed, you can text me.”

I nod, offer a smile. “Take care, Michael.”

“Why does she say your name so much? Take care, Michael,” Laura asks from across the table. I decided to get an iced tea at the cafe and sit outside. Usually this makes me feel better, but today I want to take off the lid, drink it all at once, and go home before anyone else sees me.

My legs are too skinny, my face is too round, and my clothes are too gay. I sit with my shoulders hunched.

“I think she’s worried about me.”

“What have you been telling her?” Laura puts her book down.

“The truth. We’ve been working on it.”

“I already told you, you won’t fix whatever it is. You’ll just unravel.”

“I’m already unraveled. I feel completely unraveled,” I say.

“Then it’s a good thing I’m here.” She says, and grabs my hand. “We’re in this together.”

“I know.” There is green ivy crawling up the brick wall of the cafe. It isn’t hot in the shade, and my tea is better than usual. It could be a good day. It isn’t too late to have a good day.

“When are you leaving?” I ask suddenly.

“What?”

“When are you going to go away?”

“I can’t believe it. You don’t want me here anymore?” She slaps her book closed and crosses her arms.

“I can’t breathe.” I lean forward and close my eyes. “I feel like I’m waiting for something, but nothing ever happens. I need something to happen.” “And you think that something is to send me away?” She laughs. “I’m sorry but you don’t get to choose when or where I come. Right now I’m here.”

“Why don’t I have a choice? Why can’t I choose different?”

“Even if you could, you would choose me. I can see it in the songs you play, the movies you watch. Our songs, our movies. When you want to feel something you choose me.” She jabs her thumb into her chest.

“Right now I want to feel happy.”

“You couldn’t have that with or without me. There’s nothing waiting out there for someone like you, there is no happy ending for your kind of people. Do you want to be lonely, or do you want to go through this life with me, your partner, your person?”

“I don’t want to be alone.” I clench my teeth and whisper, “I don’t want to be alone.”

“I knew I had to come and see you, because you were starting to forget us. Out of sight out of mind? I won’t have it.” She crosses her legs and leans back, narrowing her eyes. “You go out and have sex with whoever you want, but did you know that I am saving myself for you?”

“I didn’t ask you to, you don’t have to martyr yourself.”

“I am the fucking martyr, Michael.” She shoves the table, hair falling crazily around her face. “You led me on for two years without so much as sticking your hand under my shirt and then you tried to dump me on our anniversary. And I stayed with you!”

“I wasn’t trying to dump you. I was trying to be honest.” I bury my face in my palms.

“No other woman is going to give you the freedom I do, no other woman is going to let you talk about the random men you fuck. No other woman is going to love you. You disgust me.” I stand up, the metal chair scrapes across the pavement. “Is that the agreement here? You let me lead a double life so that you can come and screw with me every six months?”

“Michael,” someone says behind me. It’s Austin. Despite everything he hugs me, pressing his body against mine in an unabashed homosexual embrace.

“How are you?” he asks.

“I’m good! How are you?”

“Are you really good,” he narrows his eyes in mock suspicion.

“Never been better,” Laura chimes in from her seat. He smiles.

Austin pulls out a chair. “Why don’t you join me, we can have a little catch-up.”

“Actually I’ve already finished mine, I was about to leave.” Laura says, standing next to us.

He shrugs. “Oh, well, next time then?”

“Actually,” I place my hand on his chest, and then slide it up onto his shoulder. “I would like to stay, I’m sure I can make time for this.”

Laura’s face contorts in a jealous rage as we sit down. She sees herself back to the car, but it’s so nice to see him that I almost wish she’d leave forever.

“So what’s really going on? Are your classes okay?” he takes a sip of coffee, as he unpacks a book and reading glasses.

“If I’m being honest, I’m having a hard time lately. I just feel overwhelmed and under fulfilled right now.” I lean my elbows on the table.

“I’m sorry, boo. Can I help?”

I pick a fuzz ball off his shirt. Now he is perfect. He’s the kind of man I want in my wedding photos, the kind of man that I could actually leave Laura for. I want him to know me, I want him to anticipate what I’m going to say. I want him to understand me more than Laura does. He listens so well that I want to give him my body as payment for the attention he’s given me. I jokingly say so, and he assures me that he’s glad to see me. Finally, when I’ve exhausted myself, I start to blush.

“I’m so sorry! I’ve spent this whole time talking about myself, and now I’ve ruined your time.”

“It’s okay, it sounds like you needed to get all that off your chest.”

I grab his hands and squeeze. “Thank you.”

A squirrel rustles through the bush nearby. “Austin, do you want to get dinner sometime?

I feel like I didn’t give you any chance to catch me up on your life.”

“That would be really nice. I would really like that.” He squeezes my hand.

When I get back to the car, Laura is waiting for me. The first thing she says is, “God, you’re such a burden. Did you even take a breath that whole time?”

“He’s coming over for dinner on Saturday.”

“You’re not even listening. You’d be perfect if you’d just stop talking.”

Laura and I listen to Adele in the living room. I’m partway through roasting chicken breasts, waiting for the timer.

“You’re such a sloppy drunk.” Laura says suddenly over a glass of wine.

“What the fuck, Laura. I’m just sitting here!” I kick the coffee table.

“What?” She laughs.

“I said I didn’t do anything, I’m just sitting here.” She takes a deep breath and bobbles her head, talking in her baby voice, “I’m not talking about tonight. I’m talking about that night at the club.”

“What the hell do you know, you weren’t even there.”

“I know that you’re a sloppy fucking drunk, and that’s why Jon wouldn’t even sleep with you.” She crosses her legs and sips her wine with a grin.

“Don’t you fucking talk about him. And we did have sex that night.” I slam my glass down on the table. She laughs.

“Right, a surprise fuck in the middle of the night. Your face shoved down in a pillow so he doesn’t even have to look at your sorry ass. That’s romantic, huh?”

“You know sometimes the things you say really sting.”

“Oh stop, you know you love me.” She winks.

“No, I’m serious. You make me feel bad about myself.”

“What? Am I abusive? Emotionally abusive, is that it?” She squints at me and crosses the room to get right up in my face.

“Yeah, you kind of are. Okay?” I lean back as far as I can without looking stupid.

Suddenly she wraps her fingers around my throat. They are so cold I gasp.

“Listen to me,” she says, very low and even, “you can’t abuse something that deserves it.”

My body tremors, jaw clenches, and unclenches. She pulls back.

“Go shower, you smell like chicken.”

I’ve been in the shower for forty minutes and my skin is bright red from the steaming water. After the first ten minutes I quit crying and just sat there on the shower floor with the water beating down my back.

I hear the shower curtain rings slide across the rod. Laura is upon me then, fully clothed, gently slipping her arms and legs around me until our bodies are intertwined. Her hands are on my face, in my hair, she tilts my head back and kisses my neck, my lips. When her tongue slides into my mouth, I kiss her back. She draws my hand up to her breasts and together we pull her shirt up over her head. She holds me to her chest as she reaches down to grope me.

“Still not a man I see.”

I shove her off of me and she slams her head against the shower wall, winces in pain. I placed a palm over her mouth and hoist her up by the waist. She kicks and protests madly, clawing at my arms. I don’t want to hurt her, I just want her to stop. With all my strength I toss her out of the shower and she rips the shower curtain off the rod. She lays there unmoving, partially obstructed by the cloth and plastic. Fear runs through my body. Have I killed her? But when she stirs, moaning, I am disappointed, not relieved.

“You need to get out of my house.”

“You can’t kick me out.” She croaks.

“Get up.” I towel myself dry, pull on the clothes I’ve left folded on the toilet lid. I hang my towel up, the end with tag facing the wall, and step over the puddle of water and plastic.

Laura sits up as I start collecting her things and piling them up in the middle of the bedroom. “Michael, you’re being crazy, I forgive you okay? Why don’t you calm down? Go clean something.” “I am.” I shove the clothes into her suitcase, I don’t fold them this time. I don’t even care if they’ll wrinkle, it’s not my job to fold them.

“Michael, you can’t turn me out! You need me,” she says, grabbing my arms and pulling me away from the suit case. “You can still have a perfect life. We can still have a perfect life!”

I freeze.

“We can have the perfect life Michael,” she says again. I stare at my perfectly made bed, the perfectly draped curtains, the perfectly placed dresser filled with perfect rows of socks and shirts.

And I want to tear it down.

I lurch at the desk and shove it all to the floor, the lamp, the pencil cups, the books go flying. Laura screams, recoils, braces herself against the bathroom door. I start ripping the sheets off the bed, overturn the mattress. Smashing the photo frames and emptying drawers. It isn’t enough.

Laura’s shouting, begging, as I rip open the kitchen cabinets and start tossing dishes over my shoulders, every neat stack of plates and bowls explode against the hardwood. From the refrigerator jars of pickles and maraschino cherries go flying, some even smash through the windows I love so much. There’s yogurt and syrup and mustard whipped across the walls and I break bottles of wine against the granite countertop. The feeling of the bottle crashing against the counter sends sparks up my fingers, the spray of alcohol stings where the glass has cut them.

Finally I collapse in a puddle of milk and wine, sticky, wet, bleeding. The blood rushes past my ears as I lift my head. Austin kneels down beside me and stills my shaking hands in his.

It’s Saturday.

“Is she gone?” “Who?” he asks.

“Is she gone?”

“Michael, there’s no one here. It’s just you.”

Laura is gone when I look back in the bedroom. Her things have disappeared.

“I’m sorry Austin.” But he isn’t listening. He’s dialing 911 from the kitchen.

I stand among the wreckage and I start to cry. I cry for the three years I spent with her, and for the wasted two years after. I cry for my father who may never understand me. I cry for the men who didn’t love me and for all the ones who did. More than any of this I cry because these are my first real moments as a gay man.

It is perfection.

Little Red Shorts

“Dear God,” I pray, speeding down the freeway one night in July, “I know I shouldn’t ask for this—at least not until afterward—but please don’t let there be any real consequences.”

It was always like this when driving to hook up with someone new. I’ll cede that praying for God to bless premarital sex with a stranger—not to mention homosexual premarital sex with a stranger—is odd, but it isn’t altogether an unreasonable prayer. You just need to make it there and back without getting kidnapped and without getting HIV; anything else you can clean up on your own, but those are the biggies.

So I pray.

Sometimes I even pray that I’ll enjoy myself—that he won’t smell or that I won’t make a mess of his sheets—and once I’ve finished, I imagine God just shaking his head as he grants my wishes. Or I guess he grants them, great sky genie, because to date I haven’t been kidnapped and

I don’t have HIV.

Tonight I send up a particularly urgent request, because unlike most of my escapades, the destination is not one, but two midnight strangers. That’s right, a threeway. I’m not sure how to label the specific sin; it’s whatever you call lust plus abomination, times two.

Question: If you are about to break multiple laws, does it equate to multiple sins?

These aren’t exactly sexy thoughts so I turn them off and turn the music on. There’s something about meeting a new sexual partner from the internet that turns my nerves like nothing else. You can imagine that a threeway, much like doubles tennis, is actually terrifying. I’m not sure why I agreed to it. I was content, in my pajamas reading Jane Eyre, when my phone buzzed.

Fine, I was watching the movie. I read it once. That’s not the point.

The point is, a short series of vibrations on my phone could only mean one thing: a stream of unsolicited photos from someone somewhere else. I paused the movie right on Mr.

Rochester making a stupid face (a rather unattractive casting, by the way) and opened Grindr— and I will say, nothing good comes from a story that begins with Grindr. As I imagined, there was a bid on my app complete with a portfolio from someone named Jeff. You could tell he was older but well-aged, and fit. I was lukewarm about it.

And then he sent me pictures of Spencer.

Now for context, if you polled my friends and ex-lovers, their average ranking of my appearance would lie a step or two shy of ‘the pretties.’ The unspoken rule—that people generally have access to their own step and below—leaves me playing footsie with ‘the normals’ and ‘the slightly-aboves.’ You can imagine that when Spencer was a modelesque, 6’3 man with tanned muscles and idyllic bone structure, I was in no position to decline. So yes, despite all my mock-puritan attempts at chastity, I was shit, showered, shaved and on the road in half an hour.

When I park across the street from Jeff’s house, I remember not only am I wearing the sluttiest of red bathing suits but that my balls are literally hanging out the bottom. How in the hell do I cross the street in this? Their poor neighbors. I try to see inside the neighbors' dark houses, hoping this is some old people neighborhood where there aren’t any children. I’m not sure I want old people to heckle me either. Finally I decide that being after eleven, it’s unlikely that children or elders would still be awake, so I strut my ass across the pavement just as a car comes round the corner to catch me in its headlights. I just finish crossing the street, obviously, but not without a spotlight on my little red shorts. I was promised a hot tub and by god there better be.

Question: Do I believe in omens?

Their front door is open behind an expensive looking screen door. Music plays low inside, I knock. After a moment, he greets me at the door and welcomes me in. Move slowly, I tell myself. Gracefully, you are an adult!

“How’s it going?” he asks.

“I’m doing alright.” I smile to show I’m much less anxious than I am. This is the critical moment—the first few minutes give you all the gut feelings you need to know whether or not you’re in danger, supposedly.

“I'm great, just enjoying some music after a pretty busy day.”

“What did you do?” I swing the car keys around my index finger.

“Pool party, I’ve been drinking since the afternoon,” he laughs.

“Busy day indeed.” Take in the room, the furniture. “You have a beautiful home. I love that chair over there.” It’s a velvet armchair nestled between a potted plant and floor lamp.

“Thank you! I can’t take any credit for it. Spencer designed everything. He’s just got this eye for decor, he’s awesome at it. I helped him do the planters out front, but he’s the one who keeps up the landscaping.”

Follow him to the kitchen where I sit at the bar, set my keys and phone down on the granite. “Spencer is your…?” “My husband! Didn’t I say that? Or did I say boyfriend before?” He opens the refrigerator.

“You said you were married, but I wasn’t sure if that was Spencer. So many men have wives these days.”

“Oh god,” he laughs again, setting two cups of ice and a bottle of gin on the counter. “Is that so?”

“Oh yes, wives and families, it’s really an epidemic.”

“Why’s that?” Blue eyes fixed on me, as if he really wants to know.

“The children.” We laugh together then, and my nerves are set at ease. He seems normal.

This will be fine. I think this will be fun.

“Yeah well you won’t find any children here. We’re regular DINKs.” He says.

“DINKs?” I raise an eyebrow, carefully watching him pour tonic water into a glass.

“Dual income no kids.” He slides the cocktail toward me on the counter. It makes that clean sliding noise across the granite that somehow sounds like money. It rings in my ears.

“DINK huh? I like it. I think that’s what I should have said in kindergarten when they asked what I wanted to be.” A dog appears at the sliding door, sniffing shyly at the glass.

“But of course we have Pepper.” Jeff lets the dog inside, where it runs to lick my feet.

I sit on the ground and dig my fingers into Pepper’s fur. He sniffs my face, kisses me, and

I love him—I should come here more often just to play with the dog, and then I am embarrassed to be sitting on the ground like a child. I stand.

“Wow that’s awesome. Pepper’s usually afraid of new people but he sure likes you.”

“Dogs know good people,” I smile.

Fact: I am so smug when a man’s dog likes me. By now we’ve calmed my nerves, we’ve met the dog. I’m thinking it’s time to get on with it.

“So where’s Spencer?” I ask.

“He’s actually sleeping. I think he’s tired from the party, but I’m sure we can entice him to wake up.” Jeff brings a glass to his mouth. When he sets it down it’s nearly empty.

Pace around their dining room, it’s modern with a long shiny table stained slate gray.

Beautiful leafy plants grow from ceramic pots in the center, neat and green. There’s a wall made of bookshelves opposite the kitchen where I trace paperback novels with my fingertips. Books

I’ve read, books I’ve seen, and books I’ve never heard of.

“Have you read all these?” I ask.

“No they’re all Spencer’s. He’s a bookworm. The perfect English major.”

I imagine myself in that velvet armchair I liked so much, reading in front of their stone fireplace. It is perfection. “I’m an English major too,” I say, “I’ve read some of these.”

“Right on. What do you want to do with your degree? Law school? Business?” He leans over the table right close to me. I shift my weight into him.

“Wow,” the corners of my mouth turn up, “People usually ask if I’ll be a teacher, as if that’s all it’s good for.”

“That’s bullshit. You can do anything with a command of the language. Spencer’s in PR, and god he’s good. I’ve seen him working. I’ll listen to him on a phone call with his CEO, and when Spencer speaks, everyone listens.”

Fact: No man brags about my work. Fiction: It doesn’t matter.

“I want to go into publishing,” I say, brushing past him to continue my self-guided tour.

There’s a photo wall with different frames like brickwork, the largest of which is a wedding photo. They are a handsome pair, the two of them, all done up in gray tailored suits and white carnations. Their polished shoes are gleaming in the cool light of a wisteria arbor. Suddenly I feel that I’m intruding on something sacred, something bound. I am a spectator in this fabulous home and I don’t belong.

Glance back to Jeff, helpless and uncomfortable. Finishing his drink, he doesn’t notice.

There are a lot of photos of him in other countries—Egypt, Italy, Peru—many of which have other men in them.

“Who is this?” I point to a handsome man next to him in a photo of Machu Picchu. His finger is hooked one of Jeff’s beltloops.

“That’s one of my traveling buddies. That was an awesome trip.”

“Was Spencer there?”

“No, no, he’s more of a homebody. He’s most comfortable here, so he lets me go on adventures without him.”

“Does he get lonely when you’re gone?”

“Not at all. That’s loving someone. Wherever I am in the world, I’m not lonely because I know Spencer exists.”

“God, I want to love someone that much,” I laugh alone.

“No you don’t. You’re only what, twenty-one? You don’t want to settle down. You’ve got years of beautiful men before you settle down.”

He’s doing that thing I hate, that thing that older men always try to do. Set me on your knee and tell me how it is, daddy.

“I promise you I’ve slept around enough. I’m ready for something serious.” I smile politely back at him. “Maybe you think you are, but there’s so much left to explore.”

“I’ve already explored my way into a massive body count.”

“Oh yeah? What’s massive to you?” He pours himself another drink, coolly smirking at me like I am a child. Compared to him I am.

Pros of sleeping with older men: Better sex. Cons: Condescension.

“Upwards of fifty. Number depends on what we do tonight.” My lips pull back, seductive

Isn’t it something I’m proud of? I know what I like, I know what I’m doing. I’ve worked my ass off to achieve it. The last man I slept with told me I was the best he’s ever had. I don’t need a fucking mentor.

Question: Can you also be proud of what brings you shame?

“That’s cute. I’ve slept with over twelve hundred men. Trust me, there’s a lot of wonderful things to be had before you find the one.”

“There’s no way you’re not making that up.”

“I swear to god,” he says and crosses his heart.

You’re not supposed to swear on God, I think without meaning to. I’m sure it is the least of God’s worries.

“What would you say,” he continues, “If I told you I’ve had three loads up my ass this week.”

“I’d say I thought you were a top.” I’ve made him laugh again.

“I’d say I don’t let any experience pass me by.” He finishes another drink.

“Clearly. You better know what you’re doing then.”

He saunters toward me and feels my body. My shorts drop to the kitchen floor, and

Spencer is nowhere to be found. We start without him.

As we’re stumbling toward the bedroom, I stop and ask him: “Is this okay?”

“Is what okay?” He grunts, closing the door behind us and pressing me into the bed sheets. They’re soft against my skin, the kind of bed sheets adults buy because they can.

I want so badly to ask him the thread count but instead I whisper, “Is it okay to do this without him?”

“No, no,” he pants in my ear, and then bites it, “we play together, separate, and every which way we feel.”

It would be strange for him to join us now, even though he was the reason I came. As someone who never enjoyed threeways, I am actually relieved. And still, I wonder what it must sound like. I wonder if he even knows I’m here, imposing myself upon the beautiful space he designed.

I gather we’re in the guest bedroom, but it’s still wonderfully made. The sort of house with little brass sculptures on random surfaces. It’s sharp, angular, and clean. Nothing like the apartments of the men my age. God do I prefer this over the sweaty, weed smelling hookups of the university village.

And then Jeff… god do I prefer him to the boys themselves. Unlike them he’s sure of himself, decisive. When he penetrates me without a condom I say nothing. He pauses just long enough for me to protest, but with his wide hand under the small of my back, I would do anything he asked.

“Is that good?” I ask him, wondering how I compare to twelve hundred men.

He does something unexpected, then. Rolling onto his back he says, “Don’t worry about what feels good to me. Do what feels good to you.” I laugh.

“Seriously, go ahead and use me.”

I’m not sure I know how. Hasn’t sex always been a performance? Not tonight, he seems to say, massaging my hips. His fingertips press into my skin, I press into him, and I try things

I’ve never been brave enough to try, knees wobbling like a fawn just born. I feel just born.

After a time, he lays me back down gently, dragging his palm down my stomach as he heads to the door and throws it wide open. I watch him open the room where Spencer is sleeping.

It’s black inside. The darkness creeping out intimidates me as Jeff returns and pushes down above me.

“I want him to catch us,” he whispers in my ear. He’s really carrying on now, grunting and speaking in his outside voice. The bed squeaks, beats against the paint. I’m playing my part again, playing it well, but I’m not having fun anymore.

Oh please be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet.

I would give anything for the bed to stop thumping. I would move to the floor if the mattress would stop screaming. It is the same feeling I had as a child, standing in front of my parents’ bedroom door after wetting the bed, but afraid to wake them up—I'd have rather waited all night. I fix my eyes onto that black opening, apologetic and small, and imagine Spencer watching us from the safety of darkness.

Without warning, the door slams shut and the darkness disappears.

Jeff chuckles, drops of his sweat falling on my chest. I resist the urge to wipe them off as he says, “Spencer’s only rule is that I don’t wake him up. He hates it.”

“You’re in trouble then.” “What’s done is done. You should go in there.” He says, pulling me into a sitting position.

“No!” I whisper through my teeth, clutching the bedframe.

“Come on, just go warm him up. He’ll come around.”

“He wants to sleep. Let him fucking sleep.” It comes out angrier than intended. I realize I am angry.

Question: If there’s only one rule, why break it?

An hour later I’m lying on Jeff’s chest. We’ve been talking and he tells me many things I didn’t know I wanted to know. Pros of sleeping with older men: I learn about a gay community very different from my own. Cons: Imposter syndrome.

He tells me what it was like before Grindr, how he didn’t come out until well after college. I ask questions, tell him I came out in high school, and he congratulates me like I’ve accomplished something.

He used to make up excuses to leave his friends at the bars and walk over to Lavender

Heights where the gay clubs are. He tells me how he’d stand in front of the door, stealing a look inside when it opened but never going in.

He talks a lot about his husband, only good things. They met through a mutual friend. I tell him how rare it is to meet organically. He tells me I haven’t lived enough to meet men that way. I protest, explaining that my gaydar is broken. He says my gaydar is tuning—it’ll finish when I’m older. I ask if there will always be another threshold or if I’ll ever be all grown up. He cups my ass and says I look grown to him. I like it. I slept with a man once who didn’t tell me he was married. They were open, but I didn’t find out until his husband left him for a fuck buddy. The man I’d been sleeping with sought my comfort; I remember asking, “Why should I feel bad for you? I hope sharing your marriage bed was worth it.” He begged me to stop, told me he needed a friend. I am not his friend.

“Does Spencer see people too?” I ask.

“He does—not nearly as much as I do though.”

I’m not sure I believe him. The more I think about Spencer, the more I think he and I are the same. Closing my eyes, I picture all those men in the travel photos, imagine Spencer framing them, knowing they are the men that kept his husband warm abroad. I wonder how that feels.

“Aren’t you ever worried one of you will have feelings for someone you’re sleeping with?”

“It actually happened once. I started falling for this guy I was seeing. He was young, he said he loved me. I wanted to run off with this guy, but it was all brain chemicals and shit. I knew it was stupid, but I couldn’t get it off my mind. I had to tell Spencer.”

My nose wrinkles as he tells me the story. I smooth my face.

“I had to be honest with him because I knew that it was crazy. I knew that Spencer was the one for me.”

Then why isn’t he enough? That is my smug question for men like Jeff, but of course it isn’t that simple, is it? I wouldn’t know. Like all of my conversations with lovers past and present, I catalog the experience. It will live somewhere between the other men I’ve slept with, and all the open couples online. It will live somewhere between pop culture’s image of our promiscuity, and all the false starts I’ve had with men who were too fucked up to love me. Once I tried to befriend a gay couple I met on campus. I asked them out for coffee but it never happened. Later on I heard them telling people I asked to have a threeway. I cried. My friends think gay couples are cute, but my taste for them has soured.

“How did you guys get here?” I ask, immediately wishing I hadn’t. What I mean to ask is how did we get here?

“Get where?”

“Open… I guess.”

“Well, we weren’t always open. It was after about a year of marriage.” He rolls onto his side and props his head up. “I told him I had an itch I needed to scratch, but he was the one I wanted to be with at the end of the day.”

My heart cleaves like an unprecious mineral. “What did he say?”

“He was okay with it so long as I didn’t leave him. And now it works well for us.”

“Jeff, are there any monogamous couples anymore?” I ask, suddenly existential. And sad.

“I mean sure.” He sighs, rubbing my back. “Monogamy works well for some people, and that’s great. But I’d say about eighty percent are open, and half of those dicks who say they’re monogamous are just cheating on each other.”

“Why do they do it? Why can’t they just be satisfied with one man? If I was married I really don’t think I could be open.”

“You say that now, but you’re young. I promise, after ten years of marriage, you don’t want to rip his clothes off anymore. But Spencer’s my best friend.”

“Are you not attracted to him anymore?”

“Of course I’m still attracted to him! He’s like a model right? I just think it’s biological, for one thing. You’ve got a bunch of men who want to spread their genes far and wide, reproduce as much as possible. When two men pair up I guess it's easier to be open than when it’s hetero because they both want it. Humans didn’t evolve to be monogamous. We weren’t meant to be.”

“Fascinating theory,” I roll over to face away from him, balling the pillow up under my head. “What if I want to be monogamous? Is it possible?”

He places a warm hand on my hip.

“I’m not saying it isn’t possible. I’m saying you won’t want it as much as you think you do.”

It’s bad feng shui to hang mirrors in front of the bed because it invites a third party into the room. There are no mirrors in this room at all, but here I am.

Jeff snores lightly on his side. I lay awake in the dark, devising an escape plan. How slowly I’ve been inching toward the edge of the mattress to slip away without him waking. At any cost I have to leave before morning. I have to leave before Spencer wakes because I cannot face him. In my head I replay a scene in which he emerges from the master bedroom at the very moment I’m sneaking down the hall. I don’t know what to say except “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

Touching my foot to the floor I’m able to drag myself off the mattress without a sound, by the grace of God, who I imagine would like to see me safely home. On my way down the hall, though, I stop for the overwhelming need to lean my head against Spencer’s door. I try to hear him breathing, to know he’s still alive against all odds. I’m not sure that I would be. I’m not sure that it wasn’t a ghost who shut the door on us, because there’s no way that I could survive this marriage. My fingertips brush the silver knob, and suddenly I know the only thing worse than coming face to face would be to leave before I saw him. I turn the handle slow, so slow it doesn’t make a sound, and enter the mausoleum. It’s cool, sheer curtains catch the moonlight in the breeze. The master bedroom, like the rest of the home, is beautifully done—dark walls and bright white trim, a ceiling fan and decorative pillows from the bed stacked up neatly in the corner. And there he is, shirtless on top of the comforter, chest rising and falling as he sleeps very much alive.

What strength must it take to sleep through it all, to know what is happening on the other side of the wall. There is an abstract painting there—all that separates the men is a canvas and less than a foot of drywall.

I stroke his cheek, and lower my ear to his chest. Hear his heart pumping, the air flowing through his lungs. I cherish him.

He sleeps in the center of the bed, knee bent. I wonder how long it's been since he shared this bed with Jeff, how long it's been since they lay together. I wonder if they ever will again. His lips are smooth when I trace them with my finger. I want him to swallow me whole, to carry me in his stomach where he and I can speak without talking.

I reach around his side and hold him to me, cradling him as I pull at the seam along his spine. I stretch the skin and muscle back to watch his heart beat. It’s small and sad and lonely, so

I unhinge his ribs and hold it in my hands, that fragile machinery. But in my palms I can’t tell whose heart it is—mine or his.

I’m still naked but I don’t want to be anymore, so I fold myself inside his body and disappear into him like a duvet.

When we open our eyes again it’s morning. It’s Sunday and it’s time to wake up. When we stretch our fingers across the sheet we are not surprised to find it empty. We are not surprised by anything.

In the hall we find our husband stuffing sheets and pillowcases into the machine for washing. He needs a shower.

“Morning.” He smiles, moves to kiss us.

“Breath.” We say, resisting him.

“Sorry.”

Run our fingers through our hair. “I really wish you wouldn’t wake me up.”

“I’m sorry, I just thought you’d want to join in. It’s been a while.” He blinks at us.

“Don’t wake me up, okay?” Kiss his cheek and head into the kitchen where Pepper is waiting by his bowl. Press our lips into his little head, scratch his belly. Jeff squats down next to us, dragging handsome hands up and down Pepper’s fur and speaking in his baby voice. Sit down for coffee and an English muffin, Pepper laying across our feet. Our husband starts to unload the dishwasher. We watch him and the way the light moves across his bare shoulders. He looks back at us and smiles. The dog licks our toe, and for a moment, our little family looks just like I imagined it.

“Did you water the plants yesterday?”

“Uh,” he sets two glasses in the cabinet, “I thought you did it.”

“I asked you to do it before the party. I was ass deep in appetizers, remember?”

“I must have forgotten. Here, I’ll do it right now.” He stands abruptly and fills a cup with tap water.

“Jeff, the filtered water, and the plant food under the sink.” “It’s fine, there’s minerals in the tap.”

“I can do it.” We stand and take the cup from him, dump it in the sink. Water splashes onto the counter.

“They’re just plants,” he says. Just plants.

We carry the watering can around the house, inspecting each ceramic pot for signs of rot, for yellow leaves and drooping stems. They are healthy, albeit thirsty. Houseplants are the relics of a home well taken care of.

Jeff’s phone chimes, over and over. We wish it was on silent.

“Babe, look at this,” he calls.

Over his shoulder we stare down at the orange and blue messages. “What am I looking at?”

“What do you think of him?” He swipes through the photos.

“Cute.” We return the watering can to its home under the sink.

“He wants to come see us, Sunday funday right?”

“I was hoping we could spend the day together. There’s a gallery in the city I want to see.

Take a drive with me?”

“But babe, he’s only visiting. He flies out tonight.”

“I don’t want to. And I just changed the sheets on our bed.”

“That’s fine, I was going to use the guest room.”

“Those sheets are in the washer.”

“Spencer, forget the sheets,” he stands and wraps his arms around us from behind. “Come on.” Nibbles our earlobe.

“I’m going to the gallery today. It would be nice for you to join.” His phone chimes on the table.

While he showers we cannot resist the urge to unlock his phone where the message bubbles shimmer in our face:

“He’s not in the mood,” Jeff wrote to the boy from the photos.

“Damn.”

“You down for just us?”

“Is that okay with your boyfriend?”

“Yeah he doesn’t care.”

Boyfriend.

The boy is young, and tight, and slender. In the hallway mirror we touch our cheek and peer into the reflection. There are smile lines around our eyes.

Red shorts on the tile in the middle of the night.

You saw them then?

We always know when someone’s in the house. We always see artifacts—

A set of keys on the kitchen counter, an empty glass on the coffee table. We can even tell by the fingerprints on the sliding glass door. Last night, up to grab a drink of water, it was shorts on the kitchen floor.

When we were choosing the tile for the kitchen Jeff said he didn’t care what we picked, so long as it made us happy. Is it enough?

We should have held red shorts against the sample.

While we’re in the city Jeff’s mom calls us from Boston. “Well hello hello.” We sit on a bench by the water.

“How are my boys?”

“Doing fine, Jeff’s home but I’m in the city. How are you, love?”

“Oh that’s wonderful. You know me, one day is as good as another.” She pauses. “Oh shit, hold on the timer’s beeping.”

We smile, listening as she opens and shuts the oven. Jeff’s mother walked him down the aisle at our wedding. She placed his hand in ours, brushed a piece of lint from our shoulder, and touched us on the cheek. That day we married more than just each other.

“I tried calling Jeff but it went to voicemail, I was hoping you’d be together,” the phone crackles, struggling to pick her up from across the room.

“Oh I think he’s working on the planters today, I’ll ask him when I get home.” We glance at the time, wondering if Jeff is still with the boy from this morning.

“Are you having a nice time? What are you doing?”

“I saw a few galleries. At the pier for now. Steak for dinner.”

“I’ll be right over.” She laughs, picking up her phone and coming in clear again.

“It is time for you to visit us again. When do you think you can get to the west coast?”

Sea lions bark in the distance.

“Oh, I’d like that, but what with my Canasta night I can hardly get away!”

“Retirement suits you, sounds like. But see if your secretary can pencil us in.”

“Don’t sass your momma. Anyway, I’ve got to get the rest of this dough in the oven, have Jeff call me back when he gets a chance. You have fun.”

“I will, take care of yourself.”

“Always do, love you hunny.” Hit end call.

The gallery was stunning, Jeff would have liked it. We tell him about it over wine as he lights the grill. There are two cuts in the fridge, waiting for two husbands to dine together. We watch the veins of his forearm as he gently turns the meat with a pair of tongs. There’s salad, pasta, garlic bread, and steak. Candles, flowers, napkin rings, and drinks. We share another meal, and pretend that he wasn’t fucking a stranger down the hall.

We have the faintest desire to know, to ask about every part of it. How was the sex, did he have a nice body, did you both finish? Did you ever think of us?

We won’t ask. We will pretend that we know only what we did when we stood for the portrait under the wisteria arbor. We will remember that a gay man’s life is never perfect, that comfort and windfall joys are enough.

We can’t leave him.

Why not?

We let the answers line up in our mind and suddenly we’re facing all the words we wish we could have said in nine years of watching our husband do this to us. Why not? Because I’m afraid of leaving. Because I don’t want to leave. Because it used to be good, so good it was worth all the bullshit. Because I’m too old to date again. Because I would miss him. Because his mom would be disgusted, because my dad would say he told me so, because if I left him all our friends would know. Because I’m already getting more than I deserve. Because I couldn’t do better. Because I’m not enough, my body’s not enough.

Because I need him. Because I love him. No matter how many people he fucks in our home, or out where I can’t see. Because he loves me, and he’s the only one who ever did. Because we love each other.

Is that enough?

We don’t know. We don’t know if it is, but we know that it has to be. We know that it’s too late for it not to be. So we stay.

And suddenly I’m back in that dark guest bedroom, lying beside Jeff’s back as Spencer sleeps on the other side of the wall. I make my escape, grab my shorts from the kitchen floor. I hope he didn’t see them, but somehow I know he did. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.

Here I am, tip-toeing across their lawn at some strange hour of morning, never having met that beautiful Spencer. And yet, I know him more intimately than the man who was just inside of me.

He is me. I am us. And I break on our behalf.

I twist the shower knobs and wait for the water to scald my hand before stepping inside the curtain. It was not the strangest night I’ve ever had. I wasn’t kidnapped, the sex was pretty good, HIV status pending. I rinse the shampoo from my hair and scrub Jeff off my skin.

I have a piece of him now, and that’s one less piece for Spencer.

I want to give it back. I want to scour the earth hunting for all the little pieces of

Spencer’s husband so I can give them back, and that thought is so heavy my knees buckle. I clutch the bar in the wall where the rags hang, holding on with all my strength and surprised to realize I’m sobbing. The sounds come from deep within my spirit, shocking the slick walls as they surface and knock around the shower. My naked body turns red under the unbearable heat. I let it burn. I grieve, for my future and the predestined infidelity of my partner, for the brokenness of the gay community, for the hell that I imagined in Spencer’s skin. I grieve for all of the boys like me who let strange men steal their faith and replace it, night after night, until we are willing to settle for this half-baked version of polyamorous love.

We didn’t sign up for it when we woke up one day and realized we were gay from conception. We couldn’t have known the disappointment that awaited us. And so I roll that piece of Jeff around in my mouth, needing desperately to spit it out but I can’t. Regretting desperately that I took it, but I did.

So I pray.

“Dear God, don’t punish me. God, don’t curse me like Spencer.”

I want to give it back—that marble in my mouth, the piece of Jeff that I stole when I lay with him on Egyptian cotton—but I can’t, and Spencer is the loser. Better him than me, I think suddenly through the steam that fills my lungs and slides down the mirror in droplets.

Better him than me. But I’m the one crying in the shower at 3AM. Better me than him?

Question: Can I be both the perpetrator and the victim?

Answer: Yes.

The Taste of Silt

As children my brother and I would build houses out of mud, small ones, cities in miniature. On the edge of the property, by that old wire gate that never opens, we would pull up the weeds, brush back the leaves, and clear the space like pioneers. Smoothing the earth with our little suntanned fingers and palms, we’d squat barefoot around the circle we’d made. “The construction zone,” my brother said.

And then down to the water’s bank to hunt for that river silt, the best dirt for building. It only takes a bucket full and the right amount of water, hand mixed, a recipe tried and tested. My daddy was a plaster man, mixing mud was in our veins.

“You can always add more water, but you can’t take it out,” my daddy said when he donated the bucket and a swatch of porch screen to our project. But we pinched and poked and squeezed that silt until we were sure it was just right, making balls of it in our hands to see if it would hold. It did.

Walls with doors and windows, shaped like clay by the little trowels that were our fingers. Oak leaves for carpet, and twigs as rafters, we sealed them up against the sky. It was blue and sometimes sandy when they plowed the fields, but there were no clouds in August.

The sun scorched the valley, turning our hair blond and our skin brown as it fiercely baked our city. When the dark mud turned light we knew it was ready. Our own adobe village.

And nothing smelled so good.

Once my grandma asked us “have you ever just wanted to eat the mud?” We made faces, mocked her, and watched her laugh us off. But I knew just what she meant. And the answer, unexplainably, was yes. Yes I do want to eat the mud. And it’s my secret, which I’ll share if you keep it, that I have.

Of course I tried silt soup, so many years ago at the edge of the yard with my brother. I’d dip my finger in the bucket and steal a taste here, a dough ball there, but only when I knew he wasn’t looking.

Secret secret secret—because even as my body knew it well, my mind knew it wrong.

How could I explain that eating mud felt pure, natural and delicious, when I did not yet know those words? How could I articulate scrumptious when I was too young to know its definition?

So yes, I ate dirt, just like every other boy. But I’m not like every other boy, because unlike them

I kept it up.

Have you ever seen a grown man eat mud?

I’ve decided recently that I don’t like my brother. When we were children he only valued mud if he could use it to build things, and I don’t think he’s changed much since then. I wrote a long post on Facebook the other week about climate change and he responded by suggesting that

I should send my car to the crusher. I’ll admit, she’s not very fuel efficient, but I love my car. He said I was a hypocrite.

I think hypocrisy depends on a failure to conform to one’s own moral high ground. The thing is, I have no high ground to conform to. I’m just a man who loves the earth.

I love it so much I sprinkle it over my cereal in the morning, and spread it over my toast like butter. I keep some of it in the fridge, in old jars of mayonnaise I cleaned out and filled again. There’s a canister of silt in my cabinet, and I swear it smells just like nutmeg when I open it. I have a mason jar full of fine red sand from Utah in the pantry, and I only use it sparingly because I don’t get to Utah as often as I’d like. It’s pretty on a salad or over mashed potatoes. I use it to season my spaghetti sauce.

I don’t care for potting soil because it’s mostly little wood chips. I want real mud, the kind you can roll out on the counter and bake cookies with.

I try not to go to the doctor because they always want to take a sample of my blood. It’s always something wrong with my heart, or high levels of potassium. The thing is, I feel perfectly fine.

I had to go to the dentist recently with a painful molar. Before I went, I swished water around my mouth again and again, spitting up fine grains of sand until finally that familiar gritty feeling was gone. Dr. Sufi seemed concerned anyway, as he pressed my tongue around with the little circular mirror, and after working on my molar sent me home with a guard to wear at night.

It’s supposed to stop me from grinding my teeth while I sleep. I think about this over dinner as I take a clump of earth and work it into paste with my new crown.

My roommate squeezes fresh orange juice every morning. She used to drink coffee every day, but gave it up because of the environmental impact. Now she buys oranges from the farmer’s market and drinks juice instead. Sometimes I squeeze it for her before she wakes up, because I love my roommate. I want her to love me back, so I try not to be bad. Three times a week we workout together, and then get breakfast in town to cancel out the calories we burned.

Today I wanted to skip the exercise and head straight to breakfast but she makes me go anyway.

“What would he have me do? Live in the woods with zero carbon footprint? Facts are facts independent of who delivers them.” I say, jogging alongside her on the treadmills in the gym of our apartment complex. “I don’t understand what his point is.” Sweat drips down her forehead.

“He’s saying that I have no right to talk about climate change when I’m not practicing what I preach.”

“You weren’t even talking about driving though.”

“Exactly. I was just synthesizing the evidence to show that humans are exacerbating global heating. It was supposed to be informative. I don’t know why he took it personally.”

“I’m sorry, but your brother’s stupid.” She increases the incline on her treadmill.

“Careful, they’ll call us elitists.”

“I’d rather be elitist than ignorant.”

Hard to argue with that.

Not long after my brother’s suggestion, though, I sit behind the wheel of my car and think about the crusher. Am I part of the problem? I want to check and see what my gas mileage is but

I don’t know where to look for that or what button to push to find it. Of course, I’d have to turn the car on to check. I spend something like half an hour debating whether or not it’s worth it to let the car idle while I search. Eventually I get out and lock it without ever turning it on. Perhaps, if we live in a world where “every little bit counts,” I made a difference.

The UPS guy pulls into my apartment complex and leaves his truck running while he talks on the phone.

I have to be careful with my diet, because sometimes eating dirt can back things up. If I overdo it, I get some lower stomach aches, and I can’t make myself go to the bathroom.

Sometimes I vomit up flecks of blood, but it’s hard to distinguish those from the moody color of the dirt itself. Even so, I want to taste it, to consume it and let it live inside me. On days when I just know I can’t take it solid, I drink it like a sort of tea, placing some silt in a bowl of cheesecloth and straining warm water through it. It tastes like the delta.

A man named Dan Yakir published an article called “The paper trail of the 13C of

12 atmospheric CO2 since the industrial revolution period.” He tested the concentrations of C and

13C preserved in the pages of old books, using the dates as a rather organized way of mapping the changes. His study, and others, show that the carbon in our atmosphere really is coming from fossil fuels. I know enough about chemistry to understand what the article said, but not enough to explain it, which is very frustrating. “We’ve been warming since the ice age,” my daddy says, spreading plaster with his trowel.

“Did you read it though?” I stand awkwardly with a paper bag of burgers that I brought for lunch at the job site.

“I read a bit. Your mom summarized it for me.” He doesn’t stop to eat because he must finish the entire wall. If he doesn’t make it to a corner there will be a seam. I can tell by the way his shoulders tense beneath the gray sweatshirt that he wants to explain this to me, but he knows that I know this already, so he lets me watch him work.

“Did she explain the chemistry though?”

“What?” He barks.

“When she summarized it for you. Did she explain the chemistry?”

“What chemistry?”

“The carbon thirteen isotopes, and the atmospheric concentration—”

“Yeah I think so.” He sends his shovel into the wheelbarrow and hoists some more mud onto the hawk. It makes a gritty sound when metal hits metal under wet cement, and I can smell the plaster. My mouth begins to water. I have never eaten plaster. “Anyway, thanks for reading my post.” I sit on the rim of a bucket.

“Yeah, it was well written,” his trowel scrapes against the wall, “I’m just worried about you.”

“Why are you worried?” I pick at some french fries, digging around inside the bag. I trace the spots where grease soaked through the paper.

“You just sound like the rest of them. I don’t want you to go off the deep end.”

He means the rest of the academics. Or maybe he means the rest of the liberals. They are the same to him. “Being liberal isn’t a political ideology,” he told me once, “it’s a personality disorder.” It was back when Glenn Beck was on Fox News. He said “You have a predisposition.

I can tell that if it wasn’t for us, you’d be like the rest of them.”

How do you go on when unconditional trust is replaced by knowledge?

“Aren’t you worried about fossil fuels? It has nothing to do with politics.” My heart begins to beat faster. I am tensing for a fight, like I so often am when speaking to my father.

“I’m worried about you. I think that university’s getting to your head.”

“I’ve learned a lot in the last three years. Dad, you know me. I’m not following blind. I do my research.”

He’s finished with his wall now. He washes the plaster off his hands with the hose nozzle.

“But are you reading the truth?” he asks as he slumps onto another bucket near me. I hand him his burger and a paper bag of fries. “Your professors have an agenda; I don’t think the articles they make you read are free of bias.”

“I didn’t get this from one of my professors. I found it. I’m consuming a lot of media, from all sides.” “Well of course you’re consuming media. Media’s the problem. Almost every station is owned by a liberal.”

“Not that kind of media Dad.”

“Did you get me a soda?”

“Yeah, sorry.” I hand him one of those blue and white paper cups of diet Pepsi.

“You got a straw?”

“No I just take the lid off.” I take a sip from the rim of my lemonade.

“You’re turning green on me, son.” He says, setting his soda on the ground without drinking it.

“I think I am.”

“I don’t want to fight.” He takes a bite of the burger.

I take a bite of mine. We chew in silence for a while. “Dad?”

He grunts, fumbling with the lid of his soda.

“Can I try and explain the chemistry from my blog post? It’s pretty interesting.”

“I said I don’t want to fight.”

His beard is gray, almost completely now. So much grayer than the salt and pepper of the recession. I wish he didn’t look so old, because it’s hard to hate him like this.

“I’m glad we could do this Dad.”

“Me too,” he says.

There’s a little pipe that runs along the outside of my apartment, right up to the corner by my bedroom window where it drips water. I think it’s condensation from the air conditioner in the upstairs apartment, but on the ground floor, I just hear water hitting the planter. It’s a wet ticking clock, and it keeps me up sometimes.

On this particular night I lay awake listening.

It takes an hour to get from my parents’ place to mine. Driving the Jeep for one hour probably burns a lot of fuel, but I think it was worth it. What if he died?

What if?

Maybe lunches on the jobsite would seem so special if he died. I don’t know because he isn’t dead. It seems like parents live forever, in part because they’re always there, and part because they never change. I can hear them saying the same things, in the same voices, that they’ve always said.

I throw the covers off because I can’t sleep. Shift across the hardwood, cold against my feet. I brew silt tea and pretend it is petroleum. I would drink all the oil if I could. I want to eat every fossil fuel, just to stop them from burning. It isn’t like dirt, I know it would kill me, but I want to sink a straw in my gas tank, all the gas tanks, and take the choice away from people choosing wrong.

I walk through the Saturday morning farmer’s market with my roommate. It’s late fall, and local citrus is just beginning to show up again. She’ll buy it from the store in the off season, but she prefers to find her oranges here, organic and local. I stand beside her as she fills a blue net bag with fruit.

In September, she gave me stainless steel straws for my birthday. They are so pretty that I haven’t opened them yet, and I think she’s noticed. It’s not because I hate them, it’s because I love them. They are flawless and shiny, and I would hate to scratch them against the grit and silt that’s always in the sink from my dishes.

Later that day my roommate asks me to help her dye her roots again. She uses henna to turn blond hair red, but every month or so we have to touch it up. I stand behind her in the bathroom and begin to brush the henna mud on, sectioning her hair as a I go. It smells delicious.

“Is it hard to have different views from your parents?” I ask her.

“Not really,” she says simply, “it’s just hard to articulate them in a way that they’ll accept.”

“My parents think everything I’ve learned is liberal propaganda.” I mix the bowl of henna with the brush.

“Just keep trying. They’ll either come around or stop making racist comments in front of you.”

“I sure hope so.” We laugh.

I was a much different person when we met, less informed but more opinionated. She challenged me, continues to challenge me, and I trust her politics more than anyone. She is always sure when I am not, researched when I am lazy, and balanced when I’m extreme. While my family raises eyebrows, she applauds my growth.

In the morning I squeeze orange juice for both of us, and make sure she sees me finally open the box of metal straws.

College is a bottle of Barefoot and McDonald’s. It’s the guiltiest of pleasures, hiding in the bedroom from my roommate. She’s a vegetarian, and I know she’d die to see it, but I fucking love McDonald’s french fries. I can’t go there and leave without a Big Mac. I just can’t.

I’m not sure which I feel worse about smuggling into my room, cheap wine or a pancake of cheap meat.

“Do you want to watch this documentary with me? It’s the one I showed Cassie and it made her go vegetarian.” My roommate asks, leaning against the door frame of my room. I’m hunched over the plate of fast food on my bed. At least the bottle is hidden.

“What’s it about?” I ask.

“It’s about the domestic beef industry and its environmental impact.”

It’s the sort of documentary that I wish I could download into my brain, the sort that I wish I could learn without actually watching. I stare at my half-eaten burger.

“Actually, I was going to watch a movie tonight. Do you want to watch it with me?”

“I don’t really like movies, you know that.”

“What if we watch that documentary about Mary Queen of Scots?”

“I think I’d rather watch the meat one.”

She’s smart, pitching it to me when I’m most vulnerable, fingers covered in salt and grease. My parents spent a lot of time warning me about the professors who would try to indoctrinate me. They couldn’t have known that it is so much easier to take professors with a grain than your friends. I must say, it was a pretty good documentary.

I come home from class one day and find my roommate in the bathroom with my mayo jar full of mud on the counter. She has her hair up in a towel and she’s smearing it across her cheek.

“What are you doing?” I ask her carefully. “Trying out your facemask, is that okay?”

“Yeah, for sure.” I have the urge to pick a fight, because normal people don’t just eat each other’s food, let alone rub it all over themselves. I want to pick a fight but I don’t because

I’m the one who told her it was a facemask. She doesn’t know that it’s part of my breakfast routine. She can’t know this because I’ve gone through great pains never to eat dirt in front of her.

It is because I love her that don’t want to disappoint her, to freak her out. I don’t want to miss out on going to the gym, going out to breakfast, watching the news in the morning. I don’t want to miss out on sharing orange juice. So I let her believe it’s a facemask. An hour later I pass by her on the couch and she tells me it wasn’t very good. She says it might as well have been plain mud from outside.

On Saturdays I volunteer at a wildlife refuge one city over. It’s simple work, like grounds maintenance, but it’s pretty rewarding. While leaving them the fuck alone is one way to help animals (hence refuge), limiting my carbon footprint is another. I wonder if driving my Jeep to the refuge emits enough carbon to cancel out the work I do on shift. Maybe my brother is right.

But then again, my brother believes that global heating is a farce because he read somewhere that polar bear populations are actually increasing.

“So where’s climate change now?” He says.

“It’s still here, whether there’s bears or not.”

“But obviously the melting ice isn’t hurting, maybe it’s even helping the bears.”

“No,” the blood rushes past my ear drums in waves, “The more it melts, the faster it will melt until there’s none left.” I have to choose my next sentence very precisely. I could talk about the breakdown of thermohaline circulation and ensuing weather anomalies. I could talk about the impending threat to coastal cities. I could just talk about the exponential heating we’ll experience when there’s no more ice to reflect solar radiation.

I decide to let him tell me more about the bears.

“We’ve been heating since the ice age, you know.” He says with finality.

“I know. Dad told me.”

On my recent visit I took a moment to walk down to the edge of the property, near the old wire gate that never opens. Our adobe city was by now long washed away by winds and rain, but

I could remember it clearly. The weeds we cleared had grown back and died and regrown many times, and the fence sagged even more than it did when I lived there. Only one thing is unchanging, the taste of that dirt.

As I stood there on my own I could remember the bucket, the screen, the smell of the hose water blasting down. How I longed to be a child again, standing by myself. I took a knee and wet my thumb with spit and, pressing it onto the dirt, took a fingerprint of silt back to my tongue. Tried to find comfort buried there. No matter what my family says or does, home is where the dirt is.

When I was a child I stood there, in the same spot breathing in smoke from distant wildfires. I asked myself: “What if they’re wrong? What if the earth is getting hotter?” I haven’t lived much since then, but even I can remember when most of the summer was 99 and below.

Even I can remember when it rained all winter long. It doesn’t rain so much anymore, and the fires aren’t so distant. Sometimes I think I can hear the fire roar when I lie awake at night. I can see it eating away the door frames of my parents’ house, and still they look away. I pray the little dripping pipe by my window will save us.

It’s Thanksgiving again, and I came home begrudgingly. On my best behavior, I listen to my parents, my brother, and his fiancé.

“Yeah my sister is a vegetarian except for holidays,” she says, hand on my brother’s knee.

“Of course she is,” Dad says, and everyone laughs. Everyone but me.

“I swear she changed when she went to college because she never used to be so crazy.”

She tells us all about her sister, who we’ve never met and who isn’t present to defend herself.

“Well of course she eats meat on holidays, when it’s too inconvenient to be a vegetarian,”

Dad sneers.

“Yeah,” my brother chews with his mouth open. “Clearly she doesn’t care about the animals that much.”

A wave of heat under my arms as my heart rate rises. It takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. Someday we’ll all have to be vegetarian except for on holidays. To break the peace is against my nature, but I know too much, care too much, to let it go. It’s less to do with the crazy (or not) sister who isn’t present to defend herself, and more to do with me. Me who has often been the crazy brother not able to defend himself. I think of my roommate, who is always brave enough to speak. “Are we policing vegetarianism now? Even cutting back a little bit makes a difference.” I leave my fork sticking straight up in a slab of turkey on grandma’s china plates.

“A difference for what?” my mom asks.

“Oh not the cow farts again.” Dad rolls his eyes.

Actually it’s their burps.

“You know,” he continues, “everyone wants to get upset about cow farts. Are you trying to tell me bison didn’t fart? How many bison were there, roaming around? Shouldn’t that have caused global warming too?”

“Dad, that doesn’t even make sense. The number of bison compared to domestic cattle?

That’s not a relevant—”

“But do they fart?”

“What?”

“Do bison fart?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then how is that any better than cows?”

“Leave the cows alone!” Mom pretend cries to ease the tension. It doesn't.

I’m silent until we finish eating.

I take their dishes and start to wash them by myself while the rest of the family cuts the pie. I don’t like pumpkin pie, and I don’t like my family very much, at least not from up close.

Later that night I’m on my laptop in my childhood bedroom, scrolling through the fish and wildlife service website to see exactly how many bison roamed the plains when my mom walks in without knocking and asks why I haven’t come out for the family movie.

“I’m looking up how many bison there are, compared to cows.” “Leave the cows alone!” She jests again.

“It’s not even a good argument, though. I just watched this documentary with my roommate about the domestic beef industry.”

“Don’t ruin our holiday. Seriously, drop it now.”

“But Mom.” I sit up.

“It’s not worth it, really. Son, why do you always need to be different? Just come watch the movie with us.”

As it turns out, prior to white settlement there were around 30 million bison roaming the

Great Plains. The mass slaughter of the nineteenth century left less than a thousand by 1880, of course, but there were a whole lot of them at one time. There were a lot of them, and I’m sure they farted. But there are almost 95 million cows in the US alone.

All I’m saying is that it’s a lot of methane.

I walk along the trail with a backpack full of mason jars. It’s muggy and the air sticks to my arms and face; small insects and buzzing things listen to the muffled tapping of the glass. The creek is flowing behind some tall brush and although I cannot see it, I let the babble guide me off the trail.

With careful glances left and right I squat down in a patch of dirt that is seldom stepped upon. That is where, shielded by the grass, I open my pack and unscrew the jar lids. Brush the leaves away with my palms to find that clean sweet earth, where I lift a handful of it to my face and take a whiff. It’s weaker than expected, perhaps because it’s dry. I lick my finger and take a precious layer to my mouth. Not the best I’ve ever had, but certainly sufficient. I scoop it into one of the jars and fill it to the brim. Bison were evolved to eat North American grasses but cows came from India and

Europe. Even grass-fed beef produces extra methane, because their stomachs aren’t as efficient.

One cow can produce up to 500 liters of methane a day; the average passenger vehicle emits only

12.6 liters of CO2 daily. Methane is thirty times more potent than carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

Mix in water with a spoon until I can smell the rich dark earth. I sit cross legged on the stream bank and suck on that spoon like peanut butter.

In front of the bathroom mirror I pinch my face with the tips of my index fingers. It’s finals week and I’m breaking out again. Squeeze the hard little bumps until they bleed and bruise. No satisfying burst, no white string curling from my pore, just painful little bruises waiting to scab over.

My roommate’s bathroom things have migrated to my side of the double sink counter.

Bottles of lotion, makeup, hair ties. I use my forearm to push them back across the border. Take out a plastic bottle of witch hazel and hold it to a cotton pad. Rub it all over my face. It comes away with three finger-shaped smudges. I can never tell if it’s my own oils or just damp.

Into the garbage goes the cotton pad, alongside my roommate’s, atop last night’s cotton pads and the night before’s. The trash is full of used swabs and tampon wrappers, toilet paper that was once alive until we cut it down to wipe our asses with it.

And I don’t even do that well, as evidenced by the skid marks on my underwear when I throw them in the washer with the little slimy pouch of soap I pulled from a bright orange plastic container. I grab a plastic bottle of fabric softener and pour it over the top of the load, even though I know I’m supposed to add it first. With the laundry started I feel like I’m being productive at least. In the kitchen I open up a soft plastic bag of whole wheat bread and lay two slices on the plate. Lunch meat from a plastic container with a red lid. Cheese removed from its plastic wrapper and placed in a plastic Ziplock bag. Lettuce from thin green plastic held together by a rubber band. Even the tomato has a little plastic sticker. PLU code 4064 so the cashier at the market can punch it into the register, even though they have it memorized. I peel it back and stick it to the plastic trash lining.

Mustard from a plastic bottle, and mayonnaise from a plastic jar. Even my silt spread comes from a plastic container that once held some other condiment. I lick the mud off my butter knife. God that’s good. Stick it back in the jar. It makes a scratching sound as I pull another knife full up to my nose.

It smells like home.

But this apartment is my home. It is home and there is no silt here. There is less and less fondness at my parents’ house, river silt or not. As it stands, I still have good memories of my family, but each time I visit them a piece of the fondness is taken from me. It seems to be replacing itself, reinventing itself, changing into something I don’t recognize. It has become intolerance of change, rejection of what is new. It is heels dug into sands that aren’t so palatable.

I don’t know what will happen when there’s no fondness left.

I stick the butter knife into my mouth and pull the mud off with the back of my teeth.

Tooth against metal is a gritty feeling that still makes my fingernails ache. It tastes the way a fish smells, like mole hills flattened by a sprinkler, like the green green river that flows by my dad’s material shed full of dry plaster in paper sacks.

“What are you doing?” My roommate is home early. “Oh my god, are you eating that?” I just blink at her and tongue the silt against the roof of my mouth. She drops her bag on the table, approaching the counter to get a better look at my half-made sandwich spread thick with cold, sweet smelling mud.

“This is fucking insane. I don't even know what to say.” She walks to her room and slams the door. Shortly after I can hear her talking quickly on the phone, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. I want her to love me, but I’ve been bad.

I sit on the kitchen floor and use my fingers to scoop mud out of the jar and into my mouth. I spread it across my tongue, chew it like mashed potatoes, and press into my cheeks through the gaps in clenched teeth. My stomach starts to hurt, and I can feel the itch of the particles in my throat, but I keep eating and eating until the jar is empty. Suddenly I run to the toilet and vomit. It comes back hot and flecked with blood.

I open Google on my phone and ask it if you can die from eating dirt. The first result, in bold black characters is the phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. I think an advice nurse would have been more useful, but I call it anyway. I don’t know why. Hunched over the toilet bowl I stare at all the cotton pads in the bathroom trash.

“The world is ending and nobody cares.”

Hit ‘end call.’

The next morning my roommate is eating breakfast by the window when I come into the kitchen. She eyes me cautiously.

“Good morning,” I say.

“Morning.” Her nipples are showing under her pajama shirt, fabric pilling, as she nurses a cup of orange juice. She is, understandably, tense. “Well it’s not a secret anymore.”

“Guess not.” She holds the cup to her lips and inhales deeply, unblinking.

“Are you mad at me?” I pull up a chair.

“No.” She pauses. “I just want to know why. Like, are you okay?”

Why? I hadn’t ever asked myself why before. Why do the salmon swim upstream? Why does the river oxbow? Why do the levees grow wild brome that rustles in a stale August breeze?

“I don’t know, really.” I close my eyes, “Because it feels good.”

“I’m not going to lie to you, it’s really weird.” The corner of her mouth twitches up a little, half grinning.

“I know it is. Does it change how you feel about me?”

“No, we’re stuck together.”

“Like in a 12-month lease sort of way?”

“No like in an I’m-still-your-friend-even-though-you-eat-dirt sort of way.”

“Wowza.” I lean back and blow out a puff of air. “That’s good.”

“I still think you drink too much, and I wish you’d stop bringing home McDonald’s.”

Standing, she squeezes my shoulder. “But you’re okay with me.”

Nothing feels more weightless than a home without secrets. The very walls of my apartment seem to glisten as my roommate heads down the hall and disappears into her bedroom.

When I open the canister of river silt, something has changed. It no longer smells like home, it just smells like dirt. I wet my thumb with my lips and press it into the soft warm earth.

When I bring it back to my mouth it tastes like something newly ended, like something that should have ended pages ago, and I have to rinse it from my tongue. I want to cancel the taste, so I take a sip of my roommates’ orange juice, still sitting on the table. It coats my throat and soothes the dirty itching I’d come to know so well. It tastes like words that matter, words that people listen to. It tastes like home. Orange is the flavor of my chosen family, and it tastes good.

The Perfect Man: An Essay

It’s hard to tell this story because it will always be unfinished. I will try:

To be with Jon was to step into a TV world where everything was flawless. He was fine wine and white linen, clean sheets and candlelight. He was tailored shirts and cherry wood bookcases, old money and boutonnieres. He was the plate of food the actor doesn’t eat, the coat thrown over your shoulder, the pair of glasses on the nightstand. Intelligent, articulate, and genuinely warm, he was tea—not coffee—dress shoes and pomade.

He was pretty, just like everything that touched him. Even his friends were stunning. I too could be pretty, when his brown eyes were fixed upon me, when his soft brown hands slid across me—which they had, seven times between January and May of 2018, the dates and details of which were all neatly recorded in a notebook on my bedside table. His was a TV world offscreen, real life glossed over with a wet paintbrush, like glittering flower beds sprayed with a garden hose. I had always been attracted to perfection, and that’s what Jon had been.

The morning after was the second day of November. I woke before him, felt the warmth of him beside me. A glass and metal bookshelf spanned the wall I was facing. There were green vines and leafy things growing in ceramic pots, little easels displaying small and expensive looking paintings. His room was full of beautiful things. I listened to the rhythm of him breathing while he slept, tried to imagine a life where I always woke to that sound. I wrapped myself in the feeling of belonging somewhere, an addictive fantasy interrupted only when my eyes found a golden condom wrapper on the floor. I remembered the sex even before I saw it there, carelessly tossed onto the rug, but its presence confirmed something unnamable.

“Good morning,” he said, eyes closed and humming. “How did you sleep?”

“I slept fine, except for when I woke up to you fucking me.” I tried to balance notes of confusion with lightheartedness. I tried to balance an overwhelming need to understand with a fear that I already did.

“What?” He said simply.

“I was asleep, and then you were on top of me. I remember because it hurt.”

“That’s not what happened. Don’t you remember?”

“No.” We were still spooning; I could not see his face as he described it all to me.

“You woke me up, did your little Matt shimmy. You asked me to. Don’t you remember?”

This is something I had done before, rousing him from his sleep with a gentle pressing of my body against his, arching my back to fill in the puzzle. He described a way that I had initiated sex with him many times, with my body language and heavy breathing. I could imagine what he described, but I couldn’t remember it.

“What was I saying? I don’t remember it at all.”

“I don’t know, I was half asleep.” He rolled away from me and sat up. “Is there a problem?” I had never heard him sound like that before. I felt embarrassed.

“No, I trust you.” I said. “I just don’t remember.”

I sat on the foot of his bed while he was in the bathroom, again tapping into the fantasy of partnership. I trust you, I trust you, I trust you, I said. He had earned that trust on several occasions, had never given me reason not to. His pants from the night before were draped across a chair. He wore a very particular type of pant, with a colored band sewn into the waist. This pair was light grey with a dark grey band. The last time I saw him they were khaki and blue. Part of what attracted me to him was the way he dressed. While I was wearing hoodies and jeans, Jon wore khakis and a button up, leather shoes and a watch. The night before, he met me at the club wearing those gray pants and a black

V-neck sweater, exercising his ability to look sharp but never overdressed. I couldn’t look at anyone but him.

When he emerged from the bathroom I asked him to have sex with me. Instead he hung up the pants, brushing them a few times on their wooden hanger before returning them to the closet, declining my offer as he had done as we went to sleep the night before. It’s only fair, I suppose I thought, that he should give me something to remember in place of the pitch-dark foreplay I couldn’t recall.

Don’t you remember?

No.

He drove me home across the causeway that connects our cities. He was so casual behind the wheel, so adult looking. He was usually charming, but so serious that when he started talking in a posh accent, I laughed like a child. He spoke so many languages, sexy languages that turned me on in bed, but his phony British accent made me laugh, made my heart swell.

Months later, for a creative writing workshop, I would write a poem about that morning:

You are so willing it’s as if you forgot how it feels to touch stove tops, the way you reach for him flat palmed.

Does he know that when you see him you close your eyes and pull the lever, send yourself on through the conveyor of that great big love machine

His walls are off white. Some of them have windows. Most of them have little cracks and all of them have art. The machine just grinds you up.

He listens to the radio in the shower. You listen to the water. How many other lovers are exactly where you sit On the foot of the bed in the house of man?

I did not know this in the car the morning after, but that was last time I would ever see

Jon.

In the months following that night in November, I began to dress like him. I bought sweaters and khaki pants, leather shoes and a watch. I wore glasses that made me look intelligent. I got an office job where I could wear wool trench coats and scarves to work. I wanted to look older, more mature, more collected. I had to reinvent myself, re-understand myself, because placing trust in Jon required that I ignore what I knew of my own body. To ignore the fact that I have never blacked out before, and have not since. To ignore that although I had often invited him inside me in the middle of the night, I could not remember doing so the night we went dancing. To trust Jon meant that my consent was an irrecoverable fragment of memory.

I bought six pairs of pants with colored bands sewn into the waists.

Jon always wore a small silver cross around his neck, not because he was religious, but because he used to be. He would toss it over his shoulder when fucking me, but sometimes it would slip back and hang from his neck, touching my chest as he kissed me. The morning after we went dancing, I noticed he wasn’t wearing it. He said it got lost while he was having a medical scan, and he was still upset about it. I went to bead stores and thrift stores and jewelry stores for weeks after to replace it for him. I screenshotted a picture of him at the beach and zoomed in on the cross, hunting and hunting but I couldn’t find anything like it. My friend told me to stop looking for it, she said I should stop trying to give him love.

“Yes,” she said, “he’s pretty, and charming, and well dressed and smart. He’s all of those things and he might have raped you.”

Raped me? It was such a strong word.

“I’m not saying you need to feel like a victim, but I want you to recognize that it wasn’t right, and be careful,” she continued.

I still find myself searching for that cross necklace sometimes.

The morning after, in the car on the way back to my house, I asked him a second time to recall exactly what I had said. I laughed because I did not want to place an accusation over him. I blamed it on the alcohol. I know I got very drunk. I switched to water around midnight though.

We went to bed around two in the morning.

I smiled graciously as he said, “There’s nothing more to tell. I told you everything.”

Don’t you remember?

No.

I never asked him about it again, partly because we never got together after that, and partly because he began to disappear. I wanted to see him so badly, to show him how adult I was.

I wanted to undo the drunken damage of our last encounter and prove that I was worth his time. I would clear my schedule and invite him out. A poetry reading, or a new restaurant. A movie with an actor he liked. He usually answered a day or two after the evening I’d suggested to apologize.

He was busy, so busy that eventually he stopped replying at all. When I asked him why, he said I would understand when I graduated. He said it doesn't mean he doesn't care. I couldn’t feel him caring through my phone screen.

I had let something perfect slip away. I had to have been embarrassingly drunk to make his story true. Was that why he was indifferent to me now? I felt sure that if I had never asked him what happened, he would still be answering my messages.

I wrote him a letter:

Dear Jon,

I have been spending a lot of time trying to figure things out—I didn’t realize

that when you dropped me off the next morning I would never see you again, but if I had

known that I’m sure I would have done things differently. I am afraid—I am afraid that

when you tell me you’re too busy to see me, you really mean that you don’t want to see

me; I’m afraid I got too drunk, too sloppy, too clingy; I’m afraid that’s why you said you

didn’t want to sleep with me in your apartment that night before bed; I’m afraid that’s

why you still don’t want to sleep with me. I’m afraid because I don’t remember what

happened before I woke up to you penetrating me. I’m afraid because your version of

events makes sense; I’m afraid because it doesn’t. More than that, I’m afraid that you

cringe when you remember me. I have spent the last months trying to figure out why I

feel the need to apologize, but mostly I’ve spent this time missing you, and feeling

foolish because I know I am seldom on your mind. I hope you’re well.

I did not send it.

Months passed and I thought about Jon infrequently. I decided that never knowing what happened was okay. I was okay because I had to be. I moved on. One night I split a bottle of red wine with this 30-year-old in his townhouse. We made hot, passionate love like drunken fools on his bed, clothes and sheets strewn across the floor.

Afterward, as we lay naked and nearly asleep next to each other, I was suddenly overcome with the desire to put my underwear on. I started digging around to find it, fixated on covering myself, distressed because I couldn’t.

“Come back to bed,” he yawned. “We’ll just sleep naked.”

Instead I pulled the sheets from under him and shook them out, crouched on my hands like a child to look under the bed, under the chair, under the dresser. He turned on the lamp for me and left the room. I started to cry sitting on his carpet but I couldn’t explain why because I wasn’t sure myself. I have never chosen to have sex with my underwear around my knees.

Meanwhile he had come back with a ball of clothes collected from downstairs.

“We started on the couch,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”

No.

This is what I remember:

I remember taking an Uber to the club. I remember Jon meeting me there. I remember him buying me a strong gin and tonic, I remember him buying me another. I remember dancing with him to songs I didn’t recognize, and feeling so drunk that I had to hang on a rail to steady myself under the red lights of the dancefloor. I remember sitting by the pool. There was a woman there who spoke Spanish to us around her cigarette. I only understood half of what she said to

Jon, and only half of the sentences falling fully formed from his tongue. I remember the way he crossed his legs, the way he signed his name on the receipt at the bar, the way he danced with his lips pressed together and his drink held up in the middle of our circle. I remember the room with the walls made of TV screens playing music videos I’d never seen, the shiny black bar where he let me buy him a drink because I hate to feel indebted. I remember he made me drink half of it.

You know what else I remember? I remember the chill of the air as we left the club. I remember walking across the street to get pizza. I remember drinking water, and water, and water, and water some more. There was a short white guy sitting next to us, showing us pictures of his boyfriend on Facebook. I hugged him goodbye like we were best friends and Jon called an

Uber. I remember thinking it was strange that I sat alone in the back. I remember them talking about the driver’s YouTube channel. I remember Jon slipping a business card into his pocket while I, mesmerized by the streetlights, stayed silent. I remember the alleyway he lived in. It had cobblestones and planters, bay windows and amber string lights. I remember the stairs because I was very intentional about not tripping on my way up. I remember his apartment because it was clean, just like mine. I remember hating the just-too-wide gap between the fridge and stove of his little kitchen, and loving the throw over his sofa. I remember drinking more water, using the bathroom, and trying to seduce him. He declined because he was tired. I remember stripping down to my underwear, turning out the lights and closing my eyes.

I do not remember waking up in the middle of the pitch dark night and pulling my underwear down. I do not remember leaving them around my knees. I do not remember doing the little Matt shimmy against him and asking him to fuck me. I do not remember rolling onto my stomach and shoving my face into his pillows.

This is what I remember:

I remember waking suddenly to the stinging pain of unlubricated penetration. I remember being frozen until I realized what was happening. I remember arching my back and turning my ass up to give him better access. I remember him fucking me hard, like an animal, until he was satisfied. I remember pulling up my underwear, upon which I would later find dark, dried blood.

I remember asking him if he wore a condom, and him saying “Of course.” I remember closing my eyes and going back to sleep, tired and confused.

If I decide that what Jon did was rape, then it was. If I decide that what Jon did was not rape, then it wasn’t. I could change my mind and the verdict a thousand times, and yet, I know that somewhere out in the universe is the truth of what happened. What I decide may contradict that truth. My friend tells me that whatever I feel is true, is. Does that mean my version is weightier than the truth floating out there in the universe just because it is accessible? It feels wrong to have so much power, the power to name an innocent man guilty, or worse, a guilty man innocent. How do you go on when the perfect man rapes you? How do you take him off the marble pedestal and start over? To trust him required that I abandon what my body already knew. To trust my body required a fundamental shift away from Jon. To pick a new barometer for how I measured my own degree of perfection. Either way would hurt.

Instead I chose uncertainty.

There is a beautiful Italian man who lives in my city. He’s there from time to time as I run errands or eat outside. Sometimes I see him cycling an old single speed, standing on the pedals as he rounds the street corner with the wind whipping through his tucked-in button down, his brown curls. He is magnificent, perfect. One day I am sitting at the cafe on second street listening to him speak Italian over the phone, and I try to imagine what he would look like sitting atop the marble pedestal. The vacancy Jon left is cold and overcast, though, and instead I retire the pedestal completely. It is dangerous to place your trust in fantasy, to build someone up so high you cannot see them hurting you.

If I can’t trust my body and I can’t trust Jon, where does my faith belong?

I was standing in the shower when the walls came down around me, eight months after the night I spent with Jon. I called my friend from under the heat and steam of the water, droplets collecting and running off the screen of my phone while she spoke.

“I don’t think you need to ask again,” she said.

“I need to. I want to.”

“Do you think his story changed? Do you think he remembers something new all this time later?”

“I just need to know.”

“Don’t you?” she asked. The shower beat against the water pooled around my feet, unable to drain as fast as it came down. “If you believed him the first time, you wouldn’t be stuck on this.”

“What if he’s telling the truth and I just don’t remember?”

“Then you were too drunk to give consent,” she said.

“I won’t blame him for not knowing that.”

The speaker crackled as she sighed on the other side. “If it were an accident, he would have apologized.”

Crash.

They say your memory changes over time, that two witnesses of the same event could have entirely different recollections down the line. Sitting on the shower floor, I asked my friend why it took eight months for me to know what to call this. I asked her if eight months’ distance allowed me to remember something that didn’t happen, or if it took eight months to un- remember the story he told me.

“Neither,” she said. “It took eight months for you to trust yourself again.”

Don’t you remember?

Yes.

And I think I was raped early in the morning on November 2nd, 2019.

I find myself asking why. Why did he hurt someone who loved him? Someone who trusted him so intensely, like a child, that for eight damn months they would find a thousand ways to blame themself instead. Why, when that night was bookended by consent, did he take this from me? My friend says rape is not about pleasure, it’s about power.

Why? Why wasn’t idolatry enough for him? I would have given him anything. Instead he cruelly took something from me, and I don’t know what is left.

I opened my phone to reread our texts for this story. “I miss you” is typed out in the message bar, unsent. I don’t know when I wrote it, or why I didn’t send it, but sometimes I think it’s true, that message. I have to continue forgiving myself for missing him. More often I have to remember I don’t need to be forgiven for what happened that night. I ask my friend what to do with the six pairs of pants I bought, now that I know what he did.

“They’re yours now,” she says. “Keep wearing them.”

And I do.