Troy Anderson
Jaimie and I used to hop the chain-link fence into the thicket of the woods behind my childhood home. We walked down the dirt road, stopping halfway to pick the ticks off each other’s backs. Skunk cabbage grew out of clearances where the homeless had built their tents
and from where we made home in the mud, another 200 yards beyond where the tree line meets the train tracks, a liquor store that we would walk to in the blunt heat of the late afternoon to meet our fathers, blue-collar — his a mason, mine a roofer. We bought pickled hot sausages with the change, sucking the vinegar out of the empty wrapper through our teeth,
and me, watching it drip down your chest, the meat juice converging with beads of sweat until its reddish hue dissolves. Back in our neighborhood, we ride bicycles under a suburban canopy that wanes under the fifth day of a heatwave. Parched, brown leaves clotting in the tree line above us that, during golden hour, turn into red fruit — bountiful, ablaze,
and me, something like a cicada buried deep on year three of exactly seventeen, conjuring up these fantastical scenarios of intimacy so that the nervously persistent space that kept us apart is a gap still brimming with potential energy. At night, our dads made deep carves into the deer that they killed for sport, while we played tag around the pool of blood. In the morning after, alone, I dragged my knuckles across the sidewalk, a set of red chalk making ribbons on the concrete, excitedly crying out, “Look mom, a blue sky!” Something like this is just what boys do, play pretend with their desires. Boys who scraped our skin against the pavement,
and who tackled each other a little too hard sometimes, decorating our bodies with bruises, rug burns, empty patches of pulled hair as trophies to show off,
and who paid for prostitutes on Grand Theft Auto, their pixelated bodies leading johns behind a curtain for a fuck that we could not see but that was just enough to satiate us,
and to satiate you, I dreamed of my arm stretched down into your maw, my hand digging into your gut, reaching in
and pulling out, something like the movement of a tide, cautiously searching for the bottom of you, just to know what limits of yours exist for me not to break. We slipped into the cool garage for reprieve from the heat. A training bench sat next to where my dad kept a bucket for piss that he used when he was drunk on Coors Light. Something like he didn’t feel like taking the twenty steps back into the house for the bathroom. You laid down on the bench, making me watch as your arms buckled under the pressure of a 175lb barbell. Eventually, the smell of your ripe armpits now mixing with the smell of piss, “Your turn.” But I could only stand there, dumbstruck, at the realization you could pin me down, hard, if you ever really wanted to.
There are little cuts left everywhere in this town by us with blood that still trickles out warmly, eagerly. This nondescript town, neither too big nor too small, but most especially, not just right. Filled with places otherwise unnoticeable, unspectacular — Bobby’s house, with its weeds overgrown and on a rampage, where I crashed my bike into his 19-year-old brother’s parked car, only to have him chase us down the block; Leon’s Mega-Garden World, which had only very recently been bought out by a towing company, where my mom let us choose together the flowers for her garden; or even only the ribs of a truck bed, digging into our backs, as we laid down next to each other and our dads drove down backroads, where the horseflies were relentless, our bodies exhausted,
and where I prayed that nothing would ever have to change. These places where you—and I—had so saturated the air with our childish want to the point that it lingers still today with a half-life of at least 1,000 years.
I still hope for days, sweltering, where it could all come to a head so suddenly. Perhaps in exaltation, perhaps in a moment of reciprocity during another of our spats, perhaps just meaningless, boyish violence, but always just as we begin to feel newly alive, newly fervent for each other, you would lunge your hand around my throat, a little pulse on my collarbone begging to break through the little pulse on your thumb. A noiseless scream, as I search not your eyes for the answer to such aggression, but rather the blue veins along your stiffened forearm, popping with lust. Something like — yes, something just like a fly trying to find its way back out of a house on fire.
#
Troy Anderson is a writer and PhD candidate based in Boston, studying gay literature and gay sex. Their work has appeared in Hobart, and they can be found on X @troigh and Instagram @aendersn.