You are in the Ag Library near the far eastern edge of campus. It is Friday night; you are not playing hearts, you are doing research in the cartography room. You are only a freshman, but you may have found a major besides Boyd. You owe this to Boyd, who has planted you in the stream of what was and is and what is all to come, a scholar of surroundings.
Far away a generator blows in a shower of sparks. The university simply and utterly blacks out. You rush the doors. The maps on the table rustle in the wind you make.
You run west. Sirens have begun. The turreted buildings on the Arts quad stand like frosted layer cakes in a dark refrigerator. As you approach the top of Library Slope, you hear a roar from West Campus. You descend into a well of screams, noisemakers, breaking glass, bouncing balls, catcalls, and oaths humorously imprecise. You hear a constant thwack, thwack, thwack: claques of women are traveling the courtyards, novitiates with pocketbooks and sandals. They are comparison-shopping the abbeys, and the men, moving in pairs, are randy troubadours. Some knights are jousting with dirt clods in the Dust Bowl, which accounts for the shrieking declensions from the Prioress of Rego Park—
You
wrecked my white pants. You
wrecked
my white pants. You wrecked my
white
pants. You wrecked my white
pants
.
From upper chambers buckets of water drench the pilgrims. Fire extinguishers are deployed. Lepers are droning candles, candles, who has candles, I need candles, have you candles. It’s bedlam in the student union. Peasants slap dead pinball machines just for the noise, pool balls crack on the floor; they’re fencing with the cues. The Pub is an angry crush; the odor of spilled ale lights the tinder under the ejected souses.
A signal flare catapults to great hurrahs, and you reach your dorm. You take the stairs. Your corridor is deserted. Everyone you know has joined the feast of fools. You don’t know what to do. You cannot stay in your room, so you listen on a ledge. Someone retches. Someone sings “Rocky Raccoon.” From the rooftops, contingents curse. You listen to the escalation of rumors. Rape in the dining hall, the candy counter torn apart, free butts for all, six sophomores electrocuted in the outage.
The lepers lashed together shuffle now for flashlights. There is so much color in the darkness. You wait for the Goths, drowning in the pitch. Your ancestors died on nights like this, without the North Star to guide them or a piece of the True Cross to mark their graves. You find yourself praying for trade winds to bring him home.
Boyd is dead,
you say to yourself. You take the relic from your pocket. You wet it with your tears. You steep, wallow, drown in his blood.
Hands grab you. Boyd asks you where you’ve been, he couldn’t find you, he was worried, he’s been looking all over for you. You were? you say. He was. You are all right, you say. You are? he asks. His teeth light up the dark.
More than all right, you are immolated. You grow wings of joy. You fly up to witness the roiling kermess from a safer spot on the canvas. On high, nearer to the frame, you carol, Boyd came looking.
Your love grows five, ten, a hundredfold.
Down below, your eyes are bright, your lips bit shut.
You pull out of the forest single file and spot the basalt totems in the sculpture garden. Some are rising. Some are stretched out. Some are crouched in the hard-packed ground. It is close to dawn. You drink in their solemnity. They warn you to circle slowly through their configuration; any gaudy movement or ungentle comment might cause them to roll over and crush you. Their forms contain all the darkness in the landscape, leaving the sky to soften its tone before it slingshots the sun.
By silent decree, Dave, who has led you here, gets first survey. He enters the map. The shadows swallow him. He reappears elsewhere. His head glows, lit by distant klieg rays from the planetary research station.
The rest of you can now explore the crannies and footholds of the totems. They are a scatter of boys, a parabola of men. You are a sextant, measuring the altitude of their celestial bodies. Gomez is already fifteen feet above you. He scoots up and down a giant, cantilevered pencil box. Charles hangs from the smutty bagel shape, anchored by a notched pole. Billy perches at the left tip of a mounted, cement wedge of cantaloupe rind facing the sky. Boyd inches up the other tip. They stand with an ocean between them. On a signal, they run down the center and cross. From where you stand, their maneuver makes the sculpture tilt, and recover, tilt, and recover.
You have yet to claim your totem. You think you want to climb a tower, a tower crested by a lip with a pulpit through its center. It looks like a pushpin securing a flyaway note. From the ground you imagine that you can lie securely in its compass and see all this world, between dark and dawn, ground and sky, forest and field, all of these states at once, and calmly.
You find your footing. You climb. The seamed concrete is sharp against your skin.
You kneel in the lip. You don’t have time to read the transitions you imagined on the earth because, with a feeling close to dread, you with velvet ears and periscope eyes and millipede skin, you sense Boyd making his ascent. He has helped you rise before him. He has given you a boost at the bottom. He has told you where to place your hands. Now he is coming up. He is climbing to you, rising past fives, sixes, and one seven.
You peer over the rim. You see his dark curls crowning. You are conscious, you are very conscious of a new vista, the man you know by heart arriving headfirst. His short breaths chuff. You close your eyes.
Boyd is right. The lip has room enough for two. The pulpit divides your hips. Its shape resembles, now that you are both inside it, now that it contains you both, a stigma in a calyx on a forty-foot stem.
You lie feet to feet, head to head. Beyond your left elbow and his right elbow, all space drops away. The rope is coiled inside the boat. You are curled in the sky. You are towed instead by the rope of time. You turn your head. He turns his head. You look. You see.
You press down all your fingers.
Flowers won’t grow in stone.
You are the flower.
All else is stone.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
DALE CHASE
has been writing male erotica for a decade, with more than a hundred stories published, including translations into Italian and German. Her single literary story appeared in
Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly
MARTIN DELACROIX
writes novels, novellas and short fiction. His stories have appeared in two gay anthologies,
Bend Over, Big Boy
(Torquere Press 2008) and
Best Gay Love Stories 2009
(Alyson Books) and his story
Passion Play
was published as a stand-alone piece by Torquere Press (2009).
THOMAS FUCHS
([email protected]) has spent much of his career writing television documentaries and some print nonfiction. He has a story included in another Cleis anthology,
Boys in Heat
.
WILLIAM T. HATHAWAY
(
www.peacewriter.org
) began his writing career in the 1960s as a newspaper reporter in the San Francisco Bay Area, after which he joined the U.S. Special Forces to write a book about the Vietnam War.
A World of Hurt
won a Rinehart Foundation Award.
DAVID HOLLY
’s (
www.gaywriter.org
) stories have appeared in
Best Gay Romance 2009
,
Tales of Travelrotica for Gay Men
,
My First Time
,
Ultimate Gay Erotica
,
Dorm Porn
,
Surfer Boys,
and
First Hand
magazine.
JAMES MAGRUDER
has had stories published in
Bloom, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review,
and
Subtropics.
The University of Wisconsin Press is publishing his debut novel,
Sugarless,
in the fall of 2009. He also wrote the book for the Broadway musical
Triumph of Love.
ANTHONY MCDONALD
is the author of three novels,
Adam
and
Orange Bitter, Orange Sweet,
both originally published by Gay Men’s Press, and
Blue Sky Adam
—a sequel to
Adam
—from BigFib Books.
F. A. POLLARD
’s stories have appeared in
The Ultimate Zombie, Chilled to the Bone
and
The Year’s Best Horror Stories: XXII
. Current projects include a speculative-fiction novel entitled
Shattered Mirrors.
TONY PIKE
’s erotic fiction has previously appeared in
Zipper
and
Vulcan
magazines in the UK, and in the anthology
Dorm Porn II
. He is looking forward to the publication of his first full-length erotic novel,
Summer Term Boys
.
JEFFREY ROUND
’s (
www.jeffreyround.com
) most recent novel is
Death in Key West,
second in the Bradford Fairfax series, after
The P-Town Murders
. His other novels are
A Cage of Bones
, and, coming in fall 2009,
The Honey Locust
.
MICHAEL ROWE
’s (
www.michaelrowe.com
) most recent book,
Other Men’s Sons
, won the 2008 Randy Shilts Award for Nonfiction. A past winner of the Lambda Literary Award, he is also a contributing writer to
The Advocate
.
SIMON SHEPPARD (
www.simonsheppard.com
) is the editor of the Lambda Award-winning
Homosex: Sixty Years of Gay Erotica
and
Leathermen
, and the author of
In Deep: Erotic Stories
;
Kinkorama: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Perversion
;
Sex Parties 101
; and
Hotter Than Hell and Other Stories
.
NATTY SOLTESZ (
www.bacteriaburger.com
) has had stories published in
Best Gay Erotica 2009
,
Second Person Queer
, and
Best Gay Romance 2009
; he regularly publishes fiction in the magazines
Freshmen
,
Mandate
, and
Handjobs.
DAVEM VERNE
’s stories have appeared in numerous anthologies including
Best Gay Erotica 2005
,
Frat Sex
,
Latin Boys
,
Dorm Porn
,
Travelrotica,
and
Inside Him.
ALANA NOËL VOTH
’s writing has appeared in
Best Gay Erotica 2004
,
2007
, and
2008
;
Best Gay Bondage Erotica
;
Where the Boys Are
;
Backdraft
;
Leathermen
and
Best American Erotica 2005
. Newer stories appear in
Best Women’s Erotica 2009
;
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Volume 8
and
Oysters & Chocolate: Erotica of Every Flavor
.
ROB WOLFSHAM
(
www.wolfshammy.com
) is a twenty-two-year-old west Texas native. He lives in Lubbock and is working on
How I Fell in Love with a Terrorist Mastermind.
CARI ZABLE
is a Colorado girl who loves snow and sunshine. She has a husband, a cat and a library that happily consume much of her time.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
RICHARD LABONTÉ
lives on small, friendly Bowen Island, off the coast of British Columbia, with his husband Asa and their dogs Zak and Tiger-Lily. He reads many books and writes about them; reads many, many short stories and edits them into such anthologies as
Bears, Boys in Heat, Hot Gay Erotica, Where the Boys Are, Best Gay Bondage Erotica, Best Gay Romance 2008
and
2009, Country Boys, Boy Crazy
, and the fifteen-year-old
Best Gay Erotica
series. He has coedited (with Lawrence Schimel)
The Future Is Queer
,
First Person Queer
(winner of the 2007 Lambda Literary Anthology Award), and
Second Person Queer
, all from Arsenal Pulp Press. Contact: [email protected]