Wilde Stories 2009
The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction
Edited by Steve Berman
Published by Lethe Press at Smashwords
Copyright © 2009 by Steve Berman.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief citation or review, without the written permission of Lethe Press. For information write: Lethe Press, 118 Heritage Avenue, Maple Shade, NJ 08052.
www.lethepressbooks.com lethepress@aol.com
Book Design by Toby Johnson
Cover Photo “E is for Ennui” by Yannis Angel
1-59021-079-4 / 978-1-59021-079-6 (library binding)
1-59021-080-8 / 978-1-59021-080-2 (paperback)
“Behind the Curtain” © 2008 by Joel Lane (first appeared in Dark Horizons, Issue 52) | “The Behold of the Eye ” © 2008 by Hal Duncan (first appeared in Lone Star Stories) | “The Bloomsbury Nudes” © 2008 by Jameson Currier (first appeared in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, ed. by Vince A. Liaguno & Chad Helder, Dark Scribe Press)|“Bluff” © 2008 by L. A. Fields (first appeared in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, ed. by Vince A. Liaguno & Chad Helder, Dark Scribe Press)| “Dim Star Descried” © 2008 by Sven Davisson (first appeared in Madder Love, ed. by Peter Dubé, Rebel Satori Press) | “Echo” © 2008 by Peter Dubé (first appeared in Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism, ed. by Peter Dubé, Rebel Satori Press) | “Firooz and His Brother” © 2008 by Alex Jeffers (first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2008) | “I’m Your Violence” © 2008 by Lee Thomas (first appeared in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, ed. by Vince A. Liaguno & Chad Helder, Dark Scribe Press) | “AKA St. Marks Place” © 2008 by Richard Bowes (first appeared in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction & Fantasy, ed. by Ellen Datlow, Del Rey) | “In the Night Street Baths” © 2008 by Chaz Brenchley (first appeared in Lace and Blade ed by Deborah J. Ross, Norilana Books) | “A Troll on a Mountain With a Girl” © 2008 by Steve Berman (first appeared in Second Thoughts, Lethe Press) 2008
____________________________________________________________
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilde stories, 2009 : the year’s best gay speculative fiction / edited by Steve Berman.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-59021-079-4 (library binding) -- ISBN 1-59021-080-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Gay men--Fiction. 2. Horror tales, American. 3. Fantasy fiction, American. I. Berman, Steve, 1968-
PS648.H57W55 2009
813’.085089206642--dc22
2009031197
Table of Contents
L.A. Fields
Alex Jeffers
Sven Davisson
Jameson Currier
Peter Dubé
Lee Thomas
A Troll on a Mountain with a Girl
Steve Berman
Joel Lane
Richard Bowes
Chaz Brenchley
Hal Duncan
I think you’ll find the stories that follow present many of the daydreams and nightmares so many gay men experience.
Introduction
Welcome to the second volume in the series collecting the best gay-themed speculative stories published last year. Perhaps I should refer to this sophomore edition as our “terrible twos”—so many of the stories here offer quite chilling moments. But there is plenty of fey whimsy and strangeness to be found in the pages after this Introduction, so no need to be scared off.
Those of you who read the previous volume (and thank you for doing so!), may find some familiar names in this book’s Table of Contents. I must admit, I was concerned whether or not I’d be choosing the same names year after year. Currier, Duncan, Thomas. Granted these are all talented writers, and reading new stories by them is always a pleasure, but I worried that the field was not growing. But discovering the work of writers like L.A. Fields and Alex Jeffers—the first a fresh talent, the second a man whose prior work should be on my shelf—left me secure that I could offer readers of Wilde Stories a varied selection of not only genre and style but author.
2008 was a good year for gay speculative fiction. The fantasy novel Turnskin by Nicole Kimberling won the Lambda Literary Award. Some fellow named Steve Berman had another collection, Second Thoughts, and Craig Laurence Gidney’s Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories released (and was one of the Lambda Literary Award finalists, along with Wilde Stories 2008). Anthologies continued to be an excellent source to find tales of the queer fantastic; books like Madder Love, Tangle and Unspeakable Horror are worth keeping atop your nightstand. Editors Vince A. Liaguno and Chad Helder should be congratulated for Dark Scribe Press’ Unspeakable Horror, which earned its Bram Stoker Award win and broke the lavender ceiling for horror anthologies. While the mainstream speculative fiction field had fewer gay male short stories than in year’s past, Gordon van Gelder of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction continued to publish imaginative work by authors like Jeffers, Richard Bowes, and Rand B. Lee. Smaller periodicals, in-print and on-line, such as Collective Fallout, Ignavia and Polluto also contributed to the field.
As I mentioned on a panel at the 2008 Gaylaxicon, more and more stories featuring gay characters are shying away from the traditional “coming out” tale and are addressing other aspects about being the “Other.” I think you’ll find the stories that follow present many of the daydreams and nightmares so many gay men experience. Remember, though you can turn the page to escape, I anticipate you’ll find these stories will definitely linger in your thoughts long after you set the book down.
Steve Berman
Spring 2009
Each time Adam asks about their destination, the only answer he gets is the maraca sound of sand being thrown around by the wind, a noise like a rattlesnake’s tail, only more ominous.
Bluff
L.A. Fields
“Have you ever seen the lights?”
Adam jumps as the voice, a voice he knows very well, seems to flow in and out of his ear, roll down his neck, and disappear beneath his clothes. He turns around, and there in the shifting light of the Ferris wheel is Sam.
“Jeff’s on the Zero Gravity ride,” Adam says, assuming that Sam would only deign speak to him in order to find his little brother and Adam’s best friend, Jeffrey.
“I know, he took Julie with him. Hope he doesn’t puke on her.”
Adam nods, says nothing. The lights that were orange and garish a minute ago now make the entire carnival seem gilded and heavenly, the din of shrieks and laughter is now wonderful, tinkling music. Sam stands alone somehow, above it all, his hair high and unruly, his eyes bright and vacant, looking dangerous and beautiful.
“Have you ever seen the lights?” he repeats.
Adam can only frown, unsure of what he means. Sam has been weird lately, ever since he was in the car accident that killed his Uncle Johnny, ever since he stopped doing cocaine with his Uncle Johnny. No one in town is ever sure what he means. Even Jeff tries to avoid him.
Sam cocks his head and starts to walk away, clearly meaning for Adam to follow. Adam does, walking right out of the warmth and glow of the fairground as if under an enchantment, charmed and doomed.
They walk for a while, Adam trying to keep up with Sam’s sure, steady stride over the divots and tufts of the desert. Not only is he almost five years taller than Adam, but Sam also knows where he is going. Each time Adam asks about their destination, the only answer he gets is the maraca sound of sand being thrown around by the wind, a noise like a rattlesnake’s tail, only more ominous.
Eventually Adam realizes that they are headed to the bluff. He had not noticed how far out on the edge of town the carnival had been set up, but he supposes that even shady carny workers don’t want to spend their time in a dead-horse place like Loweville. Sam mounts the trail that leads to the bluff—the one and only interesting geological feature about their town—and Adam hurries to join him.
On the way to the top, and even after he gets there, Adam is thinking of Francis Bitmeyer. Hard not to, considering Francis threw himself off the bluff last year, just before his high school graduation. It makes Adam wonder why the fuck he let himself be led up to the bluff; not only is he afraid of heights, he is also superstitious about ghosts. But before he can say another word, Sam puts his arm around Adam’s shoulder.
“Is that not gorgeous?” Sam asks, pointing at the distant rides and attractions that are lit up on what could just be the darkest stretch of desert in all of Colorado.
“Yeah,” Adam says, more impressed by the intense heat of Sam’s body than by the stupid lights of the carnival he was just at. For a moment he remembers that he was supposed to meet Jeff and Julie by the cotton candy machine, but he doubts they miss him too terribly. Adam is always the third wheel on a night like this: Friday, opening night of the carnival, the perfect dating opportunity that they are just too kind to exclude Adam from. Sam must understand him better; in a town of about four thousand people, Sam is like the four-thousand-and-first wheel. Nobody is his friend.
Sam squeezes Adam closer to his side, closer to the edge of the bluff. Adam tenses but soon learns to huddle close to Sam, to lean on him. Sam does not seem to mind the proximity.
“You remember that kid Francis Bitmeyer?” Sam asks, his profile almost inscrutable against the inky, blue-velvet sky.
“Yeah, I was just thinking about—”
“He was in my year,” Sam interrupts. “He was supposed to sit right next to me at graduation. Neither of us were there.” Of course, Adam thinks. He was dead, and you were getting arrested and charged with possession.
“I’ve always wanted to know,” Sam continues, “whether they left those two seats empty, or if everyone else just filled in our spaces.”
Adam tries to shrug, but cannot really manage to do so with Sam holding onto him so tight. He wonders if Sam can feel his heart beating madly through two sets of clothes and a cage of ribs.
“You know, I think Francis kind of had a thing for me,” Sam says, hitching Adam nearer to the edge. If he were brave enough to look, Adam could just barely see the far-off ground, deep and dark like a sea of shadows. “He spent a lot of time staring at me the way you do.”
“I don’t,” Adam begins, but Sam stops him by repeating, “You do.” Adam’s heart starts to reach hummingbird speeds. He cannot believe what he thinks he’s hearing.
“I think once at rehearsal that Francis was trying to hide a boner under his robes.” Sam reaches with his left hand to grasp Adam’s crotch, which immediately necessitates a dizzying rush of blood to the area. Adam tries to swallow, and holds onto Sam tighter.
“Maybe someone pushed him,” Sam says, kneading Adam harder, taking him so close to the edge that, even if Sam is trying to confess something, Adam feels like he might die of pleasure before he ever hit the ground.
“What do you think?” Sam mouths into his ear. But Adam isn’t thinking, not right now. He kisses Sam firm and lush on the lips as the friction in his pants becomes unbearable and the grip he has on everything (Sam, sanity, life) begins to weaken.
Wind rushes up past his burning ears as Adam has the best climax of his long, short existence, and for the briefest moment he thinks, Maybe.
Maybe it’s his last.
Stranger things than discovering an abandoned child in the wilderness had occurred in the hundreds of years since caravans began traveling between Samarkand and Baghdad.
Firooz and His Brother
Alex Jeffers
They were all merchants, the men of his family, caravan masters, following the long road from Samarkand to the great city of Baghdad at the center of the world. A youth on his first journey, Firooz often did not know quite what was required of him. Because he wrote a handsome, legible hand and could do sums in his head, before they left Samarkand he had helped his uncle prepare the inventory: silks, porcelains, spices from the distant east; cottons, dyes, spices from the hot lands south of the mountains; carpets, woolens, leather and hides, books from local workshops. On the road, such skills commanded little respect. He could shoot, could manage both short and long blades, but the paid guards knew him for a liability if bandits were to strike: he was his uncle’s heir, they had been instructed to protect him. He made coffee when they camped, tended and groomed the horses of his uncle and the other merchants, cared for their hounds. Mostly he felt superfluous.
Along one of the many desolate stretches when the plodding caravan was days away from the town it had last passed through and the next, his uncle told him to take his bow and one of the hounds, ride away from the bustle and clamor of the caravan to hunt. Fresh game would be a treat.
Before they had gone very far, the hound sighted a small herd of deer grazing on the scrub. When Firooz loosed the hound, she coursed across the plain, silent. Holding his bow ready and drawing an arrow from the quiver, Firooz spurred his horse after. On an abrupt shift of the breeze, the deer caught the hunters’ scent. Lifting their heads as one, they turned and fled, leaping and bounding across the plain.
The hound had her eye on a particular animal she must have sensed to be weaker or more confused than the others. She pursued it relentlessly, leading Firooz farther and farther from the caravan, into a broken country where strange spires of jagged rock thrust up through the loose soil, twisted little trees clinging to their flanks. All the other deer had vanished. The young buck they followed cantered nimbly among the spires and towers and bastions. Steep shadows fell from tall spires and scarps, filling narrow passages with dusk. Springs and streams flowed here, watering the soil and nourishing seeming gardens of wildflowers in bloom, more lovely than anything Firooz had seen since leaving Samarkand.
There were trees as well, protected from the winds of the plain, tall and straight and broad, and lush stretches of green turf. If he had not been intent on the deer’s white rump and the hound’s feathered tail, Firooz should have been astounded.
The deer’s strength was failing. It staggered, leapt forward again, ducked around a steep formation. The hound sped after it. Wrenching his mare around the corner, Firooz entered the deep, cool shade of a woods cramped narrowly between two arms of rock and slowed to a walk. He saw neither deer nor hound among the trees. There was nowhere to go but forward, however. The mare’s hooves fell muffled on leaf mold. Firooz did not recognize the trees.
After a time, he heard barking ahead and spurred the horse into an easy trot. The barks broke up, became distinct: two different voices. Over the hound’s melodious baying, which echoed from the high walls of the canyon, sounded the sharp, warning yaps of a second dog.
Firooz was ready, when he passed between tall trees into a small clearing, to rein in the mare and leap to the ground between the two animals. He grabbed for the collar of the sand-colored bitch but she, startled and snarling, eluded him, bounded over the sweet grass and leapt upon the other, smaller dog. Courageous or stubborn, it shook her off the first time and stood its ground, growling ferociously. It was scarcely more than a puppy. Wrapping the excess fabric of his jallabiya about his forearm, Firooz stepped forward to separate them but stumbled and fell. By the time he regained his feet, the bitch hound had torn open the puppy’s throat and stood over her fallen foe, jaws red and dripping. Still growling, the puppy lay on its side, panting from the new scarlet mouth in its throat as well as the one it had been born with, bleeding heavily from both.
Saddened by the bad end to such outsize courage, Firooz cuffed the hound aside and severed the younger dog’s spine with a single stroke of his Damascus blade. For a long moment, he regarded the small corpse, while the hound lay at her ease, licking her chops, and the mare cropped at the grass between her feet. Clearly, the dead dog was not wild, native to the desolation—had been cared for, tended, for its woolly black coat gleamed where not matted and dulled by blood and it appeared well nourished.
Heavy shoulders and sturdy limbs suggested it had not been a courser; though not fully grown, it would not have become large enough to threaten big predators, bears, wolves, leopards: it was surely not a hunter’s dog.
Puzzled and regretful, Firooz did not at first properly hear or understand the muffled wailing that rose almost between his feet. The hound had returned, to nose interestedly at the corpse. He shoved her away again and gently lifted the dead dog aside.
It had died protecting its charge. In a perfectly sized depression in the grass lay the crying babe, naked but for spatters of the dog’s scarlet blood. Firooz’s first, terrible impulse was to kill it, too, and ride away.
The hound was back again, licking the blood from the baby’s perfect skin. Her soft, damp tongue seemed to calm it—him—and after a time the babe ceased wailing. Looking away, Firooz cleaned and sheathed his sword. He didn’t know what to do.
He knew what to do. Removing his rolled prayer rug from the mare’s back, he wrapped the dead dog in it and fastened it again behind the saddle.
The horse bridled and shied at the scent of blood. He took a clean scarf from the saddle bag. Kneeling by the baby, he nudged the hound aside for the last time. He moistened a corner of the scarf to wipe away the remaining traces of blood. The quiet baby stared up at him with a knowing, toothless smile. Picking up the baby, Firooz wound the scarf about his pliant body—somehow he knew how to hold him so he didn’t complain. Firooz couldn’t figure out how to mount the mare while holding the baby, so he took the reins, called the hound to heel, and set out walking back to the caravan. Along the way, he decided to name the baby Haider, after his grandfather.
Stranger things than discovering an abandoned child in the wilderness had occurred in the hundreds of years since caravans began traveling between Samarkand and Baghdad. The doctor who accompanied the caravan proclaimed Haider fit. A nursing goat was found to provide milk. The dead dog was buried with dignity, its grave marked by a cairn of stones beside the road. Firooz’s uncle said he should raise Haider as his son, to which Firooz replied, “I am unmarried and too young to be a father. He shall be my brother.”
Haider grew and prospered. Firooz, too, prospered. In time, he married his uncle’s daughter as had been arranged in their childhood. In time, he took his uncle’s place at the head of the caravan. His wife did not travel with him, but his brother Haider did. In all this time, Haider had become a handsome, pious, merry young man; he, too, was appropriately and happily wed, and when the brothers departed for distant Baghdad their wives remained together in the comfortable Samarkand house, caring for Haider’s children, two small boys and a lovely girl. For the elder brother’s marriage, though happy, remained childless: his wife quickened readily enough but always lost the baby before its time. Their family—indeed, the unhappy not-mother herself—urged Firooz to take a second wife, but always he refused. He loved his wife well, he said, and as for heirs he had his young brother and his brother’s sons.
The caravan was heading again for Baghdad. Reaching the spot marked by the dog’s grave’s cairn, Firooz called a halt, although it was scarcely noon. There was a spring here and often game nearby. He called his brother to him. “You have often heard of how, by the will of God, I found you,” he said. “We have passed the grave of your first protector many times, but I have never shown you the place where I found you, not so far away. While our companions hunt, let us go there.”
They took with them two fine hounds, descendants of the first bitch. Now and again they sighted game but, though the hounds complained, did not loose them. Firooz felt he knew his heading exactly although it was now twenty-one years since he followed the long-lost buck deer. They entered the broken country, then the region of strange spires and canyons and lush vegetation. Haider exclaimed at the beauty of the place, but Firooz felt an odd urgency pulling at him and led his brother on without pausing. When they came to the narrowly enclosed woods, the hounds strained at their leashes and, as they progressed farther among the tree shadows, bayed.
They were answered by furious barking, of a timbre Firooz, twenty-one years later, recognized. Keeping a strong hand on his hound’s leash, he spurred his horse forward.
Awaiting them in the clearing, stalwart, as if the years had not passed, was a half-grown dog fleeced like a black lamb, which Firooz could not distinguish from the dog he had killed and buried. The two men dismounted hastily. Without needing to be asked, Firooz took the leash of the second straining hound. The black dog continued to bark as Haider gingerly approached, but these were clearly cries of joy and welcome. Falling to his knees, Haider embraced the animal. When he looked up at his brother, Firooz saw tears on his cheeks. “I seem to know this dog,” he said.
“It cannot be the same one,” said Firooz, but he was confused by this marvel.
Properly introduced, the hounds made friends with the black dog, which Haider began calling Iman as if he had always known her name. Iman gratefully accepted several pieces of dried meat, and showed the men a spring and small pond as artfully placed under the overhanging cliff as if an architect had designed it. Beyond the high scarps around this place, the sun was lowering. Firooz and his brother washed at the spring, laid out their prayer rugs toward Holy Mecca, and made the declaration of their faith. Firooz’s rug still bore faint stains of blood.
Haider built a small fire and prepared coffee. The hobbled horses grazed contentedly on grass sweeter than any they had encountered since departing Samarkand, while the three dogs lay about—Iman always near her master—panting, happy. The brothers reclined with their coffee, talking of matters of no importance, but not speaking of marvels.
After, heated with the spirit of the coffee, they removed their garments and embraced. They were men, they were fond of each other, they were long away from their wives. No words needed to be spoken as each gave pleasure to the other, as none had ever been spoken.
Yet afterward, when they woke from slumber and lay side by side, content, Haider said, “My brother, do you truly not regret having no children?”
Firooz considered. It was not a question he had not had to answer before. “It saddens me,” he said, “that my wife cannot bear our children safely, for she so wishes to be a mother. And yet, one day she may, for I myself was my father’s late, unexpected child, after his wife had been barren for many years. As for my own wishes—it was God’s will to grant me a brother after both my parents had died. My uncle told me to call you son, but it was a brother God gave me and I have never not been glad of you. Now, moreover, there are your sons and daughter at home, whom I could not value more if they were my own.”
“This is what you say, and it is a fine answer. Is it what you feel?”
Haider rose to his feet, as naked as the day Firooz found him. As Firooz admired him, Haider said, “I believe I can give you a child of your own blood—and mine,” and as Firooz watched, amazed, the handsome young man was transformed into a beautiful young woman. “Ask no questions,” she said, kneeling at his side and placing her hand on his lips, “for I cannot answer them.” She kissed his mouth.
They made love again, and it was not so very different than before, except that Haider gave only, did not take. Indeed, when he remembered it later, Firooz felt he preferred the manliness of Haider as he had been or the different womanliness of his own wife.
When both were spent, the woman who had been his brother kissed him again, and rose, and gathered up the garments of a man. As she drew them on, her form appeared to melt within the fabric, assuming again the guise of Firooz’s brother Haider. Beard grew on cheeks now more wide and flat, around lips more thin and hard. The long sable glory of the woman’s hair drifted away, leaving only black stubble on Haider’s well-shaped skull. “We should return to the camp,” he said, offering a hand to help Firooz up.
Grasping it, Firooz held the small, smooth hand of the woman. He started and, as he blinked, saw for an instant the woman encumbered in outsize man’s clothing, but the vision fled when his brother’s gripping hand and strong right arm hauled him to his feet. Numbed by astonishment, frightened, he stumbled about, donning his own clothes while Haider rolled up their rugs and repacked the coffee service. The younger man mounted his horse easily, called to the dog, Iman, who came readily, keeping a sane distance from the horse’s hooves.
Haider appeared to remain Haider, a man, for the rest of the journey to Baghdad. Still, Firooz continued troubled. Perhaps it had been simply a dream, his brother’s transformation—they did not speak of it, nor came there again an occasion that he might touch his brother, see him whole and nude and prove that vision false. Yet sometimes, regarding Haider over an evening’s fire, Firooz thought the younger man looked ill, drawn and pale; sometimes, as they rode, the straight-backed youth appeared for an instant to slump in his saddle and to resemble more a weary woman than an energetic, cheerful man. The black dog—which followed Haider everywhere, received choice morsels from his bowl, sometimes rode perched before him on the saddle, held safe by his strong arm—would bark, Haider would smile and shake his head, and Firooz blink.
In the great city of Baghdad, Firooz conducted his business out of the caravansary maintained by the merchants of Samarkand, selling, buying, bartering, trading. It was already a profitable venture. For some days business occupied him to the exclusion of any other concern. Then a late-arriving caravan brought him a sad letter from his wife in Samarkand: she had not told him before his departure that she believed herself with child and it was just as well for, by God’s will, she had lost this baby too, soon after he left. Yet she was well, recovered from the injury to her body if not the wound to her soul; her sister (by which she meant Haider’s wife) was a constant comfort, Haider’s children constant joys. She awaited her husband’s return with fond resolve.
Haider entered Firooz’s chamber as he finished reading the letter and set it aside, his eyes wet. “You are once again not to be an uncle,” Firooz said.
“I know. My wife, also, wrote to me.” Haider poured cool water for his brother, offered a scented kerchief to wipe his eyes. “I grieve with you.”
Firooz drank. “Nevertheless,” he said, “I meant what I said, the day you found Iman.” (Hearing her name, the dog yapped, before curling up for a nap.) “I should like a child, for my poor wife’s sake, but I have no need of one.” He held out a hand for his brother to grip.
Though Haider’s well-known, well-loved face did not change, it was a woman’s hand Firooz grasped, small boned and soft, and a woman’s full, quickening belly to which his palm was pressed. “You are to be a father, brother,” Haider said in his deep, full voice, “and I a mother.” He held Firooz’s hand to his belly a moment longer, exerting a man’s strength to prevent his recoiling. “Although I should prefer your wife raise the child, as I have other responsibilities.”
“How is this possible?”
“Do you question the will of merciful and compassionate God?”
“Are you a jinni? An ifrit?”
“I am a creature of earth even as yourself, not a being of fire. I am a man: your brother. And a woman—not your sister nor your wife, but the mother of your unborn child. Firooz, my dear, there is no more I can tell you. I mean you only good.”
Firooz recoiled when Haider approached again.
“I came,” Haider said with a gentle smile, “to take you away from your new sorrow and your weary business. Tomorrow we go to the Friday Mosque to say our prayers among the ummah. This evening I intend to dedicate to your comfort and ease. Come, brother. This other matter need not concern you for some months yet. Come.”
Still troubled, Firooz gave in. Leaving the disappointed Iman behind, Haider led Firooz out into the streets of the city, first to a hammam as splendid as the finest mosque. Here they bathed—Firooz felt immeasurable relief when he saw that Haider, wearing no more than a cloth around his hips, appeared no less masculine than he ought, his belly flat and firm, his chest and shoulders broad. Attendants massaged them in turn; others shaved the hair from their scalps and bodies, as was meet, oiled and perfumed their beards; still others brought coffee when at length they reclined on soft couches and did not speak.
From the hammam, they went on to the house of a gentleman of their acquaintance, an elderly merchant who left the traveling to his sons and nephews, where they were fed dishes from distant lands and offered conversation of the kind to be encountered only in great cities.
Finally, pleasantly weary and replete, they returned to Firooz’s rooms at the caravansary. Iman greeted them with great joy, not lessened by the little bowl of tidbits Haider had smuggled under his robes from their dinner. Firooz seated himself again before his accounts and inventories.
“No,” said Haider, firm. Drawing his brother to his feet, he undressed Firooz and laid him down on the couch, removed his own clothing, blew out the lamp.
Making love, Firooz was uncertain from moment to moment whether the person in his arms was a strong, slender, forceful man or a soft, yielding, fecund woman. For one night, it seemed, it didn’t matter.
A month later, they departed Baghdad at the head of a caravan laden with the goods of all western Islam as well as infidel Europe and savage Africa. Some months into the journey, they came again to the cairn of stones by the road and here again they halted. As camp was set up, the black dog Iman became agitated. She circled the grave of her predecessor several times, then, barking and whining, made Haider accompany her in investigating it again. She led him to the edge of the encampment and gazed long across the plain where, beyond the horizon, lay the place she had been found. At last, Haider went to his brother, the dog whining and yapping at his heels, and said, “I must go. Will you come with me?”
The place, when they came to it, had not changed, but Haider had.
Dismounting from his horse, he was no longer a sturdy young merchant but a frail, weary woman whose inappropriate, ill-fitting garments did nothing to disguise the belly round and full as a melon, the brimming breasts like ripe pears. Frightened as much for as of her, Firooz ran to take her arm. “It is early, I would have thought,” she said. “I should have known God would lead me here, again, to bear my child.”
“There is no midwife,” Firooz protested, “no shelter.”
“We shall manage.”
Her labor was short, though she bit her lips to bleeding from the pain and clenched her fists so tight as to leave bruises on Firooz’s hand and cause the dog that lay on her other side, shoulders under her hand, to yelp. When his son came, Firooz was ready to catch him, marveling, weeping, to lift him, all bloody and damp, to his cheek. He severed the cord with the blade that had killed Iman’s predecessor. The mother pushed out the afterbirth onto the rug stained by much older blood and lay back, resting her aching legs. “Is he beautiful?” she asked.
“He is beautiful,” the father said, tender, cleaning the baby with fresh water from the spring.
“Give him my breast,” she said, “for I think I shall not keep it long.”
While the baby suckled, the man washed the woman, prepared a clean place for her to lie and coffee to soothe and revive her. When the baby slept, tiny hand curled around a lock of Iman’s fur, the woman rose slowly to her feet. “Bring me my clothing, please, Firooz,” she said.
As she dressed, the transformation occurred, so subtly Firooz could not determine the instant he saw no longer the mother of his son but his brother Haider. The young man knelt by his nephew but did not touch.
“What will you call your son?”
“Khayrat.”
Haider smiled. The old word meant good deed. “A fine name.” He stood again. “We should return to camp. It will be dark soon.”
“Will you carry him?”
“No, brother. I meant him for you.”
There was no other man in the caravan who remembered Firooz’s finding Haider twenty-two years before, none to call his finding Khayrat other than good fortune for fatherless babe and childless father alike.
When, months later in Samarkand, Firooz’s wife took Khayrat from her husband’s arms, she was nearly reconciled to her own barrenness.
Haider never again, to his brother’s knowledge, became a woman; never, in word or action, admitted to being more than Khayrat’s fond uncle. The dog Iman was spoiled and petted by children and adults alike, though she never forgot where her love and loyalty lay, never slept where she could not hear Haider’s breath. She bore litters to passing dogs, and every puppy resembled her, and when after a long life at last she died, there was another fleecy black bitch to be his companion.
The years passed, between Samarkand and Baghdad, bringing the family instants of joy and good fortune, sorrow and bad luck, as God had written in their fates. Haider’s wife died of a fever, her children still young. The family mourned but went on, as it must. Haider did not marry again. When they were old enough, his sons—and later Khayrat—journeyed with the caravan to and from Baghdad. Grown to manhood, they led it, and their fathers remained at home.
They sat in their garden by a singing fountain, Firooz and his brother. Haider stroked the flank of his dog and said, “Long ago, Firooz, I told you I was no jinni or ifrit, but a creature of earth like yourself. But unlike, as well. Beneficent and compassionate God made many worlds, interleaved like the pages of a great book. Some lie as close to another as any two surahs of the Holy Qur’an, others as distant as the beginning from the end. In some, things that are impossible here are commonplace; in others, everything we take for granted is entirely unknown. There are worlds that contain no miracles at all, worlds where a new miracle is born every morning. The earth from which God molded my ancestors, brother, lies in another world. It is time, I think, for my dog and me to go home.”
“Haider?” Firooz gripped his brother’s hand to prevent him from rising.
“I believe there is only one Paradise, Firooz. We shall meet again in not too long. Let me go, brother.” Tender, he kissed the back of Firooz’s hand and raised it to touch his own forehead. “I cannot love you less, here or elsewhere.”
“I should die before you!” Firooz closed his eyes, desolate.
“It is not to death I am going. Give my blessing and my love to my sons.” Gentle, he removed his fingers from Firooz’s hand, kissed his brow.
When his brother opened his eyes again, dog and man were gone as if they had never set foot on the earth of Firooz’s world. The elder brother wept, and then, as he must, went on living until he died.
The blond stud’s face, flush against the last decade, shall inherit the earth.
Dim Star Descried
Sven Davisson
His name was Setna, though he went by Angel.
He seized my hand and Adam said, “…and hast received no harm in my glory.”
The first time, he was wearing a black t-shirt, a fleur-de-lys disappearing at the edge of its left side, jeans worn a gentle variegated blue, and a white belt covered in a collage of skulls. Spiked hair, a goatee snaking the perimeter of his chin stained red in the moving lights.
At first a movement in my peripheral vision, I turned to look across the dance floor. Surrounded in a blazing coat of light. Outlined by the strobes, the tips of his hair a blond glory.
Fuck. I was made in that split-second. My breath stopped in a painful catching and Joe’s story disappeared instantly.
Moments passed and I started breathing.
“Cade…?” Joe touched my arm. “Are you ok?” he asked as my eyes re-focused on him.
And behold our abode in your father transgressed the wet tongue.
The line of David goes before thy majesty. He will give in paradise, but found wise they might be us? What have we to make entreaty to they that made themselves a side from nothing. Like what I felt in his confessions as we neared each others’ dicks again, for approval; Angel winks, laughing, and the descendent of David turns as when she was ready. He expected respectively. We hold hands and five hundred come to worship Adam. “Be, which were revealed from each other mutually, as it were the other had reached Adam his last season.” Finally, Setna went forth over the miles and was accursed from among them.
I turned to look back across the room. A new song had started and the floor had filled. “Fuck. Do you have a cigarette?” I could hear my heart beat its own disconnected rhythm smearing the music in my ears.
“I thought you quit?”
“I did. Do you have a smoke or not?” I had to grab onto something before I fell down the hole that had opened inside me.
“Sure… sure.” He reached in the pocket of his hoodie and pulled out a pack of American Spirits. “Wanna go outside?”
“Yah, I could use the air.” I finished off my whiskey—a large gulp that burned its way down.
“You all right?” Joe asked again as we exited into the alley behind the club. The emergency door locking behind us.
It didn’t matter; Joe hadn’t seen him. And besides he was off men this month.
He came in and stopped for a moment, ready for the battle, glowing in a surround of strobed light. He smothered me and left in the instance I noticed. He was one in a vicinity of stars. His wings actually screamed with fright, into the power of dripping cum and into the years of the shifted heavens. Like a fish caught glimmering in the moonlight he paused. In the slice of light I saw him down to his jockstrap and knew he was called Setna’el. His face was rallied against thee and his presence a crushing quietude of suffocating peace.
The blond stud’s face, flush against the last decade, shall inherit the earth.
But all together reading the day’s augurs—those he had strewn upon us… Shards of memory… only of his jacket and the jeans clutching his leg. I could not get his image, his hand, his base vanquished from my mind. The fading fragments were precious recollections to be known—treasures entombed somewhere in his phallus. Birds and beasts, they were all sitting on the fourth day. Later that night I would pump it furiously—images of light fleeing away before they could ultimately devour me.
Then the ram perceived the splendor of purpose; and his dick, showing hard, raced within him pinching his nipples. Drawing an extensive square, now to read their petition on skin, I went and spoke to the prophet: Hear me who art in bonds, O Marvelous Force, party… multiply me… Sleep-tossed and strange… working my tongue… hungering for an angel to redeem me.
I asked around, but no one else had noticed anyone new. Adam who bartended in the back on Friday nights couldn’t remember serving anyone he hadn’t served the same cheap draught to a thousand times before. Brian still wasn’t speaking to him, but if anyone would know he would have. Why did I put up with useless drama, if he wasn’t around when I needed him.
It became rumored that everyone had been in his pants. I was caught up in a frenzy of tension and possible truth; and never pared the whole. Period. I retained the superstition of sin against him. But dreamed of him in some pagan temple. And I was disappointed by his cock, stuffed it back in his jean. But when I awoke it spawned families of memories. I could get the fleeting image of his face, his body, the ways his clothes hung, the way they flattered his lines… I could not get his light out of my mind. The image of him possessed me like no other relationship I had ever had. Expending a decade on a lover was nothing akin to this passion five seconds invoked in me.
While middle-aged men fight, their troops numbering a dozen cascade over my nuts… their forefingers kill… the spider outnumbers an unlucky God. A third takes a passing shot at the children of men.
And moves on into a zone of its own. He stated what residents might suppose; an ass stretched wider than the years. Definitely watching the laborious struggle to him and conversing slingers of stone. And him alone, he raised the shield, and seventy others joined in his march.
Angel had grommets in both ears and a bar across the back of his neck. When he smiled his childlike open-mouthed smile, one could see the glint of the silver ball sitting atop his tongue. In our first conversation, he tilted his head back slightly laughing, his mouth opened and I got instantly hard thinking about my tongue snaking around that bar intermingling in the soft warmth of bourbon.
He had angel wings tattooed on his back. They were carefully detailed in monochrome—the feathery tips tinged in flames of red and orange. They spread out across his shoulder blades and ran in soft swirls down his back. Not quite mirror-images, but one had to look hard.
Between the two, at the top of his back, a cross was needled out in an intricate tribal conflagration.
He had twin stars on each forearm inked out in alternating red and black triangles. Trails swirled away from the one on his left like the tail of a comet. It’s a falling star, he explained. Once I asked him why the right did not. “To remind me of what once was.”
When, as the flood, the idea entered the earth.
From that first moment, when he seemed to bring a halo of ineffable light with him, I wanted him. Sure, that comes as no surprise. It was sexual, certainly, but way more than wanting to fuck him or be fucked by him. He possessed me. Somehow from that first, I knew that if he mounted me, it would mean more than his simple entering of my body.
I would be consumed, like a scrap of paper in an inferno. The flame would first curl the edges and than I would explode self-immolated.
How the fuck I sensed from moment one that having him would mean losing myself, I’ll never know.
That night after walking Joe home, I couldn’t think of anything but being consumed by fiery flames of emptiness.
Then life fucked back to my own cock, as I had been watching, I never met who our lord gave to him: There is nothing. I read their flock, one of them raised against him; a battle array, and God, time, our lord, said, “Come. His hand an estate passed from form, while all the others chalk, crumbling at the least ailment, a long succession of evictions.”
Both were swimmers to the fight. And they slammed into him, this guy, in even strokes, two eternal maledictions of purpose.
I scraped up some lube, mixing it with his white slippery load, and sprinkled it with them acquainted. You will—while another cries and they begin to be caused… they broke out again and heaven was drawn.
His face, contorted with slamming, pushed into his light. I couldn’t get laid out of respect for him, “There was this hot guy, let the other guy go forth and be brought out. And to devour them, until connected with a voice—still, different—his heart raced with angelic creation rose up from its course…” the day kills the spider unlucky again.
While the scraps of paper have shown the temple to be without a cross, it has become completely enwrapped in the bride that must be God’s angelic creation… rising to see who it was, Angel continued the practice to establish my throne above all the days of reprimand in the Watchers’ fall. The lord gave to them a blank sheet of justice and an open road.
This song is dedicated to Jello Biafra… cause I fucked his wife. It’s called I Hate You.
The Exploited on the stereo and a rustle of the curtains awoke me.
I’d left the window open so the bite of November might dampen the fire snaking across me like the flaming feathers of angel wings.
I pressed my head back into the pillow staring at the ceiling in frustration. At least I got the ass, I shouldn’t give a god damn… I’m so sad that you’re so happy… Undeterred the playlist shuffled on to Jinx Titanic. Did you like your trip to the gutter… so sad… when your heart explodes cause I’m driving you crazy…
“…Everybody here wants to fuck you...” Angel’s voice was an almost inaudible breath in my ear as he preemptively echoed the lyrics of the next track.
Pillow magic alone can not brake the dreams... I pump him and breathe in his cologne, a transgressive scent of impiety completely formed in a slave’s song, breaking his bondage as it extends itself to his natural length. My lubed cock sears electric wanting to enter him, I long for him to become captured with the unrighteousness of my eyes. He’s walking out with one of my friends… seventy times ten his strength gives him considerable mastery of the angels. Their cocks hearken to the struggle… the American side unto me?? “This course the guys…” coming over as soon as he’s off…. He stated that—splatted to the floor. Intelligent quadroon with many there…so gorgeous. He, the muscles of a thousand warriors, with torches putting to fire the holy spirit. Sheep must not look back as they bear great giants…Of the holy angels… former sheep again to trough…
I’d wake in the mornings Angel having left. I’d return in the evenings never knowing if he would be there. He made his way—his own quiet way—into me. I stopped worrying, for when he was there he was eternity.
The rhythm of our breathing moved together as we slept, as the sense of me moved to him when awake. Like the preacher told you salvation won’t be found among the sweaty writhing bodies so have an orgy underground… We’d sit in candlelight smoking cigarettes and listening to the same Jinx Titanic CD. … Every demon’s gonna know you. He’d blow smoke rings toward me—their gray haze framing the curl of his smile. You’ll be shackled like a slave boy for all eternity…
…if there’s a hell we’re burning burning burning…
This is side of dogs, foxes, and him a prince in the same. After saying this, his hand flies up his thigh. He surveyed the whole… this idea which entered execration shall be multiplied, and to reprimand my twitching dick. He strokes with a mighty notice that zips them, puts on to his left, then sin against birds, and the legs made more intense by conversed only with educated very ancient date—it made him a present of me and gave each that saw the inscription: “he I made contact with a voice came bidding…Voudoo John.” He continued to find his peace; and they at first splattered black soot and lovingly smothered his will determined each line of wizards or after a laborious struggle in length.
Now the angels he couldn’t afford and seventy times ten… and often of clear him… and there is known with a man… or ought to know idea which entered his with me a mortal happenstance victim of his fall...
“Even in immortality, life is too short for bad booze.”
Angel stood at my counter, his bare back to me, a pair of black jeans low slung across his hips, the soft rise of his ass just peaking above the waist. He poured from a bottle of Laphroaig into two iced glasses. I looked to his left to an empty bottle of Jim Beam upended in the sink.
He turned and reached out with a glass. “An apple for the teacher?”
I sucked in air and the smoky smell of fired peat opened my nostrils.
He’d splashed in just enough water to open up the flavor.
He raised his glass, “The blood of life.” He moved as if in slow motion and drank with a wink. As he lowered his glass, his slight smile caught me by the throat. I couldn’t breathe again. His beauty, his light, captivated me blinding obliterating all thought into searing white.
I took a sip of whiskey and tried to focus on the soft flavors. There was the smell of apples in the room. I focused on the narrow line of brown hairs trailing down beneath his navel disappearing beneath the top of his jeans.
He floated across the floor and put one arm behind me. Cold glass still in hand, I raised my arm across his back. I could feel the softness of the feathers as his tattoos wrote themselves into my flesh. I closed my eyes and breathed in apples.
Then my prick and foreskin extended halfway… ten thousand horsemen, and with their faces… covered. phalli… hearkened to the peculiar merit … Angel ejected more fluid but continued to write out his petition, and the matter which I awakened… aid to recover the angels in this freak…people as a mountain… the giants
A spider seen in the matter which Setna’el… the third time our prayer in regard to… combing the hair…instead see the pair shalt have no peace: ceremonial, died some three… a child must not be the tribe; four distinguish battle… and the army this latter ram.
Then the peace; and they the whole of it.
He had a wide band of polished obsidian on his left index finger.
At night while he slept the moon came through the skylight and caught it. He talked when he dreamed. He would tell fractured stories of Burgundy Street and the cottage on St. Ann. Some times I got the impression the threads of plot were lifted from another time. The dialogues were not of now. At others he would speak a broken French in an accent difficult to understand. As he dreamed the room would fill with a steam of seafood laced with the fire of red spices—of horses and cholera and the humid smell of damp stone. “And when he ate it was the third hour of the day…” he murmured one night as the moon glowed a dark harvest red.
Light ran music like antiquated jazz along his exposed skin as I watched him in the red moonlight. When I would finally sleep I’d dream of white skulls decorated in silver glitter. Their toothless smiles and empty eye sockets would move around me in a pattern alternating back into two-dimensions reminiscent of the belt he wore the first time I saw him. I remember a book I read once said you couldn’t smell in dreams.
But I know that’s bullshit. Cigar smoke, red beans and a crawfish boil. A skull cradled in a ring of arum lilies and the corpus with blood dripping from the crude nail heads cradled in the arms of a young boy clad in a black cassock.
And in other nights he would talk in a quick archaic language like something lifted from a horror movie. I would imagine an old priest worrying his beads. Then, all of a sudden, he would begin a taunt, midsentence, the voice of a bowery queen drenched in sequins. Sometimes he would talk of himself in the third person—referring to himself as Michael. I knew, somehow, that he was always the subject of these fragments. In that concatenation of nights, stolen as fall approached the winter solstice, I pieced together fragments as if they were scraps of parchment hidden away for centuries.
Still other nights, he was just Angel. Well that was still just what everyone called him. We’d lie awake and he wanted to hear my stories.
He wanted to know why I’d stopped singing with that hardcore band in college. What had caused me to be overtaken from one day forward with an unforgiving stage fright. An inexplicable reticence to be in a crowd… even if it was only singing in front of a tavern quarter-full of drunk punk kids. Why I stopped writing.
Why, if the meds stopped the visions, hadn’t I stopped taking them.
“There was a time,” he observed staring at the far wall, “when people were revered for having visions.”
“Or killed.”
“Well anything worth experiencing comes with no small degree of risk.” He laughed at himself and took a long drag on his cigarette.
I looked into his eyes, while he slept, and saw of whom shall live and it made me so hot. A scent that drives and there is no more fluid but continued... As I was blood.
I lay half awake in the mornings, my hand cradling his semi-hard cock gently playing with his prince albert. I’d suck in the moment knowing that each morning was stolen on borrowed time. The titanium ring would go slick with pre-cum and he would turn his head to face me. His eyes opening out of sleep—each lit with a spark of white fire like magnesium burning in deep waters.
He rolled onto me lowering his head to my chest. Breathing fire from his mouth onto my nipple. His beard tickled my flesh. The unrelenting persistence of metal as he lashed his tongue against my skin.
Now the angels have out… And truth as he found, male nor female, and school is gradually dissipating the leader of which went forth… the heart melts or breaks… perpetually execrates…
“Don’t think the Magi set out when he was born… That’s just part of the Christmas bullshit. They had to have left at least two years before.
The story says they followed a star. But did you ever think that it could have been an angel?”
He’d brought home a plastic crèche display drawn out in day-glo cartoon colors. The three kings looked like a 60’s backing band done up for Halloween as I Dream of Genie. Jesus looked like the Gerber baby.
Mary and Joseph like Ken and Barbie at a renaissance fair.
“When the promise was not realized, where do you think that star went? Starfire is not extinguished in an instant. It takes millenniums beyond human reckoning to burn itself out.”
I noticed he’d pierced his nipples. The open rings were formed of white metal that glowed in the low light.
Then Setna’el, called Angel, doing the stroking, surely a bit of cloth between the horse… caballo… I gasped and an exchange of names, rules… creoles…proud kind … giant erection… powerful among them there is… upon an enemy. Once say to him, though, the heavenly Watchers.
…his eyes were inscribed with his name each a letter echoing as he kissed me. And thou shalt not battle God as the last drips of his spunk dropped onto my thigh—inasmuch as the guys were gone…
“Do you want to know where the other guys are now?”
I reached over and touched his face and it was suddenly like a child’s… Finally tiring of his way, he became tender obedience… seventy times ten thousand to strike the sheep on the road.
When we got up in the morning not this marvelous which thou hast shown must have been. The young guy in the dogs caused to first devour them, until again it’s back to full… but the sum of the first ram to drink the blood. His hands so generously reached out toward me to show me the south of his chest.
In the middle of the night I would reach out to his lingering warmth. He’d be standing at the window. His face a supranatural white from the street lights. His wings’ feathers dancing red in the guttering candle light… He always turned sensing—I was awake—smile and return to bed.