*
I saw him every day for the next week, standing in the frozen foods, cold like the pizza behind the plexiglass doors. I saw him once in the pasta aisle, with a cart full of penne. His cart was always full, and the contents never made sense. I didn’t talk to him again until I covered for Jenny the night she didn’t come in. I was on register when he came through with a cart full of Tic-tacs.
“You buy the weirdest stuff,” I said, and I laughed.
“I am not from this town,” he said quietly, and he smiled. I looked over at the snow coming down outside in the parking lot, the door to the office, the Tic-tacs I was scanning; anything but his face. My heart was pounding inside my rib cage, and when he handed me the cash, our skin cells collided, stars collapsing into black holes.
I looked up, and our eyes locked. “I will be outside after this,” he said, and my stomach knotted.
“Oh,” I told him.
He smiled and took his change and his Tic-tacs and made his way out the doors. “Out there,” he said, pointing toward the doors. “I will be outside,” he said again, his voice echoing in my head.
The hours passed, and I kept looking out the windows at the front of the store, but the parking lot was an empty, snowy wasteland.
At the end of the night, I straightened the shelves and counted down the drawer, and then I locked the doors behind me. Under the light in the middle of the parking lot was a cart full of bagged Tic-tacs, stranded and covered in snow. I knew he was out here, waiting somewhere outside the light of the parking lot, his black eyes sparkling with the reflected light of Orion and Ursa Major. About five blocks later, I knew he was behind me, his feet matching my footprints, stepping into the holes I was making in the snow.
I stopped outside my building, with the movies playing inside, light washing over a small town audience, silent inbred faces filled with wonder. I thought of my room, high above, waiting for me to come inside and forget the world exists. I had done it so well for the last few years that this moment was unfamiliar, this danger was new and exciting and cold in the pit of my stomach as I felt him standing behind me; the heat from his body was dark and familiar. I realized I should have my key out, I should grab the door knob, I should do anything but stand here in the cold with this stranger.
“Maybe you don’t remember me,” he said, his voice older than before. Andromeda rotated in the distance, spinning in the darkness. I remembered his voice like a planet I’d not been to since time began, a voice I had heard in the womb, mapping the universe on the backs of my eyelids. He was a stranger with a familiar name, one that I could no longer pronounce, because it was silent in the language I spoke these days. It was so old that the sounds themselves had mostly vanished from the Earth. He was a face in a restroom stall, a name scrawled on the back of the door, a buzzing phone line in the middle of the night. He was the night sky, the stars, the supernovae I knew when I was five years old, staring up at the milky way.
“Look at me,” he said. His voice was old and sad. “I want you to remember.”
“I remember you,” I said to him.
“Turn around,” he said. “Please.” When I turned to look at him, his eyes were the color of the night sky again and full of constellations. He was silent in the snow, a ghost in a black hoodie. “Come home.”
“I live here, now,” I told him.
He smiled, his eyes deepening into black holes in his face, an inescapable force. I felt myself pulled toward him, stumbling forward.
“No one lives here,” he whispered, “Come here,” and I took a step toward him, and then another, until finally I was pressed against him, our body heat combining into a single, radioactive mass. Somewhere, in the theater, credits had begun to roll. His breath was warm against my neck, and my eyes spilled over with tears that were wet and hot and lonely. Somewhere inside me, something dark and frozen and vestigial thawed and beat again for the first time, a single, burning thump inside my chest, aching to be free. I remembered every star, every constellation inside him, because they were our constellations. His voice was soft in my ear. “Come home, Wade.”
“I waited for you, and you never came back,” I said, my voice cracking.
The world went black around us except for the tiny, frozen pinpricks of snow melting on my skin. I remembered the last time I saw him, a cold reflection in a restroom mirror, a phantom on the highway.
“It’s okay now,” he told me.
*
Back at the arctic expanse of the parking lot, we looked across the shifting snow dunes at the silent, dark grocery store in the distance. It was like I had never been there before, and I looked up at the night sky with the snow coming down. The snowflakes were like stars ahead, flying past, burning out behind me. At that moment, in the silent, rotating abyss of the night sky, I was home.
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About the Author
I was born in the wastelands of the American Midwest, and I still live there, much to everyone's regret. I started writing as a teenager as a side effect of what psychologists refer to as the "personal fable." I believed that I was unique, that my personal life story impacted the world, and that the world revolves around me. In my mid-twenties, I picked up writing again because I was sick of reading slosh and tired of having to go back fifty years to find books I actually want to read. I was especially over the only gay literature available in 2008 being soft core porn romance bullshit with jacked, oiled-up porn stars on the covers. I decided that if I wanted to read something that wasn't 500 pages of comma abuse and boners, I'd have to write it myself.
And so I did. It may not be the best, but it's what I want to read. Thank you for the support, and I hope my writing means something to you as well.
Visit my Goodreads page, where you can further abuse me by leaving me comments and questions and rating my worth as an author by a vague five-star scale! Click click! Do it!
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Thanks for the continued support and thanks for reading.
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Dedication
This story is dedicated to my partners in writing, a very select group of people who are also writers. They are all extremely talented and they write things that I look forward to reading (a rare thing these days because, in my opinion, there's a lot of literary slosh in the world right now) and they have all at one point or another helped me shape one of my typo-riddled landmines into a finished book. Without the guidance of these awesome folks, I wouldn't have the courage to publish anything I've written. I'd like to say that I do everything myself, but without the help of these people and being constantly inspired by their ability to keep writing and creating new works, I'd have given up long ago. I am inspired almost every day by you guys, even by things so mundane and inconsequential as status updates on social media, so thank you.
Gypsy Snow
Chelsey Barker
Brianne Chason
Joe Egly-Shaneyfelt
Elizabeth Verger
Barbie Butler
If I forgot anyone, I'm sorry. I blame my advanced age.
I want to extend a very special thank you to all of my readers for your support and encouragement during the 2013-2014 and now the 2015 season, as there are only two months left. I'd like to extend it like the neck of a giraffe, but alas. I have no god-like abilities. You'll have to accept some kind of mechanized extension.
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Our Constellations Page 2