Night Bigot

The rain stopped, and I wanted to take a run. Everything outside felt solid and separate. It was like being in a shower room full of naked men, and every man was wet and slick in his own way. There were leaves on the sidewalk, but they were all from different trees. I was outside, and I felt solid, too, from a lot of eating.

Josh came with me. We were a block before a car got close alongside and a scream came out. It was a woman. The only word I understood was "faggots." She kept driving and screaming. We could still hear her a block away. It sounded like she'd coughed her voice against the ground and then picked up all the broken pieces and ate them quickly but separately. I'd heard a voice like that from a neighbor who couldn't wake up her son. She'd dragged him into the front yard and shook him. He was having a seizure. He'd never had one before. I have had a few.

One of my friends told me I don't look gay until I talk. Maybe the same is true online. I don't look gay until you read my stories. I have a new story in the first issue of Sundog Lit. It starts on one page and ends on another.

Kalliope

I have a pet snake. The only time I talk about her is at parties. Someone will tell a cat story, and then they'll look at Josh and me and say, "But you don't have any pets, right?" and Josh will say, "No pets," and he'll fake-frown. Then I'll remind him we have a snake. Josh will say, "I always forget about the snake."

I bought the snake from a pet store that was nice and clean. They had a tank of baby snakes. I said I wanted to buy one, and the clerk reached her hand in the tank and pulled out a bunch of baby snakes like they were gummy worms. She put them on the store counter and said, "Which one?" I picked one that was white and pink with red eyes. The clerk said, "She looks healthy." I agreed, though I had no idea. The clerk put the baby snake in a paper bag and stapled the top so she couldn't get out on the way home.

The snake bit me the first time I fed her. She was being picky, and I was being stupid. Her fangs went in like sewing needles. She chewed on the heel of my hand. I'd read what to do. I pushed her head forward with my thumb so her fangs slid out of my hand instead of breaking off inside. We have been respectful since. She's a young adult snake now. She eats every two weeks. If I don't feed her right away, I'll have dreams she's biting me. She stays in the spare room in an escape-proof tank built for venomous snakes. She's not a venomous snake.

Once upon a week in August, I guest-edited for SmokeLong Quarterly. The story I picked at the end of the week was called 'Boy Cylops.' It was written by Helen McClory. It's on the SmokeLong site now. READ IT.

You may remember Molly Laich as the writer sitting next to me at one of the off-site AWP readings. Someone came up to her and said, "You stole my seat." Molly got up and ripped that someone's teeth out. She put the loose and bloody teeth in the seat she'd just been warming. She said, "There you have it," and then she did a curtsy and left. I wasn't drunk, but I was drinking. I never saw Molly again in person at AWP, but we are Internet friends. We are both Tauruses, and we should probably only share the same physical space every once in a while. We share some video space at Story Tapes. WATCH IT.

Someone always makes a joke conflating my snake with my penis. No one who's seen my snake or my penis ever makes this joke.

Hot Now

My friend was in town from California. Her boyfriend came, too. It was the first time any of us had seen him in person. He has the eyes of a Siberian Husky. His arm hair is burned deeply into my mind in neat and obedient rows. Arm hair varies. Mine is good, but there's no order to it, and that's fine. I recently found out some men use straightener in their beards. I have vanity, but it's a lazy vanity. I probably won't try to straighten any hair on my body.

I was late to the bar. When I got there, someone told me I'd gotten hot, which is one of those compliments that's also an insult. A man with a blue drink stood behind my California friend and kept his eyes on her ass for a while. Someone said a silver fox was watching me, but I didn't believe it. I'm in denial about strangers finding me attractive. My California friend's boyfriend came back from the restroom and told us he was standing at the urinal and a drunk man came up and sniffed the air and said, "Asparagus, huh?"

There have been a lot of toads lately. I picked one up and it peed all over my hand in a sort of water balloon explosion. I used to have this dream of keeping a garden and making a toad house. A toad house is an overturned flower pot full of damp moss. I did keep a garden once, but I didn't make a toad house. It never occurred to me.

I wrote a book. You can pre-order it at Tiny Hardcore Press. One of my friends asked me what you do when you finish writing a book, and I said, "You start writing another book." I have a new project going, but that's all I can say.

There are people talking in my yard. Hush now. I'm going to make a peanut butter and apple pie.

Is There Anything

The joke on my family is God is trying to end our genetic line. Three of us grandchildren are out homosexuals. My cousin and I came out to each other at the same time on a family vacation. We said we had secrets we wanted to tell, and we dicked around all afternoon trying to tell them. We resorted to pen and paper. I told my cousin I was gay, and she told me she was a lesbian. I was sad because I'd wanted us to check out guys together. Sometimes men would come by the dock in fishing boats or on jet skis and try to flirt with my oldest cousin. She's straight. The men were sometimes attractive and often shirtless, and I would have to write it down somewhere how hot I thought they were. One summer, a man with hairy legs accused me of trying to look up his shorts. He was not wrong.

My brother came out years later. In the extended family, there are even more gay cousins. Out of the three of us gay grandchildren, there's an assumption we'll never have children of our own. Someone in my family was telling me about raising kids, and they said, "But you'll never have to worry about that mess." It's something I let slide because I've never wanted kids. I'm lucky if I get home once a year. One year, though, I might show up with a kid. You never know. Next year, I'll show up with the book I wrote. I'll let you know how that goes, especially after my family sees the back cover. It's a sexy back cover. I told you I appreciate a man's hairy leg, and on this back cover there is a man's hairy leg.

Josh and I went to a bookstore tonight. There was a couple on a date. Go into any bookstore and there's a couple on a date. The woman had an armful of cheap DVDs. The man was taking books off the shelf and telling the woman she should read them.

He said, "Read the first page of that," and he put a book on her stack of DVDs.

She said, "Open it for me. I literally have no hands."

I looked to see. She had hands.

The man told her about more books.

She said, "Why don't you write?"

He said, "Because I can read."

The woman went to sit down and sort through her stack. She fanned everything out like she was playing cards. I looked back at the shelf and found a book one of my teachers wrote. It was on sale for a dollar. A mother and daughter were looking at cookbooks an aisle or two over. The daughter got excited about a cookbook with just recipes for rice and potatoes. The mother wanted to know if there were any recipes in there for sweet potatoes.

The daughter said, "Not as many as you'd think."

She started making fart noises with her mouth.

The mother said, "You can just tell me if you want to go."

The daughter said, "I want to go."

But they didn't leave. It is hard for some people to leave a bookstore.

Sent

There's been a document open on my desktop for a year and a half, and now that document is closed. I turned in my first book tonight. I was told by one of my editors to sit there quietly a few minutes after I pressed SEND and absorb what I'd just done. When I was through absorbing, I got up and went to the kitchen and ate a handful of cashews. I looked at the floor. I store onions on a shelf in a mesh bag, and the onion skins still escape the bag and get on the floor. If we talk about my book, and you say, "What's next?" I'll tell you I'm going to figure out a better way to store my onions. And then I'll say I'm going to write a novel.

Josh and I take walks most nights. It's getting a little cooler, and the large crickets are coming out. They sound like lizards in the dead grass. There's one block on our walk where people smoke on their porches and fan their faces and stare at us like we just stumbled onto their farmland. That's my favorite block.

I have a story in the last issue of Dark Sky, but Dark Sky closed before they could put up their last issue, so you can find my story at Barrelhouse. It's like when you see your friend with her ex, and she's drinking with him, and she's kissing him, and she sees you looking, and she says, "Shut up, Casey Hannan. It's complicated." 

I shaved off all my facial hair the other day. I looked in the mirror and said, "I look younger." Josh said, "No, you look older." I looked in the mirror again and I saw it, but that's OK.

Friend of a Friend

One of my friends had a housewarming party in a city where I've only ever bought gas. It's a fine city. There's this busted up brick church for sale a few houses down from my friend's new place. Josh and I want to live in that church. You could say something about our childhoods and how we grew up in churches and how maybe that means something specific about us as adults, but I don't know. The last time we were visiting my hometown, we drove around and looked at the historic houses for sale. They all had great porches. We have an OK porch, but we don't have porch furniture. The thing about an old church is maybe it doesn't have a porch, but it does have huge front steps and high ceilings and a bell tower and a lot of skinny windows and ghosts, jeez, so many ghosts.

The housewarming party happened the one day of the summer it tried to rain. We sat outside anyway, and this guy who lives in the basement next door kept coming out in his pajamas and walking around. He'd look up at the sky and then go back in his basement a while and come back out wearing a different pair of pajamas. And that doesn't mean a thing. It was a Saturday, and this is a free country.

Speaking of a free country, I'm reading for SmokeLong Quarterly this week, and you're free to send me a story. I get to choose one for publication. I'm reading blind, which means I won't know who sent which story. If you have it in you, please send me something amazing.

My best internet friend, xTx, has been running a series on her blog called Supermodel Summer. She's had some great contributions from artists and writers, and my story, Thin and Then, ran a couple days ago. There's a horse in it, and that's all some of you need.

After the housewarming party, we all walked a couple blocks to do karaoke in the only bar downtown. Everyone in the bar was wearing boots. The only empty tables were by the restrooms. A couple of cowboys were playing pool back there, and they were stern and curious about our group of mostly gay guys and women. They kept looking at us, and they were both attractive in a really scary, country way, so I kept looking at them. They had two spectators, sisters I guess, who were older and wearing denim jackets. This was a bar where you could still smoke, so the sisters were smoking, and I swear to God, chewing gum at the same time. I wanted to see the cowboys naked, but I wanted the life story on those sisters.

The drunkest guy in our party came over and wanted to have a serious talk about dating in Kansas City. He wanted our advice. Josh and I met over eight years ago in a tea shop, and we haven't stopped being together since. There isn't much advice there. There's no math. My friends say I'm very lucky, and I say it's not luck; it's a choice. We choose to love each other and be together. It's not romantic or magical, but it's the best choice I've ever made. I tried to tell the drunk guy that, but he said, "I don't know. It feels like there's more to you guys than that." And of course he was right.

I like this song.

Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary

You will have heard it's hot. It's so hot a woman pulled out her right breast to get some air. Josh and I were taking a walk, and we were about to cross paths with this woman. I thought she had her arms crossed, and I was seeing her elbow, but that meant she had three arms, and no, it was a smooth black boob. The woman didn't look at us. It's just so hot out there. I've been dreaming about scorpions.

Josh is in a play about DADA. It's about the literary DADA, not the visual art DADA. Josh and I went to art school, so we know the material. It's hard with history. I feel like it dies getting to me, and all I have to look at are the bones. That's fine, though. I wanted to be a paleontologist. I like bones. This play is better than bones. It's set up like a cabaret. The actors have a lot of fun with sound poetry and manifestos. Everyone is attractive and excited. There's one more show on Friday, so go, please go.

I took my shirt off and swam in a pool for the first time in maybe two years. There are Speedos, and then there are Speedos. Speedos are the illusion of clothing, and I'm on-board with that illusion. One man in a Speedo climbed out of the pool, and his Speedo slipped enough for some well-made ass to fall out. Speedos are like Band-Aids in that they always fall off when they're wet. I looked at my friend and said, "I got what I came for," and she said, "I know, right?" It's good to be in agreement. Two other men had Speedos, and they apologized for them, but we all waved our hands and said, "Oh no, it's fine." And it was. It was very fine indeed.

Molly Laich interviewed me. I forgot to tell you about it, but here you go. She came dangerously close to saying my name three times in a row. We know what comes of that. Nothing good.