November 6th, 2024
Nathaniel was 29, living in a high-rise apartment in a big city somewhere in the Midwest. It doesn’t matter which city; they were all the same if you really thought about it.
Nathaniel was still half asleep when he pointed his phone toward the apartment building across the street, zoomed, and took a Snapchat of a woman sitting on her windowsill. Her legs were dangling over the concrete. There was a crowd of firemen and bystanders huddled below her. It was the morning after the election. Nathaniel captioned the photo, “same lol” and sent it to everyone on his best friends list. He made the conscious decision not to think when he hit send. The floor creaked as he made his way across the bedroom, toward the window, in order to get a better vantage point for pictures. He could see people in all the other buildings around his taking pictures from the sanctity of their own apartments.
Opposite of Nathaniel’s window was a mirror. He went back and forth, standing in front of each of them for hours. At one point, he looked into the glass, re-spiked his hair, flexed his abs, sucked in his cheeks to bring out the true potential of his jawline, and then took a selfie. He sent this selfie to all of the men he was talking to or interested in talking with, which was enough men to take several minutes to compile a complete list. Nathaniel looked sleek in the picture: black suit jacket, black slacks, black shoes, black soul. He thought of himself as one of the model boys on Instagram. With the assistance of a decade’s worth of hoarded points on her Macy’s credit card, Nathaniel’s mother had bought him the outfit for his college graduation. She said it would help him get a job.
Nathaniel only had the suit on for a few minutes in preparation for an interview when a nervous secretary called, saying that the office would be closed until further notice. But he never received that notice.
By noon the crowd underneath the woman had tripled. Civilians were calling out to her in hopeful and blissful tones. “It will be okay,” they said. “We’ll get through it. Life is worth it,” they said. The woman didn’t believe them. Some of them didn’t even believe themselves.
By 12:30 military helicopters and jets were chopping loudly through the airspace over Nathaniel’s building. This reminded him of when he was a child and he used to watch the brothers across the street play shooter games on their Xbox.
By 12:42 Nathaniel’s mother had texted him saying she loved him, from half the country away. She’d never visited his apartment. She was afraid of planes, of everything. He’d never even formally came out to her. Though, he’d always wanted to, he could never bring himself to actually do it. At this point, they essentially knew nothing of each other’s lives that wasn’t filtered through phone calls or social media. When Nathaniel first left for college they only saw each other on holidays, breaks, and summers, and then only holidays and breaks, and now only holidays, if that. They’d grown apart, like old friends. However, as things began to worsen societally, they did swap texts and links to articles and Change.org petitions and posts and tweets; everyone did. Deep down, they’d known this day had been coming; Everyone had.
By 12:54 cellular service from all the major carriers ceased.
By 1:13 Nathaniel was sucked into the never-ending news cycle on the television. Riots had spread in every urban area across the country. There was live footage of people screaming and protesting and fleeing to Canada and being violent and fighting for their lives and dying. There was live footage of things Nathaniel tried not to remember, but the pictures made it hard to forget.
By 1:15 the cable and internet had gone out; by 1:30, the electric.
By 2:00 the woman had jumped. Nathaniel was tweezing his unibrow in the bathroom mirror by candlelight when it happened. (He wasn’t sure when the next chance he’d have to do this would be. At the time, he thought about his eyebrow maintenance more often than not.) The sound of the woman’s body colliding with the earth was the worst sound Nathaniel had ever heard. It was loud but familiar, like war. He ran out of the bathroom and looked down to the pavement. It was difficult to tell where her body ended and the concrete began. She was wearing a cheap two-dollar tank top and leggings from Forever 21. This reminded Nathaniel of a Hulu documentary he’d seen on sweatshops with substandard working conditions in southeast Asia. He wondered if she’d ever seen the same thing. He wondered how many humans had led the exact same lives, for more or less, up to that day. Nathaniel, like everyone else, like that woman probably did, thought he was different, that he was the exception. But, the truth: no one can survive the apocalypse unscathed, if they survive at all. That woman’s body was the first dead first dead body Nathaniel had ever seen.
By 3:20 the woman had been pronounced dead and a group of firemen removed the flattened version of her from the street. The scene was understandably gruesome. It reminded Nathaniel of a chef scraping eggs off a pan on The Food Network.
By 3:45 a crowd, comprised of the same on-lookers along with few new people, had overtaken the firetruck and driven it into the base of a building in a fit chaos.
By 4:00 half of the buildings visible from Nathaniel’s window were on fire. This is when he knew he had to leave the city. The world had been more fragile than he—and everyone—had thought.
#
July 15th, 2008
Nathaniel was 13 at a midnight showing of Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince in a single-screen movie theater in rural West Virginia. He’d moved there because that’s where his mom got a job. She was always getting new jobs, so they were always moving. West Virginia is where he spent every Sunday folded into a pew at the local Baptist church praying to not be gay. When he told her, his mother had been more than excited to hear he was going on a date. She wished him luck when she dropped him off at the theater.
During the film, Nathaniel was sweating as he squeezed the hand of the girl next to him. Her name was Patricia. She’d asked Nathaniel on the date in their third period science class. He said yes because the placement of freckles on her cheeks reminded him of the constellations in their textbook. Patricia’s hair was soft and red, like Mars. Nathaniel played with it and stared at her while she stared at him. The other couples around them, adult and young-adult, watched the movie. The theater was completely sold out, but Nathaniel felt like they were the only two people on Earth: first or last, it didn’t matter.
Halfway through the screening, Patricia kissed Nathaniel and he kissed her back a million times over. Their lips moved gracelessly over each other’s. The brackets of their braces clanked loudly, like instruments at band camp. Nathaniel felt intoxicated while this was happening. Later, Patricia did figure eights with her index finger around Nathaniel’s thigh for a while, until she attempted to breach the waistline of Nathaniel’s skinny-leg Aéropostale black jeans. He pushed her hands away. Instead, he insisted they just keep kissing. They did, and took breaks every few minutes to catch breaths, like divers returning to the water’s surface.
Nathaniel’s mother asked him how the date went when she picked him up hours later. He told her “good,” but really it just felt weird and wrong. The next morning at swim practice, he told all of the boys in the locker room that him and Patricia had snuck out to the bathroom during the second-half of the film and went all the way. He thought if he said it out loud it would be true. Patricia was the first and last woman Nathaniel ever kissed.
#
December 14th, 2024
Nathaniel was still 29, but he felt much older. He was parked outside a rest stop in Northwestern Kentucky, thinking about Patricia, wondering if she was still alive—if anyone he’d ever kissed before the election was. Meanwhile, he was making out with a rugged man named Nico, in the backseat of his 2002 Honda Civic. After a few minutes of this, Nathaniel started thinking about all the people who had ever been in the backseat of his car: the late-night hookups, the friends, the previous owners, the passengers. Nathaniel used to drive for Uber when there was Uber.
Nico had a shaved head and tattoos of koi fish swimming up and down his left arm. He said he believed in luck. Nathaniel told Nico he felt lucky to have met him. And, Nathaniel really did feel this way. That night, he naively thought that perhaps the world was ending just so he and Nico could begin.
They’d met hours before at the sink inside the rest stop. Their eyes locked in the mirror while Nathaniel was shaving his face, paying close attention to that strip of skin between his brows, and while Nico was wetting paper towels and dabbing them on his diaphragm, in order to simulate some kind of bathing. Eventually, Nico asked him how he was doing, and his voice sounded hard and wet, like tires on a gravel road. This made Nathaniel feel safe. Nathaniel hadn’t spoken to anyone in weeks. The two talked nervously for the first few hours and shared an assortment of Frito-Lay products from the vending machines for dinner, and then they started kissing. They felt like they had to. Society was in complete anarchy. They didn’t know when their last chance to kiss someone would be, or if it had already passed.
Nico’s tongue tasted like a charred hotdog as it slid over all thirty-two of Nathaniel’s teeth. Eventually, Nico began throwing Nathaniel around the backseat of the car, like how Nathaniel imagined a brother might play with a sibling’s doll. This caused Nathaniel to fantasize what it would’ve been like to have a real family. A leftover Chipotle Burrito wrapper in the backseat crunched underneath his spine as Nico entered him. It felt euphoric. He could almost taste the burrito by the time Nico finished.
They lived in the parking lot together for the next ten days, eating single sleeves of Oreos and snack-packs of cool ranch Doritos from the machines. Sometimes people stopped at the rest area, but no one bothered them. Everyone who lived in rural towns or the suburbs had boarded up their houses and hoarded whatever little they had left. Everyone who made it out of the cities scattered and kept to themselves. People like Nathaniel and Nico, who did make it out, lived quietly on the fringe. Nathaniel told Nico he loved him by the fourth night.
By the seventh night, the couple had completely stopped speaking. They’d listened to every CD in the car eight times all the way through. Nathaniel felt as if he knew everything about Nico. Nico’s mom had owned a failing bakery in Pasadena and his dad did so many drugs he convinced himself the apocalypse happened years before it actually did. (And Nico never forgave him for that.) Nico’s favorite color was red because that’s the color of blood, and as Nathaniel was quickly coming to realize, a lot of Nico’s personality relied too heavily on shock value. All three of Nico’s sisters had been dental assistants. Nico was sure they were all dead by now, but Nathaniel liked to imagine them fighting off a hoard of anarchists with their sterilized dental tools. In contrast, Nico had never had a “real” job and. When Nathaniel asked, he said his favorite food was Vicodin. Nathaniel told Nico his entire life story as well, but Nico didn’t listen closely.
By the eighth they stopped having sex. That night, Nico said it just wasn’t exciting anymore. Nico didn’t even hold Nathaniel when they leaned the pleather seats back after sundown. Instead, he rolled over, away from Nathaniel, and stared outside the passenger window toward the moon, like a lost wave.
As enamored people often do, Nathaniel saw the warning signs but chose to ignore them. Nico was his first real boyfriend. When Nathaniel first moved to the city, before the election, sometimes he would walk past the gay district in the city at night and look in all the windows, like someone touring the reptile house at the zoo. Once, a burly man in leather yelled at him from the door of the bathhouse and tried to coax him inside, but he didn’t go in. He felt like it would be breaking a law of some kind—personal, familial, societal. Like him entering the space would defy gravity or his mom or God, if he even still believed in the significance in any of those—in anything at all. When the man called out to him, he pretended not to hear. Which was easy, he’d been pretending his entire life.
Due to Nathaniel’s inexperience with men, he was unsure of what to do with Nico. There was no Cosmo article, no Buzzfeed clickbait or Google-able questions—or anything—to tell you what to do when your boyfriend’s mood and libido sour after the collapse of society.
By the tenth night they sat silently, listening to the crickets and wind and Earth, while they each ate a half-melted Snickers and washed it down with a shared Code-Red Mountain Dew. During the meal, Nico suggested they leave the rest area the next day. He said he was tired of it. Nathaniel told Nico they should to stay there forever, or as long as they could, that they didn’t know what the world was like outside of the rest area anymore. Nico told him that nothing happens for a reason. Neither said anything else for the rest of the night after that. Nathaniel fell asleep listening to bombs detonating in a city far off in the distance.
When Nathaniel woke, Nico was gone. He looked in the restroom and saw a note on top of the hand dryer that read: You’re holding me back. Nathaniel stayed parked at the rest area for two days in hopes Nico would return. He never did. Like many first lovers, before and after the election, he had no idea where Nico went or what happened to him; he never saw him again, but he thought about him a lot.
#
December 21st, 2012
Nathaniel was 17, sharing a bed with another boy, named Drake, from his high school swim team in a family-owned hotel with decrepit wallpaper in Grinnell, Iowa. Drake and Nathaniel looked identical. Often, after they’d bought matching swim caps, goggles, and speedos to complicate the insular world of their team, their coach found it difficult to tell them apart when they were in the water.
That night in the hotel, the mood was grim. They’d come in second place, the power was out, and snow was piling abominably high outside. The whiteness of the sky made it impossible to tell time. Nathaniel thought it looked like the end of the world, or the beginning, or that bright light people are supposed to see right before they die. He and Drake stayed up all night parodying their coach’s thick, angry, Russian accent from when they lost the final relay, just hours ago. Every time Drake laughed Nathaniel watched his shoulder muscles bulge out from under the sheets. He’d taught Drake how to shave his legs without bleeding earlier that week.
Everyone had been waiting for the world to end all of their lives, but especially that day. The ancient Mayan Calendar was to run out and people were reading too much into it. Nathaniel had thought about the world ending right before the buzzer went off, signaling the start of his 200-yard butterfly race. His goggles slipped down to his neck and his eyes filled with chlorinated water, blurring his vision. In the middle of the eight laps, Nathaniel wished it just ended right there. Nathaniel’s coach yelled at him when he got out of the pool after the race. By 10:00PM Nathaniel and Drake were laughing so hard about the goggle mishap the bed shook.
By 10:43 Drake had dared Nathaniel to kiss him and Nathaniel did it, hesitantly, but he did do it.
By 10:59 the boys were making out and grabbing each other’s muscles and laughing into each other’s throats. Nathaniel felt like he was taking his first breaths out of Drake’s mouth.
They held each other all night until their coach violently knocked on the hotel room door, signaling breakfast. They then packed their bags, made the bed, and wore their medals around their neck as a joke. It would be a “breakfast of champions,” they declared. However, when they left the room, they sat at opposite ends of the table during the meal and they didn’t room with each other again at the sectional or state or junior national or senior national—or whatever—meet ever again. Eventually, Drake requested to switch out of Nathaniel’s practice lane, and a few weeks after that he quit swimming entirely. In 2013, Nathaniel received a full-ride to swim at the University of Iowa. This was the largest university, by far, interested in him. However, he declined the offer. He said that he didn’t know why, but it just didn’t feel right. But deep down, every time Nathaniel thought about the idea of going to Iowa all he could think about was the hotel room and Drake. Deep down, he knew exactly why.
#
December 31st, 2029
Nathaniel was 34, but he was sure he wouldn’t make it to 40. He was parked at the end of a cul-de-sac in rural Indiana for the night. He hadn’t kissed anyone since Nico. For years, he’d been driving around and camping out in small towns, keeping to himself. But now, he was running out of gas. The whole world was running out of gas.
Nathaniel watched the silhouette of a family through the living-room curtains of the bay window in a ranch-style brick house placed at the head of the cul-de-sac. He counted seven shadows in total. Five kids, who all sat packed onto a single couch, which he assumed had been passed down for generations from the mother’s family, and two parents reclined in Lay-Z-Boys on opposite sides of the room. He could tell that they were eating, but couldn’t tell what. He imagined a meat-heavy dinner on flimsy paper plates. There was a make-shift windmill poking out of the ground behind the house, like a nervous flower. Nathaniel assumed that it must’ve taken the apocalypse to turn the rural, and presumably conservative, family green.
Behind the curtain, Nathaniel could see lights flashing, which were inevitably that of TV. He hadn’t watched TV since the election. He squinted and made out that the father was watching an old taping of the news: coverage of election night 2016. He assumed the father liked to watch this, like how an old man watches his favorite team win the Super Bowl again and again, or how the straight wives on sitcoms always wanted to re-watch their weddings, but their husbands had accidentally taped over it with their favorite team winning the Superbowl. That’s why humans record things: to watch and re-watch.
The father turned up the volume to overpower the conversation coming from the rest of the family. It was so loud Nathaniel could hear it from his car. The father controlled the volume and he muted Anderson Cooper whenever he said any “liberal bullshit” he didn’t want the children to be exposed to. The father was so loud, and the world was so quiet.
“The Clintons were liars and thieves. They were evil people… And I’m pretty sure, lesbians. Both of them,” Nathaniel imagined the father say.
After dinner, the father looked through the curtains to Nathaniel in his car. Nathaniel waved, but the father didn’t return the gesture.
By 12:09 all the lights were out. Nathaniel assumed they’d stayed up to watch the ball drop, out of habit, only to realize there was no ball to be dropped anymore.
The next morning Nathaniel woke up to a banging on the driver’s side.
“Do you need help?” the woman asked. “I saw you parked out here last night. It’s not safe for people like you here.” She was talking to him gently and slow, through the car window, like she was translating to a fish in a tank.
“People like me?” he said, still half-asleep, and nervously ran his hand over the uncharted area between his eyes and plucked a hair.
The woman’s husband busted open the door, cocked a shotgun, and yelled for Nathaniel to get away from the house.
“This is my house. My country.” the father yelled.
Nathaniel put the Honda in drive so quickly he ran over the family’s mailbox.
The man screamed, “FAGGOT,” and fired a blank into the air, just because he could. Nathaniel hadn’t been called a faggot since adolescence. He ran out of gas a week later and started walking south.
#
December 31st , 2013
Nathaniel was 18, alone in his bed with all of his eighteen-year-old thoughts, when he Googled the word “Penis.” In return, he saw several images of penises. He compared his to theirs. He was convinced there was something different, wrong, or special about his body, but in reality, as most people learn with age, all penises are more or less the same. From there he Googled “sex” and got videos. Nathaniel browsed these for hours until he came across the “Gangbang” category. He enjoyed “Gangbang” because the male genitalia outnumbered the female and that’s what he preferred, though at the time, he’d never admit it. Nathaniel plugged in his charger and kept browsing through the night. Before he knew it, he was live video chatting and touching himself in synchronized strokes with a man from Bulgaria on his iPod Touch. He fell asleep not soon after they each finished.
While Nathaniel was asleep, a group of boys his age spray-painted “F-A-G-G-O-T” in thick, messy red letters on his garage door. Nathaniel first saw it when woke early the next morning for practice. He spent forty minutes, four hours—forever—scrubbing it off with a magic eraser. He missed practice. However, years after whenever Nathaniel drove by he could still make out a faint outline of the letters. Every time he saw a penis after this, he was reminded of the word “Faggot” emblazoned on his house, on him. For much of his life, this was all he was to other people, and sometimes, himself. Nathaniel’s coach sentenced him to extra push-ups as a consequence for missing practice.
#
October 27th, 2034
Nathaniel was 39 and had recently joined a small commune with 30-or-so other members. They resided in a former Motel 6, just outside of Atlanta. Much like a 39-year-old living in the world before the election, everything was starting to settle for Nathaniel. Upon arriving at the commune, they assigned him to a room: 21B. This is where he met a man named Jude, who lived in 22B.
Jude looked exactly like Nathaniel thought Jesus would. His hair was long and curly, and his body was thin and damaged, like the men in porn. His skin was covered with numerous I’ve-seen-some-shit scars. His beard was thick and went down to his nipples and sometimes Nathaniel buried his face in it when they’d sneak off to a different room of the motel than they’d been assigned. This, the sex, was risky. The punishment at the commune for having relations that weren’t explicably geared toward procreation was exile. The risk made it even better.
They’d gotten to know each other, really know each other, in the kitchen. Prior to living on the commune, neither of them knew how to cook. However, early after his arrival, Jude took on the role as chef. And after a few weeks with Nathaniel at the commune, Jude asked if he could help out in the kitchen to the leader of the commune. Jude sighted specifically that “Nathaniel was good with his hands” and giggled a little bit when he said this.
On the third day of working together, Nathaniel and Jude were making some kind of stew out of whatever the world had left to offer, which wasn’t much. They talked about the old world and celebrities and apps and gay bars and everything they used to be. They started hugging and kissing on top of the prep table while pots and pans fell to the floor like bad weather.
#
July 25th, 2015
Nathaniel was 20, driving an Uber during PRIDE in Columbus, Ohio, where he was living with his mother over the summer. Gay marriage had just become legal nationwide via a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling. Men, wearing rainbow colored clothing and dresses and short-shorts and muscle tanks and see-through shirts and underwear with little designs on them, and men with muscles and facial hair and man buns and soft skin, and men wearing and carrying nothing special to discern them from everyone else, crammed themselves and all their friends into his car all day long. Many of them were screaming and hugging and kissing. Nathaniel wanted to be one of them—any of them.
Around 2:00AM there was an odd couple in the back of Nathaniel’s car. They were drunk and laughing. One of them was significantly older than the other. The younger one wore a leather vest with nothing under. This exposed his six, eight, twelve, Nathaniel-didn’t-know-if-he-could-count-that-high-pack of abs to the world. The young man was proud of his body. The older man was proud to be with him. That man wore a solid blue button down made with a soulless acrylic material. Nathaniel thought it looked like something someone would wear to a bank to ask for a loan. The younger man unbuttoned the elder's shirt and tangled his fingers in the man’s matted chest hair. This is when they started kissing.
Nathaniel turned the radio up when the couple undid their seat belts and the older man got on top of the younger. They then started dry humping and Nathaniel pretended to not watch, but in reality, he was paying more attention to them than the road. He drove slow. Men were streaming through the lanes and surrounding the cars in celebration. This reminded Nathaniel of the footage from the Ferguson riots from the year before, but the opposite. The younger man moaned in the backseat and the pleather squeaked as they wrestled around on top of it. They told each other they loved each other in between kisses and moans and Nathaniel’s abrupt starts and stops.
The couple apologized for their behavior, said that they had been drinking, when he dropped them off at their vintage mansion in the German Village neighborhood. Nathaniel could tell it was immaculately decorated. He didn’t go inside to know that. From the back seat, the older man leaned toward Nathaniel’s right cheek, and pecked him as a thank you. While they were walking into the house, Nathaniel turned the radio down and shouted as loud as he could at them, asking them how they do it.
“Do what?” the younger man asked.
“Just, like, be yourself. I mean, you’re not even wearing a shirt. I can’t even tell my mom I have a boyfriend.” Nathaniel didn’t have a boyfriend, but he really wanted one.
The younger told him that he used to be like that too. Then he said, “you just kind of have to lean into it and everything will fall into place,” and went inside to be with the older man.
The next morning, over burnt toast and black coffee, Nathaniel’s mother asked him how work was before she went to her own job. Nathaniel said it was fine and didn’t elaborate. The next fall, he took out over 80,000 dollars in student-loans and transferred to an art school in the city in hopes of meeting men.
#
July 3rd, 2034
Nathaniel didn’t even care how old he was one afternoon while cuddling with Jude. They’d just gotten an association-high from inhaling man-made cleaning materials after lunch service. Jude stroked Nathaniel’s full unibrow, like one would a caterpillar in the wild, and told him that he’d killed three people and only two of them were after the election. When Jude said this, he spoke slow and elongated his syllables, like it hurt. This didn’t bother Nathaniel. He believed in second chances. He thought about how Jude’s voice sounded like a hymn. Deep down, Nathaniel felt like they were fulfilling some sort of fucked up prophecy by being in that bed in a discarded Motel 6, outside of Atlanta, together—an afterthought to the world. With everything considered, Nathaniel still had faith things happened for a reason.
Jude looked at Nathaniel concerningly during worship the next morning. They were in the parking lot when the self-declared leader of the commune, Alex, demanded everyone start referring to him as, “King Alexander,” and then sacrificed his first-born daughter to some—it doesn’t really matter they’re all the same if you really think about it—higher power. The self-proclaimed king did this messily, Joan-of-Arc style, in the back of the building by the pool, for no discernable reason other than he could. No matter what point at history, powerful men were—and are—always doing things to flex their power. Not one inhabitant of the commune said anything, the whole population just watched, like it was fireworks on the 4th of July. To be honest, the scene didn’t even phase Nathaniel anymore. That was probably the millionth dead body he’d seen.
A week later, a woman came to warn Jude that the king knew of him and Nathaniel. Jude told Nathaniel this while they were preparing for breakfast service and they left straight from the kitchen, before anyone woke up, and started walking south.
#
November 8th, 2016
Nathaniel was 21 and thought he would never die. He was alone in a hotel downtown with a boy named Chris he’d met online. Chris was dark and had the body of an Olympian. He was only in town for a cross-fit convention that had ended earlier that evening. Nathaniel took him out for drinks and then they went back to Chris’ hotel room. They talked for a bit and then got on the bed, and took turns performing on each other’s bodies until they heard a knock on the door. This caused Nathaniel and Chris to pause for a moment, and laugh silently until the person went away. Then they started again, being just as loud as they were before.
After each of them had finished, Chris looked at Nathaniel and said, “It’s never felt like that before.”
Nathaniel asked, “like what?”
“Good,” Chris admitted.
When Nathaniel left the next morning, he saw a note outside of the door requesting for them to “tone it down” and laughed. After that morning, Chris never replied to Nathaniel’s Snapchats. They never saw or heard from each other again.
#
September 23rd, 2036
Nathaniel was 41. He hadn’t properly showered in over a decade, and he didn’t care. He and Jude had barricaded themselves in a deserted Trader Joe’s in the suburbs of Jacksonville three months ago while hiding from a gang of survivors who they feared to be violent. Since then, they’d only left the Trader Joe’s once to knab a Tempurpedic mattress and a battery powered fan from the ransacked Bed, Bath, and Beyond across the shopping plaza. Essentially, to put it in pre-election terms, they hadn’t left the Trader Joe’s since they remodeled their home, like the rich gay men on HGTV.
But now, they were running out of good food. All the perishables had expired long ago and consuming all of the other products was basically a form of gastrointestinal roulette. Earlier that day, while Jude was lounging in a hammock strung out between two of the registers and Nathaniel was shearing his unibrow with a steak knife, originally intended for preparing halfheartedly-made samples for customers, Jude told Nathaniel that he wanted to leave. He said that they knew it wouldn’t last forever, that nothing lasts forever. Nathaniel agreed. They planned a formal dinner, a last supper. They would spend one more night in the store and then go out into the world together.
By 8:00PM that night they were eating stale Joe-Joe’s by the handful, illuminated by candlelight, using a fixture from the bread display for a surface, and two stools from the back for seats.
By 8:25 they were completely trashed on aged, cheap red wine. Jude told Nathaniel he looked better than ever and Nathaniel realized he’d hardly looked at his reflection in years.
By 9:00 they were taking pictures of themselves hugging and kissing and smiling with the polaroid from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. They shoved them into a cash register, like a fifth-grade class burying a time capsule.
By 9:30 they were having sex on the sample counter like they loved each other, really loved each other, like the world was ending.
By midnight Nathaniel fell asleep in Jude’s arms while surviving cockroaches hissed through the boxes of rotten foods down the aisles.
By 6:00AM they left the store hand-in-hand, out into the world (or whatever was left of it), ready to die or to be born again. They walked north.
#
November 6rd, 2024
Nathaniel was 29 and of age to vote but didn’t. He was going to go to the polling location after his afternoon class, but then friends asked him out for drinks. He’d lied and told everyone he voted that morning, but in reality, he’d just been nursing a hangover in preparation to go out again.
That night, while election results ran muted on the TV behind a bar, he kissed a chiseled man named Tyler in a photobooth in the back of a dingy club, until the bouncer evicted them around 1:00AM. They laughed about it and drank cheap wine in Nathaniel’s apartment after. Nathaniel told Tyler he looked exactly like a Greek god.
Neither of them were looking for anything serious. Tyler talked about the bar he danced at on the weekends down the street. He told Nathaniel that it had been there “forever.” And that the owner had been at the original Stonewall riots in the 60’s and that Jeffery Dahmer used to pick up men there in the 80s. Nathaniel thought about how the world had changed so much, about how it’s constantly changing and never stopping. They took turns drunkenly and unenthusiastically servicing each other’s bodies until they fell asleep in each other’s arms. While still intoxicated, Nathaniel’s world spun around him and he thought about how he honestly had no idea what he—what anyone—was looking for at all.
Matthew Hawkins is a queer writer from Chicago, but is currently residing in South Florida where he is an MFA candidate at Florida Atlantic University. His work is featured or forthcoming in Fugue, Allegory Ridge, and Hobart. You can find him and too many pictures of his cats on Twitter and Instagram: @catdad667.