By Charlotte Bruckner
He says he has a stigmata and I know he means astigmatism but in my mind I am already pinning him to the cross. He says at night he sees every light like an apocalypse, like the end of days. Sitting next to him in the car with the world streaking around us, fog from our warm mouths and the cold night. We are waiting outside the county jail for you, streetlights haloing outward like dead stars. Any minute you’ll come running out those glass doors, one hand holding up the waistband of your pants because you didn’t want to stop to put your belt back on. But this is not a story about you. This is a story about how I haven’t slept in my own bed for six nights. How each morning I take the walk back to my apartment like a cold plunge, puddles on the sidewalk getting dirtier by the day. It’s an easy secret to keep from you when we meet at the gallery, or the all-night cafe, or any room where he’s not there. The second you see us together you’ll know. He has eyes like reflecting pools, liquid mercury. My eyes reflect nothing but where I am—picture frames, sharp corners, glasses of tonic water balanced on the edge of coffee tables. They gave you two phone calls and you called us both. Thirty minutes before the phone rang I was drinking stale coffee in his bedroom, tilting my head to read the spines on his bookshelf. We had become experts at navigating around the spaces where you weren’t, tracing the shimmery outline of your absence. We talk about movies. We talk about space travel. We talk about nuclear fallout, about light. He asks me if I think it will be soon. Fidgeting with the lighter you keep in the glove box, flame trembling to life then disappearing, I say I don’t know. Here, on the ruined leather of the car you bought together, I kiss him and I don’t care if you see me through the window fog, through the traitorous glass. I think of the story of the nun who woke from the dream of rapture so hot with shame, she carved two moons into her palms to cool herself. She dreamed the wounds, and the bed, and the stained-glass sky, and the girl she loved kneeling next to her with her forehead pressed into the sheets, believing her divine. I have never been a guilty person. But tonight, the moment that you fling yourself into the back seat smelling like steel handcuffs and old beer, I am going to start.
Charlotte Bruckner writes about bureaucratic dreamscapes, martyrs and their wounds, and repressed queer longing. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in TOWER Magazine, Vagabond City, Broken Antler Magazine, Nowhere Girl Collective, and elsewhere. When not writing, he works in theatrical costume design.