That forest fire a few weeks ago? The one that incinerated a substantial patch of forest along the Trans-Canada Highway? Blame Harry Potter for it, if you have to blame anyone.
I was reading the fourth book in the series at a sidewalk café in the West End, enjoying one of Vancouver's rare warm and dry fall days. It would probably be the last such day we'd have until spring. The weather forecast called for clouds and rain starting that same night, clamminess that would go unrelieved by much sun for the next few months. I couldn't pass up a last chance to bask in ultraviolet radiation. The waiter kept my mug full of coffee and my ashtray empty. I got little read, with as much of my attention spent on passersby as the story in front of me.
All the coffee had made me kind of jittery. It's possible none of this would have happened if I'd been drinking wine.
This guy came up to my table and asked if I would mind him sitting down.
Because I am not Canadian in the sense of growing up here and knowing what to expect from the natives, his boldness surprised me. In a good way. When someone who looks like that comes up to your table and asks if you would mind him sitting down, unless you are either stupid or terminally monogamous you answer with a something along the lines of "Sure, go ahead." If you're bolder, you ask, "That chair or my face?" I'm not that bold, but fortunately I am also neither stupid nor terminally monogamous. Terminally single, maybe.
"Sure, go ahead."
I grew up in a small town in Minnesota. Nothing but white people. Pale ones. Everywhere you looked, skin with the same luminous quality as the glow-in-the-dark stars children stick to their ceilings. So when somebody as deliciously brown as this strolls by, I have to bite my tongue to keep it from lolling out like a spaniel's. Whether I like it or not, my first reaction is to wonder, Where is he from? With the almond eyes, he could have been Asian, but with that snub nose and curly hair, there could have been some black or Latino in the mix. Plenty of Indians live in this part of British Columbia, too - couldn't rule that out. For a few seconds after he sat across from me I just let myself look. Nice. I imagined his skin would taste of cinnamon and allspice. Trite, I know, and pathetic. But that's what I imagined.
"You like Harry Potter?" he asked, eyeing my book.
"No, I'm reading it because this man in a black mask broke into my house last night, held a gun to my head, and said I was under surveillance. If I don't read the entire thing today, he's going to come back tonight with accomplices. They're going to take me off to a remote cabin and torture me for days, using techniques perfected in the Inquisition and patented by the Catholic Church."
He blinked, opened his mouth, made a sound that sort of resembled "ack" if it had to be spelled out, and closed his mouth again.
"Are you going to introduce yourself?"
"I shouldn't cut into your reading time. If that man comes back tonight and takes you away, it will be all my fault. Couldn't live with myself, knowing I had contributed to someone else's demise." I'm terrible with accents, so I could only identify the presence of one, not pinpoint its origin.
"You'd only be partially to blame. I chose a bad place to read. This is a nice day, and I don't have to work. So I'm enjoying the weather. Besides, for all you know, I have a death wish. I want to be slowly disassembled, a gob of flesh at a time. Red hot pokers and electric probes turn me on."
"And you are reading a Harry Potter story. What a fascinating combination," he said. "My name is Mark."
He extended a hand. The skin on the back was darker than the skin on his palm. A handsome line separated the two areas of pigment: light sand on a tourist beach, dark sea calm against it.
"Erik," I told him. "With a K."
"If you're reading those books, then you must have at least a superficial belief in the unknown," Mark said.
"Of course I believe in the unknown. Without the unknown, most of the world would not exist. I've never been to South Africa and don't know anything about it, but I know it's there. Existence is not predicated upon my perception and experience."
Mark smiled. "That was as subtle as a sledgehammer, but it made me laugh a little, on the inside, where you couldn't see. Let me try again. You must have some passing belief in the supernatural. Yes?"
I nodded. After a second's hesitation, closed the book and gestured to him in invitation. He doffed his leather jacket (brown) then took a seat in the wrought-iron chair opposite mine. I savoured little aromas in the air he displaced when he sat down, that new-leather smell mostly drowning out subtler tones like cedar and vanilla and something floral. Roses. This is almost obscene, I thought. I want to taste his skin like a Cabernet, and name all the notes he leaves on my tongue. Is he wearing cologne, or is this just how he smells?
Mark asked, "If I were to tell you that dragons exist, what are the chances of you believing me?"
"I suppose you'll have to tell me, and see for yourself. Outcomes like that are hard to predict, because one never knows whether the question is actually going to be asked." I grinned at him and sipped the half-inch of cool coffee left in my mug. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the waiter and lifted the mug at him as a signal to bring a refill. I popped a couple of Tums from the roll in my pocket to keep my piss from turning into battery acid after all the coffee, then said, "It could be you expect the possibility of the question to function as a surrogate, as a means of leaving me hanging."
"You must believe very strange things about people, if that is how your mind works." Mark looked grave. "Either that, or you are a very strange person yourself."
I wanted to do something a bit vulgar, I realized, but for an instant couldn't figure out just the right gesture. Maybe scratching my ear and inspecting the flakes of wax beneath my nail. Or staring straight at him, without blinking, until he began to squirm. I was raised by immigrant Swedes, who have practiced cultural eugenics on such behavior for centuries. Being nasty took effort. I licked the rim of the coffee mug at Mark, never breaking eye contact, not too brazen, but just suggestive enough.
"I assure you, I'm hopelessly bizarre," I assured him. "Despite the fact I look like the nice blond boy next door in someplace like Kelowna, I promise I'm a pulsating goofball on the inside."
"Which would suggest you believe that dragons might, in fact, exist."
"Would you like for me to believe in them? If I clasp my hands together and say, I believe!, then will they magically commence to exist? Would that make your day complete?"
Mark took advantage of the arrival of the waiter to ask for a coffee. For quite a long time, he said nothing. The waiter, a handsome South Asian whose nametag said PRADEEP, made the mug-retrieval trip in mere seconds, travelling faster than the laws of physics ought to have allowed, white ceramic mug in one hand (no doubt tinged tan inside), coffeepot steaming in the other.
"It's not like I'm asking you out of the blue whether you masturbate with your right hand or your left," Mark said. "That would be unthinkably rude of me. But you're reading Harry Potter. It didn't seem like a bad idea, to ask whether you believe dragons exist, because I have one of my own. Perhaps you would like to see it."
I blew across the surface of my coffee after I emptied four packets of sugar into it and leaned close to hear the tiny tearing-paper sound the crystals made, plunging.
"You're trying to pick me up," I said.
"You would object?" came the wide-eyed response.
"Of course not. I may be bizarre but I'm not stupid."
Mark insisted on leaving a five on the table to cover the coffee I'd drunk and he hadn't. He told me he lived in North Vancouver, not far from the ferry terminal, but he had to keep the dragon at his uncle's house out in the woods west of the city. We walked side by side up the sidewalk, parting to let other pedestrians through, shoulders sometimes touching. Mark lit a cigarette for himself - black-papered things with French script on the box - and offered one to me. When I accepted the offer, he surprised me by lighting one in his own mouth and handing it over. Think of Claude Rains in Now, Voyager. Even the trace of moisture from his lips struck me as erotic, and I had to play a quick game of pocket-pool to shove my erection to one side.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"My uncle's house."
"You want me to accompany you all the way out there." I stopped dead.
Mark took another couple of steps, realized he had left me behind, and turned around, eyes wide.
"Well - yes," he said. "Don't you want to see it?"
"You're sure there is a dragon. We're not going to get to your father's house, or your uncle's house, whoever it belongs to, and the only dragon will turn out to be a tattoo on your inner thigh?"
"You would object?" he asked again.
"No, but if that's what I'm in for, don't you think you should just tell me now, so there won't be any disappointments later? It would be criminal to build up my hopes of seeing this great, fire-breathing beast, then discover that the reality exists only in ink? Or, worse, is an exotic species of lizard you keep someplace both dramatic and faintly ridiculous, like a barbeque brazier?"
He closed the distance between us in one large step, leaned close, and whispered in my ear:
I have a beautiful uncircumcised cock.
I have a large, colourful dragon tattooed across my back, between my shoulderblades.
And I have a real dragon in the woods behind my uncle's house.
How many of these things you get to see is entirely up to you.
Do you have a car, or do you want me to drive?
I drove. No matter how bright the sparks flying between us got, I couldn't lose sight of how stupid riding out into the middle of hilly suburban nowhere with a complete stranger would be. I drove with a sense of urgency, slaloming in and out of traffic, photo radar be damned. If we had to schlep all the way out to Kelowna, then I wanted to maintain a sense of control, and to keep the trip as short as possible.
"I like your car," Mark said.
I have a newish Mercedes roadster. It's red. I drive it fast.
"Thank you."
He put his hand on my knee and adjusted his seat slightly, leaning back, spreading his legs a little. When he closed his eyes, he looked like a little boy.
I struggled to keep my eyes on the road.
"Don't fall asleep," I told him. "I don't know where we're going. I'd have no choice but to drive home and take you with me."
"You would object?"
Mark's uncle lived in a wooden A-frame house in the middle of nowhere. This wasn't even the suburbs. This was nowhere. After 45 minutes on the Trans-Canada Highway, I began to think we really would cross the mountains and end up someplace like Kelowna before he told me to exit. As the last of my patience ebbed, he directed me to take this exit, then that road, then that unmarked gravel path leading into a forest.
"This is a good climate for dragons," Mark said as my car crunched along.
"I should have driven the Pathfinder today," I said. "Something told me to, and I didn't listen. Why is this a good climate for dragons?"
"Because we get so much rain here. If the dragons set the trees on fire, odds are, we would get rain before much damage is done."
"Now you're saying dragonS with an S instead of dragon with no S. Had you noticed? Do you have more than one dragon? Will this be frightening for me?"
"There's only one, now. The others are no longer here." Mark looked out the window. I imagined a pensive look on his face. "As they grew, they were setting things on fire, so we were forced to move them to other quarters. The novelty of having them was offset by gruesome practicalities. We had to take steps. You understand."
I parked near the house. The place looked deserted. If anyone still lived there, I couldn't tell.
"My uncle is in Toronto on business," Mark explained. "He should be back in a couple of weeks. I'm keeping the house for him."
"I see."
"He travels constantly. Follow me."
Mark led me behind the house, down a trail into the trees. I followed and watched his ass, perfectly round and framed by his jeans. What would it be like to pull down his pants and bite his buttocks down low, not too hard, just enough to make him writhe and gasp? Then to turn him around and...
"He must have taken it with him," Mark said, disappointment in his voice.
We had reached a clearing. Light filtered green through the leaves overhead. A strong smell of earth and forest surrounded us, rich soil underfoot, a very clean smell. Birds squawked. Scuffmarks in the carpet of leaves underfoot were the only sign anyone or anything had been here before us.
"Isn't that the sort of thing you would have known? Didn't your uncle say, Mark, I'm taking the dragon to Toronto with me, wish me luck because I want to carry it on instead of checking it. Do you think it will fit in an overhead bin?"
"You're such a mean guy," Mark said.
"I think you like it. So is there really a dragon? Honest?"
He nodded. "Of course there is. I wouldn't have brought you here just for the sex. We could have done that closer to home."
"You seem to think it's fait accompli that we're going to get into each other's pants. I think you dreamt up the bit about the dragon just to lure me out into the middle of nowhere, to molest me in this jungle."
"So what if I did?" Mark began to unbutton his shirt. He exposed a widening V of hairless, lightly developed brown chest. "You would object?"
For the next two weeks I couldn't get him out of my head. I didn't hear from him, not a word, not a phone call, nothing. This surprised me. He had seemed determined to prove a point. The encounter didn't feel like a pick-up with kinky supernatural overtones. As delicious as Mark turned out to be, I assumed I'd hear from him, and when I didn't, I went a little nuts. Nobody really noticed, and I didn't talk about the encounter with the friends who had convinced me to move up here. I'd have sounded obsessive. Like a movie playing on a screen behind my eyes, I kept seeing him leading me by the hand down the trail out of those woods, both of us nude. In the house, we spent hours doing everything we could think of to try. Later, spent, we raided his uncle's refrigerator, then returned to feasting on each other once our stomachs were full. I got home at 4.00 in the morning.
Finally, an e-mail:
I have the dragon. Meet me at the pagoda in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. Not the public park. I assume you have been here long enough to know which is which. The pagoda is off-limits to most visitors, so we will have to time this carefully. Tell me when you can be there. Mark
This was Sunday. I could meet him no earlier than Tuesday.
His response came right away:
Terrific. Can you arrive late in the day, when the park is about to close, and hide until everyone is gone?
This sounded criminal. I loved it.
You bet, I told him. Be sure to bring the dragon this time.
The Garden, a tiny gem tucked in a corner of Vancouver's Chinatown, made no sense whatsoever as a place to meet Mark, but I showered and drove across town (getting turned around after Davie Street passes through Yaletown, even after three months here) to the rendezvous, chanting Suspension of Disbelief, Suspension of Disbelief as a mantra.
Little traffic, synchronized traffic lights, a parking spot next to the entrance to the Garden... all the signs portended a good afternoon, or evening, or whatever they call it here. Growing up in Minnesota, I'm used to long summer days, or rather, I used to be. I lived in San Diego for years before leaving the US. It gets dark there. North of the border, the sun continues to shine at 9.30 pm. What's the borderline between afternoon and evening? I puzzled over this as I bought my admission ticket and entered the garden.
It's small. According to a brochure I picked up, a gang of artisans from Suzhou, a city in China, spent a year constructing it. The materials, tools, and techniques used in the construction were almost identical to those used centuries ago in the building of the famous Suzhou gardens. Most of the elements were shipped from China in more than 950 crates containing the architectural components - hand-fired roof tiles, carved woodwork, lattice windows, limestone rocks, and even the courtyard pebbles. Perhaps I was a clod for not having heard of the famous Suzhou gardens. I had only seen this garden mentioned in lists of Vancouver tourist attractions, along with the aquarium and a couple of suspension bridges in the mountains north of the city.
I liked the place. If it truly counted as one of Vancouver's top attractions, I wondered what that signified for the local tourism industry. The tourists must have finished their tours and retired to one of the nearby restaurants for dim sum, because I had the place to myself. I wandered the gardens, white pebbles crunching underfoot, bonsai jasmine treelets perfuming the air just enough for me to notice.
"Sir, we're about to close," said the woman from the Entrance Court.
"I'll just be a moment, thank you."
My brochure identified the only pagoda-like structure in sight as Ting. A ting? A Ting? The ting? To capitalize, or not to capitalize; that was the question. And which article to use? Shakespeare never faced that dilemma, to my knowledge, when confronted with a small but ornate building in which he hoped to view a real live dragon and then perhaps get laid.
To get to it I had to step over a rope, descend a few stone steps, and make my way into what looked like a cave. Water gurgled to my right, its source a small waterfall up ahead. I hoped I hadn't been seen. Being tossed out of the Garden would leave me feeling like the king of fools.
I climbed up.
"You're here," Mark said, looking a little surprised. I had caught him reading. John Grisham, of all things. I'd have expected something New Age, full of crystals and mysterious symbols. Kahlil Gibran, or maybe Shirley MacLaine. Mark had on jeans faded almost white, and a bulky grey McGill University sweatshirt.
Next to him, a metal mesh pet carrier. Empty.
"I am. It's nice to see you again. Show me the dragon."
"You frightened it," Mark said. "It's not here, exactly."
He took something out of his pocket, squirming a little to allow his hand access. I envied that hand. The object he retrieved glinted when he held it up for me to see.
"This is a scale," he said. "The dragon is molting."
"Where is it?" I stopped to rethink my approach. "Jesus. Listen to me. It's nice to see you again - don't get me wrong. Even if the dragon is a fictional construct, I'm still glad to see you. I do have manners, really."
He nodded at me and looked pleased.
"Here." He gave me the scale.
It had the same iridescent quality as a circle of mother-of-pearl. Outwardly white, when I looked at it more closely, other colours appeared: blues, purples, reds. When I scratched it with a fingernail, it felt like bone.
"How did the dragon become frightened of me? I'm not a frightening guy."
Mark shrugged, and gestured for me to sit beside him.
"Dragons are unpredictable, especially when they're young. You never know what to expect from them. I think this one couldn't figure out what to make of you, so he decided not to stay and find out for himself."
"Him?"
Mark nodded. He put his hand over mine. Despite the chill in the air, he felt warm.
"So where did it go?"
"It rotated. Have you ever read the book Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein?" When I shook my head No, Mark explained: "Heinlein knew a few things before his time, I think, or he guessed. One of the characters in that book had an ability to get rid of people and things, not by making them disappear, exactly, but by rotating them. My uncle explained this to me. The physics involved goes over my head. I still doubt I understand it fully, but the idea is, the universe is a mathematical construct, and objects can be rotated with relation to their current position, and they leave this plane for another, where we have no access to them."
"Like at Heathrow," I said, lost.
"Something like that. In any case, the dragon can rotate himself and come back. Sooner or later he will make up his mind to return to me, and then I will have to find some chickens for him to eat." Mark shrugged again. "He often stays away for days on end."
I sensed a game being played with me.
"Are you at least glad to see me?" I asked, trying not to sound as petulant as I felt.
He leaned over and kissed me, his tongue slipping between my teeth. His mouth tasted like electricity and peppermint. After a breathless minute, he pulled away.
"Of course I am."
"We're going to get caught, you know."
"No. I bribed the admissions lady. What will it take to get you out of those clothes?"
"The magic word," I said with a grin. "That's what you brought me here for, isn't it? There's no dragon." I couldn't help grinning at the silliness of it all: my own, for believing I might see a dragon, and his, for thinking I would believe it, and for choosing this place for a tryst. Layers upon layers of quivering, gelatinous silliness. "You just want to ravage me."
"So what if I do?" Mark asked, unbuttoning my pants without first saying Please. "You would object?"
This time Mark accompanied me to dinner after we had enjoyed each other in various ways, as the sun set. We toweled off as best we could with Handi-Wipes I kept in my car, then drove to a Spanish place in the West End near my apartment. Drunk on sangria, he told me his mother was Puerto Rican and his father, a Straits Chinese from Malaysia. He had grown up in Montréal. Typical Canadian, in his way: he spoke French because of his Québec origins, Spanish because of his mother, Cantonese because of his father, and English because... well, that part's obvious. Degrees in English literature and French. He had moved to Vancouver for grad school, realized he hated his program, and dropped out to travel. Money didn't seem to be a problem. I stopped short of asking why.
I told him my own strange tale: the tightly wrapped Swedish childhood in Minnesoooooota, college in the Twin Cities, the job in San Diego I took only because I needed to experience warmth in January.
"Why Canada, though?" Mark helped himself to seconds from the vat of paella we had ordered. "If you want to experience warmth in January, there are many other countries where you are more likely to find it."
"My parents were killed last year on a flight to visit me. I lived near the airport. The plane crash-landed into a building down the street. I had ended a relationship not long before that, and all my friends were people I'd met through him, so I lost my appetite for San Diego. Taxes would have eaten up a lot of the estate if I had stayed in the US, but I talked to a couple of immigration lawyers, got a couple of foreign passports, and left. Now I'm here." I shrugged. It no longer hurt to talk about this. I hoped I wasn't giving him the impression that I might be about to succumb to grief and leap from the Lions Gate Bridge. "No particular reason. I'd heard it was beautiful. I have a couple of friends here, and they invited me to stay with them until I either got my own place or moved to another city."
"Are you going to move to another city?"
"I doubt it."
"But if I fail to show you the dragon, then you might get the wrong idea about us Canadians. I might end up driving you away. That would be most unpatriotic of me."
"Then I guess you owe it to your country to make sure I see the dragon as soon as possible. Many things are hanging in the balance."
"I will have to put extra effort into it, definitely. Have you finished eating? Unless you want to drive me home, we should get going: it is almost midnight, and the ride home will take all night."
"You're staying at my place tonight," I told him. "Unless you have to be somewhere first thing in the morning."
I woke up to an empty apartment: no Mark. His half of the bed still felt warm, and smelled like him. I rolled over and pressed my nose into his pillow.
In the kitchen, a note:
I have an appointment today at noon. Call me later, and we can get together again. I will try to convince our mutual friend not to disappear this time. XO, Mark.
Questions surfaced:
Had he really taken a pet cage containing a dragon across the water from North Vancouver on the ferry, transferred to the SkyTrain, then walked the three or four blocks through Chinatown with it, to meet me?
Hadn't anyone noticed? Or could the thing turn invisible, in addition to rotating conveniently out of view just before I arrived?
Did the dragon, in fact, exit? And if so, how had he acquired it? Why? Of what use was a baby dragon, anyway?
Had I picked up a lunatic? Was I becoming one?
Was this an elaborate seduction or a complete crock of shit?
No answers revealed themselves. I spent the day in a stew, trying to piece together a puzzle with no clue what the final picture ought to look like.
Three days later, another e-mail came, as oddly formal as its predecessors, and as sweet in its off-center way:
Hi Erik... if you can be persuaded to drive out to my uncle's house again, then I will finally be able to show you the dragon. Not just the one on my back, either. I think we will be forced to turn the real one over to other caretakers, since it is growing rapidly. We would rather not be roasted. So come while you can. Let me know if this weekend will be a good time. Looking forward, Mark.
Dragon or no dragon, I decided I'd be a fool to miss this. Boys like Mark only come along every so often. It is important to pounce on them when they do.
The column of smoke above the horizon announced disaster, even from a distance. This could not be good. I remembered seeing no other homes or buildings in the area, as we had approached.
As I crunched up the track leading to the property, sirens wailed and lights flashed. Flames roared around Mark's uncle's house, and a firefighter standing guard waved for me to pull over. Amid the panic at the sight of the house ablaze, my mind went down stranger pathways. What is it about Canadian men in public service positions? Are they genetically engineered to be square-jawed and handsome?
"You ought to turn around and leave," he advised. A bead of sweat dripped off a towering, smoke-smudged cheekbone. Through my open window, the stench from the fire pummeled my face. The roar of the flames sounded like a giant machine eating the landscape. "We think we've got this contained but just in case we don't, you'd be safer somewhere else. You're surrounded by trees, up here."
"Thanks," I told him, amazed that he had stopped to talk. In the US, someone would have angrily waved me away, maybe shouted. "I'm out of here. Take care of yourself."
One week, two weeks, three weeks: nothing. No word from or about Mark. What to feel? I hadn't been in love with him. Strange cocktails of emotions made me drunk: Concern with undertones of curiosity and dark notes of self-doubt. A double-shot of disappointment with a small bitter garnish of embarrassment. Brooding, neat.
Two months passed, then three.
I haunted the café where I met Mark - nothing new in that, though, since I'd haunted the place before I met him. The servers and both hostesses knew my name. I chose a table by the window and tapped ramblings into my laptop, drinking cup after cup of coffee.
One afternoon he showed up.
"What happened to Harry Potter?" He slid into the other side of my booth.
"J. K. Rowling is deciding that, as we speak. Ask her."
"She's in Scotland."
"My mobile phone is equipped to make international calls. But I doubt she's listed. It was worth a try. How was Toronto?"
"Pleasant. I always enjoy myself there."
"I'll have to go sometime. Never been there. What kind of Canadian has never visited Toronto?"
"The American kind with a Canadian passport," Mark said. "I was hoping you'd be here."
"You were?"
Mark's face seemed distorted for a second, and he clamped a hand over his mouth and nose. I noticed a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
"Almost sneezed," he said. "That would have been somewhat untoward of me."
"Look into the sunlight," I said with a gesture out the window. "Sneeze and get it out of your system."
"No, really."
"Go ahead!"
Mark looked outside. That scrunching-up facial expression came back: his nose quivered, he shut his eyes tight, and his mouth puckered as the urge overtook him. He took a deep sharp breath and sneezed.
Several sparks shot out of his nose.
They landed on the tablecloth, which commenced to smoulder.
For a second I didn't believe what I was seeing, but Mark poured water over the burning spot, then concealed it beneath the salt and pepper shakers.
"Fuck," he said, wiping his nose. "That wasn't supposed to happen. I really do need to leave, and you should come with me, or at least leave, yourself, if you don't want questions. I can't assume nobody saw that."
The decision took two whole seconds. I turned off my laptop, thankful it hadn't been scorched, and hurried out of the café behind him. Heads turned. Who had seen?
We walked down the sidewalk.
"You did that on purpose, you fucker," I told him.
"Doesn't seem to bother you."
"Never slept with someone I knew was a dragon."
Mark shrugged.
"You did that to pick me up again, didn't you?"
"You would object?"
Marshall Moore, a North Carolina native, now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Professionally, he's a sign language interpreter. The rest of the time, he writes (or tries). He's a travel junkie and, like his fiction, he
tends to turn up in interesting places. His work has appeared in the anthologies The Ghost of Carmen Miranda (Alyson Publications) and Best Gay Erotica 2001 (Cleis Press), and is forthcoming in Space and Time, Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly, and Rebel Yell 2: Gay Men of the South.
