It is truly cruel to bury a child named Asterion. “The starry one” who was suddenly ripped away from the lights in the sky. A boy who was born as a punishment, condemned to a prison away from his mother’s arms. It is almost ironic; born flawed due to the sins of another. His mother’s reckoning and his father’s embarrassment. They locked him away, a monster deserving only of cold dark stone. He cries for his mother. Prince of the Labyrinth: destined to die by the hands of a “hero”.

Across the small lunch table in our break room, John was trying to dismantle a mechanical pencil that somehow broke at his desk. His attention was fully focused on the pencil, reminding me of someone trying to defuse a bomb. However, mine kept drifting to the email that we had gotten over the weekend.

Our boss, Matt, announced that he had to lay off a few employees in our department for budget cuts, though he never said who. The whole office was on edge ever since the email came through. Causing people to try and overachieve in their tasks.

On Thursday, I remember the visage of a yellow phone booth from down Second Plum Street. Decades spoke wonders of the fellow. The paint was chipping, and the handle was worn by countless fingers–an equivalent to a confessional. Nonetheless, my eyes peer upon it. There’s never a line or long lingerer. It’s the most run-down phone booth in town. If only the smudged-up windows could talk—you think they’d spill any secrets? Maybe there’s a secret code to being a phone booth. ‘What’s spoken in the booth, stays in the booth.’ Or something of the like.

So you’re going to think this is absurd.

I ate a burger today.

Yes, I know—that isn’t very eventful at first glance. But I’m telling you, there was something about that burger that set everything else in motion. Or maybe it wasn’t the burger at all. Maybe it was the moment that came after or perhaps even before.

“I don’t …”

His voice trembled, fragile as glass on the verge of breaking.

He stood alone in a long white hallway that stretched impossibly far in both directions, so uniform and clean it seemed less like a place and more like an idea. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic. The walls had no seams, no corners, no imperfections–only endless white. A white that seemed meant only for pencil marks—words not yet written. At the very end stood a single blue door. It was the only color in the world. He swallowed, his throat tight, tears slipping down his face.

The sun used to shine brighter then.

Mark still remembered his face. His laugh. The way the young lad had smiled as if he had an angel peeking from behind his face. The way he used to throw his arms and full body out the window and cheer as the two of them drove along those winding roads, the air roaring past like nothing in the world could touch them. Carefree. Untouched. Alive.

It’s a cold November night. Thousands of stars swallow the dark cloudless sky, watching over an industrial building sitting in a lone dense forest. A factory of some sort, a place seen as “off-limits” to the residents living nearby.

Did you know that scars can still hurt long after the flesh and skin have been mended?
It has something to do with nerve endings getting trapped in the scar tissue.
This is to say, some wounds never fully heal.

The Greek word for wound is trauma.
I once read a book about the way trauma reshapes your brain.
This is to say, there are some things you can never get over.

✷✷✷

I could open this essay with some tired old cliche about love to tug on the reader’s heartstrings or some highly dramatized “data” about alcoholism designed to scare children and arouse Pentecostal prohibitionist pastors, but the punk in me will not allow the former and whatever is left of the Catholic in me will not allow the latter. The truth is that I am uninterested in the heteronormative definition of love and I am even more uninterested in painting my first real romance in broad black and white strokes; her body always looked most seductive draped in flamboyant, luminous gray.

Once upon a time, there was a mountain that had existed since the formation of the world. It was twice as ancient as its brethren in the west, who teemed with both human and nonhuman life, and by the time written records came around, the mountain was either a footnote or an unsolvable mystery. This was for two reasons, the first of which being the bones that lined pathways worn down with constant travel and age, and the second being the dragon.

I see Her everywhere. Through the window, under the ice, in the water. I can’t sleep because I see Her face staring back through the chilly glass panes of my bedroom window. I can feel Her watching me everywhere I go. She whispers in dozens of voices. She watches with hundreds of eyes. Sometimes I feel Her freezing fingertips brush across my skin.

I know that I must sound crazy, rambling on about being watched by a woman that no one else can see. But I need to tell someone, whenever I try to talk to other people, they seem to just stare through me…

Time stretched to an eternity. A minute felt like an hour and vice versa. God knew how long I had been sitting there, staring. Or maybe he didn't. There are things that even gods can’t tell.

My eyes must've been open for days, weeks. Staring.

But, no, that can't be right, it's only been a few seconds.

Time is fickle, it can stretch further than we can comprehend or become smaller than we know. To say that you can tell the time is white lie, made only for comfort.

Things started simple enough - I was going about my life as a veterinarian. I worked primarily with pets and strays, lots of cats, dogs, and illnesses. For whatever reason, there seemed to be a sudden increase in animals with worms, both in pets and in strays. I couldn't figure out what it could be. My team and I did everything we could, even going so far as to quarantine the afflicted animals.

Nepantilism
Divided in two
Choque de mi conciencia
inner self troubles.

Choque
What should I choose now?
Cultural Identities
Choose so you can bow.

Transcendent
This duality
Accept the power of it
the reality.

Bocacalle
Sal, mestiza ya
Do what you’d like, it’s your choice
Solo TU cuerpo.

Homology
No place to call home
Queer or not, does it matter?
Invalid always.

1. Dionysus

The carnival train, full of colors, clowns, animals, and one headless giraffe, barrelled towards the floor vent where Mrs. Macaroni stood, screaming a terrible ‘here comes the train’ out of its whistle. Mrs. Macaroni seemed glued to the spot, and when the train crashed into her thigh, she fell with a screech onto the linoleum floor, and breathed her last breath. Suddenly, Michael sprang to his feet from where he had been lying pantsless and shoeless mere feet away, saw Mrs. Macaroni lying on the ground, and screamed a heartbreaking and high-pitched ‘NOOO!’

“Gary, where are the keys?”, said Kathy, my mom.

She was in a rush to find those keys, just to get rid of her only daughter. I deserved it though, considering her only daughter was an embarrassment to her.

“Honey, would you slow down.” said Gary, my dad.

My dad could care less what was occurring with my upcoming absence. He was always too busy reviewing game footage for his high school football team, which I’m pretty sure he loved more than me.

“Stevie are you ready to leave?” Mom asked.

I didn’t really want to die. It struck me as a strange realization as I stood on the edge of the pedestrian path on the bridge, looking down at the dark water below, and contemplating the jump that I had been hoping would end my life. Despite my decision, though, it was true that death was not the optimal answer to my problems. I did wish there was a different way. All I really wanted was for the pain to end. I wanted to stop suffering, to stop fucking everything up, and had reached the point that I thought that this was the only way.

At one point, I was an only child, and I imagine that the spotlight shone on me. I don’t remember, however, as my younger sister came along less than two years later. I also don’t remember a time when she wasn’t ill and commanded all my mother’s attention. She was diagnosed at a young age with muscular dystrophy. While my father checked out to cope, my mother grounded herself by leaping into action, doing all the research she could and doting on my sister. We didn’t have much serious illness in our family; in fact, we had several relatively accomplished athletes.

After hours of deliberation and arguments, Don Juan Rashid was sentenced to death by firing squad. It was a fate he knew all too well that was reserved by God for him, and he accepted it without any hesitation, almost praying for it to come, because when that first bullet would penetrate his back, there would be a well-deserved pain, and then an all too merciful sleep. "Finally," he breathed when he was sentenced, "a cure for my insomnia."

They call us the ghetto medics, 911 rig riders responding to emergencies in the 313. Bullets over our heads, gang fights by our trucks, drug seekers faking pain, and drivers trying to beat our lights and sirens; like they got something better to do. I didn’t even mention the patients yet, shoot I didn’t even start on the drama which is fubar; fucked up beyond all repair, and I would say this patient right now is just that.

“Manny, what is you doin’?” my partner Paul scoffed at me as I run over to the first patient.

“I’m trying to save this guy, what do you think?”

The bathtub sits empty, full of cold water, and cold hearts and cold memories. The sun seeps in through the window, and refracts against the water, casting rainbows on the white tile floor. Taho knows it is supposed to be beautiful, but it is the ugliest thing he has ever seen. He cannot bear the sight of the tub, cold and lifeless. He blames the bathtub. He blames his hands. He blames the grains of sand. But mostly, he blames himself.

~

I was falling. I mean I had fallen before; from a bed to a plush carpet, a bus to the muddy ground, from the 13th stair all the way to the 1st. Yes, I had fallen before; always getting a scrape or a bruise or lesson, but I would get up. I would survive; they were never really a great distance. But at seventeen that fall from that bus felt like it broke bones, tore ligaments, ripped flesh a gape, but at 20, I know it was just a bruised ego, and at 14, when I missed that stair and my life seemed to flash before my eyes and I thought I’d die.

White

“I can’t do this anymore, I’m so sorry,” I whisper, kissing my sleeping daughter on the forehead. She stirs but she doesn’t wake. I head to the front door. My mother is asleep on the sofa, face set in the disappointed scowl that I’ve grown so accustomed to seeing. She always said I would never be a good mother, that I was too selfish and lazy to be able to take care of another person. She would get the last word again. I shut the door soundlessly, and then begin the short walk to the highway.