The Passion of Matthew

Timothy Parrish

“With God we can also force our way through violence. He Himself, when he especially

needs one of us, He chooses us and violates us.”

--Clarice Lispector

I am dead. I am streaming. I look like an actress dressed as a boy. I look like a girl cast in the role of Jesus. See her hanging from that fence post like Christ on the Cross. The stars shine above her. They light her dead eyes which see nothing. I see everything.

There is a world behind the world. It’s not the one on your screen. I died and then was born again from it. You better believe I’m going back. I think you’re in my way.

Mom was reading the Bible the night I was born. She might have called me Mathew, Mark, Luke or John, since those were the books she liked to read best. It could be my birth got mixed up in her reading since my surname comes from the one whose life those stories told. Sometimes people confuse me with him. He looked after the lost. Please don’t think I’m him. I can’t save you.

You thought you were watching something else. I’m supposed to be in some other stream. Don’t let the identity theft bother you. In death, streams merge, this stream or another, there is no stopping being born and then being born again. Now I am risen. Why don’t you just fuck off?

You probably know how the movie ends anyway. She I mean he gets beaten to death. Sorry, if I ruined it. But that’s why you dialed it up. You know it is. It makes you feel good to feel bad when people like me die. I saw you the night Orlando happened. I felt your pain. People like me. People like me. People like me.

My name lingers to betray me. I wish I could erase it. You can’t turn me off and I can’t either. I’m even in your goddamned phone. Just type the beginning of my name and your search engine summons me like a genie from your phony lamp. http:/ blank blank blank. The problem with the afterlife is that it never goes away. Click on my Facebook page. I can’t remove it now. No one can. Someday everybody will be dead and everyone will live on in pages that can’t be accessed.

This time around I’m a girl who looks like a boy. It feels right to seem an actress, I don’t know why. When you’re dead, your gender falls away. You can’t be confused by it anymore. When you’re dead, you don’t think it’s cute when Hollywood dresses girls up as boys to show how sensitive the poor boy was before other boys hit him and hit him like he was just some girl you could do that to. Boys cry too. I’m not crying now.

You don’t have to be a girl to cry.

Hey, don’t get up. I’m not actually crying. And you can’t touch me.

Professor, your life is not just what happens to you. It’s what you are despite what happens to you.

It’s ok if you confuse me with her--him. I am not the girl—the boy—in the picture people have probably forgotten now. That was someone else. Even the girl in the movie is not the boy, the girl, she is playing. He’s dead too, which I guess is why some people get us confused. I died the year before it came out. We had the same story in a way I suppose. I don’t have a body anymore so it’s all the same to me. Aaron beat mine out of existence.

It hurts when the belt hits your flesh. Fists pound your eyes and you see the world as God made it. Blood and stars. The life my mother gave me passed to come to its last moment. Everybody wants to know how I got there. Everybody wants to see me die.

The night I was born when everything fell away from me into this world. Now I am being born again. Maybe this time you will come with me when I leave.

Whose heaven is this anyway? Not mine. This eternity opened when some professor told some ghoul with a microphone why I died. He had a reason. He said I was different. He said I was not like him. He used a word you probably know. Rhymes with pray. As I was dying, I became infected. My life went viral. Worse than AIDS because it went virtual which means it never ends. The professor confused his life with my death and now I have to die forever. You believed him. Now you have your saint to pray to. I’m not listening.

Professor, your life is not just what happens to you. It’s what you are despite what happens to you. No one understands this. Ask Jesus.

Look at her—me. All martyrs look alike when they are dead. Hilary is the name of the actress I am. I am not. She fakes deaths for a living. Mine was real. I look like her in this stream, but I can stream as someone else. She never played me. I’m dressed up as her dressed up as somebody else. I have forgotten his name. This is not his story. I speak for no one.

Didn’t I tell you I won’t let you miss the end of the movie where she dies? He shall rise again. He’ll be wearing a dress. It will reveal the shape of her breasts. She’s among different stars. He looks elegant as Hillary, lustrous, far from the Wyoming fence where the stars died in my eyes. She stares into a camera, trembling. Her eyes are wet. She is moved and this movement moves her. It moves you too. In her hands is a little gold statue. Its name is Oscar. His name was Brandon. I’m Matt or I used to be. I’m flat-chested and have a dick.

Why did I have to die, people ask? I’m dead because Aaron killed me. It wasn’t because I sucked dicks. Once he started hitting, he couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t let him. He did it from love. I had known his body before. He fisted me to death.

Death is endless life. I am the resurrection. Drink me. Eat me. Stream me. I appear to service your fantasies. You make laws in my name. You summon my image to chasten others. Books. Movies. WebPages. You want me to blow you too?

You can’t shut me off. I wish you could. I hate this fence and it’s just so cold. I’m that person you never loved. That person you never knew who was that person. Oh, he was . . . ?

Once the dead were nailed into boxes and hidden in the earth. We were immolated, our ashes placed in urns or drifted to the wind. Now we’re pressed into screens and our images endlessly recycled. We have stolen eternity from God and made it virtual. I won’t leave this world until the last bit of lithium is scraped out of the last standing mountain to run the last battery operated iPhone.

I hung dead in the darkness unseen but for G-d’s pale rising light. They found me. And then I died again when I returned as an image flashing into this flickering light. To be born is to exit and to die to enter. Next time I die, I promise you, I won’t come back. Most of us are born dead and never awaken to life everlasting. Aaron was born dead. Aaron was born dead and didn’t learn how to be reborn.

Dying the first time was wonderful, better than any orgasm. No need to mourn me. It was a beautiful release. He had killed me, poor Aaron, and could not wait to watch me die. He ran away. I was grateful for his consideration. This second death has re-tuned me to the pitiful expectations of the living. My body is vacant now. Others have occupied it.

I return as an afterimage, a vestige of some pain embedded into the nature of existence this life will not erase. I have not seen Jesus, nor have I sought him. I radiate in a glow of nameless origin. Was it you, Aaron, who demanded my return? I thought I had been strong enough to escape it. For no one else would I have willingly come. Jesus lies in another stream. I told you I can’t save you. Save your prayers for Aaron.

I radiate in a glow of nameless origin.

I met Aaron and I saw the end in his eyes. He or somebody like him had been circling me my whole life. Are you listening? I would not have let him kill me if he did not desire me. I wish I could have taken him with me. He was too afraid. He said he was working for someone else and he had to do what he had to do, which I already knew. He had to keep living this life. He didn’t want to be transformed. He wanted to make like to like. He wanted me dead like he already was. That’s why he’s in jail. Your body gives you a life sentence.

Aaron left me hanging puffy-faced and bruised from a fence built for dividing cattle. The stars pulled me out of myself. Someone had to cut me down and bring me to market. Mom did it.

From my dying she took death and gave it life. Aaron killed me. Mom bore me twice. Grief impregnated her and she became large with it. The dead son did incubate within her until the professor delivered him to the media who made him live again. Strangers sought her to touch the hem of her garment, which was me. Congressman knelt at her feet. Mom became lustrous. I shone through her. The president bowed before her, seeking votes. The heavens lighted my mother until I was a saint—or a national law, which is almost the same thing. You have a new president now. He is his own hate crime, I hear, and people loved him for it too. His laws will not improve on mine.The first change is from within.

My name was compressed into a tablet borrowed from Moses. My loving, suffering mother instituted the Law of Matt. It says you can’t hate as you kill. If you do, the government will kill you two times for every one time you killed. It’s called a hate crime and with its power they mean to crush souls. They should have named the law after Aaron instead of me. Poor Aaron. He kills people because he can’t die. You must love as you kill—like God loved Jesus when he let him die. Aaron wanted to love me. He didn’t know how. So he fucked me and then he killed me. I have been resurrected stillborn but talking.

No death is different from any other. Jesus came to be killed so we might know. Now my name obscures his. You have to die before you can be reborn. I said I can’t save you.

The funny thing is, Aaron didn’t hide from killing me. He wanted his name attached to mine. That’s how I know he loved me. It was his lawyers who persuaded him to lie. They said his punishment would be less if he expressed his revulsion toward my kind.

My kind. My kind. My kind. Kindness is all. Hate doesn’t exist in this world only because some are called queer. My kind is your kind. Motherfucker.

They thought it was a sin to love.

They said, tell everyone Matt slept with men and that he wanted to sleep with you. People will forgive you. They thought like the professor. They thought it was a sin to love. In his weakness, Aaron agreed. He killed for love but he wouldn’t die for it. That was his crime.

Where do we come from? No one really knows—the scientific details hide the mystery of the thing. We are created from friction. And then for nine months a warm darkness is your home. No light gets in. Only sound. You turn somersaults in the dark. My tongue tingled in my mouth. Somehow, I know this. My body remembers. That tingling feeling was all I knew of my mother’s womb. I sought that feeling after I left it. From this you cannot exonerate me. There is nothing to forgive.

But let’s talk about you. What were you doing when you heard about the pretty faggot boy tied to a fence and left to die? You felt sorry for me, didn’t you? Oh, wait, you don’t like that word I just used, do you? The f-word. It’s a hate word, not a love word. You want to ban it. Make my death the law of the land. Don’t cross Matt or he’ll add time to your time. Don’t bother. I didn’t die for a word. I died because I was born.

What if I told you the f-word was Aaron’s pet name for me the first time we did it? That it made me tingle the sweet way it fell from his mouth? It wouldn’t make any difference, would it? You think he used it the night I died? If he had, I’d still be alive.

We didn’t make love that night. I wanted to. He turned from me. He was working for Doc—a bad guy and I’d prefer not to talk about, if you don’t mind. Doc put people in his debt and then he made them work until they were used up. A dealer in slaves, like most businessmen. Doc hired Aaron to stop me from dealing. And Aaron was nothing but other people’s hate—that’s why he couldn’t stop hitting me. He never wanted to kill me. He wanted to love me. He didn’t know how.

I know exactly what’s happening in your movie now. They haven’t beaten the boy—girl—boy to death yet. It’s not for a little while. I won’t let you miss it. How could I? And you can replay it as often as you like.

Tell you what. I’ll make this deviation worth your while. I’ll die for you, again, if you want me to. I can put you at the scene. Aaron has me up against the fence. His face is in mine. His left hand on my throat. His right hand drawn high to strike. I’m tied to the fence, trying to get comfortable. He’s whispering like the lover he was not.

Now, baby, now. You’re fixin’ to die, sweety pie. I’m blowing you to kingdom come. Are you flickering, yet? I’m coming death, man. Yours. It’s all over your eyes. Lights out, it’s closing time. Spread your arms to the stars. Tell me about the next world when you get there, baby. Tell them who sent you too.

It was just talk to him. He was messed up. Don’t judge him. He didn’t know what he said was true.

The belt was the worst, its swinging brass tongue. Creation had tongue stud and it was licking my hurt, making it come to life in my body where it always was. That starry night Aaron opened every bruise or cut I had ever felt in life. He hit me he hit me he hit-hit-hit me. It hurts so much to have a body.

He fled my consummation. He couldn’t finish me off. He betrayed me. He thought I was alone but the afterlife was all around me. He left me spread before the whole world to gape at my hanging there dying on a cross for cows. I didn’t look like Jesus, no matter what they say. Jesus would never let himself come back like this.

When you’re dead you think a lot about Jesus. You have to. You’ll find out. Was killing Jesus a hate crime? Jesus came to redeem the queers first and last. Who did he sleep with? Mom’s Bible does not say. He was bi. Trans too. He had to have been. The body is the flame upon the soul’s wick. He loved everybody equally. He just identified as male. Hilary, the actress I am not, can play him too.

I did see stars. I didn’t know if they were in my eyes or the skies. Then I slipped into darkness, like the moment just after you were conceived and you forget what you were before you came here. I didn’t hear Aaron’s words until after I was dead. He may have said other words. The ones I told you came to me when the light started flickering again and I saw you were watching me.

Cameras started to surround the scene like wolves. I didn’t want them to shoot my death. I didn’t I die on the fence. I left myself to die. My body hung there. You’ll understand when you get there—here, if you get here, and I hope you don’t. I wasn’t I. I was diffused, like ashes. It was blissful. Non-existence is everything they say it isn’t.

That feeling lasted for I don’t know how long. Then the darkness giving way. A faint iridescence, which seemed to create the distance from which it emerged. A rushing of breath and suddenly a whirlwind. It seemed I was carried up into an immense light, which then dwindled to a flickering. I heard a babble of voices. Some became distinct. Aaron’s, Mom’s, the professor’s, and so many more I didn’t know or remember. My death came alive. The stars from my last night became your eyes watching me. Combinations of colored dots that viewers access. An image forever flickering. I became streaming.

Oh, shit, I said. Is this rebirth? Is the afterlife an usb connection? Unplug me, if it is. If I could just die, this wouldn’t be happening over and over. If I could just die, you wouldn’t be there.

Why don’t you come closer? I can’t touch you. What is it you want from me? Just listen and I’ll tell you something. The wounded seeks the wounder. If you’re wounded, you aren’t dead. If you’re wounded, you can be healed. You may not know where to look. Those who would be raped must find their rapist. Those who would be killed must find their killer. It’s not wrong or right. It’s just the story you have. I’m not blaming the victim. Bodies get in the way of each other and shit happens.

I found out in Marrakesh. I had felt abandoned by my father—you may remember him from the videos. He told reporters I wasn’t his gay son, I was his son who just happened to be gay. Just happened to be gay! Like my dad just happened to be a dick. He wasn’t around when I was a kid. He had his reasons. He was always working. I missed him. I don’t know why. I didn’t know any better. They fuck you up, your mom and dad. We lived overseas for a time so he could make more money. He said it was to make me happy. He didn’t have time for me there either. So to make up for that, he put me in a hotel in Marrakesh with a bunch of other kids. He thought I’d like that. It was supposed to be a kind of tourist-vacation. He wasn’t there.

One night I left the hotel for a walk. We weren’t supposed to be out late alone. I felt called so I left my room. I wasn’t looking for trouble. Outside there was nothing between me and the stars. Do you know that feeling? I felt myself integral to the heavens’ wheeling. I felt sheltered by the sky. I felt I could endure anything, even grace.

What happened was, I came upon a group of Arab boys and they raped me. It was in an alley. They cornered me and they took turns spilling each other upon me. Within me. There was a knife that was passed around. The doer held the knife to my throat while he did me. He pricked me until I bled. I keened in unholy prayer. People walked past as it was happening. They didn’t care. They weren’t being raped. I understood.

When they were done, my rapists took turns spitting on me. One whispered the word Christian. Two others said American and laughed. Their words were not mine. Before leaving me, three pissed on the wall above my head. Their urine splashed in my hair, anointing me. They left me face up to the stars.

I was abused. I was chosen. Into me flowed acceptance. Piss drenched my hair, yet I exhaled the breath of flowers. The world had opened up its secret to me and I had received it. I had not turned away. What happened had to happen to me. It was what I felt with Aaron too. The same moment, the same feeling. I was there and then I wasn’t. Life hurt unbearably and then suddenly I could bear it.

It’s hard to understand. Don’t blame me because I don’t. Through blood and semen, a spirit came into me. Call it love or rapture. Like being raped by Jesus. It had dwelled within me, a feeling stored in my body with all the other ones, and it had destroyed me. There are no words to describe what happened. Revelation requires the destruction of everything that precedes it.

Once you experience something like that, nothing that mattered before seems to matter anymore. Anything can happen to you. You don’t care what it is. You’re just waiting for everything false to end—to be carried away from all that deceives you, which is life, into that blissful state of terrible acceptance. This knowing surfaces almost randomly, in moments of corporeal surrender. You realize it’s all happened to you before. It’s all coded into you and birth just starts it over. Your body knows what you don’t.

I won’t say I felt it again just when I was high or sleeping with other men. It appeared during quiet times too. The sun casts a certain light and strife falls away. You don’t care your father doesn’t love you or that people hurt you for fun. This life is a series of breaths and nothing more. It can feel like peace. Anything can feel like peace—even hate when it fills you with purpose. It did Aaron and those boys in Marrakesh. And that hate law made from Mom’s grief. But nothing lasts. Not sex. Not hate. Not rape. Not even the hope that everything lasts, lasts.

Aaron’s rush of blood couldn’t sustain him. He couldn’t stay until my end. He left me to the stars, for Jesus and you to find. Maybe the force that discovered me in Marrakesh will find Aaron in prison, bent over and raped like I was. I hope so. It’s the only thing that can save him. No human law can.

In the womb, you see, you are who you are. You were who you were. It’s as close to heaven as this life allows. Nothing has happened to you yet. Then your soul, if that is what it is, flowers into your body. You take on weight. You fall from your mother and the world seizes dominion of you through your body. It tells you what it’s for and what you can do with it. It hides the gay face you had before the world was made. You can’t find it in the mirror. But your body remembers and seeks that face in others. I saw mine among men.

Your life begins with a bright light, not the one Saul saw. An institutional blistering brightness unknown to the stars shrouds your eyes. You go from darkness to blindness through a light so bright it hides what was. You blink to see the devastation of everything. You learn to live in this harsh new world, but your eyes still see it through the burn of their first opening. I died when it was dark to enter the light. But not the one you see now in your room dark but for the screen.

I’m in the bathtub. I’m not eighteen months. The bubbles have receded. Plastic picture books float about me. One or two yellow ducks. I am touching the pleasure toy God gave me. I don’t know what it is. It’s the body’s truth. The place where love has pitched its tent. I pass water through it but I don’t really know that. I will have to learn to hold it when it counts. Expression, not repression, is the rule we learn. I touch my toy again. It doesn’t tinkle. I tingle. I make joy from myself. My father slaps my hand away. Stop it, he says. Don’t do that, he says. I learn to deform myself. He is making me.

But now life resists you as you are. Body operators fall upon you with their programs and instruction books. Teachers. Parents. Friends. Lawyers. Judges. Congressmen. Presidents. Directors. Screenwriters. Journalists. Don’t talk. Do this. Don’t copy that. You may piss or shit, but only when I say so. Stay quiet. Write what I tell you. Draw what I tell you. Don’t touch her. Don’t touch him! Don’t be late. Do what I say. Do what they say. Do what I say they say. Stand in line. And then you die and they make of your life a story to supplement their rules.

And now I’ve been made a saint It wasn’t the pope who did it. It was my mother. Mothers possess the gift of creation. They make you before the world unmakes you. Mary and no one else brought forth Jesus. It was Jesus’ father who demanded that he die. Mary wept and Jesus was reborn.

No law can compel love. A government can’t love a person. A government killed Jesus. Our bodies tell us whom we should love. Love is on your tongue and it speaks through your fingers and eyes and everything else. It seeks the soul through the mouth, the cock, the anus, the nipples, the ears, the toes, the backs of knees and the undersides of elbows, pulsing wrists, yes, and the clitoris too, I am told.

The body knows what persists. I gave into my body the first time I loved a man. It did not feel wrong. I didn’t listen to anyone who told me it was. This life is the set of lies we tell about the body while we wait for it to yield its soul. Aaron ended the life of my body. I can’t lie now.

Right now I’m a girl pretending to be a boy whose mind was mixed up in its body parts, some people say, but it was just the body his mother gave him. Your mother gave you yours. Make of your body what it will, but be careful of doing it in North Carolina bathrooms. They’ll arrest you for pissing in a pot.

Our bodies tell us whom we should love. Love is on your tongue and it speaks through your fingers and eyes and everything else.

I was a child, once, like anybody. I was beautiful the way some say, not I, girls are. When I was little, men tousled my hair. People called me Dandelion Head. When I became older, men still tousled my hair. They came into my mouth while they did it.

Do those Arab boys bother you? Did the spirit that infected me come into you when I confessed their crime to you? I bet you think I should have gone the other way that night. It’s hard to lock up trouble. It gets out somehow. You say to yourself, you have to learn to look away when trouble approaches. I should have stayed at the hotel. You must be good at that. Looking away. Would you have stopped to help me? You like me now because you never knew me. If you did, you would have walked right on by.

Aaron didn’t walk away. I met him at a party. Near each other, our bodies became eloquent. He took me to a back room where he shared his meth with me. It gives you a jolt like Jesus. It’s artificial but it will do until the real thing comes along. A bed was between us and we fell upon it. I won’t tell you what we did together. Some of you know.

Was it love or desire? What’s the difference? You could say that love is selfless and desire is the epitome of selfishness. You could say that love is a choice and desire isn’t. Aaron had to have me. I liked that. And I was freely given. Is that love? I sought him out the night I died. I wanted the drugs he was selling. I wasn’t dealing. I didn’t have any money. Love won’t buy what this world has to give you. When I offered him my body that night, he said no and then he took it forever.

Those boys in Marrakesh gave my body to me. I didn’t want them to. That night I shat blood. They caused my eyes to swell and not just from tears. I was torn from the inside out. When they were done, I couldn’t walk. I crawled back to the hotel. My face wet from their spit, my ass from their come. My body took everything they had to give it. The road scraped my hands and knees as I crawled across it. Above me, the stars lit my path as it did for the rapists. My first born-again experience. The next world is yours to inhabit if only you will go. I’m trying.

You’re right. It was my eyes that compelled them, like they did Aaron. It wasn’t because I was gay. I was empty, so they came into me. I was lost, so they found me. I hurt, so they hurt me. Doubtless they share the same hurt, the same one Aaron has. I didn’t hide mine from them. Had I looked away, they would have walked past me. I could have hidden my eyes. I didn’t know what it would cost. They recognized me and for a moment I was grateful. Then they threw me to the ground.

You don’t believe me. You want to explain my delusion. I have collaborated with the enemy. My abusers hold my soul in ransom and you would protect me from myself. Get this one thing straight, ok? This world is safe for no one. I’d rape you if I could just to prove it. Then you could forgive me and we might even cry together. The grace of passion is short.

You take the world as it comes and only then do you get to leave it forever. I learned that in Marrakesh. It’s a lesson I have to keep learning. Otherwise, why must I talk to you?

Once I found someone who felt about the world the way I do. It wasn’t Aaron. A boy in North Carolina. We spoke of getting married, but our wish was illegal. Our bodies were outlawed—like drugs, like prostitutes, like killers. Everything I sought in place of him. I hear the prohibition that forbade our legal union fell away after I died, except in a certain county in Kentucky where a woman made her own law, which she claimed came from heavenly dicta. But G-d lies through our minds, not our bodies, and some of us born can’t abide the laws others make in our name. I hear you have a new President now and many marriages will soon be annulled. John Roberts is his High Priest and so many want their hands washed of us in his name. Fuck Anton Scalia, by the way. I will if I see him.

Check that. I’m the blushing bride to be. Don’t you like me better when you know underneath I’m a girl?

After Marrakesh, after North Carolina, I became a drug addict, a dealer, and my own pimp. That part of my life rarely comes up, but you can read about it on the Internet. It’s boring. Through my body, my body always tried to let out its hurt. One time was as good as another. This world is a tangle of connections leading to the moment it all falls away.

I want to murder this afterlife you have given me. My law, the one Mom made, has nothing to do with peace. It makes hate the foundation of existence. It recycles this botched existence forever. The president signed it, but Jesus wouldn’t. It says nothing of forgiveness.

I want Aaron to be forgiven for killing me. He looked into my eyes and gave me what I wanted. It wasn’t fair of me. I knew he couldn’t help himself. I led him on. I was ready to die. I wanted it to be like before I was born. I didn’t know Mom loved me enough to bear me again into this world. Let me go, Mom. You can find me later.

Poor little gay boy. Poor little pretty gay boy. He sucks dicks and then he dies for it. You come tears just thinking of my death. We crucified him, you think. Or somebody. Aaron did. G-d knows, it wasn’t you. You didn’t have the strength.

I’m all around you now in those wireless wires that connect the interstices of this world and make them visible. There I am on your dresser, your nightstand, or hanging just above the light switch. Walk down your hall and find me descending Victorian stairs. Gold and silver frames surround me. There’s my graduation picture. Can’t you see the happy future in my smile? Oh, here are my wedding pictures. There’s my bride I never married. Let’s call him Jack. He’s hard to see behind the veil.

Check that. I’m the blushing bride to be. Don’t you like me better when you know underneath I’m a girl? It’s because girls are rapable. Boys rape, they don’t get raped, right? Not while they are alive. Boys fight back. You think I didn’t fight back enough? Or that I couldn’t fight back. Maybe you think I never got up off the street in Marrakesh like I never left that fence in Wyoming. You could say I asked for it until I got it. I told you I did. Why should you care? I don’t. The truth is different where I am. Homos and heteros, bi or trans. We’ve lost our categorical imperative.

I feel your movie coming through me. It’s reaching its climax. They’re killing the lead actress. Can you hear his screams? They aren’t real but I don’t want to go through it again for you. I’m tired. It’s exhausting to have to die over and over.

I can’t seem to find the stream of your movie. Look, your screen is blank. Not even white noise. A preview of the afterlife.

Hey, don’t be nervous. It’s not the apocalypse. This is another fantasy you are having through me. I’m not really in your bedroom. I’ve been accessed from another dimension, remember. You probably don’t believe in that stuff anyway.

I see a light ahead. It’s different from the one that brought me to you. And a beckoning shadow. I’ll just walk into it. I’m leaving Matthew behind. Hold him as you will. My story is not his.

“The story is from a cycle of stories dealing with questions of sexuality, identity, and family. I wrote it thinking of how hard it can be to define one's identity when everyone you know or encounter seems not to understand the place where you are, and perhaps always have been.”

Timothy Parrish is a writer and critic who lives in Davis, California. His recent short fiction includes “Phillip Roth’s Final Hours,” which appeared in Raritan, the novella, “The Critic," in Ploughshares, and “Birth” in Vestal Review. His most recent critical book is Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America.