"Cosmo Girl: Joey, a plane crashes on the border of Canada and the US, where do you bury the survivors?
Joey: Ah ha! You can't bury survivors in the water!"
After she left, he scrubbed a halo of makeup from his hair and brows. He'd never gotten out of his mother's genteel habit of drinking beer from a glass. He balanced it on the back of his toilet next to the stubs of candles.
Delicate greens crowded his refrigerator. He owned an autographed DVD of Cats. He could sing all of "Memory" while he made a salad to heal his bones and blood.
To unwind, he pushed aside pillows that Chinese silkworms had spun decades on. He didn't reach for the remote.
While he creased back chapter one of Virtual Morality, he wondered if she'd gotten the joke.
***
"Chris: "We love you. No, really. I love you. Joey...Marry Me."
He never fell because he didn't look at his feet. He was lightfooted, a term for people too small for grace, and possessed deceptive upper body strength, so Meg and Sharon had piled the Christmas deliveries on him.
The democratic treatment had flattered him when he started volunteering for the Toy Network, but palled slightly when he realized he was a sight gag for the hardworking poor. He wouldn't have been as disturbed if the joke still included him.
One of the packages skittered away, hitting him in the eyebrow and then thumping to the snow. He paused to rest the stack between his hip and the adjacent store window, breath beading his scarf. He stretched for the half-buried box.
Ten thousand people would hand it to him if they knew who he was.
The tissue-thin bulk paper smeared on his coat when he dried the package. Wrapping them en masse took a surprising toll, box of Santas box of pinecones box of trees, tape tearing his fingertips and the paper buffing them flat. His skin sung with little cuts. But at the end of the weekend, the drifts of charity dwarfed him.
"I want a big trunk, biggest one you have," he heard behind him, oddly reverberant. He backed off to take in twelve televisions broadcasting George Bailey's ambition. "I'm gonna see the world."
"You're not gonna make it, George," he whispered. He drew a ring in the mist his body left on the glass.
***
"Lance: "I think, especially in, like, today, younger people are so much smarter and so much um, into, um, everything. You know, there's so much more information that they can get a hold of, you know."
The first time he ever, it was in a sunny loft in Germany, while his first lover held him. He was still thin then, almost fey, veins ribbing his arms like polished scrollwork. When the needle came out, it left a small black hole.
He was sick by the time they toured the twenty-second country, but it was a sweet ill, a dry one, a bone-deep sensual itch. It was fresh poppy petals. It was the first snap of fall.
He promised himself he'd stop before he withered. He promised he'd stop before he passed it on.
The first time JC ever, it was in Lance's arms.
***
"JC: "It doesn't matter how small or painless it is, I'm terrified."
"It's just a little dive," Tony said. "Not even your venue. They won't know. You can sing whatever."
"I'll know," JC said, hands tangled in his hair. Tony tugged one down, hand warm and smooth as a mug of coffee, and JC swallowed.
"This isn't testing your mettle here," Tony said gently. "You don't have to prove shit. You're a number one."
"What's a number one?" JC said, wiping his nose. When he breathed in he smelled Vicks and rawness, like waking with Lance in a white room in Switzerland and realizing they'd left the window open.
"Three types. Winners, losers, and quitters. Quitters stop trying. They go all Zen or say they don't give a shit or, you know, that. Losers care so much they never let it go. They'll do anything, say anything, be anything just to cross the line."
JC nodded. When he turned over that morning, the plaster walls turned Lance into the top of a monument, at one with rigid folds of sheet.
"Winners forget they're in a race," Tony finished. "They just love to run. Baby, let your hair down. Pass them. Run."
"Pass Justin?" JC breathed, looking at his blurry hands.
"You don't have to," Tony said gently. "You already won."
***
the end.