Hands and Knees

by: Jay Graham

They want me to try on their packer. They can’t wait to show me in person so they pull out their phone, scrolling down the boutique sex toy site, through what seems to be an endless supply of products with equestrian-themed names, until they find a subsection titled “wearables.” “Oh,” I say, flatly, the image filling the screen. “I guess I should have expected that.” 

I met them three months ago in a summer class on “liberatory cartography.” The course largely consisted of sitting in various parks around the city, reading PDFs, and viewing various types of maps. They rolled up to that first session late and sunburnt, pushing their mountain bike up the low hill. I clocked them immediately because they had on this gray tank bedazzled with the word FAGGOT, and it was plastered to their body, half-moons of sweat-darkened fabric around the pits and from the naval to their waistband, down the line where a happy trail might be. They sweat from their belly button, I had thought to myself. Removing their helmet revealed a flattened nest of wet hair—grown-out brown roots, box-dyed blonde tips. Over the course of the hour I ripped up individual blades of grass from a patch between my legs and watched their shirt fade back to a single uniform color. 

What got us started on talking about packers was they’d shown me a different thing on their phone when that first session was over—a screenshot of a Kabbalistic star map—and this had turned into a conversation in which we exchanged signs and then numbers and finally names—the monosyllabic kind. Then came tentative revelations via text of our plans for the future—our fantasies of what we might feel once we sort out the logistics. After the clinics, the waiting rooms, the city council buildings, our future selves will emerge with dewy skin, our pores flushed of doubt. We’ll step out into the day, glowing with the interior light of self-intelligibility. But they are a little ahead of me, already. 

“The Stallion…” I read aloud, staring down at the picture, my mood a low-floating balloon. I’d been hoping for something more subtle, nominally. Or more dignified. Or remotely hot. This, instead, seems to be designed for people whose genitalia can be a joke to them. As if putting on a dick is just another harmless and mildly outrageous thing people do, like dressing up as a slutty cowboy for Halloween. They spread their index finger and thumb across the screen to enlarge the image, so I can get a better look at the accuracy of the texture, its proximity to biological skin. “Some are more real than others,” they inform me. Then add, “But you can see for yourself.” They tell me that I’ll like it, that they’re doing an afters at their place, post-dyke-march, that I should come by. 

The sun is down but the air still holds a compressed heat. I walk through its solidity to their apartment, my legs sore from the march, chainsmoking. When I arrive, climb the stairs to the roof, they are leaning against a wall, wearing a white tank under a white leather blazer and matching cowboy boots. Graduates of midwestern liberal arts schools are arranged in clusters on the roof, which bears our weight questionably, with its thick silver paint and tar splatters. Around their collar I can see the edge of their binder. We say hi, drawing out the syllable. “You walked all day in those?” I kick at the ostrich skin on their feet. Their mouth twists into something I can’t call a smile. “I want to change anyway. Come with me.” They lead me into a room and close the door against the noise. Their bed is a smear of white cotton.

Behind a closet door, they disappear, and I sense them digging through piles of clothes, like an animal with tough little nails. “I’ll try on these,” they say, throwing things with zippers and silver hardware onto the bed, “while you try this.” When they offer me this limp rubbery object, I know what to anticipate but also do not. It’s as pale as I am but, in my palm, weightier than I thought it would be. I cradle it like an injured bird before remembering I don’t need to be gentle with silicone. As they tear off their tank, I tug down my jeans with one hand and slip it inside my briefs, then manage to button the fly over its tightness. There’s a flimsy mirror standing up against the wall opposite me, but I avoid my reflection. In my periphery, I notice them pause while stepping into a pair of spandex shorts, lift their head. I can feel their eyes on it, bringing my own down with them. It’s cartoonishly big in my jeans. But, flushed with gin, they are beaming at me. They take a long pull from the bottle, hand it to me, and touch my wrist, bringing my hand to my fly, where they make me rub the bulge, telling me about its characteristics: its flexibility but inner firmness, the core a higher density than the outer layer. 

Opening the door wide, they quickly mesh again with the crowd, now barefoot. A shadowed image of their triangle of blonde curls is embedding itself behind my eyes, and a silver bike chain is looped around their upper body. I follow them, watching the chain ride their shoulder blades. Downstairs, in a tiny and clearly unused kitchen, all its cabinet doors hanging loose-jawed off their hinges, they pour mezcal into a jam jar for me, and I drink down the rancid smoke. The flavor shows—their smile is almost maniacal now. Washes of red light sweep over their face, briefly entering their mouth and moving over their teeth. For a second I get the sense that they want to unclip the chain from their body and beat me with it. Then someone calls their name from between the cushions of a cavernous couch, and they turn their head, giving me the sharp lines of their profile. The word cheekbone comes into my mind. I move away, drinking deeply, thinking cheekbone cheekbone cheekbone. It’s a smooth stone in my mouth, this noun, whole and hard. The cushions slowly ingest the stranger who is now occupying their interest. Voices bounce off the walls and drop around me. 

I slacken the leash on my attention, let it go wherever it wants, a dumb puppy. A guy with reflective silver surfer sunglasses is tossing his body around the makeshift dancefloor like a ragdoll. He jostles me a few times, testing. I envy the looseness of his limbs—they are free to do what feels right to them, because they belong to someone who is fully in possession of his body. There is no tension held inside the narrow column of his torso or stored in his forearms, under the soft blond hairs catching the roaming light. He’s wearing a loose black thermal with spraypainted barbed wire running along the hem and up the sleeves. “You look super hard in that,” I yell over the music, nodding at his shirt. “Fuck yeah, I’m hard.” He lurches closer to me. “You want to know how hard I am?” This had not gone the way I wanted. From the back of my throat I let out a humorless laugh, but he is already tossing his limbs in someone else’s direction. 

I linger, meet people, refill my cup a few times, accept bumps from a stranger exuding a demonic friendliness, from a spoon that, the stranger tells me, was meant for a dollhouse kitchen. A mannequin stands in the corner of the room, its arms and legs jutting out in directions that would be impossible to achieve for a body that felt pain. Affixed to its headless neck and sculpted biceps like antlers are long-stemmed candles, lit so many times the wax drippings adorn the figure’s full length, with a final candle glued to the smooth mound between its legs. An image enters my head: a hand bringing a lighter to the wick, a body kneeling on the dried chips of wax, a mouth opening to catch whatever melts and falls. 

Upstairs I find them in the midst of assembling snacks, and for reasons that remain obscure to me, a tub of Greek yogurt is involved. “Can you grab it from the fridge?” they call over their shoulder. I decide I can match their energy. Yanking open the fridge door, I nearly dislodge the handle from its screws, and spinning around to toss the tub into their waiting arms, I upend the container entirely. It flops top-down onto the floor between us, the thick whiteness of it like a heap of paint. In the ensuing pause we stare at it, then at each other, ecstatic. We get on our hands and knees. This feels correct. We move our arms in great sweeping movements, gathering it with wads of paper towels. I imagine them taking my face by the jaw and dragging my mouth against the floorboards to clean the remaining streaks. But the job is simpler than that. It’s done in two minutes. 

Time spreads out and flattens. I roll progressively shittier cigarettes. My puppy noses things, sniffs at ankles. I’m considering leaving when I see them again, shouldering through the thinning crowd into the backyard to find me. A palm to lick. They splash another shot into my jar, and finish the rest of the bottle in one swallow. The scale of their facial features has been thrown off: eyes growing to the size of plates, teeth winnowing to little pegs. 

In their basement bedroom sits an altar made from an upturned cardboard box. I hadn’t noticed it earlier. It’s been draped with a dyed purpled sheet, scattered with dried rose petals, and decorated with objects. Pushing the rejected garments off the bed and leaning back against the pillows, I watch them as they move with purpose around the room, pulling a pale rubber cock from a bedside drawer. When I realize they’re strapping it around their own pelvis, tightening it to the furthest notch, I’m surprised for a moment. A dead hornet with its long fragile wings spread out preens in a brass dish in the center of the altar. They tug at my belt, drag down the denim, and push into me. The hornet hums on its little throne. The roundness of the head hurts me. More people must be moving into the backyard to smoke, plugging in strings of bulbs, because suddenly the light changes in the room, and I perceive for the first time the crumbly texture of the ceiling, the seams where wall meets wall, the outlets that have been painted over so many times they resemble tiny inanimate pig snouts. 

I decide to take their pierced nipple in my mouth and tug, watching for a reaction. They suck in a stream of air through their teeth, as if hissing in reverse, but don’t stop. I bite down, gradually applying more pressure until they let out a sound that has the quality of cracked leather. A confused expression moves over their features at this, and then they laugh a short polite laugh, before pulling away and returning to what they were doing. When I try to meet their eyes, I find them dilated and blank, like a fish’s. An image of a hook looping into the soft blackness of their pupil flares up in my brain and burns out. When they are finished with me, they release themselves and laugh again into the darkened room. “You still like to be fucked like a girl. I can tell,” they say, and leave, dropping the harness onto the carpet and mumbling something about needing water. The faucet goes on in the bathroom. I picture them drinking from the spout, surrounded by bath towels stained with hair dye, mildewing on their nails. I hope for a moment they will inhale microscopic particles from the dirty towels that will later have a minor but noticeable impact on their health. A chronic respiratory infection. 

A feeling hangs itself in my brain, languageless, like a hammock without its trees. I pull up my jeans from my ankles, buckle my belt, feel around the mattress for my shirt, and slip out of the bedroom as the faucet stops. It’s easy to be drawn up again into the loose netting of this group of strangers. Stragglers are feeding their limbs to the furniture in the basement, milling around the backyard, lifting and tipping glass bottles to check for emptiness. 

Jay Graham is a bookseller living in Brooklyn. Their work has appeared in The End Magazine, Angel Food Magazine, Wonder Press, and The Paris Review Daily.