Ganymede, tending to his sheep in the Greek fields, walks from the midday sun. The grass around him is billowing in a dance he’s familiar with. The back of his neck is tawny and unsuspecting.

Rural Georgia echoes off Boyd’s Mountain. It’s a cacophony of engine revs and gunshots—deer footsteps and donkey songs—ricocheting off the sides of the valley. This morning, the ground’s dew has already been sucked up. Your Mama has left for the Shaw mill, driven away too early for you to get a glimpse of her orange shirt and too-tanned skin. Your Nana is in the kitchen. She’s cooking eggs and grits and gravy biscuits, ignoring the ugliness around her. For some, poverty is an exercise in minimalism; For you and yours, poverty is an explosion. Stuff seems to find itself in every part of this trailer—stacking and stacking and stacking.  

In the summer of the fifth year, your bare feet touch every sharp stone in that yard. And the broken trampoline was always an illusion: a castle, a battle, the stage. You prance over the emancipated springs and ripped vinyl. If moments in life are ever effortless, this is it. 

You are kept soft by the seclusion of this sphere. Its arms are wrapped so tight around you, blinding. You have not yet learned what humiliation lives inside your house; You have not yet learned how much red stuff will gush out after your soon-to-be classmates learn that three letter word. For now, you just play—the cicadas as background music—and ignore the crunching of rocks under the F-150s.  

Ganymede has been swept up by Zeus’s eagle. His beauty’s light is smearing through the sky like a comet. Up and up toward love.

You sit in dog piss. The sunlight is spotting through the rotted wood of the front porch, and he’s standing at the entrance of the sanctuary. The same age as you. His youth has an aura of beauty, but you can see his face is red from his father’s safety razor—the one he leaves on the bathroom sink as a test before the Mohawk plant. He looks like an angel against Georgia’s dead trees, but there’s something objectively wrong with him. He leans over to one side more than the other, almost as if he’s melting.  

Curse words fall from his mouth in rapid motion, a recent development. You don’t mind but don’t reciprocate. Instead, you extend your arm. He pulls you up. You notice how his bright, Irish skin reveals itself from his army surplus shirt. He pulls a pocketknife from his pocket—another sharpness he has stolen from his father—flashes the blade to you. Your eye’s reflection is caught in the silver and slashed by the few inches of cheap steel. Before you can react, he puts the blade to his hand—quick swipes. His skin is not transformed, at first. And then blood begins to bubble to the surface. He watches it with little expression, and then places the wound to your mouth. It’s copper and dirt and boyhood and something on the fringe of feeling enters you. Here, he marks you as the healer. 

With his body built up to the top of the Heavens, Zeus delivers Ganymede’s fate. He grants him the gift of immortal beauty and places him at the hem of his tunic, almost opening. 

The 12th summer becomes something different. The ease you once felt on this naked road has been replaced by a cyclone of ugly. That previous spring, school had become a minefield of deciding what parts of yourself you can reveal and what parts you can burn. But in this single wide, there’s something horrible living inside of you. You look into the mirror—the mirror that is duct taped to the wall vertical, barely hanging on—and all you see is the flea ridden dirt that permeates the floors. To feel sewn up, you must sit in complete darkness and look directly into a portal, a portal where someone is living. 

You’ve come to terms with the feeling of tulips blooming inside your stomach when you see him and him and him, but there’s still the fear. It comes when your classmates can understand every movement of your body—can understand how this effeminate marking makes you the devil; it comes when you see the shotgun in the corner of your grandparent’s room—sitting precariously on top of Hot Rod issues, church shoes, and empty boxes—and you remember you’re the devil. 

This feeling persists and forces you into a cheap office building. There is a puddle in the middle of the floor, and the receptionist cannot remember your name. And beyond the big, brown door is him in that office. No empathy lives inside him, just the ink he places on the pad. The pad that leads to the pills that leads to the shakes that leads to the numb hours that leads to your eyes closing. 

Just before your 13th birthday, the fever breaks. You’re crying across from him for no reason. Like every time you see him, his face is granite, and his hand is moving to the pad. You shift your body and the conversation, grip for something, and you find the putrid flame that burns big black holes into your organs. He asks the question like everyone else has in your life, but this time the answer has changed because yes feels like murder. Saying yes feels like pushing those unfeeling eyes into his skull with your kid thumbs, and you decide in that ugly office, in front of that ugly man—in front of every ugly man—yes is a way to destroy them. With this, that flame burning holes inside becomes bright blue, and you feel yourself disintegrate to ash.

God-lust infantilizes him; beauty immortalizes him. Ganymede, before Zeus with a cup of wine in his hand, looks like furniture. Zeus’s eyes never meet his.

He walks you through his home…You must send him your height, your weight, your shoe size, your waist size, your…You’re on the floor taking photos for him…He has an airplane set and a train set and a souvenir from every country he’s visited…You must wear a hood when leaving your car…He and his partner live in Toronto…His profile says that he’s looking for fwb, looking for something serious, looking for now, looking…The apartment is covered in trash just like the home you grew up in…You’re kissing him in the middle of the gay bar…Hairy college DL 4 fun…You’ve spent hours on the rug, massaging him, and he has not touched you…You’re in the shower with him, freezing…Uncut, drooping like a lilac flower…He lives in California and writes erotica for closet cases…He’s been married for 32 years, and you’ve made him realize he’s always been gay…Him hardening in your mouth, like sticking your hand in his cranium…Your hand around his throat out of fear…Two beers and now he’s using a country accent…Every word out of his mouth is a reassurance that you won’t be stuck in his hell…

Your body is fucked. It’s a political warzone of the new GRIDs; it’s a wasteland fending off an assault from PrEP, a barebacking from headless Grindr hookups, and rim job from Marjorie Taylor Greene. Your body oscillates from being the ultimate fantasy to the soberness of American whoredom. Visions of Hollinghurst—bathhouses, spent members, and Blackness eroticized—come up close. And then the bone crush of Cooper comes into focus. That destructo loss of innocence that can only erupt by inner killing. 

10 years out of that glass closet; 10 years of having yourself chewed in a new way. Every dark room glance has become a bone protruding from the back, a new spine. But in those 10 years, you surround yourself with the word of fairies who understand this life. You stand at the cusp of the hand-holding graves of Paul and Rog, sing Walt’s songs, and kiss Kramer on his bald head. Their words are the lifeblood inside you, and at some point, you realize how they live inside every single one of you. So, when you get into his Tacoma—with his ramblings of his job and his house and his child—you’ll look past that and see the roundness of Frank’s face peek through his features. You’ll think about how Frank’s psychobabble and loveliness live here, too. 

 I can see you through here, Frank. In the deep lines of his forehead. Draw yourself to me. Paul, please, I can feel your loss. You taught me what it was like to—to lose the body that holds the love and press the smoothness of that grief onto our backs—but what if I lose my own body, Paul? Write it down for me. The paper is behind the…it’s behind the Glad bags and the portable urinal and the prescriptions, underneath the Dixie cups and the worms. Edmund White, what about this boy’s story? Where should the pen go for him; what would be the words you would say to brush this narrative into the wind?

Every fairy smeared with ink has found himself ugly in the mirror. Self-inflicted thinking leads to this: the same “hey darling,” gummy smiles you’ve tried to escape. If there is any beauty exalted from the body, you know what is left is the rat infested single wide; if there is any beauty on your body, one day it will be plastered on the side of a Budweiser. Crushed. He will always consume you, toss, and follow it up with an epithet.

Zeus, now long abandoned, leaves Olympus hollow. His absence takes Ganymede’s body, again. Ganymede’s forever appeal now blinks outside the bars and is held hostage on the side of Budweiser, crinkling in men’s hands. 

With your head in his hands, this happiness could be permanent. 3 hours away from your future tombstone, it feels good to be covered by different arms. In this new illusion: you have your teeth, and he has good in him. He lets you sleep in a bed that fits your body, and there is no history in his voice. You can hear him sing and hear no knowledge of piss factories, doctors’ appointments, or boiled cabbage. It feels like immortality, and because of that, you give. 

But just like on that trampoline, this bed is the tower of Babel. The secret of your existence, always a constant, has become a form of history. One day, you wake up, and his morning breath comes through like the smell of that office building. You begin to realize how much giving has been unspoken and expected, and he has yet to surrender anything. As you turn to your side, facing his emptiness, you imagine outstretching your arms and placing your thumbs on his closed eyelids. You hear yourself whispering yes. Smile. 

The broken promise body lies in the ditch after the kick-back. The Eagle long gone. How pretty, you think, an aluminum angel.