CW: mention of sexual assault, xenophobia, implied sexual content, mention of homophobia.
I wrote this story while reading Terrorist Assemblages by Jasbir Puar, and with some songs on repeat from an Iron & Wine album, The Shepherd’s Dog.
The boy’s got a coin crammed in the front pocket of his jeans, and he wants you to fish it out from him. You’ll do him one better. You sink to your knees and unzip him like a dress.
Barbed wire erupts from his belly like startled doves.
Your automaton boy refuses every name you try to give him. He goes to the border and lays down the wire, and in the nights he manufactures it in his stomach, queer boy pregnant at midnight and birthing by midday. He does it to keep his little sister safe, he says in his lovely, distant voice. And all his exes, too. His eyes flutter shut. If we don’t safeguard ourselves enough, the homocidalists will slip among us. I can’t bear it. Everyone I love is queer.
When he says this your stomach sinks like slate. Some of the men you’ve loved most were born across the border. Their crop fields salted with shrapnel shot from a future home. Seasoned stones to suck instead. All those tender midnights you spent brewing tea to calm their night sweats. Each night, sipping the stars back into the sky. When you try to explain this to him, your automaton boy frowns and pulls closer to rest his head on your pillow. Those were the men who forced you to do things you didn’t want to, yes?
You say, no, those were different men.
That night he doesn’t stay over, and you don’t convince him to stay. You dream of the fence he’s topping, his children holding cartwheels into the horizon. Below, his hands draw out the barbed wire from his bellybutton, his bird-boned wrists clicking the way they do when he fishes out coins from between your couch cushions to swallow down. As he gathers the oily coils from where they’ve spilled at his feet, you see his gaze linger on the dull gray diamond-links of the fence. He could eat every link, if he wanted.
