Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

When he turned the fan toward the wall, it sounded like the ocean, or like the creek, when you were approaching it from the south through the pine forest at the edge of his grandparents’ farm. He worked on math and science homework that way, getting better and better at it until he was the best student in the whole state of Alabama at doing long division in his head and estimating the weight of a bowling ball in metric units. When the fan in his room was going, he couldn’t hear his parents arguing about who had taken the last Natural Light from the fridge

“You know how it goes. Vincent wanted him and Klaus over for dinner. We get to talking about relationships, monogamy, being queer, which is fucking ridiculous. We’re gay, not queer.” That Cole is going on again about how normal he and Vincent are—how regular-gay they are—is not entirely shocking. This is a common topic for him. Cole resents Roman, Wallace knows, because Roman is not only French and good-looking, but he also possesses the sort of deceptive charisma that can make even an open relationship appeal to Mississippi boys raised on Communion and the Holy Ghost. And haven’t they scraped this far from Sodom and Gomorrah in the public’s opinion by virtue of their normalcy, their adherence to traditional values? Cole doesn’t see how turning back the clock, how embracing hedonism is going to get them anywhere.