A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Without warning, Michael said, the boy disappeared. Rumor had it his parents sent him to a conversion therapy camp a few hours away. People didn’t say “gay,” Michael added, afraid it was contagious, that it would sit in the air. Michael waited for him. He waited as if he were put on earth to wait. When the boy finally came back, weeks later, he was no longer a person but an outline of one, no longer flush with humanity. Michael would knock at his door and no one would answer. One evening he pounded on the door until he heard sirens in the distance, until all of him turned red and blue. Days later the boy enrolled in a high school on the other end of town, so Michael moved on. It was all he knew how to do, he said. He was still someone’s child, and children didn’t get to plunge into their solitude. Unless they did. The boy killed himself that winter. That’s what Michael heard. At the funeral he wept and wept in the church bathroom. The truth of his death was lost in a place outside admission. He wept until he was no longer human. Like an animal, he wanted his mourning to be an enormous display. People were crying, and he was simply one of them. No one knew there was a specificity to his anguish.