Bellies

by Nicola Dinan

Sarah had a new monkish wisdom about all things queer, but with none of the monastic silence.

There were a million interesting things to say and I couldn’t think of one of them.

Nobody wants to admit that people leave the closet but not the room.

“There’s nothing more boring than a hot person who doesn’t know it.”

Gay virgin behavior.

Bailing on your responsibilities gets depressing in a couple of years.”

But this was the way I’d learned I should dress, how I’d observed I should find clothes, because if I did this, then people would think I looked good and relaxed and didn’t care but cared enough. I sat on the end of the bed.

Heading back to Rob’s after drinks. Maybe see you there. He just asked me if I’ve heard of that book Sapiens. Still into it. What’s wrong with me?

I was twenty, but moments like these felt like I was catching up on some of the levity absent from my teenage years. Back then, at parties, I would make drunk and idle conversation over kitchen islands while boys and girls hooked up in upstairs bedrooms, and helped clear empty cups and cans without being asked. Teachers said I was conscientious and sensible, because there wasn’t room for me to be much else.

I’d seen Shia LaBeouf headbutt someone at a pub in New Cross. These were surface-level things. They said nothing about me as a person. It wasn’t like Shia LaBeouf had headbutted me, although maybe I wished that he had.

I imagined myself slumped over Sarah, our synthetic moans competing in volume and deceit, the blood rushing away from my body and into my head as my mind ran loops.

“You thought dairy made you gay?”

“A later-life lesbian called Dorothy who decides to marry her gay friend as cover, but then leaves him at the altar.”

“The play’s about how sublimating our true desires for banal conveniences is never sustainable. Dorothy just comes to it first.”

I thought unfair thoughts.

When I think of Michael, I think of, like, an old, boisterous man.”

He rarely spoke about her; he spoke around her.

“I don’t know. Sometimes people just need you to be there.”

maybe the only way to close the gap between who you are and who you pretend to be is to keep pretending.

it was about the counterintuitive burden of comphet on women,

“Try some, it’s called kuih,” Cindy said. I picked up one that was a similar shape to Cindy’s, except with a green rectangle set above an equally thick layer of rice. “That’s kuih seri muka.” The kuih was surprisingly oily in my hands.

I wanted to squeeze Ming’s knee, but remembered he’d told me not to. It wasn’t okay, even if people knew we were foreigners. We’d moved through the city like friends. The most he did out of the house was shovel food onto my plate, affection buried in soup and grain.

“Because I put up with it at the time, and people change and people forget and they don’t say sorry,”

transmuted

I shouldn’t use the word crazy, but I feel like I can. In the same way I can call myself a faggot. Sometimes the shoe fits if you put it on yourself.

I never thought I would be the kind of person who someone could date and love enough to live with.

They’ll be the first to bury their cordless Dyson in the back garden when the class war erupts and the purges begin.

Our food arrives. Seabass for the women. Steaks for the men. Fish and chips for me and Tom.

pewter ornaments,” my dad says. “It’s a

But people can think of you and you not think of them, right?

I wouldn’t have been friends with Jason but for sexuality and circumstance.

Maybe it was better to pin rainbows to the walls if you planned to submit to the man regardless.

“I want a boyfriend,” I said, unable to peel myself away from the cruelty. “Not a naked mole rat.”

Desire and guilt boxed one another in a roped ring.

It was easier when I thought I was dying.

“I feel like I’ve been drawing an outline of myself using negative space,”

“Maria Therapova?”

Tom has strapped himself onto a plane with a faulty engine, and it’s not interesting because the plane has yet to crash.

I find it a little devastating that people can become this inured to cruelty.

I look just like my mother, and that makes me feel better about using all the money, like I’ve just exchanged one representation for another.

“Trans people are scary in the way that gay people used to be.

I feel safe again, and I realize I’d take any medication forever just to have someone hold me like this, and then I remember that I’m doing the opposite.

I need to stop feeling like my transition is a burden.”

Six in. Six out. I took the keys out of my jacket and squeezed them tight. The points of the blunt teeth felt good, but not enough. I wanted them to cut through skin, or for the keys to snap in half, for something to break, but they were just a set of stupid keys.

If when Marco said Marco, I said Polo, and if when I said Marco, he said nothing.

He observed the group standing next to us. Three swarthy and muscular men with balloon biceps. Their toothpick legs poked out from beneath their robes.

Brains start out wrinkly. Skin doesn’t.”

I’d always let her order for us when we shared food because, unless left with no other option, my prosaic palate yearned only for the familiar.

Gordon Matta-Clark.” “I know him,” he

The white light lit his face, like he was telling a ghost story around a campfire.