CONTENT WARNING – Death

After Paul Guest

That it will come to me in the most inopportune moments: when I’m thinking of kissing my now ex-boyfriend, when I’m brushing my teeth, when I pass the golf course where we went on our only real date. That  I don’t want to live the rest of my life dealing with it. That I’m tired of seeing your face everytime I close my eyes. That I want to forget you. That learning to cope with you being gone isn’t a linear process; it’s more like a cow spinning around in a tornado, tossed back and forth until its skull is smashed to pieces against a telephone pole and then rewinding the clock, forcing bits of bone to come together and stuffing vital organs back into an empty cavernous carcass. That you told me you didn’t think a queer could make it out of this town alive but somehow despite the Catholic guilt that plagued every caress you gave to me, I never thought you were talking about yourself.

Emerson Gray, a disabled genderqueer creator living in Saint Louis, Missouri, has been previously published in the Eunoia Review and Neon Mariposa Magazine. His piece “Life of an Ophelian Girl”, as seen in Crabfat Magazine, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He can be contacted on Twitter @Emerson_Gray_