Fellas, Is it Gay

by Ani King

Alex Begin

To park two big ass trucks too close together at a gas station, both rumbling up and shuddering to a stop, nose-angled at each other over the painted lines? What if you park two trucks too close together on purpose after your ten-year high school reunion, still rumbling and shuddering to a stop, but this time in the parking lot of a motel two towns over? And what if you park two trucks together two towns over and you rent one of those motel rooms with a single king bed and a Magic Fingers® Relaxation System that works? And what if you lay down next to each other on the bed with the Magic Fingers® Relaxation System and one of you slips a quarter in the control box so the bed starts rumbling and shuddering, and you don’t know if it’s supposed to sound like that, but you like that it’s jostling both of you towards the center of the bed? And what if the proximity of your pinky fingers makes you think about how when you were kids you used to hold hands all the time, but at some point one of your dads must have said something about that being gay because you stopped sharing sleeping bags at sleepovers, and in middle school you started talking about tits all the time, because maybe some other boy asked why you didn’t talk about tits all the time? And what if you park two trucks together two towns over, in the parking lot of a motel with a working Magic Fingers® Relaxation System, outside of a motel room with a single king bed that is definitely not supposed to make sounds like grinding metal and snapping gears, and is not supposed to smell like melting plastic or emit the ozone perfume of an electrical fire, while holding hands with your childhood best friend, who you hadn’t seen since graduation, while calculating how long before it’s too late to get out of the bed, how long before the alarm goes off, how long before the sprinkler goes off overhead, how long before the fire department shows up, is it gay to want to get into one truck together right now and rumble out of this motel parking lot to one ten towns over? Or what if you go on from here spending every night together in a different motel room with a working Magic Fingers® Relaxation System, so you leave a chain of beds behind in various broken or burning states, so a hundred towns or a thousand towns from now you yawn every morning awake together in the parking lot of a diner with a good breakfast special? And what if you both like eating a good breakfast special, eggs over easy, rye toast, bacon and sausage, hash browns crispy, hot coffee, while local folks talk about last night’s fire over at the old motel?

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Ani King (they/them) is a queer, gender non-compliant writer, artist, and activist from Michigan. Ani is the first place winner of the 2024 Blue Frog Annual Flash Fiction Contest, a SmokeLong Grand Micro Competition 2023 Finalist, and has had work featured in Split Lip Magazine. They can be found at aniking.net, or trying to find somewhere to quietly finish a book without any more interruptions.