by Ryan Kristopher Jory
The men in Bill’s dreams were smooth-chested. And mean, but he wanted their affection anyway.
He awoke with an impulse to shave all his body hair. Bill was clumsy before breakfast; he nicked the many chicken-flesh bumps that dotted his round belly. Blood ran down in narrow bands, painting him in candy stripes. Oh, but he didn’t feel candy-sweet. He felt bland and unpretty.
He dressed himself in fishnet stockings. They lifted his spirits and accentuated his calves. Bill stepped about the house, bowing to reflections in decorative mirrors. “Good morning, handsome. Dapper, dapper you.”
Bill concealed his stockings under cotton khaki pants, curious what the boss would say if he crossed his legs at a morning meeting and teased a little ankle. Something damning. “Those stockings are wildly inappropriate.” Then the boss would lift his own gray hems to showcase sensible nylons. “Pantyhose, William. Beige or black.”
Bill giggled. Pantyhose. As if any self-respecting man still wore his hosiery above the thigh. Did grocery stores even stock those L’eggs eggs anymore?
Beneath an immaculate, cobalt sky, he ambled toward work, wood soles clacking against sidewalk slabs, wishing the black oxfords on his feet were corseted knee-high stilettos. Or were those an anachronism, too, like supermarket stockings, relics of an era he lived through yet somehow missed? Bill ran a finger around the inside rim of his too-tight, sweat-damp collar.
Unexpectedly, the sun blinked out, blocked by sallow thunderclouds that appeared in pregnant, writhing plumes. Sheets of rain followed—actual sheets—glinting, flat rectangles of water, paper-thin but wide as football pitches. They beat the earth in percussive waves like liquid symbol crashes.
Caught unawares in his slick-bottom shoes, Bill slipped off a curb and fell in the gutter. All his bones shattered at once. He coughed them out at passing cars in bursts of porcelain confetti. The pieces were sharp; they scored his lungs. Drivers turned on wiper blades that smeared the rain and shards. He scraped against their windshields, a chorus of angry squeals set to the rhythm of the sheet-rain clangs.
Depleted of solid parts, Bill slid through a storm drain and washed out to sea, rolling and folding upon himself. Sulfur-stinking brine ran up his nose.
The tide returned him to shore.
A vacationing child poked him with a stick.
“Don’t poke strange things from the sea,” the child’s mother said.
“What is it?” the child said.
“An eel, I think. Sometimes, slimy creatures get caught up in fishermen’s netting and die. It’s best not to touch them, in case they’re still alive.”
The child and mother strolled away.
Bill lay alone, half-drowned, naked except for his stockings, tanning under reemergent sun, imagining the leather strap his hide would wither into, wishing he hadn’t shaved his body hair—that instead of an ugly belt he might have become a becoming stole, something a mean man might flaunt about smooth shoulders.
Ryan Kristopher Jory is a multi-genre writer, originally from Flint, Michigan. His flash prose has previously appeared in MoonPark Review, Necessary Fiction, and some other online journals. His short fiction will appear in Volume 39 of Chicago Quarterly Review. He resides with his husband in San Diego, California.
MoonPark Review 