Strange Masculinity: Read five original short stories by Fitzcarraldo Edition authors, published in collaboration with the press for Another Man's Winter/Spring 2026 issue.
She liked his name, a name she’d never heard before, there were things to be discovered in the world, it turned out. Specifically, in this corner of the world which felt so heavy with recognition: tedious, or else dreadful. He told her it meant sun in the language he’d grown up speaking, and then she liked it more, and aside from just liking it, she felt a synergy between his name and the open, uncomplicated feeling she had when she looked at his photos, at his face: a ludicrously nice face.
She’d been on the app for six months and he was the first person who’d liked her that she’d been uncomplicatedly attracted to. Which wasn’t to say that she was without any complicated feelings about his profile as a whole, but rather that there was one photo of him, smiling, about which she thought, you are hot in a way that I can imagine being actually attracted to, in person, a perception that then made her think, well what is all the other stuff then?
They lived in different cities, they met up on a bench outside a gallery in London. Are you averse to day drinking? She was not. In the pub they talked about the sea and getting up early, he said that he thought he had been a fisherman in a past life. Smiling, in the sun, it was hot, he had the best smile she had seen in a long time. He asked her what she thought she had been, she went blank, panicked, then said, maybe a zookeeper, which she regretted as soon as it was out of her mouth, and he said, you don’t have to be a prison officer though, you could just live with animals, a farmer, and she thought yes, why don’t I feel capable of expressing myself better. But in the gallery he took her round rooms of paintings by his favourite artist, and she found that being with him in space felt like looking at his photo had felt: surprisingly easy. When the gallery closed they went to another featureless central London pub, sat outside in the evening sun, light reflecting off the panes of green glass in the buildings. He was the first person who’d ever asked to kiss her in a way that felt unobjectionable, the answer shot out of her mouth, yes, and then they were kissing. Kissing people was easy when you were attracted to them, was that the conclusion to draw?
Another conclusion suggested itself to her, though, or some kind of contributing factor, something she’d been thinking since joining the app: that everything was surprisingly easy. At first she thought the discovery was different. That it was: people just really like having sex.
Or: the people who like having sex really like having sex. Then she thought it was about the way that sex corresponded for other people at least the kind of people she was having sex with with developing feelings. People believed that sex and romance and love were feeding each other in a way that she had used to, but which felt inaccessible to her now.
Which is to say, the real epiphany was about herself, about the open, blank quality that accompanied slipping into another way of being, which involved lots of sex and dating and not many strong feelings about any of it. There’s no way, she’d thought, that anybody I might want to date would want to date me, and then before she knew it she was seeing five people side by side, and no, she hadn’t slept with them all, but some part of it felt like a betrayal although she wondered if the betrayal was less of them, and more of reality. She couldn’t shake the idea that she was engaging with it on a level that was more like a tarot deck than anything. It made sense that she had this spread of five cards, and that each represented aspects of her personality, her life, which together formed a picture of who she was.
And the tarot approach to dating led you to a state where things were very exciting and not really real, for example, the actual day before her London date, she’d slept with someone back home, he’d let himself out of her house in the morning, and then come back two hours later for more, she was sure that was normal for some people but it wasn’t normal for her, and yet what she felt about it was almost nothing. She felt she had become bright, sunny, always short of sleep, always wearing mascara, always smelling faintly of sex. Being funny, being the right amount of serious. Being good at dates.
They didn’t eat dinner that night, they moved from the pub to a craft beer place beneath the railway arches, sat outside, and at some point, between kisses, she leant down to the table and sucked his index finger, his shellnail clashing against her teeth and tongue, as she did it she simultaneously couldn’t believe what she was doing and marvelled at how naturally it came to her, there’d been a lot of fingers in mouths in the sex she’d been having recently and she’d realised how much she liked it, sometimes she had the feeling that she was only now learning to have sex, to feel things outside of the quadrant of the graph bracketed by obligation and shame. He said, naughty, and she instantly felt she’d traversed the parameters of what was acceptable on a first date where they weren’t going to sleep with each other, but then he lifted his finger to his mouth and sucked it, quite quickly, in a way that made clear this wasn’t just a performance for her benefit, and this seemed to her like the most erotic thing she had ever witnessed firsthand and this taking place either before or midway through a discussion about some aspect of her work, where she remembered thinking, drunkenly, is this mansplaining, or have I done a disservice to how intelligent I am, and felt that the answer was both, and that this was inextricably bound up with the lightness, with the existing outside of real reality.
Something else she’d tried to block out but hadn’t, entirely, was that at some stage of the night, the subject of music had come up, the kinds they liked to dance to while cooking, and his comment had been, I hate pretension of any kind, and in that moment she had given him the benefit of the doubt, of course it would have been fruitless to say, or even really to think, that in itself is quite a pretentious thing to say. But it instinctively made her fearful of dancing with him. What would it be like to be with him on a dance-floor? She didn’t know, maybe it didn’t matter.
He started sending her kisses, that was how their communication played out after their date, not emojis but the ones made of punctuation, he preferred a :3 but she couldn’t see the mouth as anything but a bum, so she always responded with a :-*. It was a breath of fresh air how unguarded he was with his affection, and when she was so busy it was nice to just send him kisses, nice to come back to rows of kisses he had sent, he sent her selfies too and he always had that same face, lovely, sunny, all the rest, but there wasn’t much actual talking, the more she thought about it the more that she reflected he hadn’t asked her much about herself. She contained multitudes, she assumed he did too, and she wasn’t at all confident that what they had was based on any of that.
One evening she’d had a glass of wine and she texted him: Why don’t we each ask each other a question a day? He’d replied, First a kiss, and so they’d kissed with punctuation marks, and then they got to the question-asking, and his was about two of her earliest memories: one good, one bad. You can write about anything, he said, and then he wrote, all that I ask is that you are sincere.
The temptation was to walk through it, psychically, pretend she hadn’t seen it, like she’d walked through the mansplaining and the pretension comment, but the problem was that as she was walking, she stood on a trap-door that trampolined her up to another dimension, which was the dance-floor dimension, and they were there, indistinct grey surrounds, the strobelights were blue, the people were a mass, and the speakers were blasting out the song,
BE SINCERE
and then the camera zoomed in on her and she was dancing, manically, arms thrown out, the air around her glittering with sequinned lights, and it tried to pan out to him, but it was impossible to know, really, what he was doing, was he dancing, or was this music pretentious, too pretentious to countenance
BE SINCERE
so she didn’t know if she was alone on the dance floor or not.
Maybe if she’d tried to articulate her aloneness she would have said that it’d never have occurred to her to narrate her first experiences in a way that wasn’t sincere. That she rarely held herself back or consciously modified that the issue with sincerity, for her, was a different one, namely, feeling that that self, which felt as sincere as she could make it at the time, represented her totality, or enough of it. Almost inevitably it didn’t, but the times when she was close to saying it did were either with a friend who knew her very well, or else, with someone that she felt herself to be in love with. And of course she tried not to engage with that phrase either, to walk past that one also, because if she acknowledged it then she had to acknowledge that that was not this, but she also saw that it was silly to pretend that it wasn’t something she had experienced – had in fact experienced with someone she’d met through work just a few months before, with whom it was silly to be in love, but there it was. At the point that she’d acknowledged these feelings, for this unlikely person, she’d asked herself, quite explicitly, what if your first meeting had been an app date, what if you’d evaluated his clothes, his walk, as he came in the door, you’d have thought there was no hope, wouldn’t you, and she knew herself to be right. But she also knew that from the first time they spoke on the phone, she had been astonished at how they had talked, had tried to push away the image of Lego blocks fitting together. Or else, she hadn’t had that thought, or tried to push it away until later, because in the moment she was just in it, dancing
BE SINCERE
She got frustrated with the asterisks and bum kissing after a while, she was stressed with work, and travelling to the city in which he lived would entail staying overnight at his house, which she wasn’t sure she wanted to do, and then they spoke on the phone and she couldn’t wait to get off, felt she was doing all the hosting, and one day she was in a terrible mood (in part, she realises in retrospect, due to the pressure and the sneaking feeling that she was five-timing him) and decided to do what she’d been fantasising about doing every morning she woke up, which was to text explaining she didn’t want to see him again, that the bubble had burst, and the distance made it harder. It was scary to do, but he sent her a gracious if exceedingly short reply and she felt, for a moment, whole again, and she had the thought, it’s much easier to be sincere when you are saying no to something, and it was only a few moments later, after she’d taken some breaths, that she realised she didn’t necessarily like that as a conclusion.
This story is taken from the Winter/Spring 2026 issue of Another Man, which is on sale now. Order here.
