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.
Wake. If you’re lucky, that is morning’s first task. Wake. Not rolling over onto your side, not recalling the thoughts that have stayed the night, like a tryst who cannot sense they’re meant to leave before light breaks through on the pane. Leave that to phones – light breaking through, remembering everything.
Wake – what a herculean task! To wake first, and not check your phone. Everything after that? A form of grace, if you believe in that sort of thing. You stopped believing in it when you were younger. Every morning, after waking, and likely after jacking off – which, when done promptly, can seem akin to sleepwalking – you stand out of bed and position your phone on the windowsill, camera open: your own portable and electrical mirror. Snap. A picture of your shirtless body, how tapered it looks in the morning. You don’t believe – there’s that word again – that the camera loves you so much as to lie. Love makes a noun lie. You know it in your circadian rhythm.
The truth of photos feels indisputable. Yes, they can be staged, but isn’t it a matter of focus? As in, when you twist your thorax, the imperfections in your flesh smooth over and stay quiet like a stone sinking to the bottom of a black river. Heavy, all the heavier for its silence. Snap. Snap. Every photo after the first is confirmation, or if the sun’s dew changes, as it is doing now, aberration. It doesn’t matter. You delete the whole bunch each morning. You see your body delete itself 43 times every morning. This ritual. Last night was nightmareless, go figure. Time happens to you when you sleep. No dreams, no memory posing as dream. Time shifts you into passivity. Shifts ‘me’ to you. Your brain, a lake, frozen over, blue pangs thrusting in the ice of unconsciousness, the nausea of necessity rising up in you. Where’s the prescribed pill? Nausea is not a question. Questions have no momentum. You fill yourself with them, as many as you want: why is he comfortable saying nigger around you?
To proceed: you remember him saying, let’s have gender. His name is Norman – white, tall for a third grader, chestnut-brown bowl cut, lanky because he’s training to be a long-distance runner. Often he comes to class in his sweaty track gear, black Nike duffle bag strapped across his body. He doesn’t care much for the academic part of school; he cares about the track, its oval endlessness. He cares about running longer than the other boys. And then, suddenly, when he was on the last leg, running faster.
On the other hand, you care a great deal about math and geography, science and English. Are forced to. Good grades lead to college which leads to money which leads to family. But between family and death, there were few ideas, like divorce, like disarray. That’s what happened to your parents. As for the word ‘sex’, you think this ash-gray bridge between family and death must have synonyms. You and Norman have to stay inside during recess.
You talk too much, too loudly, while his infraction is always coming late to class, which he says is because of cross country practice, though he is usually missing his homework. The playground, where the other kids are, is right outside your class window. You watch them as though to augment the punishment. You think you have a right to play. The other kids choose where to do, well, mostly nothing: under the monkey bars, in the highlighter-toned slides with too much friction, or along the brick wall that makes an incomplete square border around it all. If you and Norman were outside, maybe you’d pretend to be interested in basketball standing under rusted chain hoops.
This is the right you feel taken from you. Not the right to play. But the right to be yourself, pretending, outside. Instead you and Norman pull crinkly Webster dictionaries from the bookshelves. They look like they were bought decades ago. Every time you pull a book, the chaff of dilapidated wood flakes off the shelf into future splinters on the carpeted ground. As boys do, you two flip through to find the definition of sex. Synonyms: intercourse, mating, relations, gender.
Gender, the hard ‘r’ at the end, sounds funny but inconspicuous enough. It becomes your secret code. Let’s have gender, you start to say to one another. Until that point, you’d only seen gender on TV. Gender was perfectly white sheets crumpling over two bodies, man and woman, lying parallel to one another. Parallel lines meant they could not touch. But of course they touched, a thinning bridge between them that, once completely collapsed, forced the eyes of the camera to pan upwards towards the non-descript ceiling. Sounds of rustling sheets, maybe a little jazz. Why did the camera pan away? When you were desperate to see what the camera panned away from, you searched for it on Yahoo. You discovered porn.
When Norman stands next to you in line before heading to the cafeteria for lunch off Styrofoam trays, let’s have gender. When a substitute teacher pairs you to complete busy work, unaware that you are usually split because of your inability to stay focused, let’s have gender. When Norman says this, you can’t laugh, at least not out loud, each restrained chuckle becoming a newly formed latch on the lock that is your friendship. You are right to think no one would ever crack your code. Even you wouldn’t be able to.
Once, on a field trip back from the astronomy museum, you sit next to Norman on the bus. Green seats like crocodile skins organise the class in pairs along the yellow school bus. The seats are cramped, you can only move left or right, can only rotate on yourself to speak to someone in a different seat. Field trips must be waking nightmares for teachers so Mrs. Gierhardt must’ve forgotten to split Norman and you. Or perhaps, being outside of the school, she does not care, or can’t.
For being good at the museum, everyone gets a thin slice of pizza. As the bus starts back for the school, Norman says, let’s have gender. But this time it sounds different, an urgency in his voice, a grown-up tone, the timbre of a person who can actually make something grow on earth. He grabs a plastic water bottle from his backpack and places it between his thighs, squeezing. The cap is still on. Let’s have gender. Norman is calling on you to do something, each repetition a kind of pleading, an intensification testing your friendship. This is the age you learn that every now and then, you must test your friends. Every now and then, you learn, sometimes friends fail. The bus driver makes a sharp turn, knocking you into Norman, though he holds firm with the bottle between his thighs. In this version of gender there are no white sheets, no bed, though you are next to Norman, exposed, and there is a bridge between you, though what it is made of is hard to tell. But the two of you built it, knew its architecture. This means you can also demolish it.
Let’s have gender, Norman repeats a little louder, but this time not only to you, which was to break your treaty, but to the plastic bottle gripped between his thighs, jostling with the movement of the bus, drawing the attention of other kids around you. They wait for something, anything, to happen as they peer at the both of you from their own enclosures. Their expectancy is the expectancy of an audience you cannot let down. Their being around your seat suffices as their ticket.
It is still true, alas, that to be an American negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol; which means that one pays, in one’s personality, for the sexual insecurity of others. The relationship, therefore, of a black boy to a white boy is a very complex thing. (James Baldwin) James – what if I tell you I like it? What if I tell you being this proximal to another boy’s body, however drenched in history we’d become, is what I wanted, what I needed? Of course, James, you might say I’m captive, indoctrinated, that whatever leash this white boy is offering me by way of the imperative, let’s have gender, in front of my peers, is a tradition transmuted historically, transmuted socially. A tradition neither of us had to buy into. We felt it in our Dickies jeans. Jeans we could only wear on off-campus trips, our collared uniform shirts buttoned to the top, Norman’s shirt bright red, mine, navy blue.
Suppose however well and good your questioning may seem, you can’t actually be drenched in history. Suppose once you touch history and it touches you back, it is renewed. On the bus the composite of Norman’s desire and my own was a pre-existing form, one you did not know you were filling, were changing and being changed by, thus changing ‘me’ back into a ‘you’.
The seats were not designed for gender, so you had to crank your spine at a right angle, one hand splayed on the seat in front of you, the other right where your left thigh and Norman’s right thigh meet. You succumb to his pleading, you sink your head around the bottle, tasting the dense acetate of the cap, then the chill hollow of the funnel, which, under the soft pressure from the ring of your mouth gives-in a little, then a little more, unclicking with a sharp-supple pop as you slide your lips up.
This action you’d never done before but somehow knew exactly how to execute. Up and down, not pendulous, as you take it deeper, the inky factory flavor of the wrapper around the swirl at the bottle’s middle: where the shaft would be, surely, where the circumcision would be, were it really him. But it was really him, it was really his. You imagine his face above you, displaying both awe at your subjection, but also duty, like that of a ringmaster’s, pointing his whip or finger where he wanted the audience’s eye to go, to his main attraction, his pretty girl, his star of the circus, pulled in orbitally by the force of his phantom appendage. Like a tipped-over flag, one leg dangles in the bus’s corridor between the partition of seats.
This must have been what the TV camera panned away from, but you don’t know what sound should accompany gender, so the laughs from the other kids transform into a kind of music, albeit a music you can’t understand. Between up-and-downs, Norman takes the cap off without you noticing, so when you put your head back down and your mouth around the length of the bottle, he squeezes, and water chucks out from the bottle and into your throat, soothing it like a lozenge. You choke on the water, cough and gasp for air.
Everyone’s laughs calcify in your ears like stalactites falling at the outer rim of a cave. You don’t understand, or perhaps you understand all too well, the electricity of the humor you are stung by but cannot find a way into. You are stone, are organic. Your wet face dripping, shook.
You arrive back at school and Norman, whose pants remain damp, apologizes to you as you step off the bus, the doors closing behind you. As if what had transpired between you could be forever locked inside, could drive away, fall off a cliff, burn without sound. “I’m sorry but I had to,” Norman says, “it’s not gay, it’s just fun, man. Next time, I’ll do you.” It is Cinco de Mayo. There are no more field trips and school ends in a couple weeks. Or maybe, you should say, summer vacation begins.
This story is taken from the Winter/Spring 2026 issue of Another Man, which is on sale now. Order here.
