Free Bouquet by Kody Boye

 
     
    The man stands at the register buying flowers
for his boyfriend.
    “ They’re beautiful,” the
clerk says. “Who are they for?”
    In this socially-oppressed, medieval-minded
neighborhood, you can’t get away with being gay, so he lies. With
his tongue in cheek and his eyes clear, he simply replies, “For my
girlfriend,” with his face straight as ever. He thinks it’s ironic
that he just thought that, but he tries to push the sentiments
aside. Calling his boyfriend a ‘she’ doesn’t further diminish his
masculinity, as there is a ‘he’ in the ‘she,’ so there isn’t
anything to worry about, right?
    “ Have a good day,” the
clerk says, passing money into the man’s hand.
    He nods and leaves.
     
    He drives home with his
hands on the wheel and his mind in the sky. His heart feels as
though it will fall out of his chest and it aches like it’s been
struck with a metal hammer. Bang, he imagines, it crushing his ribcage and hitting
his soul, and boom he thinks, for he has just delivered upon himself a horrible
realization.
    It is their three-year anniversary.
    He and his boyfriend have been together for
longer than most straight couples have.
    It’s all right, he thinks, looking down at the flowers in the
passenger seat. He’ll like
them.
    Michael has always liked flowers. He said
when he was a little boy that he wanted to run down the aisle when
his mother married his stepfather, that he was the one who wanted
to cast the flowers and not a little girl. But Michael was told
that he couldn’t because he was a little boy and not a little girl,
and in that statement his life had been changed, his future sealed
in this place of nothing and hate.
    Shaking his head, he pushes his foot down on
the accelerator and tries not to think about just what it is that’s
haunting him.
     
    “ Jim,” Michael says as he
opens the door.
    “ Happy
anniversary.”
    He presents the roses as though they are
nothing more than trinkets, fake gold in a quarter machine.
However, despite their cost, and despite their commonly-held,
feminine sentiments, it is Michael’s smile that forces a grin
across his own face as his boyfriend takes the flowers in hand and
holds them as if they’re the most precious thing in the world.
    “ I… I don’t know what to
say,” Michael says, turning his eyes up to face him.
    “ Then don’t say anything,”
Jim replies.
    He leans forward.
    The rose bears its thorn.
    Blood falls onto Michael’s perfect white
skin.
    “ Jim,” Michael says,
reaching down to take his hand. “You’re hurt.”
    “ No I’m not,” he
replies.
    When Michael frowns, he offers nothing more
than a smile.
    Somehow, Michael finds the means to smile
too.
     
    They watch TV by the light of the bedside
table lamp. Light cast across the room and painting the room in
beige, it seems as though the TV cannot speak and is instead made
to cast its own light as well. Jim tries to watch it, but he can’t
help but look down at Michael, who is cradled in his arms as though
there is nothing wrong in the world. He is a child, Jim knows, of
their generation, of their socially-oppressed and
horribly-depressed kind.
    Hold him, he thinks. It’s the only
thing that helps.
    Outside, a neon sign covers a brick wall that
would have otherwise been the only thing there. The curtain is
drawn, but still Jim can see it, shining through the curtain like
it’s a devil hidden in a fruit bowl. Its V its beard, the A its
face, the devil smiles in shades of red, white and blue, completely
patriotic in semblance to their lives which are nothing but
ordinary.
    “ Jim,” Michael
says.
    “ Yes?” he
replies.
    “ Are you all
right?”
    He wants to say he is fine, that nothing is
wrong and that there is nothing that can hold him from the
happiness he so desperately wants to have, but he can’t. For some
strange, horrible reason, his tongue is silent, as though the cat
has caught it and made it its canary.
    What do I say, he thinks, to