Free Bouquet by Kody Boye Page A

someone
who doesn’t know?
    So innocent Michael is that half the time, he
doesn’t even realize there is a slip within his mind, a stutter
within his voice or the pain within his skull. Headaches bloom
there often, wicked flowers meant to show him the meaning of the
world, but still Michael doesn’t notice. Sometimes, it makes him so
mad that he wants to bash his skull into the wall in a fake attempt
at trepanation, and other times, it makes him want to swallow as
many Advil as he can manage. However, he always does neither,
because he does not want to hurt not only himself, but his
boyfriend, the one he loves so much.
    “ I’m fine,” he finally
decides to say, drawing his boyfriend close. “Don’t worry about
me.”
    They continue to watch the TV as though there
is nothing wrong in the world.
     
    Proclamation is king, and
when the devil says AIDs, it automatically points to them. The gay disease, they
call it, the thing that the homosexuals
are made of.
    “ All you have to do is be
around them to get it,” some preachers say, then spread their arms
to their communion. “All it takes is one simple step.”
    Once, when Jim was late to
come home, Michael had called his workplace and asked if everything
was all right. Up until that time, his boy hadn’t been aware of the
existence of a young man named Michael and had asked Jim about it,
to which he simply replied, It’s my
brother.
    His boss didn’t buy it.
    They had moved the next town over shortly
thereafter.
    As Jim watches the TV in the kitchen with his
shirt halfway done-up and toothbrush in his mouth, he tries to
avert his eyes as the man on the screen continues to speak about
the AIDs epidemic. They say that people are dying, that gay men are
spreading disease because of drug use and unprotected sex. They say
they don’t use condoms, that they aren’t celibate and that they
party non-stop. Jim wants to scream, to say that it is all wrong
and that it isn’t true, but he doesn’t want to wake Michael.
    His sweet, sweet Michael… how he couldn’t
live without him.
    I work, he thinks, for him.
    Automechanics is a manly thing for manly men.
He couldn’t be gay, his fellow employees say, because he’s under
the hood of a truck, because his jeans are stained with grease. It
is the one thing that keeps them alive at night and food on the
table.
    “ Jim,” Michael
calls.
    He shuts the TV off with a simple click of
the switch. “Yeah?” he asks.
    “ Are you going to work
today?”
    “ Almost,” he says, then
frowns. Almost? Almost? What is he thinking? Of course he’s going to
work. “Yeah,” he says, raising his voice over the sound of the
toothbrush raking across his teeth.
    “ Will you come here for a
second?”
    Jim doesn’t think he can bear it, especially
after what he’s just watched on TV, but he spits the toothpaste in
the sink and turns toward the bedroom, swallowing what he couldn’t
spit out without a second thought.
    As he passes into the bedroom, he expects
Michael to be out of bed—awake and fully dressed. Instead, he finds
the precious being he has so devoted himself to, naked and with the
sheet only barely covering himself.
    “ Yeah?” he asks, leaning
into the threshold.
    “ I just wanted to say I
love you before you went.”
    “ Thank you,” Jim
said.
    Little does Michael know that those two words
are the only thing that keeps him going during the day.
     
    “ Jim,” his boss grunts.
“You almost done with this car?”
    “ Yes sir,” he
replies.
    He has been fixing this vehicle for the past
four years. Always it ends up with the same problem—a bad
carburetor, a slight of the wheel, a bad AC vent. He fixes all of
them with little more than a passing thought, as it’s his job and
it’s what he’s paid to do, but sometimes he wonders if Mr.
McKinny’s car is just buying its time before it one day explodes
out on the open road.
    That, he thinks, would be a
sight.
    He nods to his boss, bows under the hood of
the