Free Shuck by Daniel Allen Cox

takes care of itself.
    A lot of kids smoke it, but that’s too junkie for me, and snorting has never been my trip. Sure, meth can make you sick if you drink too much of it, and some people have to get their stomach pumped. I’m not like that, though. I would rather stick my fingers down my throat than visit a hospital. They take your drugs away in there, believing the media hype.
    Anyways, it was all I could do to get through a Richard Rorschach photo shoot and have me be anything but a blur. He’s too intense for me.
    â€œLook at you, right.”
    Richard dipped the tea bag in his cup like he was going fishing.
    â€œYou’re still beautiful,” he went on. “New York has had its paws all over you and you still shine.”
    I wondered if he could see my teeth chatter and my eyes go squiggly. He was expecting me to say something.
    â€œRight,” I said.
    Richard led me to a work table, gave me a magnifying loupe, and slid a row of negatives on the light tray, as neatly and meticulously as
he did everything.
    It was from the last photo shoot. I had gone crazy with a roll of masking tape, fashioning myself a coat of beige adhesive armor, then a baseball uniform, then binding and gagging myself. A knight, an athlete, a prisoner: masking tape versions of people I’ve wanted to be, each of them heroic in their own special way.
    â€œIt’s amazing how many different Jaevens can be convincingly you. You’re the real deal.”
    â€œI see.”
    Richard pressed my hand on the light tray like a cop taking fingerprints.
    â€œYeah, right, look.”
    When a light flushes your skin, your skin turns into glowing rice paper. Your veins pulse red and translucent. The mystery of you disappears, and so does the fear. Richard was the real light box, and he shone brightly through me every time I was with him.
    â€œSo what are you going to give me today?”
    Thank God Richard didn’t shoot porn.
    I tore the cushions off his couch and threw them on the floor. This was going to go down as planned, as I mapped it out when I was giving ass to a boring trick and I needed to escape cerebrally to a sixth floor in Tribeca.
    â€œI’m going to show you what I feel like these days.”
    Cushioned thud. The weight of limbs. I fell on my face, all the while locking gaze with the camera lens, with Richard. I wanted him to capture the look in my eyes just before I hit the floor—what I imagined would be a creeping fearlessness. The look of young men when they realize they own the city they’re enslaved to.
    We shot a couple of rolls. There were no mirrors in Richard’s place.
I tried to picture what he saw that day, what gave him that slapped look of awe, what made him emerge from behind the lens and stare straight at me as I fell time and time again. Maybe he was seeing invisible bruises. There were real ones for sure, when my shoulder missed the cushion and slammed into the hardwood floor, but those aren’t the kind that stay with you.
    We finished and he snuck the film away to what I guessed was his darkroom. He came out after a while, pensive and quiet. I whipped out my notebook, lay shirtless on the floor, and started to write about Derek.
    â€œI mean the pillows, right?” he said. “There’s someone you trust or want to trust, so it was like, let’s go there.”
    â€œI see them more as cushions.”
    â€œWhatever, come on.”
    â€œYou’re still way off.”
    â€œI mean, your face was like, hello?”
    â€œMaybe a little.”
    â€œOkay, good. Because you should just let it happen. Do you mind if I shoot? Why don’t I get you a tea?”
    â€œWhatever. Sure.”
    â€œDon’t stop what you’re doing,” he said. “It’s cool.”
    Our relationship changed. From that day on, I went to Richard’s to write, he shot, and he brought me a piping cup of jasmine tea roughly every four pages.

    One of