glitterdick

8,300 words

The sky explodes vibrant marmalades around Seb’s silhouette, late afternoon sun catching in streaks of scattered clouds. Light halos around his head, shoulder-length blonde hair shimmering under his summertime sheen of sweat and oil. He moves fluid and dark around me. Blue feathers of gasified menthol ice float out his mouth in shaky plumbs. The pills he fed me dissolve into my guts and turn me dopey, my veins thrumming whorish and full of sensation. I fold myself down into the sun-bleached drainage floor, where the concrete is cracked with puffs of dying molds curled out from the soil underneath. Pallid tendrils form a soft bed under where my body lays. Creatures unseen echo down in the black maw of the drainage pipe, where campus’s turds all collect, legless bodies slithering through the stagnant water, inhaling snail and minnow prey. No one can see us here, obscured from the sightlines of dormitory window-eyes, behind tangled oak and paling concrete on all sides. Primeval scribbles of eyeballed cocks and pentagrams and swastikas decorate our hideout walls, furnished with old McChicken wrappers and beer cans and charred blunt corpses. Seb looms off in the distance from me, crouched in the sparse shadow gathered under a sagging black walnut. He’s hazy just at the cusp of my vision. A red-hot cherry smolders, cig glued to the dried drool rimming his chapped bottom lip. He washes down the caustic nicotine taste with a warm Keystone Light.

My voice rattles odd through my throat, the words forming with difficulty, I slur, “What’re you gonna do after you graduate?” He doesn’t want to talk about it, but the date’s coming up fast.

He blows a raspberry and hops down from where he’s squatting. “I’m just surprised I’m even graduating to begin with, dude.” He tips the rest of his beer into his mouth, then crushes the empty can between his heel and the concrete. Foam pours out over his knuckles, pitters to the ground as he cracks open his second.

"What're you gonna do?"

“The last time we talked about it, I had a dream that night and the night after.” The last time we talked about Seb graduating, he barely spoke to me for three days. He reaches into his jeans and scratches his ass. “I had the same dream before, when I was about to finish high school, but I ignored it then. I won’t this time.”

"What was the dream?"

"I'm gonna kill a cop soon."

I wait for a tension-release laugh that never comes. “Uh, why do you wanna do that?”

“Life in prison. They don’t have the death penalty here. I need to do it now, before I go back home."

“I don’t understand.”

“Prison’s not so bad when you see it on TV, dude. It’s just, like, a more autistic version of real life. But at least in prison, there’s no jobs, no rent, free food every day. In my dream, I realized I don’t belong out here in the real world. I’m just gonna get left behind, and I’ll eventually turn into someone I hate. I think if I don’t do something big now, I’ll end up bombing a mall or some shit in a few years. Know what I mean?”

Seb’s always asking me that, but he never likes how I answer. I don’t know what he means. I never really have. “Uh-huh.”

I manage to pick myself halfway up off the ground, bent over on all fours, rosy knees and elbows bruised. I see myself reflected in a puddle of grime, rainbow oil slick warping its surface. Bent over like this, I look like some starved puppy covered with blotches of eczema scabs. A brown-black mop is curtained greasy over my face to hide all the pocks of acne. My underdeveloped neuroplasticity is mushing brain gravy in the hollowed dome of my skull. Every wrinkle is smoothed over and deep-fried in a benzo-amphetamine piss bath. I’m burning out from the inside of my lungs. I crawl to him.

“I need to start working out soon, so by the time I get arrested my muscles’ll all be fuckin jacked, dude. I’ll be buttfucking everyone in there, even the guards.”

A phantom heat gathers in my bone marrow and at the tips of my extremities, slow waves of curling heat pulsing out from my heart. The rhythm crescendos as the chemical stimulation starts to dull my nerves. Bending supine across the hot concrete, I splay out at his feet. He makes long shadows over me from where he stands. Nostrils flare as he pulls heavy from his cigarette, ashes off to his side, then presses the sole of his boot into my cheek, pushing me down until I’m flat against the ground. I taste the fresh polish as he softly uncurls my bottom lip with his toe and I run my tongue across the boot’s point.

He says, “I know you’re worried about what you’re supposed to do once I’m gone.”

“I’ll be alone.” Easy, stupid prey to whoever my next roommate ends up being.

“I know.” He says, “That’s why you should kill a cop, too. Then you can be in my prison harem. You’ll be my number one, always. I’ll take care of you, just like I do now.”

“Mm-maybe.”

He pulls the boot away and my drool stretches out by a semi-solid strand, vague red flecks from where my gums are bleeding. I’m dehydrating, shriveling like a dead fish. Seb squats over me and parts my hair to look at me, a cross-eyed mess blinking slow. My pupils are wide as saucers. A small ocean of sweat drowns my entire body. My clothes are sticking to my skin uncomfortably.

“We’re already fucked no matter what we do, totally doomed. Things’d be a lot easier for you if you’d just realized that already. You think things’ll be any different when you graduate? You’ll be getting fucked out there the same way you’re getting fucked in here. School’s just a smaller ecosystem, more rigid, like prison. I know I’m gonna die soon if I don’t do something. I don’t know how it’ll happen, but I know I’m gonna die. You’ll never find me if I kill myself.” He points a finger up into the roof of his mouth. “I know right where to aim so I don’t end up drooling in a wheelchair the rest of my life, bro. Hey, also, if I ever OD, it was just a total accident. I’d never pussy out like that.”

“Okay.”

My heart speeds up as the last shreds of sober feeling leak out from my pores. The air is soft. His hands tickle down my body, up under my shirt and into my jeans. He traces down from my navel with his tongue. The belt buckle chimes at my waist. His breath flows hot against my dick, gently displacing my pubes.

“We could kill a cop together. That’d be hot, right? Our mugshots would look fuckin sick right next to each other on the news. Imagine it.”

I imagine it. He’s right. We’d get a fan club, a more faggoty version of Bonnie and Clyde. They’d make movies about us.

He struggles to pull my pants down. “C’mon, lift up your legs.”

“Can’t. I’m too—”

Relief washes over in pleasing waves as he peels the sweat-stained jeans away. My synapses spark slow, then fuzz out. My bare ass and legs feel nice out in the open air, free from their soggy denim confines. Muscles untwine under my skin as a breeze rushes through the trees and over my exposed skin. Too dope-loose to hold it in any longer, a gentle stream of piss starts to flow out, slaking the thirsty concrete. The sour stench lingers even after the puddle has been completely consumed by the parched earth. Seb spreads my legs and my cortexes perceive a pair of spit-slick fingers sliding into my ass.

He says, “So, I’m thinking, when we’re in prison we can, like, cut off everyone’s dick n balls. We’ll have a whole cell block full of our very own eunuch fuck-slaves. That’d be pretty cool, right?” He grabs my flaccid cock and thumbs the pink head playfully. He runs the sharp edge of his finger along the base of the shaft like some phantom blade and makes a shhhhhk! sound through his teeth. “But I’ll let you keep yours, obviously, since you’re my number one.”

“Mhm.”

Among the dozens of college applications I mailed out at the end of high school, my parents made me read up on all things biblical and apply to an all-boys Christian school in Oregon, the only place that ended up accepting my enrollment. They aren’t overly religious people, my dad was just hoping all the condensed masculine energy would rub off on me and set me straight. I had to live on campus my freshman year, per school requirements about ‘becoming part of the community.’ I roomed in a shitty, smelly dorm with three other boys for two semesters. The floors were slick, polished concrete, bathrooms always out of order. Like every other rental in the Pacific Northwest, there was no AC. I had a hard time making friends, just like high school, but sometimes I’d play pirated Smash on my laptop with the boy I shared a bunk with. We agreed to keep in touch over the summer break, but I never talked to him again after that.

The next year, my parents found me a cheap apartment across town, a studio already housing one other boy: a junior, Seb. His twin bed was on the far wall across from mine, the kitchenette taking up the majority of his half of the room. With hardly more than a single desk between the two of us, the tiny studio actually felt decently spacious. The walls were painted a half-assed splotchy gray that embedded in the power outlets, bare aside from a wrinkled poster of ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin with a hole punched through his glossy paper crotch. Seb never expressed the slightest interest in wrestling, so its presence has always been a mystery. He kept his distance when I first moved in, speaking to me maybe once a week about rent or the water being cold after his shower. All I knew was that something had happened between him and his old roommate, and before I moved in, he was having to starve himself while working full-time, on top of his studies, just to make rent. When he wasn’t in class or at work, he was usually high, playing video games. He tried to sleep as little as possible, staying up well into the early morning most days.

Since the apartment was just one open room, we’d be in each other’s presence, always. It was ebbing into the Friday evening, November, chilly because none of the doors or windows were properly sealed and our revolving door of landlords never answered our emails about getting it fixed. Swaddled in a roll of quilts, with his laptop playing some old episodes of Courage the Cowardly Dog, he carefully rolled a chunk of weed into a Backwoods and lit it. The stench wafted my way as soon as the breeze came in through the cracks in all the windows, made my nose tingle. I’d never tried smoking myself, but I wasn’t some pot-hating narc. I only asked him to smoke outside.

His eyes narrowed. “It’s fucking freezing outside, dude.”

“It’s only fifty-five. I’ll let you borrow my coat.”

He unraveled from his quilt cocoon and breathed in through the blunt, deep until his lungs were filled, turning a full inch of the Backwoods into ash. He came into my half of the room for the first time, steadied himself with one knee at the edge of my bed, then exhaled the massive cloud in my face in defiance. The reek of his weed, tobacco, Mountain Dew and a Beefy 5 Layer Burrito all mingled up my nostrils and made me woozy. He clenched the blunt between his fingers as it smoldered, then dragged it along the length of my forearm, just enough to burn me without leaving a mark.

“Ow, Jesus Christ.”

“Hey, you can’t say that. You’re going to a Christian school, dude.”

“I—sorry—You just burned me.”

“You’re being naggy.”

“Sam wouldn’t want us smoking in his apartment. My parents want the safety deposit back when I move out.”

“Sam’s not the landlord no more, bro.” I squirmed away as he pinched my side so hard it made my skin sing and go hot between his sharp fingernails.

“And there’s no fuckin way you’re getting that deposit back, even if we leave this place better than when we moved in.” More smoke leaked out his mouth and made my eyes go dry. “That’s how all these slumlords operate. They know some stupid college kids aren’t gonna sue them for a deposit.”

“Fine, you can smoke. Just stop hurting me.”

The blunt’s glowing end started to unravel as it burned away. Seb took another drag, then asked, “You ever been high before?”

“No.”

He steered its ass my way and said, “Try it.”

“It smells bad.”

“The worse it smells, the better.” He coughed into his shirtsleeve and wiggled the smoke at me. “Just take a big puff and hold it in a little. C’mon.”

“I don’t want to.”

“It’s not bad for you, bro. People been smoking this shit since, like, the beginning of time.”

He took my arm and pulled me towards him, pressing it to my lips. His grasp was loose enough that it almost seemed innocent, but firm enough that I couldn’t pull away and refuse him. I could feel the remnants of his lips’ warmth on it as I puckered my mouth and breathed in like I’d seen in the movies. It was caustic going into my lungs, the tobacco and weed coagulating in a harsh, grimy sludge.

He put a finger to my lips when I started to gag. “Just hold it in a second, then breathe it all out like normal.”

My chest burnt. Something fuzzy tracked up from my heart and numbed into my head. I almost fell back as I finally pushed it out, billows of wispy blue flowing down onto the bed. My throat itched like I’d just swallowed a handful of gravel. I couldn’t stop coughing. The veins in my head bulged and my eyes went teary as I tried to hock out what was charring my trachea. Seb patted me on the back, laughing to himself. I chugged the last half of his Red Bull in desperation. I always hated the taste, but it did manage to help soothe over the inside of my throat.

“That’s it, bro. You took a big fuckin hit of that. Hell yeah.”

I thought I might throw up. “I don’t—eugh—I don’t feel good.”

The Backwood’s cherry sparked as he took another drag, lighting him orange in the dark as he looked down his nose at how pathetic I was. He said, “You’ll be fine in a sec, then you can hit it again.”

“I think I’m good.”

“Naw, c’mon, take another. The first time’s always hard, but you’ll start feeling a lot better once it starts to kick in.”

“It’s gonna make me sick.”

“It’ll pass, dude.” He ashed into an empty soda can and passed it back to me. “One more.”

I reluctantly brought it to my lips and sucked in, letting the smoke fill into my mouth before inhaling. I could feel it settle somewhere right above my diaphragm, smoother this time, an enveloping heat. Just as my head began to blur out like before, I let it all loose into my lap, then handed it back to Seb.

“You aren’t on any tard meds, are you?”

“What?”

“Like Vyvanse, Ritalin, Prozac or some shit like that for if you brain’s all fucked? Are you on any meds?”

“No. Why?”

“Sometimes weed can fuck with your meds and make you freak out. I think you’ll be good, though.”

“That only happens if you’re already on some other drug, right?”

“I mean, it kinda fucks with anxious people a bit. You anxious?”

“I’m anxious about everything,” I said, starting to feel more and more uneasy.

“Uh—well, shit—it helps a lot if you just distract yourself. It’s all a head game, y’know. If you think you’re gonna freak out, you will. Know what I mean?”

“That doesn’t help.”

“You’ll be fine, dude, I promise.”

The apartment’s canter crawled down to a rattling hum, abuela stomps from the unit above thudding over our heads. My body tensed and unwound in places unfamiliar. Logic’s straight line diverged into countless paths and the order of operations flowed back on itself like a crashing wave. A pit went wide below my stomach and left all my insides with a free-floating sensation. It was too bright. I was tired. Seb handed me the blunt. I fought to take another hit, steeping me deeper into my bed’s pillowy chasm. The fuzzy din of compressed gunshot mp3s came from Seb’s laptop speakers as he traced and tapped along its trackpad.

“You don’t have a mouse or a controller?” I asked him. “You can borrow mine if you want.”

“It’s cool. This is the only way I play.”

I craned my neck to watch over his shoulder until he picked himself up and brought the screen over to my bed. He made himself comfortable, splaying longways on the mattress beside me with the laptop on his chest. I watched as he carved a bloody path through the 3D city. Compressed screams howled below the pops of gunfire.

“I hope the new one’s as intense as Red Dead 2, bro. It’d be sick to, like, dismember the NPCs and shit, catch em on fire and watch em squirm.” After stabbing a bystander in the neck outside a hospital, “You ever go to school with someone you thought for sure was gonna shoot the place up?”

“No.”

“I never really had any friends in high school, so I’d always get stuck with the total weirdos when we’d have to group up for a project. This one time, when we were dissecting the frog, my lab partner was taking the organs and shit out the body to take home with him. Like, I saw him cut the frog up, and he put all the parts in his pockets, even the eyes, dude.”

“I never had any friends, but I never had to work with someone like that.”

“He was an alright guy, just kinda weird. You get bullied in school?”

“Not really.”

“Just ignored? That’s even worse.”

“Were you bullied?”

“I made sure no one fucked with me. I’m a little flabby now, but I used to be ripped when I did wrestling.” He drove his car into a gathering of generic NPCs, their bodies flipping over the hood as they cried. “I got a mod to make the crowds bigger. Sometimes it makes my computer chug, but it’s worth it when you drive into em all.”

“Huh.”

“You act like you were bullied.”

“What?”

“You got that deer-in-the-headlights look, always. Like when I tried to burn you earlier, you just took it. The bullies at my old school would’ve loved you, dude.”

“You were just playing around.”

“Yeah, but if I burned you for real, would you do anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“You wouldn’t. You’d probably just cry.” He said, “I also took things a little too far earlier, sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“See? You won’t do anything.”

“I’m not going to hit you back.”

“I know. I do actually feel bad about it, though. It felt like I hurt a girl or a little kid or something.” He smirked as he saw my face droop. “Hey, you want an addy?”

“A what?”

“Adderall, bro. You look tired. It’s just a pill for, like, autism. I dunno. I just get them from someone with a script for it.”

“Does it get you high?”

“No. I mean, you’ll feel it, but it doesn’t really get you high. Or I guess it’s sorta like being high, but not—” He waved a hand in the air and shook his head. “Look, it just makes you wake up and pay attention, y’know. I take it before class sometimes and it helps a lot. It’s an immediate release, so it doesn’t last super long. Hardly anyone’s on immediate release these days, though. Anyway, trust me, you’ll like it. It’s just medicine, dude.”

“Okay.”

More bullets flew across the screen, cop cars igniting, helicopters screeching. When his health bar reduced to a sliver, his character’s head caught its last bullet and the screen went black-and-white. Wasted. Propped against the bed’s headboard, he stared into his laptop’s screen for minutes after it’d died and went dark.

“So, do we just sit here and do nothing?” I asked.

Suddenly pulled out of himself, Seb laughed, then I laughed until my head started to hurt and I could barely breathe. Cold tingled just below my skin and my heartbeats went feathery.

“Naw, dawg, we can do whatever you want.”

“What time is it?” I patted around for my phone in the blankets until I found it in my pocket. “It’s only about nine. Not too late.”

“Nine? Huh. I thought it was way later.” His gaze went back to the empty screen and his shoulders slumped. “You wanna go see something pretty cool?”

“Like, outside?”

“Ain’t really anything to do in here,” he said. “You know where all those condemned houses are, like, five blocks down?”

I used to walk an extra two blocks just to avoid them when I’d run to the 7-Eleven for cheap snacks. “Yeah.”

“Down that same way, prolly about a half-mile in, there’s this old two-story mall that’s been closed up since I was a freshman. I saw yesterday that someone broke the chains off one of the fire exits in the back. I doubt anyone’s fixed it yet.”

“Why were you down there?” I asked.

“Where you think I go to score weed, dude? My plug lives around there.”

“I don’t really wanna—”

“All we gotta do is sneak past the security, then we’ll head in and do whatever we want. We’ll have the whole place to ourselves. It’s easy, bro.”

“There’ll probably be a bunch of homeless people in there.”

“It’s been totally locked down for as long as I can remember, windows boarded, chains on all the doors. No one’s been in there since forever ago.”

The nighttime breeze slapped across my cheeks as we stepped out, bundled in the darkest coats we owned. A party was raging across the street, gaggle of dope-smoking beer-chuggers making a half-crescent in the front lawn around a waning bonfire. Streetlights buzzed and flickered over us as we passed along the sidewalks and through the busy intersections almost deadly in their disrepair. Seb set a fast pace ahead of me, brisk and unwavering. I could hardly keep up. The air undulated waves around me as we moved off the main street. An all-night diner facing a laundromat were the last neon lights we went by before turning to cut through a side street. The buildings got older, more dilapidated. Boarded-up windows hid shifting vampiric silhouettes and muffled expletive barks. Littering the ground were orange and red condemnation notices for asbestos, black mold, compromised foundations due to water damage. Graffiti covered every surface, indecipherable tags and crude runes that made odd faces at us in the dark.

The mall, past the condemned neighborhood and through a thick stretch of brambles and woods, sat like a vine-smothered monolith in a fenced-off field of tall grass. Its parking lot lay empty aside from a little security patrol car with its engine and lights turned off. Just vaguely through the windshield, I could see the security officer’s head tilted back against his headrest, asleep. The chain link chimed under us as we climbed up and over. Heels back to dirt, we landed into a bed of dewy grass that reached up above my waist. We stayed low, crouching in the reeds as we passed through the security guard’s sightline, then we dashed across the parking lot to the side of the building where old trees and shadow kept us well-hidden. Staying perfectly still a moment, making sure the security hadn’t woken up to call the cops, we waited. Minutes passed in silence before we stood back up and sidled into the dark behind the mall, to where the trailer docks were all padlocked and the fire exits had chains over their handles. Under a shredded green awning, we came to a door with its chains limply discarded on the ground. The pile jangled as Seb kicked it away and pressed into the door.

Rusted hinges screeched, the door yawning open. We entered. Seb clicked on a flashlight and scanned out into the dark, lighting the untouched marble span. The drop ceiling’s panels sagged and slotted unevenly in their places. Derelict storefronts were decorated with last decade’s kitsch. Our footsteps echoed on tile, crunching into scraps of debris, shards of glass, crumbling drywall, rat droppings. The air was thick with dust and mold. A motionless escalator cried as we climbed up to the second floor, a vast emptiness with broken discards pushed into the far corners, making fluid shadows that shifted strange in our torch’s light. The air was noticeably thinner above. Skeletal remnants from an old food court lay to our left, overturned tables and chairs and the scent of rot. Painted along the farthest wall was a massive mural depicting a scene with cartoon children and fast food mascots, the paint flaked away and fading. Despite the occasional splotch of graffiti here and there, the space was mostly virgin, run-down only by its own natural entropy. Approaching the mural, Seb swept our light back across the expanse, then landed on me.

“Pretty neat, huh?” His voice was loud and bounced off the walls for several seconds before dissolving back into the stillness.

“Yeah,” I whispered. “You don’t think anyone else is here?”

“Don’t be a pussy, dude.” He shadowboxed at one of the painted children, then wrapped an arm around my neck. “Hey, if someone fucks with us, I’ll take care of you. Your maidenhood is safe with me, don’t worry.”

A kiosk had been overturned in one of the long corridors leading into a rotunda, the moon filtering in through the foggy skylight above and glinting off the crystals of broken glass underfoot. Seb shut off the flashlight as we moved into the rotunda’s center, a four-pointed star with each arm branching out into the mall’s diverging hallways. Under the moon’s glow, swimming high off all the weed we’d smoked through the night, Seb’s visage assumed a ghostly, ethereal quality. It was the first time I’d realized how handsome he was, built like some bratty French movie star, lean, golden blonde, sharp jaw, sunken eyes.

We sat on a bench that bowed down at its center. My hands trembled while holding the flashlight for Seb as he picked apart the last few buds of his flower and packed them lazily into a cone.

Running his tongue along the paper, he said, “When I come back to spots like this, I can almost remember what it felt like to know it all meant something.”

“Huh.” I think I knew what he meant, just couldn’t put any words to it.

“I’m always trying to catch that feeling again and hold onto it,” he glowed when he flicked the lighter, “but it’s gone. It’s never coming back. It’s a ghost.”

The weed tasted different without tobacco, significantly more scratchy as I inhaled it. While I was hacking and coughing, Seb suddenly shut off the light and pressed the palm of his hand to my mouth. My throat tingled as I held it in and listened. Slow, heavy footsteps resounded through the empty space, coming up from the escalator. Just as we grabbed up all our shit and tiptoed into one of the storefronts, a light cusped over the stairs and materialized in front of a large man in a too-small hi-vis vest. Behind a sideways cash register, in what apparently used to be a Hollister, we hid. The heavy register desk was pressed almost flush against the store’s back wall, giving us barely enough space for Seb to stack himself on top of me. He kept his hand over my mouth as my lungs begged to cough up the itching smoke. Tears began to trickle down my cheeks. At the top of the escalator, the security guard stood and passed his light over the rotunda, pausing in each of the store windows.

I can see veins weaving pink in my eyelids’ thin membranes, where the sunlight’s hitting through, the whole world drowning into deep, fleshy pink. Control voiding, I’m pissing myself in little microconvulsions as Seb’s mouth explores my torso, covering me in his phlegmy kiss-spit, his knuckles squelching into my intestines. He mutters nonsense about death and orgasms over my right nipple, words I’m too buried to hear right. Something icy shifts between my thighs as he pulls himself back and leaves my ass empty. I nudge my hips towards him, practically begging, then a sharp coldness meets me, pushing in, its contours angular and metallic against the soft of my hole. I open my eyes as my ears catch the distinctive machinic click of a revolver’s hammer being cocked back.

He eases the weapon further into me and says, “So, this is how I’m gonna do it, with this. I’m gonna make the pig’s head look like a bloody asshole. Closed casket.”

I imagine the .38 warhead ripping through me, tearing up all my vital organs, then spitting out my mouth. How many nanoseconds of incalculable pain does it take for a bullet to travel from a five-foot-five boy’s ass to his brain? I want to pull away from him, but he’s already seen the precum glazing the tip of my cock. I can’t help but be turned on. The pearlescent reflection glimmers in the dark of his wide pupils overtaking their irises.

“I grabbed this from my dad when I was there for Christmas. He’s had it stashed in his closet for years, dude, never touched it. I found the key when I was, like, sixteen or seventeen, and I used to take it out every once in a while and fool around with it. It felt so good slipping each bullet into the cylinders. It was like sex. I used to time myself loading and unloading, over and over. I’m so fuckin fast at it, bro. I could probably kill a lotta cops if I had some more ammo and managed to catch those fuckers by surprise, but this’ll have to do.”

My precum volcanos out all over Seb’s knuckles. I wonder if I’ll orgasm when he pulls the trigger and turns my lower half into some yawning, red crater. I see through my mind’s eye the final cumshot of death arcing through the air, glittering in the sun with my blood and shit and piss, then spattering across Seb’s death-hungry face.

He buries the barrel in me to its base, licking his lips as I groan. “It’s got six in there. Three for me, three for you, six dead fucking pigs.”

“Seb—”

“C’mon, don’t tell me you’re gonna make me do it all by myself, bro.”

“No.”

“I told you before, we’re already dead. There’s no future for us. I don’t want to be alone ever again. I don’t want you to be alone ever again.”

“I know.” I don’t understand, but he’ll still do it, even if I say no. If he’s really made up his mind, there’s no talking him out of it now.

“The first shot’ll be hard, feeling that recoil, and especially cause it’s another person, y’know. We’re programmed to have empathy, so shooting the cop will almost be like shooting myself. The second’ll be a lot easier. The cops won’t be human anymore, just squealing pigs. And I won’t be human anymore because I’ll be dead, too, spiritual suicide. The third, it’ll feel totally natural, like breathing for the first time. I’ll finally realize, in that perfect moment, I was born to be a killer. Everything before—all this school bullshit, jobs, money—just a shitty prequel we’ve been forced to watch our whole lives up till now. Fuck, I wish I had more bullets, dude. For me and you.”

When I apologized for getting a hard-on in the mall, Seb told me it was fine, it was natural. In high school, when he was on the wrestling team, it wasn’t uncommon for the exact same thing to happen in the middle of a bout. “It’s just your body doing its thing, dude. Don’t worry.” But he still prodded me about it often. He’d grab me up in a playful headlock, roughhousing. “You’re not getting a boner again, are you, bro?” he’d laugh as I tried to pull my shirt down to cover it, making its existence even more apparent.

On the spare days that neither of us had class, we’d go out adventuring for the forgotten places around town: condemned warehouses, abandoned rentals above diners and coffee shops, nooks and crannies overlooked by all but the derelicts and us. While climbing down into a dormitory’s dried-out reservoir that inclined off a strip mall’s back alley, we found a massive drainage pipe perfectly situated so that we were hidden from all angles while hanging around at its mouth. In the late springtime, when the weather started to get warmer, it became our daily meetup.

Seb was high off something other than our usual weed, a few chalky pills I refused when he offered them to me, his judgment and sense of personal boundaries impaired. I ineptly fought against his headlock as he tightened it around my neck, gradually cutting off my oxygen. Squirming and whimpering, I couldn’t beg him to let me go. I was too scrawny to put up the fight he was wanting. He loosened his grip as I gave up and curled into myself as much as possible, like prey resigning to its fate in its killer’s jaws. I tensed into his arms, a weak, malleable cocoon. He held onto me just tight enough that my lungs struggled to catch air. My feet dangled free a few inches off the ground, tennis shoe tiptoes teasing along the concrete. Being a full head and shoulders taller, his hold on me was effortless, like I weighed hardly more than a small child to him. He spoke, slurring, so close I could feel his heat radiating, “I don’t wanna hurt you, bro. I just want you to know that I can.” Such a fucked-up thing to say, but I couldn’t detect any hint of malice in his voice. He didn’t want to hurt me. He just wanted me to know that he can. His lips gently grazed off my ear as I loosened myself in submission, going limp when I realized he wasn’t going to let me go. His muscles uncoiled around me. Firm enough to keep me easily pinned in place, soft enough that it was almost comfortable there in his arms. We lingered in the position, then he let me flop to the ground as he spied the erection that had noticeably perked up in my jeans.

“You popped another a boner, dude,” he said, pulling me up off the ground and shoving me back against the wall of the drainpipe. The cement scraped a hole through the back of my shirt and scraped along my spine. He used the full weight of his body to hold me there, his chest crushing mine. “Hey, you got a pretty big one.”

“W—what?”

“You got a big cock, dude. That thing’s bigger than mine.”

“This isn’t funny, Seb,” I whined. “You’re hurting me.”

“Fuck, sorry. I was just trying to play around. Didn’t mean to actually hurt you.”

“I couldn’t breathe.”

“I’m—uh—I’m just really fucked up, bro. Sorry.” He leaned into me, and quietly, “Listen to this. So, my dad used to beat the shit outta me, y’know. He liked to use the buckle when he was drunk.” Seb raised his shirt up above his navel to reveal a patchwork of old scars cut oblong across his ribs. He took my hand and ran my fingers down the scars’ furrows. “This one time—I think I was, like, eleven—he was just beating the absolute shit outta my bare ass over something till it was all dark and purple and I knew I wasn’t gonna be able to sit for at least a week. Anyway, somewhere in there—I just felt him, y’know, felt another person close like that, really close, like physically—I got hard as a rock on his leg. It didn’t matter that he was my dad. It was just something I never felt before. I was, y’know, fighting him a bit because it fuckin hurt getting my ass beat, and I guess I was kinda rubbing against his leg just right for it to happen like that. So, he noticed it immediately, and he started beating a lot harder, and, y’know, I got harder. Then—Jesus, fuck bro, I can’t believe I’m telling you this—I ended up busting right on him. All over his pants. And that was the first time I ever came.”

I couldn’t tell if he was bullshitting me. I said, “I—uh—I’m sorry, I guess.”

“I never got beat again after that.”

“I guess that’s good.”

“No matter what I’d do to piss him off, he’d never hit me like he used to. For a long time, I was doing everything I could to get him that mad again. Before I learned how jerking off works, no joke, I thought getting hurt was the only way you could do it—the only way you could cum—but it never worked.” He said, “Hey, if you ever tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you.”

“I won’t.”

“I never told anyone about this stuff, so I’ll know it was you if word gets out. I really mean it when I say I’ll kill you.”

“I won’t. You’re the only person I even talk to.”

“True.”

“Why’d you even tell me if you’re worried about other people finding out?”

He pointed at my crotch where the erection was beginning to wane and said, “Cause we’re the same. I felt like a total freak when I nutted on my dad. I don’t want you to feel that way.”

“I’m not a freak. You said it was natural.”

“There’s a difference between what I was saying about wrestling and your dick getting hard from being choked.”

“How’s that different?”

“It just is. You know you’re different, the same way I know I’m different.”

“But it’s just something that happens, that’s what you said.”

He reached for my groin, but I was quick enough to hop away. Before I could take another leap and put distance between us, he clutched me by the arm, hard, then pinned it behind my back.

I begged him, “Seb, please, stop. I don’t like—”

“You already got another hard-on, dude,” reaching down and pinching the head of my cock through my jeans.

“That’s not because I—”

He put me in a neck lock and pulled tight, crushing my windpipe until I was wheezing. The difference between me and him was more than apparent as he easily lifted me off the ground. My arms flailed as he ran his palm roughly along the denim imprint of my dick as it went thick against my zipper. My vision went fuzzy, limbs numb.

“Are you just retarded then?” he asked.

“I’m not—I’m not retarded.”

“Not even a little? It’s okay if you are, dude. I’d never make fun of someone for that. I mean, everyone’s somewhere on the spectrum, that’s what they say, y’know. It’s not like it’s something you can help.”

“No.”

“I wonder how many people go their whole lives without knowing how their brains are all fucked and scrambled.”

“I said I’m not.”

“My dad never took me to the doctor or therapist or whatever, so I’ve always wondered if I’m a little autistic or something. A lotta stuff would make a lot more sense, I think. But I don’t think I’m really there all the way, y’know, I just got some of the signs. I was reading about it after you got that first boner in the mall, and apparently autists are more prone to hypersexuality or whatever, so it’d make sense about your obvious masochism.”

“I’m not autistic or masochist. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said with a sigh. He carefully sat me back down and lit a cigarette, offering me one. The smoke calmed my nerves. “I’m not a professional. I hate the types of people that read and read and read shit online, then they suddenly think they’re experts or something and try to, like, psychoanalyze celebrities. I thought I was onto something, but I don’t really know what the fuck I’m talking about, dude.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’m not trying to be an asshole, bro. You’re just all repressed and shit.”

“I’m not repressed.”

“We’re just alike, both of us. I know you because I know myself, and I always feel repressed. There’s always something blocking me, y’know.” He knelt down to my level.

I said, “That doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“It has more to do with you than you think, because you understand me. Why do you think we’re friends, dude? Out of everyone else in the world, it’s just you and me.”

I couldn’t move away from him as he came in closer and I felt his breath on my lips. His tongue tasted salty, soy sauce from Chinese takeout. He pulled away and looked me in the eyes, checking them for doubt. The inside of my chest sang as I instinctually craned my neck, not realizing until our mouths were locked together that every part of my body was projecting into him through my lips. I kept whispering, “No,” while I willfully motioned into position for him, lifting my dopey arms over my head as he tore off my shirt, pressing my legs together so he could pull my jeans down to my knees, raising my lips to his every time he told me to, fisting his hair as he mouthed over my body, kissing, licking, biting.

It’s dark out by the time we split apart from our drainpipe hangout and go our separate ways. Seb heads down towards campus for his night class and I make my way back to the apartment to sleep off this high. The streetlights switch on as his shadow moves down the road and disappears behind a corner. My legs are liquid under me, almost unable to stand. The cold sensation of the revolver inside of me still lingers with visions of my body being shattered from ass to skull. I’ve never shot a gun before, much less at a living, breathing officer of the law. If I pressed the muzzle against some cop’s temple and fired, his head would explode and all the bones in my arm would turn to dust. A two-way death machine. To kill someone else is to kill yourself, spiritual suicide.

I can’t sleep. My stomach growls empty, but eating anything would make me vomit. I let the TV go and go all night to distract me from spiraling. I always expect Seb’s face to show up on the news. It statics from kids cartoons to infomercials. My eyes stare devoid and unblinking, thoughts sparser and sparser until there’s nothing and I can’t tell if I’m awake or asleep. My conscious living is cascading obsolescence. I’d rather just shoot myself than some cop. The morning shifts in slow through the window’s curtained slit. My alarm clock stirs me from my hypnosis and I’m awake. Seb never came home. His phone rings, then goes to voicemail. It isn’t unusual for him to be gone, and he never says where he’s been. I skip my classes. He’s gone all day, then the next, then the next. His voicemail is twelve seconds of static. He’s been gone a week. The drainpipe shows no signs of recent habitation. I wonder if it’d be as easy as he says to slip away completely, how much it’d take for the entire world to just let me disappear. Already I fade into the background perfectly, just another piece of the human clutter, the quietest whisper in the cacophony. My professor’s aide hadn’t even noticed that I’d been gone for three straight classes. I slot out and nothing takes my place. Did I ever have a place? He’s gone a month. I need to make rent by myself, so I get a job at the gas station down the road. It’s miserable. There’s no news about some junkie shootout with the local PD, no news of a loner discovered asphyxiated by nylon rope from a tree limb. Nothing. Dead, pervasive silence. I crawl into the drainpipe, farther than I ever have, so deep the light pouring in from the entrance is reduced to a tiny white dot in the black. I call down into the dark and only my own voice answers back. I start to think Seb was right about me being retarded. I curl up on the cold concrete until the light fades away into night. I’ll lay here. I’ll stay laying here.

guyliner, 2025

glitterdick was first published by The Pixelated Shroud in 2025.