The whole thing stemmed from me trying to have sex with Carson Constance Abernathy III. For the gay male readers, I’ll save you the trouble of reading further: he wasn’t attractive.

But he both breathed and was homosexual in Snykes, Kansas. If you’ve never been to Snykes, Kansas, then you don’t know the lottery-win-feeling of finding another breathing homosexual.

I was working at the Snykes National Art, Technology, and Communications Heritage or the SNATCH (said without even a giggle by many Snykesians) for the summer. My uncle had gotten me the gig. I supposed he pulled some strings, but I don’t think much forced was needed. I’d majored in art history because I thought, at this time in our history, it would mostly be watching 80’s MTV videos and French New Wave cinema (you know lots of cigarettes and hats and things), but—spoiler alert—you still learn about a lot of old Dutchman.

My interest had waned in the subject enough that I hadn’t even registered for the coming semester’s classes. I would open the screen occasionally and stare at it—see if it would allow me to register for both racquetball and ballroom dance, but that was the extent for my future planning. My family sensed all this and was worried about my future prospects as an art history major—even though Vera Wang has one—so, my mother called my uncle pleading for any connections. He had very few, so that’s what landed me, without even a giggle, at the SNATCH.

My job was to sit at a desk in front of their modern art wing. Wing is generous, as it was a kind of long hallway with a fountain in the center. The fountain itself was carved to be, what I thought, a melted woman giving birth to a dog. It was poignant centerpiece for an extensive collection of questionable art from obscure artists in western states. By the end of the summer I could tell you almost anything you wanted to know about the South Dakota Renaissance.

But I should just come clean and tell you up front that I don’t like modern art. There’s always a shoe in the middle of a fish aquarium accompanied by a plaque with a block of text talking about how it represents the Iranian revolution, but—friend—if it takes you a block paragraph to explain yourself, maybe don’t put the shoe in the water.

You can imagine, then, if shoe-in-water is what you get in New York, that the SNATCH wasn’t home to the highest echelon of modern art. Our highlighted collection that summer was a plethora of melted plastic blobs made by a fifteen-year-old from Sioux Falls (yes, she was part of the Renaissance) called Ineluctable Modality of the Invisible. Many said it was cutting edge, but I thought it was perhaps proof of some new, emerging neurodivergence.

I learned very quickly not to give an opinion of anything in the wing-slash-hallway, as my first week I received a citation for calling the Ineluctable collection “colored feces from a robot dog”. Mr. Briskoff said it was “untoward”, so I simply began to mirror back what anyone else thought about the collection, usually starting with the benign question: “So what did y’all think?” (Note the “y’all” both folksy and approachable.)

“Oh, it was startling!” one patron said.

“Isn’t it just?” I replied.

Or: “Creativity is so wonderful isn’t it?”

To which I’d say, “Everyone does have a unique voice, don’t they?”

Most of these mind-numbing back-and-forths were with people in their sixties and seventies, the only people in Snykes who could visit the museum in its opening hours of 10-4, but, then, one day Carson Constance Abernathy III approached my desk.

As I’ve already stated, he wasn’t attractive. He was a kind of Picasso version of Ryan Gossling. If you squinted (and had four or five drinks), you could see it, but mostly it was a giant nose with dull, black eyes and sausage fingers. He did have an air of French New Wave about him, though (cigarettes and hats and things), most prominently the purple fedora that sat on his large head.

“Hullo,” he said. The word was zhuzhed up with a kind of faux-European accent, as if he’d been to Paris, or, more likely, the French region at EPCOT, but, by the way he slathered his speech with it, like butter on a baguette, I could tell he was interested in me.

“Hi,” I said.

To be transparent once again, I am also not very attractive. That’s not self-deprecation, just objectivity. I don’t do many of the gay things—working out, buying expensive clothes, plumping myself with filler—so I remain humbly “mid”. I had also put on a bit of weight while I’d been in Sykes, (What does one do in Sykes??) so my shirt and pants were a bit tight.

“It’s a lovely collection,” he said turning slightly so that I could see that he was wearing a long, dangly earring. “I really think you’ll be seeing Tamara Wizlund in the MoMA soon.”

“She is a leading voice in the South Dakota Renaissance.”

“How does one define that movement?”

“How does one not?”

At this, Carson laughed, a kind of bird warble that echoed down the hall—sorry—wing. I was sure that, thank God, I was on my way to my first sexual encounter in eight months.

It had been a dry spell since I broke up with my previous boyfriend, Ronnie. He ended things when his football season closed out and he no longer wanted me to come to his room at 3 am for quick (albeit intimate and sensual) blowjobs.

Some would say he wasn’t a real boyfriend, but, if Tamara Wizlund can be a savant with piles of plastic dog poo, then I could be the boyfriend of a collegiate football player.

Carson turned back to me and smiled. His teeth were more crooked than I would have liked, but I also didn’t know if a future encounter would require a lot of face-to-face time.

“Do you know Dianna Estefree?” he asked.

I was thinking about sexual release, so I, obviously, lied: “I love her. I was just telling another patron how transcendent her work is.”

“The first time I saw it, I gasped.”

“It’s stunning. It truly can leave you breathless.”

Carson’s dull eyes sparkled. I had unlocked some fantasy in his mind—the erudite, twink(ish) muse who came from afar and could talk about his favorite artist. I could play the part if it would lead to an escape from the prison of my current life in Sykes (sad sandwiches, lonely TV nights and things).

“Would you like to come over and see some of my collection?”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly realizing Dianna Estefree was probably someone from the Wyoming Enlightenment if Carson had access to her work. But, again, my dick was already half-hard, so I said, “That would be incredible. I’ve never seen one up close.”

“It’s a different experience. I used to see her work on the late-night art show on WBDM, and it wasn’t the same as when I held the thing in my hands. I never thought a frog, you know, could do that.”

“One never thinks it could be a frog.” I hated myself for saying that, but, when you’re twenty-one and horny, there are a lot of things you’d say for a tepid blowjob.

Carson left his number with me and said that he was free that evening.

For the record, time always moved like molasses at the SNATCH, but that afternoon was worse. Every second was a lifetime. Every conversation with a new, doddering patron was agony.

“I heard,” one said, “that Wizlund’s work is actually a unique take on the astrological calendar.”

“I think that’s quite obvious.”

I sprinted out the door at 4:06 and drove quickly back to my little rented apartment. It was clear that if Carson and I moved beyond tepid blowjobs that I would be the one in the top position (he was wearing that fedora), so preparation was much less intensive than it would have been in other situations.

But I still scrubbed, shaved, and applied what few cremes, powders, and fragrances I could before putting on a tighter-than-usual button up and a pair of jeans.

When I was ready, I shot Carson a text:

Ready. Let me know when u r free

Immediately he responded with: Amaze. Come over at 6. I’ll have whine.

The use of “whine” made me slightly uncomfortable, but, we’d crossed the event horizon, so there was no longer any use to fight it. At 5:47, I was out the door and speeding toward Carson’s house on the west end of town.

There was a pull back in the sexual gravity of the black hole when I arrived at his place. It looked like the location of true crime case—faded black shutters, peeling white paint, and a yard with tangled knots of weeds and grass. Had Carson not appeared in the threshold wearing a pashmina and smoking a cigarette while waving to his neighbor, I may have driven off.

He motioned for me to come in and greeted me with a hug. He smelled like cologne, cigarettes, and lavender conditioner. When I pressed against the soft flesh of his hairy chest, I wondered, once more, whether the desperation of living in Sykes had perhaps pushed me too far. But then he tousled my hair with his sausage fingers and smiled down at me—the crooked (probably gingivitisy) grin—then, with a boyish warble (the faux-European was now gone), he told me to stay in the entry hall.

“One minute! I need to position her!”

I waited and looked around, estimating the likelihood I’d make it out alive, but the inside was less haunting than the exterior. The walls had pictures of family members, and a sad umbrella stand with a busted parasol broke any preconceived notion that this man could murder anyone or anything, even a mangy housecat.

“I’m ready!” he called. “Close your eyes and walk into the family room!”

I did as was asked and felt my way into the adjoining space. I soon felt his thick fingers on my arms. He gently steered me a few feet and then stopped me.

“Okay! On the count of three,” he said, his voice shaking with delight, “open!”

As he slowly counted down in his boyish bleat, I planned my reaction. There was no way in hell the “art” was going to be something more than a painting or sculpture made in some woman’s garage, so I had to be ready. I had to be ready, because on the other side of this charade was the chance that I could release my seed with a real live person in the first time in eight months.

“Open!”

I flashed open my eyes and immediately fastened a joyful smile on my lips (probably too quickly).

What I was looking at, the oil painting that stood in a place of prominence over Carson’s fireplace, the masterwork by esteemed (?) artist Dianna Estefree, was a large image, in a gilded frame, of a frog with a woman’s bob haircut. Technically, it was fine—the frog looked like a frog, and the bob was rendered so that, some part of me, wondered where the amphibian got its hair done, but, at the end of the day, it was an animal wearing a wig.

More urgently, I noted that I had definitely seen this same image on the internet. Many places on the internet. Dianna Estefree was some kind of meme-art fraud.

But when I looked at Carson’s misty eyes and quivering lip, I couldn’t actually say anything. This was the man’s Mona Lisa.

“Wow,” I said finally. Years of being in the closet made me a brilliant liar: “It’s even more amazing in real life. You were right.”

Carson wiped a tear (a real, true to life, goddam tear) from his eye and clasped his hands. “Every time I see it, it’s like seeing it for the first time.” He shuffled over to another shelf and took down a smaller frame and held it out. “Upon Hearing about the Fall of the Berlin Wall is the masterwork, but I have others.” He held out a picture of a goose with a mohawk. “I wish I could buy them all, but I had to take out a loan for the big one.”

“That,” I said pointing to the frog, “is called Upon Hearing about the Fall of the Berlin Wall?”

He nodded. “It was her breakthrough. Genocide,” he said indicating the mohawked goose, “was from a smaller collection.”

The small picture was placed in my hand. Carson didn’t let go, though, he gripped my hands and pulled me closer.

“It’s incredible being in this room with someone who really appreciate it. Who gets it, you know.”

He flattened his face against mine (it couldn’t properly be called a kiss) and kept it there for some time. As he moaned a bit, I looked around the room for any other wigged animals, but the rest of the décor was purchased from a retail store.

When he released me, he put one of his thick fingers to my lips. “You’re a good kisser,” he said.

“Yes,” was the only thing I could think to reply.

He suddenly threw off his pashmina and twirled. “It’s freeing isn’t it?” he asked. “The art of it all.”

“It’s something,” I said.

He kind of pinwheeled back toward me and put my face in his hands. “Would you do something for me? You have me so inspired.”

Everything was truly upside down. I was in a murder house with an early 30s man in a pashmina who thought a frog wearing a wig represented the fall of communism. We had crossed into the black hole and this, evidently, was on the other side.

“Would you do something for me?” There was never more of a loaded question: This could have been anything from a foot massage to dressing like a member of the Partridge Family and getting on a bus.

“Sure,” I said. Because I was desperate—truly—for attention, for love, for a bad blowjob, for anything that kept me from sitting on the couch that night until I went to bed at midnight.

He gripped my hand and took me into the kitchen where he had an easel set up and an assortment of watercolor paints.

He sat behind the easel and pointed to a stool. It was a standard, wooden kitchen stool, except, of course, sitting on top of it was a black bob wig.

“Put it on and let me paint you.”

I did, because, at that point, it seemed as if it would be even more asinine to say no, so I sat on the stool, be-bobbed, and watched as he dramatically flourished his paintbrush. After several minutes of silence, he did flick on the radio—bland, early-2000s pop music filled the silence. As Sheryl Crow told me about soaking up the sun, Carson began to moan.

It started out very faintly, but with each brush stroke, it grew slightly louder.

At first it made me uncomfortable, and I tried to break the veil of awkwardness with polite banter.

“I do love this song,” I said.

But Carson held up a finger and shook his head. “We are in the moment,” was his only response.

Fifteen, twenty, then thirty minutes passed. The moaning became a steady sonic undercurrent to the radio, bubblegum pop, and advertisements for “Sneed’s: Sykes Most Discounted Discount Furniture.”

I had fully zoned out, starting to wonder if I had enough Bran Puffs for breakfast in the morning, when the low moaning from Carson evolved into…what could only be described as birthing sounds.

“Oh! Uh! Oohhwewehhhhhh!”

Rather than this slowing his dramatic paint flourishing, it only increased the speed at which he raced his hand over the canvas.

I began to sweat, unsure really what was happening. I was only twenty-one, so a thirty-year-old man making guttural breathing sounds could have been a heart attack? I wasn’t sure what middle-aged affliction could be manifesting. Carson didn’t look bad, exactly, but he didn’t look great. He was biting his lip, and his face was flushed red.

“Carson…” I said finally, not wanting to ride in an ambulance that evening. “Are you—”

“IT IS THE MOMENT!” Carson growled.

He then grabbed a second brush and began almost spinning as he splashed the canvas with reds, greens, and blues. My hands tensed around the stool’s seat as I watched his face turn from rose to magenta to plum.

Then, with a sudden motion, he thrust both brushes into a jar of water and then used his free hands to pull down his underwear. My mouth dropped open as I saw a, near firehose, release of semen launch from his exposed penis and splash the canvas.

I had oft wondered if there was truth to the porn-way of ejaculating, the steady river of cum that shot from some men’s testes. My college boyfriend would mostly goop, and I was known to dribble, but Carson—expelled. Several long shots of white sticky liquid hit the canvas, before his dick began to soften and it dripped onto the floor.

Carson fell back, completely spent.

“My god,” he said. He wiped his brow and then smiled at me. “Come here,” he said. “See what you’ve inspired.”

I got off the stool and went over to him. As weird as this evening had gotten, I was curious what he had been slapping together for the last half hour, and it came to almost no surprise that when the painting revealed itself, it could only be described as a middle-school Pollack. In the center, there was a peach dab of color with a black splash above it—what I assumed was Carson’s abstract estimation of what I looked like in a black bob.

But to my surprise I was struck—nearly dumbfounded by the site of it: the color, the spray, the semen. Carson, this pashmina’d oddity with a fake European accent and obsession with pop art, had suddenly revealed himself in a forceful, chaotic mess on a canvas. Somehow this had been inside of him—a hallucinogenic blend of colors and body fluids that had been rawly inspired by me sitting on a stool in a murder-kitchen wearing a bob wig.

What insight it offered into such a human singularity as Carson Constance Abernathy III!

To my surprise, the first words out of my mouth were: “It’s beautiful.” Followed quickly by: “You know, it could be a frog.”

Carson nodded, seriously. “It’s my best yet.” He closed his eyes and leaned back, sighing. “I think,” he said after some thought, “I’ll call it The Killing Fields.”

After that, he served me a plate of leftover tuna salad, and we watched an episode of House Hunters. We chatted, and I discovered that he would soon be away on business in Topeka, and my internship was only a few more weeks, so it looked as if our paths would never cross again.

We shared a cigarette on his porch—less French New Wave than neo-noir—and then he put his face against mine one more time and we said good-bye.

There had been no tepid blow job, but—whatever the evening had been—it filled the longing which had been pressing on my heart and making my balls blue. Before I went to bed, I opened up my laptop and finally registered for the fall semester (I chose ballroom dance over racquetball, I am gay after all.)

The next morning I got to the gallery earlier than usual. I let in two elderly patrons who eventually made it to my wing and read about wunderkind Tamara Wizlund.

As they were leaving, the older man stopped while his wife moved away.

“Interesting stuff,” he said noncommittally. “That Wizlund is so young.”

“Yes,” I said. “She’s a leading voice in the South Dakota Renaissance.”

The old man licked his lips and looked back down the gallery. His eyes fell on one of Wizlund’s blob piles. “And,” he said, amusement creeping into his voice. “How does one define that movement?”

I thought of Carson’s mixed media mess from the night before. “I think,” I said, gesturing broadly to the whole of the SNATCH, “it’s predominant definition is possibility.”

————

Tedd Hawks is a writer, teacher, coach, and developmental editor from Chicago. He’s been writing stories since he could read—focused initially on magic rabbits, his work now centers on dramatic fish. (There has been some improvement in his prose in the process.) He has self-published works ranging from LGBTQ+ YA fiction to satirical poetry. You can connect with him via Instagram, Substack, or his website.