Artifact by Silas Jones

It’s trite to write about the sensation of having a body, how it slices you up the same way a mandoline does, quickly and imperceptibly until you’re standing at the kitchen counter with blood in your coleslaw. Take the coleslaw to the beach anyway, someone will kick sand into it eventually and no one will even ask about the bandaid on your finger.

Oh, I am absolutely drenched in sweat. I’m wearing jeans with buttons in the front instead of a fly and a t-shirt with a skeleton riding a motorcycle on it. I’m wearing a binder that’s meant to flatten my tits out and across my chest; this is the part of me that’s the sweatiest. 

I wear a binder all the time. Unless I am sleeping or have just woken up and am lying flat and warm in bed scrolling through instagram. I know this is a bad habit. 

Once, a boy undressed me and called my binder a “compression vest” and then peeled it off and fucked me in the ass which made me feel like Andy Warhol. Warhol wore a “medical girdle” forever after Valerie Solanas shot him and his surgery got botched. A “medical girdle” sounds kinda sexy, kinda campy to me. I do not think binders are sexy. Is that fucked up? Warhol said his held him together. It kept his organs from moving around inside his thin famous Polish torso. 

This morning, on instagram, I saw a photograph of a shirtless youngman reclining on a bed sheet spread on green grass. He had tattoos on his arms and shoulders and hands and hair on his belly and legs and face but not on his chest. 

At first, I thought today must be his birthday.

“dear n im shaking and sobbing as i write this. i can’t believe it’s been a year. sometimes i feel you next to me. is that strange? everyone always talks about you. we will never let you go, i hope you know that.” 

Everything is humming and dripping and one of my breasts is pressed flat against my sternum and the other is almost in my armpit. There’s a square of yellow light on the exterior wall of the Children’s Museum and six deviled eggs slumped at the base of a Sweetgum tree out front. The yolks are lolling out onto the soil. What, are the birds not hungry? 

He’s tagged in the photograph and his account is public. There are 188 photographs; N naked beneath a black stone waterfall, N lost in tangle of limbs and damp beach towels, N posing in the sunlight on a twin bed, N with bleach-burned blonde hair, N wearing a Stetson, N with a new buzzcut. An old photo of N, shirtless but scrawnier and wearing a pair of child-size angel wings. 

“n, patron saint of trans boys.”

I am obsessed with finding the last post he was tagged in while alive. I am obsessed with finding out how he died. I google him and find a GoFundMe for bottom surgery. 

I appreciate GoFundMes for what they are; fucking artifacts. 

For instance, two years ago, I had sex with someone and when they asked me what I liked and I told them honestly they thought I was joking. That person just posted a GoFundMe for top surgery. Their ex-girlfriend chipped in $25. My rich ex-boyfriend’s rich dad shelled out $250. 

I don’t wear my binder during sex, unless its the kind of sex that involves keeping all one’s clothes on, especially boots; laceup boots with no zippers, that’s cheating. I wore my binder least when I was dating that boy, the rich one who called it a compression vest. I wear it most when I am single and at my most fastidious.

I wonder if N died from surgery. “I doubt it,” said my friend when I asked him to help me solve the mystery. My friend is a genius at finding the names, addresses, and family photographs associated with the married men he fucks. 

I am used to seeing Instragram posts about dead gay people. HIV/AIDS memorial accounts lay them out in a grid like a quilt, like a vision board, like a diner wall crowded with signed celebrity photos, like a fragmented journal. The journal is about boyness and the specificity of landscape and body parts. Of course, it is also about whiteness and money and who is remembered. Sometimes, AIDS can make you a part of something. Lou Sullivan taught me that when he died. Actually, he taught me that when I learned how it happened. Lou Sullivan was fastidious; he had specific, favorite pairs of pants and cleaned his apartment and kept a diary.

I feel hypocritical and debauched when I look at photographs of these men; some of them look healthy and some of them look like shit, really. This is how I feel when I walk through the neighborhood stippled like fish scales, or like pixels. I’m moving through it, them, piecemeal. 

I forgot, I have a nectarine in my front pocket. It’s announcing itself, it’s bouncing itself against my self. I fish it out and find it’s bruised all over, it’s soft and curled. it looks like shit, really, I can be so picky.

Right now, I am simply filthy. I am slinky, I am smoking cigarettes with boney yellow fingers and I have a real flop sweat going, as I’ve mentioned. I am leaving dishes next to the sink, but not in it, so the cereal milk or soup or whatever I was eating hardens in the bowl and needs an overnight soak and I just don’t care. I am Lou Reed, or that’s not quite right, I’m Kurt Cobain? Wrong city. I’m David Wojnarowicz. Whatever. I’m careless. That’s the point. I’m footed in a reflection of myself, thinner and longer legged like a late afternoon shadow. 

This nectarine is just too gross to eat. 

I walk over a bridge with flexible cement seams that flex under the traffic. The treetops beneath are the ocean floor and the city park invisible below them is Atlantis, dark and teeming. I let the nectarine drop over the railing. It revolves as it falls, the same dark, prominent bruise disappearing and reappearing with each rotation, like an eye rolling back over and over, until the leaves close around it and it is gone. 

Silas Jones grew up in Arizona and Washington. Their writing has appeared in Hobart, Foglifter, The Account and elsewhere. They are an MFA candidate in fiction at Hunter College in New York City.

8 December 2022