by Jackie Sabbagh

When I was still a boy and studying abroad in Oxford for my junior year I met an Oxonian boy named Boris who told me he was studying gender and sexuality in 19th century European art history, meeting him at a communal dinner in the college’s cathedralesque refectory where we split a twice-baked potato and gossiped about the sex lives of the American students and the social indiscretions of the English students, and I saw him soon after at the Bodleian Library forearm-deep in stocky books like Queering Impressionism and Hopeless Romantics: Gay Sex and Love in French Painting and he patted the adjacent chair with a cheeky inviting grin, and once I sat down he whisper-asked Are you here to be literary and nodding I said I have to write an essay on Blake’s influence on modernist iconography and Boris laughed and said Everyone’s always influencing everyone, and I flipped through a book of Boris’s landing on a painting of a woman sprawled out in fretful sleep wearing diaphanous white fabrics with a snarling imp perched maliciously on her chest and Boris asked quietly Do you want to hang out Saturday night, and my body flushed with dreadful warmth because these gay boys did nothing for me while I yearned still to become a woman but what else was I to do with my dark and melancholy nights, and I smiled slightly and said Yes let’s do that and Boris smiled tapping a pink highlighter on my knuckles braced on the desk’s edge and said You go do comparative literature so I left him there to take a distant shady window seat, I watched crows light on crenellated parapet walls and felt a sudden horrid premonition that every man I fucked while a man would entrench me deeper into masculinity until a life of new girlhood was impossible, and that Saturday Boris met me in my off-campus student flat where I made us two mugs of instant coffee with vanilla creamer and after he sipped his and exhaled contently he said So I brought us DMT-2 if you want to trip, and I squinted saying I have no idea what that is and Boris said It’s just a psychedelic variant that gives you geometric visuals and rapid-onset euphoria and I paused and muttered softly What if I don’t want to be euphoric, and Boris laughed saying I promise it’s harmless fun so I eyed the mini-Ziplocs of small mint-green tablets that reminded me of Smartie candies and we each swallowed one with a tepid mouthful of sweet coffee, and we ventured on an evening walk through the nearby neighborhood and I murmured I’m gonna bring us to this soccer field that looks really pretty under the floodlights and Boris said Lovely and smirked good-naturedly with his handsome squarish face, and as we passed by apartment complexes and a brutalist middle school and beige-stone bungalows I began to see squat shadowy imps in gossamer white sleep-clothes flicker inside of shrubbery, and when I surveyed the area of dim trees and homes and streets I said to Boris I don’t know where the soccer field is and he laughed before squeezing my hand and turning us around to the flats, and once inside my room we burrowed under my raincloud-gray bedsheets and Boris put the movie The Cabin in the Woods on my laptop and we watched as hot archetypal collegiates rummaged their way through a darkly-wooded cabin of obscure antiques and two-way mirrors, and as a buxom blonde girl French-kissed a mounted taxidermized wolf-head I watched the shapes swell concentrically to a vanishing point and I whispered to Boris I dislike either movies or drugs, and he smiled encircling his arm around my throbbing head and I felt his armpit hairs furl damply against my cheek before elongating like animate tendrils and stoppering my ear canal, and I saw then how deep into dissociation and mirage I was willing to plunge to stay among the homosexuals where I was dysphoric and miserable but never scared and never alone, and as the illuminant laptop screen pulsed and warped I said softly to Boris I don’t think I can have sex with you tonight and his face fell dejectedly before he located some remote grace and said That’s alright hon, and I realized the point of us taking DMT was to have weird boundaryless hallucination sex and I rested my head on an unoccupied slice of pillow and closed my eyes against a collapsing arabesque of blue-pink light, I saw a sleeping woman sprawled out in sheer white fabrics on the lurid green of a soccer field as the floodlights cast her in a stark melodramatic chiaroscuro, I saw a wolf curled in cadaverous repose atop her chest and licking her parted lips and I knew I was in far too deep for this pantomime life, I knew that I was the woman and I was the wolf and any day now I would be rising from sleep to see who was shaking my shoulder and calling me some terrible name, what was that terrible name you were calling me while I was trying to sleep against the noise and the touch and the light and the day.

Jackie Sabbagh is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, and is published or forthcoming in POETRY, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Black Warrior Review, Subtropics, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere.