Archive of Our Own

It was sometime in June when he found him at his corner, piling up wooden boxes that smelled like salt and sea weed. He wore a tank top over a pair of washed up jeans, and flip-flops where sand had begun to wear the soles thin. A trailer he had never seen before was parked right around the harbor, worn out tires and rust to coat the bumper a thick chocolate shade.

He called him out with a whistle, tucked a hair strand behind his ear when he turned around. The man raised a brow at him, and Shigeaki clicked his heels pointedly, the shirt dress he had been wearing swaying over his knees. He smoothed it out.

‘That’s my spot you’ve been messing with your fish, sir’, he said, and the man shifted his mouth to one side, put down the box he had been carrying. He had ugly hands, ruined dry by salt, and stained yellow by the cigarettes he probably chain-smoked. They mismatched with his lanky appearance like jam and white bread, but he didn’t seem to mind the discrepancy: he wiped them on his tank top, and then offered him the right one.

‘I’m sorry’, he said in a baritone voice, and scratched his chin with the hand Shigeaki had left hanging. He was oozing a confidence that made him itch in all the wrong ways. Crack, it went under his skin. Crack.

‘But the town council has granted me already all the permits, see, here’, he continued, and handed him an envelope he had fished out from his jeans. Shigeaki scanned the content quickly. A long stream of characters filled the blanks in a rush, words eating each other like anacondas, his name was Koyama Keiichiro and according to lots of kanji that were starting to give him a migraine he was a street ambulant. Fish seller. What was even the difference, really.

‘Looks like we work beside each other’, he shrugged, and scratched his chin again. ‘We just entertain different fields’.

He stared at him for a long moment. Koyama kept his face still and because of this, Shigeaki always thought in the future, they would become a whale and not just two tongues messing with each other. He looked up at the second-hand wig Shigeaki had been wearing swaying lifeless in the wind, at the cheap mascara and the slutty lipstick, and he kept his face still, and because of that they would come together.

‘How am I supposed to recite my poems with you selling your stupid anchovies’, he grumbled as he shuffled back to his side of the corner.

Koyama shrugged again, and didn’t dignify the question with a response.

*

The first four weeks passed by drenched with noises.

They bounced against the trailer windshields, those whimpers and groans and grunts, and orgasms moaned with clenched teeth. They messed up his writing process, constricted its flow to something primal, feral even. bite-suck-grind, his mind chanted like a sutra, and long gone were the placid rivers he had been trying to paint in between verses. Ink bleeding white on skin. Keep that pen sharp and wet. He was growing mad with them, shaken up in a way he could not explain.

‘War has ended for a while, Scarlett’, the short guy barked every time he caught him staring at the trailer. He was always the first one to walk out, droopy eyes dazed and sleepy. He'd fish out from his pocket whatever little money he had on him and shove it in the jar Shigeaki had set at the edge of his podium. ‘Drop the tent act and the Party City wig, and treat yourself to something nicer’.

‘Don’t take it personal, he’s not ill-intentioned, just from Osaka’. Koyama explained him one day, in an attempt to joke, as he hopped off the trailer. He thought of sea water when the ambulant limped closer, the dank smell of it, wild and feral.

‘What do you sell?’ He asked.

Koyama smacked his lips pensively. They shone in a way that had his head spinning for a moment. ‘Herrings, anchovies, shark fins too when the season is right’, he said as he stretched languidly. Damp jeans stuck to his legs in the hot summer weather, and he yanked them up to the hips. ‘Everything in high demand, you know’.

‘What do you sell really?’ Shigeaki asked again.

Koyama turned around and stared at him – through him. Playful lips smudged wet, white. ‘Everything in high demand, you know’.

*

He mounted his stand on the side of the road where a man had been shot dead once. Sometimes a relative would stop by to bow their heads and clap their hands to a quick prayer, and he surprised him by joining them every time.

He didn’t mind, he said, was used to have people gathering around him for all the wrong reasons, and he winked up at him, in a way that Shigeaki recognized, knew meant something else.

Routine crept on them at last, closing up with a series of interlacing stitches cosmos that would’ve never came together otherwise. They revolved around each other like planets, asteroids about to collide, the collapse of species and civilizations.

Shigeaki made sure to start chanting his stories when the trailer was still a pesky dot trotting somewhere far in the distance; made sure they never had an opportunity, at all, to talk to each other. He woke up in the early hours of the morning, wore his wig and pads and beat the sun on time, set up his podium when the skies were still bleeding orange.

When the trailer door shut close and cardboards obscured the windshields, he sat on the curb as he listened to those muffled cries dissipating into the air, rooting deep in his core as hungry seeds. Sometimes, he stared at the tires and wondered if the short man was treating him right, if he was giving back just as good as he was getting.

It was when the entire wrong crowd thinned down in the evenings, leaving them to their demise, that he realized a new order was inevitable. Koyama was sitting on the trailer hood, one leg bouncing against the bumper on alternate beats, and two yellow fingers holding a cigarette.

‘That shit will kill you someday, you know’, Shigeaki said, and kept his sentence open for every interpretation – how much he smoked, the lifestyle he had picked for himself, the raw eggs he ate in the morning.

Koyama stretched over the hood, caramel spread on rusty metal, limbs sliding slick and warm in every direction. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing’, he sighed contently, and it made Shigeaki think that maybe he knew, after all. It made him think: something will rot dead eventually, be it either a lung or an heart.

*

Sometimes he would leave the short man to tend to his stand as he freshened up in the gas station nearby.

He walked in on him washing himself with a wet towel on a Saturday afternoon. He stood near the sinks, his back facing him as he tried to wriggle his way in a pair of skinny jeans.

He wondered then what he wanted to scrub off his skin, what else he didn’t manage to rub clean, and felt out of place, much like a creep, when Koyama turned around and caught him there. He nodded shortly as he said, Would you toss me that shirt?, like that wasn’t the oddest favor to ask, a prostitute asking a cross-dresser to help him with his rags in a gas station stall.

He tossed him the T-shirt as he fixed his eyes on a dark spot on the floor. Koyama shoved in a plastic bag the tank top he had worn since morning and a pair of old boxers. He parted his fringe to the side, cleaned his teeth with a fingertip as he smiled a lopsided smile at the mirror, and Shigeaki simply watched him, arms knotted over silicone tits because his hair was just a mess and he wanted to fix it right.

He thought about these curls sometimes, all those little fireworks exploding in every direction as the short man fucked him senseless over frozen anchovies. It came often to him, like an earworm but meant for the eyes. An eye-worm. A vision-bee, maybe? Whatever.

‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ He asked, and the ambulant raised a brow at him, visibly confused.

‘I mean’, Shigeaki shrugged. ‘Look at you, selling yourself cheaper than the anchovies stored in your trailer’. And he gestured vaguely at the plastic bag on the sink, the ripped boxers shoved at the bottom. ‘Where’s your dignity at?’

Two fingers clicked a lighter alive, those yellow stained fingers, and when their eyes met Koyama arched his head upwards, breathed out a puff of smoke.

‘How is it any different?’ He asked.

‘What?’

He flicked some ashes onto the floor. ‘Anchovies, poems and dick, they all are items in high demand. So, what is it that makes two of them more dignified than the other?’

‘You’re delusional if you think one of those won’t define you differently’, he said. ‘The impression people will have of-’

‘Is exactly who I am’, Koyama cut him short. ‘I don’t need to act something I am not’.

Maybe it was the accusation in his eyes, or the second-hand wig burning his forehead all of sudden, the lash-glue going chemical on him, or the cheap lipstick hurting the teeth, but Shigeaki stumbled on his feet for a split second, clutched at his chunky necklace.

Koyama put down the cigarette, stubbed it with his shoe. ‘I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. What I-’

‘No, you’re right’, he said – stuttered. ‘That’s exactly who you’re’.

He tucked some hair behind his ear as he turned on his heels and walked away, and it felt like holding to a whole strand of nothing.

*

He approached him three days later, when the sun had turned a dot tumbling down in the distance. Streets were emptying and the weather was turning colder, and Shigeaki had just sat on the podium, kicked off his heels.

There was a pile of essays to his left which he had arranged properly in the morning, notes and post-its with pages dog-eared and a lore hidden in between the lines he had been trying to unveil for a week. Something about growing older and not wanting to let go of things, of marmalade dirty fingers clutching at his mother’s apron.

Koyama sat cross-legged by his side, shoved away some pages, and now the lore had turned upside down: the king dancing a goofy boogie for the jester, and the horse rising to the throne in a silky cape. What a mess he'd just made, just what a mess.

‘I’ve got a story for you’, he said, and lit up a cigarette. ‘You know, to help you expand your repertoire’.

‘You wouldn’t know my repertoire if it slapped you in the face’.

It wasn’t a question.

Koyama shrugged in his shoulders. ‘There’s a lot of strippers wearing neon bras, too many people leaving vegetables where they aren’t supposed to, and one dude wanting to set the city ablaze cause he’s pissed at some art museum’.

He rolled his eyes. ‘My art goes deeper than that’.

‘I bet that’s what the stripper said’.

He snorted with a loud sound, couldn’t help it, all aching teeth and wrinkles folding like origami. He heard Koyama sniffing quietly then, adjusting his posture to an attitude of tension, a clatter of fumbling and fidgeting and fingers tapping nervously on the sidewalk. He was trying to take back all the vitriol that had been spilled, cupping it in his palms like a child playing at emptying the ocean.

Shigeaki wasn’t entirely an idiot, could still read a room when it crumbled down on him. And for a moment he felt like he did in high school whenever a girl confessed her feelings, and he had to wait patiently for her to stop stumbling on her words so he could turn her down – nothing personal, really, just that he preferred his girlfriends tall, dark and handsome, and they were better as friends.

He snatched the cigarette from his fingers, smeared its butt with cheap lipstick. ‘Go ahead’, he said then.

The ambulant parted his lips in a pretty ‘O’ shape, surprise turning his face childish, kites taking off and knees scraped on gravel. Shigeaki nudged him on the shoulder, synthetic locks folding on a ruined tank top, a slap to good taste. ‘C’mon, go ahead. Enlighten me’, he asked again.

Koyama turned his head and looked at him for a moment longer, then nodded as he fished for another cigarette. ‘OK’.

‘OK, so here’s how it goes…’

Old Tom was a killer whale born in Eden, New South Wales, some times in the early 1900s. Its story wasn’t anything uplifting or magical, really, wouldn’t have had any child to go ooh and aah in front of a television screen, and wouldn’t have had any adult to drive for miles and miles just to sit on a chair by Sea World on the weekends, holding onto washed up signs. King of Killers was its pet name, ‘And who in their right mind would’ve rooted for something like that, really?’ Koyama asked in between two puffs of smoke.

Old Tom went down in history for having initiated an unusual partnership with the whalers of Eden.

It went something like this: its pod would chase the whales all the way inside the bay, trapping a few in shallow waters, and then Old Tom alerted the fishermen by splashing its tail like a spiked club. The men would sail their boats swiftly, adjust their aim under a pale moon shine, and harpoon the trapped animal. Then they would leave the whale hanging on to their boats all night long for the pod to feast, and collect the scraps left the day after.

Sometimes orcas even helped the fishermen to bring the carcass on shore, biting on the ropes and dragging them for miles.

‘You see’, Koyama said, not looking up from his cigarette, ‘Killer whales are picky eaters’.

Shigeaki tried to not laugh. It wasn’t that hard, because then he turned to him, and this sad look passed over his features. He rolled the butt between his fingers, threw it by a pile of garbage no one had been sent to collect that week. ‘What now, you telling me orcas befriended the locals cause they preferred their fins deep fried or something?’ He asked.

Koyama smiled. ‘No, they didn’t really like fins. They loved their tongues though, and lips and sometimes genitals too. Would’ve killed just for a taste’.

He shrugged. ‘So does every homo in Japan’.

‘How many of them do you know forming deadly alliances just to get some ass?’

He shrugged again. ‘Ever heard of Instagram?’

Koyama rolled his eyes.

‘I've never liked this story, you know, no matter how many times my pop tried to sweeten it for me’. He tossed his cigarette, watched it rolling by a pile of outdated housekeeping magazines. ‘Tearing apart something so beautiful and for what, an obsession over details’.

Shigeaki looked at him for a moment longer. He wondered then when he must’ve heard that story for the first time, wondered what kind of impact it must’ve had on him. Not many understood how a few strings of letters could shape a life sometimes, some commas there and now that kid wants to become a doctor, a few missing apostrophes and, oops, here he’s selling his virtue over frozen anchovies in the back of a rusty van. He wondered, worried sometimes, just how many apostrophes must’ve been stripped away from him, dreams ripped clean like condoms in the backseat of a trailer.

He looked curiously at him. ‘You’ve never liked that story’.

‘Never wanted to be that kind of person’.

‘What kind of person?’

‘That obsesses so much over details they end up tearing people apart over them’, Koyama said quietly, toying with his skirt. He let him. ‘Why their hair is such a mess, what’s up with their pronouns, why do they have to stand out so much, like, who cares. It’s just dumb details’.

Forgive me for having been that person, said the words he didn’t speak.

He watched him fidgeting on that sidewalk, watched those crispy hair swaying in the wind, how he perspired saltiness without ever meaning to. He looked at him for the first time since they ever met, probably, the street ambulant that had mounted his stand where a man had been shot dead once, and didn’t mind spreading his legs for a loud mouth, and enjoyed his pointless conversations with a whiny cross-dresser. Flowing like water over those pesky details, the apostrophe they all have been missing in their lives.

It was a minute later that he nudged him on the shoulder again, snatching the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips and flicking the lighter alive with a few clicks. Koyama looked at him with wide eyes, a hint of relief and a whole lot of confusion to twist his features like a hurricane.

‘That story was a clusterfuck, you know, all gaping plot holes and nonsensical lore, there’s no way it can fit in my anthology’, Shigeaki told him as he flicked some ashes onto the sidewalk.

'I’d love to hear it again’.

*

‘So, I’ve got a story for you’, he told him a couple of days later. An old lady busy weighing some sardines gave him a weird look, and he tipped his nose at her when he sat behind the stand, spread his legs a little because pads were rubbing his thighs in all the wrong places.

‘It goes something like this’, he said, and then cleared his throat. ‘There’s this cross-dresser with a slight tendency to project self-issues onto others that might’ve said a lot of bullshit he didn’t really mean to, and now is sorry about that’.

Koyama snorted loudly. ‘That’s all?’

‘What else were you expecting?’

‘Well, I don’t know, something nonsensical, I guess’, he shrugged. ‘Like insight creeping on him as he’d been watching bees drowning inside a bidet, you feel me, that kind of stuff’.

He rolled his eyes. ‘That’s just gross’.

‘H-mm’, Koyama agreed. ‘Well, was he wearing slutty neon undergarments?’

‘Those are for Sunday functions and funerals only’, he replied, and handed the old lady the bag he’d just weighted. ‘That’d be 500 yen, ma’am’.

She held firmly on to her rosary and signed herself. Shigeaki snorted with laughter.

‘Forgive him, he’s not ill-intentioned, just from Osaka’. Koyama explained, and smiled brightly as he offered her the flat of his hand. ‘And those would be 900 yen for you’.

*

He hated his body. Sometimes he fantasized about shedding his skin, crumple it to a ball, and kick it under the sink like a dead roach.

He didn’t like his hair, kinky and almost begging to be torn like a rip, to be pulled along the ground and then across thick-skinned thighs. Shigeaki hated the big smiles the guys flashed as they tossed him their mousse to fix it properly, harboring no suspicion about what must’ve happened, even with those tufts spiking out in every direction telling a different story.

He hated his heart-shaped face, its apple-kissed cheeks, their roundness. When he was a kid they were a cause of pride: he chewed with his mouth wide open and bet everything that he could think of on the amount of food he could fit in them.

He thought about those stands, summer noises, old memories washed up in blue faded photos, when his boss’ penis bruised his mouth, heated fingers to tear his tufts and a bitter erection to squish the air out of his chest, pushing fast, rocking hard, feeling like a punch that never quite knocked him out. Those cheeks could take it all, up from the tip all the way down to the base, and he couldn’t help but hate them, to hate himself for every thrust that took a little bit more of air out of his lungs and squeezed a whole lot of self-esteem out of his system.

He didn’t like his name, a handful of spitting sounds that lead nowhere. ‘shhh, Shige, shhh’, he always moaned while standing above him, whenever he cried or choked or just felt like puking, heated hands and a handful of spitting sounds to keep his head in place. ‘You like it, don’t you, Shhhige? You love this gig, want to keep it, right?’

The day he quit the strip joint, he piled up his clothes in one of the shower stalls and set a match to them, watched them burn as something in his core finally started combusting too. He laughed out of his mind when his boss grabbed him by a wrist, shoved him angrily against musky tiles. Burying him, he’s been dead for the past three years anyway, he replied with a giggle when the man asked what the fuck he was doing.

He loved her, synthetic strands that felt like nothing when torn like broken thoughts, and cheap lipstick that turned his lips ugly, unlovable, sticky and unpleasant against the skin. He loved her silicone tits, and corset, and uneven pads, a hot cocoon made of heat and softness he could crawl inside, and lose his headaches behind. He loved the untold secret her identity was, a name to not be disclosed, to not be desecrated by busy moans on strangers’ lips.

He loved her like a boy playing with his mama’s clothes would, wearing for comfort layers of fur and silk because he had outgrown the uterus for a while now, though the comparison always bothered him.

It was later in the afternoon when they were watching people pouring down the streets, and somehow they had fell sitting side by side behind the stand.

Koyama turned his head around and looked at him munching on an apple, wearing his chunky necklace and a pair of worn out platform heels.

‘Does she have a name?’ He asked, and did a vague gesture with his hand, as though to frame him between finger and thumb.

‘Ayame’.

It rolled out his tongue so naturally it felt surreal.

‘H-mm, that’s a lovely name’. Koyama hummed then, and gave him an approving pat on the knee, forget that hand there as he turned around to stare at the dimly lit streets.

Shigeaki looked down at those yellow stained fingers he could not feel, and for a moment almost hated her.

*

‘Is your hair straight?’

‘It’s not’.

‘But you give the impression of someone with straight hair’.

‘Well, my hair is not straight’, Shigeaki shrugged. ‘And you have only one question left’.

Koyama pointed an accusatory cigarette at him. ‘Excuse me, I had two left, two’.

‘You’ve traded one for a hint already’.

‘Stop making your own rules’.

‘My twenty-questions game, my rules’, he shrugged again. ‘You still got one though, so make a good use of it’.

‘Well then’, and he arched a funny brow at him. ‘Are you hun-’

He kicked him in the shins.

*

The short man came back sometime in October, long bangs spiking out in every direction which did nothing to mask the bags under his eyes.

He spilled his complaints at the speed of a bullet while Koyama was closing the stand. He talked about chihuahuas taking their last breathe in a guest bedroom he never had time to air properly, the fourth chord, then the fifth and guitar strings splitting his nails, snapping off clean and almost scarring his chin, those motherfuckers.

It was when Koyama had done strapping his last box, that he put down the cigarette he had been smoking, stubbed it with his shoe, and then shoved the ambulant inside the trailer. For a minute, Shigeaki could just look as if suspended on a weird time warp. Those were the scenarios that sometimes kept him awake at night, undulating at the back of his mind and tingling his senses like electric shocks, statics wrapping all around his intestines and breathy moans to rise up in the throat.

The trailer door shut close, feet shuffling on crumpled paper, a rich chuckle, ‘You’re not ruining this shirt’.

‘Your shirt’, the short man scoffed.

‘Yes. I like this shirt quite a lot’.

‘OK, let me fold it properly for you then’.

A beat. ‘Ryo’, Koyama almost snarled. ‘Ryo. Don’t you-’

When the door flew open again, a lump hit Shigeaki on the face and he almost lost his balance, caught the shirt right before it fell flat on the sidewalk. The short man stared at him for a long moment, flashed an all canines smile, something devious stuck between his teeth and lose jeans riding low on the hips. Scarlett, he said – purred really – and the untold knocked Shigeaki off his balance.

He breathed out nervously from one nostril as Koyama shuffled on the floor, peered curiously at him, and you could’ve easily cut the horizon with all that tension. He looked down, and he was standing there kneeled next to a bunch of frozen anchovies, tapping gently on the crevice behind the other’s knee. There was the curve of his mouth, sweaty strands sticking together as a hand stroked his scalp.

Shigeaki looked down at that T-shirt, thumbed its hem and seam and stitches, inhaled that delicious skin scent before tossing it onto the sidewalk.

Koyama smiled a lopsided smile, and he wondered how it would’ve felt like to chew the redness off those lips, to peel out his hot cocoon and slide in between these two bodies, slick as a seal. He would’ve tasted like nicotine, and smelled like sea water. He wondered then how that arousal digging into his thigh would’ve felt like, falling asleep spooned behind him, still sticky from the aftermath, kissing the sharp lines of his chest and pinching his butt as he rushed off to work, cradling his foot on his lap as they were watching television in the living room.

He moved a step forward, and then a sudden sense of confusion shoved him three more back. ‘I-uh. I better go now’. He mumbled as he turned on his heels, on the decisions he thought he had taken.

October had turned colder, and he wondered if this was the reason why Deities had decided to set his chest ablaze.

*

He sat by his side on the podium edge. There was this creamy bruise on his neck, the faintest trace of teeth to embellish the skin like a painting. ‘Yesterday we put you through one hell of an awkward situation, and I do apologize for that’, he blurted out, and tucked both hands in his pockets, left out a leg and shuffled it like a metronome.

He looked sated, sleepy, tufts of hair curling up in the evening air. Shigeaki had braced himself for a long metaphor that never came, something about bull sharks devouring each other as fetuses, or maybe the unfair and winding road that is a salmon’s life. He smacked his lips pensively, and wondered how they’d ended up like that almost without realizing, crafting beautiful apologies one day and edging on threesomes a moment later.

Sometimes he wondered about what they could’ve become if they’d met under different circumstances.

It was his left brain’s tendency to overanalyze things, a need for something to distract him from the fuzziness that engulfed his thoughts whenever he looked at Koyama and he smiled all lopsided in return. Could’ve it gone any different if they’d met as respectable people? A handshake here, a business card there. Fingers wrapping around velvety flesh, elbows bouncing off the steering wheel, everything tangled and messy as a loving wife and children waited at home. Was it their fault they wanted all the wrong things?

‘It’s OK’.

Koyama turned to him. ‘I know I keep saying this, but he really isn’t ill-intentioned, you know’.

‘Just from Osaka?’ Shigeaki offered.

He snorted with laughter, fished a cigarette out from his pocket. ‘Horny as a dandy is what I had in mind, but that will do’.

He turned around to stare at the dimly lit streets. ‘Could have it gone any different?’ He asked at some point during eternity, and flicked some ashes onto the sidewalk.

‘I mean’, he shrugged. ‘If he weren’t there’.

‘How different?’

‘I don’t know’, he shrugged again. ‘Just different’.

Shigeaki watched him from the corner of his eye, exhaling puffs of smoke with a casual kind of grace. The evening air was crisp and windy, and a hair strand had fallen over his lips, wrapped like ivy around the cigarette. He brushed it off, forgot his thumb on the ridge of his cheekbone for a moment too long. Koyama lingered vacuously, and the scent of sea water and nicotine sent his line of thoughts all buzzing in fuzzy lines.

He pulled away slowly, mesmerized, saltiness still undulating at the back of his mind. Yeah, he mumbled then.

‘Yeah’.

*

He chanted the Old Tom story sometime in November, when the skies were thick with dusk and streets slick with water. In this romanticized twist Old Tom split galaxies in half with a flick of its tail, alerted the whalers by having stardust pouring onto their ships, and the whales floated about space and time with a grace of sort, balanced unknowing planets on tail tip like seals, seasons changing swiftly whenever they were diving into black holes, wailing sonatas no one knew how to hum because humans couldn’t be bothered to look up at the skies anymore.

Shigeaki thought about those creatures sometimes, sinful lips and tongues and genitals, and all the wrongs that had turned them unlovable, deserving to be torn in half so to split grain from grass, as that saying goes. It surprised him how these little details mattered to him, how he thought they somehow told his own story too.

‘Ne, auntie, ne’, a kid whined, and he looked down at him, clicked his tongue. Sitting cross-legged by his side, Koyama snickered in a fair hyena impression over a bucket of herrings he had been salting.

‘Were the whales really that disgusting? I mean’, he shrugged, ‘Fish nuggets are delicious’. And he knotted both arms over his chest, sniffed in an annoying fashion.

Koyama smiled gently when he caught him staring from the corner of his eye, rinsed his hands in a bowl of water and wiped them on a dishrag.

‘Whales were not disgusting, just rotten then and there’, Shigeaki said, quietly. ‘Fins, tails, teeth. It was all nasty stuff that had to go’. The wavy hair, the apple-kissed cheeks and the dissonant name too.

‘Orcas didn’t want a tummy ache, you see’.

The kid raised a brow at him. ‘What made them go bad?’

The choices they had made. The ones they had not. Splinters scraping their knees as they crawled on dirty floors and buried their heads in filthy places, and self-hatred enveloping them gently like a duvet. So many were the things that had turned that flesh ugly, the skies were oozing exhausted with them.

‘Their meat just tasted different, this doesn’t mean it was rotten’. Koyama cut in, and Shigeaki wheeled around to face him, startled.

‘Their fins stayed above the water and their tongues sat inside of it, right? They didn’t share the same experiences, so of course they ended up tasting different’, he shrugged. ‘But they also complemented each other in a unique way, you see, the same way eggplants and bread crumbs do’.

Shigeaki stared at him for a long moment, and began to think about his torn identity as one of those sangiovannese eggplants. He’d been doing that a lot lately, reconnect the dissonant bits. Pile them in jenga towers and see if they stood a'right. Now Koyama had added a new layer and he didn’t know what to do, if to fold or be brave and move a different block, throw a wig and some pads on top maybe, and bare whole flesh for his next move.

‘Orcas were just dumb for not getting it’.

The kid unfolded his arms, knitted thick brows close together, and then pointed an accusatory finger at him. ‘Is this all about how eggplants are disgusting but they’re good for you?’ He asked, and looked almost affronted. ‘Did you just brainwash me into liking vegetables?’

‘What-’

‘There, on the house’, Koyama cut in again as he handed him a bag stuffed with salted herrings, and winked up at Shigeaki, in such a gentle and warm way that it struck something squishy and ugly inside his stomach.

‘Tell uncle I said hi’.

*

When he walked out of the shower, he stood for a moment too long in front of the sink. A green towel masked the mirror above it, and he removed it with a nervous gesture, flung it at the laundry basket and missed by a couple of inches.

He stared at the man that stood right in front of him. He had a soft belly, curved prettily like a pillow, and he pinched it between index and thumb, scratched on the tender skin there and watched mesmerized a finger sinking in that soothing warm.

And then there was the hair, frizzy and wavy, and he pressed a hand to it, wrapped a finger around a wet strand and pulled gently, inhaled the citrus scent of the shampoo and drowned his thoughts dizzy with it. Last, when he came upon the face, he stared at it for a moment before cradling it with a shaky hand, running his thumb back and forth along the ridge of the jaw and catching on a few hair stubs.

He looked up and the man was standing there on the other side of the mirror, naked and slick like a seal. This kind of content look passed over his features, and then untamed hair and flushed skin mixing up together in a smooth, continuous line. Easily so, flawlessly so, olive flesh smudged with rights and wrongs.

The man stared back at him. Whole as a whale, he almost looked like.

*

An unforeseen downpour whipped Heavens apart on a Friday afternoon, sent people scrambling all over like ants without umbrella.

Shigeaki quickly shoved his notes in a plastic bag and held on to his wig, jerked back startled when the trailer door flew open with a loud bang and the short man barked at him to drag his soaked pads inside, for Christ's sake.

The van reeked of breathy moans and stifled breaths, and the short man grinned a wicked smile as Shigeaki wrinkled his nose at the bad smell, slipped out damp jeans and fished a fresh pair of boxers out of a backpack.

His clothes were drenched wet and Shigeaki rubbed his hands together, fell sitting on a spongy looking wooden box, and stared vacantly at the soaked skirt sticking to the bent shape of his pads.

‘Do you have to do this now?’ He sighed next when a dirty lump hit him on the head.

The short man wheeled around at the sudden question, a fake innocent look and velvety flesh like a badge, and Shigeaki didn’t even have to search for that playful glint to know he was purposely trying to get under his skin.

He rolled his eyes, stubbed the discarded underwear with his cone heel. ‘Wife’s nose must be that good, uh’.

‘Haven’t had one of those in a while, too high-maintenance’, the short man shrugged. ‘It’s the noisy nephew I have to watch out for’.

‘You live with your nephew?’

‘That's the inheritance my sister left me’, he shrugged again. ‘Kid’s lost his momma already, deserves at least the illusion of a positive role model'.

'Hm-m', Shigeaki agreed with a non-committal noise, sympathy stuck in between uneasiness and powder foundation. He twisted a curl around his finger, then his eyes fell on an uneven mass, and he indicated the floor with his index. ‘Speaking of which, you've stepped on a used condom'.

The short man shuffled his leg and looked at the bottom of his foot. Thanks for that, he grimaced, pinching the rubber between finger and thumb and flinging it at his head in one fluid motion.

*

He patted his back pockets and knitted thick brows together, looked up at him from over his shoulder. ‘Do you have a smoke?’ He asked. Shigeaki shook his head.

He shrugged as he grabbed the jacket Koyama had left behind on his way to the gas station – pink faux leather with a cat embroidery that looked like he had stitched it on himself – fished out from one pocket a pack of cigarettes and slipped in the other a roll of banknotes. He exhaled a puff of smoke as he sat by his side, took a wooden box and tipped it over so he could stretch his legs, and Shigeaki simply watched him, his hair wild and wavy and unapologetic as he carried himself like he’d always belonged there.

He enjoyed that: getting railed over frozen anchovies and mocking a flashy cross-dresser. Shigeaki thought about his life some times, the tear jerking songs he said he composed and his dog tipping water bowls over whenever he was away from home for too long. He wondered then how easily these details came together, how so, perks and flaws making him unique. Shigeaki thought about his own life some times, the chance to skip over water like that, a rolling stone without a single care in the world.

His mind wondered some times, wandered, when uneven pads rubbed his thighs in all the wrong places or whenever Koyama guessed how many wrinkles scarred his forehead under all that foundation he wore. It came as natural as an itch, stubborn as one even. He just couldn’t help it.

‘So, what’s your deal?’ The short man asked as he lit another cigarette, and Shigeaki raised a brow at him.

‘I mean’, the other shrugged. ‘Was your momma a hooker or something? How do shrinks call it, reaction formation? Is this what you’ve been doing?’ And he smacked his lips pensively, crossed his legs in a casual way.

The skirt swished over his knees, and when Shigeaki found the short man staring he smoothed it out, ducked his head so to focus on the bob of his adam’s apple when he swallowed rather than the way he was looking at him. She didn’t know your folks, if that’s what you’re implying.

The other threw his head back as he snorted with a loud sound. You dipshit. Paper burned slowly between his fingers.

‘Does it bother you that I’m like this?’ Shigeaki asked once he’d stubbed the cigarette with his shoe. ‘I mean, that I dress as a woman’.

He blinked up at him, taken aback. He was, in a way, taken aback too.

‘That’s not what- Christ, I don’t give a damn about that, it's just'. He rubbed the back of his neck when he noticed the accusation in his eyes. ‘Why are you such a prude? You look stupid, refusing something he has no qualms giving you for free’.

Shigeaki gaped for a moment too long maybe. ‘That's the more sensible-’

‘You're chilling in a white van with a nymphomaniac’, he cut him off. ‘You wouldn't know sensible if it took a piss in one of your wigs’.

Maybe it was due to the flaws he had bared like velvety flesh, all these wrongs he wore like a badge, but for a moment Shigeaki played with the idea of crawling out his cocoon, to tear pink sponge apart and squeeze his way through the rubble.

He stared up at him, and began to think about all those faults that made him unique. He had been doing that a lot, notice other people’s shortcomings, try to remember his owns. And longing for them, for the man they’d crafted out of him. Loud, crass, stubborn, emotive, passionate. Now they were buried under layers of stockings and silicone and he didn’t know what to do, how to bring them back.

‘When a salmon reaches sexual maturity their digestive system stops working, did you know that’, he asked after a breath of silence, and the short man raised a brow at him, stared like he had just grown another wig. ‘They need to stock on sperm and eggs, got no space to spare, so their stomach shrinks down’.

‘If your origin story is you finger-blasting a fucking fish, I swear to-’

‘Desire is forced upon them, and then consumes them from the inside out’. Shigeaki smiled tightly, pinching his skirt.

‘For the past three years I’ve been pressured to live such a life, and now that he's given me a new stomach, I don’t know if I’m good enough for it’.

Heavy rain poured down on the trailer roof, played metal scraps like a drum set. The short man had set his lips in a thin line, and Shigeaki didn’t realize he’d been watching him until their eyes met and he smiled at him, something he couldn’t quite pinpoint cutting his face a weird shape. He looked away quickly, twisted his skirt with white knuckles.

‘You know what’, the short man hummed then, palming the side of his jeans. ‘I think I got something that might help you expand your anthology’.

He tried to not chuckle, to ignore the irony of things repeating time and time again. It wasn’t that hard, because then he turned to him, and he'd unzipped his fly open, pulled Shigeaki’s hand and shoved it down his pants.

Shigeaki squeaked with an ungodly sound, pulled back his arm without much of a thought, and slapped him senseless with the flat of his hand. If it hurt, he merely blinked to show for it. The most he did was to peer at him in a strange way, hell-bent yet falteringly, leaning his fingers back up and working his way on to the depression of the elbow with the lamest brush.

‘It’s a short’. He said then, quietly, softly, voice so gentle the contrast with his actions short-circuited something in his brains. ‘About a lump’.

Shigeaki stopped struggling and looked up at him, breath still itching in the throat. The short man rubbed his cheek with the hand he was not using, and gave him a small nod. ‘It goes something like this’.

‘Flesh and blood make this lump’, he started, and spread his legs a little, pushed boney hips upwards to meet his fingers. ‘And, you see, it’s a quite pathetic little thing’.

There was a pause and it made Shigeaki look at him again, twitch a finger almost without realizing. ‘It’s tiny, dirty. Dangling limp and boneless for most of its life, a dead weight. Yet, for some reason, people love to make a great deal out of it’. He placed one foot on the tipped wooden box, stretched out a leg. ‘Men measure their worth with its length, and women with how little of it they do get. And then you have fish, and they’re the nuttiest of the bunch. They shrink their stomach for it, you see’.

He looked at him for a moment longer, sucked on his tongue pensively.

‘One might wonder what the lump thinks about all this fuss, if fame is getting at its head maybe, but the question is a no brainer’. And he spread his legs a bit more there, and this time Shigeaki opened his hand wide, let it dance about velvety flesh, fingers curling around it. A naive touch, of ignorance, mankind discovering fire all over again and not knowing what to make out of it.

‘It’s a lump of flesh and blood, it thinks nothing at all’, the short man smiled. ‘Yet people, for some reason, keep its opinion in high regard’.

‘That’s the way society works’, Shigeaki replied, and barely recognized his own voice, so thin and stranded.

‘Society workships stigmas and five inches of average stupidity‘, he shrugged. ‘You know better than that’.

They stared at each other for a long moment, stigmas and five inches of average stupidity lying thick in between them, heavy burdens he was just learning how to scroll off his shoulders.

He sat limp on his palm, boneless, and Shigeaki thought about those club floors when he held that lump in his hand, the way splinters grazed his skin. He wondered if his boss knew, wondered how he felt, if he had ever realized, as his head was buried in between his legs and an unskilled tongue stroked his pathetic lump, all that ego he'd attached to it. Such a puny little thing it was, they were, dangling limp and dirty for most of their lives. It was hard to say, but he had already realized at some point, knew tearing a soul apart wasn’t normal because it was such a puny thing, and he was. He was something else entirely, way more than that.

It was hard to admit, all the fuss he had made over such a tiny lump.

He saw the short man looking at him, and he pulled his hand slowly, tucked it under his blouse with a shy gesture. He flushed, laughed nervously. ‘Your cheek looks like an eggplant, sorry about that’.

‘Shut up’, he grunted, and maybe looked a little flushed too. ‘I was being cool here, and you’ve just ruined it’. Shigeaki laughed and apologized.

‘There’s no way I can fit this in my anthology, you know’, he said after a short while, as history kept eating itself like an ouroboros. ‘Your nephew and his classmates make half of my audience’.

‘Dumb it down then’, he shrugged, clearly uninterested. ‘Set it in space, throw in a light saber or two, I don’t know’.

‘How are dicks in space supposed to be a more suitable option for kids?’

‘Scarlett, I’m a songwriter’, he shrugged again. ‘I’ve made a career out of things in space looking sad, and they’re always a solid option. Besides’, he pushed the hair back from his face and knelt down, pulled a shoelace. ‘Kid got his hands full already figuring out why auntie looks like the missing link between ape and man, he won’t notice anyway’.

Shigeaki snorted with a loud sound, ‘Shut up’. He looked at him again. ‘You might be the first person from Osaka to be naturally an asshole, did you know that’

He arched a brow at him, Osaka? What Osaka? I’m from Hyogo, you dipshit, and tied his sneakers with one bunny ear.

A wet sun shone outside.

*

In November, Koyama decided to adopt the colony of strays that had camped some blocks away from the harbor. The old man that used to feed them had passed away recently and the cats would’ve followed suit soon, he had explained with a tight smile, town folks passing them by and having no goodies or glances to spare.

He was fixing a bowl under his van when Shigeaki sat behind the stand, and Koyama grinned at him from over his shoulder. ‘It’s a little warmer down here’, he cooed, and Shigeaki hummed quietly, rubbed the back of his neck. It was going to rain soon and his scalp itched under the lace.

‘You know, your old friend Tom has paid me a visit some time ago’, he said then once Koyama had zipped the goody bag shut. His cheek was dirty black with grease and he wiped it with the back of his hand, looked curiously at him.

‘Do I know a Tom?’

‘Your pop did’, Shigeaki explained. ‘You kinda hated the dude wholeheartedly’.

It took Koyama a moment to understand where he was going, but when he did he chuckled softly, mouth curling in an amused little smile. ‘And how is he holding up?’ He asked as he sat cross-legged.

A cat sniffed at his leg, hissed with a scratchy sound, and finally dived under the van. Its tail kept oscillating like a pendulum, and Shigeaki decided to focus on that rather than the way Koyama was looking at him.

‘He’s travelled a lot, befriended some folks on the road. He’s changing his ways, I guess’, he shrugged. ‘He told me about this whale he’s met at some point, and he too. He’s-’, he paused and tapped his fingers on the stand, cleared his throat.

‘He used to be a stripper before, you know, kinda the skanky type too’, he laughed and then bit his lip. ‘I’m talking nonsense, I’m sorry’.

He toyed with his skirt as Koyama watched him quietly, watched synthetic strands stick to his forehead and cheap lipstick stain his teeth as he smiled nervously at him. He watched that big old whale bare his flaws, and headaches, and everything that had turned him ugly, and kept his face still, and because of this, Shigeaki always thought in the future, they would become a whole.

It was a minute later that he chuckled seemingly for no reason, holding on to the sidewalk with one hand because his leg had fallen asleep. Shigeaki looked at him and felt a little off of center too, because his heart thrummed like an engine and he didn’t know why.

‘So that makes him a humping-back whale’, Koyama deadpanned, and sent Shigeaki in peals of laughter. ‘And how customers liked his lap game?’

‘They hated every moment of it’, he smiled. ‘He couldn’t tease to save his life, and his knees cracked every time he bent down’.

‘Some say wobbly joints are the key to a mean lap dance, you know’, Koyama shrugged. ‘Shoot all the weight straight to the hips’.

‘Tell me you are not that desperate to get some, you’re honestly considering taking a lap fifteen tons heavy’, he teased, and a laugh escaped him.

He bit his tongue with it, because then Koyama decided to stand up and held on to his knee for leverage, cupped one thigh with the flat of his hand for a moment too long. Shigeaki looked down, and saw him standing there in his tank top and shaggy hairdo, and he gritted his teeth. There was the fluttering of his lashes as he'd tilted his head to look at him, the smooth column of the neck.

‘Maybe I’m’, he smiled, and Shigeaki pinched his skirt because hair had fallen over his face and he wanted to push it back.

‘Or maybe I’m just making up excuses to peel this whale out of his garments’, he said then, so close the whiff of nicotine on his tongue blurred his thoughts, and he stared at him for a long moment. Koyama treaded his hand and then pushed up fluid like a large cat, patting him on the shoulder. ‘Next time you hear from Tom, ask him if he’s down for a drink some time’, he said as he’d bent down in a stretch to knead the cramp out his leg, and Shigeaki nodded almost without realizing.

His stockings were soiled black with grease and he thumbed them absentmindedly, ripped that nylon cocoon of his with bitten nails. He picked at the threads until stitches started to fall apart, and it made him think that maybe that made the two of them. It made him think: emerge.

*

He removed his wig carefully, got rid of the clips and tape that kept his hair in place, tucked to a blob with no form to it.

In November the weather had grown colder, and a shiver ran down his spine as he peeled out his stockings, flung the pads somewhere on the floor. The only pair of jeans he owned was an old one, fabric having long gone soft where thighs touched, and he threw a T-shirt on top of it, a foreign band name he couldn’t even pronounce flashing on the front in some lousy font.

Last, when he came upon the face, he rolled the fake lashes between index and thumb before flushing them down the toilet, soaked a cotton tail in make-up remover and drenched his eyelids wet with it, the underside of the ear, and the curve of the chin. He then flung the ball too, and watched as pigments slowly dispersed in the water, stained porcelain a pinkish shade. 

He pulled on his stilettos, knotting their laces hastily as Ayame had been pouring out his pores, bleeding out just like those chemicals in the toilet, and he clicked his heels pointedly to keep her in place, firmly wrapped around his ankles. They still belonged together, after all: a salmon with a chubby stomach, a whale left untouched, wrongs fading into rights and vice versa. And he couldn’t help but think how those five inches of average stupidity looked quite insignificant right now, or maybe it was just him that had decided to ignore what people say for once, and turn their voices dull. He didn’t really know, couldn’t care less either.

He parted his hair to a spiking mess and walked out of the bathroom stall. The air outside was slippery and chilly, cold winds rising from the sea and cracking the harbor like a whip, and he smiled when saltiness invaded his nostrils, that darn dank smell.

He found Koyama behind the stand, slouched over a wooden box as he’d been dunking herrings in buckets of salt. He realized someone had approached only when heels clicked in a pointed way on the sidewalk, and he rinsed his hands in a bowl of water before looking up, greeted him with a nod.

‘What can I get you, sir?’ He asked.

‘Everything in high demand’, Shigeaki replied, and maybe sounded a bit cheesy there, too much on the nose.

Koyama’s breathe itched, a raspy hiccup that caught both of them by surprise. He blinked up at him, standing there with his head tilted to the side and mouth left agape. Shigeaki sometimes still remembers the quiver of his lip, remembers the way his head had lolled up and down as he was staring at him, as stuck in a daze. He remembers details interfering with each other as ripples in the water, those bare wrinkles, the curve of his tummy and the unkempt hairdo too, and when Koyama laughed heartedly and blinked a tear away, there he saw it reflected in his eyes – a whale turned a whole.

‘And whose order is this?’ He asked hopefully, and Shigeaki snorted with a loud sound, couldn’t help it.

‘This isn’t Starbucks, you know’.

‘I’d still like to know’, he replied quite simply, and long gone were the overly complicated metaphors and twisted analogies. And just then he realized Koyama was, in a way, baring himself too. No more the crass storyteller, or the street ambulant, or the cheap prostitute, even. Raw he came to be, like the fish he sold or the way he’d managed to strip both of them to the very bone, to carve a feeling out of the mess they were.

They stared at each other for a long moment, and Shigeaki moved a stutter step forward, heels clicking on the asphalt to the rhythm of unsteady heartbeats. He popped off the jeans clip with a nervous gesture, looked sideways at the trailer parked around the block. ‘It’s Kato Shigeaki’s’, he said finally, and grabbed Koyama’s wrist, threaded their fingers together.

‘H-mm, that’s a lovely name’, he hummed, and gave him an approving pat on the knee, skimmed past the thigh and forget that hand on the hem of the jeans, and Shigeaki felt each and every callus flow like water over the soft bumps of his stomach.

He looked down at those yellow stained fingers, uneven nails and stone-hard skin and its mind numbing warmth, and it took him only a moment to fall in love with them.

*

Koyama breathed in quickly and noisily when he perched on his thigh, the fine hair at the base of his neck standing straight up from his skin.

He looked up at him, smoothed away a wisp of curls that had fallen on his face as he'd wanted to do on that roadside just half a day earlier. ‘The fifteen tons lap dance was one dumb joke, you know, we don’t have to-’

‘I want to’, Koyama said.

Shigeaki wrapped an arm around his neck for balance.

He spread his legs for him.

His head lolled back when he started undulating his hips in a clumsy attempt, and it surprised him how pliant he went, a raspy moan rolling off his tongue as if he’d been waiting for a lifetime to be touched like that. Shigeaki’s pace was a beat off, he couldn’t seem to find the right barycentre, and his stiletto kept getting tangled around a loose plastic bag forgotten in one corner, but it all seemed unimportant, tertiary almost, when he leaned over to chew the redness off those lips and Koyama pulled him closer, curled slick fingers around the hair and cupped the back of his head. 

He tasted like the curry he had for lunch, smelled like nicotine and sand castles. He felt surreal and lucid like a fairytale, sutras skimming on sunburned skin, and when Shigeaki felt his hand slide in between them and trace the lines of his chest, he pushed his knee against the crotch, kissed the tufts of hair behind his ear and trailed his tongue into a spiral under the jaw, a whorl, and it made him whimper, push on the back of his heels and rub against his leg.

‘Shige-chan’, he breathed out as he’d pulled him closer, digging his fingers into a mass of black hair. Shigeaki kissed the nape of his neck, cupped one thigh before popping his jeans open and shoving a hand inside. He was velvety and wooden against him, and when he held him in his fingers, he came quickly, burying his head in the nook of his shoulder and biting on the buttery skin there.

Shigeaki laid against him for a moment too long maybe, dirty fingers and six inches of average stupidity still pressed against his thigh. When then Koyama crawled his hand over the nape of his ankle, sticking a thumb under a lace and looking up at him, he surprised them both by laying him on the floor and peeling out the last layers of his worn out cocoon.  

*

He bought a pair of white tennis shoes, got rid of the second-hand wigs and the worn out stockings, with holes lousy patched up and bits of sponge stuck in between the stitches. He landed a job as a columnist for a local newspaper.

In June it rained cats and dogs, and they holed up in Koyama’s trailer, pushed all the wooden boxes at the very back and threw an old rug on the floor, made love on it and laid there for hours as water washed the windshields dirty.

Koyama lit up a cigarette, turned to the side and blew a puff of smoke as Shigeaki buried his head on his lap, looking for that sweet spot that fit the nape of his neck just right.

Koyama finished smoking his cigarette and put it out, threaded his fingers on a nest of hair sticking out in every direction in the humidity of the monsoon season. He kissed Shigeaki on the forehead and laughed when Shigeaki shoved a rolled newspaper under his nose instead, looked up at him before pointing at one ad circled in pink marker.  

‘Didn’t write this myself, but it still makes a decent read’, he explained, and looked sideways at his chin, the way it’d wrinkled as Koyama scanned the content quickly.

Rain beat the trailer roof like an old casserole, poured heavy on the windshields. In one forgotten corner, a box sat on a plastic chair and something peeked out from the top, a pile of outdated newspapers with every column Shigeaki had written or proofread during the past four months.

‘It’s a rent ad’, Koyama said and put down the daily, looked at him in the eye. ‘For a two bedroom apartment’.

He tucked a strand of hair behind his ear, standing there with his head tilted to the side and a hopeful smile on his face. Shigeaki nodded slowly and pinned that very moment somewhere special in his memories, a place filled with food stands, and festival noises and softly hue saturated. He pinned the taste of that mouth too, cigarettes and tank tops and hair messed up by salt, and when Koyama tugged him to his feet and looped his arms around his neck, he carved a special spot for the way his heart thrummed against his chest.

‘When are we moving?’ Koyama asked, grazed his cheek with a rough thumb, and Shigeaki remembered the filthy hand he’d left hanging just months before, how perfectly now it fit his own.

He reached out to his side, threaded their fingers together.


They made two halves of the same inexact whale.