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A man with a hazy memory, who cannot remember why his family has disappeared, must confront the traumatic memories he suppressed from his horrific past…

… after meeting a man who looks eerily similar to his missing husband.

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The anthology is available for purchase on Amazon.

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Opening Passage

*note: This a slightly edited version of what was published.

A week after Seth left me, I headed over to the South End. I had never indulged in clubbing, drinking, nor picking up random men to fuck raw behind anonymous walls. Yet without Seth I felt liberated, and I would not let something as painful as my lover’s departure restrict me from the freedom I hungered for. I could not recall the exact details of how he left me, only that I flailed in a drunken stupor while we fought—and our daughter leaving with him.

The Menagerie: an obscure gay bar I frequently passed but never frequented myself. A speakeasy with no signs, no lights, wherein I sat during the night. The bartender’s face drooped in suspicion when I ordered a triple shot of tequila and gulped it down with no help at all: no salt, lime, and no chasers, sir. Gasoline downed like water.

The surrounding men patted my back and encouraged me to drink further. I ordered more shots. The world around rendered into a hazy blur as I indulged in higher spirits.

The red-headed bartender was a pale, freckled man who looked like a cheap porn magazine cut-out from the eighties. He did not cut me off after I reached my limit. Instead, he gave me drink after drink with enthusiasm, like he wanted me to pass out shitless, all the while devouring me with ravenous eyes. A strange sensation of danger overcame me; I looked around to see all the other men eyeing me with a similar type of hunger—the dangerous, predatory type—as they watched me drink myself to oblivion. The further my world blurred, the further those patrons’ hands crept up my thighs and snaked towards my groin.

I detached myself from the physical world for a moment. I looked at the rim of my shot glass, and there, Seth’s face materialized as the only clear thing in this hazy fog: his pretty green eyes, peering at me not in his usual rage, but in pity. Betrayal. Do you understand that I did it for you? his voice rang. His last words which I knew not the meaning of.

The men’s callused hands were now groping my crotch with unrestricted liberty, as if my body had belonged to them. As if it weren’t mine.

A snicker. “He likes it,” said some graceless voice behind.

With a scowl, I paid my tab and left that fucking place. When men aren’t predatory pigs to women, we’re predatory to each other and every-fucking-body else around.

Then down on Columbus Avenue, I glimpsed Seth walking as a spectacle of light amidst the backdrop of high-rise buildings cloaked in darkness. It was three in the morning; the streets had thinned out hours ago. I hiccuped and stumbled as I saw my ex-husband—what the hell was Seth doing out here? I swore I wanted to kill him, that fucking bastard! He was ruining my only free night by deciding to resurrect himself, returning to life in my deadened world. How dare he snatch the last strands of joy that I began grasping onto? How dare he sap the only integrity I felt for myself in this lonely hell?

I dashed after him. My impulsive hands stirred with life, thirsting to beat him to a pulp. I held a vendetta. I wouldn’t let him leave without at least a cracked skull. 

From behind, I pushed him towards the ground. His knees buckled and planted onto the cement, and he grunted in a soft and high voice. A voice unlike Seth’s.

“What the hell, bro?”

The man’s eyes burned with hostility—and he looked so much like Seth: a pretty face housing emerald eyes, a lanky figure which spoke of sophistication, his signature demeanor of self-assurance… sensitivity… but with a high-pitched voice unlike his. No, this was not him.

“I’m sorry,” I said as I turned to leave. “Thought—hic!—thought, thought you were someone else.”

His eyes batted over my body, then onto my crotch. The animosity and surprise in his eyes disappeared. The cracks of his fat lips upturned into a smile. A horny smile. Hit me again, daddy, his eyes begged, you know I like it. Push my face into a puddle of your piss— 

Whisky dick found no place in my mental suppression that night. And that’s why I took him home; I wanted to pound this gorgeous man’s asshole until it relapsed with the tenderness of a wilted rose. The kind of dying rose that the dead hold in their caskets after viewing hours.

I let the stranger sleep in my bed. He gave me his name—Francisco de León—after our escapades in the king-sized mahogany bed I had never replaced. My home had long been empty, so we had no prying eyes to invade our nightly acts, save for the wooden cross mounted on the wall.

I awoke the next morning before sunrise. Looking down at Francisco’s body, I held back a surge of disgust. I was so drunk last night—his eyes, though green, held an icy hue unlike the dazzling malachite of Seth’s. My subdued pain had caused me to see what was not really there, or rather, who was not really there.

Why did I bring a stranger to sleep in my bed? I wanted to retch, but I needed to display some courtesy. I was the host, after all. I told Francisco that I would cook us some breakfast, and that he should follow me into the kitchen. He gladly obliged.

“I’ll sit at the chair and watch you cook,” he said as I left the bed, his voice wet with a hint of mildew. “See how that plump ass shakes in the kitchen.”

I snickered. He leaned in to kiss me, but I veered my head away.

I sat upright, ran my hands through my hair, donned a pair of blue low-rise trunks, then headed to the kitchen. Francisco followed me down the stairway, ducking his head to avoid the bar that sprawled across the low ceiling: the perfect height to dangle a noose and hang a child-sized doll.

Then he sat on the stool in the middle of the kitchen. And there… I had to blink at Francisco’s spectacle, for my mind and vision stirred, blending with one another. Beneath this stranger of the night, Seth’s doppelganger, blood seeped from the tiles—  

“Antonio,” croaked Seth, kneeling on the cold kitchen tiles, his eyes tilted upward in defeat. “Antonio, I did it for you…” He stumbled, grabbing onto my shoulders as if to bring me down with him, to die with him. Then he lay limp, unconscious. Sprawled on the floor. Blood sprouted from the vertical mouth in his chest.

I collapsed thereafter, and all that I recalled after returning to the world were the screams of our daughter Gabriela.

A flash of darkness. Now I was standing over Seth as he lay breathless, Gabriela nowhere to be seen.

“Hello? Are you there?” asked a shrill voice.

I snapped back to the real world.

Seth sat on the stool.

It was not Francisco anymore.

My insides churned with hate. Why was he alive? He tricked me! He betrayed me with his sudden leave and was returning to beg for forgiveness.  He was not dead after all. He fucking lied to me. How dare he? He only pretended to die!

Seth moved away from the stool, his slender foot dipping into those little rivulets of blood. 

“Antonio,” he said in a deeper, unnatural voice. “You alright?”

The blood evaporated from the floor, disappearing.

And there was Francisco again, sitting on the stool above where Seth’s corpse had once dropped. His eyes begot an icy hue once more. I scrunched my eyebrows and stared at him, hoping to God my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me.

But I remembered now. All it took was an image of the dead upon its deathbed to remind me of the events that transpired. Ever since Gabriela had gone, I attempted to banish all my memories of Seth by purchasing an island counter with two stools, right in the middle of the kitchen where he’d died.

“Yes,” I said.

I took two small pans and cracked four eggs. Spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms. And cheese just for him. Oh God, I could never stand the taste of cheese mixed with egg. Butter blocks greased the pans as they melted with the heat.

“Is that your family?” Francisco asked, pointing to a framed picture on the wall, at the beautiful short man standing next to me in a business suit. In the faded portrait, Seth and I stood with Gabriela when she was six, a short while after I entered their lives.

How was that family picture still hanging there? I swore that wall had lain bare since Seth left—I swore I ripped the fucking portrait to shreds and threw it away, every bit and piece of it. I promised myself long ago that I would shred it into millions of little pieces, except for our faces, because I could never tear our faces apart. My hand trembled when I tried to mutilate Seth’s face with my nails, knives, and even a hammer… but I couldn’t do it. Now all Francisco saw were the vestiges of a family ravaged by the claws of a man engulfed in grief and guilt, lust and vice, our bodies and colors destroyed save for the faces. 

I lifted our omelets with my spatula and, one after the other, slapped them onto clanking plates.

“Antonio?”

“What?”

“Is that your family?” he asked.

“Yes.” This persistent fucking weasel.

“What’s the story?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” And I didn’t know.

“I have time to listen.”

But I don’t want you to listen. Don’t you fucking get it? I don’t want to talk about it.

“I’m gonna stay here all morning, and I really wanna know—”

I picked up his omelet plate and flung it across the room. The white porcelain shattered after a sharp clattering echo, all its broken shards mixing with the yellowy guts of the spilling eggs. Francisco jumped from the stool as his eyes tensed, fixating upon me, and that pissed me off even more. How dare he look so accusingly at a grieving man? How dare he question my authority? How dare he—

“What the hell?” he cried. “What was that about?”

I froze in place, my eyes widened, and my nose burned with the coming onslaught of tears. “I’m sorry,” I sobbed. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“All I did was ask about your family. If you didn’t want to talk about them, you could’ve just told me. But you didn’t have to blow up on me like that. So goddamn insane, aren’t you?”

“Gabriela,” I sobbed. I didn’t know the meaning of these words spilling out of my mouth, but they came anyway: “I didn’t mean for you to leave and for your Daddy to understand after everything that happened, I love you so much. . .”

I sat on the floor with my knees pulled into my chest, arms wrapped around my legs as I rocked myself back and forth, mumbling as I stared into all the dagger-like pieces. My plates. Shattered. And in those little mirrors, the kitchen light reflected millions of little faces: hallowed eyes which burned with fury—

“Seth.” I caressed his face.

“Get the fuck off of me.” He pried my fingers from his shoulders, but I pushed him even more forcefully into the wall. 

It was not me who kissed him—he leaned in and devoured my drunken mouth, our wet lips engaging in each other’s contrasting worlds. He kissed me with an explosive but empty desire, a passion long extinguished, never to rekindle. Yet I had felt the vestiges of him, his lustful embers, through the blue fire which burned me through his frosted, deadened touch. Yes, he stroked my body with the coarseness of bony fingers, an icy fire which ultimately bore no substance… no genuine love. But I was in high drunken spirits for I hadn’t felt the embrace of another man for the longest time, and I could not recall the last time Seth had touched me so hungrily.

He grabbed my ass and I cupped his stirring dick; I thrust my hands down his backside, my dick pushing against the tent of my crotch as if clawing out for escape. But amid all this hot sweaty shit, he pushed me off with an unrelenting force, scowling in disgust.

“I won’t stoop so low as to have sex with an animal,” he said.

My ears pricked in rage, and my heart turned. 

“What just happened?” I asked, stunned.

“What?”

“Us kissing.”

“Yeah. We kissed,” said Seth.

“Care to explain? It was you who kissed first.”

“I didn’t kiss you because I love you. I kissed you because I’m going through a dry spell and I’m horny. Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Seth, why do you have to be so harsh to me?” I gasped.

“Don’t you get it, you thick piece of shit? I don’t love you anymore. But unlike you, I actually have morals. I fucking hate you with every fiber of my being, but I will never, ever cheat on you. I don’t care about payback or revenge. I’m better than that. I’m only staying with you because of Gabriela. A divorce would fuck her up. I promised her we’d be the last family she’d ever have to worry about falling apart. If it weren’t for her, I would’ve left you on the streets to die. The three of us are dying inside, Antonio, can’t you see it? Our family is fucked up and you are the one who caused it all. ”

For my entire life nobody had treated me with compassion, but I would not wallow in pity or dare claim that I deserved compassion at all.

I didn’t care, though. I was so fucked in the head.

“Francisco,” I said, hoping Seth would hear me in case he lived somewhere inside his doppelganger, “I’ll just let you know that my husband died. And our daughter is missing.”

Why am I telling this to a stranger?

“Shit. Fuck, I didn’t—” Francisco’s mouth gaped. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know. No wonder you reacted that way. Oh, my God. I’m so sorry.” His jaw stayed hanging open as if he wanted to say something more, but stopped in case he would offend me. He closed his mouth.

I glanced at him. “It’s okay. I don’t know all the details myself.”. 

I knew he was thinking things like these:

Wow, he’s such a damaged person.

He’s living with regret and thinks his husband’s death was his fault.

But what about the daughter? What happened to her? Why isn’t she here?

Antonio is a miserable man. He’s suffering and has nothing but his own broken shell to live in. I really want to help him.

“Francisco, I’d prefer if you left me alone.”

“Okay. I understand.”

I heard a mild offense in his response, but he stood and offered me a kiss at the top of my scalp. My body reeled. He walked to the front door and left without saying goodbye.

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