A nun of suspect mental health gives a passionate anti-masturbation lecture to a 9th-grade religion class in the late 70s. (The Gettysburg Review, Harper's Readings)
“Masturbation,” she said, right out loud, and then fell silent, the way she’d let silences linger between the announcement of a new topic and the beginning of its discussion, and a thin, startled chain of laughter spread from student to student and sputtered out, yielding a dense, waiting quiet, and Alan Daly, alarmed at the rate at which his heart was beating, wondered if it was true that Sister Rose was crazy. [read this story now]
A man with an archaic and perhaps not wholly integrated sensibility recounts a first-date fiasco at the Museum of Modern Art. (Puerto del Sol, Best American Gay Fiction 3)
As of late, I have developed a theory regarding the museum’s second floor: one can conduct his latest gentleman caller through the painting and sculpture galleries there and, by the time he reaches Magritte's Menaced Assassin–that disturbing,
misogynistic scene with those mistrustful lavender walls hanging, like a banner of scorn, before the exit–he will have the measure of the fellow's mind. [tour this story now]
When the fire alarm system breaks down at a Long Island town pool in August, a lonely, teenaged lifeguard spends the night patrolling the grounds with a friend he's secretly in love with. (Chicago Review)
Already when I pull up he’s sitting on the front stoop and his hair looks so much straighter, or trying to be, winging back in puffy golden lobes from a center part, This blowdrying is no improvement on your hair, but I could never be so rude, and simply smile and look with envy at the open collar of his short-sleeve shirt, the lucky puka shells circling the amber ranges of his throat, dipping into the little valley below his Adam’s apple, the little V-shaped resting place for the tip of a finger, the tip of a tongue.
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A quiet twenty-six-year-old who would much rather stay in the closet writes an angry letter to his mother explaining how his family’s bumbling efforts to get him to “tell them about himself” have driven him from the house. After Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the PO.” (Antioch Review, Grain, M2M: New Literary Fiction)
I cannot explain how annoyed and mortified I was to have you waking me up yesterday with that loud rapping, only to open my door and find you standing there with a vase full of carnations–green, no less, and how appropriate in a way I can't think of, with all those fairy fern leaves and baby-whatevers to boot. There's nothing I hate more than a holiday.