Attaboy Louis
Louis liked the name: Prospect Cemetery. As if its prescient eighteenth-century builders had known that one day college boys would come there to look for one-night boyfriends.
Louis himself found no prospects in Prospect Cemetery. He tried but they didn’t find him pretty. He sat on the branch of an apple tree and relished the collective ruckus of their pleasure. They didn’t mind; he cleaned up after they left.
One day, he lingered on the trash of the boy he loved but couldn’t have. Gus Pitman, senior, kinesiology. He wanted to pocket Pitman’s condom, he longed to eat the leftovers of the pizza that Pitman had bitten into with his perfect teeth.
Pitman actually talked to Louis one night: he zipped his trousers up, clapped Louis on the back, and asked, “How’s it going?”
Louis replied that he hated winter nights.
“I guess I’ll see you around,” Pitman said as he stood there shirtless and smoothed his ginger stache down with his thumb.
Back in his dorm, Louis locked himself in the bathroom and cried. His tears, hot with delight, made him crave apples.
On winter nights when Prospect Cemetery was full of snow and empty of boys, Louis stayed in his bed and pictured framed photographs on his room’s bare walls. In those photos, he was married and had a husky by his side. Pitman’s favorite breed. Louis always threw the trash away: he never brought the condom home, he never ate the crust. Louis may have seemed ugly to the cemetery lover boys, but he believed in consent.
Shastri Akella’s first novel “The Sea Elephants”, a queer coming-of-age novel set in India, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books (May 2023). He is a winner of the 2022 Fractured Lit fiction contest judged by Deesha Philyaw. A 2021-2022 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown and a 2023 writing fellow of the Oak Springs Garden Foundation fellowship, Shastri worked for a street theater troupe and Google before he earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he also got a PhD. in Comparative Literature. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, CRAFT, The Master’s Review, Electric Literature, Rumpus, PANK, The Common, and World Literature Review, among other places. He is currently at work on his second novel, “The Plague Perfumers”. He is represented by Chris Clemans (Janklow & Nesbit).
Submit Your Stories
Always free. Always open. Professional rates.