Boys in Boxes

The men are dying.

We’re the boys who see them. In tabloids, on news bulletins. Faces pocked with purple lesions, bodies ravaged by weight loss. Their abandoned eyes, their hollowed-out stares, hold us.

We’re told it’s a plague of our own making. Our fathers—both Holy and holier-than-thou—say it’s unnatural, say their boxes are wired wrong. We sit to these comments daily; as every day as pouring the last remains of dust from a cereal box.

So we hide. In boy-sized boxes we call bedrooms. We while away the hours tuning transistor radios, searching and searching, until, amid the static, we find it: the welcoming shimmer of a synthesiser, a voice that sounds like want.

We lock ourselves in bathroom boxes. Just us and our mom’s Sears catalogue, spine creased to the same few spreads of men in their smalls.

In locker rooms, the wet slap of heat, boxed in by back-row jocks and small-town heart-throbs. We learn how they got hot and heavy with so-and-so, some girl, straddling laps and burning rubber in boxy American muscle cars. And real men don’t wear rubbers, we’re told.

After, if we’re lucky, we wander the long way home, with Tommy or Rico or Scott. We share a box of Marlboros, filched from our folks’ stash. They take a cigarette, lift it to their lips, and we breathe in how it smoulders—the hit, the rush—before they pass it back to us.

When the day comes, when our front doors are slammed in our faces, we shoulder a backpack of belongings—barely enough to show we ever belonged—and hitch a ride with a stranger, wave down a bus. We watch the world whizz by from the window and, through tears—because beautiful boys ugly-cry too—see all the square suburban streets, all the boxes of buildings where we stored our lives, blending and blurring into one. And we free our favourite cassette from its case, ease our headphones on, and travel to those cities that have always sounded like home, travel to where our real lives are waiting, new and ours and unboxed.

Originally published in Reflex Fiction.