Boy Oh Boy

Zachary Doss

Description

Boy Oh Boy is a collection of queer fabulist stories and flash fictions told via second person, asking readers to share Doss’s explorations of joy and longing. Your boyfriend is many boyfriends, possibly all the boyfriends you’ve ever had or will have. But you must ask yourself whether you have them or they have you. Your boyfriend plays jokes on you—plays jokes on the world. He is forever unattainable, and still you love your boyfriend, even when it hurts you. Doss explores how relationships can be all-consuming, how we transform ourselves to fit within their contour. Eventually, you might change so much that you don’t even fit inside your own body. This book is so much about space—the physical, emotional, and mental spheres that everyone inhabits. Doss uses humor to deal with the isolation that each of us experiences—not because we’re alone, but because we’ve become detached from ourselves, our needs, and our desires. Boy Oh Boy is our chance to understand Zachary Doss, as well as our strangest selves.

Sujets

• LGBTQ+
• Gay
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Red Hen Press
• Date de parution: 02 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781597098120
• Langue: English

Extrait

Boy Oh Boy
Boy Oh Boy
stories

ZACHARY DOSS

Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA
Boy Oh Boy
Copyright 2020 by Zachary Doss
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
This book is the Winner of the 2019 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. AWP is a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to serving American letters, writers, and programs of writing. AWP s headquerters are at Riverdale Park, Maryland.
Book design by Mark E. Cull
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Doss, Zachary, author.
Title: Boy oh boy : stories / Zachary Doss.
Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019041449 (print) | LCCN 2019041450 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597098137 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781597098120 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3604.O827 A6 2020 (print) | LCC PS3604.O827 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041449
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
Acknowledgments
Stories in this collection have appeared, sometimes in different versions or with different titles, in the following publications:
CHEAP POP , Responsible Ownership ; Entropy , Jane Eyre ; Fourteen Hills , What Keeps Society Going ; Heavy Feather Review , One Word for It, The Natural Man ; Hobart (online), How the Day Goes VIII ; Juked (online), Cold Fish, Trash Pope, Trolling ; Lockjaw Magazine , Spatial Awareness ; Lumina , Fuck Marry Kill ; Passages North (online), The Blood Mouth ; The Mondegreen , How the Day Goes, How the Day Goes II, How the Day Goes III, How the Day Goes IV ; Monkeybicycle , Spy vs. Spy ; New South (online), Godzilla, Pest Control ; Puerto del Sol (online), Bespoke ; SmokeLong Quarterly , The Village with All of the Boyfriends ; Sonora Review , Sadland ; Wigleaf , You Could Fucking Sell That, The Purses ; Sundog Lit , Embodied, Esquire, Put a Ring on It ; THIS. , Fraternal, Higher Learning, Sex Stuff, and The Problem-Solver.
Contents
I Your Boyfriend Always Has Something He Wants to Do
Trolling
Cold Fish
Godzilla
Pest Control
Trash Pope
The Natural Man
Embodied
One Word for It
Put a Ring on It
On the Outside
II And Then He Asks, What Would You Do Differently?
How the Day Goes I
How the Day Goes II
How the Day Goes III
How the Day Goes IV
How the Day Goes V
How the Day Goes VI
How the Day Goes VII
How the Day Goes VIII
How the Day Goes IX
How the Day Goes X
III I Am Having a Very Authentic Experience, You Think
Bespoke
IV You Love it All so Goddamn Much
Esquire
Sex Stuff
Fraternal
The Problem-Solver
Higher Learning
V You Did the Things That Made Sense to You
You Could Fucking Sell That
Spatial Awareness
Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison
The Purses
Transubstantiation
Sadland
Jane Eyre
Bump in the Night
Responsible Ownership
The Blood Mouth
VI The Game Begins to Occupy a Very Central Place in Your Life
Zombie Apocalypse Story
Manure
What Keeps Society Going
Spy vs. Spy
Fuck Marry Kill
VII Boyfriends All the Way Down
Universal Boyfriend Theory
VIII You Are Waiting for a Foundation to Crack
The Village with All of the Boyfriends
I
Your Boyfriend Always Has Something He Wants to Do
Trolling
W HEN YOU KEEP finding troll dolls around your apartment, you assume your boyfriend is playing a practical joke. You think your boyfriend is funny, like that time he asked you for ten dollars and then didn t contact you for six months after you gave it to him. The first troll has blue hair and a jewel in its belly and sits on top of your alarm clock. The second you find floating face down in your toilet tank. Its wet purple hair radiates from its head like a nerve.
You don t mention the trolls to your boyfriend. You pay for dinner and he talks about his job. This is part of the joke, you think, and you know the joke can go on for up to six months. When you open your bedroom door and the room is so full of troll dolls that they avalanche into the hallway, this is part of the joke. The joke is when you find, well, it must be half a million troll dolls, buried neck deep in your front lawn. Your first instinct is to call someone, but who? A gardener? A toy store?
The last straw is when there are no troll dolls at all, for a week and then longer, a month or two. You and your boyfriend start getting into fights. You don t bring up the troll dolls, but you yell about other things, about the time he left the butter out overnight. Your boyfriend yells back that you don t actually need to refrigerate butter, it will be fine. You re pretty sure you read that somewhere but you aren t willing to give any ground now.
Six months later, he calls, no reason, just wants to talk. You re pretty sure he wants something, but it feels good to hear him laugh. You open the junk drawer, but you don t remember what you were looking for when he called. He s talking about getting a new job. You find the first troll, blue hair with the belly jewel. What was the deal with the troll dolls, anyway? you ask, cutting him off.
I have no idea what you re talking about, he says, and now he s lost his place and has to start his story over.
Cold Fish
Y OU RE READY TO go home but your boyfriend is still floating on the lake, so far out he looks like a discarded T-shirt. You wave to get his attention, and when he doesn t look up, you think he might be dead. Eventually, though, he swims to shore and tells you to go home, he s going to stay here for a while.
You assume this is just a phase and go home. But he refuses to leave the lake. You keep going back, hoping he will change his mind. You bring him sandwiches and he eats them in the water, soggy bread and all. You carry a freshly laundered towel and try to lure him to shore with it.
When you drive away you watch him from your rear-view mirror. He still looks dead to you, a spot of color floating in the dark water. Alone every night, you try not to worry. You think of things that could happen. Poisonous snakes. Man-eating fish. Water bears. Crocodiles. Jet skis.
You call your boyfriend s mother and explain your concerns. What is a water bear? she asks. You start to explain that it s a bear that lives in the water, and she hangs up.
Increasingly you become distracted at work and your performance suffers. You find yourself screaming at the dog, slamming the door on girl scouts.
This is becoming a problem, you say to him on your next visit.
You sit, your feet dangling in the cold water. Your boyfriend s lips and fingers are turning blue. He tugs on your big toe and you jump, thinking a fish is trying to pull you under.
I m not coming back here, you say.
Your boyfriend splashes his face, pours water down his cheeks. Look, he says, it s just like I m crying.
Godzilla
Y OUR BOYFRIEND DECIDES to start a small business and sure enough the store he opens only comes up to your knee. Somehow he fits inside but as much as you scrunch you can t get in. Outside, on your hands and knees, you peek with one eye through the small windows.
When you ask him who his intended customers are, he says, Just really small people, I guess.
Through the window you can see your boyfriend industriously filling wicker baskets with scented soaps, making neat rows of colorful bubble bath bottles.
His shop is a disproportionately large success. Small people line up around the block for his honeysuckle-scented body lotion. He is interviewed by the local news. On television, he and his shop and the newscaster look like they are the correct size.
This won t change anything about our relationship, your boyfriend says.
You begin to fit uncomfortably into your own life. You ask coworkers, do I seem especially gigantic to you today? and while they assure you that you are normal-sized, they submit hostile work environment claims to the director of human resources.
After an argument you tell your boyfriend that you hate your job and think you are about to get fired. I can support us both, he says.
That isn t the point, you say.
Every day, as you walk by your boyfriend s shop, you imagine crushing the mob of tiny people waiting their turn to fill their tiny baskets with tiny fancy bath products, the little dark smears on the sidewalk, the way they would make the bottom of your boot sticky, the puffs of honeysuckle or lilac or rose scent on the air as you crush their bath products. You imagine biting their tiny heads off, drinking from their bleeding necks. You are big enough, and thirsty.
Pest Control
Y OUR BOYFRIEND INVITES you to move in with him, but he lives inside a mechanical bull and you dread spending the night there. That would be a less than ideal living arrangement, you explain.
I hardly even notice the cowboys anymore, he says.
But really the cowboys are a nuisance. You turn on the kitchen light at night and cowboys skitter across the floor in their Wrangler jeans, their spurs clinking. When you try to fall asleep, you hear the cowboys crawling around in the dust under the bed, singing prairie songs around a campfire.
I ll call the landlord, your boyfriend says, but his landlord is busy running the country-western bar and he tells your boyfriend that there is a reason the rent f