Hover

By Robert Frankel

He’d learned how to levitate when he was young as a defense mechanism against “who-knows-what,” the fear of which metastasizes amongst every raised-right Southern queer. If that was the strangest thing about him, he thought, maybe the bullies would think he was Jesus. Maybe his parents wouldn’t expel him or disown him if they learned anything more pertinent. The bullies grew tired of throwing rocks and soon enough pursued reachable targets. As for his folks, either his strategy worked or he had underestimated them: He received an exaggerated shrug, and dinner—hand-pulled noodles, shiitake mushrooms, Bok choy, a dark brown sauce that took its sweet time biting back—continued, unabated. He has two brothers, after all.

His skill persisted thereafter, often unintentionally, and actually that’s how we first met: He, three inches above the mosslike carpet in the center of the living room, and me, having nearly put down roots in a dark corner. The party thrashed between us, a writhing bog of bodies first exercising their adulthood and smelling like it, too. I trudged toward him, unsure of myself but certain of my intentions.

“I’ve seen queerer things,” I said. He smiled and descended.

But that night did not work out for us. I didn’t see him again until much later, long enough for him to leave for opportunity then return for his ailing mama. He approached me, this time, alone in the shadow of the shopping mall where I’d stood stuck for ten hours.

I had resigned myself to the pervasive strangeness that kept me rooted in place for days or even weeks; that voided my expulsion as a teen but neither offered nor offers protection from words or hands or Converse shoes. It was odd, at first, to kiss a floating man. It was odd, at first, for him to find me stranded in sleet or storm or summer sun. Slowly we realized how we tempered one another.

Sometimes, I regrow my roots. I call for him, and he comes to me, and, when I feel the brush of his callused hands on my shoulders, I know he is airborne. I lean into him, and he leans upon me; I am uprooted, and he is grounded. And, sometimes, I awake to find him over me, still asleep. But sometimes—rarely—I wake to find him floating in my arms, floating myself beside him. We hover above the bed, entangled, and I feel myself with him, without the world. So works this gentle strangeness he and I share.

About the Author

Robert Frankel is a writer and veteran whose work focuses on queer folks and outcasts. He writes fiction, screenplays, and—sometimes—a poem or two. His work has been published in Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine and is forthcoming in The Kismet Magazine. A native Texan, he now lives in Los Angeles. Find him at robert-frankel.com.