Jeremiah was quiet -- the youngest and quietest of the three brothers. Women thought it was because he was smart, but he was just quiet.
He spoke with his body. He didn’t know what he had to say when he beat up his classmates back in primary school. He had no premeditated motive, he acted only in response to himself. Jeremiah listened to himself, to his body. If his legs said to run he ran, if his fists said to punch he would wail. The other kids mostly ignored him throughout his childhood. Some of the boys respected him, some of the girls wanted to kiss him. Later they would fuck him. He didn’t find any of the girls very pretty, even the beautiful ones. He had fucked them all by the time he graduated and left Ithaca, but who cares, Jeremiah didn’t.
He used to weld, then it was stones, then it was yarn. His father, The King, had told him that it was far too cliché for a man as masculine as Jeremiah was, who had fucked so many beautiful women, who lived such an obnoxiously opulent life, to be a welder.
“It’s what the public has come to expect, surprise everybody, become a fiber artist.” So that’s what he did.
It made no real difference to him whether it was metal or yarn, material was just material, just another form outside of himself, a form he could control, a form he could master. Jeremiah’s woven stretches of material sold for millions. He would call them tapestries, but the irony that his pieces were merely poorly woven cheap magenta yarn barely hanging onto overpriced looms only furthered the excitement of his already impressionable audience. Critics would rave of the King’s youngest son.
Headlines like: Redefining masculinity one weft at a time, made Jeremiah’s infamy expand beyond what the people could ever conceive possible. He was the star of every and any contemporary review. He was hot, stoic, hard, yet compassionate, empathetic, and soft when he needed to be. This was all thanks to the yarn and, of course, his father’s PR team.
An important correction to make, or rather clarify, is that Jeremiah’s penis is never soft. He came out of his mother’s stomach, a cesarean section, with his baby penis stiff and pointing upwards towards his belly button and it never went down after that. He never felt arousal. He would feel the urge to fuck, but it was on no account sexual. Sometimes the inside of a woman hurt him, something didn’t feel right physically, especially after his woven sculptures rose in
popularity. Either her inner walls would seemingly burn him (not by way of literal heat but like some sort of pepper, some variation of acid that filled the space around him, that ate away at his member so that every time he would yank it free, he would seemingly appear half a millimeter smaller). Nobody ever noticed, though Jerimiah did. How could he not? He began to feel like he was drowning. He was frequently drowning in pussy, but the literal sensation of a material consuming him rather than him consuming it simply wasn’t worth the quotidian task of laying a good woman.
So he switched over to exclusive anal.
The initial paramount tightness of an asshole would confront him with whatever the closest thing he had experienced to a panic attack was, but then, once he would give one or two more thrusts, wrought with perturbation, the shaft would slide in and his cock would be surrounded by empty space. He would stop thrusting and hold it there in absolute arid nothingness. Then Jeremiah was understood and the world made sense.
He switched over to men because they would give up their assholes more easily. He wouldn’t even reveal his identity as the most famous artist in the world. He would cruise in disguise, a fake mustache and a pair of wide rimmed glasses. It would never take long to find a taker or two or three or four to bottom for him. Jeremiah would spend full days fucking ass. There was simply no other material that required no working, shaping, justifying, that didn’t ask anything of him, that didn’t inherently exist beneath him.
The inside of a hole was the closest existing form to co-exist with Jeremiah because it was just like him. It was the closest to love without wanting. The closest to a space without a limit: to death without time.
He first discovered a pox while pissing into a public urinal in Lake Balboa Park. He was visiting Los Angeles for his new show opening at Hauser and Wirth, but he had stopped caring about his weaving (if he had ever even cared at all).
They had just fucked outside next to the golf course. He didn’t want to piss where he had just came, is what he said to his date, really he didn’t want the boy to see him urinate. It was difficult to piss when perpetually erect and Jeremiah would have to engage in a meditation ritual to induce the flow of urine. It involved a mantra and hand movements and was overall extremely
embarrassing. Jeremiah didn’t believe in prayer or mantras of any kind, but for some reason, the rhythmic pattern in language worked as a focus point.
He stared down at the pox. It formed over the head of his penis, right next to his urethra. He ran his thumb over it. It didn’t hurt. He pressed down on it, as if to somehow smudge it away like a stain. It began to ooze some sort of clear fluid. He wondered if the boy had seen it. It was dark outside, it was unlikely. He pulled up his briefs.
He pulled up to the boy’s apartment. Jeremiah didn’t get tired, but the boy’s eyelids began to flutter. Whether it was from the early morning hours, or from all the tranquilizers he’d been snorting throughout the night, Jeremiah thought the right thing to do would be to take the boy home.
“I didn’t think a guy like you would fuck how you fuck.” The boy mumbled while cradling his head in the seatbelt. “You’re so shy and insecure, you don’t even say anything.” He yawned.
Jeremiah looked out onwards towards a stretch of alleyway leading only to another poorly kept residential street. There were some tents, a few people wandering, but they were silent. They hid their faces in their arms while gliding past his car. Their feet hovered over the broken glass coated concrete. The car engine ran.
“When you did me in the bathroom I thought I was gonna die.” The boy laughed softly. The windows were opaque, smeared in hot air. It smelled of warm feces. It smelled of babies. It smelled of boiling water and stained soaked leather.
A hooded woman wheeling a broken shopping cart breathed on to the backseat window. She wrote something in her breath. He could hear the sound of her finger squeaking as it glided against the glass. Jeremiah crooked his neck to see, but the message read backwards in the fog.
A man loudly thumped a radio on the car’s hood. His long white beard was intertwined with the radio’s antenna. He spun crooked fingers through his tangled webs and wisps as he pulled the antenna upwards towards the sky. His body faced the front of the car, but his eyes were glazed over when he looked past Jeremiah and the boy, as if he saw something existing inside the vehicle that didn’t.
“You need to head upstairs. It’s late.” Jeremiah said with a hardness in his voice. After he said it, he realized he sounded urgent, even scared, and he wasn’t scared, he had never been scared in his life.
A muffled melody came into focus, maybe it had been playing the whole time, but the non-English lyrics drowned it out. The boy began to mumble along to the chorus and then it was loud, then the foreground of the music overtook the entire space.
Jeremiah half listened and half attempted to translate, something he had hardly ever done while living in Spain with the exception of necessary speaking such as bathroom, food, I want. He understood something about tired eyes, a lamp going out, some sort of poison, and then he was lost again. The boy’s soft fractured mumbling faded away and Jeremiah wondered why he had tried to understand a language he had no interest in. Why he had tried to listen to a boy he never wanted to see again. He was suddenly struck with desire, a relatively foreign feeling, a feeling he had only ever experienced when lodged inside of a woman. A desire to run from whatever wanted to confine him, whatever wanted to contain him, hold him so tight he couldn’t hear himself, his body, his fists to punch out, his legs to kick past, his cock to rip through, and all he could experience was sensation beyond his control from external forces intent on smothering his form, folding him into himself with nowhere else to go.
Whatever happened after nowhere was unknown. He said this to himself, repeated it a few times over: this is unknown. And he knew he was powerless. He felt he had failed. The admittance of his failure was not fueled by “fear.” He was certain it wasn’t “fear,” but the closest resemblance to “fear” engulfed the car as the boy drifted off to sleep.
Siena Foster-Soltis is a playwright from Los Angeles and based in New York.
Crazy good
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