Last Calls
by Flint
*In order to maintain formatting integrity, this piece is best read on computer, tablet or with your phone turned to widescreen.
Last Call: I
I was in a bathroom stall in another bar, all fingers and tongues and parted lips when the first
bullet flew from the mouth of the gun, just another high, hot note in the mix the DJ was spinning.
I wasn’t there for one more drink, one more dance, one last chance to grind, all hips and ass
and heat and Everybody put your hands in the air and say HEY! I wasn’t one more body in the
sweat and throb and now-or-never-ness of last call at 2am, when shots still meant 2oz of
something sweet and sticky in a little plastic cup.
Your bodies broke open in blood
and screams, and we
came, and went,
without exchanging numbers
or names.
#s
6.12.16
2:02 – 5:14
603 (911 calls)
204 (rounds of ammo)
49 slaughtered on the dance floor, in bathroom stalls
6.13.16
1:13
1 more death
1 less vote for Trump
23 (hours), 11 (minutes)
Care & Taking
I don’t understand how we got here.
You who married my mother, beautiful broken bird,
your graceless body rising over her in your marriage
bed like you were mantling over a kill.
You who rose again in Jesus Christ, faith-fired and reeking of brimstone.
You who struck my queer cheek before I could turn, the other, that little asshole.
You who found my wife’s name, all three syllables, impossible
to pronounce, and rendered my marriage unspeakable.
You, who have fallen again, again.
To your knees.
Elbow to credenza.
Hip to cold tile floor.
Forehead to the ground,
Qibla-ward, like a Muslim
in prayer.
You with the breathing treatments and knobby spine, your
waterlogged legs leaking and scaling salt, your testicles swollen
to the size of a blue-ribbon steer, your penis slack in the mouth of a plastic urinal
filling with piss dark and thick as local honey, and the hand sanitizer you never remember
to use.
You: Mr. Life Insurance; Mr. Financial Planner; Mr. Million Dollar Roundtable.
You spent my mother’s inheritance, and my sister’s, and mine, you
asshole, you let your life insurance lapse and plan to death-lift up, up,
up and leave your wife of thirty-three years your Social Security benefit
breadcrumbs, a reverse mortgage you’ve sucked bone dry, $33,000 in debt
you’ve wracked up by opening credit cards in her name, and a plastic pot to piss in, your bread-
winning masculinity the shell game I’ve suspected all along.
I don’t understand why I’m taking care of you.
I’d kill you with a bullet or a banana milkshake or my own bare hands if I thought I could
get away with it.
Instead: I know every MD and RN and LNP and CNA and caseworker and social worker
and administrator by name. At the hospital. The nursing home. The unmannerly
Hampton Manor. Home healthcare. Hospice. I have their numbers in my phone.
I know your treatment schedule and your ever-changing medications, your heart
rate and pulse, your urine output, your hematocrit and hemoglobin and ejection
fraction ratio, the number of liters of fluid drained from between your thoracic
cavity and chest wall to make space for the weak bellows of your lungs and
your heart’s many failings.
I know when to smile or shriek or shed a tear to get you everything you need,
STAT.
I raise the alarm when we find you in the dining room, finger painting your
freshly-Cloroxed shirt, happy and bleeding, your friable skin torn, your Crocs
filling, filling, spilling red, your body not quite caught up to the fact that your
doctors had discontinued all blood thinners 36 hours ago.
I cook and shop and pay the bills and sort through the wreckage of your financial
life with my sister because you can’t do it, and our mother doesn’t know how.
I pack you lunches and snacks when you won’t eat anything on your tray, and
your cheeks hollow and hip bones jut like a supermodel’s.
Your mail-in ballot arrives along with the get-well cards and cash advance offers,
and it’s only the last that I toss in the trash, because being a right wing asshole
doesn’t trump your right to vote.
A million times a day I make my mouth shape the three intolerable syllables that
make the words my father because nobody—and I mean nobody—hops to it
when it is a stepdaughter hollering for help.
In gratitude: You allow your blood daughter, dark sister of mine, to siren song you into formally
accusing me of elder exploitation one week after she learns you won’t be leaving
her a pittance or a pot to piss in, and one day before she waltzes into your home,
my mother’s home, and walks out with your father’s Liberace-ugly double-
diamond ring—the one he gave you on his deathbed—and your wife’s diamond-
dusted gold cross—the one you gave her on your honeymoon—and left the safe
in the guestroom closet, my closet, empty as a sinkhole.
Last Call: 2
Before my mother puts the phone up to your ear, she jokes about your teeth. Year by year, night
after night, you’ve ground them down to cratered nubs, and Goodness, it’s a good thing he lost
his appetite when he did.
She’s certain that the moment heaven’s gates swing wide, the Good Lord will reward you with a
whole new mouthful, pearly white and orderly as a freshly-painted picket fence. (I’m equally
certain that God knows nobody wants to look at that gaping grey-gummed maw for all of
eternity.)
You haven’t spoken for hours, and nobody knows what you can hear, or understand. I’m
tempted to send you into the afterlife or the underworld or that cleansing crematory fire with my
litany of disappointment and rage knocking around your skull, but my queer brethren were
massacred this morning
—49 beautiful souls untethered without warning—
and if you haven’t already figured out that you were a waste of Christ’s time on the cross, there’s
no point in telling you now.
Instead, my gratitude tumbles through the ether into the hollowed shell of your ear:
Thank you for your vile accusations.
Thank you for sending me scurrying back to L.A.
I bet you don’t know my escape hatch is just an hour’s drive from where you lay dying:
Orlando, where my best friend lived; Orlando, with its queer clubs; Orlando, where I can
be among my people, safe, and seen.
If you hadn’t been so hateful, and I’d stayed and stuck it out in sticky Central Florida, I
might have been in Orlando last night, pulse rising as I danced the night away, away
from you, and back into my self.
So, thank you. You may have saved my life.
Also: Mom threw out your mail-in ballot because CNN told her it’s illegal for dead men to vote.
Then I say:
Go ahead, let go and die, it’s okay, it’s time, we’ll take care of Mom, go ahead, my
people are already there, and they are beautiful and whole, femurs
unshattered, organs plump, blood singing in their unbroken skin.
So go on now and go, go ahead,
show them your teeth.
Lives & Deaths
Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21
Eddie Sotomayor, Jr., 34
Franky Jimmy DeJesus Velázquez, 50
Stanley Almodovar III, 23
Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35
Javier Jorge Reyes, 40
Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33
Luis Omar Ocasio Capo, 20
Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22
Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36
Peter Ommy Gonzalez Cruz, 22
Luis Sergio Vielma, 22
Kimberly Jean Morris, 37
Eddie Jamol Droy Justice, 30
Darryl Roman Burt II, 29
Deonka “Dee Dee” Drayton, 32
Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25
Jean C. Mendez Perez, 35
Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37
Amanda L. Alvear, 25
Martin Benitez Torres, 33
Jerry Wright, 31
Cory James Connell, 21
Brenda Marquez McCool, 49
Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32
Rodolfo Ayala Ayala, 33
Luis D. Conde, 39
Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25
Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19
Frank Hernandez, 27
Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26
Gilberto R. Silva Menendez, 25
Simón Adrian Carrillo Fernández, 31
Oscar A. Aracena Montero, 26
Enrique L. Rios Jr., 25
Miguel Angel Honorato, 30
Juan Pablo Rivera Velázquez, 37
Juan Chavez Martinez, 25
Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25
Jonathan A. Camuy Vega, 24
Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24
Paul Terrell Henry, 41
Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32
Jean Carlos Nieves Rodríguez, 27
Yilmary Rodríguez Solivan, 24
Angel Candelario-Padro, 28
Antonio “Tony” Brown, 29
Gerardo A. Ortiz Jimenez, 25
Akyra Monet Murray, 18
C. Ronald Slaughter, 82
Last Call: 3
After the downpour, a double rainbow arcs the sky and frames an enormous billboard with a
rainbow ribbon and just two words: Orlando United.
This show of solidarity is unprecedented.
My people were shot down where they danced and drank and laughed and loved, shot down
where they stood, where they hid, where they ran for their lives—killed for nothing more than
being in the wrong queer place at the wrong queer time—and a city of non-queer folks are
rallying on behalf of our dead, and our living.
A rush of gratitude and sorrow nearly crushes my heart.
We know acceptance, of course, and of course, deep love, from someone, somewhere.
And we know how it feels to be on the fist side of homophobia and hatred.
We know the story history has told of our pathology and sin and aberrant practices.
And we know our history, our herstory, our queer and storied past.
We know the laws that have been enacted and enforced to strip us of our rights, and we protest
and march and Act Up to undo that damage and reclaim our dignity.
We are your daughters and sons and trans*kids, offspring sprung from your (most oft’) hetero
loins, and we know you mean well, we do.
And we know it took this many of us to die—at one time, in one place—for you to take
this kind of a stand.
Tonight marks one week since the massacre, and two days before my stepfather’s celebration
of life ceremony, and I am meeting my best friend at the Parliament House, our favorite dance-
hall-&-drag-queens haunt in Orlando, to celebrate other lives and mourn too many deaths.
The P-House is practically a ghost town—a ghost town with on-site trauma counseling and a
weapons check in exchange for a rainbowed wristband that reads:
WE STAND WITH PULSE
#onepulse #orlandostrong
www.gofundme.com/pulsevictimsfund
The dance floor is empty and I am dizzy with fear.
I locate all the exit signs, plot the quickest way out, decide where to hide if I can’t run.
It’s 2am. Last call. The DJ spins it out.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
You took it all, but I’m still breathing.
It’s a remembrance, a reminder, and Sia’s voice takes me apart at the seams.
I’m still breathing, I’m still breathing
I’m still breathing, I’m still breathing
I’m alive
I’m alive
I’m alive
I’m alive
It’s 2:02am, and I’m alive.
It’s 2:03am, and I am breathing, still.
It’s 2:04am.
I step into the light,
polish the floor with my tears, and dance
like my life depends on it.
About the Author:
Flint is a queer writer with an abiding interest in hybridity, generative genre tampering and upsetting the applecart of heteronormative discourse about sex/uality. She earned an MFA in Writing from the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, and her work has appeared in Erotic Review, Arts & Letters (Unclassifiable Contest winner), NAILED Magazine, and Staging Social Justice (Southern Illinois University Press), among other publications and anthologies. Sia - "Alive"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2NgsJrrAyM
About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQIA+ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions are open from June 1 to July 1. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered. Visit Submittable for more details.