unproud
written by Felecia Burgett
The raindrops stack fell apart and cascaded, slicked across the skin of your chest, drops collecting between perfect brown spots punctuated by white and honey and chives and your skin smelled like a cast iron pan, how it traps the bits and bobs of old meals, moments, in its patina veneer, how it is never properly dirty even though it can’t be cleaned, can never be cleaned, you’re ruined if they scrub you, the white soft sweet skin of your chest that collects all those scented points in time,
the morning your dog died and you were cooking eggs in the cast iron, setting some aside without salt for the dog, your dog,
the day you started the new job and turned on the burner coils under the pan but didn’t give it any light, fidgeting, unhungry, belly full of bees, so confident but unsure of yourself because it was all too new and you didn’t know what was expected of you in the coming moments,
how to get places, where the bathrooms were, what names stuck to the faces you passed
and how you compared to them,
a student of comparative bodies and faces and even voice tones, knowing you were uglier than them all, inferior, how would you fit? like the first day of high school that question, where do I fit? even though you’re older now, your skin is full of life’s patina and its smells and its binary rain code remembering feeling, you’re an adult and you know yourself, you don’t need to fit,
though it’s human to want to hide in the crowd, be a face someone would move over and past, unspectacular, unspecial,
or the day you fell out of love with men and felt suddenly lonelier than ever because you didn’t know how you kept missing the pretty big autobiographical details like that one, being gay,
or the time in sunday school when the intense-gazed youth leader asked you point-blank what the “worst moral problem in america was,”
and you were thinking atheism or poverty or hunger or war,
and he said “that’s right, homosexuality,”
and you were nowhere yet near the path to that detail about yourself, but you glanced shyly around the room for people’s reactions, you were learning, and you wanted to know how you were supposed to feel,
there were thoughtful nods, a fist clench, a soft sad faux sympathetic head tilt,
hate the sin, love the sinner!
don’t deny the faggots and dykes a husk of bread, but don’t let them eat it at your table,
or give it to them only if they take Jesus too--
--a gift with purchase, NOT a price--
and then you nodded in step and all and were a good little Christian, and whenever the chance you made sure your friends knew where you stood, that Jesus didn’t want them to suffer hell, so long as they straightened up, the beautiful hereafter would be all for them
(the hereafter, you thought, standing in the unstacked rain, which the good book said was 24/7 standing in place singing praise to God, and that was also
a gift with purchase
not a cost),
the patina on your skin sang with the rain and it slicked over it, leaving it there, like the towel leaves the grease on the cast iron (it’s supposed to)
but some of its iron leaches out into its food, and some of your metal flakes leach out into your
work, words, speech, likes, looks, the way your eyes linger on women’s bodies and then cut hard away, ashamed
not to be gay, but to be so like a man; staring at the width of their thighs and the arches of their necks and the flash of navel when they lift up their arms and their shirts move.
You always look forward to pride month. It’s nice for them. You always forget how it makes you sad. Reminds you of years wasted with men or nobody; reminds you how single you are; how it rains too much in June now; how poorly you fit in the real-world spaces.
The rain slicks down, and with it, the utterly wasted years, and with it, you remember hunger, remember unproud, unspecial, unfitting you.
Felecia Burgett (she/her or they/them) is a fantasy writer with soft spots for dragons, snakes, doomed love, and wlw narratives. She lives in central Ohio, USA, and she’s 28 years old. She’s mental health case manager with four pet snakes, Dax, Enzo, Junebug, and Glory.
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