Night Walks

Issue 52 • Fall 2025 • Fiction

I circumnavigate the block seven times before I dial the hotline. It’s 2 am. The streets are empty. The cicadas buzz. The phone rings. My shoes are half-on and flap against the back of my heels with every step. Passing underneath the street lamps, my shadow splits and doubles, fanning out and colliding again onto the decaying sidewalk. If I keep walking and never stop, I will eventually exhaust my body, fall asleep, and forget everything, even if just for a moment. It’s so lonely this time of night. I have the thought to hang up at the same time someone answers.

A woman asks where I am. I tell her I am outside my apartment building and scared to go back inside. She asks if I am thinking of hurting myself, and I tell her no, which stumps her because she’s probably reached the end of the instructional flow-chart. Her name is Samantha. She wants to know what’s going on tonight and, to lighten up the situation, I say, Oh, nothing, just going crazy, which she doesn’t find very funny, so then I tell her what my thinking is, which is hard to put into words because I can’t find a linear thought train, and I am also afraid to speak it into existence, making it real, making it possible, starting a series of actions that would lead to my demise. I apologize for calling. She says there’s no need to apologize and that I should feel free to talk things out and so I continue: Well, I had unprotected sex with this man and now I am certain—not certain, but there is a lurking certainty in the scheme of likelihoods, as if everything in my life has lead me up to this moment—that I gave him AIDS and he will run into complications and be hospitalized and die, and the rest of my life will only be a story of killing someone, the word manslaughter branded across my forehead, outcast for the rest of my poor pathetic existence.

I ask Samantha her opinion: Is this the end of my life, or am I being dramatic? Samantha gives me a short hmm. She’s thinking this is not what the hotline is used for. She hesitantly asks me if I have HIV, and I tell her that I’ve never tested positive, but there’s a chance that I could have it and not know because there’s always someone who has it and doesn’t know. She says that I could get tested, but—I inform her—the testing clinics don’t open until Monday morning and it’s Saturday night and I don’t think I can make it that long. She asks me what I mean by that, so I reassure her that I’m not in danger, it’s just that I find living quite impossible. She’s thinking again and says, Okay, okay, how would you describe how you’re feeling?

Should I go to the hospital? I ask.

She says that that’s an option.

Samantha is not a medical expert like I want. She’s a kind person trying to give back, but she can’t give me what I want. I thank her for her time and apologize for not being more reasonable. I hang up. I walk around the block a few more times, passing my car on the north side and the entrance back into my apartment on the south side, trying to make a choice. I do one more lap and then one more after that, and then I make a decision.

Russia and I had been dating for a few weeks. He grew up in Moscow and moved to the States for graduate school, which he plans on finishing this year. I knew he really wanted to have sex with me because whenever we were making out he said he really wanted to have sex with me, and this meant Russia wanted to fuck me, and although I had not been very good at taking it in the past and his penis was so big—I thought certainly there was no way something like that would fit—we could try. He told me that he’d been tested. But then I told him that I had had sex with a friend a few weeks ago and hadn’t been tested since. We stared at each other, sitting crossed-legged on the bed, pent up with desire, until he said something about not being worried about it, so I thought, That’s great news, and we continued kissing. We stripped naked, exchanged blow jobs, started a few different positions: me on top, me on my knees, and then me on my stomach with him lowering himself onto me. I felt a pressure and thought: I did it! I asked if it was in and he said, No, so I kept breathing—relaxing—just how the older men that I had had sex with when I was a teenager would tell me to do: relax, just relaaax. Then I felt it actually go in and it hurt. Russia groaned and told me it felt so good, and I clenched my lips together. I thought stop, stop, stop, get it out. No, I can do it, I can do it. Men can do this. Relax. No, I can’t. Politely, I asked him for a break. He pulled himself out and plopped beside me. His body was warm and sweat-glazed. He smiled. I told him I was sorry. He said it was great. I told him I would be better next time, and he said, There’s no rush. I fell asleep in his arms that night, naked and downcast.

But now, after getting off the phone with my mom, I collapse in bed and think back to a few months ago when I had sex with a friend. An artist type: tattoos, raggy clothes, and a dull expression on his mustachioed face. Mustache man was not actually a friend but a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, and we didn’t use protection, and I think, What if I got something from him and, without knowing, I gave it to Russia, and my irresponsibility was just that—my own fault—and now the years of careless mistakes have caught up with me. I shoot out of bed, grab my laptop, and google statistics of HIV transmission and HIV symptoms and HIV test accuracy. I watch a video of a handsome doctor talking about the importance of getting tested regularly. There must be trust, the doctor says. I ask myself if I trust Mustache, but the feeling that arises is how pathetic I am when he comes to mind. How desperate I was for Mustache to like me. I doodled his profile on scrap paper and read our text messages aloud like poetry. The night we fucked, we never kissed. It was cold. It was transactional. It was oddly porny. When Mustache fell asleep in my bed, I got up and went to the kitchen, where I sat on the floor—the tile cold on my ass—and stared at the cabinets’ wooden streaks and thought: Never again, never again. The post-sex clarity brought the crumbs on the floor into focus. The fluorescent light made my pale skin look like a corpse. The next morning, it was raining, and he walked out without saying goodbye and I thought to myself: Good, I’m better off.

I never did see him again, and then one night a few weeks later at the bar, I was swaying on the sticky dance floor and made eyes with Russia—sweet, handsome, smiley Russia.

I pull into a nearly empty parking lot outside the hospital. I pass through the automatic doors and approach the registration desk. A young nurse, maybe my age, wearing a mask and glasses looks up and asks me my reason for the visit. I tell her that I need an HIV test and she asks me if I’ve been exposed and I tell her that I have put myself at risk. She hands me a clipboard and says they’ll call my name soon. I take a medical mask from a cardboard box and take a seat on a chair the color of a sick tongue. Posters about the coronavirus bombard all the walls, and circle stickers have been plastered six feet apart on the tiles. In the corner hangs a small TV playing the local news while the bottom news ticker displays things about stopping the curve and breaking-news outbreaks. A few people wait around the room, their wounds not obvious at first or second glance. One man has fallen asleep. The ambient beeping of medical machines and technicians typing relentlessly on loud keyboards echoes across the white drywall.

A nurse comes out in navy scrubs and calls my last name. My wrists ache. I go back with her. I hand her the forms that I haven’t finished filling out, but she says that’s okay while she takes my vitals. She leaves for a moment and then comes back and has me tell her why I came in, and I know she knows, and when I say it, I feel two things: 1. This is the end of my life and 2. This is so stupid. It’s possible to hold both: I’m going crazy and am aware I’m going crazy in the same way you can be scared of a horror movie where you feel frightened of the psycho-chainsaw-holding-zombie while also knowing—seeing!—it’s a low-budget production. I explain it to her the best way I can. She asks me if I’m having any suicidal ideations, and that word lifts the hairs on the back of my neck. I look up at her now and shake my head no. She takes a second, looks deep into my eyes, and checks yes.

I go back back into a room where they have me change into robes, and I fold my clothes—a ratty college hoodie, a musical theatre t-shirt, gym shorts—as if to say I’m not like the other patients around here. No, I am a respectable, upstanding citizen. The room is tiny with white-painted cement blocks like a jail cell. Or an insane asylum. Another woman walks in and introduces herself: She’s the doctor and once again asks me why I have come in today. I tell her. She flips through some forms. She makes eye contact and talks in a soft voice. I like her. She’s kind. I wish she would just stay with me until the morning. She sits down on the foot of the bed with me and tells me that the man who does rapid HIV testing is not in tonight—and in fact, is out the rest of the week. I find it strange that it’s a single person’s job, as if it’s a specialty, as if he brings his own equipment and spends his days doing one thing and one thing only and that when he’s not here, the hospital can only provide other services like trauma-induced orthopedic surgery or lung-transplants, but they can’t possibly prick my finger to find out if my life is ruined or not because the guy whose job it is to prick fingers is not in this week! Is he on vacation? Is he sick? Where the fuck is he!

In trying to comfort me, she tells me that people with HIV live long and happy lives with the right care and that there are many support networks for people who are recently diagnosed and I tell her that I don’t care if I have HIV—I really don’t—but if I gave it to someone because of my own irresponsible choices, is there a support network for that? For pseudo-criminals, not quite worthy of going to jail but not worthy enough to go about a normal day-to-day life? Maybe a place in the mountains where it snows and we can be alone and silent and not worry about judgments?

She says that she won’t officially admit me to the hospital. She will, however, prescribe me Xanax to help me sleep. Sleep is what you need, she says. I change back into my clothes, walk back out of the automatic doors, and find my car against the rising summer sun.

In the pharmacy’s parking lot, I wait. I open the map app on my phone to search for any clinics open on a Sunday. It turns out there is one, but it’s a long drive and opens at 9 am. In three hours. While I wait, I listen to Dua Lipa’s new album—disco, funky, dancy. How was it just a few weeks ago that it came out and I was dancing with Russia like it was the end of the world? It’s like a memory from a long, long time ago. Listening to it now feels like I’m tainting it. That in searching for a distraction, I’m only ruining everything that I touch.

The pharmacy opens. I walk in with a concerning excitement for the drugs. I dream of a dreamless sleep. Of pure emptiness. They hand me a small brown paper bag with a tiny orange bottle inside. When I get home, I hop back into bed and open it up to find two tiny pills. I take them without water. I check the time. I can’t keep still, so I pace around my small room, not wanting to make too much noise in the common area where my roommate might see me have a nervous breakdown. My room is taken mostly by the bed, and in between the bed and the desk, there’s a tiny little strip that’s been flooded with an overpouring of clothes from the hamper, and now seems like the perfect time to clean up. I make my bed, tidy up the stack of papers on my desk, and fold jeans tight enough to fit in the drawers. The conversations in my head don’t include my own. Instead, I hear voices of friends telling the story of my little life. And those friends tell another set of friends whom I don’t know over a cup of coffee while catching up, and those people tell their friends and so on and so forth until this day turns into a minuscule anecdote of tragedy. It occurs to me that I am nothing to almost everybody. Whenever I find a little hope that maybe this will all be all right, it’s pulverized by how small I am, how weak I am, how fucked-up I’ve become. Russia used coconut shampoo, and his voice was low when he sang to himself. Everything beautiful about his features now feels torturous, like a film negative where light becomes an opaque blue. I pull out my laptop and watch cartoons, a developing habit of mine. I need something light, funny. It’s an episode that feels familiar, but I am not sure if I’ve seen it before because they begin to blur together. Its lightheartedness has an edge to it now. It’s delusional, I think, in its neat lesson-learned conclusions and its brightly-colored atmosphere. I can’t handle it anymore, so I shut my eyes and imagine the medicine circulating in my body, chanting to myself: sleep, sleep, sleeeeep.

I don’t, of course. My body contracts, and I hold onto my chest to keep it from falling apart. The walls around me begin to blur, and I think I’ll pass out. My breathing quickens. I feel claustrophobic in my own skin. I need more space, more space. Everything smudges, and I am falling over a cliff that’s not real but somehow scarier. I am scared shitless. I’m chickenshit. Why am I so chickenshit? I was born this way: chickenshit. That’s it! I tricked everyone! I tricked Russia into thinking that I was decent. I fooled myself into thinking that we could be falling in love. But I was only desperate for love and would accept anybody, any man, who looked my way. Russia and I kissed on that dance floor, and we couldn’t stop. I had to remind myself to stop smiling so that my lips could purse enough to reach his. Would we eventually live together and get a dog and kiss each other goodbye before we went to our respective jobs? Yes, and we would hang out with the other couples, beautiful and cultured and well-read. We’d have hot sex every chance we could, and I’d become a sex god, so enthralled and obsessed with pleasure that it would take me to states of ecstasy I thought only possible with drugs. But hope is sugar: sweet and cancer-causing. The night after he fucked me, I went into the bathroom and found blood. I didn’t tell him, of course, because it wasn’t right. I was never going to be good at it. I was never going to want it again. I’ll never ask for anything ever again.

It’s almost 9 am. I never thought the clock would move this far, but it has! I put my shoes on and walk back out to the car. The town is alive again with pedestrians holding coffee and cars honking and dogs shitting on the small patch of grass next to the sidewalk. I drive down to the clinic. It’s in a run-down strip mall with a Kinkos-printed sign that says “STD Testing Here” like a monopoly square. I walk in, hungover and desperate, but I manage to speak to the receptionist with a kind and patient tone to compensate for being here at the crack of opening. I fill out more forms and wait for the doctor. The tile reminds me of my elementary school’s cafeteria, and the AC blasts a moldy smell. I crawl into my hoodie to keep warm. The doctor comes out of the backroom. He’s a tall Indian man with a large gut and frameless glasses. He takes me to the world’s smallest examination room. I sit up on the gray-cushioned table, and he asks me the same questions with a stern, nearly daunting approach. I wonder if he knows by now what people come here for. If he can diagnose them immediately in his head but finds nothing extraordinary about this ability. In his indifferent gaze I try to find his hunch. He leaves to get the HIV test and returns with a small plastic sleeve. I expected a blood test, but it’s a mouth swab. I open my mouth and imagine the virus spreading across my cheeks like a fungus and the cotton tip pulling it off with each small twist. He swabs both cheeks for ten seconds, and then it’s over. He tells me it’s going to be five minutes. I nod. He leaves, and I am alone once again.

In this endless moment, I don’t think of Russia.

In this endless moment, I don’t think of Mustache.

In this endless moment, I think only of my mother.

Her grey eyes.

Her eyes filled with fear.

When I came out to her, she cried.

Her reaction confused me. I had to continue to clarify what I meant.

You like boys? Yes.

You don’t like girls? No.

Have you ever been with a man? No.

The last one was a lie, but necessary to eject any image of me having sex.

In her blubbering, I could barely make out the words: I’m. Losing. You.

I asked her what she meant.

She told me of her Church friend’s son coming out many years ago and leaving his family behind. Was I going to leave? Was I the person she thought she knew? Was I ever?

I pushed her instead of comforting her: Would you come to my wedding if I married a man?

Of course, she said, wiping her snot with a paper towel.

She took a few breaths.

She told me that being gay was so different when she was growing up.

I told her I won’t get AIDS.

She told me not to joke about that and walked out of the room. I realized that that was what she feared: That I’d die along with the thousands of gay men she had seen on TV, Tom Hanks in that movie, that man who randomly left my mom’s corporate office in the 80s and never came back and whom no one said anything about. She saw me on a hospital bed, holding her hands and slipping away into the next life. I wanted to prove to her that I’m good. So I can’t tell her, I think. I’ll live my double life. The double life that I had mapped out a long, long time ago. She’ll never have to know that I betrayed her.

I scroll through the photo albums on my phone, but it’s my life flashing before my eyes in that pre-death moment. I mourn the loss of everything. And yes, I would survive, but that’s not what I want. I want to be forgiven. I want another baptism. I go over to the sink where there’s a sanitization bottle and squeeze out the gel, rub it into my hands, squeeze out some more, and bring it up to my face to smell it. The acridity suffocates me, and I cough. I have to be good, and to be good, I need to be purified. I rub some on my wrist where the blue veins rise when I squeeze my fist. I rub some on my forearms, my neck, and I hold my breath and rub some on my mouth. I cough. I choke on the scent, the tiny particles clinging to the back of my throat. I cough and cough. It’s never going to be enough. I cough again. Harder and harder.

The doctor comes in, barely opening the door, says it’s negative, and leaves.

The door swings shut.

I open it, confused and unsure, and have him confirm: You mean I don’t have HIV? I ask. No, he tells me. It’s negative.

My breath is held like a tide before a wave.

Then it all crashes around me: My body begins to heave up and down. I thank him, but he couldn’t care less. I wave to the receptionist when I leave. Stepping into the sun’s warmth, I let Russia’s beautiful face back into my head and project it on every passing person. I’ll kiss him again. I’ll be okay again. I’ll be okay. I’ll be okay. I’ll be okay.

I collapse on my bed like it’s a long-lost love. Remnants of the relief burst in me. It’s both a laugh and a cry or really neither at all. I muffle the sounds escaping me when I hear my roommate get up and start his day. The shower turns on. The shower turns off. He makes his breakfast while listening to a podcast about Survivor. Everything is how it should be. I think of Samantha from the hotline. I had pictured what she looked like and saw her resembling someone very much like a friend from college. I hadn’t realized I’d been doing that. I want to tell her that everything turned out okay if she’s still worried.

I can’t sleep. Still. I return to the image of the swab pressing against the inside of my cheek. What if it missed? What if it wasn’t enough substance? I’ll go again, and then it will be done. No. Yes. Help. What would Samantha tell me now? What would my mom say? I push it away to get my mind to wander off enough to let me sleep. I push away Samantha. I push away my mom. I push away Mustache. I push away Russia. I push away the doctors and nurses and everyone and everything until I am alone. But I am not alone. There are always haunting eyes. I pull the covers over my head, shrouding myself, and feel the satin of a coffin, see the complete darkness when it shuts for the last time, and hear the cracking of micro-organisms breaking through the rotting wood to come feast.

Issue 52 • Fall 2025

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry