SmokeLong Quarterly

Noah’s story goes that his father died when he was two years old, due to bacterial meningitis, and his mother died when he was sixteen, from a car accident caused by his older brother, Richard, who at twenty-three hanged himself in prison because he could not handle the guilt. Four years later, his eldest brother Benjamin was killed in the first terror attack, when the city buses were co-opted and bombed. He whispers, I am the last branch of my family tree. Everyone always leaves, and he sees a very grim future, but, if brief, my presence is lovely. His name comes out of my mouth soaked in inauthenticity, and I repeat it ‘til it fits more right. I kiss the corner of his mouth and tell him this is the saddest story I have ever heard, and, in lieu of sex, we hide ourselves in the corner and become some dying light of an unknown source. I carve his name in a free space on my inner wrist as he drifts into sleep. When he wakes I will be gone, and he will never see my face again.

My body rejects everything it consumes, so I have taken up cigarillos, to manifest emaciation, and cruising through bruise-blue evenings, to occupy my time as I contemplate meningitis, if its mortality is quicker than lung cancer, or should I hedge my bets on terrorism. At a gay bar I steal half-pints from unattended tables until my vision goes crossed. A straight-passer with dark hair and a lopsided mustache offers me a Vegas bomb in light of the circumstances. The feeling stays down. He takes me by the neck and proposes we have sex. We find a spot by the riverbank to lay ourselves. Rigidity overcomes me as he undresses and unbuttons my trousers. I don’t sense pleasure, but I kiss him back. He tells me to say his name as I cum, to say Richard. I tell him ah, but that was my brother’s name, and he committed suicide in prison after he killed our mother in a car accident. Noah’s words come so easily, have an antacid quality that soothes my emetic heartburn. Richard touches my cheek as a father might, says to call him whatever fits. I tell him about my brother who was killed in the bus bombings, and he quiets me by tangling our tongues together and coiling my chest hairs around his finger. He does not treat me fatherly as he fucks me and I do not complain. We will die any day, and there is nothing to do about it. I believe I howl Noah, but I have reached brownout. I fall asleep with my nose in his armpit as he runs his hands over the scars of all the men I’ve assumed scraped into my body. When I wake, the sky is cerulean and pre-apocalyptic. Richard is gone and he’s left me with nothing but a pounding head and anus. For hours I photosynthesize on the grass in the lingering heat of Richard’s wanting me, and Noah was right: if brief, it is lovely. I carve Richard’s name in a free space in my inner thigh, and I never see him again.

Nineteen hours later is the next terror attack. From my smoker’s perch on Georgiy’s rooftop, I watch the black smoke billow out from a gaping wound in the financial district. The silence of a nation’s bated breath overpowers the roaring sirens. It will take three days to put out this fire, three months to sort through this rubble, and seven months to release the names of this round’s three-hundred-seventy-nine victims. In less time the president declares a civil war. I read in an article on the confirmed and suspected victims that Noah clocked into work twenty-nine minutes before the bomb detonated and sixty-four minutes before the building collapsed. All they found of his was a work badge. Sometimes, they go on their own, but everyone always eventually leaves. As I draw Georgiy’s name into a free spot on my elbow, I ensure this wound is surface level. There aren’t sutures large enough to mend opening up, so I will never see myself again.

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“Sutures” is a finalist in The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2026.