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by Matthew Hawkins

Every Friday, before the real show, Chicago punk music venue The Empty Bottle hosts line dancing. Transplants nostalgic for their rural hometowns flock to the establishment on the west side. People wearing cowboy hats and boots and flannel button-downs and long floral skirts—everything you’d expect—pack in and select their partners for the night. There’s a live band complete with amped-up banjo. Shoes stick to the beer-encrusted floor as the people do their steps. The bathrooms are disgusting too: floors covered in misplaced human waste; walls coated with graffitied offensive slurs and stickers showcasing mediocre trying-too-hard indie bands. No one finds it ironic that the local cowboy and punk scenes share the same space. During the event, you can hear a harmonica through the shared wall of the vegan-friendly restaurant next door. Though, it’s so faint that if you aren’t actively listening for it on some level, you might miss it.

In the restaurant, my boyfriend informs me the sound is similar to the muffled whirr of a tornado siren when you’re taking shelter in a basement’s bathroom. He’s from rural Ohio, so I take his word for it. This is how our conversations usually go, back to our past. I’d also grown up in a rural place, West Virginia to be specific, so this is how we first bonded. Over the course of our relationship, we’ve spent complete dates, weeks, years, discussing the improbability of us both moving to the city, of us meeting. Tonight, we spend much—maybe too much—of our meal doing it.

While sharing overpriced tapas, I tell him about the Jesus picture in my public school, which resulted in a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court; about how the protestors would get up in the morning, stand outside the school, and scream about everyone they hated; about how regularly they’d single out “the gays,” asserting that they, that people like us, were trying to take Jesus away them; about how many of the students and teachers would raise their fists in solidarity as they made their way into the building. As we finish our wine, he tells me how after graduating from catholic school, he got a job to reporting the police beat for his local college-town paper; about how I would be shocked to know how many people died by simply falling asleep on the train tracks. Although it is a concerning amount, I’m not surprised. I tell him about the first boy I hooked up with in middle school; about how we were in his bed, doing things to each other’s bodies we’d seen online, when we heard police sirens making their way down the street; about how we convinced ourselves they were coming for us. And then, while we’re waiting for the check, he tells me about the time in the early 2010s he drove all the way to Pittsburgh for a hook-up; about how he dated like this so no one in his immediate small-town circle would find out; about how the guy ended up being homeless, recently escaped from his own rural hometown; about how he and the guy slept holding each other under the cover of a gazebo located in a hillside park overlooking smokestacks of the factories along the Monongahela; about how the view made him feel like he was a king watching the empire die. After the meal, we say our goodbyes to our waitress and follow the music.

While we’re waiting in line to have our ID’s checked for entry into The Empty Bottle, we watch a concerningly large rat Frogger itself across a busy intersection. This reminds my boyfriend of his neighbor’s cat he’d found, dead in the middle of the road, days before he moved to the city. It was so mangled he had barely recognized it. He claims it looked unfamiliar, just like anyone’s— everyone’s—run-over cat. He says he’s never told anyone this until now, and that it’s felt like a dead weight for all this time. I tell him that’s because it was literally dead weight. We laugh, make our way through the line, and continue our night of trading stories of growing up queer in rural America as they come to us. Sometimes we remind me of the old men who sit at the end of bars and talk about their wars.

As we push our way to the area around the stage, the sound of Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” echoes throughout the venue. My boyfriend whisper-screams to me that he loves this song. We laugh at the thought of our Northside co-workers and friends—who mostly come from the suburbs— knowing our backstories, knowing how far we’d come just to live in the city, only to find ourselves at a weird line dancing event. But we don’t care. We allow ourselves to enjoy it. We drink. We kiss. We dance, even though we’re no good in comparison to the cosplaying cowboys and cowgirls who clearly practice their routines regularly. While everyone in the room is singing “Back in Baby’s Arms” by Patsy Cline in unison, I think about how although I often talk about how I dislike my hometown, my history, it’s a relief to be able to look back, to have a space where I can be landlocked in it—in everything I’ve dedicated so much of my life trying to abandon.

After they shut it down to get ready for the real show, my boyfriend and I drunkenly walk arm-in-arm, back to his apartment. On the couch gifted to him from his mom, who had been gifted it from her mom, we catch the end of the local news segment about a frozen body they found in Lake Michigan. I tell him about how you can find marbles on the banks of a river in my town; about the old glass factory that used to be there; about how they would throw out chunks that weren’t up to company standards out of a factory window, out into the world, like coins into wishing wells; about how my teachers told us the workers would sometimes throw out marbles with perfectly crafted cat-eye designs by mistake; about how they said if you were to find one, you could sell them for real money, New York money, my grandfather called it; about how I spent entire summers digging through that dirt; about how I interpreted my teacher’s information one way and one way only: if I found one, I could leave.

Later, in his bed my boyfriend tells me he can’t wait to see my actual home—my home-home, he calls it. While he speaks, I stare at a child’s blow-up globe he has hanging from a string on the ceiling. It’s rotating in the wind coming from oscillating fan he has pointed toward the bed. He says he wants to know what bars are like in West Virginia. I imagine him thinking of progressive urban line-dancing, of universally known John Denver lyrics. I consider just letting him continue to think that, but ultimately decide to tell the truth: there’s not many bars, and especially not any I’d imagine we’d be welcome at, or that I would feel comfortable going to; that there’s not really anything there for people like us. He suggests maybe things have changed since I’d left. I say nothing. We allow silence to communicate an understanding. Even if things have changed, they haven’t enough.

As we’re settling down, he whispers, warning me his childhood bedroom is full of spiders because of an overgrown tree that leans on the outside of his window; about how I would have to be, we would have to be, careful if we ever visited. I ask him if his, as he’s vaguely described, “fiscally conservative” parents would be cool with us sleeping in the same room. He says nothing in response. Instead he tickles me, his fingers mimicking spider legs.

Deep in the night, while he’s asleep, I escape his arms in order to go the bathroom so I can watch a conspiracy video regarding RuPaul’s relationship with the fracking industry at full volume. When I turn on the light, a massive spider retreats from the tile back to its home—a crack in the wall behind the sink. I call out to it, letting it know this bathroom is as much its space as it is mine. But it’s already gone. After the video I think about all the spiders; about how there’s a population, an entire ecosystem, an entire planet, of them scouring the Earth underneath our cities our towns our apartments our concert halls our restaurants our mattresses and bodies; about how we have no idea what they are looking for, where they are from, or where they are going, and we never ask. I save a note reminding myself tell my boyfriend about the time I tried to kill a spider when I was young; about how when I stepped on it hundreds, thousands—a biblical amount—of baby spiders rushed out and scattered the room; about how this memory reminds me of the footage of people dispersing into rural Walmart’s on Black Friday for televisions or guns or foot massagers or whatever people buy; about how everything is more similar, more connected, than we’d like to think; and about how I’m considering seeking a doctor for sleeping medication. 

When I make my way back to the bed, I find my boyfriend curled up roly-poly style—knees to chest. His body lets out an involuntary moan as my weight sinks the mattress. I whisper, telling him I love him. I hold him and he holds me. He continues to sleep, but I stay up all night waiting—watching the inflatable globe rotate wildly in the airspace above the bed.

Matthew Hawkins is a queer writer from West Virginia. They currently live in Chicago and are the EIC of Alien Magazine. Recent work of theirs is featured or forthcoming in Fugue, The Normal School, and The Southampton Review. You can find them on Twitter @catdad667.