Boy Oh Boy Read online

  Boy Oh Boy

  Boy Oh Boy

  stories

  ZACHARY DOSS

  Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA

  Boy Oh Boy

  Copyright © 2020 by Zachary Doss

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  This book is the Winner of the 2019 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. AWP is a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to serving American letters, writers, and programs of writing. AWP’s headquerters are at Riverdale Park, Maryland.

  Book design by Mark E. Cull

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Doss, Zachary, author.

  Title: Boy oh boy : stories / Zachary Doss.

  Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019041449 (print) | LCCN 2019041450 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597098137 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781597098120 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3604.O827 A6 2020 (print) | LCC PS3604.O827 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041449

  The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

  First Edition

  Published by Red Hen Press

  www.redhen.org

  Acknowledgments

  Stories in this collection have appeared, sometimes in different versions or with different titles, in the following publications:

  CHEAP POP, “Responsible Ownership”; Entropy, “Jane Eyre”; Fourteen Hills, “What Keeps Society Going”; Heavy Feather Review, “One Word for It,” “The Natural Man”; Hobart (online), “How the Day Goes VIII”; Juked (online), “Cold Fish,” “Trash Pope,” “Trolling”; Lockjaw Magazine, “Spatial Awareness”; Lumina, “Fuck Marry Kill”; Passages North (online), “The Blood Mouth”; The Mondegreen, “How the Day Goes,” “How the Day Goes II,” “How the Day Goes III,” “How the Day Goes IV”; Monkeybicycle, “Spy vs. Spy”; New South (online), “Godzilla,” “Pest Control”; Puerto del Sol (online), “Bespoke”; SmokeLong Quarterly, “The Village with All of the Boyfriends”; Sonora Review, “Sadland”; Wigleaf, “You Could Fucking Sell That,” “The Purses”; Sundog Lit, “Embodied,” “Esquire,” “Put a Ring on It”; THIS., “Fraternal,” “Higher Learning,” “Sex Stuff,” and “The Problem-Solver.”

  Contents

  I

  Your Boyfriend Always Has Something He Wants to Do

  Trolling

  Cold Fish

  Godzilla

  Pest Control

  Trash Pope

  The Natural Man

  Embodied

  One Word for It

  Put a Ring on It

  On the Outside

  II

  And Then He Asks, What Would You Do Differently?

  How the Day Goes I

  How the Day Goes II

  How the Day Goes III

  How the Day Goes IV

  How the Day Goes V

  How the Day Goes VI

  How the Day Goes VII

  How the Day Goes VIII

  How the Day Goes IX

  How the Day Goes X

  III

  I Am Having a Very Authentic Experience, You Think

  Bespoke

  IV

  You Love it All so Goddamn Much

  Esquire

  Sex Stuff

  Fraternal

  The Problem-Solver

  Higher Learning

  V

  You Did the Things That Made Sense to You

  You Could Fucking Sell That

  Spatial Awareness

  Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison

  The Purses

  Transubstantiation

  Sadland

  Jane Eyre

  Bump in the Night

  Responsible Ownership

  The Blood Mouth

  VI

  The Game Begins to Occupy a Very Central Place in Your Life

  Zombie Apocalypse Story

  Manure

  What Keeps Society Going

  Spy vs. Spy

  Fuck Marry Kill

  VII

  Boyfriends All the Way Down

  Universal Boyfriend Theory

  VIII

  You Are Waiting for a Foundation to Crack

  The Village with All of the Boyfriends

  I

  Your Boyfriend Always Has Something He Wants to Do

  Trolling

  WHEN YOU KEEP finding troll dolls around your apartment, you assume your boyfriend is playing a practical joke. You think your boyfriend is funny, like that time he asked you for ten dollars and then didn’t contact you for six months after you gave it to him. The first troll has blue hair and a jewel in its belly and sits on top of your alarm clock. The second you find floating face down in your toilet tank. Its wet purple hair radiates from its head like a nerve.

  You don’t mention the trolls to your boyfriend. You pay for dinner and he talks about his job. This is part of the joke, you think, and you know the joke can go on for up to six months. When you open your bedroom door and the room is so full of troll dolls that they avalanche into the hallway, this is part of the joke. The joke is when you find, well, it must be half a million troll dolls, buried neck deep in your front lawn. Your first instinct is to call someone, but who? A gardener? A toy store?

  The last straw is when there are no troll dolls at all, for a week and then longer, a month or two. You and your boyfriend start getting into fights. You don’t bring up the troll dolls, but you yell about other things, about the time he left the butter out overnight. Your boyfriend yells back that you don’t actually need to refrigerate butter, it will be fine. You’re pretty sure you read that somewhere but you aren’t willing to give any ground now.

  Six months later, he calls, no reason, just wants to talk. You’re pretty sure he wants something, but it feels good to hear him laugh. You open the junk drawer, but you don’t remember what you were looking for when he called. He’s talking about getting a new job. You find the first troll, blue hair with the belly jewel. What was the deal with the troll dolls, anyway? you ask, cutting him off.

  I have no idea what you’re talking about, he says, and now he’s lost his place and has to start his story over.

  Cold Fish

  YOU’RE READY TO go home but your boyfriend is still floating on the lake, so far out he looks like a discarded T-shirt. You wave to get his attention, and when he doesn’t look up, you think he might be dead. Eventually, though, he swims to shore and tells you to go home, he’s going to stay here for a while.

  You assume this is just a phase and go home. But he refuses to leave the lake. You keep going back, hoping he will change his mind. You bring him sandwiches and he eats them in the water, soggy bread and all. You carry a freshly laundered towel and try to lure him to shore with it.

  When you drive away you watch him from your rear-view mirror. He still looks dead to you, a spot of color floating in the dark water. Alone every night, you try not to worry. You think of things that could happen. Poisonous snakes. Man-eating fish. Water bears. Crocodiles. Jet skis.

  You call your
boyfriend’s mother and explain your concerns. What is a water bear? she asks. You start to explain that it’s a bear that lives in the water, and she hangs up.

  Increasingly you become distracted at work and your performance suffers. You find yourself screaming at the dog, slamming the door on girl scouts.

  This is becoming a problem, you say to him on your next visit.

  You sit, your feet dangling in the cold water. Your boyfriend’s lips and fingers are turning blue. He tugs on your big toe and you jump, thinking a fish is trying to pull you under.

  I’m not coming back here, you say.

  Your boyfriend splashes his face, pours water down his cheeks. Look, he says, it’s just like I’m crying.

  Godzilla

  YOUR BOYFRIEND DECIDES to start a small business and sure enough the store he opens only comes up to your knee. Somehow he fits inside but as much as you scrunch you can’t get in. Outside, on your hands and knees, you peek with one eye through the small windows.

  When you ask him who his intended customers are, he says, Just really small people, I guess.

  Through the window you can see your boyfriend industriously filling wicker baskets with scented soaps, making neat rows of colorful bubble bath bottles.

  His shop is a disproportionately large success. Small people line up around the block for his honeysuckle-scented body lotion. He is interviewed by the local news. On television, he and his shop and the newscaster look like they are the correct size.

  This won’t change anything about our relationship, your boyfriend says.

  You begin to fit uncomfortably into your own life. You ask coworkers, do I seem especially gigantic to you today? and while they assure you that you are normal-sized, they submit hostile work environment claims to the director of human resources.

  After an argument you tell your boyfriend that you hate your job and think you are about to get fired. I can support us both, he says.

  That isn’t the point, you say.

  Every day, as you walk by your boyfriend’s shop, you imagine crushing the mob of tiny people waiting their turn to fill their tiny baskets with tiny fancy bath products, the little dark smears on the sidewalk, the way they would make the bottom of your boot sticky, the puffs of honeysuckle or lilac or rose scent on the air as you crush their bath products. You imagine biting their tiny heads off, drinking from their bleeding necks. You are big enough, and thirsty.

  Pest Control

  YOUR BOYFRIEND INVITES you to move in with him, but he lives inside a mechanical bull and you dread spending the night there. That would be a less than ideal living arrangement, you explain.

  I hardly even notice the cowboys anymore, he says.

  But really the cowboys are a nuisance. You turn on the kitchen light at night and cowboys skitter across the floor in their Wrangler jeans, their spurs clinking. When you try to fall asleep, you hear the cowboys crawling around in the dust under the bed, singing prairie songs around a campfire.

  I’ll call the landlord, your boyfriend says, but his landlord is busy running the country-western bar and he tells your boyfriend that there is a reason the rent for his mechanical bull is so low.

  I don’t deal with cowboy infestations or motion sickness, the landlord says.

  Your boyfriend asks if you will dress as a cowboy during sex, says it might help you get more comfortable in the apartment. You try to ease into it by wearing a bandana and a pair of boots but then you remember that time you left the butter out and came back to tiny boot prints in it, and you can’t keep an erection.

  What if you moved? you ask your boyfriend. The truth is, you know your boyfriend doesn’t mind the cowboys. He tries to tell you how cute they are if you look at them right, and how they help keep other pests out with their small guns, but to you they all look like they’ve rolled around in the gunk underneath the refrigerator.

  I’m just saying, there must be apartments that don’t have a cowboy problem, you say.

  This is a very difficult real estate market, your boyfriend says. And it is, it really is.

  Trash Pope

  YOUR BOYFRIEND WANTS to become the Pope but there is already a Pope. Your boyfriend doesn’t want to wait for the Pope to get sick or die or retire in disgrace, and decides he’s going to be the Trash Pope instead.

  Your boyfriend the Trash Pope goes out to live in the landfill outside of town. It’s about as gross as you expect, but your boyfriend is optimistic. He nails two boards together for a cross and hangs it on a shack he builds out of discarded sheet metal.

  Initially there is some trouble because your boyfriend has never read the Bible and has only the vaguest idea of what Catholics do. He doesn’t speak Latin, so he tries Pig Latin instead. He burns the discarded stubs of candles. He blesses pools of stinking, rotten water.

  I’m not sure what you’re going for here, you say to your boyfriend the Trash Pope.

  He finds a lot of dead bodies abandoned in the muck. He consecrates the remains and buries them behind his cathedral. He tries to fancy the cathedral up a little bit but it’s still a metal shed draped with stained cloth with some broken wind chimes dangling off of it.

  I don’t remember there being a lot of wind chimes, you try to explain. You grew up Catholic but your boyfriend doesn’t listen to your advice.

  I’m the one who’s Trash Pope, he says.

  You start going to regular, non-trash church. It’s comforting how clean the stained glass is, how bright the light on Sunday morning. Incense smells nicer than garbage, you say to the priest at confession.

  You don’t know how to explain this to your boyfriend. Everything here is so much nicer, it’s enough that you just believe.

  The Natural Man

  YOUR BOYFRIEND DECIDES to grow his hair out. He has always kept himself carefully groomed, but lately he had been going to greater and greater lengths to manage hair growth. He waxes, he trims, he clippers, he tweezes. He keeps every follicle under such careful control that when he says he’s going to grow it all out, just not worry about it for a while, you aren’t surprised at how desperate he sounds, how lonely. You’ve always been a more natural kind of guy, but he knew that when you started dating.

  At first, there is only a slight shagginess that you find appealing. It’s boyish and interesting. It’s something to grab on to, as you say when you thread your fingers through his hair during sex. You return to his hair frequently, ruffling it as you pass by or brushing it off his forehead when you kiss him. This is okay, you think, this is nice. Of course the hair on his body grows more slowly, so for the first several weeks you don’t even notice that. You notice that his eyebrows seem less painstakingly arranged, less cultivated.

  Soon, every surface of his body is bristly with new hair. He’s uncomfortable to hug or fuck. When you kiss, it feels like you are kissing more beard than lip. The floor is covered with his hair. You have to sweep frequently. Otherwise, hair sticks to the bottom of your feet when you get out of the shower. When you have to pull the hairs off your feet, there is an uncomfortable tug, like you are pulling the hairs out of your skin.

  As your boyfriend’s hair proliferates, you drop hints about getting rug burn when you sleep too close to him, or always finding small hairs between your teeth, or even finding hair in your food. He ignores you while his hair grows even longer. He develops a thick, shaggy coat all over his body. You realize you never knew how much exactly he had to shave, how much waxing he must have done. You wonder what you were doing while your boyfriend was performing this maintenance. It must have taken hours.

  One day, after a reluctant kiss, you notice that your boyfriend has grown fangs. Did he always have fangs? You are reasonably sure he didn’t, but there he is, with oversized, pointed canines. He must have been filing them down all this time, you think. You search your bathroom for the tools, for files and clippers that might have been used to make teeth look straight and even and very normal. Then he grows long, craggy claws. And then he can’t talk through his new
, oversized teeth, so he barks or grunts. The more strange-looking your boyfriend becomes, the more normal-looking you remember him, until you remember him being perfect. Surely he had to have been perfect to become this deeply imperfect.

  You view the inevitable damage to your relationship as his fault, not yours. You start to sleep on the couch, when you sleep at home. Usually you are out all night. You go to parties where everyone wears only underwear, and you admire the waxed chests and hairless backs. Eventually, you start hooking up. It seems an inevitable progression. You still appreciate a hairless asshole every once in a while. It seems like your boyfriend knows what you’re getting up to. You come home in the early morning to find ruined furniture, chewed-up shoes, and sometimes he has peed or shit on the floor. When you leave, he stands at the door and whines, his eyes big, trying to express how much he is going to miss you.

  Eventually, you buy a collar and a chain and start tying him up in the backyard. You stop telling the men you have sex with that you can’t bring them home. You might as well, you think, as your boyfriend barks and scratches at the door. He howls as you bury your face in every hairless inch of every man you can find. It’s such a relief. Eventually, you find a man you bring home a few times. Then he’s over for dinner, to watch a movie, to nap and read on your couch. Your boyfriend barks and barks. He comes inside sometimes, but you tell the man who is not your boyfriend that your boyfriend is more of an outdoor pet. Out of guilt, you build your boyfriend a little house back there, but he refuses to live in it. He looks at you scornfully. He looks at the man who is not your boyfriend scornfully. He looks at the little house scornfully. He doesn’t come to the door as often.