By Evan Michael Anderson
The first time I ever had sex was a Craigslist hookup against the side of a dumpster behind a Taco Bell in Gentilly.
He was just passing through on his way to the Bermuda Triangle. “The Sargasso Sea,” he said, “if you want to get specific.” Apparently that’s where all the eels in North America go to spawn. I found that out as I was pulling up my gym shorts and asking him his name where he was from.
“Kitchen Sink,” he said, in response to the first question.
“Kitchen Sink. That’s your name?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a weird fucking name.”
“You’re a closeted Bible college student getting fucked by a migrating eel against a dumpster behind a Taco Bell. Let’s not get into what’s weird.”
“Fine. So why the Bermuda Triangle?”
“It’s where we go to spawn. I don’t know why.”
“Will you be heading back through here again?” I smirked.
“We die after.”
“Oh.”
Mom always said that poisoning your body with fast food was a sin, as bad as poisoning your soul and your brain with premarital sex and believing in evolution. “Don’t you want to get married? Give me grandbabies?” she’d say. “Your body is a temple. You have to honor every room inside it.”
The night I moved onto campus, I drove straight to the Taco Bell drive-thru down the road, ordered a Smothered Enchilada, and scarfed it down in my car at 2 a.m. As soon as I’d finished it, I’d driven through again and ordered another.
That’s when I saw it. The blue dumpster out back with a big yellow cock spray painted on the side. I stared at it, gluttonizing my second enchilada. As a church kid from a small town who’d never really been anywhere else, it was the most vulgar thing I’d ever seen. It made my skin vibrate like every nerve in my body had wriggled to the surface.
I got out of my car and went over to where it sat, cloaked in darkness from a tagged up concrete wall on two sides and banana trees from above, invisible from the restaurant’s windows and one of the few places in the neighborhood where the blinking red eye of the campus steeple didn’t seem to reach. Brown water dripped from a rusted hole in a corner, the smell so putrid and thick I could almost taste it. Salsa roja churned its way back up my throat. I posted my first ad that night.
I posted again the next night from the parking lot. Minutes later, a message came through, I responded, and when he showed up, wouldn’t you know it, another migrating eel. I chuckled when I saw him.
“What?”
“Nothing at all.”
It’s been the same night after night. Plowed against the rusty blue metal wall. Bodies like thick ropes wrapped tight around my waist and slick with slime while some unseen appendage goes to town. We’re ravenous. Desperate. Hungry for more–harder, harder, harder. When it’s over, the silence feels like after a prayer when the pastor says amen, the congregation all whispers and slow movements. High on a holy presence so thick you can almost taste it.
I’m waiting behind the dumpster again when he shows up. Another migrating eel. This time we almost get caught in the middle of it when one of the Taco Bell guys comes out to throw away the trash. I see him before Tricycle does–that’s his name–and reach back to grab his slick body so that he stops thrusting. The kid pauses for a second after hefting the big black bag over the metal wall, listens, shrugs, and heads back through the gray door. Tricycle cracks up laughing.
“Oh my God, that was so close,” he says, and snorts. Actually snorts. That gets me going and before long we’re cracking up.
“It was nice meeting you,” he says, turning back for one last smile before he goes. A smile so crooked, I can see all the way to his back molars on one side. I didn’t even know eels had molars.
It’s the first time I come back to my dorm room with my own smile. The first time I don’t stand in the mirror pulling at the thickening rolls across my middle from too much fast food, bruising my skin blue, and wondering if what mom said about poison might be true. Instead I’m thinking about Tricycle’s squinty eyes that disappear to nothing when he laughs.
I’m still thinking about him the next night when my phone lights up.
Same time same place? 😉
Really?
If you want. No pressure.
Yeah. I just assumed you were only passing through. I almost say like the others but delete it. Ok 🙂
We do our thing behind the dumpster, but this time after we finish, he says he’s hungry. I say I am too even though I’m not really. We go inside, and he wriggles alongside me to the counter to order and then to the back booth where we share a Smothered Enchilada, four Cheese Rollups, and a bag of Cinnamon Twists.
“So,” he says, cinnamon dust sticking in the corners of his mouth. “Pastor, huh?”
“It’s sort of the family business. Not business. Calling I guess.”
“If you say so.” He winks one wet little eye.
I throw a Cinnamon Twist at his nose and say, “What about you? Just going off to spawn and die? What kind of future is that?”
“Yeah, alright. No need to get like that.”
“Just saying. You don’t have to do it, right? Why go if you know you’re going to die?”
“It’s just what we do.”
“That’s not a great reason.”
He pauses. His little pectoral fins fan out from his sides. Then he says, “I guess it’s my mother.”
A shard of Cinnamon Twist catches in my throat.
“She made this journey. She’s why I’m here.” He looks away, body curling in on itself. I don’t know what eel sadness looks like, but I think maybe it’s something like a big wet question mark. “It’s like there’s this light I’m following. And if I turn away from it, I don’t know where to go. Don’t know where I am. Who I am.”
I imagine Tricycle leaving here, swimming down into those fathomless depths. The same as all the others who came before him who are probably dead now. Spawned, bodies splitting apart in the crushing cold, slowly dissolving into microscopic cells dispersing out into the sea for the rest of eternity. Looking out the window by the door, I see the steeple blinking red and realize we’re both just following the light of our mothers in the darkness.
The dude who brought out the trash last time is now rolling out a big yellow bucket and makes a point of noisily slapping the wet mop onto the floor so it looks like a dead octopus. I look at my phone and realize it’s four in the morning.
“Will I see you again?” I ask.
“I probably need to get back on the road.”
“What if you stayed?”
He fans his fins and question marks his body, and I understand what he means. It’s a pointless question.
Outside, he kisses my cheek, his tiny mouth making a suction cup pop, breath briny and sweet. I watch as he wriggles his way down the highway, takes a right on St. Roch Avenue past the campus gates, and disappears.
Back in my dorm room, I sob into my pillow. It’s not heartbreak. It’s not even shame. I don’t know what I’m crying for, all I know is that my tears taste like seawater, and I wish I could suck them into my lungs and drown.
It’s been a month, and I haven’t posted any more ads. I still come back to the same Taco Bell, though. Eat the same Smothered Enchilada. Walk back to the same dumpster, to the cluster of rope-shaped stains blooming from the backside. Remains of my mother’s unborn grandbabies. Above, the red eye blinks through a small break in the banana leaves, watching all along.
The air is hot and wet, and I struggle to breathe.
I walk out of the parking lot and down the sidewalk toward St. Roch. With the night air thick like this, I can almost feel the weight of it above me, stretching up a hundred miles, a thousand miles. Fathomless and deep. Like a reflection in the water, I see my body split apart, spawning into endless versions of myself. All with pretty wives and pretty kids, standing on our pulpits and wreathed in light. Over and over my body splits and spawns, dissolves into nothing.
Before I can turn right, a break in the sidewalk sends me stumbling.
Drunk.
I barely remember drinking before I left my dorm. Failing to find my footing, I trip sideways and tumble down into a ditch where I lay, looking up into that upside down ocean.
“Hey,” says a voice next to my ear.
“Jesus!” I look over. “Kitchen Sink?”
The first eel I met here almost two months ago slides up next to me. “Yeah.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
He couldn’t bring himself to go, he says. He’s been impersonating a Two-Toed Amphiuma. “A swamp eel,” he says. Hiding in dark holes, gripping onto small sticks with his fins to mimic arms. Slithering out of children’s tiny hands that try to catch him after a hard rain and the ditches fill to overflowing. “They’re really salamanders. They live on land.” He looks down, embarrassed. Two tiny vestigial stick arms hang limp at his side. He lays back in the mud, curling in so tight on himself he looks like a wet dinner plate. “Does that make me selfish? Unnatural?” he asks, blinking up at me, his eyes like two black beans.
I think about the dark corner where the dumpster sits, a lifeboat in the middle of the sea. “No,” I say, but really I’m not sure. I want to tell him that there are places we can go where the lights can’t find us. Where our secrets can feel less like sin and more like possibility, but I know it’s not true. Our lights always find us. Our mothers always see.
I reach down and grab the other end of his stick arm between my fingers, and we lay there in that ditch as it starts to rain. We stare up into that ocean, savoring the feeling of our faces being washed clean while our bodies sink into the mud. Evolution pulling us toward a new world shore. Trying to give us arms. Trying to push oxygen into our lungs for the first time.
Evan Michael Anderson lives in New Orleans, LA with his husband. His work has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2023, JMWW, and others. You can keep up with him on Threads @emichaelanderson where he mostly laments about trying to write his first novel and on X @emanderson_1 where he doesn’t say much of anything anymore.
Taco Bell Quarterly 