Alexandra

I told him that I had liked that our names were the same. Alexandra. He told me that it would weird him out, personally. It's so easy to lose yourself in someone, don't you need some boundaries. Plus, you're both women. If someone called your name, would you both answer? Isn't that confusing, he asked. That did happen once or twice, sure. But she and I had different nicknames: Allie and Alex. Ah, he said, that's helpful. I didn't tell him that I hated that distinction. That I hated every distinction. That I'd once wished our bodies were exactly the same in every possible way so that on a hot, bright day, our silhouettes would look like cross-sections of the same shape that ought not be separate, but together, whole, one.
 
 
Adam
 
It stunned him, what it was like to fuck someone you loved for the first time. Adam and Adam, like a perfect pair of double A batteries. Plus and minus. Other Adam was a power bottom. They were around the same size, but their taste in clothing was different. Adam was wearing another man's tuxedo when they first met. On New Year's, they threw a party together—their first and their last. As the countdown began, they came together from opposite sides of the living room and I watched them kiss surrounded by gold and silver tinsel. Sometime later, I saw two men on the F train—a couple—wearing matching clothes. Pastel tank top, denim shorts cuffed at the thigh, white sneakers, neatly trimmed facial hair, curly chest hair peeking over soft cotton. They sat side by side, the space between them a hard sliver of sherbet orange plastic, color spreading steadily as the train hurtled forward.

 
Paris/Perris
 
People always ask her if she was named after the city. It's just a name, really, meaningless in a lot of ways. Because there are a total of eleven cities named Paris in the world. Seven of them are in the United States—mostly landlocked places, unromantic, nothing like the original City of Lights. Though perhaps filled with light in their own way. Or so Paris imagined; she'd never been. When she met Perris, they told her most people spelled their name wrong. Spelled it like hers. They didn't mind, really. Just a name. Perris was born inland in a valley full of dust. Just outside of town, those craving water built an artificial lake. Lake Perris is flanked by small mountains and fed by a weak dam. Before Perris could crawl, their father held them in his arms and dipped their tiny, naked body into the lake's clear waters. When Perris sleeps, Paris watches the angle of their collarbone, the way shadow pools in the shallow at night, how the recess of pale bone and skin drinks in morning light like a trough. The waters rise and fall with the rains. On the floor of Lake Perris, there's a small reef made of tires. Paris imagines fish being poured into new waters like slippery bits of color, scale catching sun.


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Sydney S. Kim is a queer, Korean-American writer and artist based in Los Angeles. She has stories in or coming from American Literary Review, Nat. Brut, Jellyfish Review and others.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Phil Roeder.

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