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Chains

Zach Benak

We drove past the icy acres of flattened crops that surrounded Cornhusker Road. Our destination—the Applebee’s parking lot—had a month-old mound of snow, mud, salt, and trash plowed off to a corner. Nebraska winter was in full rot. 

We arrived a little after 9pm, just in time for half-priced mozzarella sticks and greasy queso blanco. My date was a fair-skinned soprano from my show choir group. She asked about my plans to move to Chicago for college, and laughed at the stories I told about drunken escapades with my older friends. 

When she excused herself to the restroom, I looked around the restaurant and heard rowdy laughter coming from the bar. Standing beside a few empty mugs and shot glasses, I saw him. He looked the same as he did six months prior—skinny, blonde hair in a quaff, and wearing a black shirt unbuttoned to reveal a smooth chest. 

This guy had served my friends and me at an Outback Steakhouse the previous summer. We were there to splurge our summer job income, but he enamored me the whole dinner, running a hand through his hair and flashing a white smile after delivering orders of sirloin and sweet molasses bread. I’d been content in the closet up to this point, dating girls I was emotionally connected with and hardly attracted to. But this twenty-something waiter and his pretty face and slim physique made me, quite suddenly, imagine otherwise. In a moment unseen by anyone else, I wrote him my number and a flirty message on the dinner bill, desperate for him to want me the same way. 

Six months later, I was looking at him again, wondering if he remembered the bushy-haired, underage kid who left his number on a check back in August. I wondered if that sort of thing happened to him often. I wondered if he rolled his eyes when he saw it and threw the receipt in the trash. 

I kept staring at him the rest of the night, as he got progressively drunker, louder, and more flamboyant. I wanted him to see me, but knew I’d be mortified on the off chance he recognized who I was. And I kept thinking about him while I drove my date home, as she expressed sadness that I’d be moving to Chicago come September. I responded with basically nothing at all, feeling neither sad nor happy, but mostly ashamed at how a fleeting moment of audacity and liberation back in August collided with lingering confinement now in February. I wondered how much longer I’d feel this alone, knowing exactly who I was and what I wanted, but unable to be true to any of it in this small town full of dead cornfields and chain restaurants. 

Zach Benak lives in Chicago. His prose appears in Gasher, 45th Parallel, Reckon Review, Litbreak, Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology of Middle America (Belt Publishing 2021), and elsewhere.

Image Credit: Jason Geer

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