"Hauntologies" in SUBTROPICS

My essay “Hauntologies” appears in the latest issue of the University of Florida Gainesville’s literary magazine Subtropics, Issue 36/27, Spring/Summer 2025, edited by David Leavitt.

Here’s an excerpt:

Speechless

My parents agreed that eating earwax would make you mute. How much? I wanted to know, but they never said. This was muteness of a different order from mere laryngitis, for which teachers were known to miss school; this was irrevocable. Sometimes, after swimming, shaking water from my ears the way my father had shown me—first three tosses of the head to the left, then three tosses of the head to the right—I heard a sizable chunk of earwax rattling around. In the morning, I would wake to find that a few crumbs had dribbled onto my pillow.

I had been to see the father of a classmate, an otolaryngologist. I knew it was all connected, inside my head. If a few crumbs could trickle out one way, then they could trickle out the other, right down my throat. Staring up at streetlights from the backseat on my way home from the pool, I tried to still my head against the jolting of the car, never certain when the little bit that wouldn’t hurt you could suddenly become the too much that might.

Years later, I told this story to a woman I was dating. A few nights passed, then she came to me with a smile and a curette. She sat down in the middle of the room lit softly by a single torchiere in the corner and patted the beige carpet beside her. No virgin she, nor I unicorn, I lay my head in her lap.