East Coast Gazette

SGA, to me, is like that boyfriend you found putting a carton of eggs into your dishwasher and then you threw him out in his underpants and chucked his shit at him successively through your bedroom window because that was how furious you were with him and does he know it’s going to cost you $300 to get that God damned washer fixed? Does he even care? And then you shout stuff like, “Go fuck yourself I hope you get raped by alley cats!” and shut the window sash extra hard.

But then like, four days has passed and nobody has woken you up in the middle of the night to tie you up to the headboard or asked you to make chocolate dipped strawberries or asked if you could spike a peach and if you could could they do it with a fifth and no, of course I’m not afraid of alcohol poisoning. And nobody has brought you light up pens with fuzzballs on the end at work or sent you naughty text messages with all the words spelled wrong and in all-caps or watched Blue Collar Comedy with you late at night and never judged you for braying like a donkey and saying, “Oh, God, I know!” at the “You know you’re a Redneck if…” jokes and you realize your LIFE IS BEREFT without his stupidity.

Yeah, that’s how I feel about SGA — which explains why I’m trying to gorge myself and utterly failing — has nobody been writing in the last month? COME ON GUYS.

Snapshot: (from a larger work to come) Septpartite

Rodney’s memories of leaving the mountain are blurry at best — arrested images of John shaking him awake at some indeterminate hour of morning, since all time in the SGC passed in the same smear of suffocating concrete gray. And then suddenly there’s a Jeep and the windows framing startling-blue skies, and Rodney remembers falling asleep again, huddled against a door, the warm weight of John’s hand on his knee. He’s on the airplane before he even bothers to ask where they’re going.

“Where?” he mumbles, face mashed into John’s shoulder. He’s been covered with one of those flimsy airline blankets, a pillow tucked in behind his lower back. He doesn’t remember much of this, but then he’s got another week of Percocet to go before his prescription runs out, and the world tends to go a little neon and fuzzy-edged on the drugs.

“New York.” John closes a palm around the back of Rodney’s hand, underneath the blankets. “Feeling okay?”

Rodney nods his head, bleary, rubs his nose on John’s collarbone. “Just sore.”

John nods. “Good,” he says, and holds up the SkyMall magazine with his free hand. “What do you think would be a better gift — giant crossword or shower CD player?”

“Depends on how much you hate the person,” Rodney mumbles, and closes his eyes again.

“I guess I could always send flowers,” John decides, and Rodney goes back to sleep, listening to the pilot tell them they’re three hours out from JFK International Airport.

*

Part of Rodney — the part that spends most of its energy writing in a metaphorical Lisa Frank diary in pink sparkle pen about how AWESOME John is — has speculated that John comes from better breeding than he’s willing to let on. The fact that they end up in the Mandarin Oriental only reinforces this suspicion. The lobby is all power colors and sleek post-modern jumbles of subtle flower arrangements, staff that melts away from awareness. There’s a woman at the reception desk, backed by a triptych of paintings that look like a smear of color, who smiles and says, “Yes, of course Mr. Sheppard — your suite is ready,” and “We’ll have your luggage sent up in just a few moments,” and, laughing, “Yes, of course we can send up dinner.”

“Bring coffee,” Rodney tells her, half-dazed. The 23 hour to 24 hour transition plus the dirty sucker punch combination of pain killers and exhaustion is still keeping him comfortably numb, but John has a hand on the small of his back, guiding him gently, and Rodney knows that if there was anything he’d need to worry about, John would be doing the worrying for him. “Strong coffee, please.”

“Of course,” the woman agrees, voice kind, and a bellhop comes running.

They end up in the Oriental Suite, which looks like something out of a hash dream, so Rodney says so and John says, “Yeah, I think it’s time I get you back into bed.”

Rodney lets John take off his shoes and shirt and jeans and roll him into soft, cool linens, arrange the pillows and draw up the sheets. In the background, he hears their luggage arrive and dinner come, and the slide of silverware, John pouring himself coffee and the faint sounds of the television murmuring as he falls asleep again. It’s early evening now, and the coffee (strong!) will be cold when he wakes up again in the middle of the night — but he’s only 14 hours into making up for a near-80 sleep deficit, his heart going arrhythmic and his body screaming and then somebody had broken two of his ribs, so Rodney tells himself that John will reheat the coffee, and goes to sleep.