You Boys
Anita Mechler
It’s Spring. I am laying on a blanket on the soft earth, allowing the sunshine to light up my closed eyelids, the reds and oranges of my veins. The next door neighbor is spraying down large terracotta tiles; I know this by sound and smell. We’re experiencing rays of sunshine the likes of which we have not experienced in some time. It’s the time for flowers to bloom from their brown and dead-looking existence, when people start shedding more layers of clothing and coming out in their own bright colors. I look around more when I’m walking somewhere or riding my bike. Times like these make me think of boys. All kinds of boys. It seems like so many of them are out of their winter hiding places and traversing the city streets.
I think of the chubby ones with sweet, rosy cheeked faces, aiming to please. Or perhaps, it’s the wiry thin creepy neck-chokers, who act sweet to get their way. Or a boy who never thought he was beautiful until he got behind a guitar and a microphone. There are the pretty boys, who have always known it, but his mama’s coddling only got him so far with women who don’t dream of changing wet nappies. The flower-givers, penitent or expectant. The looming drink-buyers. The ones with stupid doe eyes. The ones with boyish charms and floppy hair.
Boys with crooked smiles and fucked up teeth, especially those with metal-capped rakishness. The ones with nothing to lose, on a frenetic train to the edge of a cliff. The ones with mischievous, inquisitive, scientific eyes. The ones with singular loves, mad devotion, killer instincts. The ones who will talk your ear off about the most interesting things you’ve ever heard, using words that give you tingles and slightly damp underwear.
I love thinking about them as children; imagining adult Ichabod Crane and what life path brought him to dominating asshole or cute, awkward guy with a big nose. Or he could have started out like cheerful Dicken, lover of animals or Pied Piper, the mountain man whose dream is to live in a cave. Or maybe a Humbert Humbert only satisfied with the youngest, freshest nymphette on the block. Even perhaps, he could be Frankenstein’s monster, articulate with longing but too ugly to think he deserves love, even from his master. What actions or fates gave force to the men they become? What innate tendencies exist in the blood, brain, heart, or cock that created the monster and the hero?
Perhaps it is apt that they be fictional characters, complexities held within the pages of a book because who really wants to be distilled down to a few words of description. But as the wind lovingly caresses bare skin, and the sun’s rays penetrate the needy epidermis, these are the things of which I think. We say there is nothing new under the sun, but our hearts wish for more.
Anita Mechler is a writer, storyteller, painter, and librarian. She co-founded the Chicago-based writing collective Drinkers With Writing Problems. Her work has been in Library Journal, The Vignette Review, and Our Urban Times. She lives near Detroit with her husband and very spoiled cat while posting on Substack at anitamariemedium.
Analysis by Daniel Amster
A litany is a prayer reinforced by repetition, pleading for a response. It is a list of things to build up to what is not had. In the flash essay “You Boys” by Anita Mechler, this is found in descriptions of sunlight piercing eyelids. It is in the comparison of people and plants shedding their winter clothes, and animals emerging from hibernation. Most prominently, it is found in the juxtaposition of male archetypes presented. All of this is desire seeping through resentment; euphony and cacophony resonating off from each other.
The second paragraph in “You Boys” is seeing sunlight through closed eyes. The archetypes organized are different approaches to “sweet” — boys who are either too bright to look at, or who think brightness is being hard to look at. The boy in the third sentence here is an example of the former, with the potential to turn into the latter, and the soundscape imitates this. Note the alliterative, euphonic tempo of boy, beautiful, and behind, intercut by the cacophonic one-two combo of got and guitar:
“or a boy who never thought he was beautiful until he got behind a guitar and a microphone.”
The third paragraph is the skin shed from fantasizing; the bare essentials distilled. Four of the five sentences here have the highest ratio of cacophony to euphony in the entire essay, with the likes of “metal-capped rakishness”; “frenetic train to the edge of a cliff”; and “mischievous, inquisitive, scientific eyes” marking the narrator’s anger and indulgence. The description of boys has essentially been reduced to a series of adjectives serving as Rorschach tests. It is only in the last sentence that the narrator moderately relents on all of this; softening with embarrassing vulnerability, exacerbated by the start of the next paragraph:
“using words that give you tingles and slightly damp underwear. I love thinking about them as
children;”
The fourth paragraph rationalizes sleeping while awake. The start of it is the narrator wanting to make men as uncomfortable as they have made the narrator. There is an underlying pleasure able to be found in discomfort and inflicting discomfort, like a nightmare where the dreamer is all the characters within. The narrator is all the boys here, too — from the ones they wrote themself, and the interpretations they hold of those they have not written. Their signature is painstakingly etched in each syllable, fighting neighbors with the coordination of a dance. These are all contradictions and sounds that make up a prayer, and the readers — almost as gods — are given the job of interpreting it themselves in the final paragraph.
“Perhaps it is apt that they be fictional characters, complexities held within the pages of a book
because who really wants to be distilled down to a few words of description.”