A Broken Cup
By Emery C. Walters
It wouldn’t have been so bad if Carmel, as he liked to call his bastard self, had died snorkeling, or picking up a cone shell, or falling off a f*****g cliff. Yes, I would have felt stabbed in the heart, but I’d have been surrounded by sympathetic friends and enveloped in loving arms. If he’d died of AIDS, I’d have had understanding and condolences, but he had never had anything worse than crabs, and that was a long time before I’d met him. But no, all he’d done was spread rumors about me and make up some huge imaginary mountain out of an imagined slight. And he had taken off with a twenty-two-year-old lady-boy, a katoey, from Thailand.
So now what I get are phone calls and texts saying, “Russell, did you really do that to Carmel? Because he seems like s
