miss unity – the other nicholas

Nicholas flipped open his Macbook Pro. He plugged a USB microphone into one USB jack and a $20 ring light he’d purchased from Amazon into the other. Then he placed the laptop on the middle rung of the wooden ladder nailed to the foot of his bed. With the microphone and ring light attached, Nicholas found he could balance the laptop on the ladder, with the two accessories acting as counterweights. Leaving the laptop balanced on the rung, he wheeled his desk chair into the corner of the room, and positioned it in front of the bookshelf facing the open laptop. He sat down in the chair and switched on the ring light. He fiddled with the position of the camera and the light, then rearranged some of the books on the shelf behind him. When everything was to his liking, he stood up, banging the top of his head on the potted philodendron hanging from a metal hook haphazardly screwed into the window frame, and raced upstairs to make coffee.

Nicholas had only recently reintroduced coffee into his diet, having temporarily eliminated almost all foods besides liver, cod, beef, raw honey, berries, cruciferous vegetables, and tea. Nicholas hoped that by doing this he’d be able to reduce his intestinal inflammation, restore his gut flora to a healthy balance, and cure himself of an unspecified mystery illness that had all but stopped him in his tracks following a tooth infection in the last months of 2019. The infection had been so bad that, during its acute phase, Nicholas had barely even been able to open his mouth. It was the worst pain he’d ever felt, searing, shocking pain that shot down both sides of his neck, and all the way up into his eyeballs and brain. Nicholas had made an emergency appointment to see his dentist, who prescribed a ten-day course of antibiotics and referred Nicholas to an oral surgeon. “This is the last referral I’m giving you,” the dentist said as she angrily filled out the referral form. Months earlier, this same dentist had recommended Nicholas have four of his bottom molars extracted due to extensive, irreparable decay, but Nicholas had ignored the dentist’s advice, as he’d ignored all advice about his dental health for the better part of a decade.

And now I’m paying the price, he’d thought glumly at the time. I guess this is what my parents were always warning me about. Both of Nicholas’s parents had had significant dental problems, and for years had been nagging Nicholas constantly to go to the dentist and have his teeth taken care of. But he’d never heeded their warnings, and now here he was, with four bottom molars so full of cavities that there was no longer any hope to salvage them, not even with root canals. And unfortunately, the teeth would turn out to be the least of his problems.

Within a day of beginning antibiotics, the swelling in his face had gone down and Nicholas found himself able to eat and drink and go about his life more or less as usual. But then, at his hip hop dance class several days later, something exceedingly strange had occurred. The class had been warming up, performing a series of squats, kicks, crab-walks, and other exercises set to music. Nicholas was on his hands and feet, crab-walking across the dance studio, when he began to feel excruciatingly tired. His face burned red hot, and the muscles in his arms and legs began to quiver. At the same time, he suddenly realized that his bladder was full almost to bursting. I’m going to piss myself, he thought. Either that, or explode! He sprang to his feet and wobbled dizzily to the restroom, then stood over the toilet for a full minute as a powerful stream of crystal clear, colorless urine exploded out of his urethra and into the bowl.

When he was finished, he flushed, pulled up his shorts, and shakily rejoined the group. I have overtaxed myself, he thought. I am pushing myself too hard. He resolved to continue the exercises at a slower pace, not worrying about whether he was keeping up with the instructor or the rest of the students in the class. But even at a reduced pace, within minutes Nicholas felt his muscles begin to falter. His heart pounded, and he was out of breath. Five minutes later, his bladder was full again. He ducked into the restroom and once again let loose a mighty cascade of clear, colorless urine. When the urination felt complete, Nicholas squeezed his bladder and the muscles in his pelvic floor, pushing every drop of urine from his body. That’s all the pee, he thought. There can’t possibly be any more. Within ten minutes, however, Nicholas’s bladder was full yet again. By this point, Nicholas thought the other students in the class must have begun to notice his frequent bathroom trips. The students had divided into two lines, and were rehearsing the dance they would perform at the biannual dance concert held at the local high school. Nicholas was in the middle of one of these lines, far from the restroom. Slowly, without changing his facial expression, Nicholas began to dance backwards out of his position in line, heading in the direction of the restroom. Thankfully, most of the other students were too engrossed in their own dancing or too polite to notice Nicholas drifting out of his position in line. As subtly as he could, he danced into the restroom, and exhaled deeply as he began to urinate once more.

From that point on, Nicholas urinated upwards of twenty-five times a day, sometimes as many as forty or fifty. His urine was uniformly clear and colorless, except for the first urination of the day, when it took on a slight pale yellow hue. If he severely limited his water intake, he could get the total number of urinations down to fifteen or twenty, but on those days he felt dehydrated, sluggish, and fatigued. In fact, Nicholas felt sluggish and fatigued every day, even on days where he drank enough water to compensate for the water lost to his many urinations. The fatigue was so debilitating that Nicholas was no longer able to take his daily jogs, or go to his hip hop dance class or the hot yoga classes he’d attended religiously ever since giving up drugs and alcohol several years before. The fatigue was bad enough, too, that he’d had to quit his part-time job at a small beeswax candle factory three towns over, and cancel his registration for the yoga teacher training course he’d been planning to attend that summer.

“We’ll have to check your urine osmolality,” Nicholas’s doctor had said after Nicholas dutifully described his symptoms, “as well as your total urine output.” Nicholas left the doctor’s office that day with two plastic two-liter containers, and by the morning of the next was obliged to return to the hospital laboratory to request a third, having filled the first two all the way to the brim with pale, achromatic urine. Test results indicated a diagnosis of partial neurogenic diabetes insipidus, a deficiency of the hormone arginine vasopressin, which controls urine concentration and retention of water in the blood. Nicholas learned that partial neurogenic diabetes insipidus is typically caused by lesions on the pituitary gland. But after two MRI scans, no such lesions were discovered. A specialist prescribed desmopression, a synthetic version of arginine vasopressin, which, when Nicholas took it, had little to no effect on his symptoms.

“Have you tried any alternative medicine?” Nicholas’s doctor asked during one of their appointments. “There’s this doctor I follow on TikTok. Here, let me show you.” Nicholas’s doctor wheeled his desk chair over to Nicholas and pulled an iPhone out of the pocket of his lab coat. He held the phone up to Nicholas’s face, and Nicholas watched as a young, ample-breasted Asian woman in a bikini emerged from a swimming pool holding a can of alcoholic seltzer. Water dripped down the woman’s torso and face as she flashed a sultry grin and sipped the drink. “Hey guys,” she said. “It’s Dr. Emiko. Did you know that White Claw only has 100 calories per can? That’s less than a glass of wine.”

“Hold on,” said Nicholas’s doctor. “She has other videos, too, where she talks about hormones and stuff.”

Nicholas watched as the doctor scrolled TikTok. As he waited, Nicholas gazed at the doctor’s round, fat body. He was breathing heavily, still out of breath from having wheeled his chair across the room. Who does this guy think he is, giving me advice about my health? Nicholas thought fatphobically. He then scolded himself mentally for making such an offensive, insensitive remark, even if only to himself.

“Anyway,” the doctor said, putting his phone back in his lab coat pocket. “She offers consultations through her website.” He stood up, offering Nicholas his hand. “It’s worth a try at least.”

Nicholas hadn’t consulted the sexy doctor, but he had, over the course of the next three years, tried many forms of non-allopathic medicine, including supplements, Reiki, medical qigong, reconnective healing, acupuncture, chiropractics, shamanic healing, meditation and self-healing, traditional Chinese medicine, and various dietary and nutritional interventions. On the recommendation of a shamanic healer, he’d stopped taking the antiviral medication he’d been prescribed to treat his HIV. He’d even purchased a device that purported to send electric pulses through the skin and into the blood, cleansing it of toxins, fungi, and viruses. Most of all, Nicholas had prayed. But after almost three years, and countless unhelpful interventions, a terrible thing had begun to happen.

Nicholas, the perpetual optimist, had begun to give up hope.

***

Nicholas unzipped the foil coffee bag, poured beans into the grinder, and turned on the kettle. He unfolded a coffee filter and fitted it into the plastic dripper resting atop his favorite mug, a half-sized ceramic one decorated with a folksy picture of a wood duck. The rich, Earthy smell of coffee filled his nostrils as he ground the beans and spooned them into the filter. He’d been hesitant to add coffee back into his diet, worried that its acidity might produce inflammation or acne, but had recently read on the Ray Peat forum that coffee had “nutrient-like” properties, and that Ray Peat himself had recommended caffeine as a health supplement. This information, coupled with his prior knowledge that coffee contained hardly any harmful PUFAs, reassured Nicholas that he could once again begin enjoying his morning cup, as well as the occasional afternoon pick-me-up. Once he had his cup of freshly brewed black java in hand, Nicholas hurried back down the stairs to his basement quarters, spilling the coffee slightly as he crossed the threshold, and, banging his head against the philodendron a second time, took his seat.

“Ow,” he muttered.

He checked the clock on his computer screen: 4:06pm. Six minutes late. He opened a new tab in Chrome and logged into Twitter, where several messages awaited him. The messages were from Thomas, one of Nicholas’s mutuals. Thomas wished to interview Nicholas for his literary podcast, and the two had agreed on 4pm that day, December 4th, for Thomas to conduct the interview. The podcast was minor, and Nicholas hadn’t listened to any of the episodes, but he liked Thomas, and was interested to hear the types of questions he would ask. At the very least, Nicholas thought, it would allow him to practice speaking extemporaneously about his work, a skill he wished to cultivate.

“Son of a bitch,” said Thomas’s first message. “U coming????” said the second, followed by a Google Meet-Up link.

Nicholas clicked the link, and soon a box popped up on his screen with Thomas in it. Nicholas watched as Thomas popped a pill into his mouth and swallowed it dry.

“What was that?” Nicholas said.

“Adderall,” Thomas said. “Did you know I almost blocked you and everyone involved with The Calamity Manual?”

“Really?” said Nicholas. “Why?”

“Because you wrote a story with the N word in it!” Thomas exclaimed. “And I don’t agree with everything about The Calamity Manual, either. It’s just a difference of opinion.”

“Um – ” said Nicholas.

“And I don’t want to talk about it,” said Thomas.

“Okay,” said Nicholas, sipping his coffee discomfitedly. He had written a story containing the N word, months earlier, in February of that year. While surfing Twitter, he’d seen a post by Sometimes Magazine, one of the trendiest online publications, advertising a writing contest, the theme of which had been “Nontraditional Love Stories.”

Well, Nicholas had thought, I certainly have a lot of those.

In a fit of inspiration, Nicholas dashed off “Internet Boyfriend,” a 2000-word nonfiction essay about his online relationship with Dirk, a twenty-one-year-old gay Nazi from the Netherlands. The relationship had started when Nicholas was in the midst of a months-long psychotic break, and had messaged Dirk via Instagram after Dirk followed Nicholas and liked some of his posts. At the time, Nicholas hadn’t minded Dirk’s frequent racist, white supremacist comments, or his many offensive jokes about women and Jews. Looking back, Nicholas felt somewhat ashamed to have internet dated Dirk, but rationalized the relationship by chalking it up to his own mental illness. Nicholas believed that during his psychotic break, he’d been possessed by some kind of mischievous trickster spirit from another dimension, a spirit who ignored, or perhaps even intentionally flounced, conventional standards of social intercourse, including moral and ethical behavioral norms. The trickster-spirit-as-Nicholas was attracted to Dirk because Dirk was fearless, and outrageous, and didn’t care what people thought of him. It found in Dirk a kindred soul, a twin flame, someone who got off on the frisson produced in conflicts between various tribes of humans, who laughed at the ludicrous self-seriousness of men.

And besides, apart from Dirk, Nicholas had no other friends at the time. It is a well-established fact that no one wants to hang out with a psycho in the middle of a breakdown. But Dirk showed Nicholas true kindness. Love, even. Which had to count for something, Nicholas believed.

In order to add verisimilitude to his essay, Nicholas included several DMs and text message exchanges verbatim, including ones where Dirk had used inappropriate and obscene language, like the N word. It made no sense to censor these comments, Nicholas reasoned, because they were the actual words Dirk had spoken. Nicholas felt that as an artist, it was his responsibility to deal in unvarnished truths. His philosophy regarding immoral language was the same as the one Charlotte Brontë outlined in the 1850 “Preface” to the new edition of her recently deceased sister Emily’s then-scandalous novel, Wuthering Heights. In her “Preface,” Charlotte Brontë wrote:

A large class of readers [...] will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only - a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologize; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full length. The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does — what feeling it spares — what horror it conceals.

Like Charlotte Brontë, Nicholas believed it a rational plan to write words at full length. He knew that Dirk, like Emily Brontë’s fictional Heathcliff, was a profane and violent person, wont to garnish his discourse with all manner of expletives. But Nicholas believed, in his heart of hearts, that no one was hiding anything by concealing the letters of certain words behind dashes. To utter the phrase “the N word” was the same, he felt, as uttering the actual N word itself. It transmitted the same meaning, and even inscribed identical sounds into the mind of the listener. He also believed that words placed under societal taboos would only increase in power the more they were prohibited. While he personally found the N word offensive and repugnant, he believed that there were many reasonable aesthetic justifications for its use in literature and art. Art must reflect the reality of life, he believed, including the darkest parts of it. In the case of his essay, Nicholas thought it was important to provide unedited examples of Dirk’s racist speech, even if such language provoked a visceral reaction from readers. Literature should express all the beauty and horror of life, reasoned Nicholas. To attempt to conceal the horror would only lessen the impact of the beauty.

Nicholas had been writing and publishing stories online for more than a year, and had taken pains to surround himself with people who shared his free speech absolutism, and other philosophies about literature and art. Nevertheless, the publication of “Internet Boyfriend” caused a ripple of controversy to spread through the cyberwriting community. Following reader complaints, the editors of Sometimes pulled the story from their website. A day later, it was republished at The Calamity Manual, another internet magazine specializing in transgressive and outsider literature. Nicholas’s tweet promoting the story received hundreds of likes and retweets, and the editors of The Calamity Manual wrote to Nicholas to inform him that the story had been viewed over 500 times in its first day of publication, an impressive total in the world of small niche online presses. The controversy was mentioned on several “right-wing” podcasts, which Nicholas felt nervous about. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be associated with the so-called “alt right.” But what could he do? It was out of his hands. The story was out in the world, to be read and judged by the public.

Oh well, he thought. No press is bad press, I suppose.

Nicholas sometimes wondered if he was going down a dark path. He had always considered himself a progressive, liberal-minded person. Before his symptoms began, Nicholas had been on a path of healing, spirituality, yoga, and light. Now, he was often grumpy and crotchety. Many days, he hardly even left bed. Making a simple trip to the grocery store could lead to total physical and mental exhaustion. His muscles were constantly sore from lack of use and dehydration. He felt like he’d become a different person. His personality, his emotional life, his physical body: all had been transformed by constant urination, dehydration, and fatigue. A previous version of Nicholas would have agreed with Thomas, would have argued that to even print the N word, regardless of context, was immoral and harmful to Black people. What had changed? Had he merely grown tired of the moralizing antics of the hyperwoke left? Or was it possible that his illness was turning him right wing?

Am I redpilled? he wondered. Or am I just exhausted and dehydrated, and a narcissist?

Nicholas considered himself a performer first and foremost. But once he became ill, he found it more difficult to perform as his drag character, Miss Harmony. Every time he had a gig, he was stuck in bed with exhaustion for three to five days afterwards. Writing had become his primary means of creative expression, mostly due to the simple fact that he could do it from bed. In fact, Nicholas hadn’t started writing and publishing at all until his symptoms began. In a way, he felt like writing had become a kind of surrogate for performance, a way to satisfy the same creative impulse without sacrificing his health every time he did it. But the more he wrote and published, and the more time he spent on literary Twitter, the more he felt an odd shift taking place in his moral and political values. But how much of it was real, he wondered, and how much was simply theater? How much was a reflection of his true self, his creative spirit, his inner light? And how much was an expression of his fatigue, exhaustion, and lack of proper hydration? Nicholas wondered, too, if he would go back to being normal once his health improved. In many ways, he missed being a “libtard,” a word many of his online friends used to describe liberals. Things had been much simpler then, he thought. Less ambiguous. The whole world drawn in black and white.

He didn’t explain much of this on Thomas’s podcast, though. Thomas didn’t seem very interested in the topic.

***

“So you had a psychotic break?” said Thomas. “What was that like?”

“It’s difficult to describe,” said Nicholas. “Language requires a shared reality that we can all access. During psychosis, you become privy to a different reality, one that isn’t shared. Or at least, not among everyone. And without that shared reality, the power of language starts to break down. You can’t describe the things you see, or the experiences you have, or even the sense impressions you get, because they don’t correspond to objects or ideas in the reality we all share. I guess the term for it would be ‘hallucinations.’ But everything I saw then, that I know wasn’t objectively real? At the time, that stuff seemed more real than anything else I’d ever seen before.”

“Whoa,” said Thomas. “I’m getting anxious just hearing you describe that.”

Nicholas wasn’t sure what to say. Thomas did look rather agitated.

“Er…” he said. “Should we talk about something else, then?”

“So you still live with your parents?” Thomas asked. “What’s that like?”

“I don’t still live with my parents,” Nicholas said. “I live with them again. I left home when I was sixteen, and didn’t move back until a few years ago, when I was getting sober. Obviously it’s not ideal, and hopefully it won’t be permanent. But at the same time, I’m grateful to have a family who –”

“Have you always been thin?” Thomas asked. “When did you start losing your hair?”

Nicholas ran his fingers across his scalp self-consciously.

“I haven’t lost my hair,” he said. “I just prefer shaving my head.”

Nicholas reached for his coffee mug. The coffee was by now lukewarm. Only one mouthful remained. He lifted the mug to his lips and tipped back his head, filling his mouth with coffee. He held it in his mouth until it turned cold, savoring the rich, bitter flavor. He imagined the coffee trickling down his throat and into his stomach, then being absorbed into his bloodstream through his stomach lining. He imagined the liquid zooming from his blood into his kidneys, then on into his bladder. As he’d done countless times over the past three years, he tried to will his body into correcting its inappropriate overproduction of urine. He visualized water going back into his bloodstream instead of collecting in his bladder. He tried to remember what it felt like to be hydrated, energetic, and healthy. What it felt like to run three miles every day. The way breath filled his lungs while he jogged in the early morning air. The sensation of sunlight warming his sweat-soaked face. 

“I am the master of my own reality,” he whispered.

“What?” said Thomas.

Nicholas zoned back into reality. He couldn’t even remember what the question had been. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, discomfort radiating from his urine-filled bladder.

“Can we stop now?” he said. “I’m starting to get pretty tired.”

That night in bed, Nicholas read The Shining by Stephen King. He had just reached the section of the book where Dick Hallorann, the Overlook Hotel’s cook, reenters the plot. While working at a resort in Florida during the Overlook’s off-season, Hallorann receives a series of psychic distress signals from Danny Torrance, whose father, Jack, has been driven mad by the demonic presence haunting the Overlook. Hallorann then becomes one of the novel’s main characters, and the reader follows his journey from Florida to Colorado, where he will attempt to rescue Danny and his mother from the evil hotel. Starting at around page 450, Nicholas began to notice more and more instances of the N word. All the sections about Hallorann seemed to contain at least one instance of the slur. Nicholas wondered if Stephen King’s audience in the 1970s, which surely had included at least some black readers, had tolerated King’s frequent use of the N word due to the high degree of racism present in society during that period. Were people saying it more back then? he wondered. Or had everyone just gotten more sensitive? Were all these N words really necessary? Could King get away with using it today? Would he even attempt it? Would it be so wrong if he did? Nicholas opened his laptop and googled “Stephen King N word.” He scrolled through pages of results on websites like Quora, Reddit, and Goodreads. Some posts defended Stephen King in his use of the slur, but many argued that it was offensive, even harmful for him to include it in his books. One post compared King unfavorably to Mark Twain, the latter of whom, according to the person who wrote the post, was “enacting an anti-racist critique” by using the N word. Nicholas wasn’t sure what it meant to enact an anti-racist critique by using the N word. 

Sounds exhausting, he thought.

Later, Nicholas lay in bed, staring at the wall, where the outline of a dark figure was faintly visible. It was roughly the size of a large human, but completely dark, except for two pinpricks of light where the eyes were. Shadow man, Nicholas thought. A squirming sensation coursed through his flesh. He felt almost paralyzed with fear, unsure whether he should look away, turn on the light, or utter some prayer or spell. The dark presence on the wall did not exude a particularly sinister aura, but Nicholas was wary all the same. He watched as the shadowy figure lifted one spindly arm and gave a slight wave. Nicholas looked around the room, noticing other shadows on the floor and wall, and felt that all of them were suddenly conscious, sentient, searching, and all focused on him. The squirming sensation in his flesh increased. Rippling waves of uncomfortable stimulation traveled up and down his arms, face, and chest. His heart rate increased, and he was nauseous. He closed his eyes.

“I forgive,” Nicholas whispered. “I forgive, I forgive, I forgive.”

***

The next morning, Nicholas stood in the kitchen, watching his mother eat processed, wheat-based, PUFA-containing sesame sticks while staring blankly out the window. Over the past several years, Nicholas’s mother had fallen victim to an array of health problems, including cancer, spinal issues, and eye deterioration. Nicholas sometimes tried to point out ways in which his mother’s poor diet might be contributing to her overall ill health, but his mother rarely appreciated such unasked-for interventions. Nicholas had recently read Tao Lin’s autofiction novel Leave Society, in which the protagonist, Li, frequently offers his mother suggestions regarding supplements, medications, dental work, and nutrition. While reading Leave Society, Nicholas felt some slight pangs of jealousy whenever Li and his mother conversed about health. Unlike Nicholas’s mother, Li’s mother took seriously the health suggestions proffered by Li. While she didn’t always take Li’s advice, she at least seemed appreciative of the efforts Li made on her behalf. Nicholas wished his own mother could be more like Li’s. He wondered if perhaps his mother’s willfulness was a result of her western upbringing, or the feminism she’d discovered when she was still in her twenties.

Nicholas toyed with the idea of emailing Tao Lin to ask for advice about his health issues, and about dealing with his mother and her willfulness, but decided it would be inappropriate, given that they’d only interacted once, when Tao had written to politely decline two pieces of writing Nicholas had sent to Muumuu House during its open submission period. “Feel free to send more when we open again,” Tao had written.
Maybe I’ll write a piece of autofiction describing my symptoms and send it to Muumuu House when they open again, Nicholas thought. And Tao Lin will read about my symptoms and take a special interest in my case. The idea seemed at least slightly less inappropriate, if more passive aggressive, than asking directly, and Nicholas resolved to make an attempt.

It’s worth a try at least, he thought.

***

Several nights later, Nicholas checked the clock on his laptop. 2:36am. I need to stop staying up so late, he thought. I need to stop looking at Twitter. From the laptop speakers, healing ambient music played. With great effort, Nicholas sat up and rolled himself out of bed and down onto the floor. He sat cross-legged on the rug, looking at his reflection in the full-length mirror. In his right hand he held a lemurian quartz crystal. In his left, a small piece of meteoric glass known as moldavite. “My thoughts create my reality,” Nicholas whispered. “I am the master of my destiny.” Then, in a slightly louder voice, he said, still looking at his reflection in the mirror, “I forgive you. I forgive you for all of it. I love you, and I forgive you. It doesn’t matter what you did, and it doesn’t matter why. None of that matters now. You deserve to heal. And I forgive you for everything.”

Nicholas unfocused his eyes. Almost immediately, a hazy gray shimmer appeared in his bedroom’s reflected mirror image. As his own reflection became muzzier, Nicholas fancied he could see another presence hidden inside it. The eyes were larger than Nicholas’s, the pupils fully dilated. The flesh on its face was gray, saggy, and paper thin. The eyebrows were white, and as he examined them, the hairs seemed to change, curling around themselves and growing longer, like ivy creeping up the side of a house. This is another Nicholas, thought Nicholas. The presence seemed pleased when Nicholas thought this. Its upper lip curled, and sharp fangs poked out in a wolf-like grin.

“Hello,” said Nicholas.

He waited, watching the other Nicholas watch him.

“What do you want?” Nicholas asked. “If I give you what you want, will you go away?”

Nicholas and the other Nicholas regarded one another.

“Answer me,” said Nicholas. “I’m not afraid of you. Tell me: what do you want?”

Minutes passed. The only sounds were the low hum of Nicholas’s HEPA filter and the soft electronic pulse of the music.

Nicholas said, “If I give you what you want, will you go away?”

But the other Nicholas said nothing.

*

MISS UNITY was an American drag queen. This is her last published writing.

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