by Aureleo Sans

Linda Sormin, *Mula Ni Tano*, glazed ceramic, gold leaf, found string, discarded plastic 3D misprints, epoxy resin, watercolor on paper, 27 x 24 x 27 inches, 2022. Photo credit: Dave Schmitz, courtesy of the Artist and Patricia Sweetow Gallery.

Shame Boy

Aureleo Sans | NOV 2023 | Issue 29

You never wanted to be normal people. That’s why the neighbors called you Shame Boy although you weren’t a boy anymore—barely a man. They knew about your home life, the reasons why you never looked them in the eye, why you laughed at sad shit, why you walked around shirtless, with your fly down, suggesting crack. At least they thought they knew. They kept a tally of the caseworker visits to your house. After the visits, you’d see them throw up their literal hands and loudtalk, like they also thought you were deaf: “There’s nothing we can do when the system doesn’t do its job.”

Even though you still lived with Ma, you were really on your own, always had been, always would be.

When Ma was in one of her states, which was frequent, she slumped in a corner and ranted about villains. Other times, she’d dote on you, cook your meals, bleach your stained shirts and underwear white, do all the chores, moonlight as your security guard when people tried to knock down the door or when gunshots pealed, reassured you that you were not like all the other boys but instead a holy glory like a celestial body or a thick-trunked ceiba tree.

But when she felt bad, Ma soured. She accused you of seeing Papá. She’d fixate on small, telltale details, the way you sat in a chair, the way you chomped down on a piece of Dubble Bubble bubble gum, the way your legs grew long and muscular, all souvenirs of a long-lost ghost, which she discovered daily in you.

She’d say, “You’re parroting your Papá’s behaviors.”

“You’re conspiring with Papá.”

“You’re just like Papá, who let slutty women take advantage, sluts who would take all your money and rob you of a future.”

“You,” she said, “would do to her what Papá did to her, but she had fists now and she wasn’t going to let herself be choked and smacked around so easily. She knew what you were up to, the loathsome things you had in your heart.”

Her scripts repeated, accumulated lurid detail. When you weren’t acting like Papá, you were letting other men, bad men, slip their dicks inside you, turn you into a faggot and a maricón and from that, there was no coming back because Catholic forgiveness only extended so far.

For a time, you lived in your mother’s alternate reality. She wanted to give you her shame like a lump of coal at Christmas. But she didn’t notice that you received a different gift: a motto to live by, a reason to thrive, a body electric. To be honest, you weren’t even sure you liked the bodies of men, including your own. Yeah, you got an erection but it was whatever. Sometimes you do things and you don’t know why you do them, like you go on autopilot, like you lose what it is that makes you human.

Bodies of men were sour, smelling of onions or Dark Temptation or Old Spice Pure Sport, always, always one of the three. Their skin sagged like cheap dollar store purses, their penises, urgent and unlovely. Too small, too tall, too banal, too rubbery and minutes later, also too hard. No matter how they were decorated—with a couple freckles or a fire truck-red tip or a profusion of foreskin, there was no way to spruce up a dick, an item devoid of adornment, an item of utility. Worse yet were balls, the shipwreck syllables of “testicles,” the semi-translucent, shimmery skin, the hair that got everywhere or the absence of hair and resemblance to hairless rats, the stubble that grated against your skin, the bitter blandness of gluey jizz, the whiff of bleach, the fact that you had to put your mouth on a slit that pissed piss. Don’t get it twisted. You had zero interest in women and you didn’t want to be one. Rather, you longed for a body that was Ken Doll smooth—without holes. You hated peeing. It took too long, and you had to do it too many times a day. It was a downer.

But, one way or another, you had to remind yourself: a human being has to live, and you almost always have to make money. When you calculated the distance between you and A-B Honor Roll and a high school diploma and staying out of trouble and community college and real college and still staying out of trouble, you adjusted your expectations down. You began to prowl the rest stops and the Buc-ees of the world. At home, Ma said, “The only thing I ever wanted was for my son to not be who he is.” You never bothered to respond. Like the teachers said at school, “Actions speak louder than words.” And so when you wrapped your lips around an immovable object, when strange men forced your head deeper into their crotches, when you gagged and your eyes teared involuntarily, you thought of your mother. When you stood up in the restroom stalls and you paper toweled down your damp and stained knees, you thought of her and you smiled.

aureleo sans is a Colombian-American, non-binary, queer, formerly unhoused writer and poet with a disability who resides in San Antonio, Texas. She has been named a Sewanee Writers Conference Scholar, a Tin House Scholar, a Roots Wounds Words Writers Retreat Fellow, a Lambda Literary Fellow, an ASF Workshop Fellow, and a Periplus Fellow. Her work has appeared in Shenandoah, Electric Literature, Passages North, the 2023 Best Micro Fiction Anthology, and elsewhere.

Linda Sormin explores fragility, upheaval, migration, survival, and change through sculpture and site-responsive installations. She was a 2021 and 2023 participant at European Ceramic Workcentre in the Netherlands, creating new work for three exhibitions: Ceramics in the Expanded Field: Sculpture, Performance and the Possibilities of Clay at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, USA (October 16, 2021 - April 2, 2023), No Boundaries at Messums, London, UK, a solo exhibition at Messums, Wiltshire (March 5 – May 1, 2022), and a two-person exhibition at Peach Corner Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark (September 29 – November 5, 2022).
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Sormin lives and works in New York City, and is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at New York University. She has taught ceramics at Emily Carr University, Rhode Island School of Design, Sheridan College and Alfred University. Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Sormin moved to Canada with her family at the age of five. She has a BA in English Literature and worked in community development for four years in Thailand and Laos. She received degrees from Andrews University (BA, English Literature, 1993), Sheridan College (Diploma, Craft and Design, 2001) and Alfred University (MFA, Ceramic Art, 2003). Sormin’s work is included in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC, USA), Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON, Canada), CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art (Middelfart, Denmark), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY, USA), Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), Arizona State University Museum, (Tempe, AZ, USA), World Ceramic Exposition (Gyeonggi Province, Korea), and Schein-Joseph Museum of Ceramic Art (Alfred, NY, USA).