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F ICT ION
Neither Here nor There By Lucy Faye Rosenthal
I met Devin in a basement in Tivoli, between walls of pink fiberglass and a concrete floor that was sticky with spilled Genesee. We were watching a three-piece local band sweating and playing simple, spirited punk music beneath the cool glow of a work lamp. They looked like they were around my age, early twenties, and so did Devin. He was standing near me in the small crowd. I noticed his t-shirt first and his tattoo second. The shirt was vertically-striped — mint green and salmon and white — and the tattoo was just below the inner ditch of his elbow — a line of text rendered in hand-poked dots of black ink: Nobody broke your heart. I leaned into him, gesturing toward his forearm. “You broke your own, ‘cause you can’t finish what you start?” He smiled and nodded. After the band packed it up, Devin and I drank upstairs in the kitchen until it got late, and I walked him out to his car. It was an old navy-blue Volvo slathered in bumper stickers — I Stand with Planned Parenthood and No Farms No Food and Radio Catskill — and when he kissed me, he held me as if he were
