Simon Iskander

After being kicked out of his drunk, abusive father's home for being gay, 22 year-old Stanley embarks on a road trip with two friends and an unlikely companion. Leaving his small Midwest hometown for the first time, he embarks on a journey of adventure down a highway of discovery.

A streak of sunlight seared across Rich’s face through a crack in the curtain. Moaning, he turned over. Although his body demanded it of him, he did not go back to sleep. He wouldn’t allow it. Not a single night had passed where he didn’t dream of that fateful day, three months short of a year prior, when his life had been turned upside down. Drifting back to sleep would mean revisiting those images, succumbing to the night terrors yet again. When would he know peace? He hadn’t been able to rest

This wasn’t the way his dad should’ve found out – if he were to ever find out at all. But as it were, Stanley knew the gig was up when he opened a copy of the Eaton Gazette and saw his own panicked face in a crowd of other gay men desperately fleeing a burning nightclub in the outskirts of the Midwest town of the same name. The fact of it being an attack would garner no sympathy from Stanley’s staunchly homophobic, slicked-hair, goatee'd, beer-bellied drunkard of a father. Stanley had always fan

It's the 90's. Stanley lives in his trailer park home in a small town in the Midwest with his drunk, abusive father. After being outed by the local news following a fire in a local gay-bar he frequented, Stanley knows the gig is up and packs up to hit the road, direction anywhere. Yet there's something in the small town of Eaton that Stanley can't leave just yet...

The January air blew a cruel chill on Rich’s face. Reaching in to his jacket pocket, he retrieved a pack of cigarettes. As he inhaled the first drag like his life depended on it, his face flushed thinking about what Philip had said. He wanted the words to pass through him like the fog, never to be seen again, but they left a mark, like a sodden, persistent patch on his clothes. Being alone with his self-pity, his grief, was a drug; he realized that now. There was never too much of it he could ha

Thanks everyone, for your comments so far. More exciting drama coming your way as the story builds up.

He remembered the first time he'd visited Philip alone, when he was a naive student, fresh off the boat and new to the town. His uncle had sent him a chaffeur. It was a drastic change from the dirty busses he'd wait seemingly endlessly in the cold for. He'd never remembered his uncle to be that rich, at least not in the limited amount of time he'd spent with him, on the rare occasion when he'd visit with his mother, or during college open day, the last time he'd seen him. Back then, his boys Adr

Following the loss of his boyfriend in a tragic accident, Rich is left in a state of limbo, unable to process or control his emotions. When reaching out to his wealthy, secretive uncle for legal advice, Rich's state leads him to actions he'd never thought possible; and down a rabbit-hole that will change the course of his life forever.

Rich never failed to be impressed when he walked into his uncle’s home. Philip – who was technically his mother’s cousin – lived in a sprawling 6-bedroom villa sitting on the eastern edge of Lake Marron with his wife and two teenage kids. Its massive pine doors gave way to a splendid faux-marble foyer from which you half-expected a butler to emerge. As it were, Evelyn, his mild-mannered wife, was the one to greet him, and receive his gift – a box of truffles coated in powdered chocolate, which s

As I idly scroll through the remaining profiles, a new face pops up. I instantly recognize it as Ian. The doorbell rings. My eyes zip from phone to door in rapid succession. There he is. And why am I so surprised? It’s not like I hadn’t suspected it. I had. Strongly. So why is my heart racing? Why am I crestfallen? Is it because any chance of it being impossible had been destroyed? Or was it my residual, paradoxical homophobia, still present in my nascent coming out? Ring, ring.

Eyes linger far too long on me in the changing room. What exactly is it about me that’s worth looking at? A glance in the mirror confirms I haven’t made any embarrassing errors in dress or hairstyle, which eases my nerves a bit. This starts to feel like the new normal; shot nerves, jitters, the creeping feeling of self-consciousness that, contrary to any of my expectations, had intensified rather than abated with age, and had accelerated when my feelings for Stan had developed. Nobody inside

Love can be described as a restlessness of the mind. At least, that is how it felt to me. And I did not hesitate to call what I felt love, because what part of what I felt towards him be any less? Had the Greek elders been at my table for dinner, I would not have changed my mind. Lust, infatuation, desire; they were merely subcategories, geni in the family of that miracle that Sophocles said frees us of all the weight and pain of life. But I was not restricted to any one of these. What I felt wa

“Jack the legs, keep your elbows steady, and, most importantly, keep the core stable.” Stan’s head tilts towards me, jaw slack, paying close attention. A single drop of sweat slithers down his chin and liberates itself onto the mat below. I look around to see if anyone has overheard, not knowing whether I’m paranoid for my own sake or on behalf of my tutee, sensitive as I am to his potential embarrassment about being guided but also to the sound of my own voice, particularly if I’d doled out

"We look at each other for the longest two seconds, a knowing look, communicating something beyond the restraints of speech but to which we are both finely attuned; a common language...which, in its evolution, had turned our signals into pictures so vivid we were terrified of giving anything deeper than superficial away, and so we turn our heads, almost simultaneously, focusing our attention elsewhere." When Stan's friend offers to be his personal trainer, the offer is too good to refuse. But the experience threatens to transform the pair in ways neither could have predicted.

His feet flew off the footstool and landed on the floor loudly. He pitched his body forward and mashed two buttons on the controller in his hands, eyes wide and glued to the screen. “Come on!” He spurred his on-screen character on. I could just let him win… Despite only half-focusing on the game, I had not had much trouble beating Charlie consistently. It wasn’t his fault, I’d just had the game for longer. But even with a handicap I was still able to dominate. Frankly, I wondered why he