Joshua Ambre
FREEDOM TRAIL

In front of the visitor center, our tour guide adjusts his breeches. They’re slightly too tight to be family-friendly, but I’m relieved to have something to look at besides old buildings for the next hour. I watch him hitch them up a final time, the hem of his blue frock coat barely concealing the bulge. Beside me, my sister nudges me on the elbow. I grin at her, anticipating a lewd and hilarious aside, but all she does is point at Craig feeding a Nutri-Grain bar to a squirrel. I fake a smile while she snaps his picture, and another one when he runs back to join the group, just in time for the guide to begin his spiel.

“Welcome ladies and gents, pilgrims and pub-crawlers, tea-spillers and turncoats! I hope you left your sea legs aboard the Mayflower, because today we embark on a walking tour of our nation’s most historic sites!”

I dig the toe of my shoe into the dead grass, wishing I was digging my own grave. History is bad enough between the covers of a textbook, let alone acted out poorly between noon and one o’clock, my stomach already clamoring for lunch. I wish I could say the tour was Mabel’s idea, or, even better, Craig’s. But the truth is it was no one’s idea at all. It sort of just happened, the inevitable result of the three of us sitting silent in her apartment, having exhausted all our life updates within the first half-hour of my visit. “I’m not big into history either,” my sister said, purchasing the tickets on her phone. “But it’s one of those things I’ve been meaning to check off my list.”

My sister is living in Boston now, making a killing in big pharma. She hates it when I say it like that. She prefers to call it a living, not a killing, especially since the drugs they make save lives. I prefer to call it what it is: class warfare. “Whose lives are you really saving?” I ask her. “The rich or the poor? And who ends up footing the bill?” At this she’ll shake her head and fall silent. My sister may win at a lot of things, but arguments have never been one of them.

“Play nice with your sister,” Chase had warned me on the drive to the airport. “If we move out there, we may have to stay with her for a while.”

“True. You know what, on second thought, maybe Texas isn’t so bad. What if we just bought guns instead? If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

This got a laugh out of Chase, followed by a heavy silence. They took one hand off the wheel to fiddle with their earring, a small pearl at the end of a silver chain.

“Just try to keep an open mind . . . and an open eye out for apartments.”

The group is moving now, threading its way carefully, almost reverently, along the thin brick line marking the Freedom Trail. The cheery patriotism behind such a name juts out at me like one of the sidewalk’s many loose cobblestones. Supposedly, in recent years, the tour has expanded to include sites of Black history as well, no doubt capped off with a performative placard and an asterisked footnote in the brochure. It’s hard to imagine anything more given the tour’s chief demographic: white Midwesterners gawking beneath Harvard beanies, purchased mere hours ago at one of the many vendors lining the Common. Even as we walk, the couple in front of me keeps stopping abruptly to take pictures.

“Check it out,” says the husband, zooming in on our guide’s three-cornered hat. “He looks just like that guy from Pirates of the Caribbean.”

“Jack Sparrow?”

“What do you mean ‘Jack Sparrow?’ Does he look like a pirate to you? I’m talking about the other guy, the British one.”

“Ohhh,” says his wife, stepping backward onto my big toe. “I see it now. Too bad it’s not Johnny Depp, though. Now him I’d need a picture of.”

She proceeds to take one anyway, along with a slow-motion video after her finger slides too far to the left. Her husband tries to help her, but he can’t on account of his gloves: sleek caramel leather, surprisingly chic and feminine, most definitely a gift from his wife. He plucks them off with impatience. I can feel myself getting impatient as well. I’m on the verge of saying something rude when Craig comes up beside me.

“That costume is amazing, isn’t it? Next time we stop I’ve got to get a picture.”

Craig’s enthusiasm might have made sense if he hadn’t grown up here, or some town near here, according to Mabel. She met him at a farmer’s market in Cambridge, buying lettuce, which quickly turned into him buying her a bundle of sunflowers. There’s a picture of this exact moment on my sister’s Facebook, which has remained her profile pic for the eleven months they’ve been dating. “I just love that picture of them,” my mother tells me whenever she gets the chance. “Remind me to have her send it to me so I can frame it.” This despite the fact that Chase and I have been dating for almost three years, and there are no pictures of us in the house. Or the fact that she and my dad hardly ask about them, unless to clarify, for the hundredth time, whether they should refer to them as my boyfriend or my partner. As if they’ve ever introduced them to family as anything more than a friend. Needless to say, the picture always slips my mind.

“Oh my gosh, Caleb! Did you see that little guy? He looked just like Freckles!”

Following my sister’s gaze, I turn to see a squat spaniel with reddish-brown spots being paraded through the park by its owner. She’s not wrong; the resemblance to our old family dog is striking, uncanny, even, right down to the little twist in his tail. I start to smile, but it quickly fades when I remember how he died. Well, not how so much as where: a thousand miles from home, in the middle of New Jersey, of all places, where my sister was studying at Princeton. She had begged our parents to let her take him to college, something they’d never done for me. “She needs at least one friendly face,” they’d said, “all alone up there. If you’d gone out of state, we would have done the same thing.” I guess, in their minds, Texas Tech wasn’t far enough away for me to get lonely. Or else they assumed, and assumed correctly, that this was a feeling I was already used to.

“Who’s Freckles?” asks Craig.

My sister launches into a full biography of “her” old dog, but I don’t get the chance to correct her. The guide has stopped us to point out the Massachusetts State House, its massive gold dome blazing like August in the feeble October light.

“Now there’s an egg I’d love to find in my Easter basket.” The husband directs this comment at our guide, who smiles at him dotingly. “Buy a hell of a lot more than chocolate with that.”

“Not all that glitters is gold!” the guide says, wagging his finger dramatically. “Well, actually, in this case it is. Twenty-four carat to be exact, but it wasn’t always that way. The dome was completed in 1798, but the gold leaf wouldn’t come until the nineteenth century. Can you imagine if the government had tried to fund that back in the 1700s, on the heels of the Revolution? With taxes like that, they’d be dumping more than tea into the harbor!”

From the group, a smattering of laughter, most of it nasal, all of it forced. 

“There was only one other time when the dome wasn’t gold. During World War II they covered it with gray paint to escape detection in the event of an air raid.” 

The guide pauses to let the gravity of this tidbit sink in. We all wait, breathless, for the husband to make another comment, but he’s busy helping his wife with her phone. The guide seems almost disappointed, like he’d conjured up scenes of planes dropping bombs solely for this one man’s amusement. As we walk to the next stop on the tour, I turn to my sister and laugh.

 “An air raid? Are you serious?” She and Craig look over at me, but their faces don’t register the joke. “I’m sorry, but why the fuck would the Nazis ever bomb Boston? To cut off the Allies’ supply of clam chowder? It’s not like it’s New York.”

“Whoa there, partner.” Craig places a stern hand on my shoulder. “Those are fighting words ’round these here parts. Boston’s got plenty the Nazis would want. Harvard. MIT. All those brilliant scientists. Like your sister.” He wraps his arm around her waist. Beaming, she kisses him. “I mean, technically all of that’s in Cambridge, but still.”

 “Yeah, Caleb, listen to Craig.” My sister smiles up at him, placing one hand on his scrawny, concave chest. “He’s a local. And anyway, Boston is way more of a target than Abilene. You’ll be safe there, don’t worry.”

In the pause that follows, they kiss again, only this time Mabel’s eyes stay open. She’s staring off into the distance, which is smart of her, because if she so much as glanced at me I would have flipped her off over Craig’s shoulder. She knows damn well how hard I’ve tried—how hard Chase and I have both been trying—to get the hell out of Texas. The truth is she’s right. There’s nothing for us there. Nothing for me but my dead-end job selling kitchen appliances, and nothing for Chase but danger. They’ve always been a bit fluid when it comes to gender, wearing crop tops and pearls, dangly earrings, pants from the women’s section. Recently they’ve started wearing skirts as well. Not the trendy kilt-looking ones donned by muscle gays on TikTok, but actual flowy garments. I think they look great, of course, but the stares from strangers, the whispered comments, the hot rush in my stomach whenever we pass a group of men on the street—straight or gay, sadly it makes no difference—leave me worried for their safety. I often wonder if things would be different on the East Coast. More accepting. And yet the only one to make it here is my cis het sister, the only one in our family to get everything she ever wanted.

“Yeah, thanks,” I tell her. “When World War III hits, I’ll keep both of you in my prayers.”

Our guide is leading us across the street now, his outfit made more starkly anachronistic by the passing cars. Just a short walk up the road to the Granary Burying Ground, he assures us, where we’ll see the tombs of Paul Revere, John Hancock, and, of course, Sam Adams.

“Sadly, there’s no tasting flight included with this tour,” he says, winking at the husband.

“Hey, can we make a pit stop? My wife has to go to the bathroom.”

The man gestures toward the 7-Eleven on our right. The guide blinks rapidly, clearly taken aback. Whether from the sudden intrusion of modernity or the man’s total disregard of his joke, it’s difficult to tell.

“Sure,” he says. He tugs sharply on the cuffs of his coat. “But please, do make haste.”

The husband and wife disappear through the automatic doors, leaving the tour group strangely silent. Besides the ambient noise of traffic, the only other sound is a sweet yet tinny melody—orchestral, classical—which I hadn’t noticed before. I look around for the source, and it’s then that I notice the speakers under the awning of the 7-Eleven, piping the music out into the street.

“Do you hear that?” I ask my sister. “Is that Mozart?”

“Actually, it’s Vivaldi,” she says. “Four Seasons. Which one is it, babe?” She turns toward Craig, who cocks his head to listen. “I can’t quite tell.”

“Hmm, it’s definitely not ‘Spring.’ Maybe ‘Autumn’? No, it’s got to be ‘Winter.’ Yep, it’s ‘Winter’—you can tell from the violins.”

Craig wags his hands like he’s conducting, and Mabel showers him with pretend applause. They both start laughing. Craig laughs the loudest, though, clearly because he’s proud of himself. For knowing the music, for landing a joke, for snagging a girl like Mabel in the first place—I don’t know. It makes me cringe just watching. They’re perfect for each other.

“Damn. Y’all really do live different out here. Even your gas stations are classy.”

My sister starts humming softly in the back of her throat. It’s her way of revving up to cut me off.

“You know why they play that music, don’t you?”

I hesitate, wondering why there has to be a reason. Is beauty not enough? Or culture? Living in a place like Boston, I would think she’d understand that. Then again, what do I know? I’ve never even made it out of Abilene.

“Because it sounds nice?”

“Nope. Homeless people.” I can tell she’s waiting for my reaction, but honestly I don’t have one to give her. “It’s to keep them awake at night. So they can’t sleep out front. Isn’t that so fucked?”

Her voice is ridged with outrage, but I can tell there’s a valley tucked away behind it, weirdly happy and green. I know she’s not really glad about the homeless people. She’s just excited to be the one to tell me, to prove, yet again, that she knows better and more.

“Damn,” is all I can think of to say. 

The husband and wife reemerge from the 7-Eleven, and we jump right back into 1776. The guide is going on about some church up the way, but all I can focus on is the music. The violins are screeching now, each note the serrated tooth of a saw. Back and forth, back and forth, I imagine the musicians’ arms moving, turning entire forests into stumps, and with that wood building even more violins, each one shriller than the last. Somewhere on the walk to the graveyard, it occurs to me that we do this in Texas too. There’s a strip mall downtown that blasts the radio after hours, only instead of classical they play country, twangy songs about cowboys yearning for home. It’s strange, how many songs like that there are. How the singers never seem to get where they’re trying to go.

A wrought-iron gate looms open to our left, black teeth protruding from the red gum of the cobblestones.

“And here we are at the burying ground. As you can see, it’s a bit crowded—more than five thousand bodies here in all—so I leave you to explore at your leisure. All I ask is that, out of respect for our dearly departed, you please stick to the path.”

Our guide steps aside so the group can enter the gates single file. Craig and my sister shuffle awkwardly beside me, trying to decide who should go in first.

“Y’all go ahead,” I tell them.

“Are you sure?” says Mabel. “But you’re the one visiting.”

She clings to Craig’s arm as she says this. It’s like she’s afraid to talk to me alone. Or maybe she really does love him. Either way, I try my best not to judge. To feel grateful she has someone she’s close to.

“Don’t be silly. I’ll be back again soon.”

I said the same thing to Chase at the airport, only then it hadn’t been a lie. It was a promise—to continue building a future together, no matter how uncertain things seemed. I remember how tightly they’d hugged me, the smell of their perfume when they let me go: light and sweet, notes of citrus and vanilla. I had wanted to keep it on me, tucked safely in the collar of my shirt, but it faded somewhere in the line through security. Just one more thing I couldn’t take with me. One more thing I could only hope to protect.

I let Craig and my sister go ahead of me, followed by the husband and his wife. Not far from the entrance, the weathered path comes to a fork. Both sides are lined with blue-gray headstones, their only adornment crudely carved skull-and-crossbones. Craig leads my sister one way, mansplaining something the guide said about Puritan iconography, while the husband and wife go the other, cracking jokes about the skulls. 

“Davy Jones’s locker,” whispers the husband.

“Aye, the Black Pearl,” says the wife.

Muffled laughter floats between them. Under the rolling expanse of overcast sky, under the splintered masts of leafless trees, I turn down their path and follow.


Joshua Ambre

Joshua Ambre (he/him/his) is a queer poet and writer committed to poking holes in the so-called wholesome values of American suburbia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fiction International, Sequestrum, Hypertext, and elsewhere. Joshua was also named a Very Short Fiction runner-up at the 2023 Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival. He is currently living and working in Washington, D.C.

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