Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): From Something Solid, The Nineties, "Home"

The hook was baited, for the fish to understand
something hidden. However much Manhattan
basked in the media spotlight, as the home of all
cultural East Coast action, the portal-ways, planar
spaces, advanced compositions, heady coloration
schemes, which tumbled from her teeming head,
could have no home there. Manhattan, media
spotlight or not, had no recourse but to be dumb.
Inauguration beneath the surface to just that, the part
of life against stage-lights, but Abby simply had no
choice. She was the threat to an established cultural
order. No Byronic hang-ups, just a pair of the most
crystalline eyes ever bequeathed to a human being,
forced to leave what had been her home. Broadway,

where she had served, proved to be no help. Musical
theater was third-world lechery, as was Manhattan itself,
so that the fish forced herself to flow into a new, foreign
city: all buildings, no Broadway. The girls who were her
girls were everywhere. She hoped. And lucked out, because
crafting hands molded the situation into a form sculptured
to please a ferocious appetite for queer life. No queerness
lacking in Philadelphia. Just the sense of a new kind of
flow, sense of order, hierarchy: permissions to be granted,
privileges to be earned. Always the thought that Manhattan
could be retreated into. Abby found that when she bit
down on Philadelphia, the planar spaces expanded
themselves into something epic, unprecedented, as did
a sense that compositions announced solvency. Home.

© Adam Fieled 2025