Today the tourist discovered a scarab in his underwear, turquoise and trying to burrow at the base of his penis.  He let a yell fall from his hotel balcony, yet he’d meant to direct it at himself for sharing his mattress with another traveler.

The tourist had sighted the man at the museum bar.  The slick stranger wore lips as glossy as the colonial portraits looming above and the kind of tan you can’t peer through.  His words exposed too much, though.  Under covers, he told the tourist that men who lie with men birth magic while they think they’re choking lust.  The tourist dwelled on the possibility, and then tugged his thoughts toward future countryscapes mounting before him.  “Let’s pretend we don’t speak the same language,” he said.

As they lay watching pyramids dim on horizon, the men stopped passing the cigar to one another and held hands instead.  When night’s womb completely enclosed them, the tourist ripped through dark and locked himself within the bathroom.  He blasted cold water into the basin and commanded the affection seeding in his gut to come out and drown via the drain.

The tourist gained confirmation that distance was the best companion when his bedfellow slipped into boots without giving customary thanks.  Forcing a smirk, the tourist told the silhouette by the opened door, “Maybe if they started selling postcards of my lovers I’d stop forgetting them.”

Now, as he struggled to dislodge the wondrous bug from his broken skin, the tourist recalled how the stranger’s body had given off a bluish glint as they sweat.  Last night he’d told himself it was just the moonlight of another alien desert.