Summary

“Not-Daniel” (11) begins with a first-person narrator waiting to meet a man for sex in the parking lot of a hospice where both of their mothers were dying from cancer. The narrator is unnamed and remains so throughout the story; Philyaw gives little backstory for either of the two main characters. The narrator compares the experience of the furtive meeting with the man to being a teenager, with the only difference being not “relying on the boy” (12) to buy condoms; this is one of the few details throughout the story that hints at the character’s gender, suggesting that the narrator is likely a woman. The narrator calls the man, whose mother’s room was across from her own mother’s room, “Not-Daniel” (12) because she initially mistook him for a boy named Daniel McMurray who she knew in junior high school. She also mentions that...