Nature documentaries voiced by baritone sedatives and about an hour of awkward casual contact on the couch, hands grazing thighs and nestled knees and nested desires incubating under the skin. Then she says, ‘You can fuck me if you want,’ as though asking for the channel changed. When I form the question on my face she says, ‘Yeah, you can fuck me. Just don’t try to kiss me on the mouth.’ I ask if she keeps her hymen in her throat and she tells me to forget it. The narrator says that certain types of mantis eat their mates.
Little bubbles of conversation float above the squabbling murmur of the room, popping into moments of clarity and vanishing into the atmosphere. Caleb itches at the crown of his thinning pate, dirty fingernails dug between follicles with miner zeal. ‘I mean, you never stop wanting to have sex with other women,’ he says, taking another drink, doing a rub your head and pat your stomach routine. ‘These days it’s too much trouble,’ he says with failed acceptance. ‘I’ll just wind up disappointing some girl.’ It makes a sad kind of sense. ‘But you never stop wanting to do it.’
She slips her hand into my pants and lays a kiss against the corner of my mouth. The softness of her palms and all that I can think of are car wrecks and the awkward sweaty aftermath of fucking. Whispering now into my ear, broken glass and bent metal, nothing upon nothing, sweet and viscous. She tastes of vanilla. Below the belt ministrations, gravel rash and bruising. Her hands are giving me mixed signals. Stop, I tell her rising. Softly, stop, but she rolls onward, lays me flat and curbs my reservations. Let me drive this time, she says
Waiting to cross and the woman in front of me keeps coughing pointedly and looking in my direction. I’m the only person who’s ever smoked outdoors and the outrage has forced her into passive aggressive action. Burning my choices down to the quick, I want to feel for her wasted umbrage. Nicotine coated synapses like a Teflon shield of nonchalance, I exhale into the sky, a cumulous pall appalling the woman. Thin lipped and dagger eyed, she gives me another quiet in the library cough and stares, forcing me to smile and wiggle my tarry yellow fingers at her.
Right after I cum I’m rolling a cigarette, wondering if I got anything on my hands, and I think about jumping out the window. Five stories down and that would be it, hopefully some beautiful nothing. Game over and put down the quarters, I’m not playing anymore. Sasha told me she thinks about doing it all the time, only that something always holds her back. I told her it was hope. There’s just enough good shit that happens to make you think that life could have more good shit. Hope is a lie that you wish would come true.
I tear my shirt up climbing the metal picket fence surrounding Bates Catholic, just so I could shortcut where I’ve never been. I get to the pub too early, pouring drinks into my self-esteem before the boys even arrive. Intricate intercoms squirt retro classics into the atmosphere, the decades grinding against each other beneath an apathetic DJ’s ministrations. Sad couples and collared shirt degenerates mill together in clashing cliques. I smoke too many cigarettes and wait, picking at impatient seams every time a stranger stares and measuring my time in cider swigs. Nobody comes until I’m already drunk.
I get hooked on the weirdest things. French horror films and Japanese Chip-tune and shit like that. For a while I couldn’t stop eating those orange flavoured vitamin C tablets, the kind you give kids when they’re getting a cold. I could sit down and eat a whole jar. I get hooked on ideas too. I can’t stop chewing until there’s nothing left and I’ve pissed away all the nutrients. I’ve had time on my mind lately. Rolling it around and sucking at its surface, looking for the centre of an infinite jawbreaker. It makes my teeth hurt.
Afterwards I’m lying there staring at the ceiling and thinking about other women that I’ve had sex with. She asks me what I’m thinking. I tell her humanity’s inevitable future is a technological evolution, a sort of digital hive mind. When we run out of space we’ll find a way to become it, shedding our mortal skins and moving as pure energy. There’s a rolling snicker and she slips her arm under my neck. I love the way you think, she says. No you don’t, I think. I count to thirty and start again. Obsolete bodies and expended energies.
I push the wad of tissue up my nose and say, ‘I said pineapple.’ Laura looks at me and shrugs, putting on a coat of indifference. I watch a blood drop drying on the sheet, its vibrancy dyeing a stiff brown stain. My tongue feels dry and swollen, the wrong kind of meat in my head. I point at the water bottle and Laura hands it to me. She tells me the music was too loud, what’s the point of using safe words in unsafe conditions. It’s a coded message. I can hear the house moving through the walls.
‘Me and Sash,’ Colt says, ‘we just want you to be happy.’ He stubs his cigarette into the sawn up remains of his steak and sighs in a paternal way that hits just shy of condescension. ‘I’m not your father,’ he says, reading my face. ‘Do whatever you want.’ I don’t know what I want. It’s a problem, it’s the problem. I try explaining this between beers, using more words than I needed and finding less meaning than I wanted, stop-starting so many times that he offers to wind me up. I tell him my gears are broken.
Second coffee, third cigarette, I’m playing one of those iPhone games where you tap on things and wait to tap again. Hours wither and die while I tap and think about what I’m not doing. Sasha texts me later in the day asking how often I think about killing myself. I’m not sure if she wants to talk about me or her. Every day, I tell her, serious or not. Glad she’s not alone, she thanks me for being miserable. I try to be grateful for her. It feels like I’m diving without a full tank of air. Tap.
Wicks has a hard-on for tapping his pencil today. Ratatat tapping against the top of his clipboard, the sound of a busted metronome trying to eke out the time for Beethoven before it dies. I can’t tell if he’s doing it on purpose or being annoying by accident. I tell him I like Mozart and he raises one of his rabbit warren brows at me. Tap tatap tap tatap tap. When I tell him not to worry he curls his gashed out little mouth and asks me about the pills. I say that they remind me of him.
He holds the pistol southpaw and quickly cocks the slide, ejecting an unspent cartridge like a downed fighter pilot. Mayday. He traces the bullet’s arc with his right hand and catches it mid flight between thumb and finger, circles down and flourishes it in front of my face. ‘I can do that ten times out of ten,’ he says with smug aplomb. ‘Imagine how easy it’d be for me to put one into you.’ Inches from my eyes the bullet mocks me, steely and resolved. I push my wrists against their bindings, hoping the ropes break before I do.
I saw a pregnant lady relishing a cigarette today, her free hand absently cradled beneath the swelling responsibility in her belly. The man beside her strode and chatted casually. I found his nonchalance bothered me as much as the chemicals coursing towards the woman’s umbilicus. Maybe he talked to her already. Maybe he’d already lost that battle. Maybe he didn’t care. She didn’t seem the type to give a fuck. Her doctor would know. A doctor will tell you that smoking is harmful then stand at the base of your womanhood waiting to catch the embodiment of your mistakes.
‘Jesus is my homeboy,’ I insisted, tap-dancing through the crowd the way a seamstress threads a needle. I bet my shoulders against the drunkards for another view of the prophet Brad. ‘He has the stigmata,’ I wailed, pointing to the sores that scourged the prophet’s palms and wept quietly in the creases of his elbows. From his cardboard enclave Brad watched, beatific, munching day old Mexican alms from a takeaway container. A half witty hand written sign propped against his feet read; Consider a Contribution: Consider Yourself Saved. The Prophet’s silence said it all. I wailed, ‘Hey Zeus.’
A Few Short Words 