Say we had sex. Say we had normal sex, just you and me, and you were almost my first. Friday night movie date with wine and slow dancing at Nine of Cups. Feeling the warmth between us, I wanted you. The dance floor was too crowded, too noisy with too many people. You planned our first time and I mean that in a sweet way. Coming in from the clear cold October night, I was clear-eyed, too. You weren’t the only one that planned. For the last twenty-eight days I’d swallowed a pill, anticipating...
Stepped into your apartment with the red shag carpet, freshly vacuumed. Charlie your beautiful long-haired cat welcoming me with a soft swish of fur against my ankles, crisp laundered sheets on your bed, a lighted candle filling the space with the scent of vanilla, a lovely ritual. Jimmie Spheeris on the turntable, Isle of View, taken from its fantasy brown-toned cover (and I already loved you but didn’t know it yet). Jimmie crooning “Let it Flow,” a gentle guide to our bodies’ surrender mellowed by intoxicating mind-blowing marijuana, another first.
We screwed our way forward. Until...
The Story of O. Why have ordinary when you could ride the crescendo to unexplored pinnacles? So...
Dirty movies became the ritual sucking the air out of the room. Loud grinding music, thick dicks pumping whores with fake boobs always sharing the room with us. Your eyes closed, imagining yourself at the party. Am I there? I must be. It’s too noisy with too many bodies. The fun drugs give way to the keep-you-hard, keep-you-alive drugs. Jimmie and Charlie both gone. But let’s say it never changed. Just you and me under a starry starry night, making love in the quiet.
grew up in Oklahoma but had the good fortune to live many places in the U.S. and abroad. She’s taught English, worked as an interviewer for the Houston Housing Authority, and worked for seventeen years as a lab technician. She currently lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.
Her work has appeared in journals, moonShine review, Main Street Rag, and Chiarascuro, as well as regional anthologies: Looking Back, Christmas Presence, Clothes Lines, Echoes Across the Blue Ridge, and It’s All Relative. She received a 2010 RAPG grant and served as the Henderson County rep for the NC Writers’ Network from 2010-2014. She also started a monthly community Literary Open Mic for regional writers that continues to be well attended. She was a Top Ten finalist for the Doris Betts Fiction Prize in 2013.
