Fiction

Going Home

     When Julian looked into his little brother’s big brown eyes, his became glassy and itchy with tears. Thiago wanted to come along with Julian and his friends, but Julian didn’t want him to slow them down. Julian was embarrassed of Thiago, who was 2 years his junior, because he had short stubby legs and winced at the first sign of trouble. If something dangerous were to happen, Julian could imagine his brother getting hurt or even killed.  He would rather put Thiago out of his misery by leaving him behind rather than to see him get his body or feelings hurt by his friends’ rough play. Besides, their cousin Manny couldn’t stand him.

     “He acts like a little fag,” Manny told Julian once. “I just want to beat the shit out of him every time I see him.” It enraged Julian to hear Manny refer to his brother in that way, partly because he agreed with him.

     The tears rolling down Julian’s face were of impotence– that he wasn’t brave enough to abandon his brother or adequately strong to defend him against his older cousin, if Thiago came along. Julian knew what it felt like to be left out of things. On his last day of elementary school, all of the boys in his class were nowhere to be found. He was a leftover of a 5th grade apocalyptic rapture. As Julian exited his last class of the year, his ass numb from inactivity, he bumped into his other classmates who were all laughs and smiles. When Julian asked where they had all been, one of them boasted that they had been watching jungle porn at his house. They had all conspired a day before to do so and didn’t even think of inviting Julian. They had made a pact and drunk the poisoned punch. A mass deflowering. It didn’t bother Julian that they thought that he was a loser. It didn’t bother him that he didn’t get the chance to enjoy the exquisiteness of jungle porn. What bothered Julian was that they had thought that he was too young to understand.

     “Just stay the hell back,” Julian yelled at little Thiago as he descended the hill upon which his grandmother’s house was located. Julian hated excluding his brother, but he wanted Thiago to see him as his strong older brother and the other kids to see him as one of their own. From a distance, Julian waved to his brother, as a way of saying goodbye and telling him to go into the house. But Thiago remained, looking at his brother drifting farther and farther away from him, his sputtered whimpers drifting into the loud howl of an abandoned puppy. “Just shut up,” said Julian, looking at his brother’s distant silhouette. “Don’t make me go up there again.”

     The other boys were waiting at the bottom of the hill, impatiently for Julian to hurry up. Although he wasn’t the youngest in the group, Julian felt less wily than the rest. He hung out with them because they were tough and Julian wanted to toughen up. A menace by association. These street kids could rough you up and rob you blind without a moment’s notice. Julian liked that about them.

     Julian’s hiking party included his cousin Manny, who, unlike Julian– in Tijuana solely for summer vacation– was living in Mexico due to his parents’ finances. They grew up together, and being only a year apart, this meant that they were in constant competition for their family’s approval. Success in this gauntlet meant more to Manny than to Julian due to the former’s lack of parental affection. Manny’s parents had too many kids to care for and too little time to care about them individually.

     The youngest kid in the group was nicknamed Rabbit, but he also went by “El Sex” because his mother was one of the town’s prostitutes. Rabbit was never home, and nobody ever visited his house or even knew where it was located. He was always at other people’s houses, and the only time you could assume that he was home was when all of a sudden you couldn’t find him at anybody else’s house. For all they knew, Rabbit didn’t even have a hole to call home.

     The last kid’s name was Coco. He wasn’t really a kid though, he was way older than any of the other kids and looked more like a man than a kid. He was charming and had a smile that made Julian’s face fill with warmth until his temples began to perspire. That smile was the same he placed on Julian’s eyes with the grace of a dove as Pastor Emmanuel invoked the name of the Holy Spirit, dunking Coco into the local church’s baptismal waters. When he emerged from the small pool, Coco blew water out of his nose and took suffocating breaths. Once he found his composure, he stuck out his tongue as though he had just helter-skeltered down and out of a water park slide.

     “Guess who I caught fingering herself?” Coco asked as he hopped excitedly around his three companions.

     “Who? Who did you see?” Rabbit asked, wearing a big grin, its malice augmented by the length of his buck teeth. “Was it your mom?”

     “Ugh. No, stupid. I saw Dora. Dora was the one. I caught her dipping her fingers into her hole when I went to visit her brother.”

     “Was she all naked and shit?” Manny asked.

     “Yeah, pretty much,” Coco said with a chuckle.

     “So, you saw her big tits?” Julian asked.

     “How do you know she has big tits?” Coco asked.

     “Yeah, how do you know?” Manny asked.

     “Yeah, how do you know?” Rabbit echoed.

     It came as a surprise that Julian would have that form of sexual reconnaissance, given that he had such neatly trimmed and combed hair and a fresh, round face. The face of a cherub. He was deemed too cute to know of such things. To them, Julian was a larger version of his younger brother.

     “Well, you can see how big they are when she wears tight shirts,” Julian said.

     “Yeah, that’s true,” Coco confirmed with a smile.

     Coco told the others that when he saw Dora pleasuring herself, he froze. It looked as though Dora was trying to wedge her whole hand into her vagina.

     “Ugh, I don’t think I can shake her hand ever again,” said Rabbit, wiping his lips with his shirt sleeve, then spitting. Rabbit always punctuated all of his remarks with spit. Sometimes loogies, but even when he didn’t have any saliva to spit with, the mere puff of precipitated air expelling through his puckered lips was enough to satisfy his oral fixation.

     “That was like a month ago and she’s probably washed her hand a million times since then,” Coco assured him. “Plus, you shake a person’s whole hand, not just one finger, stupid.” Coco enjoyed calling everyone “stupid,” especially kids younger than he was, right to their faces, and to adults behind their back and under his breath.

     “So, what happened? Did you bang her?” Julian asked, allowing the sparseness of the town’s edge to loosen his tongue and start talking like an adult.

     “No,” Coco said, looking down sullenly. “I had the chance, but I was too chickenshit to take it.” As he led the way towards the surrounding hills, Coco told the story of a similar thing that happened to him years ago, when he used to accompany his mother to clean rich people’s houses.

     “Well, she wasn’t my babysitter,” Coco said. “She was babysitting the son of my mom’s bosses.” On one occasion, the babysitter was under the impression that Coco’s mom wasn’t coming to clean the house, so she decided to take a shower and walk around the house naked. “When she saw my mom and me in the kitchen, she freaked the fuck out.”  The sitter tried to unwind the knot on the towel wrapped around her head, but it was wound so tight that she had to reach for a small dish rag. “She had some big ol’ titties,” Coco said, jumping up and down. “They were just bouncing and bouncing. Boom, boom, boom.”

     “Did you get to see her pussy?” Manny asked. Manny was obsessed with vaginas. A few years back, Manny, Julian and their older cousin Stan, who had just turned 18, rented a couple of porno videos. Up to that point, Julian had only heard of porno movies but had never actually seen one. He was very excited, but he also needed to pee and he didn’t want to miss all of the loving, so he held it in. The nudity took longer to reveal itself than he expected and by the time the first woman revealed her silicone-enhanced body, Julian was about ready to burst.

     “Why don’t they show the girl’s pussy? They just keep showing her tits. Man, I wish she would turn around so I could look at it,” Manny said.

     “Just shut up and look at the girl,” Stan replied.

     “Um, I’ll be back,” Julian said as he jumped off the couch. “I gotta use the bathroom.” Julian ran past Manny and Stan, hunched over with a double-handed grip on his crotch. While the other two boys were under the laughing assumption that Julian’s testicles had spontaneously combusted, Julian was unloading his bladder, hosing the toilet as quickly as possible, trying not to miss the scene’s penetrating content.

     Coco said that he got a little glimpse of the sitter’s pubic region, but that she kept covering it.

     “Then what happened?” asked Rabbit.

     “My stupid mom started yelling at her, which woke her the fuck up, and the fine-ass babysitter ran with her big ol’ booty into the bathroom,” Coco said, licking his lips. “Man, if only my mom hadn’t been there. What I wouldn’t have done.”

     “What would’ve you done?” Julian asked.

     “Well, I would’ve jumped on her and fucked her, stupid,” Coco said, incredulous in the face of Julian’s naiveté.

     “Yeah, stupid,” said Manny.

     “Yeah, stupid,” echoed Rabbit immediately after, both acting as if they themselves knew what Coco was alluding to and would have taken a similar course of action.

     My cousin Manny and Rabbit had become inseparable ever since the former took a beating in lieu of the latter. Rabbit had the mouth to start fights and Manny the body to finish them. These two were so close that they used to masturbate in each other’s presence, covered in blankets, to Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, “The Doors.” The scene from which they drew the most inspiration was one depicting Nico, from the Velvet Underground, performing fellatio on Jim Morrison. When Julian met up with them after one of their “blanket sessions,” as they used to refer to them, they were practically holding hands. Even when it came to coming, Manny would come first and Rabbit would echo right after.

     Julian felt left out, as he had on multiple occasions. He loathed his baby face because of it. To make it up to him, Manny decided to treat his younger cousin to an all-American, fun-loving pornfest. Upon Manny’s pushing play, the video flashed a splash of illumination onto the dark wood paneling, consuming the room with light. The image of a brunette woman lying on her back, legs splayed open, and a man with the biggest penis Julian had ever seen, took over the screen. This thing protruding out of the man’s torso was inserted slowly into the woman, who was as surprised as Julian and Manny, to see how it kept fitting inside of her. She made it disappear completely. “But how?” Julian wondered. It was an act of magic, for all he knew. A miracle.

     “Where did it go, and how did it get there?” Julian asked. Manny and Rabbit snickered quietly.

     “It’s because chicks have three holes,” Coco said, stopping the expedition and turning around to face Julian. At an incline, Coco looked bigger and wiser than usual. “One of the holes is for shitting, the other for pissing and the last one’s for fucking.”

     “Oh, that’s where they stick the semens, right?” Rabbit said. “That’s what they call artificial cocks. Right, Coco? Semens?”

     “No, stupid. Semen is the shit that shoots out of your cock when the tip starts hurting so much that it makes you want to pee. Semen is pee that comes from your balls.”

     “So what’s the name for artificial cocks?”

     “Those are called dildos, stupid,” Coco said as he turned around and continued the walk.

     The hike brought the boys closer and closer to the hill’s summit. As they traversed its steady incline, they came across different types of desert creatures, such as lizards, butterflies, big cockroaches and rats, suicidal squirrels and intrepid gophers, all of which served as target practice for the boys.

     “Holy shit,” Rabbit screamed. “Did you see how I almost clocked that gopher on his stupid, pointy teeth?”

     “You almost did, gopher teeth,” Coco said, as he, Manny and Julian broke into laughter. “I actually dated a girl with big, fucked-up teeth. She was the first girl I did it with.”

     “Did what?” asked Julian.

     “Sex, you idiot,” Coco quipped.

     “Why do you always talk about sex, man?” Julian asked.

     “Because sex is everywhere,” Coco replied, spreading his arms like wings, palms facing up, twisting his torso from side to side. “The birds sing because they want to fuck other birds. We’re here because our parents fucked. Rats fuck like crazy. That’s why there are so many goddamned rats in the world. You see how the bees are buzzing around the flowers? They’re fucking them.”

     “Wait, really?” Manny asked.

     “Really?” Rabbit asked.

     “Yeah,” Coco said. “I want to fuck every girl I see because fucking feels so good. In fact, if Julian were a chick, I’d probably want to put my fingers down her panties.”

     Manny and Rabbit went into a teasing frenzy and started to push Julian around, poking him with the sticks they were using to mutilate all of the innocent creatures that they came across and weren’t smart enough to run away. Julian was the only innocent amongst them, or at least the only one who wasn’t afraid to admit it.

     “Alright, stop acting like faggots and leave him alone,” Coco commanded. “Yeah, so this girl was all up on my nuts. She kept telling her friends about me.” When they finally reached the top of the hill, Coco turned around to face the other kids. He planted his walking stick perpendicular to the ground, and they all took a seat on whatever they could find.

     “So, then what happened?” Manny asked. “Did you see her pussy?”

     “Yeah, did you see her pussy?” emphasized Rabbit.

     “Well, one day when I was walking by the bathroom I saw her walking out. So I pulled her into the guys’ bathroom and locked it,” said Coco. “After that, she started jerking my dick and I put my fingers in her pussy.”

     Manny’s mannerisms became jittery, manic. He was receiving the drug upon which his brain depended. Rabbit, who was sitting right next to Coco, couldn’t take his eyes off of the storyteller. Julian was worried. He was hoping that Coco and his girl didn’t get caught. He wanted to hear more but was afraid that an adult in the story would find out what Coco was doing in the bathroom.

     “Did you dildo in her pussy?” Rabbit asked, not blinking once.

     “Man, are you stupid or something?” Coco asked, exasperated. “I’ve told you a thousand times, dildos are fake cocks. Man, you should know. Your mom probably sticks a couple of them in her pussy when she’s not getting fucked by half the neighborhood.”

     Coco and Manny started laughing, coughing because of the amount of dust their giddy feet were kicking up. Rabbit laughed, taking his friends’ reaction as a compulsory laugh track he subconsciously needed to obey. Julian laughed under the same pretenses, but he could see that the remark had hurt Rabbit a little bit, his upper lip drooping slowly, draping over his chipper smile.

     “Yeah, so then she bent over and spread her ass for me and that’s when I shoved it in,” Coco said. “Man, she was so fucking tight that I busted a big-ass nut in her.”

     “How long did it last?” Julian asked. All eyes turned to Julian. How come I didn’t think of that? Manny and Rabbit wondered. This was the main reason why the boys hated and liked Julian. He was intuitive and sensitive. He thought of things they would’ve never thought possible, making them feel curious and stupid, all at once. After a second or so, all eyes went back to Coco.

     “I think it lasted like a minute,” Coco said, scratching the back of his head, the tingling feeling that accompanies nervousness. “It’s because once you stick it in you automatically come.” The boys’ eyes bulged in disbelief. “One time I had sex and held my come inside my balls for five whole minutes.”

     “Damn, that’s a long time,” Manny said.

     “A long fucking time,” Rabbit said, padding Coco on the back.

     “Yeah, I felt like my balls were going to blow u—” Coco said, suddenly interrupted by something he saw.

     “What happened?” Julian asked.

     “I don’t know,” said Coco, “I just saw something black run behind you guys.”

     “Yeah, me too,” Rabbit said.

     Manny and Julian turned to see what the other boys were so alarmed about. Coco stood up in one clean motion and pulled his wooden Excalibur out of the earth. He brought his index finger up to his face and formed a cross with the line between his lips, whispering, “Shut the fuck up.”

     The other boys rose up slowly and spread out around the bush Coco had motioned to.

     “Rabbit, when I tell you, you’re going to throw this rock at the bush,” Coco instructed.

     “Okay,” Rabbit whispered.

     When Coco mimed the stone throw, Rabbit launched the rock into the bush. The bush shook for a moment. Nothing happened. With a look of puzzlement, the boys took a step forward. The bush rattled once again, and a piglet, brown and hairy, bolted out as if on fire, past the four boys. Coco yelled out to follow it. As they sprinted downhill, right behind it, the piglet kept looking, unsuccessfully, for another place to hide, swerving left and right, jumping over rocks and fallen branches. The boys picked up rocks along the way and threw them at the fleeing animal, trying to injure it. The piglet veered away from the points where the rocks collided, gliding through the clouds of dust rippling around it.

     “Look, it’s going into that cave,” Manny said.

     “I’m not fucking going in there,” Julian said, curtailing his stride, falling behind the pack.

     “Yeah, you are, fucking pussy,” Coco yelled, trying to catch his breath.

     The piglet ran in, as did Coco, Manny and Rabbit. It took Julian a few seconds, but he reluctantly joined them. When he finally caught up with the other three inside the dark cave, Manny was shining a light on the creature.

     “It looks like a baby,” Julian said, alarmed by how small and defenseless the creature was. Its shivering vulnerability reminded Julian of the nights when he used to console his brother after he’d wake up from a nightmare.

     “You look like a baby,” Rabbit scoffed, poking Manny’s ribs with his elbow.

     “Let’s kill it,” Coco said as he began to gather several rocks. Manny and Rabbit did the same. The piglet was trying to burrow itself, digging desperately into the dirt.

     “Get him! He’s trying to get away,” yelled Manny.

     The boys began to hit the piglet with a torrential rain of rocks, eliciting ear-piercing cries from the animal, similar to those of a child. This was the very reason Julian had refused to bring his brother Thiago along. He could picture his brother being tortured in the same fashion by the gang. Julian closed his eyes. The boys laughed. The symphony of pain and play reverberated through the cave walls and through Julian’s tortured eardrums.

     “Coco, it’s running towards you,” yelled Rabbit. Coco kicked the piglet like a soccer ball, its little, broken body thudding off the wall and bouncing on the dirty ground. “That’s my boy,” Rabbit yelled, as he and Coco hand-slapped, echoing over the piglet’s dying whimpers.

     “Hey, Julian,” Coco said, “open your goddamned eyes, you little pussy.” Julian opened his eyes and saw the piglet heaving violently, its last breaths interrupted by spastic jerks. It looked like a run-over puppy. “Come over and kick it a little. Don’t worry. It’s almost dead.”

     “No,” Julian said turning his back to the boys. “It wasn’t hurting anybody.” Hurting things was fun, Julian thought, but killing was different. He imagined it felt like drowning, like being thrown from the third story of a building and not knowing whether you would survive or never open your eyes again. “Just do it without me.”

     “What?” Coco asked. “Bring his faggot ass over here.” Manny and Rabbit ran over to Julian, who was beginning to run towards the mouth of the cave. They dove towards him before he could exit and grabbed his legs, knocking him flat on his face. They flipped him over and dragged him by his feet towards Coco, who was standing over the piglet’s tenderized body. Manny and Rabbit picked Julian up and each held him by his arms.

     “Here, kiss your baby boyfriend,” Coco said, picking up the bloody pig from the ground and shoving it in Julian’s face. The piglet’s eyes were hanging out of its sockets like a landfill baby doll, and blood was gushing out of its baby snout. It was shrieking in pain. “I want you to kick me, Julian,” Coco mocked, snorting like a pig.

     Julian knew what he had to do. The piglet would never be the same. It would never run or play again. Even if he refused to torture it, it would die at the hands of his friends or in agonizing pain if he were to convince them to leave it alone and go home.

     With one eye opened and the other half-closed, Julian saw the piglet on its side, running in circles with the only leg that wasn’t completely broken. He took a deep breath, a big gulp of snot and closed his tear-lined eyes. With tears rolling down his cheeks like drops of blood, Julian let out a loud cry that filled the totality of the cave and jumped up in the air, breaking free from his captors’ grasp. As he landed back on the dirt floor, Julian crushed the piglet’s skull. The sound was similar to that of stepping on a raw egg, the bloody yolk bathing the ground adjacent to it. Julian’s shoes were spattered red with blood and muddy with purple brain matter goop and bone. He released it from their cruelty, just like he would’ve wanted someone else to do for his brother. To end his misery in the face of brutality. To send him to heaven instead of living in hell.

     “What the fuck?” Manny yelled, “What did you do, stupid?”

     “What did you do, stupid?” Rabbit yelled, or maybe it was just the cave’s echo.

     “That’s okay, guys,” Coco reassured them. “We were going to kill it anyway.” Coco began to unzip his pants and motioned the rest of the group to do the same. “Let’s pee on it now.”

     Julian was apprehensive once again, but he also knew that if he didn’t comply, it would take them even longer to head back home. As the boys whipped out their baby penises, Coco pulled out his large, over-developed one. Manny and Rabbit started to spray and splatter their urine on the piglet’s desecrated carcass almost on command, but Julian was having trouble starting. Manny and Rabbit were laughing and crossing streams and Coco kept tugging and jerking at his penis, which looked erect. Julian was first to finish.

     “Hey, Coco. What the fuck are you doing?” asked Rabbit.

     “I’m jerk—”

     “Aw, dude. Are you jerking off?” Manny interrupted.

     “Yeah,” Coco answered with a smile.

     Julian remembered what that looked like from the pornos he had seen, but it wasn’t until that moment, until he saw Coco release semen, that he figured out what had happened to him a few months back while watching Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film “The Godfather.”

     The scene where Michael Corleone undresses his Sicilian wife Apollonia, exposing her small, perky, olive-tone breasts. That sight gave Julian a strange sensation in the pit of his stomach, as if he needed to pee. After everybody went to sleep, Julian rewatched the consummation scene, and the sensation in his pants returned. The organ that had delineated his boyhood was slowly petrifying and cobblestoning the way into his manhood. The scene passed, and so did the feeling. Julian rewound again, and again the feeling returned, a little more intense each time. The rush that it elicited was an addictive feeling. Julian did it over and over. He was transfixed on Simonetta Stefanelli’s Barbie-doll breasts. Julian stared at her body for an eternity. The amount of time necessary for Julian to thrust himself out of childhood and come forcefully into manhood. When he reached the unbearable feeling Coco had mentioned, he felt a warmth emanating from his innermost being. Julian imagined that this was what Mary, the mother of Christ, must have felt when her body was inhabited by the Spirit of God. It was complete and utter envelopment. A baptism by fire.

     After the intensity of the moment allowed Julian to blink and move his limbs again, he found that he had soiled his white cotton briefs with the same substance that Coco was dripping onto the piglet’s cadaver.

     “This is the cave of dicks,” Coco said proudly. “And I’ll beat the crap out of you, like I did this pig, if you mention this to anybody.” They shook on it and zipped up their pants.

     They were greeted by a darkening sky as they emerged from the darkness of the cave. Everybody was quiet, even Rabbit. Julian wished he had stayed back, playing the stupid games his brother wanted to play. He knew that they had a long way to go before they saw any streetlights. Coco would probably run off before then, with one of his real friends. Rabbit would disappear like he always did. Manny would start acting as if he was Coco, talking about things he knew nothing about. And Julian would go back to being his brother’s older, chubbier twin. But he knew that even after he crossed the threshold of his grandmother’s house, he would never be able find his way back home.

Artwork by Cory Bilicko

Bilicko, C. (2016). Pee-Shy [Painting]. Oil on canvas, Long Beach, CA.

Naked Pigeons

     Jara.

     Jara Milner was the love of my life.

     All I wanted was to lie beside her. All she wanted was to be admired.

     Jara was a result of a complex, well-tempered arrangement of economic and eugenic alchemy. I was the product of an equation that joined two immigrants with uncontrollable urges. Jara’s birth was a preconceived notion, a dream that two college-educated adults brought to fruition. I was a happy accident derived from the fevered boredom of a child of 34 and a woman of 21. Jara’s parents were childhood sweethearts. Mine were a pair of people in which each person was the sum of the two preceding people.

     She was a princess. I was a Fibonacci number.

     Before we kissed for the first time, we used to interlace our fingers, twist and turn them into various positions and shapes. Nothing below the wrist was allowed. We performed this seated Renaissance court dance for about two weeks, traversing a Kamasutra’s worth of fingerings. It was the preluding hand puppetry before the real play began. I always wondered if things would have moved more precipitously had I been born handless. A Fibonacci stumper.

     After the yearning of hand gymnastics came the hugging, erotic wrestling as I used to call it. Greco-Romance. As with the hands, we explored all of the various positions in which a couple of fully grown adults could embrace one another. Facing each other, Jara giving her back to me, I giving mine to her, spooning with me as the big spoon, spooning with me as the little spoon. Seated while she nestled her large buttocks between my legs seemed to be Jara’s favorite position, of cuddling that is. She would relax the full weight of her body to fall back on my bony chest and I would use the full strength of mine to become a firm, yet pliable, flesh and bone upholstered Barcalounger.

     When we finally arrived at the kissing phase, she hated the way I kissed.

     “Get the fuck outta here,” my mother said with the side of her mouth, taking a long drag from her cigarette. She exhaled a cloud of smoke from her side smile, drawing away the nicotine wand from her lips and tapping it on the ashtray. “How do you know that?”

     “Because she fucking told me ‘I don’t like the way you kiss me’,” I said, fanning away the fumes.

     “Well, what does she expect?”

     What did Jara expect? Her lips were full, the size of a vital organ, muscly like a heart or a liver. Soft like the labia majora and deep fuchsia like the minora. They tasted of the beeswax lip balm she moisturized them with. All I wanted was to submerge my lips in their pillowy wetness, suck on them, and do whatever I wanted with them. That’s what I was dying to tell my mother, but I didn’t want her to start asking me about the sex I wasn’t having with Jara.

     “I don’t fucking know,” I said, swirling around the hot ash in the translucent black tray. “I guess, I can kiss her how she wants. More politely.”

     “She’s kissing you like you’re a fucking idiot. A snot-nosed poopy pants,” my mother said as she placed a new cigarette in her mouth. “A peck on the lips like two little Easter chicks? That’s bullshit.” The notion of another woman rejecting the seed of a son who came out of her, by the seed of a man she herself rejected years before, infuriated her. Oedipus on its head.

     The kissing fiasco got better. All I had to do was make my thin lips as thin as possible, a cartoon’s mouth, and make sure that its width didn’t surpass the dimensions of Jara’s blossoming lips.

     “You have these cute little duck lips,” Jara said, sucking her lips into her mouth, doing an impression of a toothless hag. “I could just kiss them all day.” But she wouldn’t.

     We only kissed when Jara wanted to and I was only allowed to mention the act, or have any desire to perform it, when she was ready. There were no impromptu public displays of affection to speak of, and my craving of being scolded or reassured by complete strangers, regarding the inappropriateness of our amatory performance, went unrequited. Any complaints regarding our lack of kissing sent Jara barging out of any room.

     When the time to kiss did finally arrive, I needed to be in a seated position so that she, in turn, could sit on my lap. Not straddling because, according to her, only whores straddled. The space between my legs could not exceed a 34-degree angle. During this period of unbridled pleasure, my hands were to be above her belly button, but below her sternum. They needed to be digitally-interlaced and shackled around the most erogenous of zones: the love handle.

     I was not to dip my hand down her panties to rub her ass, or up her blouse to fondle her breasts as this would elicit in me feelings of a sexual variety. The same ones that brought me into existence. If my penis did poke his head into our amorous exchange, Jara was very diplomatic in thwarting it. She was Franklin D. Roosevelt, stalling my hammer and sickle.

     “Oh, don’t worry about it, baby,” she said with a motherese tone, massaging the back of my head against the grain, “we’re not ready for sex, yet.” Then she gave me a maternal peck on the forehead, veined like a map of occupied Germany after World War II. It was during these moments of repressed rage that I really could’ve used a diaper. A Fibonacci umber.

     Jara was a full-figured girl and she was fully conscious of it. It was one of the reasons why I fell in love with her, and the main reason why she didn’t want my hands to idle amorously around her expanding waist. Once these conditions were met, the kissing could begin.

     Jara loved her big juicy lips, caressing their rim with her tongue in a seamless circular motion.

     “That’s why I’m a great kisser and you’re not,” she assured me, “because I’ve got big, beautiful lips.”

     She would place her nose under mine and breathe deeply, pollinating my restlessness. At this point, if I went for the kiss she’d say “Don’t even think about it,” pulling her face away from mine.

     Her upper lip nestled itself between my nose and upper lip, an area that needed to be shaved smooth or the kissing would immediately come to a momentary halt. Her bottom lip burrowed itself between my lips like a cat between a pile of blankets. And then, we waited. Our kissing sessions carried the vitality of a pancake stack. One of her favorite moves was to lick my lip-beak, flicking it side to side with the tip of her tongue, but as soon as mine slithered past my teeth’s threshold making contact with hers, she asked, “Do you want me to stop?” I swallowed an empty gulp of saliva.

     “I want to keep going,” I replied, my voice cracking in desperation. She mocked my voice break, gesticulating violently.

     “Then stick your tongue back into your fucking mouth.”

     There were several triggers that could put a stop to a kissing session. I wasn’t allowed to look at her, opening her eyes periodically, making sure that mine were closed; movement of any kind was highly discouraged; breathing needed to be controlled, pleasant, and in no way possess the qualities associated with moaning.

     “Why are you breathing like that?” Jara asked, mimicking a donkey’s bray and blowing her nose on my eyes.

     Then came heavy petting.

     Jara hated stimulating my genitals because she felt that, like a bumbling stutterer, it took me way too long to just come out with it. Besides, the mere thought of warm come spritzing on even the minutest part of her body sent rigor mortis shivers up to the crown of her head and down to her tail bone. This explained why she handled my penis in the manner one would tug a turd clogged in a toilet bowl.

     “Shut the fuck up,” she’d whisper, as she stroked haphazardly, looking over her shoulder, chafing away the upper layer of skin from my erection, losing partial feeling. Fibonacci numbness. She felt that my verbal manifestation of pleasure would wake up her brother sleeping in the room adjacent to us. “I’m gonna stop if you don’t quit squealing and grunting like a fucking pig.”

     Jara was afraid that her brother would tell her parents that she was having sex again. She had brought dishonor to her family once before in the way of a leaked homemade video of her having sex with her boyfriend at the time. Said boyfriend had posted the link on Facebook and tagged all of her family members, immediate and extended. That night, over 55 people saw Jara’s large, pale breasts, punctuated by carnation nipples, convulse randomly as a dark, out-of-focus presence thrusted harshly from behind.

     I found the video when I accidentally snooped around and clicked on folders I had no right to open.

     “Why the fuck do you have a porno video of a guy doing you doggy style?” I yelled.

     “He was my first boyfriend and I didn’t know any better,” she yelled louder.

     “So why do you still have it saved in your computer, along with all of these pictures of him kissing you and grabbing your ass?”

     “Don’t ask stupid questions,” she replied as she walked away from me. Any question that she didn’t want to answer was stupid. Apparently, I was full of stupid questions. “They remind me of when I was young and thin.”

     Jara told me not to worry about the contents of that folder because she was going to end up with me anyway.

     “What happened before we met doesn’t matter,” she said. “Let’s pretend that we were born the instant we met.”

     This was our first real fight, or at least one in which I expressed anger towards her. I felt remorse for attacking her on a matter she probably had no control over. A senseless case of revenge porn. Fortuitously, this argument allowed us to talk about the highly awaited— a year, two months, three weeks and five days in the making— topic of intercourse.

     Our first night of passion unraveled at a dingy Motel 6. In 1962, this fine establishment used to charge $6 a night. In 2008, they charged me $89 for the room that we used for a whole of eight passion-filled minutes. That’s all Jara needed and to her, well worth the $11.12 per minute. By minute two, I was already feeling the pressure to perform.

     “You’re going to come for me, aren’t you?” Jara asked, breathing agitatedly while gyrating her hips uncontrollably, mortar-and-pestling her pubic bone into mine.

     “No,” I replied.

     “Yes you are,” she said baring her teeth, forcing a smile. “You’re close. I can feel it.”

     By minute five, she was letting me know that she was about to come and that if I wanted to come inside of her, I needed to do it now.

     “I better see milky discharge in that condom when I pull your dick out of me,” she moaned.

     Minute eight came. She came. I didn’t.

     Jara released a sound I had associated with hoofed animals and dropped the full weight of her full figure on me and dozed off. She had been slain.

     When she came to a few minutes later, I was still inside of her.

     “Are you gay or something?” she asked as she held my penis in her hand. With a disappointed look in her eyes, she yanked the condom by its empty reservoir tip off my sad flaccidity. “What the fuck? You’re not even hard.”

     I knew I wasn’t. I hadn’t been since minute two when she first requested my seed. I looked down and gave her a look of shock, mainly to pity her.

     “I guess, your mom only makes faggies,” she said, as she flung the stretched out condom off to the side. She was referring to my older and younger brothers who were both gay. One closeted, the other out and loving it. “You should’ve told me you were a fucking faggot and I wouldn’t have wasted my afternoon and the past year trying to build this relationship.”

     She turned around, readjusted the loops of her bra, snugged each breast in its respective cup and hooked the closure in the back. Still bottomless, Jara lay back on her pillow, reached for the remote and turned on the television. “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” was on. Watching her watching the film we had seen together in theaters earlier that year, reminded me of how good we were and how fucked up we were now.

     “Why are you such a goddamned, fucking bitch?” I yelled, jumping off the bed, the sound still reverberating on the popcorn ceiling. This was the start of our second big fight.

     “What did you say?” Jara asked, with just enough dexterity in her nervous rage to mute the TV.

     “Why do you treat me like shit? All I want is to be beside you and admire you and kiss you and make love to you.”

     Jara’s eyes welled up with tears of rage, of fear. Crying wasn’t something new in our relationship, in fact, it was so common I had grown immune to it. But this time it felt different. I walked towards her side of the bed and sat next to her.

     “I’m sorry for calling you a bitch,” I said. “I don’t really feel that way. I’m just so frustrated, with you, with us.”

     Jara was silent, the most silence that had ever come out of her. All she did was sniffle every couple of seconds. Her weeping was the sobbing of a hoofed creature in pain. I placed my hand on her back and she dropped her head on my shoulder.

     “Listen, I’m here for you,” I said.

     “I know,” Jara replied, her voice crackly with mucus. “It’s just that I wanted us to be different.” She turned her head and gave me a long kiss. Her blue eyes, specked with shades of brown and green, dilated a void, leagues-deep, full of vulnerability. She told me about the sexual trauma she had experienced with her ex. They had only been together for a month before making the sex tape.

     “That’s the reason I’ve been so apprehensive with you,” she said, “and a little bit of a bitch.” We both laughed. “Okay, a huge bitch.” I kissed her forehead, each eyelid, her fairy-tipped nose and then her big, beautiful lips. She was protecting herself from herself, from trusting too much, from men, from that shame ever happening again.

     We sat there for what felt like days, my lower back burning from discomfort. I motioned to the bed with my neck and Jara lay her body down on it. I untucked the raspy covers, that seemed filthy regardless of how many times the chamber maids claimed to have washed them, and pulled them over her. She smiled and closed her eyes.

     Smiling back at her droopy eyes, I began to realize the reason behind Jara’s deliberate delay of intimacy. I kept visualizing the poorly-lit and grainy quality of the video clip, and replaying the acts of violence Jara’s ex-boyfriend put her through. His cocky smile, her labored moaning. The overpowering, gaping, shoving, choking, crying, gagging, nose-breathing, nose-pinching, coughing, cumming, swallowing, more gagging and even more crying. And hurting. Lots and lots of hurting.

     This pain led to her taking things way too slow. The addition of the current mode of affection to the previous one started to make sense. First, hands only. Then, hugs plus hands, followed by kissing, hugs, and hands. It was a pattern. A Fibonacci sequence. When it came to sex, she was out for control because she felt out of control.

     I walked out of the room with shriveled balls between my legs. In the bathroom, the thundering swoosh of the shower curtain opening gave way to the shriek of the shower faucet’s handle knobs turning. The water shot out skillet hot, bouncing off my puckered back. I twisted and turned the hot and cold knobs like a safety vault trying to find the right combination. Reaching an agreeable temperature fogged a curtain of steam in the room. This, in conjunction with the water’s scalding pH, momentarily impaired my vision. In spite of it, I caught a glimpse of Jara approaching me. A blurred Eve.

     She joined me in the shower, embracing me from behind. A Fibonacci nabber. She kissed and suckled on my shoulder blade. I turned around and placed her head on my water-falling chest. Quiet. Listening to the sound of drops splashing, one by one, on the swampy tile, rolling faster and faster, around and past our wrinkled interlaced feet, the closer they neared the drain. A golden spiral.

     We were two virgins, each imagining the other being born that very instant. A double fantasy.

     We washed away the pain. We cried away the shame.

     And after that, we were never the same.

 

Artwork

Bilicko, C. (2014). Being Open [Painting]. Acrylic on canvas, Long Beach, CA.

Seizing The Rope

     A woman standing listless in front of a periodic-table-sized Greek menu stared blankly, her eyes shrink-wrapped with insomnia and hatred for the world, waiting for Peter and me to order. She didn’t seem amused by my indecision, so I picked the only thing on the menu that I could pronounce.

     “I’ll have a gyro,” I said, pronouncing it “ji-row.” Peter chuckled.

     “What he meant to say was ‘yee-ey-roh’,” Peter said to the woman, followed by an apologetic smile on my behalf. The woman didn’t seem amused by Peter’s kind gesture either and continued her unblinking, writhing stare, waiting to put in our orders, head back to the kitchen and instruct the cook to defile our food.

     To my surprise, my order came with a large side of fries, a large salad and a large drink. This establishment was one of those B-graded places that try to compensate for their shitty food quality by stuffing you with a large quantity of it. Peter ordered a side salad and a Styrofoam cup for water.

     As I struggled to chew the dry strips of rubbery lamb, crunchy with bits of ground bone, Peter made an attempt to educate me on whatever bullshit was floating around in his head. It was a habit of his that I didn’t find particularly amusing. For tonight’s lesson, he was going to teach me about the finer details of Greek cuisine.

     “Tzaztiki sauce is made out of cucumber,” he said, as he angled the greasy bottle onto my food basket and squeezed it, ejaculating a spurt of sauce onto my sinewy cuts of meat.

     Up to this point, all of our interactions had been kept strictly within the confines of the college bookstore we worked at. We were friendly, but weren’t really friends. The foreplay that two people enjoy during the beginning period of their acquaintance, before they decide whether to become real friends or people that they used to know, was nearing its end for us. This was our chance to see if our relationship could survive beyond the book stacks.

     Peter was older, in his late fifties, maybe sixties, and preferred not to socialize with college-aged employees. A loner by choice. He believed that his intellectual superiority wouldn’t allow them to keep up with his wit and sense of humor. He spoke German and wore rings bearing strange sigils that had obscure, mystical Celtic significance. The fact that I was a few decades younger than Peter, and still able to carry a stimulating conversation with him made me believe that maybe we could indeed be friends.

     My coworkers didn’t see this other side of Peter. They refused to. They were too focused with his obsession of correcting their grammar and accusing them of contaminating the English language. I admit that it wasn’t easy to be around Peter, but I refused succumbing to the same prejudices my coworkers had built around him. Besides, it felt dangerous to hang out with the most despicable person in the bookstore, a man that was even disliked by management. The boss kept Peter around because he couldn’t just fire him for being grossly unpopular.

     The unknown quality that had at first attracted me to Peter, the challenge of winning over someone you admire and proving to them that you are worth their time, soon became the very reason why I grew tired of him. The more I got to know him, the needier he became. I found his presence suffocating, especially the excuses he would fabricate just to have something to talk to me about. His constant checking up on me. He was aware that I enjoyed the occasional dirty pun, but he soon began using this licentious liberty to introduce sexual anecdotes, such as sharing his opinion on what outfits my bare chest would look good in, and live updates on the erectness of his penis and the reasons behind its petrification.

     Peter had a unique way of demonstrating his affection towards me, prodding the small of my back with his index finger as I bent over to pick up a stack of books, and whispering “Freeze!” into my ear. When I would turn around to confirm that indeed it was Peter, he’d burst out laughing in what sounded like a combination of a seizure and an asthma attack. “It’s a little something I like to do,” he said. “It has a sexual connotation that I’m not comfortable discussing at work.”

     After a while, it didn’t matter what the topic of conversation was, Peter seemed to find a way of twisting and turning it into something sexual.

     “Are you here to ask me something or to look at my legs?” he said, as he was standing on a tall ladder. He was wearing shorts, as he commonly did, exposing his pale, harry legs, striped with varicose veins and spangled with leaky capillaries.

     “No,” I said, wincing at the thought. My attraction towards Peter was intellectual and the only organ of his I wanted to interact with was his brain. “I just wanted to ask–“

     “You know I have a foot fetish,” he said, bursting out into his spastic laughter. “Don’t be such a tease.” As I walked away, half indignant, half appalled, Peter kept calling me back, promising to be serious.

     He often mentioned how he and his partner were devout practitioners of the Wiccan religion, according to him, his ancestors’ true religion. On one occasion, Peter described to me a secret ritual that took place at one of the covens. One in which he and other members of his sect would receive fellatio from a young initiate, who would then take their semen and swallow it.

     “They really are a ton of fun. You should join us sometime,” he suggested.

     At the time, part of me knew that the relationship Peter had with me was of a predatory nature, but I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and simply see it as one of his many quirks. Embrace it as part of his personality, as part of what made him unique. However, Peter mistook my willingness to be open with him for vulnerability. Because I hadn’t made it known to him that his advances were bothersome, he accepted my silence as consent.

     “So, can I see your feet?” Peter asked, as we waited for our bus outside the Greek restaurant. I was taken aback by the directness of his request, but not completely surprised. I couldn’t really think of a reason why showing Peter my foot could potentially backfire. His attraction towards me wasn’t as subtle as he thought and his flirtation had replaced the witty banter we once shared. Maybe if I gave him what he craved for so much, he could see that there was no chemistry, get over it and move on. Maybe by doing this, Peter and I could find that first high and rekindle our intellectual conversations.

     As I began untying my sneaker, Peter sat there slapping his hands on his thighs.

     “I didn’t know that you also took this bus,” Peter said. I found his attempt of making this situation less awkward to be pathetic, like a cop trying to be your friend as he’s writing you up for speeding. “I wonder why I’ve never seen you on it.” I laughed, rolling the slightly moist sock off my foot and balling it into my empty shoe.

     I was aware that we took the same bus for a while, even before we had stricken our first conversation. Back when I agreed with most of my coworkers that Peter was a fucking weirdo. I used to avoid boarding the same bus as him, opting to wait another hour or so for the next one to arrive.

     “Yeah, what a coincidence,” I said.

     “Well, I think the word you should’ve used is ‘serendipitous’,” he said leaning back on his seat, stroking his rogue mustache and beard with his thumb and index fingers, drawing an oval from the base of his nose, around his lips, down and around his chin. “What you should’ve said is ‘How serendipitous’.”

     This was the way that Peter treated people, preferring to be right in spite of being perceived as an asshole. He only ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch out of a scratched-up, microwave-mutilated, green-lidded Tupperware that was the exact dimensions of four soggy bread slices. He was getting a Master’s degree in Magical Arts and never divulged what he planned to do with it after he graduated. His hair was long and oily, wispy with barely enough girth to support a hair tie. He didn’t care if his druidic peanut butter breath and armpit stench bothered anybody he came in contact with.

     “It’s just cheaper if you don’t care about what people think,” Peter once told me.

     As I rolled up my pant sleeve to my left knee, partially cutting the blood circulation, Peter took my foot with such gentleness and care. The soft night breeze grazed cool on my skin as Peter held my foot in his sweaty palm. He was acting differently, unlike the aggressive, combative attitude he took against argumentative customers or incompetent coworkers. This was Peter the lover. He looked at my foot from all angles. I thought of him as a doctor, a podiatrist. At least, that’s how I decided to feel about it. He analyzed the sole and thumbed his way down from the ball of my foot to the heel. Every couple of seconds he hummed softly, “Hmmm…hmmm…hmmm.” It reminded me of a foot exam, as if he were approving my foot, saying “Hmmm, yes. This is a strong, healthy foot.” I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the massaging gestures of his hands felt great, almost therapeutic after walking in a maze of books, for four hours straight. The hums started to morph in to moans, dropping the Hippocratic “h” altogether. He raised my foot closer to his face and readjusted his glasses as he squinted.

     “Please don’t put it in your mouth,” I requested, slightly retracting my foot, laughing nervously. It was my version of the call girl “no-kiss-on-the-lips” clause. I wanted to keep it casual, but the pressure he was applying to my foot, along with his breathing, became more violent. More amorous. His thumbs were pressing themselves into the folds on the plant of my foot, past my nerves and muscles, into my bones.

     As Peter placed my sweaty foot on his lap, I was trying to think of ways to desexualize what was going on between us. An argument in which him deriving sexual pleasure from touching this utilitarian extremity was not akin to cupping a breast or jerking a penis. It was only my stinky foot after all, it wasn’t like it was my mouth or my ass being used for erotic purposes. I caught a hint of peanut butter as he crinkled his nose, letting his jaw drop and sticking his tongue out, as he did every time he analyzed something. He did it to read the fine print on book receipts and as he stared intently at my left toe.

     Being treated as a sexual object took me by surprise. I was fully aware that Peter had a foot fetish and, thanks to internet porn, what a fetish itself was. I was there, at our store’s Christmas party, when he broadcasted to the whole staff that he had an affinity for feet. I laughed nervously when our boss teased Peter of being a pedophile. I was the one that went up to Peter, after all of our coworkers had had their fill of ridiculing him, and asked follow up questions about his sexual deviancy related to foot worship. If I had indeed initiated this, then why was I wishing I had never initiated it at all?

     Moments later, Peter began to tug repeatedly at the fabric in his crotch. It didn’t look as though he was pleasing himself, it seemed like he had already taken care of that part during the moaning. His face showed signs of discomfort. When I studied the area, I noticed that— even in the dim street lighting— a small stain had bloomed and puddled on his khaki pants. The dark circle was immediately concealed when he placed his backpack on his lap. The warm build-up and release now left both his crotch and my foot out in the cold.

     Peter was gay, so what did that make me? I knew this for a fact because he had shown me a picture of him and his partner once. He was married to a man who looked like his identical twin. Together, they looked like Gandalf the White embracing Gandalf the Grey. Like Thing 1 and Thing 2. But now, not even the vastness of Seussian wit could help to name the thing I had just taken part in. This man had just made love to my foot with his hand and stained his pants as a result.

     Had this made me gay, even if I hadn’t derived any form of pleasure from the act? I couldn’t feel relief even after we had consummated Peter’s strange request. Not when semen was spilled. My mother once told me that when a man comes, he only does so out of love. Women can fake it all they want, but men can’t.

     “He feels it every time, even when whacking off a quick one in a bathroom he wouldn’t even take a shit in,” my mother once said. “It’s like spilling blood.”

     If Peter were to be found dead later that night, the police would bring me in for questioning after they found my DNA— skin cells and lint— under his dirty, lifeless fingernails. I could be convicted of his murder based on what we had just done. Brutal, bizarre Los Angeles Murder Case, Began with sex and suicide, the headline would read. I had played along with Peter’s fucked up joke and I figured that I wasn’t the first person ever to use sex as a weapon, as a means of getting what I wanted, having seen my mother do it many times before.

     Peter looked away as I slipped my toes back into the cold sock, over my instep, rolling the cuff midway up my shin. He was such a gentleman. I broke the silence by mentioning to him that it had been my first time eating Greek food.

     “It’s quite good, isn’t it?” Peter asked, scratching the bald spot at the crown of his head.

     “Yeah, I think I’m starting to develop a taste for it,” I said, mirroring his uneasiness. It was our way of checking to see if the other was okay. Of asking, “Was it good for you?”

     As I tied my shoelaces, I looked up at him, he was sniffing his hands, snorting the sourness of my feet, taking deep breaths of my essence. We continued to sit there without exchanging a word or glance. All I could think of was of the great pun that this encounter had created. One about a man who had helped another pour cucumber sauce all over his leg of lamb and, in return, had needed to use the latter’s foot to help the former pour his cucumber’s sauce. The night’s demureness and the wind’s howling aversion told me that it probably wasn’t an appropriate time for joking. Peter continued to drum his palms on his thighs.

     When the bus finally arrived, Peter shot up and walked briskly towards the door. He looked back, a gesture that he was waiting for me to board.

     “You know, I actually need to stop by the library to pick up a book,” I said. “Go on ahead without me.” Peter went inside and the bus drove off. I sat back down on the bus bench and waited another hour or so for the next bus to arrive.

     After that episode, Peter kept asking to see my feet. Sometimes, he would approach me and not even bother with a greeting of any type or even say “Freeze!” He’d simply ask to see my feet with the ease that one opens the refrigerator, and grabs a beer with the only goal of satisfying a longing. He asked multiple times a day. The same question.

     “So, when can I look at your feet again?” Peter asked.

     I was neck deep into something I only wanted to dip my toe in. Did he expect me to kick my shoes off, throw caution, along with my socks, to the wind and show him my feet in broad bookstore with coworkers and students walking around? Did he think we were lovers? And I, his mistress?

     After I realized that our encounter did nothing to improve our friendship, I did what my mother would do and I began to distance myself from Peter. Like her, I tend to attract needy people in an effort to feel needed. My mother attracted and nurtured a doomed relationship past the torrents of marriage and the penal system, for as long as she could, until my father served her the divorce papers from prison. My relationship with Peter had reached this point.

     My disassociation from Peter began to garner as much attention in the bookstore as when I first started talking to him. The staff continued to view Peter as strange as ever and me a little less so.

     “You guys looked fucking weird together,” a coworker mentioned. “He looked like your grandfather.”

     I wanted to tell her that he actually was a very nice guy and that he was weird for reasons other than the ones she and everybody else thought. Reasons unknown to her. But I withheld the real reason out of respect for Peter. His work life was already hard enough with all of his neuroses and stigmas that came from being the oldest person around. I didn’t want to add the title of pervert, which he was, onto his plate and the title of gay lover, which I totally wasn’t, to mine.

     “Yeah, he’s a fucking weirdo,” I replied, taking the most humane route, a mercy kill, and giving my coworker the validation she so callously craved for.

     I walked towards the bus stop after another late shift. Peter had worked that same shift with me, but he wasn’t waiting for the bus at his usual spot. I assumed that his partner had picked him up, as was sometimes the case. I boarded the incoming bus, looked around and I didn’t see him there, to my relief. We both knew what I had done to him. We had both used each other, but I felt that I had done so with a wicked motive in mind, and he was merely satisfying his basal needs.

     The bus arrived at its next stop and a group of people got in. Peter was one of them. I fixed my gaze on him, trying not to blink, as to not miss the moment when our sights could possibly cross. He paid for his fare and walked down the seat-framed walkway. As he neared my seat, he didn’t even glance towards my direction. When he passed me, I got a hint of peanut butter mixed with the ripeness of compounded underarm sweat, two scents that I had nostalgically associated with him. Peter found a seat near the rear of the bus.

     I kept looking back, partly to see what he was doing and partly to see if he would finally notice that I was also on the bus, a serendipitous phenomenon he wondered about the night he fondled my foot. He didn’t. He simply looked out the window and dozed off with his mouth open.

 

Artwork

Bilicko, C. (2017). Push, Pull [Painting]. Oil and acrylic on canvas, Long Beach, CA.