ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
SOME NIGHTFALLS
by Ethan Paquin

Monday
Vague suggestions buzzing in the basement television bar. "He took me to Paris," one girl says. She wears a leather vest with a peace button on it. "And I fucked this dude I picked up at some poetry festival," the girl continues. "He took me onto the balcony of the hotel and he like propped me up on the railing and / yeah / the railing / no it really didn't / I was too out of it ... " Vaguely hellbent to return to my room and write lines about her crystalline eyes and powder-blue peace button.

Tuesday
Cue ball strikes 4 ball -- medium sized-tits over in the corner. The kind my favorite online chick has in her pussy-eating photos -- they droop below her and I can see the tiny stretchmarks and birthmarks along the side of each breast, all the while she's buried nose deep in some slut with a belly paunch, covered in ink and pierced, everywhere. And the one who's being burrowed into, her glance is off-kilter, sad frown, looking out of the frame. The little wings of the earth are growing tired, I pretend she thinks.

Wednesday
"You are the most amazing woman since Britney Spears," I say, realizing I'm half-drunk. "That's so nice," she eventually shouts over the bar noises, sipping from a fruity drink, some greenish thing with an Eiffel Tower stirrer nodding between the ice cubes. The high drama of pool tables and sports cable television, everything noise noise noise, hence urgency urgency urgency.

Thursday
Caught ex-girlfriend's dad talking to his dick, tracing circles on the broad globe of the head. He must have been a cartographer. No, too ironic. Now, how to slip out of this room. And, is this the fear of being ravaged, the fear of the knowledge of receipt.

Friday
"Don't you respect women?" she asks, half-serious, 23. But she's not a serious-enough feminist to stop rubbing her thick cunt against the bulge in my khakis. "My parents made me this way," I say. "Don't hate me because I'm forward." And forwardly one progresses away from the singularity of his mother and into other women, wet plurality. Obeying the sharp demands in a woman's writhe, as his father. What if she dries on me, never to fade away.