Stories

“Gas leak?” he says. “Someone called in a gas leak?” he says in a deep voice. He has super short hair and a tiny silver hoop in each ear. I look him up and down. His gasman uniform fits him loose and sexy, and I like his boots.

The sofa or the bed?

Richard opens the door and finds Vickie on the sofa, watching TV. Disappointing.

“I aced the final,” he says.

He waits for her to say something. She doesn’t; she keeps both eyes on the TV. It’s a cable movie that she’s watching, one of those ones in which every five minutes the hero comes running toward the camera and then you see a big explosion behind him. Vickie hates them.

“Why are you watching this?” he asks.

When we get back to Catherine Street, the Vietnamese couple are having sex in the apartment under ours. Their passion increases as the temperature rises, and with the sun blazing hard at 92-degrees, they can't seem to keep their hands off of each other.

The thought was absurd, I know, misplaced, but it was pure. Like her. Maybe that’s what took hold of me. Her eyes were open, and kind, and seemed to be smiling at me, which was also absurd - why would she be smiling? Yet, that was my first thought when I found her.

I tried to get over Kevin, my ex-boyfriend, by pretending he was dead. Not the kind of dead where you sip an iced frappuccino on a cloud, but the kind where you’re stuffed into a wooden box and buried under dirt during a rainstorm.

At three I woke up writhing on the sofa, clutching at the spaghetti straps. The nightmare again: someone sitting on me, hands at my throat, trapped screams. I stumbled into the bathroom, splashed water on my face.