Tampa

Spread open between my fingers, my labia looked like a splitting heart.

Some nights, in order to orgasm, I have to reimagine history and tell myself that neither of them made it past the eve of my arrest alive: that Jack suffered a fatal wound at my hands in the woods, and Boyd, bleeding alone from the skull in Jack’s bedroom, succumbed to shock and died

I knew I should produce a look of worry or strain, but habit prevented me from forming any facial expression that might aid in the development of fine lines.

We locked eyes for what could only have been seconds, but it was enough; we were two deviants who had recognized one another in an identifying game of telepathy.

His eyes froze with appalled disbelief. Perhaps it was a rush to judgment, but my first inclination was to blame his faith. He was suddenly looking at me as though he’d seen a demon appear on my shoulder or watched hidden expletives carved into my forehead become visible. I wanted to remind him that desire was only human but figured that was probably just what he’d expect the devil to say

He’d stepped backward with one foot, and then another. The incredulous look on his face told me I’d already lost him—somehow he’d seen through me, or perhaps he was skilled at foreshadowing. I’d imagine a pious avoidance of sin requires that

Ogre linebackers and delicate-boned waifs would all register as the same unwanted note to her sexually deaf ears. From the looks of her glasses, she was so blind she likely wouldn’t notice if all her students were replaced with crash-test dummies except to note that their classroom behavior had improved.

When I did finally go to bed, Ford was asleep with the firmness of denial. It was only in times like these, when he would ask a funny question but then show he was overtly ignoring the answer, that I wondered if Ford suspected more than he let on. He seemed to understand that resolution didn’t need to have anything to do with truth, and to choose a sense of harmony over insight every time.

He’d hooked up with a new girlfriend, a quirky thing named Darcy who hadn’t the faintest idea how to correctly use a comma.

Went batty. Some parent was complaining that her son found the lectures in his class to be unintelligible. Gary just began screaming. Asked the mother if she was aware that her son had drawn an illustration of a hairy boner on his mitosis-video response worksheet.

“But Gary didn’t stop there. He lit up a Bunsen burner and began stripping. Set his tie and shirt on fire, then his pants. Parents ran from the room screaming. By the time the cops came, Gary had turned out the lights in his classroom and put on an old-school filmstrip about the atom bomb. He was sitting in one of the student d