Twenty-two years of trying to restrain myself and it’s come to this. Fuck, fuck, fuck! This isn’t how I wanted the first time to be.
Wait. Am I going to be thirty-nine or forty this year? I always forget. I started saying I was forty a couple of years ago, when I realized I had been saying I was thirty-five for like four years.
She knew not to yell at an autistic person.
She knew not to honk her horn.
Twelve hours. That’s how long I managed to hold out. What kind of crazy person yells and screams and breaks shit for twelve hours over green onions? Like, if you don’t like them, don’t eat it. Or make your own dinner. Some people are fucking ridiculous.
I guess I stopped looking at her as a person a while ago. Just some droopy-faced parasite. The latest in a long string of people taking advantage of my generous nature. I can’t believe I fell for the lies and sob stories again. I can’t believe I’m acting like this is some sort of surprise – again.
The golf skirt she has on is way too short. Not many girls are over six-feet tall. Even fewer would try to pull off the mini skirt look. With her legs splayed open on bedroom floor, it rides up to her waist, exposing an untrimmed bush of red pubic hair that matches the hair under her armpits. Along the insides of her thighs, scars tell stories of years of self-harm. Stories she used to gain my sympathy. And I’m the crazy one? I never have been a fan of short skirts.
I knew better than to do this inside. And I knew not to use a blade. All these years imagining this moment and I fucked it all up. My little EMS folding knife held up pretty well. Not bad for twenty bucks. Fuck! This is going to be a disaster to clean up. See? I do care about something. This old-ass carpet needed to be replaced anyway. Circa 1983, just like everything else in this house. It’s a fixer-upper.
There’s gotta be something left in the linen closet that my ex-wife didn’t make off with. Not my bed sheets. They’re plenty big enough but won’t do anything for the mess and they’ve gotta be covered with my DNA. There are a couple of unopened plastic envelope things in the back. I can’t decide if I should wrap her in the green shower curtain or the red one. An obvious choice: Green. I like how the red one matches the bathmats. I’ll have to swap that out for the one that’s in there. Not right now, though.
I used to believe her stories about being a victim. Her dad, he’s a real piece of shit. So when she gave me the whole woe-is-me, hard-luck story, I had reason to believe her. I wanted to help her. I mean, I want to help a lot of people. Maybe she could have helped me, too. But then I lived with her for a couple weeks. It made me reconsider how own problems may actually be the result of my own assholery. I mean, there are a lot of shitty people out there, for sure. It’s a hard line to draw, between being a pushover and being adversarial. Neither often end with the best results.
I really should have prepared for this. I could have dug a hole or got some acid or something. Snuck up behind her outside. I don’t know. Something more thought-out.
Depression sucks, y’know? I spent the last couple weeks in bed, barely able to eat or sleep. There’s no food in the house anyway. She’s been taking my grocery money and, I don’t know. I can’t drive because of the brain hole. That was basically her one job when she moved in here.
I need to get my car smogged. The tags are expired. Now I have to drive across the county with three-month old tags. Whatever. I drove around Fresno drunk for a year with no license and expired tags and never got stopped. I only have to make it like fifty miles tonight. I’ll take Mizu and Lena. The likelihood that I’m going to get questioned or my car searched over expired tags if I have a German Shepherd and husky in the back seat is slim.
“Load up, girls.”
Mizu loves going for rides. She sets a good example for the puppy. Everyone thinks Lena is her puppy because they look so much alike, but they aren’t even the same breed.
This old Subaru doesn’t have much life left in it. Any time I get it going over fifty miles-per-hour, it starts shaking like the Tacoma Narrows. My first instinct is to pull over and check for a blown tire. I get one blowout in ten years and now I’m obsessed with it any time I drive. It’s been twenty years since crashing the Firebird and I still expect an encore of that episode whenever I’m behind the wheel. Maybe I’ll be able to replace this one with a newer model next year. The rubber mats in the back have done an awesome job protecting against dirty dogs and, presumably, anything that leaks out of shower curtains. I pull the shade cloth over my cargo section and slam the rear door of the Outback.
I wanted to do something more thoughtful. More poetic.
What she needed was an opportunity to be disabled for a while. To have to rely on somebody else. There’s nowhere here that’s both soundproof and secure. The Harry-Potter closet under the stairs would be perfect if the door were replaced. Just a couple weeks locked in there seems appropriate. Way more appropriate than this. There’s blood and dog piss soaked through the carpet pad. It used to just be dog piss. I’d keep her dogs, but they keep killing my chickens. If I could teach them not to get up on the counters and how to stop shitting in the house, that would make six dogs. Too many.

When you live three miles down a dirt road, it’s impossible to keep your car clean. I used to drive down this crooked road every night. During the dry season, every car would be faded-brown with dust. And the rest of the year, mud splattered and caked everywhere. This includes on your boots and dogs, which means everywhere. Before moving out to the country, consider if you want to sleep with mud in your bed.
Lucky for me, I haven’t been driving much lately, so my car already has a solid coat of dust on it. Nothing conspicuous here. I have to abandon use of my rear-view mirror before long. The sprayer on the back window must have gone out. It’s not the fluid, the front still works. Another repair this car will need.
Thankfully, it’s late enough where I don’t run into Kathleen on my way through the back gates. It’s hard to decide which would be worse, the idea that she could be a witness, or the thought that I might have to listen to that old crone blither on about pointless shit for half an hour. Someone should wrap her grizzled ass in a shower curtain.
Still no locks. Now I just have to get through before the cows try to push their way into the other pasture. To them, my approaching headlights mean food. Cows aren’t bright enough to realize that no, I don’t have six bales of hay in the back of my Subaru. I idle my car through the sliver I’ve opened in the gate and nudge the black heifers out of the way with the front bumper. Never honk, that will just attract more of them.
The pigs are more likely to find their special eggroll down by the road and in the flat areas by the lake. But so could anybody else. I’ve got to go way up to the top of the hill, then down the game trail to the bottom of the ravine. There’s no water right now, so there won’t be any animals at the creek. Fortunately, there won’t be any people for another six or eight months down there, either. It’s too fucking hot out here in the Summer. Plus, the women who own this property are morbidly obese so they couldn’t get down here if they wanted. My ex-wife would be the only one in their family who could do it. She’ll probably end up looking like them in a decade or two, but for now she still has the surfboard body type.
She didn’t get me. She could have, but like most people, she wanted me to adapt to her versions of concepts like love and family. I don’t get it. Can’t we all have our own versions of these abstract concepts and when we’re with someone, find ways to combine them? It’s pretty silly how people want to find and be with people who think exactly the same as themselves. How could their gods magically share the same bias and bigotry?
I just want to love when and how I want to love. Maybe I’m not cut out for this relationship thing. Some of my friends and their partners seem to really get each other and have good communication skills. Whenever I try to do that, I end up getting verbally or physically assaulted. Is that my type? There must be some kind of criteria for a healthy relationship that I’m not seeing.
The whole process of online dating is like that. Or it used to be. Five or six years ago, when I last used those apps, the in-real-life meetings were more like terrible job interviews than any kind of conversation. These thirty-somethings – single mothers or desperate for kids – or both – trying to pry out my five-year plan as I looked over John Lennon sunglasses at the little whirlpool I’d made in my cocktail with the straw. She’d usually ask me something about whether or not I’d have a relationship with someone who has kids. Or someone who’s divorced. Or someone who is ten years older than me.
“Depends on the someone,” I’d say, pretending like I didn’t know what she was asking. Then I’d tell her that if she wanted to smoke a bowl, I only lived a few blocks away, but she could only stay for one drink, then she’d have to leave. I don’t sleep with people on the first date, I’d say. An hour later, she’s creaming on my cock like nobody’s ever pulled her hair before.
Make sure to only keep one condom in the nightstand. They always want to go again in the morning, but if you say you only had the one condom, you can get sucked off before you send her on her way. My advice, not like I follow it, is do make sure to send her on her way. I love to cook and I almost never get the chance to anymore. Sleepover guests are a good excuse to make a fancy breakfast. Yeah, I could do it for myself, but I’m not going to, no matter how many people tell me I should. If there’s one thing all the ‘ladies’ on Plenty of Fish are hungry for, it’s a man who cums in their mouth and then makes them fresh-fruit crepes. And this is how you end up with stalkers. How I ended up with stalkers. It’s also how I accidentally ended up in some several-year-long relationships. Which is basically the same thing except they enter your house through the front door.
Once I back my car up to the edge of the ravine, I climb into the back seat, give the merchandise a shove and watch it flop wildly down the hill. It only makes it about half-way down. Giving chase, I kick the bundle with my heel and the pale-green wrapper uncoils, sending its contents into the dry creek. She’s already getting stiff. Normally, I’d make a joke. I bundle up the shower curtain and head back up the hill. I’ll toss it in the dumpster at the mini-mart on my way home.
“Seriously, Mizu, did you have to go swimming right now?” She used to take a swim in the lake four or five times a day when we lived out here, summer or winter. I fold down the back seat and wrap the seat cover over the headrests. Lena bounds back to the car, her legs and undercarriage caked with mud.
“Okay, load up.”
I really need to get those fucking tags renewed.