and you say and think and think and say and round and round it goes, some warts all around the neck and wrists and above the left hip, like the time she bumped her head against the bureau and blamed you for it although you were miles away on a trip to antigua where the children dance around you to and fro darting their hands into every pocket and what a cruel dog it must have been on that day as you kicked it when no one was looking except for the old man who smiled approvingly and his wife bespeckled and worried because even with them damn things on she still couldn’t see a thing.

After the levees broke, he decided to sign up with FEMA as a house inspector. It was a two week course that more or less taught him how to point and click and use the government issued laptop. The day he passed the course they gave him the laptop and an airline ticket for Louisiana leaving the next day. They told him, by the time you get to the motel, there will be a list of houses. Fifty dollars a house, work as much as you want. They also gave him a badge and added, with this you should be able to arm yourself and buy a bullet proof vest…
-We recommend it.
He touched down the next day during the evening and when he got to the motel, he jacked in. About 2000 houses scrolled down, then the screen shot back up to the top of list. The motel was shabby, planes constantly landing and taking off. He didn’t mind the noise, he wasn’t planning on spending much time here and he really didn’t have much of it. She was getting married soon and he had only a week.
The first day he got himself a Beretta, a small 9mm gun with a short barrel and textured grip. He didn’t bother with the bulletproof vest. He then ate at a greasy spoon next to the gun shop, grits and sausage. He didn’t touch the eggs because he saw the cook sneeze right on them. His waitress was a young black woman with a 70’s style afro and a thirty some odd bracelets on her right arm. They jangled as she set his plate.
-You one dem inspectahs?
-How’d you know?
She turned away still looking at him, swinging the curve of her hip, smiling.
-Cuz ya gun whiteman, cuz of ya bulge…
In the bathroom stall she worked his cock from within his pants with her thumb sliding up and down his shaft and the glans and did something with her index finger that felt like she was separating the balls in his scrotum and her nail dug just outside his asshole. He fucked her from behind grabbing hold of her afro and worked her clit while she she splayed the fingers of one hand above the toilet and she reached back with the other to slap his ass. She laughed, Forty acres and a mule!
All this before 9am.
The first couple of houses were pretty much what he had seen during the course: furniture in disarray, jammed up in doorways they floated to. The next batch was where thing got a little hinky: owners demanded to know what value he was going to asses the damage to their homes, what were they going to get. He honestly didn’t know but home owner in particular became irate and stopped him from leaving.
-Boy you aint leavin til you tell me.
He calmly put the notebook in his saddle bag and took out the gun. He didn’t pick it up and point, his father, a policeman in Baltimore had told him you never raise a gun unless you’re going to use it. Rather he kept his arm at his side but the home owner saw it.
-Oh come on man, that’s entrapment…
The highlight of his day came when he approached the last house on his list. It was a 2 story colonial with white siding that clearly needed replacing long before the flood. He rang the doorbell and no one answered. He stepped down from the porch and called the number listed. A woman answered, and she told him not to come in.
-Why?
-There’s gators.
-What?
-Dem gators won’t appreciate de intrusion.
-Ma’am did u say alligators?
She opened a window from the 2nd floor. She was blond and looked a bit like Farrah Fawcett, in her forties, before the anorexia and psychosis set it. Gators! She yelled, Go’on take a peek.
And he did: There were three of them in the living room, one atop the other, some post coital reptilian orgy. He slowly closed the door and called up to her, I’ll be right back.
He went to the local butcher shop, asked for the bloodiest cut of beef they had.
Back at the house, he opened the door and swung the meat back and forth in the front door, until the gators were roused. Jaws snapping and a low growl/hiss, he threw the meat into the street and ducked behind as they charged out. He darted inside and slammed the door shut.
The Farrah Fawcett look-a-like came down the stairs.
-We should be alright, the ASPCA should be here by tomorrow.
-Well, well, What will we do until then?
She toyed with the strap of her slip and walked back upstairs. He followed.
What he found about forty year olds was that although they did not show the abandon of twenty somethings, who spitting on your dick was considered foreplay, or the creativeness of thirty year olds with their lingerie and scented candles, they were truly open to anything. We’re real sluts, his mother’s friend had told him as a teenager. Just imagine all the cock we’ve seen.
And the Fawcett look-a-like was no exception. He fucked her on her back but bent her legs high against her just to get to her asshole. As he was putting it in, he wondered why assholes only came in pink or dark brown, hers being the latter, which only excited him more. He dug his fingers into her cunt, first one, then two, and was impressed that when she scame and bit on the shoulder her twat clenched his fingers just as tightly.
The next series of days went more or less just like the first, he assessed and fucked indiscriminately; teenage girls, strung out housewives, desperate mothers with babies crying in the hallway or in the next room. He tried to without a condom whenever he could, longer and harder than when he had to wear one. It was, after all, the point.
He returned in time for the wedding, standing next to the groom. For the briefest moment he panicked, did he forget the rings at the motel in New Orleans? It was ridiculous, he had left them home the entire time. She had brought them before he left, and they had fucked atop the peninsula that separated the kitchen from the dining room in his little condominium.
After the bride and groom took their vows and shared their first kiss as man and wife, after the photographer was done with shots for the wedding album and the first dance was danced (“the heat of the moment” by asia), he cornered her in the bridal suite of the reception hall.
I knew, she smiled.
Knew what? He asked and loosen his cummerbund.
That you could never say no to me, she said and pulled a chair in front of the vanity dresser, took off her panties and hitched one leg up on it, pulled her dress up and revealed her freshly waxed pussy.
No, he said, and walked towards her, and despite all the mouths and cunts and assholes and handjobs he had gotten as recklessly as possible, despite going out of his way to expose his body to as much filth and disease as he could, he found himself hard for her. And when he jammed his bare cock in her, she gasped.
No, he said again and jammed her again even harder, feeling her wet and tight against his skin.
But you said no to me, he added and almost came right then and there but didn’t. It wasn’t enough, he could never fuck her enough.

she collects dust. hand and knees, scraped knuckles, right from the floorboards. saliva drenched, from her neck to the base of her spine. she peddles it for pennies, she peddles it for comfort. in from the cold, like a knife, he traces a single finger down her face, down her neck, to the collarbone. she pauses, his finger slides back up to her chin, lifts it. it’s so heavy, sweat down his finger, trembling lip. you are so sincere, he tells her, she moves her head quick, snaps her jaws, takes hold of his finger to the first knuckle. he laughs, she shakes her head. just like a dog, he says and tugs gently: he doesn’t want her to let go, he doesn’t want her to go. he laughs and tugs, there’s much too much dust here.

Sitting in the waiting room. Always waiting, waiting for what? Just waiting, Waiting for Godot, for some sort of arrival, some sort of departure, waiting for rain, waiting to die, waiting to live, waiting, waiting, waiting. Hold your breath. and it’ll burst out of your chest, it’ll ravage you, punish you, floor you, leave you gasping just when you thought you didn’t want to take another

Everyday, have this at least, despite the sorrow and sadness, have this at least, this measure of you, this ounce, hang onto to this at least believe in this at least, not your failures, not the disappointment of who you are, just this, hang onto this, the words and the pain, the loss and the dispersal, this vital act of simultaneous becoming and disappearing: this is who you are, the congregation and dispersal, the want and the lack, the focus point, the sieve of despair, the void come to life.

our capacity to demand, for reassurance, for justice, for hope, endless, unbound, always thrown in the face of someone else. we expect reciprocation, we expect a volley in return, we expect to hear the tenor of sincerity, we expect like for like, love for love, hope in return for despair, we demand and rend and tear and claw until we get something, not just anything, but that which belongs to us, that mirrors, a pound of flesh for kindness, sutures for this wound.

Even pebbles add up to boulders, shaky as they are. You make the effort, mountains out of molehills, a pile of whispers into conversation. What matters is the steady pace, even if at a crawl. It all amounts to something, it all adds up. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or a magnum opus, everything big starts out tiny. even the body succumbs to a virus.