Writing Exercise 6 – by Vance Power

“Oh man, fucking is the last thing I should be doing,” Corrina thinks as she reaches down and cups the head between her legs. “ Yes Desmond, kiss me there,” she whispers, placing her hands over his ears in hopes that he would barely hear her in case she had his name wrong. She looks around his room again, her face twisting into a mixture of pleasure and denial, worry and ambition. There is little time to think about what she has been avoiding, but what the beers would no longer keep from bubbling into thoughts, ideas, plans, and impossibilities.

A small twin bed in a small apartment with no seeming order to how and where objects are placed. Every storage area is a potential placement area for a random item. She had seen pots and pans hung from the shower curtain rod, and a toothbrush in a bowl that had old oatmeal crusted along its edges, raisins that were transforming again into something new, some new unspeakable fruit. The kitchen cupboards were wide open, and any one of them could have spices, forks, cereal boxes, socks, pants, deodorant, or more. It was a system, it seems, of anti-systems.

They are in a small bedroom that is painted a dark color, hard to see which one in the flickering light of the three battery operated candles that light the room. There are thick gold curtains and pictures along the wall. In each of the pictures are various family portraits, and in each one a different family member has been vandalized. There is one of Desmond (was that really his name?) and his parents, and his mother has devil horns, a rough smile, and eyebrows drawn over her with a red sharpie. Another one may be him and his brothers, though their faces are covered with stickers of mister yuck.

Imitation potpourri dominates the senses, overpowering even the wet smell of sex, the slick mingling of body sweats and saliva, the smell of bar breath that is peanuts, beer, cigarettes, and conversations about nothing that led to this room, this moment. Somewhere beneath a pile of clothes a twenty year old mini-boombox is playing Al Green. “ Al Green,” Corrina thinks, “of all the possibilities. Maybe he keeps that booty box cued up just for moments like this.”

She is caught between denying what is happening to her body, where she is, where she had been exactly seven hours prior that resulted in a large pile of still-bundled cash stashed beneath the front passenger seat of her ’81 Datsun 280z. She cCorrinaot allow her thoughts to drift back to that, or to what might happen next. Denial is her new vehicle, and that is what landed her here, to this place, three blocks from where she had met him and made another in a series of bold moves for the day.

He slides up between her legs and she can taste herself in his sloppy kisses. Her face is hot and sweating, and she dives into an immediate and ungrounded passion in another attempt to keep her mind from wandering. “I should have downed more beers,” she thinks, but remembers there is someplace yet to go. Not here. This is just a last stop in this fucked up town.

She feels him moan as he slides into her, and her arms are wrapped around him. There is only one thing she can think of to keep herself from wondering about how things came to be earlier, and the possible consequences. There is only one way to silence the screams that will not leave her memory, the ricochet of a bullet off of a red brick wall. The dull thud of a pistol-whipped idiot who thought to play hero.

Corrina flips them both over and straddles her temporary lover. Her muscles tighten as she fights to control her wandering thoughts. Her clothes are near the door. When things began to heat up, when their hands went from uncomfortable wandering to groping one another, she made sure that every piece of her clothing was tossed near the door. She thought about the next step.

With her breasts hung inches above Desmond’s face, she guides him back inside. The thoughts continue rising, and despite her best efforts she can still see the butt of a pistol upside the face of a handsome young man. His stern concentration sunken as two front teeth eject from his mouth and his body sinks, crumples. Corrina begins her pace, thrusting in an effort to displace her thoughts. She finds a rhythm.

The sweat. The potpourri in the room, the sounds of Al Green’s vocal range are challenged by the crescendo of their sex. Too many beers into the game, Desmond is yelling another woman’s name. It does not phase her. This was not about intimacy or connecting. Not even about meeting any needs. She just needed to quiet the images.

The bedstand is rattling, shaking. There is a bobblehead doll of Pete Rose, with an odd and perverted smile. The rhythm increases. Desmond is shouting an amass of screams that are primal, unintelligible. She feels his body tense. Every muscle tightening beginning at his fingers and working their way to his tight balls. The moment is right up them.

In one quick move, Corrina leaps from the bed, grabs her clothes from near the door, and darts out the front door. As she closes the door to a string of confused and enraged phrases that deafen the music, the night, the sounds in her mind from today’s memories, she smiles and slips quickly into her clothes. Heading towards the parking lot, Corrina thinks about a destination. With none in mind, she walks hurriedly to her car, it winds and winds beneath the night sky and finally spurts into life. She closes her eyes, rolls down the window to let the over potpourri and sex smells escape her, slides the shifted to drive, and rolls out into an unknown.