by Comeau, Joey
“What’re we doing tonight?” I say and Clay smiles.
“Tonight, sir, there’s a meteor shower,” he says. “I don’t know if you heard. It’s kind of a big deal. We’re going to go out to the country, where there are no streetlights, and were going to watch the sky fall.” This is Clay’s birthday surprise for me. It’s hard to believe he even remembers the meteor shower. He’s got no interest in anything like this, but I must have gone on about it one too many times, my voice all earnest, waving my hands in the air while I talked.
Clay gets excited about things, too. It’s one of the things I love about him. He gets an idea in his head and it lights him up. There’s not a cynical bone in his body; everything is fun. Everything’s an adventure. It doesn’t matter what the plan is. He has dozens of plans. Let’s go to the movie on Tuesday. Let’s go to China. Let’s learn how to leave no trace at all in the world’s databases and let’s live off the grid. Let’s learn to knife fight. We saw an ad about that. Learn to knife fight using training methods developed for Russian Special Forces. The flyer ended with the ominous, “You don’t win a knife fight. You survive.” There is always more room in our lives for something so deadly serious.
And Clay’s enthusiasm is infectious. Now he’s talking about Wallace again. He wants to come into the store wearing a leather vest. I have no idea where Clay would even find a leather vest. He wants to wear a big fake cop moustache. A disguise. Wallace has never seen him, which makes me feel weird, now that we’ve said it out loud. Clay’s never been into the store. I’ve never been into the casino, either.
“I’ll seem like just any other customer,” Clay says. “Oh this is going to be brilliant,” He’s repeating himself now. This is how you know when he’s really excited. He goes around in circles, and the idea is more exciting to him every time. He wants to get his friends to do it, too. Every queer he knows. Go in and blow Wallace kisses. Pat Wallace’s ass affectionately after he’s been helpful. Ask Wallace for his phone number.
When Clay’s around, I feel like I’m more exciting, too. That’s a good quality to have in a gentleman friend. I come up with plans of my own for us. Let’s try to befriend the squirrels that live in the walls and attic. Let’s go get some candy and stay up all night watching horror movies. Let’s sleep over in a graveyard, so the dead can visit us in our dreams.
I don’t fall in love very easily. It takes a long time and then, when I have fallen in love, I’m still not sure. I’m suspicious of myself. What if tomorrow I don’t feel the same? I have to wait, to be sure. And I wait and wait. I think I might be at that stage with Clay. I’ve been waiting for a while now. I have dreams about telling him.
We drop the car back at the apartment and unlock our bikes. I love biking in the dark. I didn’t think I’d get a chance to see the meteor shower tonight. I thought for sure he’d take me out to dinner or to some movie. Watching a meteor shower is amazing because to the human eye it just looks like dozens of little moving points of light. Thin streaks of light. Except they aren’t. They’re chunks of debris falling to earth. Fast and burning and where do they all come from? I’m not sure. They’re little bits of something else.
Space always makes me think of infinity. The universe just keeps going and going and, when I think about it, it actually feels like my thoughts have to get bigger to understand. And then I get scared.
We bike out to the dark and find a perfect spot. We’re in a field with a hill blocking the streetlight from the road, the best place for us to stretch out and watch the sky fall. We lay down side by side on the grass and dirt, watching the sky. Beside me, Clay says, “There!” and I see it too, the first streak of thin light.
We watch for a while, until I get scared thinking about the yawning void of space and the maddening smallness of our solar system in it and the smallness of our planet in that solar system and of my own voice in the dark and I almost say, “I love you,” right then and there, but instead I pull him on top of me.
I like having his weight on me. I like the feel of his breath against my cheek and I like the feeling of being trapped, too. Pinned down. He kisses me and smiles, then tries to roll off me. I hold onto him tightly.
He pins my wrists to the dirt. He stretches me out so my belly’s exposed and he kisses my neck. He puts his mouth right up against my ear and says, “Nobody can hear you out here. Cry for help all you want.” And I struggle against his grip. He pins my wrists with one hand and with the other he pulls my belt open, shoves his hand down to wrap cool around my cock and I say, “No.” And I try to pull free.
We forget all about watching the stars. He kisses me and I struggle against him just enough. “Let’s move,” he says. There’s a tree here. We stand up and we kiss in the moonlight with the stars falling and no cars anywhere and oh it’s all very perfect and romantic and all I can think about is I want him inside me. I want him to press his finger inside me.
He pushes me against the tree. I spin us so that he’s against the tree and I put his hand in my hair and make a fist of it. He’s smiling. He forces me down to my knees and I squeeze the front of his pants. Gripping a cock through them that isn’t fully erect yet, but doesn’t really need to be. I pull at the button.
I open my mouth, looking up at him, and he takes my hair in both his fists and shoves my face down on his cock. My lips are forced open. Then further. I’m still struggling, my hands waving helplessly in the air.
He’s hard now. I make a choking sound as he reaches the back of my throat and I struggle. He pulls my head back to let me gasp for air and to force me to look up at him. He spits on me. His spit is thick on my face, and he says “Whore.” He shoves me down on his cock again, fucks my face while I dig my fingers in the bark of the tree, the zipper of his pants cutting against my lips and cheek, again and again. Then my hand is up his shirt, pulling at his nipple and leaving streaks of dirt on his chest while he uses my mouth. Then he pauses.
“Is this okay?” he says, looking down, and I can only nod.
Yes.
I want him to come on the ground here in front of me, or to come across my lips. I want him to push my face into the dirt and pull my pants roughly down just far enough so he can get at my asshole. My knees are wet and cold through my pants.
Clay pulls me back by the hair and forces me to look up at him again.
“My turn!” he says.
And so I twist his arm behind his back and push him against the tree with his shirt pulled up. The bark is digging into his chest, and I’ve got his pants pulled down so I can get at him. My free hand is wet with my own spit, my finger pushing at his asshole. I use my body to hold his arm twisted between us. My teeth are tearing at the condom wrapper. I wrap my hand around his throat while I enter him. “If you make one sound, I’ll kill you,” I whisper in his ear.
When I come, I panic a bit, because I can suddenly see everything. I have my hand around his throat and I feel like I am just returning into my senses. Did we go too far? But Clay reaches up and kisses me on the cheek and then on my mouth and he says, “You’re beautiful.”
Afterward, we watch the night sky, still half-naked. His chest hair is soft and I rest my head on him. The dirt and twigs are digging into the skin of my hip. My pants are still around my ankles. This is so quiet and would be such a perfect time to say, “I love you.” But you can’t say something like that just because the moment is right. It’s too seductive, having the moment be perfect. I would worry that I said it just because it seemed like the right time. The stars keep falling.
“It makes me nervous,” I tell him. One after another after another the streaks of light appear and vanish. “It goes on forever.” I sound stupid. Chunks of burning rock from God knows where, raining down on us. Rocks that are older than our whole solar system. And when our sun explodes and we are all destroyed, we’ll be rocks and chunks of I am not sure what. Maybe we’ll rain down on somewhere else.
On the bike ride home, we keep making wide slow turns from one side of th
e road to the other in the dark. We talk about Halloween, which is soon. I say maybe tomorrow night we should go climbing trees in the neighbourhoods we grew up in and Clay says maybe we could learn how to fight with our bare hands.
Everyone should be able to kill a man with just their thumb. We could be ready for anything. There are whole martial arts devoted to just disarming someone. Just disabling them and getting away, Clay tells me. He knows just what I want to hear. My lips are raw and they taste a bit like blood and dirt and this is a perfect birthday.
calculator
At fifteen, I was caught with half a carton of rotten eggs in the woods. They knew it was me right away. I wasn’t wearing a mask. Halloween was about being horrible, not just pretending.
The police never pressed charges. The man who arrested me knew my father from downtown. He sat down beside me in the back seat of the cruiser and rested his thin hand on my leg and said, “This is no way for a kid to behave.”
At home, my mother took me upstairs to my room and laid into me with a wooden spoon. “You think you’re too old for this?” And then I waited in the dark for hours. I waited until they were asleep and then I opened my bedroom window and I dropped from the second floor to the ground.
I landed on my ankle funny and limped to the garage for a weapon. A tire iron. There’s a special way that a tire iron feels in your hand when you know what it’s for. And I knew exactly what a tire iron was for. I broke sixteen car windows before dawn.
My hands were cold and shaking when I put the tire iron back and snuck back inside. At breakfast, I acted as surprised as my mother that the ankle was broken.
My father offered to pay for law school, if and when I got to be law school aged. I studied math instead, worked weekends. I kept breaking glass because I liked breaking glass. Baseball bats and wine bottles in the woods.
A sales clerk caught me with my hand down the front of my pants in the personal finance section of an office supply store. She turned bright red and I almost dropped the calculator I was holding. It had two lines of display, and a multi-level undo function.
I pressed the buttons on the calculator in sequence, exploring its functions, admiring the second display line, the speed of its calculations and the utility of its error control functions. I lost track of my surroundings. I slid my hand down the waist of my jeans and a fifty year old woman in a bright red vest was suddenly at the end of the aisle snorting at me.
Tuesday night in an office supply store, fingering myself. The woman spun and marched off. I wanted to run, but I wanted that calculator, too. I needed it. I wanted to take it home with me. Anyway, there were no cameras on the calculators. The cameras all pointed to laptops and ink cartridges. There was no evidence. It was her word against mine.
The only evidence was easily handled. I set the calculator on the shelf carefully and turned and walked through the bright, clean aisles toward the back of the store. The clerks that I passed smiled politely at me. They hadn’t heard. They would.
At the back of the store I entered the bathroom and I ran my hands under warm water. I soaped them with a squirt of the pink pearl soap. I washed the soap away and then I soaped them again.
The calculator cost me sixty-five dollars at the front cash. Washing my hands had given the old woman plenty of time to spread the word. I paid in cash and smiled at the nervous girl behind the cash.
Outside, I sat in my car and took my knife to the packaging. I cut into the plastic again and again, until the calculator sat in my palm. Then I pressed the pad of my thumb against the shiny black ON button. The number zero appeared and already the world around me was beginning to fade.
I sat hunched forward in the parking lot of that store, my fingers on the plastic squares of the calculator, my other hand down the front of my pants. I had to concentrate. It was difficult, entering numbers and formulas with one hand and circling and stopping and circling again with the other. It was the perfect form of concentration.
When my legs began to shake, I pulled my hand out from my pants and I pulled them down to my knees. The skin on my leg pressed against the door of the car. I set the calculator against my cunt, so that the hard corner of the device pressed into just the right spot, and the cool plastic edge ran through the soft skin just right. I spat on my hand to make the plastic wet. I moved the calculator back and forth, pressing with the corner and then I reached for the knife.
I took the knife blade and pressed it into the fissure where the two halves of the calculator’s casing met. I continued to press the calculator into me, moving it slower now, my thumb reaching for the function keys. I ran the knife to the top corner and twisted it, like I was opening an oyster. The casing cracked. I moved the knife to the lower corner.
My legs were shaking more and more. I was thinking one and one hundred thousand. I was thinking compound interest and multi-level undo functions. Two level display. I cracked the lower corner, and the calculator opened.
I leaned forward as I came and looked inside. I put the knife down and I ran my fingers, wet, over the circuitry of the calculator. There were no sparks. There was no hiss. The circuit board was flat, with sharp points, and it was slick under my fingers.
I leaned back into my seat and left my hand resting on the exposed and ruined insides of the calculator. My breathing came easily and I felt as though I could sleep right there in the parking lot. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, listening to the passing traffic and the calm of my breathing.
dirty word frequency count
ass.......................................22
audience................................1
beg.........................................1
bite........................................8
blindfolded...........................2
blood.....................................8
body....................................12
breast.................................18
bruise....................................1
caught...................................5
choking.................................2
cock....................................27
come....................................47
condom..................................4
could...................................32
couldn’t..............................11
crying....................................2
cunt.....................................10
dildo.....................................4
dirt......................................16
equation................................5
eyes.....................................32
fingers................................61
forced...................................2
fuck.....................................16
fumble...................................3
generosity.............................2
gently...................................2
grind.....................................3
grip........................................2
handcuffs.............................3
hard....................................25
hidden...................................5
hole....................................15
inside..................................37
moan.....................................4
mouth.................................43
naked....................................3
neck....................................13
nipple..................................14
photograph...........................4
please...................................3
rough....................................8
secret...................................3
sex......................................12
shove..................................11
smile...................................31
soft.....................................18
sperm....................................2
struggle...............................5
teeth.....................................6
throat..................................4
tongue................................19
touch..................................22
use......................................13
violent.................................2
virginity...............................2
wall....................................15
watch..................................17
we.......................................54
about the author
Joey Comeau is the author of Overqualified, Lockpick Pornography, Bible Camp Bloodbath, and One Bloody Thing After Another. He lives in Canada and, with photographer Emily Horne, he makes the webcomic A Softer World. Google that shit.
Table of Contents
the girl who couldn’t come
one two three four five six seven eight
ghosts
the steps
christmas tree pornography
and then the werewolf
