A Woman Barking, a Man Crying
What I remember is dry desert wind, dirt all over your body and mine, and the pool that looked so good from the highway, up close was sprouting green and snot-like around the edges. There was music blasting from somebody’s car radio as we parked but all we heard was bass. After we’d showered there was nothing left to do but drink so that’s what we did. It’s what we would do anyway. We’d already scanned the supermarket earlier for something that would really fuck us up and found a bottle of whiskey for four dollars and seventy-eight cents, some cheap beers, some oranges. The fan in our motel room was broken and the blankets itched, but everything was salmon pink and kitsch so it didn’t matter. We sat on the stained carpet and drank while we sang along with the radio and smoked cigars. We danced – that was always the good part, the dancing. We took photographs and then we took turns squeezing the juice from the oranges into each other’s eyes. We argued. We got distracted by sounds coming from the next room – a woman barking, a man crying, then remembered we were arguing and argued over who forgot first. Sometime between midnight and sunrise when the temperature dropped but our bodies were freshly covered with sweat we watched a couple have sex on the broken deck chair beside the pool. Neither of us had seen sex so close and so real. It was ugly. It was big, white flesh angrily pumping, it was clenched teeth and cellulite ripples dancing all over their bodies.
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Lauren Aimee Curtis is a writer from Sydney, Australia. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Two Serious Ladies, Going Down Swinging, The UTS Writers’ anthology Hide Your Fires, and Spineless Wonder’s anthology Writing to the Edge.