becoming, pt. 2

read part 1 here.

There was a boy. His name was Steven or Shaun or Seamus. Selby remembers resting her head between his folded legs, the sweet smell of his crotch, and the way he stroked her hair, stretching out her curls with a gleeful “boing!” like the boys in grade school used to do. He had a girlish giggle and a crooked smile. On her twenty-eighth birthday, she’d gone out with friends and drank herself ageless, accepted the joint when it was passed, drifted in and out of bars until they closed, allowed her friends to drag her to a house party, through crowds of people milling around in the hot night, she thought she had never seen so many people, roving like animals released from the zoo. The party thinned until she and the boy were left, groping each other with mindless hands. In bed, the boy’s skin was damp against hers. She cupped a hand over the flab at the base of his abdomen. He caressed her ears, her elbows, desperately gripped her naked hips, then turned out the light. Waking late in the morning, Selby watched the boy scuffle around his bedroom, his body suddenly not so flawed as it had been in the night; his lean silhouette cut the air, weapon-like. He blew his nose with the corner of a wrinkled t-shirt and dressed, ignoring Selby’s guilty “good mornings.” Through the door, she heard him talking to a roommate, “where’s the girl from last night,” the roommate asked. “I don’t know,” the boy said, “she was gone when I woke up.” “Are you sure,” his roommate said, “her stuff is still here.” The boy said he didn’t know. It didn’t matter anyway, he hadn’t planned on seeing her again and he couldn’t stand around talking about it, he wasn’t going to waste this day like all the others. The two roommates decided to go for breakfast, remarking on their messy apartment, how suffocated the place made them feel. “The weirdest thing happened,” the boy said as he and his roommate went down the stairs, “I knew she’d left, but I could feel her in bed next to me.”

Picking her way through post-party clutter, Selby found her belongings, her keys hanging over the edge of a red plastic cup, her feet protesting her shoes. Thinking about what the boy had said, she pinched herself. Sitting half-dressed on an unfamiliar couch, she felt numb but the pinch stung all the same. Outside, obscene sunlight collected itself in reflections on the hoods of cars, dappled the surfaces of greasy puddles of water; Selby stepped out into the street, crossed it, the boy’s odor lingering in all her subtle creases and folds. Nothing had changed. Her birthdays were like that. She was nine, then she was ten. She was twenty, then twenty-one, twenty-five, then twenty-six. There was no gravitas in age, only decay. Her grandmother had warned her on the evening of her twenty-eighth, as Selby got ready for her night out. “Just wait,” the old lady said, “it passes. You’ll get old and heavy, like me.” The morning after, Selby walked to her car with shoulders heavy under the weight of carnal acts. Her thighs were sticky with sweat and sex. The inside of her mouth dry, her tongue a salted slug. She drove herself home, to the squat house she shared with her grandmother, at the end of an urban block preserved in time, green lawns and white awnings fiercely tended at the will of several old ladies, who refused to let the dark corners of the world shadow the prim stairs leading to their front doors.






this is a work of fiction, composed by and belonging entirely to me. please don't steal it.