Christopher P. Mooney

My Name is Penelope

He sucked on my AlloDerm lips and pounded my concentration-camp hips, trying in vain to fill my belly. I’d suspected, when he told me he’d given both his dogs – a German Shepherd and some kind of coyote – variations of his own first name, that the sex wouldn’t be selfless enough to be good enough; that he couldn’t pick pleasure out of a line-up. And I was right. Even in a part of the country as flat as this, an orgasm was never on the horizon.

It started with his fingers – the middle three, large, like a bunch of fucking mutant bananas and with knuckles like moldy walnuts – somewhere inside me, fumbling so deep they might be clawing at marrow. Fuck. It felt like a lion was chewing my spleen. Then – my body willing but my mind detached from the consensual unreality of what was being done to me – his tongue slurped at where he thought my still-hooded clit might be the way a trapped rat attacks a metal bucket. Then he was on top of me. I tightened my legs around him, ankles crossed and hands clasped behind his neck, as he rutted away at me.

But I could deal. Not a problem, and not unprecedented: pro-choice and promiscuous, I’ve had more scrapes than a three-year-old’s knees. So, with him panting over me like a whisky-breath Santa stoned on puberty, his clammy skin the color of boiled milk, I drifted away, as oblivious to his touch as he was to my indifference, compiling a grocery list and a who-to-try-next list. 

‘Lucille,’ he shuddered as that cloying sperm smell told me it was over.

My throat constricted. Desire, the most painful of all the abstracts, was no longer with us. It died with his utterance of that name; an undeniable presence that felt as heavy as an iron lung.

He was soon asleep and I lay there, motionless in that bed of ghosts, my cheeks the only wet part of me.

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