Daddy's by Lindsay Hunter Page A

dust is gold in a stream of sunlight but regular and dirty in the no-light. Giddy splashed up some water in disgust and Daddy’s wife clapped her hands while the Davey motes shivered off her and fell into the toilet and swirled down to the underworld. God strike you lonely then dead, Carnation whispered and Daddy’s wife giggled and pulled up her undies and left us.
     
    Davey’s faint jangling still hung in the air and one by one we climbed from the window and jumped. Giddy twisted up her ankle and began to crawl. Grandmother was in the office looking like a drugged specimen in a yellow lightbox, her feet up on the desk and her skirt open and a glint of drool working its way down her neck, and we continued on past her and past the motel itself and into the dark thatchery behind.
     

    It was the moon brought us there. Daddy told us our mother’s dumb forlorn soul wafted up to that white eye and got tangled up in its eyelashes, and there the moon was staring wildly from the treetops. Carnation said we was lost and we should pray and sure enough Grandmother’s motel had disappeared into a dark nothing behind us, and we knelt in the dirt and held hands and whispered bright nothing prayers and begged for an angel’s shovel to dig Davey up from the sewage so he could show us his candied heart once more. We prayed the moon would unstopper long enough to suck us through to the other side so we could see how dull the stars were at their backsides. Far off our daddy began calling for us, and we pretended it was a wolf’s howling, or a car rushing down a highway, or that loud emptiness you hear when there’s nothing to hear and pretty soon you start believing there never ever was.
     

LOOFAH
     

    He woke up after having a dream of falling. Just before he fell this guy from his college trigonometry class walked toward him shirtless. Then he fell.
     
    He opened his eyes and watched his girlfriend jump around the room on one foot. Charley horse, she yelled accusingly. Her big toe was stuck in the up position. He had a throbbing hard-on and figured it was just as painful.
     
    His throat was dry so he got up and went into the bathroom. He popped a zit in the crease between his nose and cheek and slurped at the water coming out of the faucet. His girlfriend limped in and stood behind him until he met her eyes in the mirror. You could’ve helped, she said.
     
    What could I have done? he asked her. He answered himself: Nothing. His girlfriend sighed, sat on the toilet with her shirt bunched between her legs. This had always been his dirtiest fantasy, ever since he was a child: a girl’s exposed thighs and the delicate sounds of her pee stream hitting the water.
     
    His girlfriend was in a punishing mood. Get out, she said. He leaned over and kissed her forehead, maneuvered his hard-on under the waistband of his boxer shorts.
     
    He found a soft orange in the kitchen with very thin skin. Its insides were bloodcolored and dry. He put it back in the fridge and stacked its peels in the middle of the stove.
     
    It was raining outside. He could see a faint reflection of himself in the window. The guy in his dream was shirtless. His girlfriend had beautiful ice-cream-scoop breasts. The guy in the dream was shirtless. His girlfriend had pillowy dicksucking lips. The guy in the dream was shirtless. His girlfriend often played with his balls when she was bored. The guy in the dream was shirtless. His girlfriend got drunk almost every night and breathed Let’s get nasty into his ear to the point where the smell of margarita mix got him hard. The guy in the dream was shirtless. His girlfriend let him tie her up once. The guy in the dream was shirtless. His girlfriend the guy in the dream was shirtless.
     
    It’s raining, his girlfriend said behind him. She opened the fridge and he stood behind her and tried to finger her. It made him think of the dry bloodcolored orange and he gave it up.
     
    Jake. The guy in his trig class’s name