Shelby by Pete; McCormack

else I could do. Their reaction punched me right in the sternum. Uncle Mannfred was standing off to Auntie Carol’s right, leaning against the frame of the office door, his moribund frown indicating he was close to tears. Auntie Carol seemed disappointed but understanding. Without me even having to ask, she disappeared into a back room for a couple of minutes before returning with a check for $56. My first and last day and they were already treating me like family. Joel (one of the workers) had mentioned during a coffee break that they’d been trying unsuccessfully to have a child for the past seven years. Infertility. Now they were attempting to adopt but bureaucratic barriers were blocking their every move. If it ever works out, I envy that kid. Auntie Carol oozed maternal instinct. So did Uncle Mannfred for that matter. They were so passionate about their sausage making I feared I was passing up the chance of a lifetime. As I pulled out of the parking lot, they simultaneously wished me well and then waved, with five or six employees following suit.
    Arriving home, I collapsed on the pull-out couch, closed my eyes and reminisced about being lost in the short-lived throngs of passionate lovemaking. An errant whiff of weiner seasoning on my hands shut that memory down, and my heart sank at not having worn a condom; there was something grossly immoral about being connected with every lover she’d ever had. Then again, I reasoned, I was in love and prepared to see it through any nightmare.
    I called Gran and it was wonderful to hear her voice. When I told her about my day at the sausage factory, she laughed with such gusto she dropped the phone. Henceforth in the conversation I was referred to as “Little Smokey.” I further confessed to her that my exam marks would be shattering to Mom and Dad and that I had no intentions of returning to university come September.
    â€œDon’t expect me to tell them,” she said. She knew I knew what she meant. That was her way of keeping a secret.
    That evening, darkness fell slowly upon the city, the night unsure of whether or not it was late spring or early summer. Thoughts of Lucy and joblessness and future outlook and unprotected sex with a stripper had pummelled me into a corner. I decided, much as I often did in my simpler days frolicking through university, to go out walking.
    By eight forty-five I was standing on the corner of Broadway and Granville waiting for a bus downtown. Attractive women were on both my flanks. I smiled confidently and puffed up, reasoning that sex with Lucy might be causing me to be giving off a different aura. I turned to the woman on my left. She was well made up. I nodded and smiled.
    â€œWonderful night,” I said. She replied with a blank stare bordering on disgust.
    On the bus I thought about how there once was a time when practicality was the key ingredient behind choosing a mate. How effective are her childbearing hips? How easily can he pin a cave bear? Then some ten thousand years ago the first sedentary civilizations cropped up along the River Tigris and people suddenly had time to examine their spouses’ physical properties, much as one would study a Monet in the Louvre. Overnight, natural selection became a question of cheek bone structure and charm and the width of one’s lips. Homely intellects like myself were ostracized to perpetual bachelorhood, expected to update primitive tools and the like. And here we are today filling up our secondary sexual characteristics with silicone and exercising to improve calf definition while the planet—sadly, still the only one known to harvest this thing called life—goes up in smoke.
    Then I thought about how wonderful Lucy was for going against the norms of avant-garde natural selection by spending the last couple of weeks mating with a genetic outcast. Sure enough I became aroused, and wondered if I was now free to drop by Lucy’s apartment at