Stabs at Happiness by Todd Grimson

following her down here.
    It was infernally hot down here. Reddish pink lights and spots cut through plumes of smoke. A Chinese dragon danced, all gold, to the accompaniment of cymbals and wailing flutes and clarinets.
    â€œLet’s go,” said Dirk, to Kit. “Let’s go someplace… where we can…” He raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
    In the backseat of Dirk’s car Kit started feeling Jean up again, exciting her, she was still telepathically receptive to his touch. He knew how to find the right spot. God. She moaned, shamelessly, knowing the others could hear and knew exactly what was going on. But this was who she was supposed to be!
    It didn’t take long to get to the hotel… but then, time was losing its normal relation to events. It was smoothing out, flashing with little subatomic suns and glares of light. Microscopic nebulae and mirrored moons that could have been streetlamps or reflections in the pupil of an eye floated, revolved.
    The next thing she knew, in Room 421, the needle was dipping into her vein, waking her up in a hurry, the cocaine making her feel like she was going to die yet flooding her with a new electric life. Ooh… she felt so good… ummmmm…
    There was an arrangement of one couple on the bed, another on the floor. Kit was fucking Jean for awhile, but he seemed more interested in mathematically changing positions than in giving himself time to come. He had instructed her, while she was undressing, to leave on the garter belt, seamed stockings and high heels.
    Fawn had frizzy red pubic hair and freckles on her upper back and lower arms. The more intoxicated she got the more in evidence was her Southern drawl. She was from Vienna, she said. Vienna, Georgia.
    The radio was on. With the strains of an orchestra in the background, an announcer was saying, “Direct from the beautiful Bamboo Room in the Hotel Belton… in the heart of beautiful downtown Des Moines…”
    â€œThe Bamboo Room?” exclaimed Harlow, laughing like a four-year-old, helplessly and unaffectedly, the cocaine giving her a feeling of indescribable giddiness and wellbeing. The wig had come off, and she told them a story about her head having been shaved a month ago in New York because she helped get some gangster out of town the local mob was looking to knock off… a few minutes later she said that she was married but her husband was in Sing Sing…
    â€œGiddy-up. Come on, horsey.”
    Jean rode around on Dirk’s back. He had a good body, something was said about him once having been a prize-fighter, he kept himself in good shape. He could maintain his erection, doing Harlow doggie-style while Kit sat in the green chair, watching, fondling the skull and hair of Fawn as she blew him, working like a pro.
    The needle… drawing up blood, the spurt of red… and then pushing it back down into the chemistry of the body, exciting the nervous system like a disease, white death… red and black inside the veins, a hundred miles an hour—faster, faster…
    Some kind of big swelling liquid warmth built within Harlow’s lower belly, her private parts, flooding her deepest reaches, the hole of love bleeding all through her sex and down through her legs, stiffening and straightening out her bones, making her cry out…she didn’t know what she was saying… speaking in tongues like a Baptist handling snakes…
oh God
… interior rush of a swift black sea. Cresting, foaming… submerging an entire continent … making it disappear just like that.
    It was Kit’s idea for the two women to get together. Actually, neither Fawn nor Jean were all that crazy about each other: Fawn was jealous, and Jean either sensed this or reacted to something else; perhaps, simply, in contrast to her relations with men, she was just a snob, stuck-up about her looks, in any case, Fawn knew what to do. Even if she didn’t care for Jean, she