All Fours

I inhaled my fingers, her warm, buttery cunt smell, and kept them under my nose as I walked.

“Divorce only reinforces the supremacy of marriage!” I complained to Jordi as we drove to the gallery where her headless women would be exhibited; she was worried about the floor plan. “You’re either married or you’re not, it’s a binary. Whereas if marriage is important but not the organizing principle, then it can keep changing, the way the parent

And sexy clothes. I had worn them without really understanding why, thinking of sexy as one of many styles, not realizing it was the only style. You should always be emerging from a shell if possible.

“They watched pornography together and he learned how unrealistic it is. And he had so much sex that it became ordinary for him. He wasn’t like other teenage boys, running around causing mayhem because of their clogged-up fourth chakras.

I’d thought the two paths were: sex with Davey vs. a life of bitterness and regret But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising like this night had been. While I didn’t have the narcotic high Davey gave me, there was another kind of elation and it was, among other things, weirder. I felt untether

Twenty years ago I’d been in my twenties; twenty years from now I’d be in my sixties. I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty-five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot. I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to. I understood that death was coming and that all my cur

Even if I started a new, more open relationship immediately after the divorce and stayed with that person for fifteen years, it wouldn’t be the same stretch of life. Coming into ourselves as parents and adults—none of that would happen with anyone else. If there was anything meaningful about aging, it was tunneling backward in time together, holdin

I sang the low, mourning song of a sailor’s wife. Come back to me, big dick, please take this heartache away. He is lost o’er the sea, my big dick. I cried with my mouth hanging open, the sad, empty place where the dick should be, and then, after a while, I just silently held the crying dog but left my mouth gaping like a distended stomach, loose a

all my patients—think they’re supposed to play it cool about these changes”—now she was checking my moles—“but ‘freaking out’ actually plays an important role in transitions. Picture how the vaginal canal squeezes the water out of a baby’s lungs—it’s the shock of this squeezing and the sudden cold air that makes the baby cry out and take their firs