Lauren Friedlander

Lauren Friedlander

Healthier

Before the stoma, I had these stomach pangs for nearly a year. At fourteen, I figured it must be cramps, monthly blues knocking at my door at last. But menstruation sounded so revolting, I swore to myself to never go through it. I ignored the maydays of my body til June, when a pang panged away so insistently I fainted in the cafeteria, just conked out face-first into the mayo-side of a hoagie I’d no intention of eating.

After two weeks in the hospital, the doctor informed Mother and me that my digestive tract was lousy with ulcers. He waved his pen towards my folded torso.

“How could you let it go on this long?” Inside the pen, a mermaid’s glittery clamshell bikini floated from her nips.

Truth was, Mother had no truck with Western medicine, its overly expensive solutions and overly authoritative men. When I dislocated my shoulder at eleven, for instance, she’d plied me with whiskey to shove it back herself, only heading to the ER once my arm went purple, bone near breaking skin.

The damage to my lower colon had grown so severe, the doctor explained, that there was no option but surgery: to sever and discard the ragged lengths, and then, like a magician’s scarves, yank the leftover tube through the stoma, a two-inch hole to be carved left of my belly button.

Still, Mother resisted.

“Say, Doc.” She cleared phlegm from her throat and wrangled her hair into a Chip Clip. “Doesn’t the body have ways of . . . healing itself?” She could really switch on around a man. She’d even gotten herself halfway together for the occasion, put on shoes, a bra, actual pants. As she leaned over my hospital bed in his direction, cleavage burst from her top. The doctor twiddled his pornographic pen, but his answer was firm: “She’s too far gone.”

When they wheeled me off, I heard her suck her teeth and mutter, “Big Med strikes again.”

* * *

After surgery, the doctor insisted I name my stoma. “Denise or something,” he winked. “Make her a real gal pal.”

“Please stop,” I said, and looked. There it was: the raw end of my colon, beef red, poking from the new hole in my gut.

The body is such a dumpster, I thought.

He lifted my gown to my breasts and leered knowingly—this was a dude whose jellied pointer and middle fingers had rooted through my sphincter every morning for the past two weeks.

“You can look away if you want,” he said, so I looked harder.

Listen, I telepathed to the stoma. Whoever you are, I will know you.

As he prodded along the rim of the hole, he puckered his lips in an anal moue. I could smell the cigar smoke on his pockmarked skin, blackheads thick as hairs in the pores in his nose. I had the sudden urge to knee him in the danglers.

“Hokay, Nina,” he chirped, “time to strap on the ole feedbag.” With a flourish, he presented the colostomy pouch that would attach to the stoma and gobble up my excreta like a champ; it resembled a fleshy, deflated water balloon.

Eventually, Mother reemerged from the bathroom with a fresh ring of brown lipstick and insisted I be discharged post-haste, despite the doctor’s better judgment.

With a hard clap on my shoulder she declared, “Strong as an ox on steroids, this one.” In one movement, she snatched the doctor’s mermaid pen and prescription pad. She blotted her lips, scribbled down our home number, tucked it in his lab coat’s breast pocket, and yanked me by my wrist into the real world. The whole routine was executed at warp speed, honed by decades of thirst. A man could only stand dumb in her wake, like he’d just been haunted by a very horny ghost.

We clacked down the GI wing. Mother peeled the blood-specked cotton ball from my arm and balled it up in her bra instead of the trash, lest a nefarious attendant retrieve it and sell my DNA to the government.

“What?” she reasoned. “They don’t have enough of you?”

She was legally required to drive me home, but the full extent of the law ended there. When we reached the driveway, she watched me climb out of the car and ease myself onto the crabgrass. I felt her eyes on my pouch and her sneer veining through me before she went inside, unable to stomach the sight of me any longer.

I lay down on the front lawn and watched the house across the street. The Oranges lived there. Six kids with chalk-yellow hair and hermit-white skin and the mega-horn for Jesus. Because of whatever wackadoo religious sect they’d espoused, each Orange wore a brown, sack-ish uniform: heavy skirts for the daughters, thick corduroys for the sons. The eldest, Hickey, was eighteen. Hickey was different. He was my secret, and I was his.

Lying there in the grass, I cradled my pitiful belly and squinted to see if Hickey was in that house. His pickup wasn’t on the street but something had me hoping, despite everything.

I waited and waited. Firebugs came out and I waited. Then I pulled myself up and went inside.

In the kitchen, Chebu blinked from her warm spot on the windowsill, oblivious to the fact that I’d returned with part of me missing. Her tail, cut to a stump when Mother ran her over, twitched eagerly as always.

“Cheebs.” I flicked some muck from her whiskers. “We’re not so different, you and I.” She resumed licking her asshole with gusto. Everything was as per usual.

The house was dark but for the blue light of the living room TV. I followed the trail of Chip Clip, pants, and bra tossed onto the carpet like dead things washed ashore. There was Mother, manless and switched-off on our plastic- covered couch, wearing an old terrycloth robe with nothing underneath but a pair of her ex-boyfriend’s Jockeys. When that dickrag dumped her some months ago, she started pinching cartons of off-brand liquid Nyquil during her shifts at Heaps of Cheaps, chugging them one after the other when she arrived home.

She’d clearly worsened during my two weeks away: red syrup spilled down her bare chest and stomach, one tit winking through the robe.

“Would you wipe that hangdog goddamn look off your face?” she slurred. “You’re gonna be fine. Always are.”

She was right. Always was.

I hobbled towards the light of the TV, playing a local talk show called Be the Sun! With Cheryl-Louise. Cheryl-Louise strutted across the stage in an unshakeable yellow wig, an American flag pinned next to the mic on her collar. Like a car crash, I admit, she was hard to look away from.

“So you’re telling me, Talluleann,” said Cheryl-Louis in her hard Kansan twang, “that you and your husband haven’t made love in one full year? That you’ve plain given up?” The shot zoomed in tight on Cheryl-Louise, her face completely smooth, almost ageless. You could see her tongue flapping behind trans- lucent teeth. “You haven’t been honoring the sacred pact you made before God?”

Tears welled behind Talluleann’s spider lashes.

“Daughters,” Cheryl-Louise turned to the audience, “a sex life is just as whole a life as daily life. A social life, a spiritual life. All one. They need each other to feed. Bloom. Flourish.” She knotted her fingers together, the daggerish red nails of either hand converging. “Without the sacred carnalities, chickadee, you’re gonna lose him. The love of your life. He’ll leave you to plain rot. With your what exactly, your knitting circle? Bookclub’s gonna keep you warm at night? Sunday potlucks? You know I love a potato salad, but come on.” She paused and licked her lips. “Light mayo, bacon bits, Lord. But come on.”

Talluleann nodded effusively.

“Tell me! As a daughter of God. To forsake a sex life in all its gloriousnesses. Is that the healthiest choice you could make, Talluleann? Think, Talluleann. Think. What you have. To. Lose.”

By now Talluleann’s head was buried in Cheryl-Louise’s generously- enhanced bosom, sobs thumping against her clip-on mic. C-L tugged Talluleann up by her ears and dabbed at her smeared mascara with a pinky talon. Talluleann had left a mask of snot blotches on Cheryl-Louise’s silk blouse. “It’s our duty, is it not, for our husbands, the loves of our lives? Nobody said godly daughterhood would be all daffodils and buttercream, did they?”

Suddenly Mother grunted and rolled over on the couch, the plastic below her squeaking in agony. “Hot Christ,” she mumbled with a hand over her nose. “Is that you?”

It was. I tugged at the elastic on my shorts and saw that warm, gritty waste had started leaking around the rim of the pouch, ill-adhered. Not one full day in the real world and already I’d been sniffed out for the walking septic tank I’d become.

Cheryl-Louise screeched on as I descended the basement steps to my bedroom—“Tell me! Tell me where it’s writ!”—and made a beeline for the shower. After a splashing of pits, tits, and underbits, I secured the skin around the hole and peeled away the pouch from pink and burning skin beneath. Hard streams of water pummeled against my guts, stuck out like a raw, unfeeling tongue. How I longed to shove it back in. With a washcloth I daubed at the glistening hole, squeezed out the muck from the old pouch in meager plops, and attached the new bag to the stoma.

Two prescribed pain pills down the hatch. I collapsed onto the futon, granules of cat litter on my feet, and waited for the Dilaudid to kick in. The pills were nothing compared to the dose the nurse had injected directly into my veins, which rendered me cross-eyed, sent my head priority express to an abstract plane, out, and out, and out—til my heart pumped liquid metal. My frontal lobe tingled then leadened. I nuzzled the stuffed crocodile by my pillow, a gift from toddlerhood. The fur of its phallic snout had hardened with my secretions, rubbed off in flakes. The crocodile had always kept my secrets.

I peered into its belly pocket. Still there: the tiny, creased photo of Hickey and me from before. I’d cut out the cast photo from our final performance of The Grapes of Wrath, the spring play, two months ago. Pictured center: Hickey Orange as Tom Joad, newsboy-capped, flannel unbuttoned to reveal the glimmer of a cross under wisps of chest hair. His grin brought out the squint in his blue eyes. The right bored wolfishly into the lens while the left, slightly lazy, had wandered to a point beyond the frame.

And far stage-right, there was I: in blurry mid-lunge as I joined the cast’s outer flank, trussed up in an abominable granny dress with a face full of Ben Nye wrinkles, thankless nobody, Migrant Woman #2.

Nightly I admired this photo of us in the glow of my bedside lamp while I nudged the crocodile snout-first between my legs.

Hickey and I had rounded a base or two before the photo was taken. The first time was quite unplanned (or so he told me—though I swear I smelled fate when he gave us freshmen a ride home post-rehearsal, saved me for last, then lingered), and after that, we’d done it all, or almost, in his pickup truck. I’d felt his dick straining in his corduroys; he’d grazed my newly-bloomed rack, wreathed my head with his silvery fingers, thumbed the upper ridges of my eyeballs.

After the cast party at Fajita-Rama, he snuck me through the parking lot to the pickup, drove me to the grain silo, and let me blow him. At the time I thought a blowjob entailed actual blowing; I alternated between gentle streams of air and window-fogging exhales. He stopped me, surprisingly expert as he corrected the position of my teeth. Part way in I had a pang, and choked, put my head between my knees, spit dripping, so so sorry.

“I think I’m sick,” I told him, before I’d even told myself. He must have thought I meant spiritually. He took me by the hair and, with the tip of his nose, traced a cross on my forehead. Later, after he came, he cried and asked if we could pray.

This became our unspoken ritual. We met at the silo every Sunday night at ten, for weeks, up to the brink of summer, until the stoma. He showed me how to move my hands along with my tongue. He told me about “morning wood” (to me it sounded like a Robert Frost poem). After sailing through the art of fellatio, I wanted to go further. I wanted to get him to touch me, to pull him inside me. But he refused.

If it was about my age, I told him, I was much more mature than he was. Tenfold.

He sighed. “That’s the trouble with girls.”

He knew what we were doing was wrong in the eyes of God and the law, two of his very favorite things. If we couldn’t hide from the former, he said, the least we could do was keep our secret from the latter.

Squirming against the crocodile, eyes closed, I replayed Hickey’s monologue as Tom Joad: “—I’ll be all around in the dark—I’ll be everywhere—Wherever you can look—!” My body in my mind was airlifted to the auditorium and its musty black curtains, the moonlight on the silo, on the pickup, AC blasting at our slimy faces as we pressed together again and again. I opened my eyes. And just like that, I was here, now, ruined. Cheryl-Louise’s sermons droned on above: “—where does it say Thou, Daughter, shalt have it easy and peasy and also lemon-squeezy? Knucklehead 2:12? I should say not—!” Up there, my mother was curled on her throne of filth; down here, I was no better. We deserved only each other.

I plucked bristles of green fur like Christmas tree needles from the sticky flange of my pouch. These stomach pangs would go away, the doctor said, after the nixing of the offending innards. What I felt now were more like phantom pangs. Just the thing for a haunted life. I’d never be alone.

A sex life, Cheryl-Louise had said. A whole other life for me to fuck up, and I had. Hacked it off, left to bleed. Hickey could never see me like this.

I placed the tightly-folded picture of me and him on my tongue and swallowed it with another Dilaudid to numb myself from the pain or whatever of what I’d become, of knowing that tonight, our Sunday, I’d have to break Hickey’s heart.


A nipple-hair shy of nine o’clock, I fished some Spanx—off-brand, stained in the crotch—from the depths of Mother’s closet, thinking that’d keep the colostomy bag under reasonable lockdown. After some farcical maneuvering, I wrangled my torso into four or five thicknesses of Saran wrap. Then I hoisted the Spanx up to my breasts and examined my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Bones jutted under sallow, bluish skin. I telepathed to the stoma, End it. Tonight forward, we’d be on our own.

Mother’s snores muted the click of the front door behind me as I left in search of Hickey. I trespassed briefly into the Oranges’ backyard to see if his light was on. Hickey lived in a shed at the far end of their property, which his parents had converted into a room for him when he turned eighteen. Admittedly, this was not the first night I’d tried to seek him out. I once visited to see if our weekly rendezvous could transpire in bed, rather than over his pickup’s stick shift, but Hickey said the visibility from his parents’ room would make my comings and goings far too risky. Still, sometimes I just crept back there, never knocking, only to be soothed by the amber glow at his door.

That night, there was none.

In our town, there were only so many places to hide.


The silo wasn’t far from our subdivision, along the creek, past the sewer drain beneath the bridge I used to pick up conversation pieces found under mounds of wet leaves, syringes and empty liquor bottles, to lay at Hickey’s unappreciative feet like Chebu would a roach. Tonight’s peace offering: the smutty titty pen nicked from the doctor’s office. I’d squirreled it away in my sneaker.

Night swelter made it difficult to breathe. Sweat bubbled from my armpits, from the waistband of the Spanx, pooled in the folds of plastic wrap. Pangs nipped at me along the way, but what triumphed was an ethereal sort of throb— in my downtown shopping district, yes, but also deeper, core-of-the-earth-deep, propelling me.

Half a mile in, the road turned to gravel. The old grain silo loomed before me, punched through the sides and head by a massive shaggy cottonwood that had taken root, shivering under the moon. Then I saw him.

The high-beams of his pickup spilled against the whisker wheat as I pushed onwards, slickened with myself, closer and closer. Moonlight washed over the polished calf skull on his dashboard. The curly blond hairs on his throat were brilliantly haloed, his chin in his palm, his gaze in his lap.

He flinched when I tapped at the glass.

“You’re here,” he said, muffled. He looked all over but at me. Our hands met on either side of the window in a playact of surrender. He dogeared his C.S. Lewis and cracked the passenger door.

“I was gonna give you one more Sunday,” he said, as I climbed up and rolled the window down. My arms forgot how to conduct themselves and fell into a wilted X across my chest. A takeout container of popcorn shrimp rested next to the skull. He gestured towards it; I shook my head. We both stared at it for seven thousand years.

A pang chewed into my side.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“On the better side of the dirt,” I grimaced, waiting it out. Eyes shut, I reached out to touch him, his slender forearm, the rough skin of his elbow. He was there, next to me, really there. I wanted to fall into his lap, pull him out, and eat him whole. “I am extremely fine. But—” Blubbering, I readied to tell him we were through.

He rubbed the worn vinyl of the seat as if it were my shoulder. “You should have told me you were sick.” My jaw opened and closed and opened. “You don’t know what it was like,” he went on. “I saw you everywhere but it was never you.” He bit his lip so hard a froth of spit and blood spilt down his chin. He blinked and his left eye snapped into place. “I want to show you something,” he said, and jumped from the car.

He rounded the truck and I followed. The bed was padded with a thick fleece blanket and sprinkled with heads of withered dandelions, plastic tea lights clustered in the corners.

He grabbed one and flicked on the bottom switch, then flung it aside when it sputtered out. “Battery’s dead I guess.”

Had he waited for me here these last two Sundays? Had he thought of me and touched himself while the lights died?

My mouth fell on his so forcefully I may have given myself a light concussion. Quickly he unhitched the tailgate and climbed in as his body grasped for mine. His hands ran up either side of my waist and slipped under my shirt. Then he stopped. His good eye rinsed me clean.

With my vision fuzzy at the edges, I lifted my polka-dot blouse over my head, wrenched the Spanx down my pelvis. Sheathed in plastic—moonlit—I switched on.

After a silence, Hickey moved toward the edge of Saran wrap and peeled it from my skin. As he peeled, I revolved. At last I stood in my least-raggedy bralette, but the only thing that fixed his eye was the pouch, Bandaid-colored, just hanging there.

“I’m sorry,” I said to the ground. “I’m ruined.”

“No?” he said, as if he wasn’t sure.

“Lying on my front I think stretches it. But I could lie on my back. You’ll never believe how easy it is to pretend it isn’t there.”

“Let me see you,” he said, and fingered the bottom crease of the bag.

I hadn’t eaten, so it had hardly filled out. I unstuck the flange from my skin. I’d never been nakeder.

He directed the glow of his phone at the wound, granulated with yellow crystals, his lips pursed in an O.

“If you’re wondering if I disgust myself, trust me—”

“Stop.”

I forgot there was no talking of these things with him, only doing.

He grabbed for me. I realized he was trying to lift me onto the truck bed, but I was too tall, and his upper body strength left something to be desired. With my litter-hauling biceps I heaved myself up for him. He laid me down and wrested the Spanx over my sneakers, which stayed on. He slid his belt open and unbuttoned his corduroys, yanked himself out. I parted my legs for him, but he slid them closed and worked himself up my torso, above the stoma, and nudged my lips apart with his mildewy dick. The heavy buckle of his belt clinked against my throat as he had sex with my face. He came quicker than ever, spilling down the sides of my mouth into my ears. Then he eased off me and started crying, as he so often did, but instead of being moved to prayer, his cheeks bulged as he hopped off the truck to vomit in the dirt.

He crouched for a while, coughing, then slammed himself against the body of the truck. “Why do you like me?” he muttered.

I thought hard for the right answer. I liked how he read, for instance, flipping pages under his nose to inhale their bookish musk. How thoughtfully he enunciated, how his voice lilted up like a question. More than anything, though, I liked that he had chosen me. That anyone had chosen me.

I settled on: “You are the only person in the world I don’t hate.”

“Don’t say hate.” He fiddled with the snaps on his shirt. “It’s not right.”

I liked how everything was right and wrong with him.

“Why do you like me?” I asked.

Hickey was silent as he returned to the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. An old song came on the radio, something tinny and faraway.

I inched off the truck bed and picked up the pouch, the Spanx, my blouse and skort. The wind lifted the ream of plastic wrap, a splattered ghost. I bound myself haphazardly, but it didn’t stick—the map of fluids had lost all cling.

“I’ll drive you part way,” he called to me.


“Really?” I’d always walked home before. Maybe this was love.


“If you duck.”

“It’s dark.”

“You never know,” he said. I returned to the passenger seat. He backed up and swung towards the hill.

As we hit the asphalt, he said, “I’m going to Iowa.” He paused like he expected me to say something. “Rutherford-Evangelical, for my degree, so I can learn how to be g—” he scraped a nail along his pant leg “—a good pastor?”

We reached the railroad crossing. The bells began to ring and the gates lowered; red lights flashed upon the dashboard, the calf skull, the godforsaken box of shrimp. I tried for “Why?” and “When?” but each time the horns blasted over me as freight car after freight car hurtled by.

Once we slowed to a halt at the edge of our subdivision, my hand went for the door handle, his for the nape of my neck. He pressed infinity loops on my spine’s uppermost knob.

“Iowa isn’t so far—” I started, but I was still facing away from him, one cheek fogging the window.

“Thank you for showing it,” he said, “to me. I—I like to think—not many men would say that.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I love you. Because of it. Nobody may ever love you for the way you are. Ruined, or—but I will. For always.” From behind, he ran his fingers along the pockets of my earlobes. He squeezed hard on the meat of my arms and kissed the back of me goodbye.

Love. The word roiled through me like the flushing of a toilet. Maybe it was that equivocating lilt of his, but it didn’t feel how I thought it would, the first time. Maybe because it was true: that he would be my very only ever love. And even he could hardly look at me without puking.

I fled through back lawns. The Saran wrap loosened and flew, the leavings of my body ran hot down my legs. The pickup trailed quietly behind me the whole way home.


Mother was where I’d left her, pickling on the couch. I rested against the foreleg of the ottoman the cat had ripped to its inner foam and soaked in the light of the TV, panting.

“Now that’s a hunka goddamned spunk.”

The words gurgled up from the once-white chenille Mother had clutched to her breasts. She hacked up a bolus of phlegm and re-swallowed it, flipped onto her stomach.

“Who is, Mother?” She wouldn’t remember this by morning.

She snorted, her head wrenched at a demonic angle towards the TV. On screen, Cheryl-Louise tended to a father-daughter duo at each other’s throats. She separated and seated them on either side of her, her arms wide as angel’s wings in their laps.

The daughter bellyached some garbage like, “But Papa, I love hee-yim!” Foundation streaked muddily down her temples.

“Look.” Mother let out an awful laugh, a sort of asphyxiated hyuuugh. “Boys make girls dumb as dried shit. Don’t you give your flower up, Neen, not like me.”

The father rasped, “She don’t know love from her backside.”

Cheryl-Louise clutched her Chanel-clad heart. “But she does, doesn’t she? She knows the love of the Lord. And you—” she swiveled towards the younger “—if it’s true you know His love, then you know how precious that is. Love, it is that rare jewel. It is not every day just falling off the apple cart awomp-bam-boo. Daughters go their whole lives looking for it. Take it, babe, wherever you can.”

I yanked my shirt up to my boobs and let the raw end of my colon bask freely in the elements. I popped two more Dilaudid, unstuck Mother’s near-empty bottle of Heaps-quil congealed in its own juices, and washed them down. I took my first full breath in weeks, maybe months, my stomach expanding til I thought it might explode in shreds of ulcerous confetti. The stoma prickled as my belly distended. The doctor had told me the wound would fade, shrink, but I could swear it was growing.

I removed the doctor’s pen from my shoe—I never did remember to give it to Hickey—and in the glare of the screen watched the mermaid twinkle viscously, robing and disrobing her stoplight nipples. A glittering vision of the stoma embossed itself, unbidden, under my eyelids. Cheryl-Louise, or not quite. Stoma-Louise. A name at last, per doctor’s orders. Not the Denise he’d asked for, the gal pal, curse of circumstance, slug-trail-slopping in her wake, no. Stoma-Louise was irrepressible.

How do you do it?, we begged, an audience of unlovable daughters. Heavens! cried Stoma-Louise. She curled into a luscious, neon mouth, connected to a buxom expanse of guts, broad at the top, sloped sensuously to the tapered bottom. Who in their sound mind and very stable body would not. Tap. This? We applauded agreeably. Tell me! She swiveled and mooned us with the aperture of her dainty little tip, untainted by the pervy fingerings of a doctor who got off on steroid enemas. She shimmied around, swollen with two breast-like gobs of passing waste, and unraveled herself across a plastic-covered couch, exquisitely Pollocked with her own stomach chum. She fixed me in her stare: If you won’t take him, she murmured, I will.

Technicolor sludges flooded my eyeballs as I stumbled to the kitchen for two bottles of spring water—never tap, not even to brush with, for fear we’d be brainwashed by fluoride—and proffered one to Mother. But she flapped it away and reached for my hand. My guts hung weeping in the open air, but she brought me close and wrapped herself around me. Her body rested, knowing or not, against my feculence, her fingers on my entrails. Tenderly petting, or trying to push them inside. Sticking and unsticking. Bonded in blood and filth.

A pang wrung me out. She raked my baby hairs with her nubby, bitten nails. The ceiling fan jerked above us to an ominous rhythm. If it chanced to fall, I imagined, Mother and I would be severed by the blades into a hundred meaty pieces.

When she fell asleep with her face smashed into the arm of the couch, I slipped out from under her and covered her half-naked torso with an afghan.

Dilaudid had numbed the worst parts of me, so her petting and pushing hadn’t hurt the stoma—in fact, it seemed to glow at having been so sweetly touched, shudder even, wanting more.


The sun had barely risen as I slunk across the road. Grass wet, though all night I hadn’t heard it rain. I’d been up hours. Chased Dillies with another bottle of Heaps, flushed away the plastic wrap and cut my colostomy bag to ribbons. But the stoma wouldn’t tire. It white-knuckled through the night, leaking all over the house. It slopped itself out while the world was dreaming. It sent me to him; pushed me, really.

I cut past the Oranges’ front yard and ducked behind pines. There was no light from his shed but the stoma pushed. Cracked the door and there he was, curled on his sweet cot, drool-stained pillow clenched between feet.

I rolled him face-up. He awoke, said nothing. A pollen-colored fuzz coated the corners of his lips, and when I forced my tongue inside, he tasted horrible. It was fine. He already had morning wood.

As I unzipped him, he began to guide my head southerly—old habits, even half-asleep—but I stopped him, pinned his arms, pulled him into me. Into the stoma wet and hungry. He shoved it back into my body with a piece of him too.

It hurt. I cried and so did he. It was fine.

I pulled him in deeper, and the hurt became something else, maybe love. Our filthy bodies mashed together as I telepathed, It’s fine, it’s fine, and soon enough, maybe, it would be.