Anaïs Lothrop

Part I
A fetid smell of not-quite-alive. Ad memorandum concealing little foyer, “My roommate’s mom died last month,” she said. “Don’t mind the mess.” I didn’t. The only salvageable personal affect was an old Singer sheened in dust.

We rounded the corner and she led me upstairs. Underfoot, the matted carpet was dingy, catching my socks on the steps.

Demarcating the two railroaded bedrooms, a rifle lay.

I began to salivate in this wretched place.

I found her through last-ditch desperation, combing through some gimmicky gig site–professional cuddlers for hire. Her profile was a forgotten relic of pandemic loneliness. Called at midnight, back in the city that same afternoon. Smiled reassuringly through therapy; parents expressing relief, gratitude for my resilience. An hour from this intervention I sought comfort in the arms of a stranger. Over the phone she spoke rapidly, a gnostic quality to articulations so nebulous–trailing, disjointed; it thrilled me. Her voice possessed such neurotic intensity. A hark that jostled me from my brooding.

I lapped up her unintelligible gospel, especially when it veered into freneticism.

And so there I was, at the top of the stairs, rifle and obese pitbull staring back at me.

I was deeply sheltered though nothing scared me anymore.

Yet these surroundings were staggeringly unfamiliar in a way that evaded hostility.

I was in another world, one of filth and poverty, desperation, illness, death.

I had gone from watching Water’s Multiple Maniacs that morning and effectively entered “that world”.

Her room–a mess of visually tolled warnings warning of an oncoming stroke. Skeletal wires and circuit boards snaked her walls. Shelves bore tools I could not name. Hardware and stones and ash-greedy windowsill and three monitors, arrays of fantasy wear and toys and emptied estradiol bottles lining her desk. It was disorienting and I relished it. I had chosen this, chosen to come and she had soft eyes and trembling hands and a racing tongue and a story so unwound it made me forget about yesterday and wanting to lie on the train tracks so everything else could be ground to a bloody pulp.

After hours of talking we both went hungry and stared at each other feverishly. We made to the bed like animals; shared desperation overtook us.

I was scared and sad and my heart broke open many times as I felt littler and littler. It was beautiful but all wrong.

I need to write this in segments. I don’t think I will ever forget her.

Part II
The sink was clod with a pile of dirt. Out from it, a thousand shattered porcelain mouths gaped. Centipedes snaked through the bathmat and I felt like I was going to die. Hunched over the toilet wringing chicken vindaloo out of my cunt scared I was going to get sepsis or something. Christ. I tracked the bathroom with sativa laden vision and the dirt in the tub on the floor in the basin and the fissured ceiling and flushing humid walls but all I found was two ply and I just prayed like hell.

I trundled back to the bed and she grasped me in apology. We watched some sort of Starseed documentary on youtube and her granite eyes widened while she told me her thoughts on transhumanism. She kept apologizing for hurting me, but we were both too far gone to realize my vagina and her cock were mortal-pestling the remnant spice.

I crawled to the window and fixed a pillow behind me. Stuffing was pouring out of it like guts. Poor thing was gashed. I raised up the window and lit a cigarette. We looked at each other a long while. She moved closer, resting her head near my pretzeled legs and so I stubbed the stale Newport and laid supine beside her. She turned then to face me, raising her torso with bent arm and her black-walnut curls were all sticky and static. She furrowed her brows as she looked me square in the face and told me that when she looked at me, she saw fire.

She told me she thinks she loves me, falling in love but that it was real reverent shit. Her pupils mooned big eclipse. I said an awful lot after that; all sincere, truthful to inhabiting this marsupium. It houses the wretched indigence of two one-time lovers, both dying, one a mother with a thirteen year-old girl and a head that’s gone, she said, ‘cause of my schizoaffective. I, the other.

I left early that morning. I had worn a romper over–fitting for that rumpus room–and drew a shirt out of her hamper for more cover. I still wear it to sleep, but I don’t have it with me now here at school. It’s at my family’s house.