One morning, Jane woke up entirely herself.

She glided easily out of her apartment, down the hill towards the park and lingered beneath Grand Army Arch’s flexing muscles. She was delighted to notice the snow drops’ bursting bonnets were still coming in, although soon they wouldn’t be able to compete with the daffodils’ encroaching real estate. It really was a lovely day, the kind that tousles people with optimism.

Jane arrived at her neighborhood food co-op. By the display of honeydew, a healthy sweat osmosed between her and the other shoppers and it refreshed her. The co-op had a rippling sexual feeling emanating from it. Maybe it was the approximation of a socialist utopia that the community played at. She always imagined that, in between stocking produce, the comrades were pulling each other into the walk-in dairy cases to sample each other for ripeness.

No such thing was happening, at least that she could see, while she wandered the aisles, eventually settling on a container of blueberries, a canned iced coffee, and a day-old pastry that she threw into her bike helmet and carried like a basket. As she stood in the express line, she heard a woman behind her say into her headphones, “you just can’t eat too much of any one thing, because everything’s got poison in it.” Jane didn’t turn around, but she nodded in agreement.

As Jane devoured the stale pastry on the steps of the Brooklyn Museum down the block from her apartment, she watched everyone in their spring costumes and felt like she was part of their elegant, normal-people parade.

Then her good feeling realized its mistake and began to crawl away from her. It usually happened like this. She could spend hours, even days, filled with a sense of wellbeing, but eventually she would invert. On those inverted days, she would watch herself from the corner of the ceiling, appalled by her ugliness. She knew if anyone could see her in those moments, they’d be disgusted to find out how little she was a person and how much she was a bug.

Jane tried to shake herself back into the moment. She thought about the farmers market people and imagined how she would paint them, later, when her memory would contort their happy faces out of proportion. She continued to scan the scene left to right as if looking for someone she knew until she came across a familiar looking stranger.

He was tall, broad, and bald, wearing a black shirt tucked into too-short black pants out of which sprouted high white sneakers. He looked out of place in the Easter-egg market crowd. Although, Jane considered, if he were pushing a stroller next to a petite sundressed woman, he wouldn’t stand out. What seemed strange was that he was alone. She liked the shape of his head and the suggestion of an unsure density of hair struggling to burst through from beneath the skin. He had a physical intensity that would have been entirely too masculine for her taste if he hadn’t also had these incongruously sensual, red lips his beard couldn’t conceal. Jane couldn’t resist when one single disharmony betrayed an entire face with its beauty.

She must have seen him before. He could be a Tinder missed connection, or the guy on her block who walks his pitbull off-leash, or maybe a neighbor who had once accidentally locked his bike to hers. No one stares this long at a stranger. She smiled. He approached her slowly and at a distance, positioning his body as if he were asking a favor.

“Can I bother you with something?” he finally asked.

Jane was sick of interrogating her own feelings. She was game to be surprised. “Sure, with what?”

He made her laugh by smiling wide and responding, “I don’t know yet.”

He introduced himself, “I’m Jody.”

Jody didn’t pursue Jane as much as he moved into her. While other lovers had kept her attention with periods of disinterest, Jody threw his desire around her like a gentle but occlusive net.

Jody looked and dressed like many other men Jane had wanted throughout her life. As if he was an art handler, or a bartender, or a carpenter, or a graphic designer who dressed like a carpenter. These other, similar looking men, would often tell her about how they were hung up on their French ex-girlfriends or secretly in love with their nineteen-year-old neighbors. They would often confess to Jane that they weren’t even that interested in sex at all, before inevitably kissing her, taking her clothes off, and engaging in the typical acts she enjoyed but almost never had to ask for—choking, slapping, spitting in her mouth. Afterwards, any emotional intimacy that grew between her and those men would shrink the amount of time they spent together, until at the moment when they knew each other most deeply, they would stop seeing each other entirely.

Jane accepted this pattern, and the role she played in it, as she was inevitably bored by the men who wanted to date her more conventionally. She was still, undeniably, a romantic.

The first time Jane and Jody slept together, she got lost inside his mouth. Neither of them showed off with any tricks or kinks. As she remembered it, both of them barely moved. It was oceanic, marital sex that left her confused about how to return to herself once they parted.

Jane felt him hanging around in her body the next day and was frightened that she was capable of being so porous. Meeting Jody reignited Jane’s belief in alchemy. Whatever inferior materials made up Jody and her, when flinted against each other, sparked something that looked enough like gold.

But there was a catch, a hint of mutual unwellness, that surfaced their second night together.

As a closing act, Jane swallowed when Jody came into her mouth. They held onto each other and after their pulses slowed, he asked, “is that something you typically do?”

“Swallowing?” Jane was caught off guard. “Sure, sometimes.” She always thought it was a theatrical gesture to run to the sink and spit.

“But you don’t really know me,” Jody went on, “I’m just some guy. Don’t you think that’s risky?”

“Jody, I was the one who had to suggest we use a condom.”

He giggled and admitted he had gotten carried away in the moment.

Jane’s post sex relaxation evaporated. “Do you usually not use protection with new partners?”

Jody explained that he had been seeing a couple other women recently but there was only one who he didn’t use protection with.

“She said I’m the only one she’s been with for the past year, and she seems honest.”

“Why do you think she’s honest?”

Jane tried to picture this woman he uncharitably called “not very sexual.” An adult woman living in New York City who kept herself on ice just for him. She imagined a timid teenager aged suddenly into her late twenties. She must live in a tiny studio apartment, she must work at a desk job. She has sex three times a year at most. She demurs when he offers to go down on her. She says she doesn’t need to come. Maybe he doesn’t even offer. Jane remembered he had said, wiping her juice off his mouth, “it’s funny I've only ever wanted to do that to someone I loved.”

Jody shifted the subject. “I really haven’t been sleeping with that many people recently. How many different guys are you giving head to? Like how many in the last year?”

Jane attempted to calculate how few blow jobs she’d have had to give in the past year that would add up to “not that many.” This was typical. She globalized, all fucking typical.

It seemed to her as if all the men she fucked determined sexual risk with the attitude of a dowser. They would close their eyes and gather a feeling, and if the feeling got them hard enough, it was safe to proceed, preferably raw, unless asked to put on a condom, at which point they would snap for a second out of their reverie and say “of course.” sometimes adding, “but you don’t have anything, right?”

“I’m sorry. I’m being a jerk.” Jody apologized and covered Jane’s face with light kisses. “I can be a difficult person sometimes.”

They faced each other like twins in a womb. Jane felt an endless forgiveness for him, and already a hint fear that he would leave her. They touched tip to tip.

Jane considered that while they were making love, Jody seemed to read her completely. Every time they paused kissing she would open her eyes and see the curve of his ear, his textured dome, and a shoulder so sensitive every freckle was blinking and receding like stars. She had wanted to make the intensity between them banal. She wished he would hurt her, but couldn’t find the words to ask for what she wanted.

Jane was afraid anything she said to him would risk something. Either a falling in or a falling out, but she didn’t know where the falling would go. Jane blurted out the first true thing that came to her.

“Looking at you is like looking in a mirror.”

Jody pulled her closer. “That’s what I thought the first time I saw you.”

Jane and Jody came to an agreement. Both felt stricken since their first meeting. Their love wasn’t a healthy kind of love, but neither of them could bear to leave things as they were. So it was decided that they would spend three days together and never see each other again.

Jody held her hand the entire ferry ride, and asked over and over if he could kiss her on her face. Jane replied each time, yes, and with that they began the terminal weekend of their romance.

Jody worked in Brooklyn, but he lived in Staten Island in a home he inherited from his dead father. Jane and Jody’s encounter had only just been born and stumbling up on its legs, and Jane had not seen where he lived. He’d sent her a few photos during their brief text correspondence of the view from the back deck where he would smoke, a sliver of his white shoe often blurring the foreground before a dense and wild garden.

When they arrived, Jody led her up a path to a looming, gingerbread Victorian. The front stairs yawned cozily beneath them and Jane felt as if she were already far, far away from her apartment in Brooklyn.

The outside view of the house led Jane to believe there would be substantial interior, or at least the usual rooms of an upstairs, downstairs, and basement residence. But when Jody led her inside, every room she passed was filled end to end with jagged stacks of cardboard boxes.

“I know,” Jody was sheepish, “I’ve been getting to them.”

He led her through a surprisingly functional-looking kitchen, that someone, at some point, had made cheerful with every clownish shade of fiesta cookware. Through the side of the kitchen was another door.

Jody announced, “This is it.”

Jody’s bedroom opened into darkness. A solid wood, sleigh-style bed frame with metal pineapples spearing into the ceiling at either end filled the space, almost to the walls. She thought, if Home Goods were a feudal kingdom, this is where its royal infanta would sleep.

But everything surrounding the bed was decidedly less contemporary casual. The mattress was partially clothed with a single fitted blue jersey sheet and two small blankets curled up on top of it like sleeping dogs.

A banana peel curled, in death throes, on its belly beneath the sleigh, leaving a trail of melted pulp. A round kitchen table by the bed acted as a desk for a wetland of coffee cups growing furry green patches, and bowls filled with sticky blueberry and cereal entrails.

Jane took in the texture of the space and it felt too tight. She went to open the blinds. There a thin colorless ribbon crawled the sill from one side to the other. Jane got closer and saw the ribbon was actually a busy network of barely visible ants.

“I eat every meal in here,” he said, beaming, gesturing towards the looming sleigh that seemed to be getting larger each time Jane looked away from it.

“I started to clean up before you got here, but I decided I’d rather show you how it actually looks most of the time.” He paused. “This is me.”

Jane stayed silent, but she kissed him as if to assure Jody that she still wanted him. As they pressed against each other, the bed put its fat arms around them and made them tiny within it.

There, in Jody’s monstrous bed, in the nest of trash Jody had arranged with the care of Bowerbird, they transcended their initial gentle lovemaking. It was still oceanic, but far away from the glinting clownfish of a sunlit coral reef, somewhere unwholesomely deep where none of the fish have eyes and gigantic worms survive off volcanic vents that pipe in poison along the seafloor.

Jody unzipped himself and began a type of ritual. He held her back from continuing to kiss him as if to take an inventory of each segment of her body. Kissing each part, chanting to himself, “you’resofuckinghotyou’resofuckinghot.” Jane felt herself descend into him. Naturally, she wanted to be worshiped like this, but she had to get out of the glare of his magnifying glass.

As they kissed, they began to tussle. They paced out their power struggle, but Jane had always intended to let him win. When the moment was right, Jody reached towards the table for a condom waiting beside a lidless drum of creatine powder.

The room breathed out all its stifled air. Oftentimes during the act itself, Jane would be a little away and distracted by details like a carpet pattern or a missing track light bulb. But here Jane joined an ecosystem that buzzed with a welcoming drone. She began to see the natural beauty of the rinds and the dust. It was almost pastoral. If rain had started misting down from the ceiling, it wouldn’t have surprised her. She belonged in this room. She was the carnivorous plant and the bug caught within it.

As they made love, Jane felt a pulsing inside her knock throughout her body until it seemed her cunt was all over her, all the way in her head and in the tips of her toes. She was a bell and he was ringing her wildly. She knew her face looked stupid and she sent a thought telepathically to Jody asking if he knew how badly she wanted him to squash her, splatter her, exterminate her.

Jane was euphoric, disoriented; she wondered if somehow, because of the downward angle of her body, her pussy juice might have migrated up too high into her lungs and felt a moment of panic. What if she drowned in the cumrush? At that moment, all her doors were open.

“Hold on,” Jody huffed, “I don’t want to come yet.” Jane beckoned him back to her center, where he reattached his mouth. It was there Jane arrived. The inverted summit of her climax blinked open like a sleeping grave. Her moans became weird and animal in the acoustics of the room.

She thought how easily their lovemaking could become a kind of mutual cannibalism– they could have eaten and lived off each other for days. But by early that morning they finally fell asleep, spooning together just a loving, normal pair.

Jane was lying with her head at the wrong end of the bed. This was how Jody liked to sleep, facing the huge back wall of the bed frame. She had taken out her notebook and begun to make reference figures for every piece of discarded fruit in the room. She tried to sketch Jody but only got as far as the soft feathering of his left eyebrow.

Jane realized, even with all the food and trash, the room didn’t have a smell. Although, she considered, maybe it did, but she had become nose-blind. She buried her face in the loose fluff of a pillow and smelled only hints of her own unwashed hair. Steam from the adjacent bathroom floated in carrying the harsh primary color smells of drugstore body wash with just a suggestion of mildew. Jody was in the bathroom brushing his teeth after a shower.

Outside, the window opened up like a portal on a ship onto a sloping green and there, a dainty hoof appeared. Jane held her breath. The stick extended forward and the doe it belonged to wobbled into view on her furry stilts. She waited for the animal to feel her eyes on her and flee.

The deer grazed the lawn at her feet unaware of Jane. She turned the white stripe of her fleece at the window and let ten to fifteen pellets of shit drop to the ground where she nibbled a short distance away. Those few pellets lighter, the deer turned over her shoulder and leveled her big black marbles directly at Jane.

Jane waited to be mistaken for a predator and make the vision dart away. But after sizing Jane up the deer turned her head upward and bit at the leaves a short distance above her.

“That’s strange.”

Jody had been watching from behind her.

“This area must be lousy with deer.” Jane was almost embarrassed, as if having been caught in a private moment.

“I’ve never seen one here,” he said with sincerity.

She assumed this was a lie, although there was no particular reason she thought Jody was lying.

“I hit one with a car once.” Now Jane was lying. “Not that long ago. It was an accident.”

“Did you kill it?”

Jane shook her head and said she didn’t know. She invented a story about this deer. She and an ex-boyfriend were on a road trip. Jane waited to catch Jody’s expression. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but wanted to introduce the idea of another lover in her orbit, to see how he would react. Jody’s face stayed neutral.

Jane built the following: The deer was male. They couldn’t have seen it coming. One moment they were driving and the next the hood of the car was pierced through with antlers. Within seconds it writhed out and ran away leaving chunks of fur and meat all along the front of the boyfriend’s Subaru Outback. The next day they took the car through one of those conveyor belt car washes. They watched from inside as the mechanism’s sudsy fingers slapped against the gristle, pushing it around instead of cleaning it.

Jane asked Jody if he had ever killed anything by accident.

He said no. But he told her about having listened to a fox kill a cat, right here, next to his bedroom window.

“It wasn’t the first time I’d heard a fox kill something. But I usually run outside and yell to scare it off. This time I just couldn’t. I listened to the cat screaming until it stopped. I don’t know why I didn’t do anything. I was just thinking about the fox. It must have been hungry too.”

Jane looked outside and the deer was gone.

Jane and Jody had less than a day before their inevitable split. Jane knew how much time was left between them, but somehow could not figure out the exact time of day. Jody’s room remained dark at all hours.

Jane took one of the many mugs to the bathroom and emptied it: three filled and tied off condoms, an orange peel, and a quarter of a cup of moldy coffee plopped into the trash can. This isn’t a solution, Jane thought, this is just a bigger container. She couldn’t take the trash out to the kitchen bin, at least not without having Jody notice. She would have to take it all the way outside and bury it in the yard. As Jane was hatching a plan to scrub the entirety of Jody’s landfill, he threw open the bedroom door and stood haloed in the light from the hallway.

“Why did you make me cook by myself?” He sounded hurt.

Jody had always planned all their meals. When Jane tried to help he would take whatever ingredient or utensil out of her hands and tell her she didn’t have to do that. Jody simply wanted her to watch him.

“I was trying to clean up a little,” she apologized.

“Don’t,” Jody said, referring to her cleaning, not her apologizing. “I want it this way.”

Jane could not square the agitated angel in the doorway with the creature that had been inside her only hours before. After exiting her, he always ran to the bathroom to take a scalding shower. There, he would brush his teeth as if trying to rub the gum from the bone. Afterwards, he would pull, from some hidden hole, a clean pair of gray boxers, a black tee shirt and a pair of black workwear pants and get dressed.

Jody would then become a kind of accountant. He would attend to his ledgers. Every day he kept a log of how many times he jerked off, whether or not he got high, what he ate or if didn’t eat, and how many cigarettes he smoked. Jody needed to keep track of all these things. So, it shouldn’t have surprised Jane that he would search for each filled and knotted condom they had used and count them up, making sure none were missing. Jane thought his behavior was odd, but didn’t ask for an explanation. She assumed his reasoning would be somehow even more unsettling than his actions.

Jody entered the darkness and presented Jane with a towering sandwich.

“It’s for you,” he said, “I’m not hungry.”

Jane was uneasy but began to eat as she watched him back. She was, unlike him, starving.

Jody’s face went taut, as if maybe he was about to smile, but Jane couldn’t be sure.

“I don’t think you want to hear this,” he said, “but there has been more going on than you realize.”

Great, she thought, he’s seeing someone else. Her stomach dropped with relief and betrayal.

She played dumb, “Oh? What?”

“I haven’t said anything because I was hoping you would notice.”

Jane gave him a blank look, but now she wasn’t faking it.

“This is something that’s important to me. Have you noticed that you never give me as many compliments as I give you?”

This wasn’t a bit, Jane realized. He really believed it.

“I don’t feel like you care about me.”

The sandwich she was still eating became more structurally unsound. Mayonnaise droplets rained down and pickles began to drop from the bread down into folds of the navy sheets. She knew she couldn’t stop eating the sandwich without risking its falling apart entirely.

“I told you how much I needed to feel supported, and you haven’t tried at all.”

She hadn’t tried? Hadn’t she given herself over to him completely these past few days? Wasn’t she here, installed in his bedroom? Besides, wasn’t this their goodbye weekend? How had she not met expectations that were never supposed to be there to begin with? Through her full mouth she tried to protest.

“Don’t interrupt me. I hate being interrupted,” Jody snapped.

She tried to speak again but her voice clacked like a set of softly tapping tongs. The room around them receded and the mattress began to bob gently on the tide that roiled inside her belly. She knew the only place she ever existed and would ever exist was here in this bed adrift on the sound of Jody’s voice.

As if noticing the exact moment Jane began to drop away from herself, Jody’s tone softened. “Please don’t leave,” he said. His voice was as gentle as a child’s. “I love you.”

He came at her and curled up tight in her armpit, where he announced, “I want to be your best friend.”

Jane couldn’t deny that it felt good to be loved and it felt good to be full. Jody wrapped himself around her as she stuck her finger in a dollop of dropped mayo and used the goo to draw the outline of his face, as best she could, into the navy blue sheet.

March 27, 2025