Smut

(This is fictional and yet it still makes people think badly of me.)

Kai wanted to traipse from motel to motel like an outlaw. She wanted the frantic haircut in a gas station bathroom, the alias with a name that isn’t her own, and for the mouth of her suitcase to always drool blouses. She liked the dark sunglasses of it, the all-night truck stops, and the ribbons of freeways stretching out, always leading away.
Instead, this motel is just a bus ride from her house, and she’s isn’t going anywhere. Just sits on the slippery bedspread, the one stitched with periwinkles, telling herself, There are dirtier things, There are dirtier things.
She’s been having dreams where she calls for ambulances but when they get there, nothing is wrong. It’s just her, barefoot in a dingy nightgown, attempting to say she’s sorry. There are other dreams too: Kai robbing a bodega at knifepoint, Kai drowning kittens in tin pails, Kai seducing you at parties, then leaving you bruised and alone. Each morning she wakes up with stones quaking in her stomach, as if shame could solidify.

Jackson has yellow teeth but beautiful hands. He and Kai sip cream sodas bought from the motel’s rusted vending machine. Everything in the room has its pair: twin beds, twin sinks, twin water-stained highball glasses. They are filming a movie, Jackson’s movie, Eros Circus, and Kai is the star.
“It’s too bad we don’t have a couch in here, like the pros. But it’ll be great. You look ravishing, darling.”
Hers is the sumptuous body, ripened with butter cakes drowned in plum sauce, or overly sweetened lemon tea. She is not fat, but she is full. Her hunger has unwittingly formed a body whose symptom for others is lechery. Her body is her only option, as she is frequently silent—not for lack of things to say, but for lack of opportunity or allowance to say them. Her body speaks. So when Jackson says, “You are ravishing,” what he really means is, “You look ravenous.”
The room, with its carpet like rock-sand, watery paintings of seagull beach-scenes, and moth-eaten yellow curtains, starts to close in on them so the pair go outside. They sit by the swimming pool, green in spite of the chlorine heavy in the air. They keep looking through the fence to see if the others will arrive soon. But the July night is falling glassy-blue and it’s hard to see through the bougainvillea growing in the chain link.
Eventually a battered Chevy shakes the gravel and twin men get out. Both are tall and thin with wavy blonde hair. One wears a polyester Superman costume, the cape limply spread across his shoulders. The other is Clark Kent, in a gray suit and tortoise shell glasses.
“No, no, no!” Jackson shouts running toward them. “I asked for conjoined freak twins. This is a circus, not some boyhood, comic strip fantasy!”
Kai looks at her own costume: all ballet slippers and trapeze artist sequins, and laughs.
Clark Kent sheepishly apologizes and Superman stares at Kai. They all go inside the room and the men set up the camera equipment and Kai paints on more lipstick until she looks like someone else.
Kai never wanted to be herself. She does not just want a change. She wants to be an other.
A knock on the door reveals a stout woman with gelled hair and a eyeliner beard.
“Ah ha! Our cunning linguist has arrived,” Jackson says. The dyke rolls her eyes and calls him a fruit. She is the bearded lady.
“Does anyone want to do a line of K? I cooked plenty last night,” Jackson says, producing a small bag of ketamine. Everyone in the room nods and Kai finds a coaster for him. The coaster has a picture of a jungle bird none of them have seen in real life. Jackson cuts a few lines and pulls a straw from his pocket.
“Our movie star, my applejack, you first,” he says to Kai. She whisks her hair away and vacuums two lines.
“Easy,” Superman says. “You don’t want to fall into a K-hole.”
Everyone snorts one line or just a bump, which makes her feel greedy.
“Guess we should get naked then,” the dyke says.
“There’s the spirit.” Jackson says, lifting his camera, “Ready, aim, fire on Eros Circus.”
“Don’t you mean, lights, camera, action?” Superman asks.
“There’s really little difference in this movie. Now remember, you are actors. Here, in this motel room, you are not you, now.”
There is the plot of course, but we’ve heard it before. The trapeze artist and Superman are in love and he owns her, but his brother, Clark Kent, loves her too. And then there is the pesky bearded lady, always trying to lure the trapeze artist into her tent. Under this Big Top, the sunlight splitting into pink and white stripes, will they find a way to figure it out, to love and fuck her all at once? How many times can Kai dissect her heart?
Many times, it seems. The ketamine kicks in just as they maneuver a four-way kiss. Kai learns that the world is made of layers, and each one opens like stage curtains on a loop. While three people undress her, she looks into a motel painting of a stormy sea. She is on that wave, going up and up, but it feels as though her stomach was left on the ocean floor.
Hands moving over her, hands crawling and skating with certainty, with a destination. She had wanted to be the sort of person who knew what to do with her hands. Everyone moves over her like maple syrup—they are translucent and shining golden. Superman stands over her, now just wearing his cape, and tightens her hair into his fist. She looks down at his cock and before she can make the connection of what it actually is, because nothing is connecting, it is in the back of her throat and he is telling her to keep her eyes open. With her eyes peeled she sees that the dyke’s cock is bigger than either of the twins, offensively big, really. It is the color of a creamsicle and is flecked with glitter.
Superman leaves her mouth, pulling out spit like moon thread, and he is replaced by Clark. Clark comes suddenly, like a toothpaste tube squeezed too hard. This lack of professionalism upsets Jackson, but the dyke saves the scene by rubbing it into a froth on their bodies.
Then it’s all hands and mouths, and noises. The syrup of the room turns into flames. All at once, everything is on fire, everything is burning. Not just their bodies, but the room too. The curtains eaten away by tongues of fire, each brick in the wall melting like sugar cubes. The fire catches onto the outer world, too. Trees on fire, birds aflame flying from them, cutting the night sky in a comet’s arch. Kai is on the smoldering ceiling, watching them tug at her body below. They are relentless.
“There are rubies in your stomach. They’re blue,” Clark Kent says to Kai. His pupils are gone.
“Then wouldn’t they be sapphires?” the dyke asks.
“No, they’re blue rubies. I need to get them out,” he dives into her. She still doesn’t know what to with her hands. If she did, she couldn’t do it anyway. She is lost in a K-hole, and she is the only one. She tries to move but her mind has frozen her neurons. Wiggling a toe is like lifting a cement block.
And Jackson is there with the camera, he is the ringmaster, he tells them what to do.
“Twins, put Kai between you both. Remember how much you love her, how you would do anything for her. There, that’s it. Perfect.”

With everyone pounding inside her at once: the dyke at her mouth, Superman at her ass, and Clark Kent in her cunt, everything falls away. The room gone, the twin beds with the twin boys gone. The motel, the street, this circle of sky, scratched at the edges by pine and telephone pole, all gone. The ten hands in the room catching fire like the birds. Their burning hands fly away from them, out the window that is no longer a window. Everything receding into itself, everyone’s ribs caving, puncturing their lungs, their last breaths escaping into the yellow ether of the singed curtains. Words too, and her name, dissolving like salt in sea. All this, until there are no words, and all she can do is scream so loud.
EEEEE eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee O,O,O,O.
They carry her to the bath and submerge her in cold water until the marrow soaks back into her bones and she finally stops screaming.

When Kai wakes up she is in the passenger seat of the Chevy, slipping down the highway through foggy dawn. Clark Kent is driving next to her humming quieter than a radio ever could. He has laid his wool jacket over her. She doesn’t know where they are going. She doesn't know if he'll stab her to death and scatter her from the open window, or if he’ll bring her to a river she’s never seen, and wash her off, sweetly. She doesn’t know what he will do to her, but she takes his hand in hers and holds it between her palms.
“How did you end up there, pretty girl?” Clark Kent asks.
He wants a justification that makes sense, a reason why she would do something like that. He wants her to say that maybe she was in that motel room because a bad man held her too close when she was still in diapers, that the rent is due tomorrow, or that she really is ravenous, hungry enough to pull things into her that aren’t her own. But her reasons aren’t problems, unless the absence of reasons is a problem.
“I was there, like you were there.” She drops his hand.
She’s materialized out of a biography that doesn’t exist. Not because it wasn’t written, but because the hand erased the words once they began to settle—like forgetting, like forgiveness.
“Your voice is beautiful. Like a song I haven’t heard in awhile,” he says.
They drive and drive, until suddenly—sunrise.