Ouroboros by Cora Lee Originally published by Dream Boy Book Club A sexy neighbor moves in downstairs. I see her in the driveway, unloading everything she owns. Her apartment has the same layout as mine, I bet. I can hear her through the floor, moving from room to room, hammering or vacuuming or whistling to herself. I want to invite her up, but I don’t want her to see my ankle bracelet. I paint the tips of my toes, then my fingers. I try to make up new names for my polish colors. Swan Dive, Fit of Passion, Behold a Pale Horse. My sexy neighbor washes her car in the driveway. The soapy water makes a shadow on the concrete. The car dries in the sun after she goes inside. But then, that night, it rains. I hope my sexy neighbor doesn’t feel like it was all a waste. I’ve been trying not to think of time as something that can be wasted. Early Bird Special, Vengeful God. They could give me a job doing this and I would be so good at it that you could pick a shade on name alone, I think. I want to tell my sexy neighbor all these things. I would tell her we’re not that different, her and I, not all that different, except that I’ve done a couple bad things. Instead I lay on the ground to be closer to the wall socket. I have to charge my ankle monitor twice a day, for two hours each time. The carpet bristles against my cheek. I imagine a line of colors and I name each one: Daydream, Sweet Dream, Pipe Dream, Lucid Dream, Bad Dream, American Dream, Sex Dream, Prophetic Dream, Fever Dream, Dream Come True.

Rottwild By Cora Lee Written as a result of the IKEA Residency Chopper was the bitch who started it all. Now she had outlived her master. She had thick leathery nipples that hung off her belly and when she rolled over on her back you could see all six of them lined up, poking through her black fur like tombstones. Her descendants filled the backyard. That’s how Victor had made his money. I drove 100 miles to be here. I knew I was getting close when the billboards said things like Stop Fentanyl Overdoses or Are You Going to Hell? Victor’s eldest son answered the door and handed me a t-shirt, identical to the one he was wearing. It looked like this: Victor kneeling next to Chopper with wings photoshopped onto his back. We didn’t know what to do. Victor was the first of the cousins to die. Now his house was full of family and puppies and babies, and everyone was asking me questions like “Where’s your boyfriend?” or “When are you moving back?” I picked up a puppy. He had that soft loose skin that made it hard for me to stop touching him. I felt a hand on my shoulder. My favorite cousin was here. “If I die,” he whispered, “Don’t put me on a fucking t-shirt.” Three joints were in circulation at all times, so as soon as one left my fingers, someone passed me another one. To decline would be to say “I don’t belong here anymore.” I did not decline. When I looked at the faces of the rottweilers around me their markings seemed more fantastical than I remembered. More grotesque, like Juggalo face paint. There was always something to learn from my cousins. Like how to burn trash in your yard without legal recourse. “Have the kids roast marshmallows over it, that way it’s a cooking fire.” If my boyfriend were here he’d say “Your family sure does love a scam, don’t they.” He was not here. I had started a whole fight with him just to get what I wanted, which was to come alone. My favorite cousin opened a black cherry White Claw for me. “You good?” he asked. It was slick and cold against my skin. If I took a drink I would be making a choice. Someone handed me a baby, which meant they could not tell how high I was. I held her on my hip. It surprised me how natural it was, to carry a baby, even when I was high and my mouth felt like it had been wall-papered and I was still holding my drink and deciding what to do with it. The baby repeated the only word she knew, again and again. I did not want to hear that word right now but I bounced up and down to make her laugh. If my boyfriend were here he would take the White Claw from me and say, “This is a decision that concerns the both of us.” A girlfriend of a cousin came to retrieve the baby from me. I did not remember her name but I smiled. “You’re next,” she said, and smiled back. After this weekend she would still be here, in this world of dog breeding and insurance fraud and babies, and I would be gone, back to some other world. No one here seemed to worry about what was responsible, or what made sense. I was envious. It was becoming clear to me why people chose to procreate. There wasn’t some logic to it, like passing on a part of yourself or populating the earth. It was some other thing. It was a yearning to hear someone call out for you, over and over. The can was starting to sweat in my hand. The next morning we all converged on the cemetery, wearing our matching t-shirts. The eldest son drove Victor’s pick-up, the truck bed full of pacing dogs. Not Chopper though. She sat shotgun, waiting for the son to open her door and scoop her up like a giant baby. He set her down next to the grave pit. That’s where Victor’s sons all stood, each holding a full-grown rott on a leash. My favorite cousin put a hand on my shoulder. And when the casket was lowered, Chopper started to howl. She knew. The other dogs followed, a painful, sustained baying that drowned out all the other noises in my head.

Dog Day Afternoons By Cora Lee Originally published in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood Pablo’s father was a handsome, French pianist in his forties. His apartment was immaculate and minimalistic. He was usually absent when I came to retrieve Pablo for his 90-minute walk, but sometimes I would turn my key in the lock and hear him playing the grand piano in the living room. It sounded beautiful, but imposing, and made me feel like an intruder. After his walk I fed Pablo a mix of baked sweet potato and two types of dehydrated meat that were mixed together. Pablo lived considerably better than I did. He was a caramel colored poodle. Every time I sliced Pablo’s sweet potato, I slipped a piece into my own mouth. The first time I did it I felt dirty and barbaric. Then I came to look forward to it each day. The cooked sweet potato sat in a bowl on the counter, waiting for me. The skin was loose and papery. The flesh was a deep, sweet orange. It was bland, unseasoned, and my mouth watered for it. I preferred it when Pablo’s father was not there. Once, two months into the job, he walked into the kitchen as I prepared Pablo’s elaborate meal and gasped. “You must cut it up smaller,” he said, gesturing at the sweet potato. He took the knife from me and diced the tuber into miniscule cubes. “He can’t eat it otherwise,” he told me. I nodded and offered up my most subservient smile. Before entering each apartment, I removed my shoes. Since I wasn’t supposed to use the clients’ toilets, I memorized available bathrooms along my route: the Trader Joe’s on 23rd St, the various Starbucks locations on the Upper East Side. Every day I pissed in the same places, not unlike the dogs I walked. When Pablo’s apartment was unoccupied, I would sometimes use the bathroom. It overlooked Gramercy Park. If I lived here, I thought, I would take a bath in this claw foot tub every afternoon and watch the world through the window. But I did not live here, and my afternoons were full. I had dogs to walk. My job was not a phone app. It was a high-end dog walking company, and I had only got the job in early August because I had struck up a conversation with a dog walker who was leaving the city. He was headed to California, the state from which I had just moved, and it felt like coming full circle. I would be trained as his replacement and walk the same dogs each weekday at the same time. The job started at 3:00 pm and ended at 10:30. The best way to get from one apartment to the next was on a bicycle—it was nearly impossible to make it to each dog on time by subway. After my final walk I would bike home, across the Queensboro Bridge and then the Pulaski, to get to the room I rented in Bed-Stuy. In the mornings I went to school. The dog walker who trained me said that Callie was unloved. She was a Pomeranian Husky. People on the street would sometimes stop and ask me, “Is that a pomsky?” and my skin would prickle at the word. “I don’t know,” I would tell them, even though I did. Callie got walked five times a day, but never by the family that owned her. They lived on Fifth Avenue. When I entered their apartment, I would often encounter the maid, the personal assistant, or the private chef. The mother and the two teenage daughters were leggy blondes and there was always one of them lying on the couch in the sitting room. I padded silently through their house in my socks, so I wouldn’t disturb them. There were two long-haired cats with smooshed faces. Callie was relegated to her own room, about the size of a studio apartment, that was bare except for a doggy crate, a beanbag chair, and an assortment of toys splattered across the hardwood floor. After her hour-long walk, I had to mark in a spiral-bound notebook what type of business she had conducted. Once, while I was leaving, I saw a wine glass tipped over on top of the grand piano, surrounded by a dark red puddle. My whole body jolted, thinking that it must somehow be my fault. When I looked closer I realized it was a prank. The wine was made of plastic. My scalp would sweat, making my hair look perpetually oily, so I kept it in two long braids. Kareem, the doorman at the Callie’s building, asked who did them for me. I sort of had a crush on him. He had four thick cornrows that clung to his skull and was handsome and sarcastic. His sister did his hair, or sometimes his mom. He didn’t know there was no one in the city that touched me. I taught myself to French braid from YouTube videos. Once in the elevator of Callie’s building, I found a twenty-dollar bill rolled into a tight tube. If you divided my eight-hour shifts by the amount of money that showed up in my bank account each Friday, I made around $7.50 an hour. This was piecework, I’d been told when I got hired. That meant that I got paid per walk but was not guaranteed a minimum wage. I was not paid for the time I spent biking to different corners of Manhattan, or for the inconvenient gaps in my schedule. At the time I was unsure whether this was a good job or not. I learned my way around Manhattan, going to neighborhoods in which I likely wouldn’t have found myself otherwise. I was trying to navigate a world of wealth. I thought I had known rich people in San Diego but realized after a week of dog walking that I had been mistaken. There was an unspoken divide between the people who lived in these neighborhoods, and the people who catered to their needs. At school I felt conspicuous. I was the oldest one in all of my classes and had never been on a real university campus before. I had transferred to NYU after four years at the community college in my hometown. At a transfer orientation, I was asked by fellow students, “Are you sure you want to work while you’re in school?” A boy questioned why I didn’t live in dorms like the rest of them and I told him that it was too expensive. “How much is it?” he asked. In early September, one of the girls lay on the sofa at Callie’s apartment as the Brett Kavanaugh hearing played on the television. I lingered in Callie’s room, listening while I put her leash on. So much was happening in the world, and my life revolved around eight different dogs and their bowel movements. My third walk of the day was a large, beautiful black German Shepherd named Piper who lived in Greenwich Village. I was inconsequential to her. Like most of the dogs, she never appeared excited or unhappy to see me, just indifferent. I loved taking her down to the Hudson River, and strolling cobblestoned side streets lined with beautiful brick buildings. As the days got shorter, I would peer into the glowing windows and eavesdrop on the sound of people making dinner. When it rained, I would wear a trash-bag-poncho in which I had ripped holes for my head and arms. The soles of my shoes had worn through, so I slipped a pair of doggy bags over my socks to keep my feet dry. They crinkled with each step. I worried that one day I would show up to an apartment and see one of my classmates. Eloise hated to walk. She was a small, grey, curly-haired dog and lived across from the Flatiron building. The sidewalks there were always crowded with people churning in and out of Eataly and the Lego store. I would carry Eloise through the throngs of people until I could get two blocks south where I would set her down. She liked to stiffen her legs, and when I pulled her leash she would slide along the concrete. I would tug her towards the apartment of Parker, an ancient miniature schnauzer who was just as stubborn. I had to text Eloise’s father after her walks and tell him whether or not she took a shit. I wasn’t supposed to let him know in person, though I saw him every evening. In their back room, the doormen of Eloise’s building had a five-inch-tall metal figurine that depicted one rhino mounting another rhino from behind. The rhino being penetrated had a label on it that read the building’s address. The other rhino was labeled “The World.” Parker’s mom had her own Wikipedia page. She was a young, bubbly, old-money, Manhattan socialite. The elevator opened straight into her home. Her son had a male nanny who looked like a model. One night I found her seated on the couch with an Asian woman crouched on the floor in front of her. It was her personal manicurist. Another night I showed up with a tear-stained face, and she looked at me with genuine concern. “What’s wrong, girlie?” I shook my head, unable to form words. She asked if I needed a hug and I nodded. She rubbed my back in wide circles while I cried about the job that I hated, my perpetual exhaustion, and the pittance that showed up in my bank account each week. I could explain none of it to her. It was the first time I’d been touched in months. Food was always on my mind. On Sundays I would make a big pot of beans and rice, and bring some to work each day in a Tupperware. Often, after walking Eloise and Parker, I would go to the Trader Joe’s on Sixth and 21st, where I would buy a single banana and steal a protein bar. When the weather was nice, I ate in one of the many parks. As it grew colder, I sat in the corner of a Starbucks, not buying anything, charging my phone and doing my homework. There was an inconvenient hole in my walk schedule. I had eight dogs scheduled each day, and sometimes an extra one or two more. But usually from 8:30 to 10 pm, I had nowhere to be. For the most part, I was invisible to the children of these families. Piper’s home had a trampoline in the living room. The teenage daughters at Callie’s didn’t even turn their heads when I opened the door. I was a background feature, expected to be silent and reliable. There were two children at Eloise’s. The boy was maybe four, and the little girl was young enough to toddle but couldn’t talk. When they heard my key in the lock, they would run to the front room. The boy liked to ask me questions about my life, what I did over the weekend and whether I walked other dogs. He was surprised to find out I went to school, too. The day before Halloween he offered to share his candy with me if I didn’t have time to trick or treat. He knew more about me than any of the adults I worked for. I’d never hated a dog until I met Winona. She was a bull terrier with black beady eyes whose body was so dense and meaty that if she did not want to move, I could not force her to. She lunged at any creature that came near her, be it animal or human. Her choke collar had no effect on her. She would strain against it, letting the pronged chain dig into the flesh of her neck. I picked her up on the Upper East Side each night at 8 pm and would walk her to the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, past the hot-dog cart and straggling tourists. Winona once yanked me towards the remnants of a hot-dog on the staircase and gobbled it up before I had the chance to dislodge it from her jaw. She would thereafter return to the same spot over and over, as if by magic the hot-dog would be there once more. But I wasn’t so different. When I found a tray of bagels in a meeting room on campus, I returned every afternoon to poke my head through the door, hoping that the tray would materialize before me again. At night, each apartment window looked like a square portal into another universe. The buildings in New York were older and taller than the ones in Southern California, so everything felt significant. I could look up at any moment and remember, with surprise, I am in New York now. Sometimes I would stand and warm myself on the air coming up through the subway grates, savoring the groaning sounds of the trains underneath me. In the sidewalk planter boxes, ornamental cabbages replaced the summer blossoms. New York was constantly unfolding around me, and I wanted to open my eyes wider so I might be able to take it all in. People began to ask me directions and I was pleased with myself when I found I was able to answer. Bacchus and Buxley were brothers, two incontinent bearded collies on the Upper East Side with divorced owners who had both remarried and lived eight or so blocks apart. Every week they traded B & B off, and I had to remember which apartment to go to. The owners were friendly and so were the decrepit dogs. They would often accidentally pee in the hallway as I tried to rush them outside. It is likely that these dogs are now dead. Occasionally I would walk a brown and white puppy named Maisy on the bank of the East River. The service elevator brought me to the apartment’s service entrance. I would arrive a few minutes early and stand outside the door, watching the clock. With this client, you were not allowed to arrive one minute early or late. The owners spent $100,000 a year so that Maisy could be walked 12 times a day. She smelled sweet and clean. I loved to cradle her in my arms. I developed a sore on my ass from biking and couldn’t get it to go away. It rubbed against my jeans painfully. At night I would get home at 11:00 pm and sit in bed, massaging my feet, and trying to soothe my body. I would wake the next morning at 6:00 am and everything would repeat. I learned the city through dogs. They shit straight on the cement. You could never really pick it all up because it just smeared around. Especially Pablo, whose excrement was softened by excessive amounts of sweet potato. I sat in the dog park with him, looking up at the buildings of my university. It felt impossible that this was my life. I called my manager and told him I was miserable, that I wasn’t even making minimum wage. “Don’t do me like that,” he said. “Give it another week, I’ll see if I can get you some more walks.” It wasn’t more walks I wanted, it was more money. It took me three tries to finally quit. In mid-November New York got its first snowfall of the season. It would be my first real winter; I was from the most southwest corner of the country. One of the doormen warned me ahead of time to dress warmly, but I didn’t have anything to wear. I watched the first snowflakes with wonder and dread. Within an hour the world was cloaked in white. I could no longer recognize the city. My shoes had no tread, and I slid everywhere, not trusting myself to lift my feet up. The next day would be my last. I never said goodbye to the owners. I said goodbye to the dogs, quietly, with a scratch behind the ears. They wouldn’t miss me. A replacement would come on Monday and they may not even notice. I hadn’t been their first. I said goodbye to the doormen. “This is my last day,” I told Kareem. My final two walks of the day were cancelled. So all of a sudden I was done. I hadn’t biked so I hopped the subway at 23rd Street to head home. It was over. I stood body to body with rush-hour commuters and felt warmth emanating from all these living creatures. A year after quitting I saw a young man with a familiar looking Pomeranian-husky in Washington Square Park. I checked the time––it was the afternoon walk I used to take Callie on. I felt an urge to call out to him and say, “I know what you’re doing! I’ve done it too!” But I couldn’t even remember Callie’s name. All I could remember was her beanbag chair, Kareem, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the smooshed face cats, and the prank wine glass. When it finally came to me, they were out of sight.

Troublemaker by Cora Lee Originally published by Expat Press My boyfriend’s wife was a remarkable beauty. She came into my mind when I was driving, or cutting clumps of wheatgrass to feed to the juicer at work, or lying in bed at night. Her name was Bianca, which was a name that could only belong to a beautiful woman. I was scrolling through her Instagram page when a text from Sukie interrupted me. “Thought of you today. I backed up into a car and drove away without leaving a note.” What the fuck does that have to do with me, I wanted to know. “Just seemed like something you would do,” she responded. Bianca was really put together if you know what I mean. She looked like she got expensive haircuts without wondering if it was “worth it.” I stalked her regularly on Instagram. She was 46, so she did not use social media in the same way as my generation. She did not maintain a curated yet “effortless” internet persona, she did not come up with witty, ironic captions. Everything she posted online seemed to be in earnest. This made her even more fascinating to observe. She posted very rarely––tasteful photos of herself on special occasions, a flower arrangement on a dining table, a sunset. Her and Lucien in formal attire, his arm around her waist. There were no thirst traps or photos of comical vanity license plates. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a bad photo of her. She had a photogenic smile and a clear, expressive face. There were lines at the edges of her mouth and eyes, but she carried them with a grace that made me envy her even more. There was a timelessness to her. Sukie said I was obsessed. “I think you’re fucking the wrong one,” she told me, lying splayed on my bed. Sometimes it was a challenge that Sukie was such a knockout. She was too self-assured to be daunted by an attractive woman, and I couldn’t make her understand. I’d grown accustomed to the fact that for the entirety of my life, my best friend would be “the hot one.” But Sukie said I was “the bad one,” and that this was better because I had cultivated it all on my own. I loved her for that. I checked Bianca’s page every other day but of course I did not follow her. I did follow her husband. Lucien did not follow me back, which made sense, since he was cheating on his wife. But I noticed that he did watch my stories, where I posted pictures of myself in skimpy outfits and screenshots of funny text messages from Sukie. There was something soothing about emphasizing the difference between me and Bianca. When I was feeling like a brat, I would go through his feed and double-tap old photos he posted, so he would get a notification and feel a jolt in his crotch by being forced to think of me when I wasn’t around. Sukie didn’t approve of my romantic exploits, which were often what she considered “bad ideas.” I rarely approved of them myself, but I was more interested in the thrill of sexual tension than in finding true love. I already had Sukie, so what did I need a genuine romantic relationship for? With boyfriends I always became a worse, more paranoid version of myself. Any time I dated a guy seriously, I became convinced he would leave me for a girl with a good FICO score or a RoombaTM or something. Deep in the pit of me I knew I didn’t want that for myself, but I couldn’t help feeling there was another way to be a person in the world, and that it may end up better than whatever I had going on. At least I didn’t have to worry about Lucien leaving me for someone like this, because he was already married to her. I was 19 years younger than my boyfriend and his wife. I worked at a juice bar, which is how I met Lucien in the first place. Being the 27-year-old juice bar employee already felt ridiculous, so I wondered how it felt to be him, and to be fucking a girl who works at a juice bar. And it wasn’t just a regular shitty job, either––I had to wear an orange visor and matching t-shirt during my shifts. Most of the customers were the type of women that I revered and feared: yoga bodies, bullet journals, juices full of vegetables instead of fruits. I understood that they were individual people each with their own troubles and desires and complexities, but when I stood behind the register, I compared my life to theirs as if they were one homogenous entity. It wasn’t fair to me or them, but that didn’t stop me. Lucien was a regular. He was the kind of guy who was just going to get hotter as he got older. He was fit in a non-threatening way. He wore a watch that seemed expensive, and he looked like he had a Roth IRA and a plan for the trajectory of his life. He ordered juices that had names like “Royal Sunrise” (carrot, beet, tangerine, wheatgrass), or “Green Machine” (kale, cucumber, celery, wheatgrass). But Lucien stood out from the other male customers. He put his phone away when he got to the front of the line, unlike the men who had full-on conversations via Bluetooth while I stood there and waited for them to mouth their orders to me. Lucien had a way of looking at me that made me feel like we were both in on a joke. After hours of fake smiling and customer service voice, this was more intense than having a gun pointed at my head. I have been described as having an “unusual beauty,” which is what men call it when they can’t figure out why they want to fuck you so bad. Men would say to me, in the throes of passion, “You’re kinda sexy,” but there was always that word “kinda” there to dilute the compliment. But even for a girl like me it’s easier than you think to seduce a married man. It just takes eye contact and shit talking. Every time Lucien came in I showed him a little attention, accumulated details about his life. When he said he was from Chicago I raised my eyebrows and said, “Let me guess. A suburb outside Chicago,” and he laughed more than was warranted. I wanted to occupy a corner of his brain and it seemed like it was working. He came in every day. How much juice can one man drink? Finally, he buckled and scribbled his number on the merchant copy of his receipt. I texted Sukie. Nothing in my life felt real until I shared it with her. “Congrats,” she said, “on your next train wreck.” Lucien had me saved in his phone as Cox Cable Customer Support. Sometimes, just to stir up a little trouble, I would call him at odd hours––not midnight, that would be too simple. Something like a Sunday morning at 9, when he was probably having my favorite kind of sex, lazy morning sex, with his beautiful wife. I imagined him spooning her from behind and burying his face in her expensive haircut. I wanted Bianca to say, “Who would be calling right now?” or better yet, see his phone screen and silently try to make excuses in her head. We were a bit of a cliché, and I was alright with that. Most of the time we just had sex, but when he was sentimental he’d take me out to dinner in a part of town where he’d never go with his wife. He would order for me, which seemed incredibly old fashioned but also sort of erotic. On those nights, I would wonder what excuse he gave her, and what she was doing, and whether she believed him, as I poked my fork into chunks of swordfish. He did not like it when I asked him questions about Bianca, so I had to only do it rarely and make them not sound nefarious, only curious. I waited until after he came, panting and damp in the backseat of his Range Rover. “What does your wife do for fun?” I wanted to know. He turned away and pulled his Ralph Lauren boxers back on. “Something’s wrong with you,” he said. I had told him I was not on birth control, but he came inside me all the time anyways. Sukie said he must be an adrenaline junkie. I would tell him I needed forty bucks for the day-after pill but then go get it at Costco for seven. I was waiting in line when Sukie texted me “You getting Plan B?” She always knew where I was, like a guardian angel. We shared iPhone locations. “Get me one too,” she added a moment later. Neither of us had a Costco membership, and without one there’s only two things to do there: buy alcohol or use the pharmacy. I turned to the woman in the white coat behind the counter. “Actually, could I have one more of those?” I did wonder if Bianca had an idea of what was going on. Did she not notice the influx in her husband’s juice bar expenses or wonder why he’d started “going to the gym” right before dinner? If she ever went through his phone or computer I’m sure she’d find evidence of me tucked away somewhere. The videos he took while he was inside me, the photos I sent him during my lunch breaks. If she was any ounce the psycho that I was, she would have looked through the users who liked her husband’s posts on Instagram, and she would have noticed that I came up again and again. One night I commented “Lovely!” on a photo he posted of them on their anniversary. Lucien deleted the comment within ten minutes and I thought he would be mad at me, but he texted me later that night saying, “You’re being very bad,” which could only really be a good thing. On Saturday night, I met up with Sukie to go to the Midnight Room. They had a new bouncer—a young girl wearing a black tube top sitting on the stool outside the door. I could see her belly button ring dangling over the hem of her pants. She hardly looked old enough to enter a bar, but the way she sat with her legs spread was commandeering. She looked at my ID and then at Sukie’s. “Wow,” she said to Sukie. “You look sooo young. You do not look 27.” Since when, I wondered, was 27 not considered young? Maybe I needed to recalibrate my idea of what youth was, as I too was 27, and thought of it as an extension of 21, still saying I was in my “mid-twenties” and using that to justify why I did not have my shit together in any meaningful way. She turned to me, assessing me for a moment. “Like, I don’t know, you just look 27, you know.” I don’t think she even meant it as an insult. She turned to the next couple in line, unaware of the havoc she’d unleashed inside me. At the bar I stared into my gin and tonic. “It doesn’t even matter,” Sukie said, “What’s wrong with looking the age you are?” Which was not actually the response I wanted. Beautiful women always love to pretend that beauty constructs don’t exist, as if our value in society isn’t based on how supple and barely legal we can look for as long as possible. I told Sukie to shut up, but I rolled my eyes and smiled, as if to say I was joking, because I didn’t want to both look old and ruin her night. But on the inside, I pushed the bouncer’s comment around and around in my head, as if I were Sisyphus and this was some punishment for something bad I’d done. Sleeping with a married man, maybe. Or lying on my timesheet. “Why do you care anyways,” Sukie said, “You’re twenty years younger than what’s-her-name.” But that was it—the only thing I had on Bianca was my proximity to adolescence. And when that was siphoned away, I wouldn’t be a threat. The last sip of my drink was hiding among the ice cubes. I sucked it up and locked myself in the graffitied bathroom. When I pulled my shirt up over my tits to take a pic in the mirror for Lucien, I held my phone in front of my face to block it from view. I didn’t want him to see my skin losing its youth. Plus, if they had an argument tonight, and Bianca wrested his phone away from him and saw this photo of me, I didn’t want her to wonder why her husband was cheating on her with someone less attractive, which was something I had wondered about myself. I crashed at Sukie’s that night. The room felt stifling and I could not mute my brain long enough to fall asleep. I shifted out of Sukie’s bed and padded into the bathroom. All her skin care products, her creams and serums, were arranged in a row on the counter. Maybe the answer was here. I picked them up one by one, turning them over in my hands, reading their descriptions: “firming,” “collagen-boosting,” “age-defying.” It seemed like I’d been missing out on some crucial aspect of womanhood. I stuck my index finger into a tub of overnight moisturizer and smeared the fluffy white cream across my forehead and cheeks. This was doing something, I told myself. I took a picture of each label and tried to put the little bottles and jars back how they had been. I turned the light off and crawled back into Sukie’s bed. A Monday morning seemed as good a time as any to hit the mall. At Sephora, there was a door greeter, who smiled and welcomed me in. She was wearing the all-black Sephora uniform. Her face looked airbrushed of any imperfections, but this was real life. I smiled back. The first step was to acknowledge the staff. Not so effusively that they remembered me, but enough that I seemed neutral and unafraid. I’d been at this for a while. Also, I never asked where a certain product was. That made it seem like I came in for something specific, and it would be more noticeable when I left empty-handed. I meandered through the store, smiling and nodding whenever I encountered the contoured face of an all-black clad employee. I opened my phone. I scrolled through my photos. Hydraulic acid serum with added collagen. Supergoop lotion SPF 40. Witch hazel facial toner. I searched the shelves for exact matches. I tucked the lotion under my arm. It was better not to walk around with items visible in my hands. I moved to the next aisle, which was empty. I squatted down in a feigned search for something, my purse resting on the ground beside me. I casually, discreetly, transferred the lotion from under my arm into the depth of my bag. I found the eye cream in the next aisle, and then the serum. I repeated my act, my practiced casualness. I was getting greedy. I wanted the whole routine. I wanted steps, structure, order in my life. I wanted a smooth, clear complexion and for someone to be surprised at my age. “Excuse me, ma’am.” The voice came from behind me to the right. I did not turn around. My heart sank into my gut. A hot flush bloomed across the surface of my skin. On my left appeared those black employee slacks, a flash of darkness in my peripheral vision. I turned a bottle in my hands, as if debating, as if I were remaining calm because I had done nothing wrong. I was simply a customer. A woman browsing products I might be compelled to purchase. I pretended to read the label of the lotion I was holding. I wondered if there was a Sephora jail, a little cell in the back where they’d cage me up while we waited for mall security to arrive. Or maybe they’d take a mugshot that would hang in the break room, and all the girls would look at it and think, “She really looks her age.” Except that the black pants walked straight past, headed to the voice behind me on the right. I waited for a moment before standing. My legs felt bloodless. No one was looking at me. Sometimes I do believe in God, just a tiny bit, and I’m certain that I’m his favorite little troublemaker. I returned the stem-cell hand and body lotion to the shelf, calmly. I glanced over my shoulder at the woman who I’d thought had spoken to me, who I thought had caught me, but who had only been summoning assistance from a staff member. My pulse stopped slamming for one second. Of course it was her. Bianca was gesturing at the shelf, explaining something to the employee who was nodding attentively. Maybe she could feel my stare, because she turned her head and her gaze passed over me. I waited to see recognition in her face, any flicker in her expression that would clue me in that she knew who I was. But her face remained impassive, and she turned back to the woman in front of her, her lips still moving, forming words that I did not hear. In the parking garage, my heart still bucked inside me like an engine misfiring. I needed to shit. I tossed my purse on the passenger seat and put my hands 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, trying to reorient myself. I reversed out of my spot. I heard a sound, like one loud, commanding knock on the back of my car. I snapped my head around. There was no one there. I had just backed into the Lexus parked across from me. I scanned the garage for witnesses but found none. I put the car in first. I drove away.

Life Would Be Different If God Was a Bitch By Cora Lee I answered a Craigslist ad seeking a foot model. Sixty bucks for two hours. I told myself that was pretty good. I knew that it wasn’t really. I sent a sample photo of my feet to a man who signed his emails “Tre Styles.” I assumed this was a pseudonym, unless his parents had named him after Cuba Gooding Jr.’s character from Boyz in the Hood. He told me I had beautiful feet, which was a lie. At the Dekalb Target, I shoved black pantyhose and red nail polish under my puffer. Those had been his two requests. It was February. It was 30 degrees out. I texted him when I arrived at the Marcy Ave subway station: I’m the girl in the green jacket. He replied I’m the guy in the wheelchair. I sat, facing him, on a public bench. The Interstate 278 was behind me, and across the street I watched construction workers on cherry pickers holler at each other. People walked past but nobody seemed to give a shit what we were up to. Tre Styles had limited mobility in his hands. Every movement took considerable effort and time. He could have been 40, or 50, or some other age entirely. He switched between two different cameras, very slowly, pointing each at the lower half of my body in turn. I wiggled my toes and rubbed an arch against a heel. The sheer pantyhose underneath my mini skirt did not keep me warm, but adrenaline did, at least for a little while. He said I was a natural. I asked what he did with the photos–he sold them online, yes, there was a large market, you’d be surprised. I doubted he would last the full two hours, but I was wrong. Towards the end, the cold set in, and he asked me to put my foot in his lap so he could touch it. This had not been part of the arrangement. I wanted to say no but I didn’t know how. I didn’t want Tre Styles to think that I was disgusted by him, because I wasn’t. It’s just that physical contact made it too real. Well, it was just a foot, after all. At that point I could hardly feel it anyways. I told myself this was “good material” for writing, which is what I always told myself when I sensed I was making a bad decision. So later I tried to write about it and a girl from school told me I shouldn’t depict a disabled man as a monster. I felt ashamed. But I had only written down what had happened. Tre Styles was not a monster. He was just a pervert like everyone else. At the end of the semester I read an excerpt of the piece at an undergrad event and people laughed, in a validating way. Afterwards my professor confessed to me and two male students that we were her favorites. We went and got sloppy drunk at my classmate’s West Village apartment. Our prof smoked weed with us and lay down on the couch with her eyes closed. I gummed some coke and bit the hottest guy in my writing class on the neck. I puked a bunch of wine into the toilet and it looked like blood. Life goes on. If I feel like it, I can find the photos Tre Styles took. He texted some to me and I kept them. My calves look toned and you cannot tell how cold I was.