Our latest flash fiction instalment documents one woman’s sexual appetite and explores the thrills of being desired – and desiring others
By Rebecca Schiff for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network
She slept with men who only wanted to play Settlers of Catan. She slept with law students who had framed copies of the Constitution on their bedroom walls. She slept with sound architects, sound engineers, and the second baseman from her softball league. She hardly ever slept. Sometimes she took a pill, but often she lay awake next to a sleeping man, trying to read the Bill of Rights in the dark, then called a taxi and went home. She liked riding in the back of a taxi at night. It felt private, even with the driver up front. She liked recognizing the streets closer to her building, and she liked the deli where she sometimes went to get money to pay the driver. She’d grab a can of condensed milk, a hairnet. She wasn’t sure what for.
The men never called. They sent her smiley-face permutations and pictures of their cocks, but not one had called her since the year 2004. That man had met her at a flash mob in a department store, then looked her up in the last phone book the phone company ever printed. She had lived in a different building then, had withdrawn cash at a different deli, and needed a landline to communicate with parents who didn’t trust cell phones yet. She and the man dated for five months, but things never got as good as figuring out that he had found her in the phone book.
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