The dog squirms at my feet, the toy-become-rag held limply in its jaws, the doll’s chewed wet imitation of a hand dangling and waving like the loose, slobbering lips that surround it. The fur a blizzard mixed with clots of mud. And when I reach down to play with the animal, to grab the toy from its suckling mouth, it jerks backwards, like my gesture hurts it, like the air displaced by my hand has flown into and attacked its watery eyes, like it hasn’t been begging me to play with it for the last several minutes. When I give up, pulling my hand back, it restarts, nudging my knee with new urgency. Stupid animal. Its nails click absentmindedly on the hardwood like crickets. 

Groaning, I get out of bed, the frame squeaking. Electronic trumpets blaring through the walls, cheap, distorted. 8 pm. Catchy but forgettable, the same as a million other news programs yet somehow very individual, identifiable, branded. Like snowflakes: each pattern never before and never again. I get to go out tonight, I remind myself. Hooray. I grab my cigarettes, I grab my phone, I sweep towards the door in one motion, a gust of wind. The scrawny eyes follow me. My stuttering fugue of a shadow, carved into the yellow on the wall, bursts out in front of me as the door opens; when I flip the switch it persists, blurred, in the faint, flickering light of the television down the hall. The tube of fur hurries against my feet, its behind a dark dot shrinking towards the tumorous growth at the end of the hallway, out of which sticks a pimple: my mother’s head. The carpeted floor squeaking under my toes, I follow the dog. The armchair’s different segments define themselves as I approach: her shoulders, her flabby arms, her frayed and stained bathrobe, her legs propped up on the ottoman. The animal jumps up onto the chair, making it tilt slightly, my mother’s right hand absentmindedly reaching over her to stroke it, her eyes still fixed on the television, not moving even as I step into the bounds of the living room. I glance over at the screen, reluctantly transfixed by its indignant tone, relating some snappy story about how outrageous it is that freshmen at a liberal arts college were told—no, encouraged—to use anal beads at orientation. Just what, the confused face wants to know, is the world coming to? Is this the “education” our children get now? It sweeps over me, his words burying me. Like I’m encased in a trance, lost in a storm, the elements obscuring so much that I’m unable to even see my own hand in front of me, to move my feet out of the sleet. It cuts to commercial, releasing us. The dog whines quietly, shoving itself into my mom’s lap, greedy for affection, attention. My mother’s pupils turn, bearing up at me, burrowing into my temples, biological drills entering my flesh, implanting probing larvae. I try to squirm away, holding my gaze aloft, at the rug across the room whose grainy texture, in the semidarkness, resembles a beehive. Sensing weakness, she asks, over the fuzzy din of the television, her mouth animated by the flickering light, what I’m doing tonight, whether I’m going out. Yes, I say, my voice monotone, submitting to interrogation. She asks me where I’m going. I wave my hand in front of me, casually, sending her eyes buzzing back towards the television for a moment. With Mike. She nods approvingly, happy that it’s someone she likes, not realizing that I didn’t answer her question. 

The commercial ends and her black eyes, with a glint of blue or green, flutter between the wings of their lids with recognition and pleasure, the rest of her body a motionless lump, the blanket like crunchy, hard armor over a segmented abdomen. Fixated on the television, she gestures, with her left hand, for me to come closer. I inch to her, just barely, the familiar stench of cigarettes coalescing cloudlike around me. “Did you take money from the safe?” she asks me, blankly but accusatorily. In her bedroom, under her bed, filled with cash and gold and guns: family heirlooms. I respond that I didn’t. She squeezes her eyes, though I’m not sure whether that’s in response to me or the reporter on the screen, who has just told us that hordes of African killer bees have invaded the West Coast and are wreaking havoc on family farms, thanks to China and the inaction of certain high-profile, leftist governors. Her frazzled hair a nest. She releases me. My chest tightens. I make my way out, listening to the rustle of the dog as it traverses her stomach. 

Leaning against the gray stone of the building, pushing my head back, I place the cigarette in my mouth, shielding the glowing end of it from the wind, which rushes against my hand, biting it. It’s not even that cold, according to my phone, but the wind makes it pretty unbearable. A predator, ripping off your covers and grabbing at your body. It beats against the fire escape, the metal scraped like the frantic cries of a child or a cat, tossed out hopelessly into the empty darkness. I could quit smoking anytime I wanted. I don’t even like it, I feel no urge to do it: once I like it, then I’ll stop. 

My phone is already in my hand when it starts ringing, vibrating, buzzing, something wild struggling to escape. I answer. Mike. He asks whether I’m coming to the party. I shrug to no one. Maybe, I say, sort of coyly, wanting him to beg me. Come man, it’ll be a good time, he assures me. Lots of girls will be there—this is a very big selling point; you can hear it in his voice. Okay, I relent, taking a drag of my cigarette, feeling the urge to cough. I imagine, despite myself, going there and really hitting it off with someone, someone who can motivate me enough to get my life together. I ask how he’s getting there. Riding his bike. I roll my eyes. Imagining him out there, fighting the wind on the two wheels, nearly capsizing with every gust, nearly invisible in the darkness, swept over into the underside of a passing truck. 

I tell him I’ll meet him there; I’m taking the train. He asks if I have any money, whether I can buy any alcohol. I hesitate for a second. Sure, I say. I have some cash. I can go get it. He laughs, like what I’ve said is very funny, a real good joke. Sounds good. The beep jolting in my ear. Mike and I are old friends. This is a problem: old friends are hard to get rid of. Even when you constantly piss each other off, even when you ask too much of each other, you default to toleration. You become so close you’re almost family, and that just means you see and exhibit your worst behavior to each other. Lately, I’ve found him especially obnoxious. He’s been seeing this girl he doesn’t even like; technically, they’re broken up, but they’re still fucking. They get high, they bicker, they fuck, that’s it, that’s all they have in common. And I guess they’re bound together by the fact that he has a stable job and she’s months behind on rent. In some ways, they both draw each other in, illusory lights for the pale and confused, sure to die inside at any second, pulverized by a newspaper into that weird dust moths are made of.  

I toss the cigarette, its paper curling up on the sidewalk like a cooked worm, the smoke its dispersed moan, and head back upstairs. This wind is pissing me off. The staircase reeks of rotting orange rind, as usual, a hint of chemical to it; I wrinkle my nose at the artificiality, the flavor injected into some toxic cleaning product, no doubt. Next to the door on the third floor—our floor—there’s a crack stuffed with several old rags, some wet and dripping, probably blocking a broken pipe from spilling out into the stairs, red blood cells clotting against the inside of an open wound. On the other side of the door, a few black folding chairs, several of them in bad shape, probably unsafe to sit on, unused and ignored for who knows how long; I remember them being there when I left for college, already five years ago. I close the door to my bedroom, the rustling of the television still going—the reporting now concerns a horde of rabid environmental activists who have chained themselves to trees to protest the construction of a superhighway over a nature reserve. Glancing back again at the closed door, I slide open my dresser drawer, stuffing my hand in and extracting a small bag, which I shove into my left pocket quickly, the paper bills rustling like leaves. 

I lean back, figuring I have a few minutes, open an incognito tab. I’m already hard before I’ve even typed in the delirious porn stock phrases. One video to the next video, to the next video, and so on. They all seem so promising at first, like they might just show you that vague perfection that’s in your head, that fantasy you only have vague traces of but are convinced you’d recognize if it only appeared on the little screen in front of you. You watch the video; it immediately seems unsatisfying, imperfect. You open another tab and go to the next one, the next promising thing, and all the while your cock is screaming to let it stop, to let it cum, but something makes you want this to never end. You pause this video and open another tab and another video. Repeat. When I’ve finished, when little droplets of cum have drizzled onto the sheets with a slight patter, I pull my pants back up, like I’ve exited a fugue state. Probably how those environmental activists will feel when, after they’re pulled away from the trees and arrested, locked in a jail cell for some time, they return to the site of their protests and find that the forest to which they had devoted so much energy and time no longer existed, washed away, the cars passing over it indifferent and forgetting. The look of disgust on that porn star’s face as I finished. Horrible industry. Cum leaking from the head of my penis into my underwear like tears from an eye or like blood from an open wound. 

While I piss, a drum beats in my head. I realize the time. I need to get out, need to be in the midst of people. I say goodbye to my mother, pulling up my pants, a hum of warm excitement and cold nerves buzzing through my body, the dog running towards me as I leave, its little legs struggling rapidly in hot pursuit. It looks like some ferocious wind is pushing the excited animal towards me, its legs doing the maximum to prevent its entire body from being swept up, from careening over onto itself, upturned like a tumbleweed. The train pulsates to my head, as I listen to its screeching approach, as I sit inside and feel the wheels churning and rotating under the soles of my feet, in my chest, hammering harsher and harsher, then decelerating for the next stop, the city smeared in the window. Cars, a few pedestrians bold enough to brave the windy streets, a lone man on a flimsy bike struggling to stay upright against the whipping, the black asphalt twinkling underneath his bundled-bloated body like a dim screen, his left foot dangling unhealthily, his back hunched in a young old way, the posture suggesting perversion or lewdness. 

Right as I step off the train, Mike calls me, his voice clipped and encircled by bursts of static as he apologizes for being outside, and he lists off the alcohol I should buy. Obediently, I step into a convenience store and get what he’s told me to, the rotund clerk’s bulging eyes scanning me, his arms crossed in front of him, pressed into the flesh of his upper abdomen. A mangy brown cat, its fur ungroomed and standing up, as if pushed back, perpetually rotates its head to follow the fruit flies that spiral lazily about. I pull the little pouch from my back pocket, the man emitting a slight rustle of displeasure when I hand him a one-hundred-dollar bill and a sheepish look. Back on the street, a few motorcycles roar by, buzzing; I instinctively clasp my hand over my ear, swatting in vain at the noise. 

I get to the front door and place my plastic bag of alcohol on the pavement, its handles flickering in anger, upright, clear wings off flies. I send Mike a few texts, asking where he is, whether he can come let me in, and I wait there, looking for signs of life in the windows above me. The few passersby glance at me with beady eyes, especially this one woman, an old hag with a cloth covering her head, only the long flesh of her nose visible to me, her back stooped and thin, her grey dress flapping about madly and panicked.  

Finally, he appears on the steps, advancing on, grinning at, me, his hair in a whirl. How long have I been there. I shrug and say it’s only been a few minutes, and he laughs and says he would have been there sooner, but the wind slowed him down, and there were even a few bursts of rain that swooped in, forcing him to seek refuge in convenience stores and bus stations, vanishing as quickly as they’d come. I shrug and wave it off, already feeling slightly embarrassed about this party, wishing I’d stayed home, wishing I’d spent the money on something besides alcohol. 

We exchange some words as we make our way up the stairs. No, he shouldn’t worry about it, I have plenty of money. He doesn’t press further, but I assume he understands where it came from: for all his idiot life choices, he’s not stupid. When am I going to get a job? Not sure, depends on when something catches my eye. The same thing I told my mother the day before when she asked. He tells me he’s fed up with Adriana. But he won’t end things because he still gets to hate-fuck her. I mumble something about how that doesn’t seem very healthy, nor does it seem like he’s truly fed up, but we both know it’ll never really make it from my mouth to the depths of his mind, not in a million years. 

The sound of music nudges, whining, against us as we climb towards the apartment, pulsating bass and percussion, familiar but forgettable, some vaguely house-influenced beat churned out by fifty-plus producers and thousands and thousands of dollars of corporate money, the same as hundreds more hits like it, but somehow entirely its own. When the door opens, we are greeted by a gust of welcoming shouts and exhalations, coalescing with the overpowering sweet burn of alcohol, assaulting my eyes and my nose like a tornado of sand, making me gag until I’ve shoved enough of it down my throat to make me forget it’s even there, a fish habituating himself to air. I place my own bag of alcohol on a counter, a magnet to which hands flock, flapping, fishing out their own individual cans, a sweet floral nectar. Mike, greeting some of the other men here with widened arms and jubilant expressions, gestures to me and introduces me. They all nod, politely indifferent. One of them, a short guy wearing a headband with “happy birthday” sticking up out of it on two springs like a pair of antennas, informs me that his name is Leonard and that it isn’t, in fact, his birthday, or anyone’s here as far as he knows, as he hands me a solo cup filled with some combination of vodka, rum, orange juice, and Sprite. The surface of the shotgun cocktail shimmers and shakes as it settles into my hand, merchant ships thrown here and there by the roaring waves, the boxes full of cheap toys made in Chinese or Thai factories ripped from the decks and scattered into the calcified ocean’s acidic swirls of foam and carbonation. I take a few gulps of this shipwreck-filled seawater, trying to integrate myself into the conversation. One of them, a tall, big-shouldered guy with drops of sweat accumulated throughout the surface of his skin, is talking excitedly about a nature documentary he watched the other day while he was “stoned out of his mind”, in which a pack of leopards tore the skin off an antelope’s leg, then off its other leg, the antelope running as pieces of it were ripped off one by one, until finally it couldn’t go any further and simply fell over.  

The conversation is interrupted by the shriek of some girl across the living room, of laughter. A cloud of feathers has gathered underneath her, coating the wooden floor, and I see a small girl, with a droopy face and a revealing black crop top, standing over her, on the futon, reaching into the pillow and throwing out handfuls of feathers one by one, quickly destroying it to the amused shrieks of the surrounding women, who all clutch White Claws in their talons and flail around like their arms are made of fabric and stuffing. As I scan over them, one girl, with bleach blonde hair and circular plastic glasses that make her eyes look a little too big, makes me pause for a second. Her face reminds me of someone, but I don’t know who. I move away from the group of men, still talking, with blood on their tongues, about the antelope, about how “absolutely brutal” leopards can be, into a corner of the living room. There, with no one to distract me, I force more and more of the cup’s contents past my lips and down my throat. When the cup reaches the bottom, when all that’s left is straight, undrinkable alcohol, I fill it again. I watch the fevered atmosphere around me, the frenzied, frantic shouts and gestures, the gyrating drunkards swarming the living room and the deck outside, their talk an indistinct buzz.   

I find myself talking to some yuppie who works for a consulting firm that’s “helping with” the bankruptcy of Puerto Rico. He probably makes more money in a month than I’ll ever make in my whole life. I barely talk, he just keeps going and going. I am released and then am swept into talking with another consultant, for a PR firm, who tells me, shamelessly, that he has mostly worked for tobacco companies, especially concerning the recent move to ban menthol cigarettes. In my intoxicated state, I might allude to this being an immoral job; but I see green satisfaction glinting in his eyes, as if this only excites him. 

More drinks are pushed around, everyone growing excited to fill their cups again or ingest more shots. A chubby girl, with an extremely tight crop top, a pushed-out stomach, and too-tight black pants, her body different segments fit together by the terrors of evolution, pulls out a bottle of some “limited edition” vodka, “Evergreen Mint Delight” flavored, which we shove back down our throats and pretend isn’t as unpleasant and painful as every other type of vodka. The pungent smell of marijuana, reefer, weed, grass hits me as well, accompanied by the familiar bubbling, the snap of a lighter.  

I find myself now faced with that blonde girl, the one with that familiar face, I know I’ve seen it, on someone else maybe. I put my hand on the little side table next to me for balance, so weak that it seems like it might snap and bend, and I almost knock over a pot holding an anemic succulent, barely preventing it from shattering all over the floor, laughing the whole time. I’m talking, but I have no idea what I’m saying. Something sarcastic, though I’m not quite sure what the joke is, about how Democratic legislation to fund more electric car batteries is surely going to save us all. My words are vapor, evaporating straight out of me, hanging in the air like a fog, a haze of my own making, a cloud that I can’t understand except in the broadest of terms, blocking out the sky, an omen. It surges back into me, rushing down my throat and into my lungs, whipping sudden chunks of hail at me, threatening to push me, knock me off my feet, and I watch her face slowly turn more and more annoyed, until she finally walks away, suddenly, ending the conversation, and I’m not sure what I’ve said, only that it can’t have been good. 

I’m falling into the kitchen, where I see Mike, talking and laughing with several people. He gives me water, tells me that it seems like I was “hitting it off” with that girl, and he says it so confidently that I believe him for a second. My back scrapes the cool side of the refrigerator, and I nod, nod, nod. He hands me a new, freshly filled cup of water, which I lap up with gratitude, surprisingly good after all that alcohol. He’s talking, I’m nodding, but my eye has been caught by that girl, now across the room, who I watch playfully hitting, slapping, the shoulder of some big-shouldered guy wearing a tight t-shirt, and I imagine him coming over to hit me, to punch me in the face, to shove me against the cool white tile, like I’ve done something wrong. Guilt burns over me, over I don’t know what.  

Mike pulls the cup out of my hand and hands me another one, with more water, which I set about drinking again, imagining that I must look like anyone of the other guys jammed into this kitchen, like I’m a part of their conversation about, what is this, the best flavor of vape on the market today. Mike, meanwhile, is laughing, with two of his other friends, all standing equidistant from each other, three points forming a triangle, about a total “horse girl” one of them used to sleep with in college who, would you believe it, genuinely wanted to have sex with horses? 

One peels away from the group, nudges me away from the fridge and boisterously opens it up, the rest looking on, split between nervous glances towards the hosts and laughter to goad him on. He rummages through for a second, grabbing and showing off random food items, like a pet showing its owner its toys, to great amusement from the others. He seizes a cluster of grapes and starts handing them out to some of us, one of which I take and start eating, dumbfounded at their sweetness. 

And just as he closes the fridge and returns to the swarm, one of the hosts storms over and begins berating us for taking her food, her eyes settling most of all on me, who, I realize, is holding the largest cluster by far. Noticing this, she starts to say that she doesn’t even know who I am, and at this point Mike jumps in and starts talking, rapidly, about how I’m his good friend, how I’m very drunk, how my father just died about four months ago, how my mother’s a total bitch, so it’s been really tough on me. The girl doesn’t seem convinced, and I can tell that it’s only because she likes Mike so much that she eventually backs down, shooting me strained looks of measurement: I keep eating the grapes. Mike, trying to smooth it over, asks her if she wants some ketamine, a typical Mike gesture of generosity. She raises an eyebrow, asking how much he can spare, and then she leads him over to a group of her friends, a few of whom follow them into one of the bedrooms, closing the door. 

  I see the blonde girl starting towards the door, grabbing her coat, along with several other women. Feathers have coated the floor near the door, jumping up as they maneuver and dig their hands through the pile of sheen coats to find their own, which they pull up, holding out in front of them like dead chickens hanging from their necks, glistening in a rainy Chinatown storefront. I hurly myself towards them, towards the semidarkness, the warm fluorescence of cheap holiday lights and Ikea lamps. She watches me approach sideways, her eyes of prey. My body is a shambling puddle, a machine coming apart at the seams. I’m talking, but I don’t know what I’m saying; words are blowing out of me, the feathers at our feet swirl up, gusted by the open door, her words mouthing the phrase, “I don’t like you” to me, her eyes narrowed and sharp, her face filled with disgust that flashes in my mind, like I’ve seen it before, it’s so familiar, and then she’s gone, the door is shut, the feathers settle back down, a few of them still clinging to the ends of my pants, their feet pounding against the stairs, one of them wondering whether it’s raining outside, whether it’s gotten colder, whether it’s still as windy as it was before.  

I swing my body around, coming face-to-face with the pot on the little side table, almost bumping into it again, my face red with shame, like I’ve done something truly evil. It’s quiet, I realize; there’s a vague hush that’s spread over, and I realize people are being drawn to the shut bathroom door. A few girls at the front are knocking persistently, the cheap wooden thuds intermingling with the haze of weed and the intoxicated general mumbling. Mike is standing sheepishly to one side; we make eye contact for a second, and he gestures to the bag in his left hand, dangling like a rag, before he shoves it into his left pocket, like he doesn’t want me to see it after all. 

I ask the larger girl, with the black crop top and the pimples, what’s going on. I really need to piss, I explain, as if trying to garner sympathy. One of the hosts did too much ketamine, and she started k-holing and then locked herself in the bathroom. “That asshole,” she says, gesturing towards Mike, “gave her way too much.” Her face is indignant, and I feel a swell of offense rise up in me on his behalf, but I keep my mouth shut. The pimpled girl sighs and walks over to the couch, which squeaks slightly as she collapses onto it, where she cocoons herself in a blanket, her eyes staring off at the blank TV, pretending that there’s something of great interest being shown on it.  

We wait, like construction workers wait for a siege of protesters to end, for the girl to be cajoled out. The urge to piss assaults me with such ferocity that I wonder how I went so long without noticing, without even thinking about it, and I can feel the warmth pressing against my bladder’s walls, the castle walls imminently threatened with a breach by Crusaders. Finally, she’s lured out, her friends clinging to her the second she opens the door, like she might change her mind and run back in. The general mood has been killed now, and people begin to disperse, the wreckage revealing itself. I hurry into the vacated bathroom, shutting the door, the shame of meeting that girl overwhelming me. As I piss it feels like I need to throw up. My head, which before was so light, feels heavy, brought back down to Earth, stripped of its wings and abandoned to gravity, cut down and burned and paved over, ripped from reality into a few bullet-points completely deprived of detail and context. 

When I’m done pissing, I turn and sit on the toilet, the room spinning. I reach down into my back pocket, formless next to my ankles, and fish around for the bag of cash. I open it up, looking at all the hundreds of dollars in there. Hundreds of dollars of pension money. Hundreds of dollars to support my meager spending habits. Hundreds of dollars to blow on drugs and alcohol for other people in a bid to get them to like me. The bills’ rough paper suddenly unnerves me, spiked cactus skin, rough tree bark, crunching beetle shell, and I throw them down after my piss into the toilet, green on green, the buzzing swarm through the door, swirling in the whirlpool, insignificant, the guilt in my stomach rising up and constituting itself in an awful bile that hurries from my throat through the gaps in my teeth and down onto the tile. And I think, how alike we are, that girl locked in here with the ketamine and me, both ashamed. I think about how alike we are as I destroy the bathroom with my vomit and my mother’s cash and I wonder if I’m ever going to enjoy smoking cigarettes.  

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Nick B. Ponzo is a PhD student in Italian Studies at a university in the Northeast US. This is his first publication.