By Sarah Oechsle
So, I have this thing.
A hot ball of plum-colored slime. It lives in a cage, in a box, on a shelf in my closet, but it still screams late at night. Other times, I can feel it sagging off my brain stem, compelling me to fulfill my body’s deepest—no—only desire.
To fuck losers.
See, I’m married to a winner. When I met Jack, he was a line cook at Texas Roadhouse, and we were soulmates. But he changed. It’s happened with every boyfriend. The death metal front man I dated for a year until SQUSSY’s album went double platinum. Then the divorced dad, packing an extra 40 pounds and a drinking problem. Two years later he was in Duke Med. It’s not always my doing. The geriatric biker I hooked up with in college told me he was in love with me after one night. Next day, clipped by an Amazon truck. $18 million in the settlement. Now he lives in Boca Raton and plays golf every day.
I thought Jack would be different. He wasn’t just a loser; he was a loser and proud. He loved his shitty walk up studio. His crumb-covered futon. The weekends he would barely get off his Xbox. But after that first promotion, they just kept coming. New jobs and big wins. Great suits, better cars. Now, he works in one of those industries where you mention what you do at parties and everybody knows the Mercedes S-Class parked up the street is yours.
But I loved him in spite of it all. For him, I thought I could push that part of myself down. Put it in a cage, put the cage in a box, and put that box on a shelf in the back of my closet. There’s something scrawled on it in a language I pretend I can’t read. And it worked, for a while, until one Christmas morning when I walked out to my own Mercedes in the driveway, big red bow on the hood.
“I just wanted to show you how important you are to me,” he’d said as I stared, slack-jawed, at my car commercial come to life. “I couldn’t have gotten here without you.”
That thing in the cage has been screaming ever since.
So I taught myself to shape shift. If I couldn’t fuck losers, somebody else would have to. Used to be I could only manage it on the full moon, but now I can just picture the moon and find my body changing, twisting, shrinking. I can change the color of my hair, the shape of my nose. I can be a milf or jailbait depending on the vibe. Most women can shape shift, actually, if they picture the moon hard enough.
So now, when that thing starts throttling the bars of its cage, I can slide off the sheets to it. Take it in my teeth and choke it down. My Benz starts up clean and quiet. I don’t want to wake Jack. I doubt he’d even recognize me. Tonight, I’ll be Sunday. 24, blonde. I change in the car behind Wendy’s. It used to hurt every time, now it only hurts when I make myself smaller. Watch the flash of new, blue eyes in the rear view, almost purple in the light of Wendy’s little braids. I go red instead of blonde, to match.
The best place to find a loser is a bar with one pool table. It’s here I see him, baptized in the parking lot’s blue glow and ripping a line off the boot of his car. He looks like he used to play football. I wait ten minutes then follow him inside, where he spots me as he’s bent over the faded felt. His shirt’s riding up and I glimpse the pale, doughy flesh it probably used to hide. His hair’s gotten too long. It looks oily to the touch. He whiffs the shot and I walk straight up to him. Cut to the chase.
“Want to buy me a drink?”
He gives me a dumbfounded look. Glances around. He thinks it’s a con. A bit. But nobody’s laughing. “Really?”
“Yeah, I need a margarita.”
That seems to snap him into it. “Yeah. Definitely. Let’s get you a marg.”
The drink is sickly sweet, the way dive bars always make them. Drinking it makes me feel a little gross. A little sick, in a good way, like sniffing the crotch of my leggings after a run. I sip off the half-salted rim and ask him, “So what do you do?”
He tells the truth. “Um, I work for a moving company.”
“That’s so hot. You must be really strong.”
He actually blushes, fat cheeks reddening under the Miller Time sign. I can see him trying to flex. It’s a rush I haven’t gotten at home in a long time: that “What is she doing with me?” feeling. A guy like this—broke, out of shape, a little past his prime and well aware of it. I bite my lip.
“If you could buy anything in the world right now, what would you want?”
He opens his mouth and closes it again twice before he answers. “A new car. A nice car. Like that Beamer in the parking lot.”
I give it to him in the bathroom. I can tell he hasn’t done this in a while, and the out-of-breath way he gets when he’s inside me nearly gets me there. He’s hard and soft, dry and wet. Strong, yes, but way out of his depth. Fucking him makes me feel a little sick, in a good way. Like a dive bar margarita. And more than that, it makes me feel like God.
He finishes in 44 seconds. Apologizes, and I feel it from my pussy too my brain stem. I’ve got to get back. In a year he could be in the best shape of his life. Two more and his startup would IPO. Plus, I really have to get changed.
The moon is high when I claw back into myself, sated again. I spit the thing out and grip it in my fist. Stare at it for a long moment and feel a twist of something close to grief. Then I stuff it back in the cage, the box, the shelf where it screams.
* * *
Sarah Oechsle is a writer living in Asheville, North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Weird Lit, After Happy Hour, and Thirteen Podcast, among others.