apartment: A short story

Susannah Breslin

1996

He was down on the rug with the dog and he had started with the first one holding it between his fingers and then moving it around. “Boobs, boobs,” he said under his breath and moved down to the next one on the dog’s stomach. They were nice. His mother was in the doorway watching him and he was on the next one and it came out of his mouth again. “Boobs” saying how it felt in his hand. It was like the time he had touched the babysitter’s breasts when his father had given him money to kiss her in front of the camera. Once, he had tried to put his tongue in her mouth but she had gotten really mad and told him not to do it again not EVER. Her face had been a tight ball.

Now his girlfriend was on all fours in front of him and he was fucking her. He had his hand pushing down on the small part of her back so his dick was hitting her harder and better and higher up. “Boobs” it had come out of his mouth and she was trying to turn around toward him and saying “Huh?” He thought about how he could take his dick out of her and just ram it up her ass and she wouldn’t be able to do much but maybe take in a lot of breath real quick. He could tell her it was an accident. His dick had slipped. He opened his eyes and pretended he was fucking the old babysitter. He opened his eyes and the girlfriend was still there with her butt bopping forward every time he went up into her. His dick was getting limp.

He lay down on the bed and his dick got hard again so that it was up on his stomach. His girlfriend was still on her hands and knees with her butt in the air and her face in the pillow turned away from him. It looked like she was waiting for him. He got back up behind her and his dick started to get limp again. It was really pissing him off. He lay down and it was hard again. He got back up really fast and tried to get in her before it had a chance to realize what he was doing. It shrank faster and when he pushed it up to her quick it crumpled back on him.

“I’m going to make dinner,” she said to him lying on her back. She appeared to be addressing the ceiling but she was probably telling this to him. “I could help you,” he said. He was lying on his stomach, looking at the side of her face that was closest to him. He watched her heart moving her left breast up and down. She had small tits and he thought about raising his left arm up and letting his hand fall down onto her tit and seeing if he could flatten it all the way. It would make a slappy meat sound. He thought that after she left she would jack off at home. If he put his hand up and further back down towards the wall and let it fall it would land on her face. That would make a harder hitting sound. Her mouth would get all mashed up against her teeth but he wouldn’t be able to see that with his hand in the way.

She got up and put on a t-shirt and boxers from his drawer. She went to the refrigerator and began taking things out that he couldn’t identify because they were all in bags or containers. She took something out of a bag and started messing with it. He found his underwear in the sheets at the bottom of the bed and put them on and went into the kitchen and stood next to her. The food had been taken out of the bags and she had opened the containers. She had put a big knife out onto the counter. He looked at it. He had one hand in his shorts cupping his balls with his palm.

He took his girlfriend’s hand away from the food and put it on the counter and started moving the knife with the point down in between her fingers doing Mumbly Peg. The point was hitting the counter between her spread out fingers and making a banging noise. He did it faster. She leaned towards him and screamed loud in his ear high and short so he stopped and she went back to the food. He thought he saw her roll her eyes out the window to the people in the apartment on the other side of the street. They were standing together behind the blinds lined up and looking out so you couldn’t see them except for their eyes. There were two pairs of eyes up high and two down low that were the kids looking out. She picked up a cucumber and began peeling into the sink.

He left her moving stuff around in the kitchen and went into the bathroom. He pulled his dick out of his underwear and stood back against the wall to see if he could pee into the toilet from that far. It made a loud noise and splashed up on the seat some. If she had to go to the bathroom she would either sit in the wet pee if she went soon or put her butt onto the dried-up pee on the seat if she did it later. One time he had gotten up in the middle of the night at her house still drunk from the bar they had been to. He couldn’t find her bathroom in the dark so he went back into the corner between the bookcase and the wall. He leaned with his head on a shelf and peed onto her rug until he couldn’t go anymore. She hadn’t said anything about it yet and he had done it about two months ago.

He saw that the garbage can in the bathroom was overflowing. There were towels and clothes on the floor. He took the wastebasket from the bathroom and went out the back door and down the stairs to the back alley. Dumping the trash into the big can he watched as a bunch of little white bundles fell in. There were about four carefully wrapped packages going from the basket into the bigger container. She had been having her period until a few days ago and he knew that what was in them had to do with that. He put the lid back on the can and checked to see if anyone had been watching. It was possible that the slats of the blinds across the street had been spread apart from people looking out. He wasn’t sure. He thought he had seen the curtains in the lower apartment moving around but that could have been from the wind. Or maybe someone had fallen down just then and had grabbed at the edges of the drapes to catch themselves but had missed and hit their head into the edge of the window on the way down to the floor. He couldn’t tell.

When he got back up into the apartment the girlfriend had one pot and one pan boiling on the stove and she had finished making the salad. “I am making soup,” she told him. She didn’t say what was in the pan but he guessed it was meat. She put her hands palm down out over the stove as if she was keeping it down with her hands. She turned and walked back into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. The door stuck so she had to close it again and slam it hard to wedge it closed. Standing in the kitchen next to the stove he could feel the heat coming off onto his stomach. He was still in his underwear and he realized that he had gone and taken the trash out in only his shorts.

He picked the lid up off the soup and looked inside. It was thick and yellowish with pieces of vegetable in it. He leaned over to the sink from where he was standing and got the container of liquid detergent that was there. He turned it upside down over the pot and poured some of it in. There was a white spot that was the detergent in the middle of the soup so he used a spoon to stir it in. The color of the soup was now a lighter yellow. He put the lid back on and sat down at the table until the girlfriend came out and put the salad and a hamburger on the plate in front of him. She set a bowl of soup next to the big plate with the vegetable and meat but the girlfriend did not give herself any soup. He began eating the salad and hamburger and spoons of the soup in turns one after the other. The soup tasted a little soapy so he held the other food in his mouth and ate it all together with his nose plugged and then it tasted better.

When they had eaten everything she said, “I think I better go.” “I think you better go,” he told her. She had put all her clothes on and was ready to leave so he walked with her to the door. He opened it for her and she kissed him goodbye on the mouth. He could see that the eye of the man in the apartment across the hall was pressed up against the glass of his peephole. The eye was wide open and bulging out the hole so it made a bump on the door. When the girlfriend walked out the door he closed it on her so that she was caught between the door and the frame around it. Her arm below the elbow was sticking out into the apartment so the door did not entirely shut. Her fingers were moving around and he could now see her in the hall through his own peephole and she was undoing her pants with her other hand. He saw she was going to masturbate in the hall if she wasn’t able to get home soon. Her one hand went into her pants while the other one opened and closed trying to get out from in the door.

If the dog had been there he could yell for it to sic and it would jump up and hang by its teeth from her arm. He leaned towards her hand where it was feeling up and down the side of the door for the doorknob. He bit the forearm near the wrist and the hand turned towards him and tried to grab at his face but it couldn’t maneuver much between the door and the wall. What was he going to do? It kept looking for ways to get out and he could hear the eye of the man across the hall breathing deep and hard. He knew the big knife was in the kitchen and he suddenly tried to run for it and get back in time before the hand knew he was gone. He ran through the apartment and made a small u-turn in the kitchen to pick up the knife without even stopping. He ran faster in his underwear it seemed. But back at the door the hand was gone and had even closed the door shut carefully and quietly behind it. At the window over the sink he could see her walking away and he threw the knife out the window at her. It fell down into the bushes underneath him.

This short story was originally published in Chick Lit 2: No Chick Vics in October 1996.