Best Debut Short Stories 2020 by Yuka Igarashi

Author:Yuka Igarashi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646220236
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2020-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

IT WAS AN old one-story motel—a wraparound building with white plastic chairs outside, doors that opened right onto the parking lot. A man was smoking a cigarette outside his room, wearing sweatpants tucked into snow boots. In the strip mall across the parking lot, I bought two bottles of red wine and Chinese takeout. I sat on the edge of the bed and ate out of the cartons. Tess slept in the hotel crib. There was a TV on the dresser and a mirror on the bathroom door that faced the bed. Looked as if there were fingerprints on it, like maybe somebody had fucked against it, or else someone had touched her mirror self with greasy hands, once. Alice took a shower and then sat down with me. She put her head in her hands and the vertebrae in her neck were sharp knobs. I thought of the box of bones I’d left buried beneath the snow. Alice toyed with a fortune cookie. She rolled the paper between her fingers and I remembered her hand over Tess’s face in the car.

“The doctor gave me something,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “He gave me the pamphlets, too, Will.”

“Maybe when we’re back in Milwaukee we should see about getting you some help.”

It wasn’t what I’d wanted to say.

“You think I’m crazy,” she whispered.

“No, baby, no.”

“Of course you do.”

She pushed me back on the bed and her towel fell away. She took off all my clothes and kissed me so her tongue touched my tonsils.

“This is it, right?”

I wanted to say no, no, it’s not, but it would have been a lie and when I smelled the place behind her ear I was so hard I said nothing at all. It had been months. She worked her tongue all the way down my chest and stomach and when she took my dick in her mouth, I wanted badly to be inside her or at least to touch her or smell her, but she stayed down there with her hips over my knees and one hand on my balls until I almost came, and then she bit down on me and I cried out and flipped her onto her back. I drove myself down into her throat, and I knew she couldn’t breathe, and I put my hand on her neck and felt myself there, and when I came she reached up and put her fingers in my mouth and pulled me down to her, and I kissed her so I tasted myself, and I licked her lips for her. I tried to touch her, to open her legs gently, but she swatted me away and closed her eyes. I fell asleep fast.

I woke to a cry that did not belong to Tess. The door to the bathroom was open just a crack, and a slice of harsh fluorescence shone onto the bed and my body. I got up and watched Alice through the crack, one leg up on the sink, her back curved, her feet arched, one hand between her legs.

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