Departure by Melanie Cotter

New Year's Eve began as a plot driven story and ended with a boy climaxing. No one knows why he had to climax this night, but people just assume that sort of thing happened on New Year's Eve. "So I like sex" he said, "big deal." New Year's Eve was the first time he ever had wiggled about shamelessly on top of a girl, who lay in the most awkward position possible. She must have been doing it for the first time too, but the boy couldn't tell that just by looking at her. She didn't have any hair between her legs and he assumed that meant she was an experienced and thriving sexual contraption. He caught his dad watching porn once and thought that's how sex would be. Pants would part and bodies would slide into each other.
    Later in life, when he was biologically qualified as a man, he lay nude in bed at night and enjoyed the way his genitals fell onto his leg. Like a sausage or a hot dog for people who can't afford sausage. Once in a while he would cut up hot dogs and put them into his afternoon Spaghetti O's. Numerous phallic dogs floating in O's made him happy every now and then. The morning newspaper left ink on his fingers. He would shake the large pages before he got to the obituary section just incase they were wet. How hot off the press were newspapers anyway? Coffee made him want to bounce about like free falling items that have the ability to bounce so he always had hot chocolate with his newspaper instead. He would heat it in a pot because microwaves were micro and he wasn't sure what that meant. No matter, the homemade stuff was so good. He often thought about putting peanuts in it so it could be the liquid equivalent of Peanut M&Ms, which he frequently adored chewing.
    His roommate was a professional eccentric, which meant he was queer and often wore a yellow tie. His roommate would say "I met quota today," which translated into the woman from a different department at work had permitted him to squeeze her breast as if he were testing a melon for its quality. Next week it would be a woman from the bank he kept his $7.50, and the week after it would be the housekeeper of his ex-wife. It was impossible to determine who he would grasp next. He had met quota, and that was all that mattered in a fast paced world. Business as usual.
    The man did not mind the eccentric roommate. Sometimes the roommate would bring women home, and the man would go to his room and pull out a small red notebook. This is where he would describe the women as best he could, so he could later recall her while masturbating. The roommate knew this. One time he brought home a woman with bleach blonde hair because he knew the man liked that. He smacked her ass outside the man's door, and she bounced away. Perhaps she had coffee earlier. Perhaps she had sensitive receptors in her ass that made her gallop like a horse.
    "Use that as a fancy little, sexy little entrée to your story tonight," the roommate said and winked like a fiend or a man who was dead. The man wrote in his red notebook "May 5th: Roommate is rat bastard." And thank God he wrote that, because he wanted to hang himself. The man put on his shoes and left the apartment. It was dark like black outside, but he wanted to walk anyway. He was a strange sight on the street because he was always looking down while trudging along. He said it was because he was looking for money.
    The Blue Spruce was a bar that the man often went to. It didn't smell like spruce, but there was a blue light hanging behind the bar for effect. The man could smoke there if he wanted to, but he didn't like cigarettes. He liked places that allowed all the rights of the constitution to be exercised. He wondered if Jesus ever smoked anything illegal. He must have; he wore sandals in all the pictures the man had ever seen.
    A waitress approached the man as if she wanted something. "Howya doin' and what do you want?" she asked.
    "Never better, best day of my life," the man replied, "and I want fluids."
    The waitress walked away like she didn't want anything anymore and the man began to ponder. What the hell did howya mean? It must have been foreign. His family had small traces of French in their blood, but he didn't care. The French had better food and wine, but they were also cheese eating surrender monkeys as far as he was concerned.
    The waitress brought him a mug with a brown fluid substance in it. He drank a tentative sip and decided he didn't like it. It tasted wet. Girls were supposed to get wet too. He read that in a dirty magazine that housewives buy while in line at the super market. One time in high school the man tried to make it with a girl, but he had trouble controlling his genitals. When the girl asked if he was going to have sex with her, he calmly replied "I don't know how to touch you, but I'm working on it." She let him touch her small round nipples for a little while before she grew bored and exited the car. That was the day he decided that love was like the perfect dress worn by a prostitute, made of some girly fabric that swished just right and made a woman's breasts look delicious. It just didn't fit on a hooker. But the man wasn't looking for a perfect dress. He wanted the kind of dress he could hang over the bathroom door after a party. He wanted the kind of dress that zipped up from the side.
    The man walked home. The woman was no longer there, but the roommate sat at the kitchen table eating a mango. He was fully dressed in his usual attire. The man wondered if he even bothered to take off his clothes while he was with the woman, or if he merely pulled down his zipper. The mango looked queer when he held it up to his lips. It dripped on his tongue and the man knew the blonde woman had climaxed.
    "Didn't you wonder where I was?" the man asked.
    "What do I look like, your fucking mother?"
    "You do in that tie." The man went into his room and parted with his pants.

About the author:
Melanie Cotter is a graduate assistant at Central Michigan University who is currently teaching ENG 101. An excerpt from her creative writing thesis has appeared in Temenos. She gives credit to Matt Roberson for his drive to educate others about modern fiction and to Nick Page for all of his support.