Everywhere Larry looks he sees cunt, the dream of it, the salty murmur of satisfaction. It has become overwhelming with its silver-pink purse unveiled at every glance, traipsing from every corner. Unconsumed by the pixeled pudendum perused before his work's net moratorium, he views it on billboards, in faces, over garments, and beside coat racks in the employee lounge.
    In his eyes, the seething expanse of hairy pearls undulates, and so much unexpected unmentionable is enough to drive a sane man mad. Even spied in velvet, it is dangerous, especially in browner shades. Larry is possessed by Aphrodite's pink flower--the bloom peeking from innocuously rose cashmere sweaters, the balding skin of a woman's toy poodle, or the foam-dripping snatch of a cocoa man's mustache. Cunt hides in the fur trim of a commuter's jacket and in sly white clouds over dream-blue labias (or sopping, gray cumulus with white whispy backgrounds)--it calls to him routinely, "Lar-ry, Come out and pl-ay-ay!"
    These visions started after he met Susan, at the work shaming-session, when she told him to stop surfing porn and then he told himself, "You may not plunder sex sites on the job, old boy, so have some control!" Now, he has this control at work, but the organs still emerge from the woodwork, glistening like teenage shroom hallucinations from dribbles of the water cooler or wending free from the paneling of pristine surfaces of butcherblock. House-pets and the ripped edges of cardboard boxes begin to entice him.
    His cunt-quitting has became a farce of unexpected overexposure--like how a smoker increases intake drastically when imagining no more butts, then suckles each microcosmic smoke-stack in a seismic rejection of that thought, nursing each butt like the last oxygen mask available on the end-drop of a turbulent plane. Going down? Larry has. He thinks, "No more cunt? My world is over. I have been trained since birth to pursue this one thing. This will be my devil's dilemma, my heartbreaking loss." The physical reaction pounds in his veins like a hammer, surges like a toothache in an open cavity, while faintly, ever so faintly, despite his volition to quit, he hears his own primal plea: No, nonononono, more, and more and more cunt: You will not keep me from the prize.
    Also, since he ages, this has caused a slowdown in the amount of actual cunt he gets, so he theorizes that this is why this is happening. The more he desires this love blossom, discrete punani, esprit d'pulchritudinous, the more creative his mind becomes to obtain it: Can't get it at work, find it everywhere else. Like poor slops in tenements who dream of rich picnics, or women in Czechoslovakian death camps who wrote recipes for apple fritters in the absence of flour, sugar, and even apples-—he thinks incessantly of his lack, of his desire, onward and upward, viewing more and more cunt in unusual places, but left unsatisfied.
    And the fantasies are getting worse.
    This fixation so consumes him that this morning, he saw cunt in the rough black hairs of an old woman's neck on the subway. Those tiny fibers looked like vulgar obscenities, and as he turned away from the woman's smiling face—having been thoroughly shocked, having never had a thing for fat, old cunts—he sighed. A pity, he decided. She appeared to have considered him. Perhaps he should have looked deeper.
    He rethinks the original debacle weeks ago and recalls the exact, unmanning moment. Though plenty of employees were reprimanded for net-surfing—one girl for writing stories on a free site, one gay boy in chat, and an old lady in a sewing circle—only Larry had been called to the gray-green carpet in Susan's office.
    "Why, Larry?" Susan had asked, "Why on earth would you do this at work? Couldn't you check the sex sites at home? Explain it to me, Larry. I don't understand..." And she was benevolent and patient, her silver brows knit, her face open and compassionate like Mother Theresa, but Larry would not explain it to her because he could hardly explain it to himself. "Because I'm stupid with no self-control," was the first thing that came to his mind. He would not say that. Not to tight-assy Susan of the control-top pantyhose--so he didn't speak.
    He lowered his dark lashes then said, with a touch of contrition, "I promise to stop. I'm really sorry," but at this exact moment the very first improbable cunt appeared in her eyes. It sat on her lashes and spasmed, so he sat with his hands folded over his lap, trying not to draw attention to his groin. He thought of unzipping his trousers and shouting, "Elvis has left the building," as a euphemism for his rising member, (as a child he had always wanted to be Elvis) but looked away from her blinking eyes to the sun-bleached memos pinned to the cork-board above her desk. He stared into her dying cactus and glanced to the industrial clock on her wall. It was only ten a.m., another six excruciating hours.
    "Do you promise to make every effort to stop cruising porn at work?" she asked, but when she blinked again, he saw another butterfly cunt spasm flying free across her peepers, and thought, looking at the picture of an enormous Rottweiller on her desk, about old women he read about in magazines who bought large dogs to service them and applied peanut butter to their crotch: was she one? He couldn't stop staring at the picture, thinking: The Woman and Her Dog. The Woman and Her Pet Dog"—where had he heard that before?
    "Yes, I promise," he said, noticing the photo was centered, neat, almost too perfect. Did that mean something?
    "That's good," she said. "Do you like my dog?" She followed his eyes to the photo then picked it up to dust off with her blouse. "I love my dog." She stared with deep affection at the canine face before turning a terrible look on him and saying, "Seriously Larry, I don't want to have this talk again."
    "We won't."
    "Very good." Her cunty eyes blinked. When she glanced right at him, he wanted to tell her that her gaze was daunting and that the sugar-substitute NutraSweet that she used became formaldehyde at eighty-some degrees, preserving her stomach like a science class frog and that she should stop using it, but when she came closer, ready to shake his hand and blinking all the while, he instead wanted to say something crazier, anything different enough to stop the movement of her dual cunt lids so near him. She offered her hand for a shake but after he grasped it, she pulled back abruptly and coughed, looking at him like she might be assessing his child-molester potential. Then she let loose: "I could understand one downloaded page from the net—but two hundred, Larry? Two hundred in the cache? You'd think we'd have harassment suits sky-high. How could you view such smut on your monitor when anyone could walk by?" The alt-tab stroke was plain on his mind. He shrugged, noticing a run in her nylons, splintering the stretchy sacks all the way up her thighs.
    "You've worked here fifteen years," Susan said, "so I don't want to fire you, but cut out the net cruising. One more instance and I'll have to let you go. We have policies to dole, adjustments to make, people to talk to, and not nearly enough time to waste on internet slacking. Here's your first and last warning, Larry: Cut it out."
    She went on, but he didn't listen. Exactly, he wanted to say, we have work, and work is what we should do, but it bores us, and there's no more insipid business than insurance—so, aren't you going to wake up one day and realize that, Susan? If we worked somewhere more stimulating, even vaguely more interesting--say in a factory or a beauty parlor, even in a morgue--a copy of Sports Illustrated swim models might do just fine, but the reward must equal the punishment, dear employer, and so it must be full nude exposure. The Law of Big Numbers causes a parallel proportion for the Law of Stimulating Need. He said none of this aloud, but muttered instead, "Say no more, Susan. I won't need another warning." "Good." Her cunty eyes blinked severely like an abridged orgasm, so how could he explain anything when she seemed so bereft? Her hair, constricted at her nape in long, coiled twists, reminded him of snakes. In a brown suit, she couldn't be more drab.
    He thought of birds where the female was duller, and she spoke again, but he blotted out her voice and focused on her lower face where her lips had become an undulating vulva, opening and contracting. The sound of her voice was a drone. He thought: By zip-code, driving record, age, and multi-car discounts, they beat the soul from us, Susan, the screens for premium are duller than rusted exactos, and yet, you don't seem to regret the loss of your youth, your joy in this business... But he sighed, giving up his manifesto, as he heard her say, with finality, "...so I want you to put the company first, okay?"
    She frowned, and he had the sinking feeling she would not understand his musings or new rationales--neither that online cunt had saved his sanity while improving his productivity, nor that there was a special lure in emails sent by complete strangers headed up with the ten promising words: You are One Click Away from Pictures of Nude Girls.
    "Cunt!" he wanted to scream. "Salvation!" Invariably, he clicked away from split premiums only to see Hilda and Her Magic Disappearing Cucumber, Sally with Two College Friends, Jill does Two Dogs and Masturbates with a Blender Lid--and returned to work invigorated. But this would be no more. The line had been pissed in the snow, or drizzled in dry, brown sand. Susan was the joy-killer.
    Still, free cunt was nothing to scoff at, he thought, staring at Susan's mouth, so labial, still roaming in his mind over his invisible manhood. Though he never checked the sites from home, how could he explain to her they were necessary at work? How to explain this desperate need for the motherlode of all pink or petal-soft. Could she find a penis so entrancing? He doubted it as she said, splish, splash, spasm, "followed by routine checks. I'll see you in two weeks."
    "Penis in two weeks," he replied, thinking of his own.
    "What?"
    "See you in two weeks." Well, he couldn't blame her for a lack of excitement. A penis was a tool, he thought, functional, good but not the bloom of a poppy, not even vaguely reminiscent of seafood. A penis was not beautiful, nor did it have to be. It did not give birth, or have endless orgasms. He said nothing further, but pondered these things on his way to his desk and went home five minutes early.
    At home, he thought of how his own love life consisted of a blow-up doll named Judy and a few over-viewed pornos. Real girls were too confusing. They wouldn't date him, or they would, but only if he took them nice places and paid for everything then made no advances. When he was younger, he got more sex for less buck, but the bang to buck ratio had deflated just as his stomach had expanded. He'd even gone to dating services, put ads in the paper, done everything possible! He was not picky. He was not adverse to dating women with imperfect figures or adverse ages, but never seemed to meet the right ones. And little things put him off, like women who micromanaged his driving--or a virgin at forty--or girls who asked what he did before asking his sign. He wanted to say, "Virgo, baby," but wasn't allowed. The seventies, he was informed, were passe—despite the retail industry's recent revival of bell-bottoms.
    He processed premiums. He balanced books. A week later, he'd called his mother, always a pride-swallowing mistake. "You need to shoot lower," she said. "I love you, baby, but you're no spring chicken, and your hair's not too thick either. Unless you strike it rich—Did you buy your lotto ticket today?—you'll never date Angelicas and Shelleys. Go for Maudes, Elizas, a girl who might make you dinner and watch a movie on the couch. You're not ugly, but you're no Tom Cruise. Larry, I have to go. Regis is on, and that's my final answer."
    "Thanks mom," he said, considering cold pizza in the fridge. Green mold clung to the crust. Froggy cunt? "You've been a big help, mom," he said to the dial tone, "Again." He paused the outpour of the self-indulgent monologue he'd enjoyed many times before, the one that started like, "Why can't she be supportive like other people's mothers," and grazed the lunchmeat drawer instead. He glorified a baloney slice with a squirt of Dijon mustard and wondered: Since when had forty-five been the death-knell for easy sex?
    He had a blind-date that night, set up by a swinger friend, but when he got there, it went poorly. The girl, who had never heard of lip bleach or wax, asked immediately what he did (meaning: What did he make?). He felt more interested in her whiskered mouth than what came out of it.
    She looked none too happy with him either. "They said you were thirty-two," she said, sucking at her soda. "You look older."
    "I'm not thirty-two." He laughed, but she glared as if he'd wanted to trick her--he and the other bad, bad man—so he wanted to say, "And I thought you were good to look at without the paper bag," but he hated to watch women cry. He was not a bad guy.
    Still, all over the restaurant, he saw cunt: cunt in the drinks on the waitress's tray, on the brocade walls—enough cunt to make the unimpressive lip-cunt before him pale. Apparently, she noticed his distraction because she left almost immediately when he began to consider the lint on her chair. He paid the bill and got in his car, cursing his luck. At home, he even got on his treadmill for a furious, five-minute run, then fell to the couch exhausted.
    Judy, crammed into the closet, had deflated last week and needed a patch. Plus, there was that disconcerting mew her mouth made--like a windtunnel. He thought about calling an escort service, but had visions of VD or sudden immune deficiency. His computer hovered in his periphery, the screen chanting, "Open the net. Open sesame. Open at home. Buy a subscription and look at me... We're all here, Larry. The girls you've wanted for years..." He opened the net, but was not compelled. At work, they functioned as a titillating vehicle away—but at home, he was not nearly as interested. He stood, stretched, then took a walk, noticing how many cunts blossomed in dropped flowers from the dogwood trees, eating up the night. Women walking hand in hand had no faces--only waists and hemlines. He did not know where he was going, but trudged on until he realized he was two miles from home. His feet ached. His nose was raw from the cold air. He sat on a curb as fall draped its melancholy shadows over his shoulders, and: Poor me, he thought. Oh damn, I'm pitiful. He had a sudden urge to never see cunt again.
    Maple leaves curled like bent fists on the sidewalks, yellow, brown, and red--no! More pale—pale red?!—more cunt. He wanted the sky to swallow him like a seasoned whore fellates a finger because it was unfair to see so much of something he wanted and have so little.
    This was, he thought, definitely hell. The next day at work, he put his oomph into his job, tirelessly sifting paper and clicking on the right buttons. Surprisingly, Susan called him in. She said, "Larry, I have to talk to you," and guided him into her office.
    When he sat, she said, "You've been exceptionally good about avoiding the net, and I wanted to commend you, Larry. Not a single site was cruised this a month, and I'm afraid, the other employees relapsed, so I fired them. That's why Helen isn't here. God Larry, I hate employees unable to follow directions, but that's not you, thank goodness." She patted his shoulder.
    Perhaps he imagined it, but she seemed to caress his arm through his suit, her hand stroking briefly up and down, swishing her painted nails rhythmically on his poly-fibered sleeve. Just as suddenly, she then said, "Would you like to have a drink after work?" Her perfume was spicy-fruity. A pearl-clip decal for her high heels had fallen off one shoe.
    "What?" Had he heard correctly?
    "Strictly informal. You can say no."
    "Susan," he said, "We don't get along. Why are you asking me?" She turned to her huge window with its view of the dumpsters and a solitary tree. From her stooped posture, he could tell he had hurt her feelings. "I like you. I didn't mean it. Okay," he said, "let's have a drink. Why not? No problem."
    Her shy smile made him feel better, but she insisted on driving when they left, and when they arrived at the bar, she took off her long, gray coat, loosened her hair, and told him about her hubbies one, two, and three. Later, when she rubbed her heel against his ankle, he almost ducked under to make sure he hadn't imagined it. Susan was hot for him! his mental voice stuttered; the revelation was so astounding, he proceeded to get drunk.
    "I just felt I could talk to you all the sudden," she said, "like you looked in my eyes and knew what was on my mind..."
    Not bloody likely, he thought: Your eyes were all cunt to me.
    "So, I said to myself, Susan—that man is much nicer than you thought he was. And you did well with what I asked from you at work Larry, so I thought I'd ask you here."
    "I'm here," he said, grinning stupidly like somebody's pet teddy bear.
    After she downed seven Margeritas then put her barbed-wire barrette in her purse and fanned out her hair with her hands. "Larry," she said, "Can I tell you a secret?"
    He wished he had a mint to hide his liquor breath. He drank his fifth Daiquiri. She looked prettier and prettier. "Sure."
    She sighed. "When I saw all those sex sites you looked at, I thought it was great to see a man who still had a strong sex drive. So many men peter out with age. Like they can't please a woman anymore. But you—oh, how should I put this? Well, I shouldn't ask. I imagine you have quite a lot going on." Her finger traced little circles in the condensation rings on the table, drawing spirals and odd patterns. "Am I right?"
    He said: "Be more specific."
    "Oh, all right." She leaned in. "I wanted to know if you still want it—I mean regularly. Since Jeff passed away, it's been hard for me to meet men. When I do, they can't keep up."
    "I can keep up," he said. Their faces were so close that he watched her lashes, entranced they were so brown when her hair was so gray, and as he took her clothes off with his eyes, he suddenly thought: Making love to this woman could put me in crutches. She is my boss. I might get fired. A jolt of acid entered his stomach, almost bowling him over.
    "I'll be in touch then," she said.
    "I have to go," he slurred. "I'll take a taxi. Good luck."
    That night he cruised sex sites for three hours, but couldn't get excited. The next morning, he walked to the subway, thinking about Susan. She came into his mind's eye and lingered—so he thought of her finger, tracing patterns on the table. He contemplated her Rotweiller and three dead husbands. "A dangerous catch," he said aloud.
    The office air was electric that afternoon. The spell of women, he thought. They had the power to draw a man in, then make him wait—but Susan did not dally. She put a note on his desk that afternoon. It read: 1233 Bread ST. 7 p.m. Not about work.
    He hyperventilated like he had as a child and used his lunch bag to stop the ragged breathing. Inhaling the ham scent of his noon meal, he calmed and got through the day without incident. At 7 p.m., he was standing at her door, with daisies, wine and chocolate. His face filled with a sappy grin and when she swung open her door in a frosty white pair of sheer pajamas, having died her hair walnut, she was beautiful, had been getting more beautiful in his eyes all day. "I'm here," he said.
    "I see that." The wine, chocolate, and daisies, were left in the hall. "My dog's in the yard," she said, "because I thought we might want to be left alone." Then she shut the front door and ripped off his clothes. He fumbled with her flimsy garments, not wanting to rip them since he hadn't bought them, but she stripped them herself. They were soon almost nude.
    "Susan!" he said, prudish for a moment, trying to extricate himself, but "Larry!" she replied, teasing, pushing him into the wall, and he called her name again, "Susan, sweet Susan," but she did not cease seducing him. "Susan, Susan, Susan," he said as he writhed on her bed--uttering her name like it was his first baby word, uttering it non-stop for the next several hours, especially when he first plucked beige shoulder pads from her bra-cups, and she colored prettily.
    "Susan," he said, enjoying all of her.
    "Should we do this again?"
    "You have my number," she replied. "Use it—or don't."
    When he walked outside, drunk on the air, he felt he had been taken for a carnival ride. Even the unremarkable became amazing. "You tree," he cried. "How beautiful your leafless branches! You cement, how wondrous your flat, even texture! You pole! Hmmm, what to say about a pole?" And better—there was no cunt in his landscape!
    He stopped walking and looked down at his shoes as if they held the answer: Where had the cunt gone? Had he dreamt it all? He thought of Susan sleeping in her bed, wondering how he would feel to see her at work. He thought of her dog and her probable stock of peanut products, but when he entered his apartment, there was a slight pain in his temples, and the dull light of the monitor flashed. It had captured the body of a sixteen year-old girl. She was nude, with long, red hair, and her pubis had been shaved like a tiny heart of curls.
    She winked, staring at him from the still-life and then laughed. "So you finally got some?" she said. "Click me. Get some more."
    He wondered if he was dreaming. "Come on," she said, but her desire seemed ominous, her eyes like lasers. This girl would never care who stroked on the other side of her monitor; she was hard-edged and sharp--taking manly fans with her tight, young body and stealing their money without offering a single, soft sigh. She was not Susan.
    As if she could sense his thoughts, she turned to him and said, "You just now realized the sex object always takes you to the cleaners? The sex object does not regret your presence or absence because it does not register that you have one. An object is just an object, after all, somewhat like a toaster. You see yourself in it, and you think you've won something, but you're wrong. I have a boyfriend, see?"
    The view on the screen shifted about thirty degrees to depict a young man on the bed beside the girl, grinning. She laughed a cruel laugh. "So why would I want someone like you anyway, Larry?" She shook her hair and returned to her original position, dropping her thighs a millimeter wider as if to lure him back.
    He thought of an ex-girlfriend who sent nudie pictures to prisoners on death-row. "I just like to think of them, thinking of me," she said. "Masturbating to me. But I never give my real address. That way they can dream all they want, but I don't care? I'm not there." He stared venomously at the screen. He thought only: Susan warned me. She was the one who made cunts everywhere, and I saw them first in her eyes.
    The girl in the screen seemed less and less present, like a photograph of a painting of a drawing of a cartoon, so he scoffed, bored, and closed her window, but his computer shot up five pop-ups of hard, naked girls with immaculate bodies. He closed their windows too, but they seemed to multiply as he shouted, "Stop, already! I have what I wanted," and still, buck-shots hacked repeatedly across his screen to be erased by his clicking finger. As his mouse connected with each tiny X, he felt stronger, then strongest of all as he shut down the last internet search engine with the lingum of his index on the flat gray mouse.
    The almighty cock-click of a single digit made a giant of his forged resistance. He didn't need the imagined or artificial. As the piping screensaver came on, he used the same finger to dial Susan's number, pressing the seventh digit with fervor, then was greeted by her soft, "Hello."
    "Susan," he breathed, scratching his belly.
    "Larry? Larry is that you?"
    "Yes." He pictured the silver-laced cunt he'd known earlier, her face above it, swooning, and the hoops of twine curling above his nose when he was face-deep in its heat. He relived the memory of her scent, wanting to be back in her bed, imagining a pet dog he'd never seen, and how it might moan for affection from her yard. The dog. The damn dog! Did it exist? Shouldn't he have heard a dog that big?
    He thought about reality and falseness. Nothing was truly real, nothing but the thing in the instant that you choose to see it that way and agree with its own certainty, like he had been consumed with cunts. Larry was so obsessed with this idea as he called, he barely recognized his voice when it crooned, "I have just one question for you, Susan. Are you lonely tonight?" He was channeling Elvis. He felt very smooth.
    "Yes," she said, with sleepiness in her tone.
    "Good, I'll be there soon."
    As he said this, the screen degaussed and threw up one last pop-up of the cruel young redhead, so he picked up a stapler and beat her back until he registered only a shatter of splintered glass, an empty hole in the monitor where a woman had been. He went about filling it with branches from the birch trees outside, muttering, "Susan, Susan," then walking to her house, whispering her name like a mantra, a lullaby, a dream, or a saved man's chorus in a soft, elegant swan song of which everyone might know the tune, but only he could hear.



About the author:
Heather Fowler received her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University in May of 1997. Among other venues, she has published short stories in the following journals: Storyglossia #28 (May 2008); Cityworks 2008 (May 2008); DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION (February 2008); CityWorks 2008 (April 2008); Temenos (Fall 2007); Mississippi Review online (October 2007); See You Next Tuesday (2006), Frigg: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry (Winter 2006), the muse apprentice guild (October 2002), artisan, a journal of craft (September 2002), Literary PotPourri (May 2002), Exquisite Corpse (Summer 2001), The Barcelona Review (May, 2001), Quercus Review (May, 2001), Penumbra (May 2001), B & A New Fiction (Jan. 2001), Barbaric Yawp (Dec. 2000), Zoetrope All-Story Extra (June 2001, October and December 1999). She worked as a Guest Editor for Zoetrope All-Story Extra in March and April of 2000. Her story "Slut" won third prize at the 2000 California Writer's Conference in Monterey. Her poetry has recently appeared at INTHEFRAY (February 2007), Empowerment4Women.com (November 2007), and been selected for a joint first place in the 2007 Faringdon Online Poetry Competition (October 2007) , as well as published in various venues including: the Map of Austin Poetry, The Coast Highway Review, the Driftwood Highway 1999 Anthology, Joe's Journal, Best of the Beach 1998, The Publication, and the Cityworks Literary Anthology, Volume 6. She currently seeks agent representation for her short fiction and completed novel entitled Gravity--a literary, magical realism love story between a man born with zero-gravity and a woman who can literally hold anything down. Please feel free to contact her at fowlerhm@hotmail.com.

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