Read this.

Why? Because I didn't write it. And it's fucking brilliant. And I don't use that term lightly. I mean, it's pumping my pussy open brilliant. And I'm not just being crass. I'm quoting. From this. Which, if you didn't realize, is fucking brilliant. But it also makes me want to say the word 'fuck' in that certain way where my eyes are kind of glazed over and where even though I'm spitting it out like it's something crude and taking extra time to enunciate the 'k', the way I'm saying it makes it just another word. Fuck. It makes me want to talk like I'm some character in one of Chuck Palahniuk's books with some kind of drug addiction or identity crisis or as luck would have it, both. Or like I'm starring in some movie where I hate my life, the kind where I always look like I'm under fluorescent lighting even though I'm standing in the middle of a fucking playground at 3 o' clock in the afternoon. But most of those movies don't exist because most movies don't take place at 3 o' clock in the afternoon on a playground. Not even Recess. Because I'm pretty sure recess is right after lunch. And now I'm talking too much because when I read something that's fucking brilliant all I want to do is write. Including 'pumping my pussy open', I just used a variation of the word 'fuck' seven times.

This is by one of my sister's classmates in her college english class; this is arguably why we should go to college:



Neighbors
by Sarah Watts

I’m fucking Leighton Meester behind the couch when my wife walks in. Leighton Meester is that big-toothed chick from that show on the WB my wife makes me watch, and I wasn’t even aware, necessarily, that I was attracted to her until my wife walks in the door and I find myself fucking this big-toothed chick behind our sofa. I’m banging her so hard the floor lamp falls over and the light bulb breaks, but Dinah doesn’t seem to notice, and she’s carrying in groceries and unpacking them at the kitchen table, talking about organic fruit on sale and how that’s better for the baby. All the while I’m sticking my head over the back of the couch, trying to hold a conversation and fuck Leighton at the same time, and Leighton is moaning so loud I consider covering her mouth — but that would look weird, some psycho asphyxiation shit, so I don’t.
You’re fucking this girl on our wedding day? Dinah asks me suddenly, her face twisted up, a bag of potatoes in one of her arms. You’ve got a boner? On our wedding day? Listen, she says. Wake up.
Suddenly the house is shaking and everything is falling off the shelves. Leighton thinks I’m doing this and so she starts moaning louder, and I don’t know whether I’m supposed to keep plowing away or run out of the house. Leighton is shaking me suddenly saying, listen, and I pry open my eyes.
Dinah is next to me, holding herself up on one elbow and pumping my chest up and down with the palm of her hand, peering at the ceiling. She’s got her sleep mask wrapped around the back of her pony tail, and when I clear the sleep out of my throat she bolts upright, her neck craned upward. There is no noise but the birds outside the window.
“The birds?” I say, mashing the heel of my hand into my eye.
“God! Shh!” She says. Then, “no. Listen.”
Then there are low voices, a woman and a man. I think they’re talking at first, outside the window in the alleyway, but their voices swirl and settle in the ceiling. There are only mumbles at first, and then a sound breaks free, a woman’s voice, a singular note of pleasure-pain threading itself through the air. It lasts for what seems like a full ten seconds. One-mississippi seconds. Dinah turns to me like she’s expecting a prize.
“Are those the neighbors?” I ask. I stare at the ceiling too.
“No,” she says, “it’s the birds. Of course it’s the neighbors. At least, who else could it be?” As soon as she says it, the woman’s voice is severed, and we’re completely still like we don’t want to scare them away. We hold our breaths. After a minute the woman starts up again, her voice rising and falling. I hear the man moan something through the ceiling.
“Sick,” I say, and start to get out of bed. Dinah pinches the back of my shirt and tugs me back in.
“Do you hear what she’s saying?” Dinah asks, her eyes wide. “I think she’s saying something like, fuck me, fuck me. Or maybe, do me? It’s hard to hear.” She sits upright on her knees and her sleep mask falls out of her hair. “Damn, I wish I could hear!” The headboard of their bed starts knocking lightly against their wall.
“He’s really giving it to her,” I say.
“Yeah, now you listen,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Now it’s interesting.”
“I don’t hear her saying anything,” I say. “I just hear the guy.”
From the other room, Carter starts babbling in his crib. When I lift my butt off the bed to get him, Dinah snaps the back of my boxer shorts. “Wait!” She says. “Do you hear it? God, that’s hot. I think she’s saying, ‘fuck me.’ How come we’ve never heard them before?”
I shrug. “Maybe they don’t have sex all that often,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Dinah snorts. “Not once? Not once in the two years we’ve been here? I doubt it.”
The headboard knocks on the wall and suddenly it’s quiet. I hear their spring box grunt as someone steps off the bed and onto the floor. Someone walks into the bathroom and starts running water.
“That’s it?” I say. Dinah shakes her head in disbelief.
“What a rip,” she says. “I don’t even think she came.”
“Jesus, Dinah,” I say. The baby is calling now, anxious. “Carter’s up,” I say, and shuffle out into the living room where we keep his crib. I hope he hasn’t heard anything. I hope he doesn’t internalize it somehow and then start mimicking it when he gets to kindergarten or something. Dinah sits on the bed a moment, disappointed, and then she staggers out into the living room, her arms outstretched to the baby.

* * *

When Dinah works her shift at Dunkin Donuts, Carter and I have a schedule. No TV. My mom gets subscriptions to these parenting magazines, something that really cracks up Dinah since a) she’s not even a parent anymore, not in that sense, and b) the money she uses toward parenting magazines could more practically go toward Carter’s formula, or the house fund — both of which that would benefit Carter directly, she says. I agree with Dinah in a way, because as far as I’m concerned mom doesn’t see Carter enough to make a magazine subscription worthwhile, but had it not been for her magazines I would not have known this: kids who watch television at a really young age have a way higher chance to develop ADD and ADHD and shit like that. The article said something about synapses in the brain not being wired correctly, and since television episodes are half-an-hour, they grow up thinking all problems get solved in a half-an-hour, or something, and so their conflict-resolution gets all fucked up as well. So no TV. I puree his baby food in the blender. We play with his little blocks. His stuffed moose. I get out the stroller and we walk around the nice subdivision on the far end of the park. When we get back to the apartment, with the two windows and the mold growing above the shower, I feel like a rotten liar. Worse.
By three we are usually on the tail-end of naptime, and I kind of putter around the house trying not to wake the baby. Sometimes have a beer. Sometimes I put him to bed in this bassinet we keep at the foot of our bed, just so I can do the dishes or something. He’s in there when out of nowhere I hear the neighbors upstairs, three in the afternoon, pounding away, and I run in there like they’re doing it on our bed instead of one floor above. Thankfully it’s just their mattress squeaking, and it’s kind of muffled through the wall, but still. Still. I look at Carter and he’s breathing deep, his eyeballs twitching underneath his eyelids. And then I hear that guy moaning again, these long-winded moans that stretch and stretch.
“Mother effer,” I grumble. Carter keeps sleeping. Seven in the morning on a Sunday, sure, I can understand. Like me and Dinah don’t do it in the morning every great once in a while. But naptime? Three o’clock? And yeah, I admit, I feel like a real jerk here, but it wouldn’t be half as bad if it weren’t just that guy I could hear. Maybe I wouldn’t mind as much if it were just the woman. It would sound pretty, even. But now it’s creepy. Like this guy is in the room with him. Moaning.
Dinah walks in early off her shift when Carter is still sleeping and the neighbors are still going at it. She notices me standing vigil at our bedroom door, and she frowns, putting her Dunkin Donuts box on the table. She’s still got her hairnet on and a strand of her hair flops out of it.
“I got Munchkins,” she says. “What?”
I motion for her to come closer. “The neighbors are doing it again.”
“Yeah?” She whispers, brightening up. She peeks her head in and out. “They didn’t wake the baby, at least. Has he been out for long?”
I make the number one with my pointer finger. “Since one,” I say. “Listen. I don’t like hearing that guy through the walls. In my kid’s bedroom. It’s gross.”
Dinah peeks her head in again and waits, then goes over by the basinet and looks down at Carter, concentrating. She comes back out and closes the door until it’s open just a crack.
“I don’t hear any guy,” she says. “I hear the woman. And the floorboards sort of scraping. Should we call them?”
“Wait,” I say. “You hear the woman?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Should I call?”
I tip-toe over to the basinet. Again, the guy moaning. Carter’s eyelids flutter. I tip-toe out again.
“Go in there and listen,” I say. There’s no woman. There’s no floorboards. There’s just the guy. Go listen.”
When she comes back outside her face is scrunched up like she smells a fart. “What are you talking about?” She says. “You need one of those earwax cleaners. It’s the girl up there, and their bed is scraping on the floor. I’m actually surprised Carter’s still sleeping, they’re so loud. I can’t believe you don’t hear them.”
“I hear the guy,” I say, stabbing my finger at the door. “I only hear the guy, I swear to God. I’ve been listening for twenty minutes. How come you get to hear the girl and I have to hear this dude?”
“How come I get to?” Dinah asks.
“You know,” I say. Dinah shrugs.
“I think men and women hear differently,” she says. “Different frequencies. Or something. She’s more high-pitched and I have better hearing. I read about it in Parenting.” By now the neighbors are finishing up — or at least the guy is, from the sound of it — and Carter is sighing, waking gradually. Dinah pushes back the door and goes in to tickle the paunch of his stomach with her fingertips.

* * *

By the end of next week we conclude that the neighbors are on a schedule: Carter wakes up around seven and they start doing it. They finish by the time he’s done with breakfast. In between gloppy spoonfuls, I run into the bedroom and stand on a chair, hoping I can hear the woman, or the headboard again, or anything except that guy moaning, saying oh feels so good, in the room where my kid sleeps. Once I got the gumption to clear my throat loudly when I was standing on the chair. I even knocked the handle of the broom on the ceiling like an old lady would do, which shut him up for a minute, but not much longer than that. At the end of his naptime, they start back up. Carter sleeps through it. Around eight, when Carter is asleep in the basinet and Dinah and I are watching TV in the living room, we hear them faintly, always the same. She hears the woman, groaning, screaming stuff about her asshole and how bad she wants it, and I hear the guy, moaning, shaking the bed. It’s goddamn disgusting. Every day.
“It’s not their fault,” Dinah tells me one night when we’re holding hands on the couch, trying to find something to watch. “It’s this piece of shit apartment complex. The walls are paper-thin. I’m sure they’ve heard us too, you know.”
I put the remote down. On the channel is some game show with Regis Philbin, but I don’t care. “First of all,” I say, “we definitely don’t sound like them. We’re not loud like them. We don’t do it like five times a day. Once or twice we hear them, okay, I understand. This is still America, last I checked. But holy shit, it’s like they’re on their honeymoon or something? Second, Carter’s not deaf, last I checked. He’s going to internalize all of this. Subconsciously. His first words are going to be about assholes and fucking, and he’s going to get kicked out of playgroup.” I realize I’m almost standing. My butt is an inch off the couch, I’m getting so worked up. Dinah puts her hand on my arm and I deflate.
“Okay, first of all,” Dinah says, “if Carter could understand a damn thing right now, that would be a different story. But he’s five months old, Wade. He’s just a baby. I’m sure babies don’t mimic their parents when they hear them fucking.” She reaches over to swig out of my beer. “Second,” she says, swallowing, “maybe they are on their honeymoon? And in that case, it’s kind of sweet. Vulgar, okay, but sweet. Remember our honeymoon, for Christ’s sake? The lake? Weren’t we loud?” Her eyes look misty. “It’s kind of sweet.”
Dinah can be a hard-ass, but she’s emotional. She cries at those ASPCA commercials. With the dog and his one fucking eye. She reads chain-emails about kids with cancer and she cries. When we found out we were having a boy, she started crying, said we had to name him Carter because she had a dream her dead Grandpa came to her and said to name the baby Carter, and so that’s what we did. Carter Eliot, after T.S. Eliot. She reads him sometimes too, and cries. Me, personally, I can’t stand him. All this bullshit about hollow men and mermaids singing to each other? But she was crying, so what could I do.
When we hear a knock on the door, we almost think it’s the neighbors’ headboard except behind the door there’s a throaty voice that says “Just me,” and taps again for emphasis. Dinah gets up and wedges her pajama shorts out the crack of her ass. She unbolts the door and jerks it open. Brad from next door is standing there with his hands in his back pockets, rocking back on his heels.
“Howdy,” he says. “Fuck, I didn’t wake the baby, did I?”
Dinah shakes her head and steps out of the doorway so that he can come in. Brad and his wife Sonia and their four-year-old Chloe are the only family in the complex young as we are. Brad comes over to drink beer sometimes when Sonia is out selling Avon. Sonia and Dinah drink rum and root beers on the front porch in the summer, flicking their cigarette ash in the parking lot.
“Sonia wants to know if she can borrow your blender,” he says. “The shake machine at McDonalds is busted.” Brad hesitates. “If we run the thing, it won’t wake Carter up, will it?”
I shake my head and Dinah goes to the kitchen to unplug the blender. She rinses the baby food out of the bottom and rubs it down with a paper towel. “If the upstairs neighbors don’t wake him, you sure as hell won’t,” I say.
Brad frowns. “What neighbors?”
I gesture to the ceiling with my beer. “The newly-weds. They fuck non-stop. Listen.” I turn the volume down on the TV. Faintly, you can hear the mattress squeak.
“I don’t hear,” Brad says.
Dinah comes back from the kitchen with the blender and hands it over. I push mute on the screen and you can’t hear anything but some kids outside in the parking lot smoking cigarettes, the hum of the television, the krr-chunk! krrr-chunk! of the neighbors’ mattress. We all crane our necks toward the bedroom, silent.
Brad shakes his head, totally lost, like, you guys are fucking crazy.
“You guys are fucking crazy,” he says. “I don’t hear anything.”
Dinah takes him by the sleeve and drags him into the bedroom, careful to walk with the balls of her heels so Carter doesn’t stir. They stand for a minute and Dinah stares at him expectedly. When they walk back out, Brad is still shaking his head.
“Go get Sonia,” Dinah says, and he does, returning a minute later with her and Chloe in tow. Sonia barely gets in the front door before she scrunches up her face like Dinah does. Her face jerks up toward the ceiling.
“Jesus Christ, that’s disgusting!” she says. She pivots Chloe by the shoulders and shoves her out the door. “Go wait in the apartment. Lock the door behind you,” she snaps. When Chloe scampers out, Sonia backhands Brad across the chest.
“Real appropriate for your daughter, I’m sure, Brad,” Sonia barks. She stares disbelievingly at Dinah. “You have to listen to this all night? This filth? Real good for Carter in there, I’m sure.”
“What do you hear?” Dinah asks.
Sonia’s mouth drops open. “What, you can’t hear? Sure.” She points at the ceiling. ‘Pump my pussy open?’ Are you kidding me with that? There are children in this building,” she hisses in the direction of Carter’s basinet.
“I don’t hear anything,” Brad says, still holding the blender.
“I hear the woman,” Dinah says.
“I just hear the mattress,” I say.
We stand in the living room in complete silence for about a minute and a half. Then Dinah says, “This is like one of those miracle medical shows.”
“How is this a medical miracle?” I ask her. “This?”
“Bet your ass,” Dinah says. “All of us hearing different things at the same time? That’s medical. I’ve never heard of it before. It’s a medical miracle.”
“Kind of a shitty miracle,” Sonia adds.
“The only miracle is that Carter can’t hear it,” I say. “I don’t think he can anyway.”
“Can’t understand it, anyhow,” Dinah says.
Brad shakes his head. “This is so fucked. I’m gonna go plug this baby in.”
When he leaves, Sonia and Dinah prowl around the apartment like crazy ghosts, flitting back and forth in the tiny living room on the balls of their feet, hissing at each other what they hear and what they don’t hear. Dinah is right. It is some sort of medical miracle, how four grown people can hear four different things at the same time. Brad is right too. The situation is fucked. I tell the girls I’m going to bed, but instead I close the bedroom door and stand by Carter’s crib, long after the mattress stops creaking and Sonia goes back to her apartment, after Dinah un-mutes the television and starts watching PBS. I’m sad for Carter, and I couldn’t tell you why, just sad there’s a couple fucking right above his head in the first place, and sad that maybe Dinah doesn’t want to call upstairs and ask them to stop because if it weren’t two neighbors fucking it’d be some dope dealers in the parking lot or some car alarm or some other ugliness in the same world as our baby where it doesn’t belong. I lean over Carter’s bed and watch him for I don’t know how long.

* * *

Dinah brings home Prudence Bijarani after her shift the next day around three, and I’ve moved Carter’s basinet to inside the hall closet, just in case he can hear the neighbors fucking, by some chance. Prudence is exceptionally quiet, the few times I’ve met her, but Dinah is one of her closest work friends and she has two kids near Carter’s age. I know exactly why she’s brought Pru to the house instead of, say, Mandy Fullwiler who works the same shift or her friend Corrine. Prudence sells holistic ear candles on ebay, the kind that you light on one end and it sucks out all your impurities into the candle. Fucking disgusting. Pru does like two of those a week, which is more than you’re supposed to, I think, but her ears are completely void of wax and other impurities. Dinah tells me she has excellent hearing.
“Now look,” Dinah says. “Come here, Pru.” She positions Pru in the middle of our bedroom, or as close to the middle as she can, since our bed takes up most of the space. Dinah takes a couple of steps backward and looks down at her watch. She’s still got her hairnet on and a strand of her hair flops out of it.
“And,” she says. “Now.”
Sure enough, the neighbors start fucking. Pru frowns. After a while she shakes her head.
“I don’t know,” she says, and Dinah slaps her hands together.
“I knew it,” she says. “I knew this was some kind of medical miracle. What do you hear? I hear a woman talking about how big this guys dick is and how she wants him to stick it in her asshole. Is that what you hear?”
Pru cringes. “I hear several women,” she says. “Not talking about assholes.”
“Women?” I say. “You hear more than one?” Figures, I think. I would so much rather be hearing women fucking, even though it’s still depressing as hell to know they’re fucking right above your kid’s basinet. Compared to the moaning guy, though, hearing a bunch of women orgasming in tandem would be like a lullaby.
“I want to bring my sister over here,” Pru says. “She and her husband are medical doctors, still in school. I don’t know why we are all hearing something different. Maybe one has studied this.”
“Bring her over,” Dinah says. “And her husband too. Twenty bucks.”
Pru and I turn our attentions from the ceiling and stare at Dinah. Her lips are pursed together. “Each,” she says.
“What?” Pru asks.
“Jesus, Dinah,” I say.
“Twenty bucks,” Dinah repeats, jutting out her hip like she does when she’s set in her ways. “From the both of them. This is a god damn medical miracle, don’t you think? This is like Ripley’s Believe it or Not shit! Word gets out, this house will be a zoo. Like a fucking shrine. This apartment will be fucking Lourdes. Twenty bucks is insurance.” She raises her eyebrows at Pru as though she expects the money to be in her hands already.
At first Pru acts really offended, huffing and rolling her eyes, saying why she shouldn’t have to pay a dime and nor should her sister and brother-in-law, out of common courtesy — I did you a favor coming over here in the first place anyway, she huffs. But in the end Dinah wins out, and Pru walks back over to the Dunkin Donuts parking lot to get her car and drive uptown to her sister’s place. Secretly, I’m steaming. When Pru leaves, I stalk over to the kitchen and start unloading the dish rack, trying to slam the dishes in there to emphasize how goddamn mad I am, but not overly so as to wake the baby.
“What the fuck, Dinah?” I say after a minute.
“What?” She’s just standing in the middle of the living room, same as when Pru left, staring off.
“You’re charging people to come to our house?” I say, and I pluck baby nipples out of the sink and fasten them to the ends of bottles, knowing that I look probably beyond retarded right now yelling at my wife and waving baby nipples in her direction. “We have friends and this is how you treat them? You charge them? Like, admission?”
“I can’t think about that right now,” Dinah says, cocking her head toward the hall closet. “I got him to think about.”
When Pru and her sister and her sister’s husband arrive at eight, Pru forks over two twenty-dollar bills, and the three of them stand near the middle of our bedroom with their heads cocked like birds. I sit at the kitchen table feeding Carter a bottle, trying not to hear the guy above me fucking like mad.

* * *

Two weeks later, Dinah quits her job at Dunkin Donuts. The girls on her shift along with the manager throw her some party in the breakroom with this banner that says We’ll Miss You Dinah!!!!!! and little munchkins in the shape of hearts. It’s sweet of them, I think, but I know they’re still a little miffed at her for having to pay twenty bucks to come over and hear the neighbors. Dinah makes $600 the first week and $1260 the next, all from friends-of-a-friend who want to crowd in and verify that they’re all hearing something different. Totally fucks with Carter’s naps. I take him to the park two, three times a day when people are over. Dinah is social, but we only know maybe a hundred people in town. Two hundred tops, if you’re talking real distant acquaintances. I hoped the first week we would have run past the list of people we knew, or at least the list of people we knew who were willing to spend twenty bucks to hear people fucking, but the second week I noticed strangers filing in and out. Listening. Giggling. Saying things like Fuck my butthole around my kid. Stuff that he can’t understand anyway but it’s the principal of the thing. Kids repeat things, last I checked. Dinah clears two grand the following Monday. She takes us out to Red Lobster. She waves a twenty in my face and points to the lobster tank. That, she says. That is what I’m fucking having tonight.

* * *

When we get home from Red Lobster, our landlord is pacing outside of our apartment. Geoff is a huge sweaty motherfucker from Poland, whom I’ve only ever seen when someone gets robbed in the parking lot and he has to come file a complaint. Dinah’s got the baby in her arms when we’re walking up to the door and she hands him off to me without looking.
“Is there a problem, Geoff?” She says, and he whips around, his bald head gleaming. She marches up to Geoff like she’s going to sock him.
Geoff points to the doorway. “You have too many visitors,” he says, and shakes his head. Come to think of it, he might be from Russia. It’s impossible to tell. His have sounds like haff. Like Chanukah.
“I’m having family over,” Dinah says, and Geoff shakes his head.
“There are too many,” he says, still shaking. “And some of them black. You can’t run business here.”
Dinah looks back at me. I’m still a few feet behind her with the baby and I give her a look like, what do you expect me to do about this? Carter fusses and I bounce him around.
“Wait a minute,” Dinah says. “I’m not running a business. I had a couple friends over, we hung out, they’re gone. It’s not illegal to have friends over.” Dinah keeps whipping her head around from me to Geoff, her voice starting to shake. “I mean it’s not illegal to have friends over, is it?”
Geoff holds both his hands out in front of him like he’s directing traffic and waves them at our faces. “Someone called and complain, say you was charging interest, admission, something like that. That’s a business. You can’t run business here. You can’t sell drugs here.” My heart sinks. Drogs, I think, and I almost laugh. I feel dizzy. Drogs. You cahnt sell yor drogs here.
“Drugs!” Dinah’s arms flap up and down like she’s a chicken, and she looks at me like, can you believe what this sweaty motherfucker just said to me? Except she looks terrified too when he says drogs. “Drugs!” She screams.
“You could get evicted. I could evict you,” Geoff says, trying to talk over Dinah’s screams. “You have business here, I am not asking what is, I just say it has to stop. It stops now. I see it again, I call the police.”
“I’m a mother,” Dinah screams, and the kids at the other end of the parking lot turn to look at us. “I work at Dunkin Donuts. I don’t fucking use and I don’t fucking sell! Who do you think you are?”
“I see again and Ima call the police,” Geoff says, flapping his hands.
“Fuck you,” Dinah says, and reaches for Carter. “Give me the baby. I don’t do drugs. Ask those kids over there who fucking uses. I’m a mother.” She brushes past him and jams the key in the door with her spare hand. We both run inside and she slam the door in Geoff’s face, loudly enough to make Carter cry.
“I’m sure as shit not stopping,” she says when we’re back inside. “Sure as shit.”

* * *

The next day at three, more people come over. The neighbors fuck away upstairs and I take Carter to the park. I push him in the swing. We walk around the nice neighborhood with the stroller and there’s this kid selling lemonade and she’s so cute I buy a cup, even though it’s fifty cents and it tastes like ass.
Here’s the thing: I love Dinah. Love Dinah. She’s so good to me, and I love her, and she’s cute as hell. When we found out she was expecting I wanted that baby to be a girl. I wanted it to look like Dinah. I wanted a miniature-Dinah that I could spoil, a Dinah that wasn’t so hardened around the edges sometimes, even though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t admire her for it. She doesn’t take any goddamn guff, from anyone. If she hates you, she’ll tell you. And it was growing up poor that made her like this. And when she told her ma she was pregnant, her mom started crying right there on the phone, saying that she was going to be poor the rest of her life. And I said some bullshit about how we were a double-income family, because I had a job back then, and how — what, I’m gonna let my family starve to death? I’m gonna let my son grow up hungry in some ghetto, even if we both worked at Dunkin Donuts, that was going to make us unfit parents somehow? And Dinah kept covering the receiver with her hand, swatting me with the other, crying.

* * *

On the landing outside our neighbor’s apartment, I stand facing the door, one arm raised in the air like I’m about to knock them the fuck out, or at least knock the door the fuck down. And I think about Carter and his first day of pre-school, and what if he walks over to some cute little girl and asks if he can please put it in her asshole, God forbid, or starts talking this horrible talk, this filth, like, this is how people interact now? This is how he thinks grownups interact? Because who knows what he can hear?
I raise my hand to knock and I wait. What do I say? Hi, my wife and I can hear you guys fucking every day? Why do you fuck on a schedule? Why do you fuck right above my kid? Could you please stop fucking so loud so my wife and I don’t get arrested for running a business out of our home? Can you not fuck so loud so my kid doesn’t get nightmares? I don’t know what to say. Carter is asleep in the stroller beside me. I put my arm down. Wonder how long we can do this without Geoff ratting us out. I think of Dinah. Her mother. I think of our house fund.
I raise my arm again and knock.

Grow up. No.

I'm home alone so much that sometimes I forget I'm not an adult. I feel so grown up sometimes that I feel like I don't need to go to school because I already know everything there is to know. Statements like that really help my case. Not.
But when all I feel like doing is cooking and cleaning and leisure reading and even working, just not studying...I feel like this is it. I'm in my thirties. My life is over. In the good way--my life is stable. For the one hour and a half it takes me to prepare the crepes and the meat for Crepes de Estilo Jalisco, I feel mature. Yet for the past two months since the first day of February I have been Highschool Girl. I don't know what I want. I only know what I don't want. I want everything. I want everyone. I love attention. Boys. Boys. Boys. Boys. Boys. Calculus? No, just boys.

Eastery Sunday.
Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. I wanted to go to church today. But sleeping took precedence...over God.
Good, God. I'm taking this nominal Christian thing to a whole notha level. Isn't it unfortunate that there is a huge line between believing in God and being a Christian? Dios mio. Oh God. Oh my God. God damn.

Stupid videos.
I have seven interviews. And the rest of my spring break diary. Work. Work now!
Penis fucker. They won't work.