jon doughboy – secondhand stories

My advice to her when she asks me why everyone avoids her at this party is to stop telling secondhand stories but she doesn’t understand me so I slurp my sugary margarita and clarify, stories about things your friends have done, places your friends have been, contests your friends have won—no one cares, I say, it’s too removed—and she says that reminds me of my friend Melissa’s mother who told her, on the night before her wedding at the motel we were all staying in at Deerfield Beach and it’s hot, right, Florida—so you were there? I ask, interrupting, at the wedding, right, the motel, and she says, no, yes, at the wedding but not in the room during this conversation, I heard this from Melissa, as I said, she says, then I say, this is what I mean, I barely know Melissa and I don’t care about Melissa or her mother or what her mother said to her—and she says, but you don’t know what she said so how do you know you don’t care? And then this other dude comes over, a coworker of mine, and, you guessed it, she starts rambling about her friend Sri’s trip to St. Croix which is somehow relevant, connected via sainthood or seltzer or the cross, and my coworker is dying, eyes glazed like a sticky cruller, so I pull her aside and say, this is exactly what I mean about your boring secondhand stories and she says I don’t get it, if I’m so boring, why are we together, and I’m thinking about this later, on the drive home, thinking I should just dump her but feeling like I’m a boring story, too, and maybe she can tell the world about me, inflict me on the world, bash its ears with me, which would give some purpose to me, to us, to my otherwise purposeless life, and I’m still half-thinking about this later when we’re fucking doggy-style, leaning on her dresser, and I see myself in the mirror behind her, like a ghost haunting her torso, creepy ghost claws gripping her tits, and I’m pounding away and the mirror on the dresser is banging the wall, its heavy oak frame scraping the lemon-yellow paint off the wall and I pause, lean forward, and whisper in her ear, ok, tell me now, and she says, what? all sweaty and frustrated by the pause, arching her back but into the banter, and I say, Melissa’s mother, and she shudders on my cock, a full body tremor, and later, lying in bed, she says, this will make a great story, and then she’s licking my cock clean, aftercare in every crevice, and she has a geographic tongue so I think of continents down there, hemispheres, the layouts of countless lands and cities and empires swallowing me up, but she never tells me about Melissa and after we break up that’s what I wonder about so maybe it was a good story and I gave her shitty advice and I wonder, too, about what she meant about this making a great story, if that this was us or me or my cock or the reflection of us fucking in the mirror or the paint coming off the walls, and I wonder who she will tell or has told, wonder about which of my other stories she’s appropriated to bore other people with at parties I won’t attend and I hope, in a flash of conceit in the void that is this life, that that person listens even if they’re bored. 




When he’s not spelunking in his native Dolomites, JON DOUGHBOY is copyediting Max Sebald’s posthumous erotica novel, “the Hot Fluids of Uranus.” Read exclusive excerpts @doughboywrites


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