by Ken O'Steen
In the dark, in the bed, nothing in the bedroom looked familiar at all. Then I realized it was another bedroom altogether. The woman beside me in bed was a better acquaintance than she had been in the loveseat, if the absence of clothing and the tender proximity of our bodies to one another were of value as clues. I raised my head a little more and was able to observe that this apartment had a terrace similar to the ones where the parties were, until it dawned on me, it was an apartment in the same building. The terrace was covered in virtual jungle: a potted overgrowth of plants and flowers. There was also human life evident, here, for there was Rolf, emerging from off to the side, and standing in the middle of the flora. Drunk I assumed, and lost in the uninhibited freedom of the great outdoors, he unzipped himself and took a leak. I said a prayer that my bedmate wouldn’t awaken then. When Rolf was empty he came back inside the apartment. He lay down in the middle of the floor, causing the dog lying there, which I now recalled lapping at me during some foggy juncture earlier, to get up from his spot and leave the floor to Rolf. Shortly thereafter, still awake, trying to assemble a reliable chronology of my recent history, I realized the woman in bed beside me not only had awakened, but now was rubbing me in a sensitive spot. Abandoning the compilation of historical moments for sensations associated with participatory eroticism I began to respond in a congenial way, until the vigor of our activism bounced us off the mattress onto the floor. Awakened again and chastened, Rolf stood up and left the room, politely closing the door behind him.
There was a certain amount of leapfrogging, wrestling, clenching and diving, but eventually she was pinned. Yet shortly, in the course of penetrating her with a frenzied precision, an extraneous sound manifestly coming from some place other than either of us, became salient among the ambient sounds. The squeaking had a rhythm: squeaks coming at regular intervals. In fact, they almost seemed to be happening in concert with the thrusting of my mighty sword. Around this time the mutt, whose space we had inherited second hand from Rolf, had begun to paw and howl at the door like a Mississippi blues singer circa 1935. Our exact longitude and latitude were inches from the closet door we were banging hard against. Had there been witnesses at the scene they would have heard something along the lines of, “…so good,” squeak, “Oh God,” squeak, “Jesus,” squeak, squeak, squeak. Then slowly it occurred to me. I reached underneath my lover and ran my hand over flesh and floor, finally discovering and pulling out Rover’s rubber squeaky toy, which had been pushed so far inside her it was halfway to El Dorado. On the last squeak she began her illustrious finale, causing me to commence to join her with my enthusiastic, but comparatively pedestrian denouement. Then we fell asleep on the floor.
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