The Speed Chronicles
Page 18
Thanks to this superbly practical insight, Dolores soon found herself quite rich in pleasures and hours. All day she rested or played with herself; all night, so it seemed, she expressed her womanhood by taking in the penises of this world, whose friends, clients, and encounters all became stacked up upon each other. Sometimes she wondered whether this was what she had made all her prior sacrifices for, but the sensations of the Femerol still thrilled her sometimes in her spectacular nipples, the green angel was good to her, and many of her sexual encounters gave her great joy. She said goodbye to this man and that; sometimes she wished to find a woman to love and live with forever as she should have done with Rosa, but how could she expect to see anyone like Rosa again? In a lesbian bar in Tijuana the women had been far from kind to her, and in Xalapa there might be no such place; not even Ana María had known of one. So happily Dolores let herself be carried down the weeks and months. Surely there would come another purpose, or at least a new adventure. Descending the stairs to greet her neighbor Adelina, she smiled at the world, smoothed her hair, straightened her dress, and hurried off to buy just a little more crystal. She was already itching to get her sweet breasts sucked.
WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN is the author of twenty books, including Europe Central, winner of the National Book Award; Riding Toward Everywhere, an examination of the train-hopping hobo lifestyle; and Imperial, a panoramic look at one of the poorest areas in America. He has also won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His journalism and fiction have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, and Granta. Vollmann lives in Sacramento, California.
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