Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

by Alissa Nutting

  “We’re almost there.” He picked me up and put me inside a pouch in his stomach that I didn’t even know he had. Actually, I’m positive he just tore his flesh open and let me hang out inside so I wouldn’t have to walk anymore.

  The inside of the pouch was wet and oozy and took me back to when I was little. Each time my family had to go on a long car ride, my grandma first sat me down on the toilet and poured warm water between my legs to make me pee. It’s something I was trained to do from the earliest age onward, and suddenly I found myself sitting in a warm blood-organ puddle. “Whatever you do,” I thought, “don’t pee inside the devil.” I think he felt it before I did, but suddenly we both got really quiet and it was the most awkward moment of my life. Or it would’ve been, if I weren’t already dead.

  I defensively took my boobs into my hands before confessing, just in case he was sore about the whole thing. “Sorry,” I offered. After it was still quiet for a moment I added, “I didn’t mean to.” For a second I thought I was going to faint from embarrassment but then he started laughing and so did I; I started laughing so hard that I cried. My tears were acidy and smelled like motor oil. I think my new boob ducts are connected to my tear ducts.

  Finally we arrived at the end of the tunnel, where the dead smell seemed to disappear. I wriggled out of his pouch, then he reached down and did a squeegee-like wringing motion; all sorts of things splashed onto the ground and then the flap was instantly gone. It’s cute how he doesn’t make a big deal out of his ability to do such amazing things. Although he tells me I do amazing things that I don’t think are amazing at all, like have eyebrows.

  “Do you feel the air?” I asked, but he was already smiling. This was his coup de grâce.

  We’d arrived at a cave where cold air was literally blasting. Feeling cold after being hot for so long hurt somewhat; it made me realize that it probably was painful to breathe for the first time when I was born. I kept breathing the cold air and soon it started to feel pleasant, like stretching a muscle that’s sore.

  He flipped on a light switch. In front of us there were hundreds and thousands of rows of frozen liver and hair. After stacking the bags of money in the back, he nervously put one of his arm hooves against the other and locked their grooves together. “I’ve never shown anyone this place before.” He paused. “You can imagine how popular it would be.”

  “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.” I stretched out on a liver strip near the lip of the cave so only the top half of my body was in the freezer. I wanted to bask in the difference.

  “You actually can’t,” he said. “I mean, you could try, but Hell won’t allow you to. You’d burst into flames.”

  This safeguard pleased me. To be honest, I’ve never been able to keep a secret.

  We stayed there breathing cold air for quite a while. It reminded me of the first time I smoked a cigarette. How strange it was to just breathe and feel better.

  “I should be getting back,” he said finally. “If I’m gone for too long, it’s not good.”

  I nodded. Usually in Hell it’s so hot that my skin is bright pink. But when I looked down I saw a very pale chest and, for the first time ever, the purple-green veins running through my acid boobs.

  “You can stay if you want,” he offered. “I can come get you later.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m ready.” It wasn’t true. I figured he’d know that I was lying to be polite. Hopefully, this would let him know how much I liked him.

  He grew wings and giant claws to hold me so the journey back would be faster.

  “I love this,” I said. “We should fly more often.” He seemed unsure. I pressed the issue until he admitted that he doesn’t like to grow wings and talons. He thinks they make his head look disproportionate. I had been pinching my nose because of the smell, but I let it go before speaking. I didn’t want to sound like some annoying mother-in-law from New Jersey.

  “I think you look really terrific,” I whispered, and his claw tightened just a little.

  Later that week he and I had such a fun afternoon that we decided to make a night of it. I tried to bake him some scones, but we got to talking and I forgot the oven and they burned. I’m horrible at baking and cooking. It was a point of contention between my husband and me before I killed him.

  “Let’s go back to my place,” he said.

  In my old life (we’re encouraged to do that, to call it an “old life” rather than “life,” as though Hell is still living), I did not do many exciting things. I never went on a real vacation, for instance. And I only remember swimming once when I was young. I certainly did not sleep with the devil.

  “Am I going to get lucky?” I asked flirtatiously. I thought he’d like that but instead he completely clammed up.

  Maybe because his house is not the Transylvanian sex-dungeon I was expecting. This isn’t to say I wanted to be tortured, but moderate pain is different in Hell, less “ouch” and more “I guess I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

  His bedroom is just really plain and ancient: a single torch and a bed. There’s the usual smell of rot, but not the unbearably fresh kind. Instead it’s like something died a while ago on its own and has never been found or cleaned up. Which makes me think of my husband. I imagine how much I’d freak out if the devil dragged my husband’s corpse out from behind the bed, or worse, if my husband were actually in Hell at that very moment, still bearing all the death-stains I’d given him, and he’d been following me and was going to burst in during the middle of our intimate moment and ruin everything.

  “I’m glad he’s not here, but why didn’t my husband go to Hell?” I asked. “I always thought it would be the other way around, that he’d be in Hell and I’d be somewhere else.”

  The devil lay down on his bed and gazed at me. I took the cue and curled up next to him.

  It’s amazing how perspectives can change. I was always on my husband to cut his fingernails, but the devil has the longest nails I’ve ever seen and they don’t bother me. They’re thin and very yellow—they remind me of paper in a really old book.

  “Your husband was mean, but he wasn’t evil.” The devil’s breath on my neck was hot and brothy. It felt kind of like being kissed by a pot of soup.

  I stopped him for a moment, not upset but curious. “Are you saying I’m evil?”

  “You did an evil thing.” He said this in a fatherly and chiding way that I liked beyond words. I couldn’t disagree.

  When I took off my shirt he seemed to grow uneasy. For a moment I assumed it was my weapon-breasts. “Will they shoot you?” I asked. “Or do they only do that when I’m mad?”

  He got up and pulled a curtain across the opening of the room, then moved toward the torch.

  “Don’t you want the lights out?” The way he asked this, it wasn’t really a question.

  “No, I want to see you.” In a way, this was the biggest part of the excitement. The devil is millions of folds that I knew somehow unfold. It’s impossible to describe him: he is the largest insect in the universe, and a dragon and a goat and a man and a beard and skin that has been burned clean.

  “I can’t,” he said. “Right now, I can’t.”

  I thought Hell would be all give or all take. But that doesn’t work long-term. We’re all here for eternity; we all have to go to the same small bar.

  Most importantly, we all have to admit that we are wrong sometimes. Knowing there was obviously at least one time, in our old lives, when we were all very wrong makes this a little easier.

  I nodded and he blew out the torch. I couldn’t see him but I could feel him swelling, becoming fifty shadows almost as big as the room. My hand was on his chest when the torch blew out, and in the dark I felt his skin begin to slide under my palm like he was a magic plant growing and growing. Soon my hand was on his hip.

  I began to explore his bones with my hand; I felt far more bones than legs or wings. I tried to count with my fingers their hundreds of knobs and ends. He lay back down, though he hardly
fit upon the bed at this point, and coaxed me up onto him. His warm breath was coming from every direction at once.

  “This part is a little normal,” he said. But it wasn’t true.

  Afterward he fell asleep quickly. I felt him shrinking back, his entire body receding and folding, everything tucking neatly into place. I listened to the deep years of his lungs and decided to have a cigarette. We are eternal smokers, he and I.

  It’s true, the lighter was cheating. “Respect his wishes,” I tried to tell myself. But even if it meant bursting into flames, the temptation to look was too great.

  When I clicked the lighter, years seemed to pass. I could see through all the parts of him. His skin now looked like a clear bat’s. In his wings, cells were beating far faster than I could see; behind his lids his pink eyes were spinning. His long tongue flickered in his mouth and his stomach was filled with what looked like small limbs.

  Then he woke up and caught me peeking.

  “I’ve been in love before,” I told him, meaning the other time was not one bit like this. I felt my ribs and my stomach beginning to grow and unfold like his skin.

  He shot me a smile. Don’t go getting swept away, it said, a grounding look to tell me that Hell is different from my old life, but not as different as all that. Not so different that I couldn’t get hurt, or hurt him. He let me look on just a moment more, then the flame was blown out by a wind that came from nowhere.

  Trainwreck

  Although we broke up two months ago, when he calls I agree to be his class reunion date anyway. I buy a low-cut top I can’t fill and stuff it. Upon picking me up, the first thing he comments on are my breasts. They look frighteningly geometric and remind him of earmuffs, or Princess Leia.

  I had cut a tennis ball in half and put one side into each bra cup. More natural-looking materials were available in my apartment, but I’d had a vision: he and I at the end of the night, drunk and reenamored. I’d take off my shirt and they’d practically glow in the dark. “Let me squeeze those fuzzy lemons,” he’d say, and I’d laugh and he’d toss them across the room; we’d make love to the sounds of their bouncing.

  Already it seemed that probably wouldn’t happen.

  * * *

  When I wake up it’s three thousand degrees and morning. I vaguely remember being in a large punch bowl and the DJ saying something about me over the microphone. I’m in a hot car, his, covered in a film of fruit punch and grapefruit vodka. One of the tennis ball halves is gone from my dress. I look over and see it on the driver’s seat, filled with quarters next to a note:

  Here is some change. Go wash the puke from my backseat. Please use the foam brush. The one that leaves steam lines. Everyone at the reunion asked if I’d met you that night at an AA meeting.

  I mean to do this but realize I’m so tired, so I find a flower bed a few blocks over and crash. The ants arrive uninvited. They like the dried ice-cream punch on my skin and don’t stop biting if I only crush half of their bodies.

  Unfortunately their carcasses stick to the punch film so I appear to have a flesh-eating disease. When I return to his car, he is standing there with a very clean woman. She is looking in at the vomit on the backseat with a glare of recollection and pain, as though it used to be her dog—her pet that somehow got liquefied and sprinkled with parsley (on the way to the reunion last night we’d stopped for some Italian. The waiter kept checking out my tennis balls).

  “Are those bugs on your skin?” he asks.

  “I’m Beth,” the woman says, then seems instantly worried I now know her name. She can’t look at me without scratching her arms. I would scratch my arms, too, but my fingernails are already filled with dead ants.

  “This is your cousin?” she whispers to him.

  I then realize clean Beth, likely his new girlfriend, had been unable to attend the reunion. So instead of showing up without a date he told her he’d take his cousin and called me.

  When I walk up to him, Beth steps back. My one tennis boob has fallen down somewhere in the front of my dress, poking out like the tiniest pregnancy in the world.

  “That’s right,” I report. “We’re cousins.” I put my hand on his inner thigh. I realize my clothes are wet; maybe I peed myself at some point, or maybe the flower bed had sprinklers.

  Beth leaves immediately, on foot.

  I wait for him to run after her—to walk myself home, wash off the dead insects, and grow very, very bored.

  But instead he stares. I’m itchy, squirmy; he takes it all in. His finger grazes across my ball-stomach. “I’m deciding if you’re too much,” he says, and I decide this is fair. I try not to scratch while I wait.

  Gardener

  It began during an unconscionably long dry spell in lovemaking for Robert and me. I’d gone to the bathroom to cry in my robe, which is big and towel-like and cloaks my lonely breasts that hang low from age. I kept pulling my robe in tighter to swaddle them; in my head I could hear them screaming for attention and I tried to muffle the noise through suffocation. I was pondering going into the guest room and smothering them with a pillow when I saw the gnomes.

  They appeared to be necking, a female and a male gnome. I squinted at them through my bathroom window. “You’re seeing things,” I told myself, “that frigid man has made you lose it.” Yet there they were in front of me, clearly rubbing against one another by the bushes. Then I watched the plastic deer that sits in front of our hydrangeas get up and walk over toward them, stilted on thin plastic legs, to lick the sweat from their skin.

  Of course shame followed. I already felt guilty about wanting to be satisfied by my husband, who had now turned me down every night for almost half a year. Each day drew closer to that horrible landmark, the point at which, I felt, I had to accept the fact that Robert either was cheating on me or just no longer wanted sex.

  But now, with these hallucinations, I had a newer, more velvet shame—was I having a psychotic break? I cannot describe how hypnotic it was to watch the gnomes, the deer with the sandpapery-plastic tongue. Whether or not I was hallucinating, watching seemed wrong at first, like getting turned on at the zoo. After the month I’d had, though, I couldn’t help it. Only a few minutes passed before I opened my towel robe and pressed my flesh to the cold, dark window. Panted. Made steam.

  When I went back to bed, I stared at sleeping Robert. A pie-slice-sized ray of light shone through the curtains onto his turned-up chin. My skin was flushed and my towel robe hung open, absorbing the sweat from my body. “Wake up!” I thought. “Look at me! I’m presenting you with all I have.”

  I said his name, shook his shoulder a little. No response.

  I started to tie my robe shut, then paused. In a strange way it suddenly seemed like a door, a boundary between the fantastic and the real. Leaving it open meant a night-world where gnomes and deer lived and played. Closed meant Robert’s sound snores.

  For the first time in decades, I got into bed without it. I left it on the floor.

  * * *

  That night I had a Lilliputian BDSM dream about the gnomes tying me to my bed. It culminated with the male gnome riding in atop the large plastic deer, foreshadowing his prowess over creatures several times his own size.

  I gasped as I woke, but Robert was nowhere to be found; he’d left for work and I was stuck playing detective: searching for traces of his aftershave on the carpet in front of his dresser, looking for new stray hairs around the sink. I felt like maybe I’d invented the person I’d always assumed my husband to be, and now, at sixty-two, it was perhaps time to let the illusion go.

  “Well, we’re not teenagers anymore,” he tells me that night in bed when I bring up how it has been six full months of abstinence. I’ve dressed like a cheerleader, albeit a fat, wrinkled one. I purchased the uniform from a costume shop. The fabric is cheap and the initials of the school it touts are a dubious FU.

  “Do you want me to get a breast lift?” I ask, though he’s already turned over and has shut off the light by his bed stand. See
ds of gentle snores are already pollinating in the back of his throat.

  Against my better judgment, I creep out into the garage in my uniform.

  Robert’s car is a long Cadillac and I lie down across the hood and the windshield, stretching out. From here I can see the backyard out the garage’s side window, and once again the gnomes have taken up one another’s sexual company. The lust inside the male gnome’s sturdy brow makes his cherubic face seem thrillingly dangerous. In twilight his white beard has a silvery hue; its shine is modern, like clothes the young people wear into nightclubs. He seems to be in some kind of race against himself. Or maybe it’s a race against sunrise.

  Spying on them, I have the strangest sensation that the car beneath me is going to start up, turn on its lights, and bust through the garage door, carrying me splayed upon it in my failed costume. Would the gnomes stop what they were doing and hide then, I wonder? Would they erotically harden in place?

  * * *

  The night that marked a sexless two hundred days and nights, I decided this is it. I grabbed my pillow and a blanket and left the bedroom. “What?” Robert called half-heartedly. “Is it the snoring?” I went to the guest room and told myself that from now on, I was sleeping there. I’d had enough of pretense.

  The guest room is right next to the garden, so close that I feared they might see me watching. I carefully lit a single match and hid below the windowsill. Peeking through the mini blinds, I watched my gnome in the throws of passion with the yard’s plumpest female milkmaid gnome. I decided that she might have to have a horrible ceramic accident soon.

  But oh, his buttocks, the worker-bee industry of their contractions as they squeezed up and out! The muscles of his tiny back as he ran his fingers through her hair! I lit match after match as they burned down to my fingers, letting the pain linger slightly longer with each one. It stung: Why had I gone my whole life without knowing that kind of passion?