Something to Sleep To

Tyler grabs the back of your neck, slamming his dick into your mouth again and again, relentlessly as if it were another gun. Maybe the same one he once had shoved down the back of your throat, and you had taken the initiative to blow a hole through your own cheek. You also wonder how clean his dick is and where it’s been, but you quickly backpedal because you know exactly where that particular organ has been making its rounds. The space monkeys casing the place are only too happy to bend over for Tyler - both metaphorically and literally.



The head of Tyler's cock slips through the hole in the side of your still-bruised face, and you can imagine the spray of jizz bursting through the gap like a popped zit when Tyler nuts in your mouth, gagging you, choking you, before chivalrously remembering to throw your own off-white undershirt in your face to clean up when he’s done.



He reclines on the thin, squeaky mattress with his hand resting low on his stomach, scratching at the drying splatters of semen and spit and blood, because your cheek never heals, even months after the incident when you tried to shoot him and yourself. When you did shoot him and yourself.

You swallow more blood than saliva these days, even when at the height of your reign in fight club. The average person swallows two liters of spit each day. That's enough to fill an orca's tank at Sea World in only 12,976 years. In the time it would take you to accomplish this task, the orcas - and all life on earth - would be long past extinct. Right now, all you have is Tyler's tadpole swimmers racing through the paths of your spit to fizzle out in the acids of your stomach, and that’s nearly enough.

You had orange juice from concentrate along with your usual breakfast of bland oatmeal from the institution's outdated kitchen this morning. The kitchen is decorated with rustic Home Living catalog accents that remind you of home. Page forty-seven hosts an artistic spackling of black mold in the upper left corner of the cracked ceiling; page twelve features dull, crunchy cockroach carapaces and rat turds coating the water-warped bottoms of every cabinet. You yearn for a swig of gasoline to rinse your mouth with, homemade napalm cooking in your stomach juices and frying the wriggly little fuckers on their way down.

You dab gingerly at your mouth with the shirt as neatly as any executive diner after their starting course of clam-and-piss chowder. You'd almost prefer the acrid undertones at this point, but you don't want to give Tyler any more brilliant ideas.



You throw the shirt back in Tyler's face, the sleeve catching on the lit cigarette in his mouth like hooking the too-small plastic ring around a glass bottle in a crappy carnival game, taking home a plastic bag with your prize goldfish that will die in two hours because even though you could produce enough saliva to keep the fish afloat, it couldn't actually survive in the thick, viscous liquid of your spit. Too acidic. Plus the mucus would gum up its gills, unable to pull in oxygen, and it would suffocate.



The shirt gets stuck on Tyler's cigarette, because if you could smoke after blowing a wad like a second bullet into someone's mouth, that's what you would be doing. The shirt gets stuck, and while Tyler is swatting the material away from his face, you use the distraction and grip your hands under his thighs, shoving him over onto his stomach and nearly off the bed. He's flailing, immediately on the defensive with his heels kicking up into your ribs and elbows blindly aiming for your busted cheek, but you eel up his body and swing a hard knock with your fist at the back of his head, stunning him long enough to pry his cheeks apart and shove your way into him.



You spare a wistful thought for lube, if only to spare the skin-grating chafing against your dick, but you didn't have time to dig out a spare globule of fat from your gaunt belly and boil and boil the quivering yellow-pink chunk of yourself until you could scrape off a thin film of glycerin to ease the way. Tyler wasn't worth the effort, grunting and bucking beneath you as you humped against him forcefully enough to shudder the thin metal frame of your bed. You had pulled the bed away from the wall weeks ago, after the rhythmic thump, thump, thump prompted your neighboring psychopath in the room over to return the enthusiastic drumming with his own face until he'd cracked an old lobotomy hole and bits of brain dribbled out of his forehead in the exact color and texture of your breakfast.



You fucked Tyler as hard as you wanted, harder than any actual person could take without rupturing their prostate, because at the end of the day all you'd have to show for the effort was a wet spot on your bare mattress and a pillow flattened under your fists where Tyler's head should have been.



You finish up quickly instead of drawing out this intimate, tender moment between you and...you. Tyler curses as you pump him with round after round of orcas and goldfish, swimming in the upstream of his lower intestines like salmon out to spawn. He collapses when you do, the long, lean line of his back only slightly more comfortable than the coiled springs that liked to punch their way up through the unclothed mattress and bite you in the ass while you slept. And you did sleep. You slept like a baby on your padded slab with no sheets and no pillowcase. You didn’t get sheets unless you became one of those unmanageable patients the staff tired of fending off rabid bites and handfuls of thrown feces, until one day when they would conveniently make your bed up for you as neat as any four star hotel.

There would be fresh, laundry-crisp sheets with pale blue stripes pulled taut over your mattress and a complementary mint perfectly centered on your meticulously fluffed pillow. The next morning, room service would wordlessly unknot the twisted length of sheet from the metal railing at the foot of your bed, nudging your head gently to the side to get at the other end wrapped around and around your blue-black neck, stuffing the used linens into a canvas bag to be carted down to the laundry facility in the building’s sub-level, while you were bagged up and carted down the street to the mortuary. Then your room was scrubbed clean for the next tenant, the mattress bare and waiting.

You roll off Tyler and pick the still-smoldering cigarette out of your singed shirt, the homemade fag made up of rolled together bits of shredded toilet paper and milkweed from the overgrown tangle of flora in the 'gardens' out back that were the sleeping grounds for more Robert Paulsens than you care to consider. You finish off the cigarette and snub the cherry end between your thumb and forefinger, flicking it towards the hollow metal seat in the corner of the room hooked to a hole in the ground that served as your toilet, minus the floating detritus of used condoms.

You tuck your hands behind your head as Tyler flops over and splays out on his back with his shoulder nearly brushing your own. You smile, the hole in your cheek puckering and flaking off a scabby crust of semen and spit and blood, listening as your neighbor knocks a gentle lullaby into the adjacent wall that eventually turns squelchy, like an overly ripe melon knocked one too many times in the local grocery mart, Tyler just breathing beside you.



And then you sleep.