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BLIND DATE

They kill the sweet baby cows before their eyes turn brown, you know. Pale fleshed, silly creatures, blindly trusting, going into the dark place with the filtered light, the muffled voices, growing complacent, coaxed by soft hands that touch with gentle movements, moving forward from one place to the other, no stress, content with the attention received. Little innocents, who walk into a room to see what is there, sensing no danger, held down, forced into an uncomfortable and scary position, and then it's over. She was aware of all these facts before, but it never affected her ability to enjoy veal. Now, she hates the taste of veal. It was on his breath that night, when he raped her after dinner.

SEX, LIES AND CLOSED CAPTIONS

It took a multitude of dates, of fumbled gropings in her bed or theirs, of that uncomfortable dash for a taxi whose driver would glance at you knowingly before she realized she was happier with faux sex. She became an artiste, the phonefuck her canvas, something as unreal as the pleather that covered her furniture. The pleather soothed her vegetarian sensibilities because the material allowed her the look of leather without the guilt and the phonefuck allowed her to have sex under her control. It was on that pleather sofa that she reclined, a veritable Scheherazade, dressed not in silks, but in her sensible cotton pajamas, headset in place, weaving her tales of girls in school uniforms and dominatrix mistresses and women in rubber girdles for her select clientele who passed the rigorous selection process necessary to receive a call. She used her honey coated throaty voice to bring them to their moaning end, swearing they were with her in person, grateful to pay the exorbitant prices she charged, not knowing she watched her television with the sound off, cheating on occasion by stealing ideas from the multitude of porn channels there for one's viewing pleasure, allowing her to remain distanced from what she did or said. It was only when she was met by silence after passionately uttering the words "Fick me in my cubt!" that she realized spelling and accuracy in typing weren't necessary job requirements for the person who worked the closed caption desk.

CIVICS LESSON

She spoke through the cigarette smoke, letting it filter her words, her memories. "It was horrible after the fall, when the Government vanished overnight," she said, giving the word a capital letter, making it a person, not a thing. "We stood in line for everything: food, clothing, ration coupons, coupons to get coupons. My parents stood in line for two weeks to get furniture, taking turns in that line just to get furniture for us to live on, and it was bad, ugly furniture that was like our lives, flimsy and handed down, but, it was ours. When we could afford good furniture, my mother made my father keep one piece, so we could remember, as if I would forget going to school in boys underwear." Her words fell to the floor when she stopped talking, reminding me she was only 23, and all of this had happened in a time when I was worried if shoulder pads would stay in fashion another season, and I wept.