There she was again, come back like an old hit, flanked by the latest in sexual consent. She’d made sure he knew to come around by not inviting him. Not that it was her party. She was crying anyway.

He stood there all kinds of coy and lounging. Always sure of one thing, some thing: her desire to destroy, to ferret out a truth and swallow it whole. Not that he wasn’t hungry, too, just more prone to throwing up.

It had been a long time and he’d suspected it would be like this. Seeing her with the newness, their twoness like the inevitability in a badly written couplet, the landmines in the field of rhyme. One old, one young, one male-ish, one female-ish, interchangeable for one another, disposable, with no malice above all.

Just vacuums sucking at needs pretending that an emptiness could be desire.

“Shit,” they’d both said on entering, as if the lack of surprise in them both could be surfaced by taking on its false transparency mimicking it in expression and bodily contortion.

“Shit,” she said when looking at him again for the first of what might have been many second-times tonight. Her silent, secret, near-human secretions waxed and waned behind her.

“If I could just fall out of orbit for a minute this party might just get started,” she mumbled to the crowd that was slowly taking shape around them.

And before he even had a chance to decide if he should bleed, plead or fight the crowd had divided, choosing sides, giving her the victory.

“Not one, but TWO, count ‘em TWO, wanting to get that tag! And she got ‘em locked in! locked in! Took out all they teeth even! Damn nigger! I don’t see you with no slaves!”

The crowds chorus crushed at him. How many ‘oh fucks/fuck you’s’ went thru his head we will never know, but we could see him scan the room before we wrote ourselves back out of the story.

“Gotta be at least one,” he thought an old thought. A thought he’d thought had lain dormant, covered against its nakedness, if not one he had dumped many years ago chasing after sexy, new thunks. But no, it was back, and he gave in to its insistence and came and put it in his eye and on his tongues.

“Shit,” he said to himself watching his own actions from a distance, “why you playing like that?” Not sure whether he was talking to himself, her or Them-The-Crowd, everyone answered,

“What the fuck you think
this is a
Board Game?”

Her twin external enhancements had switched sides so that the crowd which had missed the sight of one could now catch the gummy sight of the other.

“That will give them something to chew on,” she whispered into Jack’s neck before slipping him back into her stockings next to the broken condoms for that truly special occasion.

He’d given her those sensual prophylactics back in the days when he had been her invitation for him to arrive. They’d poked holes in them together, smiling down their needles at each other.

“Can’t believe you brought ‘em,” he coughed past his sleeve at her. It sailed over the crowd so none could be infected by a terrible implication. She caught it in her tissue, deftly placed to look as she was only dancing with it.

(He would find her reply later on the bottom of his shoe as he left, feeling wounded still at the sight of her thighs covered in hickeys and the rubbers… THEIR rubbers! Bought on the brand name alone: ‘PROMISE.”)

She sneezed. And the crowd, already turned against him due to his lack of slaves of his own (“nigger ain’t no master!”) or even seeming to have the power to procure at least one (“ain’t got no defanger! No rope!”), screamed at him, “Go on, you fruit cocktail! Can’t you see you making her sick?” Folks and cats and people, peoples, The People was dancing like it was TV, wiping the floor with cat and dog shit from the Alligator Shoe.

Meanwhile, he was trying to figure out if he should fight, plead or bleed; on the open expanse of the dance floor no roads appeared open to him.

“Damn I wish I could smoke,” he thought, but the party had decided against him: the only thing smoking tonight was her. And try as he might he was not she…

All eyes turned upon him even those of her dusty familiars. “You ain’t gone do nothing right tonight,” pulsed from all corners of the room. He turned to look at her. One last chance, Oh Lord, to redeem myself? One last chance to forgive you your trespass, Sweet Lord Jesus? But nothing. She was back to sucking the courage from Jack’s neck, her other hand down between her legs keeping his place open so she could slide him back in before someone asked her to share.

He had just made the decision to beg. For forgiveness. He thought he had to beg. He had looked upon the face of the party and had seen not an available slave among them (but then his masters had programmed him to work that way and not even a freeman like him could escape his programming). There was nothing to fight and he could not plead the fifth because she’d already drank it.

Beg motherfucker beg.

Beg for not having slaves. Beg for your sobriety in a drunken boat. Beg for smelling like a dick and not pussy. Beg cuz your momma did. Beg cuz your daddies had all taught you how. Beg cuz your soul is a sponge. Beg cuz right now you know that if everybody wants it, it has to be good. Beg cuz you begged last time and it didn’t work, but you know what they say about old habits. Beg cuz it’s the end of the night and you haven’t tried that yet. Beg cuz it’s the end of the story and it’s a plot device.

She stepped back and turned away even as he came forward. He tripped or maybe was tripped by one of her twin minions or maybe it was the jack on the floor, but no matter the cause, there was no remedy. And he fell and as he landed his face embedded itself into her ass (where it had been often enough, but never like this…).

“Thank you,” she said, “but not tonight. I’m sure when I grow old I’ll want one just like it.”

As the crowd-reflex forgot about him he staggered out of the party, the jack in his hand. He thought himself a hero of freedom for having been able to reach between her legs and steal it without her noticing. He hadn’t seen her grimace as he’d done so, though.

He walked out into the night or maybe day, not that it mattered. The worms were out, the rooster was crowing, the sun and the moon were up and most importantly there was a tissue under his shoe.