Stephen Kempster Whelpdale Thomas

A guy comes home from work one day to find his wife naked on the kitchen table. “Hungry?,” she asks.

They begin to make love, but he can’t shake the feeling that something about her has changed. Her hips feel different. Maybe he’s just never held her like this, or maybe it’s the position. They feel so bony. He remembers seeing his mother in her slip when he was a child, at the new house; how her wide hip bones protruded through the white silk and he could see the roundness of her stomach in a way that her clothing usually covered. He could see the bumps of where her ribs met between her unsupported breasts. Philip Roth once wrote, “When you’re dead, what does it matter if you didn’t marry the right person?” 

“I’m tired,” he says.

A closeted gay guy fucks a dude in the butt.

Then he goes home to his mother.

“Did you do your will?” she says.

“No,” he says.

“It only takes twenty minutes. You can do it at breakfast tomorrow.”

She’s standing beside the stove, boiling water in a crock pot in her jeans and hoodie and an uncharacteristic bandanna around her head that makes her look like someone she’s not. The kitchen is lit by only the two miniature halogen bulbs under the cupboard where the plates are kept, over the toaster, beside the stove, and the mother’s shadow fills the whole side of the kitchen with the dishwasher and the sink and the window above the sink and the other cupboards. This kitchen is colder than the one he grew up in for some reason and yet his parents have more money now than they did then. Although he doesn’t come back to this house often, he is closer emotionally to his parents now than he ever was as a child, although they still don’t know his sexuality. He feels sometimes that he is incrementally revealing himself to them with the argyle and things but maybe that’s wishful thinking. There’s cinnamon in the air but also a kind of dishwashing hangover that seems to follow his parents wherever they go. From where he stands in the dining room, in line of sight of his mother over the kitchen’s kneewall, he can also see the TV in the TV room, on which a family of athletes with the same last name as his first crush are all crying. His lips are sealed and air whistles past his nosehairs.

“Okay,” he says.

A man who is like Robert DeNiro as his Raging Bull character has a small Italian woman tied up in a basement with a thing adjusted by a big old-fashioned nautical-looking crank pushing her hips out in front of her so that she’s almost lifted off the floor by her wrists which are tied together over her head and attached to an eye hook, and is whipping her breasts with a black leather thong. He says, if you can take more, tell me, and she says, I can take more. He says, you can take more, what? She says I can take more, please. He says no, you can take more, sir. She says, I can take more, sir. He whips her breasts harder and whips the thong back and forth over her naked thighs. Her thighs and breasts are red and her pubic hair has been shaved off. The man is fully dressed. He does not look like a sir. His clothes are casual and unstyled and his face is potatoey; he has wispy, incomplete facial hair like a second-year philosophy student. The woman is not beautiful. To her it is a release to be made someone’s object; as a friend of mine once said, she has given in to “the insane desire we all have to be absorbed by something larger than ourselves.” The man at this moment is existing in a deeper plane of spirit than his nervous acting betrays. He is shocked by how this girl has transformed before his eyes. She is an object. She is a sex object. He has almost ceased to understand that she’s alive. He wants to fuck her. Outside, it is raining.