Margo's Got Money Troubles

by Rufi Thorpe

The sadness from the morning didn’t exactly go away; it dried on me and slowly crumbled, leaving me covered in little flakes, like if you eat a glazed donut in a black shirt. That was how it was being a grown-up. We were all moving through the world like that, like those river dolphins that look pink only because they’re so covered in scars.

What she liked most about sex was that feeling of all the normal posturing and social rules falling away, the giddy panic of realizing you’ve lost control and you’re not getting it back. Instead, you’re just helplessly writhing, victim of an ancient itch. Then it’s over, and one of you gets up to go to the bathroom and pulls on their underwear, and you can feel the horrible slide back into the world, into language and clocks and calendars, into who you are pretending to be and who they are pretending to be, and it’s lost, it’s gone.