In the Unlikely Event

by L.J. Shen

A NOTE FROM THE NAPKIN Look, I don’t have high hopes for this spur-of-the-moment contract. You think it’s my first rodeo? I’m recycled, bitch. I’ve been around the block—long enough to know how this works. They will keep their promise for a few weeks. Maybe a month, if they’re really into each other. Then I’ll start to wrinkle, stink, and fall apart, or his mother will find me and throw me away, muttering profanity at her untidy son, who, of course, by that time will be balls deep in someone else and not actually present.

But he doesn’t wait for me to answer. He gets into his car and drives off, leaving me standing there, with his pulse still beating in my palm.

But let’s be real. I’m a forty-something cokehead with a sex addiction, and I have absolutely zero doubt that’s how they view me and what they think of me. Seeing other people screwing up their lives is not painful at this point. It is even—dare I say it?—therapeutic. Like knitting. Knitting a disaster. That’s why people gossip, right? To get a kick out of other people’s problems. And

Whoever invented the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” evidently had the memory of a goldfish. “Out of sight, out of my fecking mind” sounds more fitting.

“Sometimes I think he won’t rest until this place is a dumpster. I once caught him making love to an empty can of baked beans.” “Tomato soup, actually,” Mal amends, straight-faced, but his purple eyes are twinkling with mischief. “And that can has a name. Laura.”

He’s singing to himself now, oblivious to our existence. I don’t know what he’s on, but I hope it’s laced with cyanide, because every year he gets to live, our generation gets dumber and a (Victoria’s Secret) angel loses her wings.

Ashton Richards is doing cartwheels in the rain, yelling, “We’re all going to die one day, and we are so self-observed and obsessed with shit that don’t matter.” We don’t pay attention to him. “What are you waiting for, God?” he screams to the sky, opening his arms.

I told her about the chocolate bar incident, which prompted her to slap Mal with the pet name Mal-Teaser.

And I’ll do anything in my power to help her. Even if it kills me. Even if it villainizes me. That’s what they don’t tell you in the movies. Bad guys have hearts, too.