Dykette

by Jenny Fran Davis

she noted this somewhere deep in the folds of her brain, to be smart about things rather than so fucking stupid, as she tended to be. Hers was a stupidity she’d tried to reclaim as radical naivete, approaching the world as though wholly new to it—a sense of being Amelia Bedelia, refreshingly literal and sexily oblivious. But oblivion was out, it didn’t work anymore. Being smart was in.

This was what it meant to flash one’s green ribbon, to flash one’s pink belly: to bare the ways in which you were totally destructible, and ultimately powerless.

Sasha registered this as meaning that Jesse thought being infinite was sexier than being finite; probably the thing that made him a lesbian above all else.

The way we make and remake each other, sometimes brutally. The way we are made and remade by and for each other.

The phone’s screen was glazed over with ice. It would soak in a cup of rice all night, and in the morning they’d turn it on to see what had been saved, and what lost.

You want every tote bag to be a purse! Sylvie lamented, drunk at a bar somewhere in Morningside Heights. Sometimes a tote bag is just a tote bag!!!!

Sasha could tell that Lou, like her, was sexually oriented toward the future. They were both horny for it, always had been; they liked the implication of a future better than the future itself, sometimes; what was most delicious to them was the promise of what was to come.