Sam Pink - Hurt Others

“Thanks for the napkins,” you say.

“Yeah thanks, it’s good,” says your girlfriend.

The fastfood employee nods, taking a pull on her cigarette and looking at the sky.

You and your girlfriend walk to another fastfood place nearby and sit on a yellow parking brick, eating the chicken.

Food from one fastfood restaurant, in the parking lot of a different fastfood place.

Your girlfriend says, “What if they hire someone to check the parking lot to make sure this isn’t happening. Are we going to get in trouble. Are you ready to die for me.”

“Can I have like two or three napkins, please.”

Sitting on the yellow parking brick, you think about accidentally discovering a secret society of people who buy fastfood from one place and eat it at another place.

The snow is stopping a little, and the thunder and lightning are low.

And guess what, you hate your life but not yourself.

Later at the apartment your girlfriend looks at her laptop computer while you lie in bed.

You’re sweating for some reason.

When your girlfriend is done with the computer you check your email.

There is one email.

It’s from a magazine you sent some writing to.

“Hi,

Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately I’ve decided to pass on your story. The first line was very intriguing, but the piece ultimately turned into a very confusing, unsettling mix of adult content, violence, childishness, and innocence. I found it a little difficult to read.

Best wishes,

(xxxxxxxxxx)”

You close the computer and put it on the floor.

Your girlfriend takes off her clothes.

In her bra and underwear, she starts to handle your dick then she puts it in her mouth and after a little while you orgasm on her chest in three big shots.

You feel better.

You put your hand on her shoulder and say, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I started laughing now and said, ‘Finally, the evil is gone!’”

She laughs and gets on the bed with you.

Your dick drips, getting soft.

The hair around her ears is curly and you feel ugly.

And you experience a strong desire to be sitting at a desk in an empty schoolroom in the middle of the night.

And an equally strong desire to be on top of Mount Everest throwing rocks down at people climbing up.

Your girlfriend is rubbing some of the stubble on her crotch.

“Hey, do you think you’d want to kiss it, like just for a while,” she says. She makes a punching motion at your face and a clicking sound with her teeth. “Eh?”

“You know I do,” you say, and smile insanely, raising your eyebrows, unblinking.

She leans back on her elbows and opens her legs a little.

She takes her underwear off, and there’s a small cord of wetness that expands and snaps, connecting her skin to the underwear.

It finishes off what’s left of your weak, emotionless self.

It slashes the throat of that self, with the edge of the same shovel it uses to bury it before it has fully died.

She spreads her shaved crotch open a little.

You put your hands on the back of her thighs and push them back.

There are pieces of toilet paper stuck to her asshole.

You lick and kiss between her legs.

She makes a lot of noise and clenches up and gets red in the face.

But no, there’s no romance.

You’ve never romanced anything.

It ends like it always ends.

Where you’re both asleep.

Where you dream about not being able to walk well, yet still having to walk across a large field filled with hills.

Alone and lame, trying to walk across a large hilly field for some unknown reason.

It’s very hard to balance and each step feels endless.

You only have dreams now that make you feel shitty and wasted when waking up.

The kind that seem to change who you are for a few hours.

The next morning you wake up alone.

Your girlfriend is in the bathroom.

You go down the hall and find your boots.

Putting on your boots by the doorway, you imagine Michael Jordan — but a Michael Jordan that has like, neon-blue skin and no eyes.

The blue, eyeless Michael Jordan has your girlfriend’s voice, and says, “You’re my best friend, I hope you know that.”

I used to work at a bar/liquor store called The Carousel.

It was in Romeoville, Illinois — a Chicago suburb.

I worked in the back area, stocking the coolers.

Sometimes I’d have to go out into the bar to hook up kegs or clean the bathrooms too.

There was a bartender there named Robin.

She was in her fifties.

The guy who got me the job at the bar — Carmen — he told me Robin was in some porno movies.

He wanted to prove it to me even though I didn’t say I doubted him.

So one day after work, me and him went across the street to a small supermarket.

There was a bagger who worked there and he collected porn.

He was the one who told Carmen about the porno.

A few days later the grocery bagger guy brought the movie over to the bar and gave it to me and Carmen in the back area, where trucks delivered alcohol.

Carmen said thanks and took a small bag of cocaine out of his pocket, smashed a little rock on the top of a broken down refrigerator in the back area.

The guy sniffed the cocaine and left through the backdoor.

After work, I went to Carmen’s house in town to watch the movie.

The movie opened with a young Robin lying in bed.

She was wearing a red “sexy” lingerie thing and the bed was in a large, open, unfurnitured room.

It panned away from her in bed, to the window.

In the window, there were two guys looking in.

They were dressed like trainrobbers from an old movie.

They had robber-masks on and were talking in secret.

They crept into the room and walked up to where Robin was pretending to sleep.

She woke up and looked at them.

She put her hand to her mouth and said, “Oh no, am I being robbed.”

Carmen said, “She looks really young.”

“She looks good,” I said.

Then the movie cut to a shot of her on her knees with both the robbers’ dicks in her face.

She started jerking both the dicks off — fingernails on her hands, red and long.

When the dicks were hard she put them both in her mouth.

Then she took one out and kept one in, pushing her mouth all the way up against the guy’s pubes.

“Yeah she looks really young,” I said. “Her butt looks the same.”

“Yeah it looks weird,” he said.

“No I meant I like how it looks. Big hips.”

Carmen cleared his throat and said, “Oh.”

Something else was happening in the porno, but I was thinking about gnawing on Robin’s hips.

Only, in the thought, I didn’t have any teeth, I was gnawing with my gums.

Carmen said, “That guy at the supermarket said her husband made her do pornos. He said he knew her husband and he’d make her do it because he didn’t work. I guess if you mention it to her, she gets pissed.”

“Robin’s nice,” I said. “She always tips me more than the other bartenders.”

He cleared his throat. “Yeah.”

I watched Robin getting fucked in the ass and mouth at the same time.

I said, “Hey I pissed in the Bloody Mary Mix a couple days ago.”

“Yeah?”

“Ha, yeah. This one guy at the bar called me a faggot because I had a pink shirt on I think. So I took my plastic thing of juice into the bathroom and emptied it then pissed in it and when I made the Bloody Mary Mix I dumped it in, because the guy who called me a faggot, I know that’s his drink.”

“Cool,” he said. “I think I’m going to make a porno too, man.”