I come home every night to bed frame knocking against a thin layer of drywall. The desk in my room is covered in vinyls on top of their sleeves and cheeseburger wrappers. I need to write something. I need an orange.
The kitchen light hums with electric pulses, strobes of white energy. There's a pad of paper beneath a bowl of week-old fruit. I peel a navel orange with my thumb and the cap of a pen and shove wedges in the front of my mouth. They get quite every few minutes, changing positions or grabbing a bottle of Astroglyde in clumsy fingers. It's hard to be forced to imagine roommate's genitals.
My mom sent me a vase of flowers last week. I was sick. I had an infection drained in my knee. I've limped all week and walked crooked through doorways and up flights of stairs like a lowland gorilla. I want to consider these flowers as a Valentine's gift instead of a pity gift for a son who can't effectively groom. An ingrown hair that turned ROY G BIV.
I start scribbling lines on the notepad. The orange is gone, peel open like a detonated hand grenade. I want the beers from the fridge to come to me, they'll make noise that drowns out the sex. Maybe I'll turn the TV on. I want to watch the Maryland basketball game. I want men to move with raised hands, move like the tops of forests in April wind.
Outside the engine in my Fox is stuck. Like stick in a bike spoke stuck. Turn key, nothing. Lights come on and flood the frontside of our place like a busy dock belching cargo across the country, but the engine is other-side-of-the-moon black.
A door opens. A toilet flushes. There is coughing and laughing. I want to limp back to the fridge for another glass of anything brown, just so the vacuum of cold air spilling from the door seals drowns out what I listened to for twenty straight minutes. I hear a door shut again and hurry to the fridge.
