Small Talk With Strangers

The house is on a street off a one-way street, and for a moment, she's worried that she's gone the wrong way. He's told her to park right behind the dented Continental near the corner, and it's not hard to find. She calls him. Come outside, she says. It's just across the street, he says. Come outside, she says.

She sits in the car, where she's already sat for almost three hours, and watches the street. It's dark out already, and this might be a bad neighborhood. Philadelphia is the murder capital of the world, he's told her, and she believes it because she hears sirens in the background whenever they're on the phone. A teenager rides his bike past her car, and she's embarrassed to be white when he looks at her.

She stays in the car for a moment, until she sees a door opening and closing. He's there, and when she opens the car door, she hears him swearing. Fucking cat, he's saying. And she waits for him to be done to start pulling things out of the car, which is so full of crap that she has to climb into the back seat to find the little bottle of shampoo that's fallen out of the bag she's packed and under the piles of clothes and books and mostly unread newspapers and paper coffee cups. By the time she gives up looking for it, he's standing there waiting for her. Hi, she says. Hi, he says, and they're strangers making small talk again.

He looks normal, she thinks, with a regular haircut and a trimmed goatee. Last time she'd seen him, there was a mohawk, or maybe a shaved head, which showed off the tattoo that covered his skull. The tattoo was of cogs, like inside a clock, all meshed perfectly together. Behind the cogs, however, is fire, and when he showed her that first time she thought about how sad it was that all the work that the cogs were doing was all in vain. Now that his hair, and a black baseball hat with some logo she doesn't know on it, covers the tattoo, she imagines that it's no longer there. Being near him is easier if she doesn't imagine everything going on under that black hat.

She doesn't imagine much as they cross the road together, after she's been sure to lock the car, and he unlocks the front door. Careful of the cats, he says. They can't come out, he says. Okay, she says, and she follows him inside, through a little hallway and into a giant yellow living room with pin up posters and metal band show advertisements and the low, creeping stench of cat piss. I like the color, she says. Very yellow. Yeah, he says. My roommates did it.

She puts her bag down, and a cat crawls over to it. She picks the bag up again. I need to shower, she says, at the same time he asks her if she wants a tour. Sure, she says, at the same time he asks her if he's supposed to shower with her. Nah, she says. By myself.

He takes her upstairs, and the smell of cat piss gets stronger. Their rooms, he says, pointing down a hall. My room, he says, walking her by a large closet. The air inside is hot and stale. Bathroom is down there, he says. Thanks, she says.

In the shower, she borrows someone's shampoo, and she squeezes gel from the giant bottle of liquid antibacterial soap, the sort he tells his customers to put on their fresh piercings. She lathers, shaves the air under her arms, her legs, between her legs. A fresh cut opens on the back of her heel, but she doesn't stop it. Out of the shower, she dries off with a towel she'd had in her car when he called, and she puts her dirty clothes back on.

He's watching television when she comes back downstairs, and she sits next to him. Small talk, again. Small talk, and a documentary about water buffalo. They pretend to watch for a moment, and then he pulls her legs open and wiggles his fingers between them. She pushes his hand away twice, and then lets him push them inside her. Upstairs, he says, and he pulls his fingers out so she can follow him upstairs and onto the mattress on the floor of his little closet

where he's on top of her pushing and she's on top of him rocking her hips and he's behind her slamming into her and she's under him again and he's biting her nipple while she's reaching for his balls

And here's a few things she doesn't know while he's fucking her:
1. When he was twelve, his best friend killed himself, and he was buried over to the left in that cemetery he took to screw her once.
2. He never drinks because his father is, he suspects, an alcoholic who brews his own beer. He grew up taste-testing the skunked brews, and the smell of beer smells too much like the home he's been running from forever.
3. His first tattoo was on a dare, in a parking lot by some kid in the back of a van, and his first piercing (his left nipple) was done by himself, with a safety pin one afternoon when he was even too bored to jerk off.
4. The last girl he'd dated had aborted his children (first one, then twins four months later), and he'd refused to go with her to the clinic, even after she'd cried for real.

and she's on top again facing away from him and he's grabbing her ass as she wiggles it down on him and he slaps her once and pushes her forward so he's behind her again and it's hard and fast and harder and faster and everything tightens and he pulls out and

releases. She feels warm wetness on her back and it drips down her ass. Here, he says and throws a dirty t-shirt off the floor at her, and she uses it to wipe him off her. There are no clothes to put back on, since shorts were just pushed aside and shirts were pulled up and down. She lays next to him for a minute, and she moves a little and accidentally brushes him with her arm. Sorry, she says. It's okay, he says. And there's more silence. And how do you feel about children, he asks. Why do you ask, she says, and he says, oh, no reason.

And that's how it goes: small talk with strangers whenever they're not lapping up each other's lonely fluids.