A square of blue night came in through her window and shifted her curtains. They pulsed in and out, the edges parting, then joining gently together again when they pressed against the wire screen. They reminded her of kissing lovers. A brief spark of disgust flared inside and then the feeling faded.

They wanted her so bad, those old men she spoke with online. They said “I can’t believe you’re talking to me.” She just asked them to follow her and then they would and then she’d never talk to them again. One day her friend texted her “Who tf are these guys?” with a photo attached of six different white men wearing wraparound sports sunglasses who had commented on her picture, her picture where she was so skinny. She replied, “My tinder bois.”

In her fantasy she would meet a beautiful older man, or even an ugly older man, and he would be rich, really rich, not the middle class that passes for rich because no one is middle class anymore. Really rich. And he would introduce her to an underground society that only met in the tallest of skyscrapers. Soon she would become an agent in her own right, after being ensnared in some high level dealings where she’d collect pillow talk and murder men, like that prostitute from the Hunger Games. But she would have a lot to learn until she became the ruthless killer she was, using her body like a trained dog.

The first time she went on a mission she thought she would be extracted from the field before the dirty oligarch fucked her. But after stalling as much as she could, after the oligarch played her into joining him in all those drinks she was supposed to plow him with, the time came when something had to give. In his apartment, his spaceship of champagne light overlooking the city, twinkling with office buildings that looked like many stranded diamond bracelets, he’d fuck her against the windows. Her body would be pressed up against the glass, getting fucked on the most elite stage. If this was a movie, the drone would circle in the night air, taking in her body—a doll the size of a bridal cake topper. The only girl in the world.

Coming back from her mind, she looked at the face of a man she would never fuck, the face on her phone, the real old man who had been sending her his old man messages, his old man poems, and decided to touch herself for the first time since the breakup. It had been a while since she touched herself because it made her shudder and it made her wet and it made her cry to think of him fucking other women. And it made her mad. She lay in bed wanting him and feeling scared, for some reason scared, like she couldn’t get comfortable and nothing could sooth her and he was dipping into women with the tip of his dick, and sliding it in and taking it out. She had been so in love with that man that, early on, when she stared at him, she saw gold dust in his face. A veil shimmering hard between them.

The ads for porn were porn. The GIFs flashed comic sans exclamation points and she could’ve almost just masturbated to that. There were tabs for race, position, cum type, fantasy. Porn for women. She clicked “hottest videos’.”

Step-brother and step-sister talking in the kitchen. Step-sister is in sweatpants and a cropped tank top, step-brother is getting a glass of milk from the fridge.

Where’s mom and dad?

Out, they’re out.

There’s an accident with the milk, it spills all over, she bends over to clean it up,

“You’re such a clutz Johnny.” That took her out of it for a moment. Johnny was a name for a boy she had known in elementary school who was simultaneously violent and quick to tears.

Somehow by accident he’s inside of her.

What’re you doing! Uh, ugh, wait. Don’t stop.

Step-sister is holding onto the refrigerator handle. She looks at this girl’s face, her thin, platinum pigtails. It becomes obvious to her how much makeup she has on, how old she is, even if she’s young.

But his cock is so long and she can’t believe she’s seeing it, all of it, going in and out of some girl’s hole. A true hole, a circle of flesh gaping, and now he’s showing everyone the hole. It’s like a video of surgery, webs of flesh. She touches herself and wonders why she hadn’t done this before. It feels good right now. The bloodlust of abundance, she wants to eat it all, she wants to put all of it inside.

She edges away from the edge, and scrolls down looking for suggested videos, she wants to stay here longer, she wants to see all of it. The bloodlust of an abundant thing without price. There’s an ad for a video game. A blond elf in a leather skirt and a buckle over her huge boobs bobs around a little, taking out her sword, putting it back. The ad says “BUILD HER, FUCK HER, IMPREGNATE HER.”

A Japanese massage. It’s long, there’s 30 minutes where the girl is actually just getting a massage. There aren’t any subtitles but she imagines what they’re saying as the female masseuse finally puts a finger in her patient.

Oh excuse me. I don’t think that’s appropriate. She imagines the patient saying.

Actually this is a very legitimate massage. I’m a woman. This is like a gynecological exam.

Really?

Even better. People pay me thousands of dollars all the time. Your vagina will be like ten years younger, I’m soothing the canal walls, checking for bumps, irregularities. What if something crawled up there? In that case I could pull it out. Don’t you want it pulled out?

Of course I want it pulled out.

Haven’t found anything yet. But we’ve got to be sure. And you know what? It’s okay to enjoy this. I won’t get offended, it’s only natural.

Then the male masseuse comes in. There’s a job only he can do. Professional until the end, and then it’s too late to refuse, because they tricked her, and she wanted the trick anyway. Everyone was rooting for the trick.

The next video looked hot but ends up disturbing her. An emaciated woman is strapped to a table, or is it a chair? It’s like a dentist’s chair, but without any arms. She seems to be on some dark stage, everything is black but she is lit in a harsh light. Fat bald men circle her, their boners bobbing, jostling, pink. They take turns. She takes it and she says she wants it but she doesn’t want it. She can see it hurts. She can see something is wrong and it’s making her horny anyway.

It seems there is nothing left to do but sit in her dark room alone with her ugly purple vagina, when she remembers the old chat site she used to go on when she was 15 and horny. She would put in “anime” as a talking point and then all these people wanted to roleplay sex as Sakura and Naruto and she got into that. She had even used the video function a few times. Men always had their dicks out there, and one day she decided to show her boobs then she turned around and showed them her ass. Some of the men came immediately, once they saw her. Thousands of people and she was the only one, the only girl on there. Was she a legend, did they log on every night hoping to see the girl they heard was perfect and showing herself? On her knees, her face out of frame, or else wearing a baseball cap, tilted down. That was the important thing, not to show her face. When she was still in middle school she had heard about a girl who had done something similar. She killed herself after some guy had seen her face, found her social media, and started blackmailing her. She told everybody about it online and then drank a bottle of bleach and died and then everyone made fun of her for that cringe video, flashing notecards in her video instead of speaking. Feeling sorry for herself.

It was more boring than she remembered. They said “I have my hand on your boob.” “I’m inside you.” Where were all the freaks that wanted her to be their sex slave, that wanted panty pics at the dinner table because she was still a student, a school-girl? It occurred to her that the people she was chatting with were adolescent virgins, like she had been when she used the site. All this typing, this fruitless search. She turned away from her laptop, curling into herself, her forehead a bit damp. An animated sparkle sound emitted from her laptop, she looked over her shoulder. One more.

Each chat began the same way.

Anon: M/f?

You: f

Anon: age?

You: 18.

Anon: me too

Anon: u wanna roleplay

You: yea
You: were r u from?
You: where* lol

Anon: do you have a dog
Anon: ohio

You: no
You: that’s cool

Anon: you have a german shepard his name is Max
Anon: you get on the floor to play with him.
Anon: what’re you doing?

You: I’m petting him, scratching him behind the ears
You: what do you look like

Anon: black and brown fur
Anon: your childhood dog

A Lassie. Someone to take care of her.

You: i m just a little girl

Anon: you’re not wearing underwear
Anon: max is nuzzling your crotch

Both chat bubbles go still.

She imagines the hard nose pushing against her underwear, hot breath. But it’s dog breath. It can’t be good to be imagining dog breath. She can feel him holding his breath across the world, in whatever shitty bedroom he lives in, in the middle of nowhere.

You: this is weird

He takes a pause. A flash of brilliance.

Anon: don’t worry
Anon: its a robot dog.

The german shepherd is converted into chrome before her mind’s eye, his back an interlinking shell like the cloisonne fish keychain she used to pin to her butterfly backpack when she was little.

He continues, sensing weakness, sensing a crevice to cram in through.

Anon: you’re wearing a nightgown but no panties
Anon: he forces you on your back
Anon: with his paws
Anon: his big dog tnonge
Anon: tongue

You: i’m trying to get out from under him but he’s too heavy

Anon: your parents are downstairs, you dont want them to hear u

Is he panting somewhere in the world. Is he getting hard. Is he sweating. Is he greasy and ugly. She imagines herself in her childhood bedroom, struggling on the shag carpet, clawing her way to the door. If she can open the door, the light is on in the hall, and everything in the dark room will dissolve, relinquish its hold.

You: i roll over, i’m trying to get away. I want to scream but i dont

Anon: he’s on top of you
Anon: your nightgown slips up
Anon: he’s inside of you

Anon: u like it
Anon: u like that dog dick dont u

She imagines getting fucked by a dog.

Anon: whore. U like it

I do like it, I do like it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…

The chat continues, she gives into it.

She’s on a black stage. Eventually the chain is pulled. The warm pulse of her orgasm comes, there’s gold everywhere. A shower of dust released from a webbed sky and it falls all over her.

The next morning she wakes up confronted by the black face of her dead computer. It’s staring at her. It knows what she’s done. She probes herself. A picture of a german shepherd flashes before her conscious.

Something stirs. She feels a little bad about it.

Not that bad, though.

Today is Monday, workday. Her sheets are kind of damp, she can feel the sweat and dead skin accumulated on her scalp, there’s wax in her ears. After her shower she is purity, lightness, energy, a pearl. She is young and skinny in her skirt and pretty. Out the door and it’s the most beautiful weather, morning air wafting through the whole city. The sky is so big, so many early colors. “This could be France!” she thinks to herself wildly, happily. The world is hammering away. She begins walking her long walk to work.

Everything is under construction in this part of town, she’s almost always under that forest green scaffolding. When she crosses the street she sees the new buildings launching into the sky, covered in orange netting draped over the bare concrete bones of whatever is coming next, for whatever reason. Shards of sun chase her, refracting off the windows. She follows the sun, it follows her. An expansive feeling is inside, the wind’s texture is delicious against her.

A little metallic jingle registers, pulls her from her thoughts.

A dog collar. His owner wears a trench coat and heels. The steady click, click of a classy woman. Her dog is trotting behind her. It is a small, thin dog. She stares at it.

“I know that kind of dog” she thinks to herself. Little chicken thigh legs, skin so thin over the palm sized skull. A greyhound, a whippet? What’s the name or the difference?

The dog feels her staring and looks at her cautiously from the side of his eye, and when they meet each other’s gaze again he quickly looks away. Just like a person would, caught in eye contact. Another nervous animal walking around the city.

Her ex loved dogs. She remembers that now. He wanted one so bad. They’d be walking down the street together and he’d drop everything to chat up a dog owner, squatting down to ruffle the ears of a snorting, gagging bulldog. He would point out athletic looking dogs, the kind that look great in bandanas strung around their necks. The kind that look particularly like handsome boys.

“That’s a perfect dog for me,”

“It’s cruel to raise a dog in the city,” she’d say.

Everyday they talked about dogs, debated about dogs, until she was backed into her oppositional stance. She said they were genetically hacked into loving their masters. He said but now that they’re here we should respond to their love, we should match it.

He was scrolling through pictures of rescues on his phone, he kept showing her, she projected dismissiveness. She looked around his sunlit apartment, a shaft of light on his big red carpet, the pale bookshelves, the good furniture. It was so clean, it smelled good, a dog would ruin that.

And then another picture, “Oh, isn’t she beautiful?” Big red dog, shiny and gorgeous like a movie star. A stupid pang of jealousy went off in her stomach, “What’s a dog got that I don’t?”

They were drunk, walking down the hall to his door when they had finally had a fight about it. It started because he was talking about that red dog, the bitch. And she said,

“Shut the fuck up about the dog, fuck. Fuck!” He looked shocked and she laughed, backpedaling desperately into a conversational tone. “I just don’t get the obsession, haha,” she said. “Is this like the boy version of baby fever?”

By then they were at his door. He was putting the key in the lock. He didn’t look at her when he said, “Is it so bad that I want unconditional love?” Then he swung open the door and walked into the dark apartment. “What?” she thought, “What? But I love you unconditionally.”

She followed him into the apartment and closed the door gently behind her. He had already turned on a light but the place was still dim. He was at the sink washing his hands. She came up behind him, wrapped her arms around him, rested her head on the warm plane of his back.

“I’m sorry. I think you’d make a great dog dad. You should do it, you should.” She couldn’t remember why she had complained about the dog so much. Had stopped him, really stopped him from doing it. Just a dog. No big deal.

He maneuvered out of her embrace and looked her firmly in the eye.

“I don’t need a baby, I want a friend.”

She broke from the current of people on the sidewalk and stepped past the threshold into the lobby of her office building, into the air conditioning, and said goodbye to the sun and the dog which went on its way with its owner.