Funny Story
by Liz Stewart
Bullet vibrators are not meant for assholes, but I liked the feeling, I wanted it, and Shanna always gave me what I wanted. By myself, it always worked great. I still stand by the sensation, the gluttony of pleasure that encapsulated that whole era of my life, the unabashed lesbian sex I was finally having that first winter of living alone.
“I’m so sorry,” Shanna called from the bed. “Would you like me to try?”
I was crouched on the edge of the toilet, fishing inside my asshole for body-safe silicone. I remember curling my toes around my dirty blue bath mat. I was so bad at cleaning that place. Mould grew up every cramped wall. In my memory, I had been sitting there for hours and she hadn’t said a word, shocked or shamed into silence.
“No, Jesus. You should go home.” I could not comprehend why she was still there. We hardly knew each other. The bathroom door was shut. I was practically begging for privacy.
“I think I need to take you to the hospital,” she said. “It sounds like it’s not coming out.” That she could identify the state of my asshole by sound alone was enough to make me want to disappear. I looked around for a way to kill myself. Bed springs creaked and I stuttered to my feet, making for the handle, ready to barricade myself in with the mildew if that’s what it took.
Then the door opened and she was there, naked, ruddy, biting at her chapped lips. I covered my pubic hair with a free hand, as if she’d never seen it.
Her hair was the colour of a golden retriever and her face was the shape of a heart. She was short, thick-limbed, with distant, lime-sized tits. Apparently she was a wrestler, but I’d never heard of any rural Manitoba wrestling league, and I couldn’t for the life of me picture her in a mouth guard.
“I hate hospitals,” I told her and brushed past her to put my clothes back on. The buzz in my ass was getting claustrophobic. Mid-stride, I vibrated, and froze in place to groan. The noises were in equal parts frustrated, pained, and rapturous. It sounded like it wasn’t coming out.
What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t call my parents. I’d die before I shoved my homosexual proclivities in their faces like that. I couldn’t call my friends. They’d all moved to Winnipeg after high school. None of my ex-lovers would pick up the phone.
In the end, I went willingly.
Shanna got dressed and walked me to her parents’ pickup, parked jauntily on the dead grass driveway. It was nearing midnight. We both shivered while she turned the car on. April in the prairies, and the ground was wet with shrinking piles of old snow. I couldn’t get comfortable in the red upholstered passenger seat.
“Jesus,” I kept saying, “Jesus, jesus, jesus.”
Shanna peeled down the main street and turned onto the highway. I didn’t question it at the time. The hospital in town was small and there would be no doctor available this time of night. They probably would have sent us into the city anyway. Shanna was saving us time. So we started north, the long forty-five minutes to the city.
I was a live wire. Every second I was twitching, swearing, shrieking in anger-ache-ecstasy.
“Shh, shh, shh,” Shanna said, not taking her eyes off the potholed highway. “This reminds me of the time my brother and I—”
“Fuck! Drive!” I was sweating. I was sick to my buzzing stomach.
“I am.” Her voice was clipped and calm, a flatness I didn’t recognize. What did I know about Shanna? I knew that she referred to her first time eating pussy as her “second baptism,” and that when she did it, mid-March in the pitch dark of my basement, she pulled her face off my clit and begged me to tell her she was doing a good job. I knew she did whatever I asked with a timid openness that didn’t exist in her clothed life. I liked her best when I slapped her in the face, rammed her into the headboard, and she cocked her head and bit at her lips like, was that okay?
We met on an app. Well, we met in high school, when she was in ninth grade and I was in twelfth, but it didn’t count as meeting, I was trying so hard to disappear. Her profile was sunny and full of friends and drunken nights. One picture of her holding a large-mouth bass on the edge of a dock, wearing a bucket hat, smiling. I was impressed by that. She was looking for “someone fun,” same as me. Nothing too attached. It helped, I told myself, that she would be leaving soon. Actually. Concretely. She had an acceptance letter. She had her flights booked.
A highway empty as a hole, that’s what I remember. And Shanna’s lips bleeding, her tonguing at them, staring into the space between headlights. I arched my back and moaned.
“I am not comfortable with this situation. Pull over. I can call a cab.”
“No, come on. Sit tight. I know it hurts, but it’s going to be okay. We’ll be there soon.” A lie. We hadn’t even passed Riverside.
“Boundaries, Shanna, boundaries. Let me out, this is too weird.”
The truck swerved, straddled the yellow line, then righted itself.
“Something dead,” Shanna said, her face twisted. Guts and a twisted head on the side of the road? Get over it, I thought. Think about me in this situation. My asshole burns.
“A deer,” she said, and glanced at me. My face was not the comfort she was looking for. She turned on the radio.
The second time we hung out—always late, always at my place—she told me she hadn’t caught the fish in the picture. Some ex-boyfriend had, and she put it in her profile as a joke, “to make me look more butch.”
“Fuck!” I yowled, and spread apart my cheeks through my sweats to relieve some of the impossible pressure.
“Shh, shh, dear,” she said, and put a hand on my knee. Whether she was being intentionally affectionate, or if she had been primed by the image of roadkill, I’ll never know.
“I never see you like this,” she mused tonelessly, staring ahead, “You know you’re usually really hard to read? This is the longest I’ve gone without wondering how you’re feeling.”
I kicked the glovebox, wrangled the seatbelt with my hands. We crossed the bridge with a rattle.
“How long has it been since you got me drunk and convinced me to go home with you?” she continued, and I moaned, “Two months? I don’t think you’ve asked me a single question about myself. I can’t tell if you like me. And I can’t tell if you’re using me, manipulating me. I have to assume you are. Trying to.”
We crossed the #2 intersection, and the cab was momentarily lit. Shanna’s neck, its blue veins, sprouted from the furry hood of her winter coat. She was biting a smile off of her lips. I was still wet from the sex we didn’t finish having, her spit still stuck to the inside of my thighs.
“You like me like this?” I asked.
“I think I do,” she said. Her voice was soft, and I clawed the radio off to hear her say, “Like I finally have you. Attentive, for once. Present.”
A lump rose in my throat. She hadn’t driven me anywhere before. We never had a reason to go anywhere but bed together. My poor butthole rang like a phone, and her smile widened.
“Pull over,” I begged my stranger, “Please, pull over,” I thought I might be able to push the bullet out. I thought she might fuck me and leave me on the side of the road. It would have been a relief.
I lunged for the wheel. We jerked across the road onto the gravel shoulder.
Then my palm was in her stubby fingers, bent unnaturally toward the wrist, which screamed in pain. Wrestler girl. For the first time, I thought she might be my type.
“Don’t,” she warned, and threw my hand away, pulling us back onto the highway. I rubbed my wrist, buzzed, and gasped, lightheaded. Giddy.
“I want to know you,” I told her. Declared it. “I want you to know me.”
“I don’t care anymore,” she said.
I told her anyway. We approached the city lights, and I told her about my childhood fear that a tiger would jump through my window and tear my chest out. I told her I wanted to start wearing boxers. I tried to convince her that I was not a broken person, but someone who was going through a metamorphosis and would emerge from that mouldy basement, some day in early summer, with a fully formed personality and a healthy attachment to others.
We pulled into the hospital. I kissed her knuckles and thanked her for the ride, and she thanked me.
“For the funny story,” she said, and she left me there, at the front doors of Emergency.
I only saw her once after that. Three years later. I had changed my name, started wearing boxers. I had moved to Vancouver for a girl, and it wasn’t working out. I had found happiness like a cup of water, a continual thirst, absorbed and pissed away.
The wrestling opens were advertised on posters at the SFU library, where I was a regular loiterer. I checked their website to see that she was registered to fight.
I think I was in search of something familiar, sitting alone, wringing a program in my hands. And walking into the ring, she looked the same—her hair in two braids, her body rippling beneath a burgundy singlet. A whistle went and her hands shot out, grabbing the other girl’s hair, and when it was slapped away, the back of her neck, and then her hands themselves, and they held each other, violently, until Shanna shook free and, leveraging the back of the other woman’s leg, wrenched her onto her back. If it were me she would have stuck two fingers in my mouth. If it were me she would have spat. Bodies, thrust together and shoved away. A gasp and a cheer from the crowd, and I was with them, awed, lurching to my feet.
She didn’t scan the crowd for me. I didn’t try to catch her eye. Mid-match I realized I was being ridiculous and walked out. I caught a bus back to the new basement I was living in.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Liz Stewart is a fiction writer from small-town Manitoba. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Writing at the University of Victoria, and now lives with her girlfriend in a car somewhere. She won the This Side of West 2021 Prose and Poetry Contest and has been published in Plenitude Magazine and Camas Magazine, among others. @lizisdoingit on Twitter.