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through his body, to her hand like an electric current. He leaned into the vibrations and pulled her to him, and she lifted her skirt and moved up close to him and pressed her clit against his thigh. She looked over his shoulder, out through the window, to the city. The lights were coming on like the flecks of bran. The wheat, the chaff, the constant sifting and falling, the rising sparks. Underneath the sparks there was all that rolling darkness. The wind through the windows, her skirt, his voice, the wind. His hands, the wind, his voice, the grain from a hundred farms. What was he saying? There’s nothing else outside of this, he was whispering, not one single thing outside of this.

Two Cans and a String
    BY JACK MURNIGHAN
    WHILE SHE FUCKS ME she makes me talk on the phone with various members of my family. Multiple conversations with my mother, my brother, my aging grandmother. And then the exes, the coworkers, the credit card agencies, the pizza deliverers. I ordered the electricity for our new apartment with a shoelace tied around my balls and the back of her teeth dragging up and down my cockhead. On my hands and knees on the parquet making dinner reservations with my pants around my calves and her thumb up my ass. On my back and immobilized cupping the receiver tight in my hand telling Mom the highlights of my week at work trying to keep her from hearing the steaming urine splash off my chest and stomach. When the phone starts to shake in my hand and I feel the exigent tightening behind my balls, I breathe deeply through my nose, holding back through each anxious throb, only to release all at once beneath the cover of a throat-clearing cough. “I’m sorry, Grandma, I must of swallowed funny. Excuse me.”
    My name is Lucien. I am a line cook. I spend my evenings bent over a commercial grill tending to a massacre of meats. My days I spend with Alice; her evenings—her evenings she spends. I am thirty-eight years old; I don’t know how old Alice is. She says twenty-two or twenty-three or twenty-five depending on the situation, but it’s clear that she’s older, perhaps much older. Quite some time ago I gave her the keys, and she normally doesn’t arrive until I’ve already made the coffee and stirred the eggs in the bowl and am sitting distractedly at the table waiting for the sound of hard heels in the stair-well, the sound of her smoker’s wheeze as she tops the final stair, the turning of the lock as she gasps her last breaths to try to conceal that she’s unfit, sleepless and entirely overplayed.
    She comes to me because I never ask. Never ask if she will come again, never ask where she’s been, never ask what she’s doing or how she can do the things she does. When she first saw me, she saw what she hoped to see in my hands. Broad, pale and hairless as a child’s. She thought I’d be thick and pliant, a sizeable block of workable clay to shape with the insistence of her needs. And this is what I’ve been for her: a neutral page on which to write her dramas, to play out her fantasies of security. She didn’t know, she still doesn’t know, that the hair on my fingers and the sides of my hands is perpetually burned off by flame-ups from the grill. She knows that I cook, but doesn’t know anything about it. What would I tell her? That you test a steak with a two-fingered push like a doctor percussing a patient’s chest? That you turn a chicken breast when the liquid starts to puddle in its center? That when I come home at night and manage to fall asleep, I dream not of golden meadows or armed assailants, but panic my way through forgotten entrees and dropped dishes?
    She comes in drunk and often with smudged lipstick, wearing clothes you never see during the light of day. She hurries in and kisses me on the cheek and flops into bed and lets me bring her coffee with her cigarette. Soon thereafter I bring her the omelet but she eats only a