To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him Read Online Free PDF Page B

dollar on gasoline and treat yourself to me. I’m a cheap piece of meat. Heat me up tonight. I’m cheap like sugar and food coloring—I’m the big Barbie birthday cake you buy a little girl when you can’t afford to send her to college. Cut me up, eat me up, forget about it. I’m cheap like paper—a golden piñata shining in the sun. Fill my holes with your sweet stuff, hombre. Smack me around a little. Then go on your way. Give another man a chance to use his stick. Pull me down from the sky and tear me apart. Take everything I had inside, then smash it into the ground.

Ants
    A nts have been on my mind a lot lately. (Not literally, but you know.) We get lots of them in the summer. There are the big red ones outside, and the little black ones inside. The red ones bite me when I’m working in the garden. My anger at them is always tempered with grudging respect. I’ll put my foot near the edge of a flowerbed so I can pull out a weed, and the ants will start attacking me. I’ll yell, “Dammit! Ow! Die, you little red bastards!” But then I’ll realize that these ants are running out and braving the Giant Foot to save their people, and I’ll have to coo, “Aw!”
    The black ants never bite me. They just come in to eat the food that the kids have dropped around the dining table. I used to freak out when I saw them and run to douse them with bleach, brake cleaner, or whatever was on hand. Or else I’d get my oldest shoes—the ones with no treads left—and use them to pound the ants into the floor.
    But I don’t kill them anymore. Why should I? They’re only looking for food. It’s hot outside and there’s nothing but bugs and abandoned garden tomatoes for them to eat. There must be billions of ants out there, in our town. Or maybe even billions in my back yard alone. It must be like some kind of impossible dream when a colony of ants discovers the way through my kitchen door. I can just see the first ant coming in. He pulls himself up through the crack and, suddenly, the air is cool. It’s alien. “Weird,” he thinks. Maybe he’s a little scared. But he goes on. He is a scout, determined to complete his mission.
    When he gets under the table, he stops and stares. (Or waves his little feelers around. Whichever.) It’s like mounds of shining treasure in the pyramids of Egypt or something. Tortilla crumbs! Bread crumbs! Little bits of cheese! And— oh, my ant goddess!—a pool of melted Popsicle!
    But he doesn’t know the brand names, of course. He just smells the food. He senses the sugar. They all like sugar, you know. They’re just like me. Well, not like me at all, really. But they do like sugar.
    And they work so hard. There’s no telling how much organization it takes to get them all into the house and out again with the food in tow. Some people think that colonized insects must be telepathic. Either way, their systematic workflow is impressive.
    Ants really like to congregate in the piles of dirty laundry, I’ve found. And I can’t help but notice that they like to hang out in the crotches of my panties. Sometimes they eat holes into the fabric.
    This might be sick, but I find that sort of flattering.
    Not so flattering that I’d make up long involved fantasies about it, of course. I mean, I would never sit around and imagine large ants from outer space kidnapping me so that they could tie me up and then stimulate the pleasure center in my brain with real-seeming holographic scenarios about attractive celebrities being romantically interested in me, all so that the giant space ants could harvest the precious crotches from my panties and the nourishing juices contained therein.
    Or that a cornerstone of their alien economy rests on the sale of said juices and therefore makes my pleasuring an absolutely vital cause, requiring a huge lab and Research and Development Department to sustain it.
    No, I would never think about it to that extent, because that would be wrong. I’m just saying that