“Undo. Undo. Undo!” Nina frantically tapped Ctrl+Z.

But the keyboard was a vestige of muscle memory, it didn’t work here.

She sat at a green table with beings who she nearly hated as much as millipedes—dogs, with human bodies.

The pit bull at the center of the table, wearing a hoodie and sunglasses, dealt two cards to each player with his pale-skinned, five-digit anthropoid hands.

Flip. Flip. Flip.

He placed the cards down to devour a medium rare steak, its shredded vestiges dropping to the table with the juices from his smacking slobbery lips.

The other members of the table joined in. 

“All in,” said the Rottweiler in a bowler hat, vest and pin striped shirt. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and pushed a pile of used band-aids to the center of the table.

Nina dry-heaved from the sight. It was worse than the dog-people, and a close second behind millipedes.

The ace on the river gave Nina a royal flush, but there was no way she was grabbing the pot of blood-spotted rubber skin flaps.

Nina’s phone alarm erupted.

It always did at 5:52 a.m. Every weekday. Exactly. 

Her idiosyncratic calibration deliberately fine-tuned her morning choreography in metronomic discipline, synchronized meticulously to the millisecond by her own peculiar internal logic. Or in other words, she figured out how long it took her to… do… stuff.

For example, it took her exactly twenty-five seconds to turn off the alarm, remove the covers, sit, stretch, and stand. Nine seconds to walk from bed to bathroom and close the door. Seventeen to tie up her hair. Two to start the faucet, pre-set to 121 degrees Fahrenheit, and eight seconds to remove her sleep shirt and underwear. She packed them neatly into the hamper which was emptied every night.

Showering and toweling off took precisely 15 minutes and 32 seconds. She then dedicated four minutes, twenty-eight seconds to floss, brush, and rinse for an even 20 minutes of hygiene maintenance.  Five minutes to blow dry, five minutes to poo. Admittedly she should’ve done it before showering and not afterward, but my prose is more important than her schedule.  While the exact details in which order I may not be completely aware, I do know her routine included an allotment of time to stare at herself in the mirror to notice all of her flaws. This took anywhere from one to twenty-six minutes depending on her mood on any particular day.

Breakfast, which consisted of two eggs over-easy with gluten-free toast and avocado, took five minutes to prepare and five minutes to eat. But multitasking breakfast whilst comparing herself to AI-generated images of women on social media extended breakfast time to almost an hour. 

And now she was late. 

No problem. She had contingency plan-c12 for just these types of unexpected delays. The outfit for her day was already pressed and prepared. It took no time at all to adorn it. Her hair never needed more than a quick brush, and she could sweep it into a professional ponytail with a dab of product. She was also a seasoned expert at makeup, able to apply a full face while yelling “ffffuuuUUUUCK!” on her mad rush out the door, finishing her signature eyeliner wisps at a stoplight during the commute.

Nina screeched her brakes into her parking spot with the calm, calculated collision of near-fatal precision. 

Scratch that, reverse it. Nina shifted her car to R, backing up from having knocked over a plant. She grabbed her bag, purse, keys and coffee container and prepared to enter Trite Essentials L.L.C. 

She took a deep breath. 

It was a Friday. 

She briskly walked through the office foyer, past Rich’s office as fast as she could, without being obvious. Today he didn’t immediately summon her, because he wasn’t in his office. - Phew. She beelined for her workstation. Picked up a phone to pretend to be on a sales call - the only method effective enough to insulate someone from Rich bothering them. A method the entire sales team knew about and employed.

She looked down at her desk. The yellow highlighter had tilted, a centimeter off parallel from the evenly spaced lineup.

She corrected it.

“Wake UP!” 

The abrupt shout from the other side of the annex disrupted her focus. Rich was yelling in the office, which was fairly usual. 

“What are you doing, are you daydreaming?” She overheard Rich playfully scolding. 

Nina stood up, peaking over her cubicle firewall, from here she had a clear view of Brian slouching back in his chair, giving Rich a defiant look. 

“Oh god, here we go.” She said to herself. It had only been a matter of time before Rich picked on the new guy. He didn’t do any work it seemed. He had been sitting at his desk staring out the window since his first day. Every time she happened to see him, whether it was walking past his cubicle, or catching a glimpse when she stood to stretch her legs. He sat there, staring. Possibly drooling on himself. 

As a professional sales rep herself, she found Brian’s office behavior very unprofessional. He was a bit unkempt. His hair seemed to do whatever it wanted, void of any supervision. His clothes were old. Not tattered, but not new or ironed. He wasn’t tall or extremely handsome, no more than totally average. There was a faint hint of odor around his cubicle also, he might’ve smelled a bit. Not terrible, but similar to a puppy. 

“OMG, puppies,” she laughed in her head. 

She found them so cute. Definitely a little stinky, but adorable all the same. 

Whenever she saw one, she wanted to take it home, because they were usually without one. 

They needed attention, which she found annoying most of the time, but they were good for a cuddle. 

Nina epiphanized she was describing all her ex-boyfriends.

Although she’d never owned a puppy who stalked her, they do tend to root through your trash.

It was the precise mix Brian’s pheromones emitted of overcompensating mediocrity with authority-defiance and faint puppy smell which drove Nina absolutely scorching with uncontainable desire. It made no sense to her at all. 

He was not what she thought her type should be. She was supposed to be with someone put together like her. Someone semi-important. In a business-casual vest, with square-rimmed glasses. This guy? The thought made her a little angry at herself. She put down her headset and went to the restroom. It took her exactly seven minutes and twenty seconds to masturbate, much shorter today than her usual seven minutes and twenty-nine. 

On her way out, she was accosted by Brad Rogbin, Senior Junior yeah, you already know where this is going.

“Hey Nina, Brad Rogbin, Senior Junior Sales Executive. I was just wondering…”

“I know who you are, Brad.”

Brad did not appreciate being addressed by his first name only. While it was a pretty solid first name, he felt it lacked the necessary gravitas which presented the extent of the worth and value he brought to the company. Brad Rogbin, Senior Junior Sales Executive, was a somebody. He held the highest-ranking position in the sales team for the company’s entire 17-week history. If there had been a hierarchy at Trite Essentials, he would unmistakably be Rich’s right hand’s right hand man's right hand. He felt he should be addressed with the acknowledgment he deserved. Because “Brad” on the other hand, felt short and dismissive. Brad sounded like the name of some idiot who peaked in high school and ended up regularly huffing glue under the elevated train while financially and spiritually ruined by a failed career in corporate magic. And that Brad died 17 weeks ago. Brad Rogbin was his name. And his game was executing sales at the highest rank of the lowest tier of employees at Trite Essentials, a small startup operating out of a dirty warehouse in a vacant industrial park, currently focused on the production and marketing of a metal wire Twist Tie knockoff which often caused tiny puncture wounds in fingertips. 

He looked at her, with his hot inner contempt simmering below the boil. 

“Yeah so, I noticed you spent eight minutes in the bathroom when, as you know, we are only allowed fifteen, you only have seven left for the day and it’s only 10 a.m.” 

“Fuck you, Brad.” She said, "I'm busy.” 

Nina went to her desk; she highlighted her time sheet for her four-minute break in yellow. Her anger sizzled with the knowledge she was being monitored for using the restroom, and by Brad, nonetheless. With his cheap trying-to-be-cool haircut and men's body sprays he was convinced created an animalistic attraction from the opposite sex, as the ad phrasing had targeted him. His overly-cocky faux-confidence masked an obvious inferiority compl—

“Oh goddammit.” 

Nina went to the restroom again for seven minutes and twenty-nine seconds with an extra forty to get the job done. 

Brad rounded up her bathroom time to sixteen and reported it to Rich. 

“Hey Nina, could you come over here please?” Rich asked. 

Nina walked to Rich, standing next to Brad who had a smug look. 

“Brad tells me you were on the terlit for sixteen minutes. Company policy is fifteen per day. You went OVER. A MINUTE OF TIME THEFT.  I’M DOCKIN’ YOUR PAY!”

Rich wrote on a Post-it note and said aloud, “NEGATIVE twenty five and four one-hundredths cents, US Dollars.”

He stuck it to Nina’s head. The note publicly branded her like a defective toy. 

-$0.24 4⁄100 USD - RR

“From now on, Nina, and this goes for everyone, you will log your terlit activity in the Terlit Utilization Logbook. We need metrics and time efficiency if we’re gonna hit our goals.” 

He wrote on white masking tape pasted to a binder, “TOILET LOG.”

“And this, folks, is leadership,” he said, arms out like a dictator expecting cheers.

One brave intern begins a slow clap, and the rest follow, faces pale. Nina peeled the Post-it off her forehead without speaking. She nearly laughed. The pathetic spectacle of overcompensated confidence masking deep-seated incompetence was always kind of funny. When it came from an actual position of power, though… it was still funny, but more in a terrifying oh-god-he’s-holding-the-nuclear-codes kind of way.

Rich shouted, “New office motto! TERLIT TIME IS UNPAID TIME. Nina, record it in my QQB, also why don’t you wear skirts? I like my girls to show some leg.” 

Nina uncapped her orange marker. There were no restroom minutes left to use the black pen today. She wasn’t sure if she was angrier at the entire situation as a whole, or the annoying fact the time she actually took was rounded up to sixteen. However, company policy dictated all time entries be logged in thirty-second intervals.

She and Brian made eye contact, but they both looked away. Both feeling sad for the other, both feeling confusingly attracted to the other, both angry at many things. There was an abundance of complex electrical emotions in the room, well... at least three. I guess its not really complex now. I explained it so simply. Perhaps I should rather poetically express this in a verbose metaphor overusing fifteen to twenty synonyms to describe the situation ad nauseum. 

Nah. 

Nina aggressively scribbled down her unpaid time in the Toilet Log. She neutralized the burn of humiliation by reminding herself she fully intended to give her two weeks’ notice. Soon. Very soon. She had been referred by a friend to a new company. A forward-thinking company. One where they allowed as many seven-minute and twenty-nine second restroom breaks as she’d ever require to suppress the volcanic rage inside her. 

She wasn’t sure how any self-respecting person could work here. Then again, she worked here. But not for long. Brian, on the other hand, didn’t have much hope. If only he carried himself like she did, maybe then he’d actually say whatever it was he so clearly muttered in his inner monologue. Maybe I should follow my own advice, she thought. But she had an effective method to tamp out her impulsive grease fires: slamming a lid on her mouth.

Maybe Brian’s had his own method too. Maybe he merely kept the lid on - never allowing it to breathe. But clearly, it still was. His average face silently screamed entire psychotic manifestos. She wasn’t sure if it was frightening or compelling.

The truth was, they both must’ve needed the job. It was a thin, fraying thread, suspending them above their own personal pitfalls, its singed fibers laboring to stay intact, enough to stitch their lives together beneath the flimsiest illusion of stability. Hers was already unraveling, reaching for something stronger. His would hold long enough to trap him at Trite Essentials forever.

She went back to her cubicle and took a lighter from her drawer, lighting a vanilla-scented candle on her desk. She hovered her palm above the candle’s breath, letting the heat flirt with her skin, measurable, contained, alive. The previous feelings of humiliation and anger flickered into a lingering smoke settled in a fog below the air space she could breathe back in. She also found joy in pouring the molten wax, only a little, unnoticeable but effective, within the spaces of Brad’s keyboard. Particularly the keys he’d use to spell his name. 

But she needed something else. A reminder of Trite Essentials soon drifting into a distant memory. She opened her email and scrolled to her acceptance letter.

To:N.Forne@TriteEssentials.buildyourownwebsite.biz

From: Recruitment@Antidrome.com

Subject: On REF: NINA. Referred Applicant #021481

Dear Ms. Forne,

Congratulations!

We are delighted to extend you an offer for the position of Theoretical Director of Dream Empathy, located in the Antidrome Dreamspace Pyramid, reporting to the Supervisory Management Team of Department Directors, Northeastern Region.

Your tentative start date is Day 195, 0001 Æ (Antidrome Event) and is contingent upon successful neural alignment and pre-dream engagement protocol satisfaction. You will be notified via intuitive signal drift once all contingencies have been cleared.

This is a Continuous, Non-Physical Conscious Placement.

Nina continued reading over the stylized fonts of this new company. 

JOIN US ON OUR MISSION INTO THE IMAGINATE INFINITE™

This sounded really good, in the way she thought she understood it. It made more sense at least a bit more than the next line.

“At Antidrome Inc., we specialize in Unconscious Productivity (UP®), Dream Monetization (DM™), and Post-Lucid Asset Refinement (P-LAR®).

Through our proprietary Somnesthia™ platform, we capture and convert the imaginative byproducts of UP® into usable intellectual property. These dream fragments are then licensed and sold to advanced artificial intelligences seeking Emotional Experience Algorithms, Paramnesic Authenticity Metrics™, and Meaning-Generation Datasets.

We believe the human mind is the most underleveraged platform in history.

And yours is now a part.”

She felt very proud to have been chosen.

She knew she had hidden potential; it was simply a matter of time until a company recognized it.

She reread the section about compensation:

Base Empathy Credit:

We are pleased to offer you a starting salary of Limitless Financial Freedom, issued in the form of Antidrome-backed virtual currency, known as Non-Tangible Funds (NTFs). This currency is fully exchangeable in any economy, contingent upon global acceptance of Antidrome as an economically viable entity.

She might admit later, most of the words, at a certain point, were dampened beneath the volume of “Limitless Financial Freedom.”

Antidrome’s benefits were refreshing, and honestly, kind of exciting. Innovative. Efficient. Their SleepWork / FreeLife Balance System™ combined sleep and work hours to be spent concurrently. Aside from team-building sessions and daily meetings, her shifts would align entirely with her natural sleep cycle. 

She could spend her life, while awake, or during “DownTime” as Antidrome called it, free to do whatever she wished. 

She never needed to commute to a physical office.

She never had to wake up at 5:52 a.m. again, unless she chose to end her UP shift then. Which she wouldn’t. 

She wasn’t stuck in this city anymore. She wasn’t bound by time or space. She could do this anywhere and whenever. 

This all sounded amazing to her.

But it was the next line which really sealed the deal:

UNLIMITED RESTROOM BREAKS. (you are free to employ a bedpan during your UP®.)

She exhaled, long and relaxed, dousing out the candle's flame on her desk, as if it, too, collapsed from sheer relief. This was why she kept rereading the email. The unlimited restroom, not the bedpan.

Also, clothing was optional. Who would know? But she was a bit concerned she would always wonder.

Even personal hygiene was optional. Eh, okay. No thanks. 

She was slightly concerned her coworkers could be… secretly feral. 

Identity was optional - the exception being her employee ID number. 

Your projection of your synesthetic self is optional, adaptable, and entirely up to you (however, company policy encourages maintaining at least 75% recognizably human).

At first Nina thought of being a cat.

No. Not a cat… a phoenix…actually a cat-phoenix hybrid.

So: three-quarters human, 12.5% cat, 12.5% phoenix.

Ugh. But where would she even buy an outfit? Would she need one or two pairs of shoes… or none?

She glossed over the final benefits, Deferred Ego Retirement Plans, Optional Memory Shedding, and Rebirth Sabbaticals; she was too busy mentally debating whether she'd prefer a feline face with flaming wings, or a flaming face with toe beans. She definitely would keep her human breasts. No question. What do phoenix tits even look like? Nips ablaze probably, she guessed. “Awesome” she thought.

We are pleased to Welcome you to Antidrome Inc. And welcome to Somnesthia™. This is a place where your potential will go beyond more than yourself.”

 Sincerely,

Indeterminate Representative #44-C

Recruitment Division

Antidrome Inc.

www.antidrome.com

Your Dreams Will Build the Future™

ADDITIONAL NOTES

This position is not bound by physical employment law and may persist across multiple lifetimes. You will no longer require federal identification, bodily presence, or belief structure.

Antidrome Inc. is committed to dream-equity, psychological diversity, and recursive feedback inclusion. We are proud to be a Post-Form Equal Opportunity Entity, making decisions without regard to past-life karma, terrestrial gender, chronotype, zodiac misalignment, or unresolved mother issues.

Maybe she could just make her own nipples ablaze… like, selectively… thanks to her humanoid phoenix DNA.

I don’t assume to know what goes on in a woman’s mind, nor would I claim to. But this all makes sense to me. As a mind whose existence is nothing more than a silent voice in a space which can be everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, for all I know, I could be a woman. 

So, in this case:

Here’s exactly what was going on in this woman’s mind: she was thinking about her own boobs.

Like I just said. Like all women do, according to my sheer ignorance. Everyone thinks about boobs all the time. This doesn’t make me a man necessarily, it makes me alive - despite the fact my mere existence is questionable and my free will, at best, is dubious. 

The fact Brian spends most of his day thinking about or with his male genitalia once can only assume it’s true for the opposite sex.

But this raises the question, what am I?

I guess my Brian body attaches me adjacently to masculinity, if you could call him masculine. He feels like a man, or so he says, but I have all the dirt on Brian. Sometimes he thinks he should identify as a pig. 

Honestly, I could go either way. Man. Woman. Pig. Pigman, or none of those things. I’m indecisive, and ambivalent, but I think not having to have the decision made for you is maybe the best.

Well, I guess my Brian body attaches me adjacently to masculinity, if you could call him masculine. He feels like a man, or so he says, but I have all the dirt on Brian. Sometimes he thinks he should identify as a pig. 

Honestly, I could go either way. Man. Woman. Pig. Pigman, or none of those things. I’m indecisive, and ambivalent, but I think not having to have the decision made for you is maybe the best.

Be whatever you feel. Today, I feel… 72% male, which is probably around the top of my baseline. I’m gonna wear pants but still don’t give a shit about Marvel movies. I won’t be drinking any Yaeger bombs or spelling “eagles” loudly and obnoxiously, but I’m not putting any makeup on Brian… today anyway.

Whatever a standard binary 100% male is, I’m not sure if I’ve ever experienced it. There are plenty of those football-and-super-hero-movie loving, cargo-short-wearing, beer-guzzling idiots in the world, who more than likely have sexually harassed someone in the past. As far as I can tell, this is the hive-mind agreed definition, but it shouldn’t be right. Those guys are silly and stupid, and they cry a lot more than they are willing to confess.

What does 72% male facial hair look like though? I’ll have to wonder about it. The twenty-first century and its very complex categorizing system of rules and limitations can sometimes be difficult to successfully box yourself within it. In the 90s the culture rejected such social constructs, but they’ve come back with vengeance.

Not since the post-nuclear family era has there been such public fixation on defining fluidity. But now, instead of two requirements, we have thousands of expectations, sometimes vague and nebulous, contradictory direction depending on who is directing, with constantly shifting specificity on both what to look like and how to think… this sounds a lot like some of Brian’s jobs.

Maybe I’m not telling the truth here. I think Brian should identify as a pig. He’s pasty, pale, patches of hair in weird spots and a little chubby. He chews with his mouth open, partially my fault, I’ll admit. When I get bored, I try to catch bugs with it. It’s this stupid game where I pretend Brian’s mouth is a venus fly trap.

Yeah, it’s dumb. But there’s not much else to do up here besides entertain yourself. 

These are all things I could get him to ask me to make him have me fix these things for himself, easily. A simple “please” once in a while would be nice. 

But for fuck’s sake, no one should ever have to witness this man have sex. He huffs and puffs like a smoker in a marathon, which comes out sometimes like a grunt, once as a full burst of snot. He drips sweat onto his victim while shoving his spongey, humid skin into them. Crushing them beneath his weight for a grueling eight to twelve minutes, because his arms are too weak to hold himself up for so long.

Why Nina chose to endure it a second time is a mystery to me.

Oops, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s go back… or forward.

No. Actually, perpendicular to Z space.

So rather X and Y diagonally, plus… or even minus… time. 

It should land us to the nearest coordinate where we left off in this fractured-continuity timeline, buried inside a questionably tangible metaverse. 

Nina spent the rest of the workday generating AI images of herself as a cat-phoenix. Catastrophoenix, she named her avatar. And Catastrophoenix had the superpower of fire nipples which could incinerate Kafkaesque, commission-based sales jobs with strict time-restricted masturba—restroom breaks.

Kafkaesque wasn’t even a strong enough word for Trite Essentials. It was probably worse, because she was almost certain she didn’t fully understand what it meant. She knew it meant whoever said it was trying really hard to say it.

But Trite Essentials probably could be defined this way. Everything felt like a mistake, but no one will explain why, and you have to submit the same sales form three times for shipping, financial and commission. But each category of customer had slightly different forms and you always feel like you’ve been accused of something, but you don’t know what. The only fact remained was you needed to appeal to Rich. But at some point, he used the copier to print out old modeling photos of you from the internet, images you didn’t even know were public, and placed them in a folder labeled “Evidence.”  

This place was hell. 

She was happy to be moving on to Antidrome where she wouldn’t have to deal with incompetent leadership, because there was no leadership, only directives issued by an unnamed and faceless entity. The mission, as far as she could tell, was to dream vaguely and be compensated even more vaguely. Everything was wrapped in a soft, welcoming tone, like being euthanized by a guided meditation. And the soothing guided voice was screaming, “Leave. Walk out. Now!”

So, she did. Right then. Right at 5 o’clock. Exactly the time when her shift ended. And she was never going to return to Trite Essentials again until 8 o’clock Monday.  

But at least this was the beginning of the weekend. 

It took her exactly 12 minutes to drive to the gym. 30 minutes to work out. 10 minutes home, and 2 minutes to walk up to her third-floor apartment. Seven minutes and twenty-nine seconds to masturbate a third time. 

It had been a rough day. 

Not her record, but not too far off. 

The record, six times, was set the day her college professor told her she “needed to calm down.”

Another thing which was set the same day was the professor’s car.

The lack of evidence of whoever was responsible never quelched the rumors. Particularly among Nina’s college friends. Even years later. 

Nina’s phone dinged from a text. 

“Snapdragon. Tonight. You volatile bitch. Lol.”  

They planned to pick Nina up at 10. 

This gave her a little less than four hours to prepare. It was going to be tight. 

Thirty minutes to debate what to wear. 

Thirty minutes to debate whether to go at all. 

One hour to eat, shower and waste time. 

Another hour to debate what to wear. 

And twenty-seven minutes of manic preparation. 

Planning the schedule had already made her late. 

She walked out her door at 10:07. Her old college friends were waiting in the car. 

I find the one thing more confusing than trying to understand what goes on in the mind of a woman, is trying to understand what a group of them talk about. It’s not like I haven’t heard such conversations; I have. But as far as I can tell, they are simply a series of anecdotes and subjects constantly shifting into new ones without much segue. This to say, is not worse than men’s communication which consists of conversational grunts about balls. Sports balls, and their own.

Nina and her three former college roommates, whose names are even less important than their purpose, drove off to Snapdragon. They filled the ride with topics including personal relationships, family, work and shared experiences according to Google.

Alright fine, I’ll name them and give them Australian accents. 

“Oi! Hey, Walk-On Character #2,” Minor Character #1 said, “What the bloody hell is Plot Device #3 doin’ back there?” 

“She’s not helpin’ us move forward, I can definitely say. She’s dead.” 

They all laughed except for Plot Device.

Nina finally turned her head into the back seat. “Oh my god… she is dead.”

They screamed in the harmony of Missa Hystorialis in F♯ for the Recently Deceased, as they pulled into the parking lot.

They flung the unwanted red herring into the bar’s dumpster like the temporary distraction she was, and walked to the club entrance, laughing, tripping over their heels like any woman trope described by a clueless man.

The door blasted open, and the pressure differential sent Nina’s and her two remaining friends’ hair cascading backward in cinematic slow motion. 

It was a breathtaking entrance, tragically unobserved.

♫

Grind on each other like we like it

(we can’t fight it)

Teeth crush tryin’ to bite it

Smear the blood, eat the flesh

Pour a meat daiquiri on your chest

Cherry glaze burns party sweat

Everything is fucking wet

They danced on the cold, hard cement floor, thirty feet from their friend’s trashy grave outside, already forgetting she ever existed. Nina spun mid-groove and caught, in the corner of her eye, a familiar face.

Brian. From work.

Staring at her with the psychotic focus of someone who’d been lobotomized into enlightenment, unblinking, locked in place, his confused eyebrows trying to decode reality like a CAPTCHA: check every box containing ‘human connection.’ Maybe he was stuck on whether this image showed enough of one in the corner, or not quite enough to hit submit.

She turned again, he was closer. Moving toward her like a zombie until he stood a meter from her. 

“Uh… hi, Brian.” she said, instead of: why the fuck are you staring at me and not talking? 

“How… are you?” 

“Hi Nina!” he snapped back into life, “We work together, and we’re both here too… cool!” 

“Yeah,” she side-eyed him, widely. “I guess you’re right.” 

“Yeah.” he agreed, nodding and smiling, like an idiot. 

While the music was blasting, there was an awkward silence. She gave a polite smile back and nodded with him. 

Nina could tell she’d have to take control and hand-hold this dummy into her crotch. So, she rolled around in the mud of his social level. 

“I don’t only exist at work, you know? I come here… and go other places too. I like the music here.” 

“So you like music and you work at the place I work? Wow!” 

Oh come on, give me something to work with, she thought. Jesus Christ, maybe liquor will make him sentient. Maybe getting him drunk would turn him into a real boy, so she pulled him to the bar.  

But it didn’t seem like he was there. His body was. The faint puppy smell was. But the usual open windows of his eyes revealing multitasking and complex thought processes were uncharacteristically blocked by drawn shades. She looked at him again, peering in, and he looked like a disaster.

She downed her drink. Then another. He was kinda cuter than she had originally thought at work and while sober. Their conversation was interrupted as she was pulled off her stool. 

“Nina! We’re goin’ to the next bar you spazzy cunt!” 

She turned to him, “Sorry I gotta go. Can we talk Monday? It was good to see you.” 

He paused, looked at her. Then said with soft certainty, or at least what Nina thought she heard was, “It would be nice to see you nude.” 

The whiplash of confidence he had pulled from his bag caught her off guard. It could have been creepy if it hadn’t been so … weirdly innocent. She alternated to a contingency plan. It would take three minutes and fifteen seconds to explain to her friends she was staying, a ballpark of fifteen minutes to get a cab, allowing for at least one more drink to solidify her decision-making ability. And depending on whose apartment was closer, they could be having sex right around a quarter past el—

Even I dreaded this inevitable moment.

I don’t want to describe it. Recounting all of Brian’s particular… copulation eccentricities feels both gratuitous and repetitive.

So instead of revisiting the grotesque debacle in unnecessary detail, I’ll simply offer the most sanitary summary possible: yes, Brian and Nina rubbed their bathroom parts together.

If there really were a god, he really did not think this through. Why are genitals multi-tool? Why combine our erogenous zones with our waste shooters? If you were building a water park, would you also make it a sewage treatment facility?

And another, more grounded, reality-based question: how did this happen under natural selection?

The same parts used to reproduce are also the ones most likely to give you a disease.

In what way did it ever benefit the continuation of the species to have the baby-making parts and the Play-Doh poop factory exactly next to each other? I don’t even want to talk about ducks. 

Play-Doh is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc., which I’d like to clarify is in no way responsible for the human anus. I want to differentiate to avoid any defamation about defecation suits. 

Honestly, it feels like a sick joke, and the only convincing argument I can think of for the existence of a deity who’s either a prankster sadist, or so catastrophically incompetent at product development they had to retrofit everything with dysfunctional hardware updates.

So when religious people say their god hates people who don’t use the hardware exactly the same way, they should be reminded: what they really hate is their own god’s nonsensical wiring, not the end user.

Humans should put aside their differences and agree on one universal truth: all sex is gross.

And I find particularly so when Brian engages in it. 

Perhaps because I have to sit in the front row, forced to watch a terrible play at an amateur community theater, until I can quietly slip out the exit.

Which is exactly why many people feel their thoughts shut off during the act or are left with nothing but reptilian brain insecurities.

“Is she enjoying this?” Brian wondered. “What does she think about me?” 

“Can sloths move faster, but just choose not to?” Nina pondered. “Maybe they have it all figured out? The world moves too fast, and it needs to catch up… or rather slow down… to them. Maybe it’s a lesson we could all learn. How would it translate to late-stage capitalism? hmm…” 

“I think she’s enjoying this, let me try this move.” Brian thought. 

“...and maybe it would be beautiful,” Nina continued, “if the world decided to tick at a milder pace. Uber might be annoying. But maybe if humans had been closer related to sloths…” 

“Yeah, she’s into it.” 

“... Homosapiens might not have survived though without running… and actually, a humanoid sloth wouldn’t even be a homosapien, are sloths even in the ape family? I’ll have to Google it…”

The critics would later agree, the performance started to fall apart in the second act. They noted the parallel narratives never converged in any meaningful way. To be fair, the first hadn’t established much of a storyline either. The second had a flimsy foundation to build upon.

And the third, let’s just say, didn’t fulfill its promises.

They did, however, find it provocative enough to briefly research sloths.

“Was it good for you?” Brian attempted to sound confident in his cliché and insecure question.

“...Sure, um, do you have any matches?” Nina assured him.

“You smoke?”

“No.”

“Yeah, there’s some in the bathroom actually.” 

“Perfect. I just need to freshen up, I’ll be at least seven and a half minutes.” 

Nina closed the bathroom door and rested her hand against it, as if holding it shut would keep the memory of what just happened from getting in.

Brian stretched out, arms crossed behind his head, and stared at the ceiling, fully immersed in the joyous memory of what just happened.

Nina cupped the matchbook resting on Brian’s cluttered sink and looked at herself in the mirror, water-spotted, toothpaste-splattered, and rimmed with flecks of tooth gunk, flung loose by floss and left to fossilize.

At least he flossed, she noted, like a paleontologist reconstructing Brian’s ethology from his sediment.

But the thought quickly gave way to a more urgent question, her own behavior, which she debated excavating.

It’s not like she didn’t enjoy sex. She did. But she’d get distracted, usually by the contorted face of the man above her, looking like a dog wiping its butt on a carpet.

It was something which tended to happen to her, not with her. 

Honestly, it felt more like a collaborative effort when no one else was there.

It wasn’t all bad, dissociating was fun.

Instead of unpacking it further, she burned some toilet paper. One square at a time, watching as they curled and dissolved into sparkling ash, wandering through the air, flickering like glittering embers until they faded to black, ending their mono-purposed lives. 

She was liberating them from a monotonous prison, chained to a cardboard cylinder, condemned without trial, queued for a fate worse than the electric chair. She was simply giving them a more dignified execution.

She did this until they were all free, their ascension into the aether complete. A redemption which was long overdue. Then again maybe it was too soon. She realized there was nothing left to wipe Brian out of her vagina with.

A bath towel hung next to the shower suggesting a questionable degree of sanitary reliability. She begrudgingly took it off the hook.

Saturday night echoed the previous, but with even less satisfaction. The cardboard roll still sat naked on the spindle. Brian hadn’t gone to the store at all. Therefore, the next oppressed object begging for redemption was a 1993 Hyundai Stellar, its incendiary liberation from Rich’s tyranny igniting right before dawn.