He opened the car door and told me to get in, quick it was pouring rain so I wasn’t thinking. I can’t say I came from a small town where everyone knows each other and it’s no big deal to jump into someone’s car I came from a city on the beach where people just stopped and offered you a ride when the weather was shitty because things were just that way there. I didn’t think when I jumped into the car with the greasy man with the mullet didn’t think anything weird when he seemed surprised that I actually was standing on the corner waiting for a bus in the pouring rain As the conversation started to turn, I mentioned having a baby a family, a husband waiting for me at home, somehow that seemed to turn the greasy guy on even more. I kept him driving as close to my house as I could get, because now that I’d missed my bus I wasn’t going to backtrack the half-mile in the rain just to get back to where I’d started. “How much do you charge to touch?” he finally blurted out interrupted my menial conversation on my shitty day at work how degrading temp work could be. “Just with your hand, nothing else?” “I don’t think my husband would appreciate that,” I said making my voice calm, I wasn’t going to freak out, he was muscular and hairy he was so much bigger than me. “How much would you charge just to watch?” he asked, then sighed, pulled over, said, “Maybe you should just get out here.” It was about a mile from my house it was still raining but I got out and walked just the same.
*
Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, Earth’s Daughters, and Appalachian Journal, and her recent book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body, and Bound in Ice. She teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and Hugo House in Seattle.
