5/20/2023 0 Comments Chelsea cain heartsick series![]() ![]() An entire universe of mites writhing, making a home, under my skin. A thousand licking tongues laid their voices like eggs in the soft places of me, hatching with every slippery compliment drifting down my thigh, every brazen joke squeezing my waist. They climbed up out of the mold then, as maggots do, and flew into my mouth. Once, I thought they were harmless and laughed at them. Soon enough, I learned they exist in every bar, from sticky-floored college dens to sleek date-night spots they are as much a part of the decor as the fruit flies. Odious, but easily scrubbed away with the right sort of acidity. ![]() When I was still young and dewy, I thought these sorts of men were nothing more than a residue, akin to mold slime under the sink and confined to the seedy, late-night dives of my early cocktailing days. He was brothers with Whiskey Ginger, Beer Is the Only Thing That Can Have Too Much Head, and Give Me a Smile Girl. He became, simply, Bud Light, an epithet gifted in honor of the only words he ever deigned to toss in my direction. Somewhere, in revenge, I’d forgotten his plucked it out of my pocket and dropped it to the floor, to be swept away with the food scraps at the end of the night. ![]() Ignoring him, truthfully, because in all the months he’d been coming to sit two feet across a hammered-copper counter from me, he’d never bothered to learn my name. My story begins as it so often has: I was ignoring a man at a bar. ![]()
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