Kent Kosack

Fiction

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If only the team could see Luke now: Jenny naked under him, her clothing a crumpled ball on the dashboard, her body naked and trembling because it’s cold in the back of his Explorer, he feels it too, outside and inside, a numb, creeping dissatisfaction, but mostly he’s thinking about how impressed the team will be that Jenny lost her virginity to a lineman and not Drew the gangly QB or Stefan the halfback who at 16 claims to have gotten more head than Hugh Heffner, but now her breasts are lolling and it’s good, isn’t it? Weird, yes, weird but good or maybe just weird or maybe

Jenny likes Luke’s eyes, big, brown, sad eyes, and his butt, big too, but firm, hard as she grips it, and though this is the fourth football player she’s slept with, this is her first time doing it in an Explorer, the upholstery coated in matted dog fur that smells wet and rural, her Noninna’s farm upstate, Mason jars full of oily tomato sauce filling the whole pantry and she liked to turn them upside down to watch the oil separate, slide along the glass, and he’s sliding into her, simmering tomatoes, wet dog, inversions

Milo the hound, his first dog, taking him to get put down when he was eleven, his father insisting—it feels good, strange and good, is this how it’s supposed to feel?—that he see it through because Milo was really his dog and the sound of Milo’s nails on the linoleum floor, fighting against going into the clinic as if he knew. Sweaty girdles, discarded jockstraps, steam pouring out of the locker room showers

She arches her back because he’s only just hitting it, teasing it, but if she arches her back—there it is—and who is he and does it matter? Because she liked Stefan, likes Stefan, but Stefan has Sara and Abbie and could have his pick of the squad, has had, will have—the spot, that’s it, she whispers—but she isn’t about to be someone’s third or fifth choice and Luke has nice eyes and this car smells like a farm but Stefan has nice everything—that’s it, almost it, but not quite—wrinkled fingers, rusty lids, a wooden spoon stained red

Did he come? Something happened but he’s still hard and no, it was another thing, he doesn’t know what, some sort of pre-coming, and Coach Nelson had said if he did his drills, hitting the sled, jacking it up with not just his arms but from the hips, that his girlfriend would thank him and was she his girlfriend now—now, now, almost now—thinking of Coach Nelson, his sharp chin, his broken nose all flat and rubbery—why do they call condoms, rubbers? Aren’t they plastic? And why is he thinking about Coach Nelson and his stupid teammates who called him a homo for still being a virgin at 17—and he’s trying to focus on Jenny but the team keeps intruding on him so he imagines them dead, all of them, a bus accident, guts everywhere, drowned in a flood, vaporized by a nuke—and he’s coming now, this is it, yes, the Big It, the first It, who’s a homo now? And the jingle of the local sporting goods store where he bought his first cleats is for some reason thrumming in his ears as he comes—are you coming? Did you come? He asks her because he doesn’t want to be selfish and thinks this demonstrates maturity and experience—and he falls on her chest, panting, hearing that jingle: gotta go to Mo’s, gotta go to Mo’s, yeah, gotta go to Mo’s, Modell’s! 

They lie there for a while. Listen to distant cars. Smell the upholstery, each other. 

He leans back, puts his weight on his palms, flexes his pecs. Her face is flush. Her hair, damp. Skin goose-pimpled. He notices her left nipple isn’t straight. It drifts to the left like a lazy eye, a sideways glance. He asks: What are you thinking about?

She runs her fingers along the thin strip of hair from his belly button to two pimples on his sternum, one a whitehead, swollen, ready to pop. She takes her hand away, rests it on her chest. Mounds of crushed garlic. A colander full of basil. Stefan. Nothing, she says. You?

The team, he says, sliding the condom off into a paper towel at the ready.

What?

Pulling for a right sweep. Driving the outside linebacker into the sidelines. Slipping and landing facedown in the wet, cleat-torn earth. The goalposts charred, radioactive. Nails gouging linoleum. Stefan’s thighs powering him upfield, hips swiveling. You.

Kent Kosack is a writer based in Pittsburgh. His work has been published in Exacting Clam, Full Stop, minor literature[s], 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere.

Photo Credit: Kit Bose is a photographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She primarily shoots with film, developing and printing her work in a traditional wet darkroom. Driven by a desire to experience the otherworldly, she uses photography to document uncanny locations in both rural and urban environments, evoking the sense of unease that arises from emptiness.