It Feels So Good When I Stop - By Joe Pernice Page 0,3

a belch. From outer space they can shoot a pimple on a nomad’s bag while he’s taking a leak in the desert. Hiding out on Cape Cod did not exactly qualify me for “off the grid” status. If Jocelyn wanted to find me, she could.

I lit the next smoke with the end of the last one, then extinguished the butt in the backwash at the bottom of a bottle. I could hear a single boat motor shrinking in volume as its propeller chewed the water’s epidermis, pushing both boat and contents in the direction of Gay Head.

I drank another beer, and was about to go inside for the night, when I caught sight of a shadowy form moving up the street. It appeared to be hugging its midsection as if it were privately suffering from indigestion or a knife wound. I wasn’t overwhelmingly compelled to involve myself in anyone else’s trauma, but if whoever-the-fuck- it-was died while I was hiding inside, well, shit, what kind of person would that make me? I’d stay put until it passed out of my airspace. After that, it was someone else’s problem.

When the body entered the circle of streetlight adjacent to my sister’s driveway, I could tell it was a woman. Her Kelly green track jacket and purple Doc Martens hummed. She stopped momentarily and straightened up when she spotted me watching her from the porch. She slipped back into the darkness, and when she emerged, she was coming up the walkway, straight for me. I was more surprised than anything. I mean, if something happened—unless she had a gun or something—I felt pretty confident that I could take her. I tightened my grip on an empty bottle just in case.

She came up to the bottom step. I made her to be in her mid-thirties. She had a round face, capped by a grown-out black China-doll bob. Her steamy breath left her in truncated puffs. Both legs of her jeans were wet up to just below the knee, as if she’d been standing on the beach long after the tide had begun to roll in.

Her voice was raspy, like Brenda Vaccaro’s. “Who are you?” she asked.

I could tell she wasn’t straddling the peak of Mount Shitfaced, but she was either on her way up or at the corresponding point coming down the other side. I was actually slightly amused. “Who am I?”

“Mmm.”

“Who are you?”

She nodded, like that was a reasonable answer. “Marie.” She pointed in the direction she’d been moving. “From there.”

I looked at the blemished blackness into which she was headed. “That’s nice.”

“It was.” She pointed at me. “You got another one of those?”

“Of what, beer? Smoke?”

“Both.”

“Sure,” I said begrudgingly. As a drinker and a smoker, I knew the code: If your supply is visible—which sadly mine was—you always share when asked. I loosened my grip on the empty bottle and handed her a full one. I didn’t think she was going to pound it on the spot. I watched the beer pass from one receptacle to another, restricted only by gravity and the unfortunate narrowness of the bottle’s opening.

She swapped the cold, empty bottle for a cigarette.

“You need a light?”

“Mmm.” She cupped the flame and leaned into it. The backs of her hands were a multicolored filigree of tattoo ink. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

And then she split.

My eyes followed the glowing orange tip down the street until it was too small to see. Welcome to Cape Cod, I thought.

I ARRANGED MY makeshift bed on the barren living room floor, which was covered with a sandy, mange-afflicted gold shag rug. I chose a spot close to a small color television perched on a milk crate that James had set up in the early days of his own separation. I covered myself with a moving blanket and hunkered down.

I couldn’t sleep, so I started jerking a disinterested dick towards a distant conclusion. I flipped through the wank bank, finally stopping at a love scene starring me and a Bay State Games bronze-medalist pole-vaulter who was in the same Major British Writers study group as me. I couldn’t remember if her name was Catherine or Kathleen, but she went by Cat or Kat, so it didn’t matter. Jocelyn kept crashing the vignette no matter how hard I tried to write her out of it. And then I stopped trying.

Jocelyn was sitting across from me in an empty bar in Hadley. A torrential downpour was in full swing. It was close to midnight. Our relationship was new. We