Bridget Callahan
I like you. I like your jawline. I think you are cute. I think about you kissing me. Pushing yourself against me in an alleyway somewhere, your fingers running under my skirt, coaxing. Hungry for that undefined want. Americans spend 110 billion on fast food every year. America sells enough pizza every day to cover 100 acres. One in four deaths is from heart disease. My heart is diseased. It eats away at me, smacking aortic fissures and cracks like little teeth. Run your mouth down my neck, and put your mouth to my breast, see if you can feel it chewing through my chest.
Tech CEOs are fasting for days at a time to biohack their bodies. They swear it makes them smarter. They use apps to track it. Someday they will make employee biometric monitoring apps and punish them for eating. Multinational corporations have accumulated almost 200 trillion in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. One in five American families is totally unemployed, meaning not a single person in the household works. 42.2% of Americans don’t have enough food.
I picture us in that hotel room. Your friend leaves the room, and we look at each other. That look is a towline, and we’re pulled together fast. You kiss me deep, scavenging. Your hands leave bruises you grab my ass so hard. Then I’m on the counter. I spread my legs for you. Your tongue starts at my ankle, and you lick all the way up my thigh until you’re tonguing my wet pussy. I beg you. I say please, don’t, stop. It’s not enough, I need
99.8% of California is experiencing extreme drought. Half the western continent is on fire—the ashes are leaving layers on the mountain peaks as messages to future geologists: Now was when everything burned. Just five countries produce 50% of the world’s CO2 emissions. The ocean is now 26% more acidic than it’s been in 300,000 years. The ocean is bubbling with hydrogen sulfide bubbles in a 1000 mile dead zone on the coast of Namibia and
I touch the outline of your cock underneath your pants, and unzip you. Your cock is so hard and strong, I put my mouth on it, swallow you. It’s not enough. I’m aching. I feel this void. It’s dark and empty, but warm and tight, and I know once I have your cock buried deep, it will stop hurting. Every bit of blood, bone, skin and breath sucking tight around you, please. Fuck me until you’re all I can think of, like smoke or
Half the world’s population lives within 37 miles of the fast-rising ocean. Please fuck me. 21.5 million refugees have been displaced by climate change, and spread across the planet like ants running. Please bend me back and over, brace me against the wall and thrust yourself into me. The bigger the flood of mass migrations gets, the more fascist the world governments get, and we’re about to deport 800,000 immigrants’ children, we’re about to build a wall, we’re about to seal ourselves away against the flood and let people die around us. Harder, please, yes. Cum in me. Do it. I’ve got plastic inside me, to stop babies from planting themselves on my flesh, but
Cum in me and pretend you can actually get me pregnant. Pretend we’re building families and everything will be loved and healthy and fine. We’ll drink bottled water on hikes, and drive everywhere without thought, and eat far away foods at brunch like gods. We’ll use air conditioning, and still run fans. We’ll shower every day, and throw out scraps of paper just because we didn’t like what was written on them.
Then hold me, as the third Cat 6 hurricane of the season crashes into islands around us, as whole populations drown around us, as your semen runs out between my legs, run your hands through my hair and whisper in my ear half-breaths. When the largest recorded iceberg calves off the arctic shelf, crashing like a new continent into the oceans, let me push my hips into yours and brace the bottom of my feet against the tops of yours, and pull your arms closer around me. The permafrost is melting. Inside, there are diseases waiting. Smallpox. Anthrax. Dormant for thousands of years. Waiting to infect something. Waiting to kill us. Don’t go outside. The rolling fog is coming. Fall asleep beside me, snoring and dying, and in the morning let me feel you stir and twist, ready to go again.
Bridget Callahan is a writer and comedian from Wilmington, North Carolina. She is an editor at The Tusk, and all her neuroses are on full display on Twitter at @bridgetcallahan.