THE SKY LOOKS BEST OVER SOUTH DAKOTA, SHE SAYS.
I say, fuck South Dakota will you please.
She says, you go fuck South Dakota. Then she says, you fucking child.
We go on like this for a few minutes until she removes her clothes. Naked she looks like a real woman with the skin and bumps. Otherwise, I don’t know what’s happened to her.
She wants me to say she is pretty, beautiful, call her a filthy whore. She wants me to touch her places.
She doesn’t have children but wants me to call her mother. She wants me to spend the night so she can nurse me in the morning. She always wants, this woman.
Me, I can’t say there’s anything I want for outside of sleeping the night straight through. I’ve been told I should visit a doctor, that I should consider medication. The people who told me this, I’ve seen them naked, too. The same skin and bumps and awful wants as this woman here.
The one thing I know is this—Mother did not give birth to me.
The other thing I know is it is no real calamity.
My real calamity is I can drink myself drunk or dead and still not sleep through the night.
After we’re finally done we both say we’re hungry but there’s nothing to eat. We listen to our naked stomachs grumble instead of talking or finding food somewhere.
If I had to guess I’d say I met this woman in a downtown bar in some bad luck city. There was probably a jukebox playing country music and maybe we danced to it. Otherwise we stayed at the bar and nursed one nasty straight up after another with beer chasers until deciding this was the best we could do. Either way this was probably three or four years ago now. I think her name is Alice or Gretchen. She won’t confirm or deny anything but I went through her purse once and found driver’s licenses for both names. One had her as a blonde in Georgia, the other a brunette in New Mexico.
Me she calls her baby boy. She’s never said why.
She says things like, Come on over to Mother now baby boy.
I tried to shake her once in the Pacific Northwest, but it didn’t work. She says she wants to fuck me in all fifty states; that she won’t give up until we hit them all.
I don’t know how many are left.
Tomorrow I’ll leave her in this hotel room and break north. I’ll hide out and try to get some sleep in Sioux Falls until she catches up.
But what I’ll tell her is I’m going out for breakfast and will bring Mother back something good.