souls’ day breviary

1. Oremus

I’d met everyone earlier that night, picked up a few substantive facts because that’s what you do at that kind of party. He was drinking sour apple schnapps from Bavaria out of nostalgia, her landlord was a little too controlling. The inflatable pig – clean shaved – expressed continual disappointment with the vagaries of adulthood; a patchy beard. And then, at the end of the alley, a friend nods toward a make-out in progress. Some said fingerbang. Later: pants down and positioning in an adjacent alley (they’d moved), tweaked nipples. The whole thing.

2. Antiphon

I didn’t see, but it was her first night wearing a beret ($5 and, the girl with one vampire fang said, “worth it”). He was a fedora-d adjunct at a senior college in Queens who nicely introduced himself as a teacher. Western Civilization – “Bible to Freud.” Roughly the bits I’d cut out, but I was rooting for him regardless. A friend whose last name I still wrongly pronounce with an aspirated ‘K’ said it was only frottage, humping. Someone else – married to an architect – said there was more: rain-wet cock & crumbling mortar, dirty skies opening on the venially sinning. Luckily for them, they both wore hats.

• That Thing With All The Drowned Authors: An Apology
• online books to read and share
• Triangulating Happiness (2007)