Sexual Tension

Photo by Get Lost Mike / Pexels

Residencies are the best and worst when they cut you off from internet. This makes you more productive, sure, but it also prevents you from using the web for its main purpose, which as we all know is porn. It thus becomes inevitable that you (in this case, me) must find a suitable appendage attached to a warm and preferably fetching body with which to stab yourself for pleasure.

It’s only the first night but I must act fast since there are only eight of us. At dinner, I have my eye on Alfredo, a wing-tipped Argentinian who calls himself an “air artist,” which sounds hot, whatever it means. Over peach cobbler in a Georgia stone house surrounded by cabins and the river where Deliverance was shot, Alfredo claims to have never watched TV. I spot my opening.

“I can’t watch TV either,” I inform the table. “It’s just so much slower than reading.”

Alfredo nods with a scruffed chin. I smile; clueless men make the best prey. To bolster my point, I bring up the adaptation of the Quebecois literary sensation Salée Roonet’s Tête-à-têtes avec Confidantes, which has proven that modern bodice-rippers can be award-winning when peppered with français. “I don’t know how people justify watching ten hours of TV when they can just read the novel in one sitting.”

“Books do get drawn out for no good reason,” adds Savage from Atlanta, a painter whose knitted cardigan and blonde highlights read suburban mom. I imagine a peewee soccer game in her neighborhood where all the middle-aged women have names like Petty, Vicious, and Bossy.

“Good for her that she got her book made into a show,” Tom interjects. He’s a Mississippi food writer who clearly doesn’t worship in the church of Roonet.

“She’s not hurting for cash,” I reply. I’d read a interview where she talked about her enormous wealth impinging on her socialist values, which made me want to pull out my pubes one by one. My popularity, such as it is, is confined to literary circles eager to embrace a token trans woman, especially since I’m albino Filipino