Ed Park, Pippa Garner, jaimie branch, Black Holes, Ghost Streams, and more.

ser-quasoid

gen-spade-wound

mus-croissant

tec-wonder

art-mckloud

sys-tnr-std-cond

tec-gellix

gen-brody

mus-eckmannpsych

art-ballast

mus-wooden-nickel

ser-infini

ser-onyx

tec-ballpill

tec-tiny

tec-hobeaux

gen-manicotti

ser-landnama

mus-pixel-western

gen-neue-world

tec-belwe

tec-burko

art-margate

ser-fk-raster

gen-modern-ombra

ser-cheee

art-ehrie

gen-fk-screamer

ser-gliker

gen-buffon

sci-american-typewriter

ser-pipa

gen-excaliber-nouveau

art-ohno-fatface

mus-basteleur

sci-pipo

ser-ohno-blazeface

sci-ameliapro

Test          

art-strike

gen-fleya

art-roberta

art-tenpoint

ser-bradley

gen-puchakhon-magnifier

ser-hybryda

art-kenwyn

ser-herbus

mus-gooper-condensed

sci-twoblock

ser-scandia-stencil

art-cako

ser-blimone

ser-bb-standard

ser-guillotine

sci-eklektyk

gen-combat

sci-microgramma

tec-twobit

mus-french-typewriter

ser-taters

ser-clip-regular

mus-churchward-marianna

art-nichrome

tec-hunter

sci-borax

tec-booty-bold

test

art-churchward-tua

arch-catalog

till-melted

mus-antique-olive

ser-separat

mus-workbench

sci-boogie-school-serif

mus-robur

test-font

till melted

sci-joe182

sci-cirgeos

tec-boecklin

tec-sudety

sys-zipper

ser-martin

ser-marvin-visions

art-gopher

ser-bb-strata

sci-herold

sci-supera-gothic

gen-mondwest

ser-twopoint

Heaven Tonight is a new series of erotic stories that transgress the conventions of desire. Authored by artists and writers, each story offers its own perspective into the effects of passion, shame, lust, loathing—and all things sex-driven. Curated and edited by Micaela Durand.

is a series of erotic stories that transgress the conventions of desire. Authored by artists and writers, each story offers its own perspective into the effects of passion, shame, lust, loathing––and all things sex-driven.

Yuxi sits in the waiting room with one hand deep in her pocket, pressing a thumb against her urethral opening through the lining in her pants. The pressure is enough to alleviate the pain, an iron bullet ripping through the core of the earth.

She leaps up and lumbers toward the woman in burgundy scrubs.

“Yoo-shi.” She corrects the woman. “Can I do the urine sample now? I really have to go.”

“I’m going to measure your bladder. I’ll get the sample from that. Don’t use the restroom yet.” The woman leads her into an exam room and points to a recliner where there is a doggy pee-pee pad and gown. “Put that on and take a seat.”

Yuxi does the Kegel of her life, rips off her clothes, throws on the gown, and sits. The nurse practitioner comes in and inserts a catheter while Yuxi lies back on the raised recliner, feet in metal stirrups, knees splayed. An attendant holds a kidney-shaped plastic bowl between Yuxi’s legs while the urine flows out on its own. She feels so much gratitude, her eyes water. She closes them in ecstasy. This is the dictionary definition of R-E-L-I-E-F.

The nurse removes the catheter. With a purple-gloved hand, she inserts a speculum into Yuxi’s vagina. 

“Yeast infection. I’m going to test for BV.”

“What about a UTI?” Yuxi asks. “I have a UTI too.”

“You’ll get the results back in a day or two.”

“Can I get a prescription now?” Yuxi is desperate.

“How am I supposed to treat something when I don’t know what it is?” The nurse practitioner pulls off the latex gloves and drops them in the trash. “You’ll get an email from the lab.”

“Is the doctor going to see me?” Yuxi asks, pressing her whole palm between her legs, wincing.

“The urogynecologist won’t see you unless I refer. You seem fine,” she says, closing the door.

Fine. FINE? Yuxi flings open the medicine cabinet door. She has a swimsuit on where she’s wedged a bag of frozen blueberries in her crotch. The whole area is throbbing with a different kind of pain, a cold stabbing, which is preferable. Aspirin. Tylenol. Ibuprofen. The Lexapro she never took. The sunscreen she never wears, but always intends to. And in the back… an empty bottle of Cipro. Wait, no. There is one pill left. This is like striking gold! She knows one antibiotic pill isn’t going to cure her, but it will be enough to get her through the night. She hopes.

They are sitting next to each other at an Irish pub in the East Village. The lime wedged on her gin and tonic is outlined in brown. Her urinary tract puckers. Yuxi has forgotten his name. A mirror on the wall behind him is positioned perfectly to reflect his bald spot, which glows in the honeyed light like a bespoke yarmulke.

“So, you build furniture?” she asks, momentarily glancing at his long face before her eyes are drawn back to the mirror and the richly negative space of his hair.

“It’s just a hobby. I’m building all the furniture for my new apartment.” He shows her images on his phone. Tufted rose-gold chair. Tufted rose-gold headboard. Tufted rose-gold ottoman. “I cofounded a performance group. We sold it a few years ago.”

“Like Wooster Group?” Yuxi asks. “What do you mean, sold?”

“No, it was just three guys. We played music and there was choreography. Did some stuff in Vegas and then sold it to a Canadian company. I was nominated for a Grammy. But I didn’t win.” He looks down. “I’m recently divorced.”

Grammy? Vegas? It isn’t intriguing enough for her to pursue, so she lets it go. She is just relieved to be pain-free, if only momentarily, and makes a note to always leave one antibiotic in the bottle just in case. Pay it forward to the next UTI.

But what about tomorrow? She knows she’s going to be in another realm of burning hell come morning.

“Do you want another?” He holds up his empty glass.

The tufted rose-gold sofa is oily beneath Yuxi’s ass. Pantyless, she is perched awkwardly on the sofa’s edge, her dress hiked up around her waist, while the man kisses her. His thin lips are hard, pressing into her face while leaving a trail of saliva on her chin as he laps, his tongue coated in white fuzz.

“Just a minute,” she says, leaping up.

In the bathroom, Yuxi looks at the mirror. The vague smell of his sour saliva wafts up from her chin. She rubs it with hand soap and splashes some water on her face. She pulls at the edges of the mirror. It doesn’t open.

Looking behind her, she sees a cabinet. Bingo. Inside, there are vials, ampules, an empty tube of itching cream. Finasteride. Valium. Viagra. No antibiotics? Where is she going to get antibiotics now? Stupid rose-gold asshole. She came over here for nothing.

He had warned her that he was on antidepressants and Adderall, which made him jerk off and speak in tongues to her cunt ferally without direction or end.

She sits on the toilet and squeezes out a few painful drops. She can feel its trajectory, her urethra lighting up red as the hot burn slides through her. 

The hot anesthesiologist who ate her out until she was raw and swollen on his 44th-floor balcony overlooking Times Square. The pleasure was liminal—horny, painful—and there is nothing that turns Yuxi on more than straddling thresholds. He had warned her that he was on antidepressants and Adderall, which made him jerk off and speak in tongues to her cunt ferally without direction or end. On antidepressants, he couldn’t come or stay hard. Yuxi, bent over the glass balcony’s ledge, felt the Manhattan wind slide over her skin as the sound of strangers honking diffused into the air between skyscrapers.

The anesthesiologist made her come a few times, eating her out before his leg cramped up, his mealy dick slapping against the glass balcony wall as he stumbled. Its modest print marked their encounter. Yuxi calls him the ED Daddy. Because, erectile dysfunction. Because, six years ago he got off the antidepressants long enough to ejaculate into a cup and make an IVF baby with his ex, an unhinged psychiatrist.

Then there was the poly psychonaut who fed her pills whose names she could never remember because they were a complex sequence of numbers and chemical compounds. Sex with the psychonaut always began with him clinking a pair of chrome butt plugs. They would argue over who got the smaller one. Yuxi has hemorrhoids but she tells herself that if she really lubes up the plug, it’s ok. Just no anal sex. The loser would get the big one jammed up their ass. They would hallucinate and stick things into each other while high. The remote control, once. And the last time, two nights ago, a tiny ceramic llama sculpture. That one was for a video they made called 

When she squeezes it all out, the pain subsides. She wipes and flushes, cups water from the sink into her palm and splashes it between her legs a few times. The bathmat is soaked. She squishes her bare feet into it, finds a clean hand towel in the cabinet and rubs herself dry.

On the rose-gold sofa, a poor Chesterfield knockoff, the man holds his half-soft dick in one hand, stroking the tip with his thumb and forefinger. Men, Yuxi thinks, hah. What confidence they have. A framed photo of the Blue Man Group hangs on a wall behind him. He stares at her through heavy-lidded eyes, one long arm draped over the sofa’s freshly upholstered back. She stands there watching him, waiting, out of reach.

Washington Square Park is so crowded, Yuxi has to elbow her way through the NYU students raving around the desiccated fountain to happy hardcore.

It is just after 9 pm. She had left the man’s apartment in no time at all, having gotten down on all fours ass-first in front of the rose-gold sofa doing slow Kegels while he jerked himself off. Yuxi had meant it to be taunting and ridiculous and grotesque all at once. She pushed her asshole, making her hemorrhoid pop out and go back in again as she contracted her sphincter. Her special skill.

It doesn’t matter. She can do anything if she times it right. It is pulsing flesh, after all. And she needed to get the hell out of there while it was still early.

Exiting the park’s northeast corner, she dodges a skateboarder who eats shit on the asphalt. The skateboard shoots out from under him, narrowly missing her. He’s thrown into a parked car. A blond dreadlock flies off his head and slides down the windshield of a van. Yuxi stops, squeezes her labia together through her dress like a hoagie. The bacteria is flourishing. She can feel it reproducing.

She had not been able to locate her underwear in the apartment and rushed out when he went to the bathroom—before he could discover that she had taken the Blue Man Group photo. Sans underwear, bonus collector’s memorabilia.

The skateboarder grabs the dreadlock and retrieves his board from beneath the van. He stands on the curb, fastening the single dreadlock back into place behind his ear. It is a clip-on, Yuxi realizes.

This one lives in a prewar duplex on Mercer, a corner unit with a lofted bedroom overlooking a massive living room and kitchen with cast concrete countertops. Yuxi hangs her bag on the backrest of a stool and kicks off her platform boots.

Yuxi nods. She leans her forearms against the counter, then lays her cheek down. The coolness of the concrete travels from her cheeks and arms down to her crotch, which is flickering with activity.

“It’s hot outside, Pedro,” she says. “Some kid with a clip-on dreadlock nearly took me down.”

“It’s like Burning Man there on the weekends now.” She gets up and turns around, hoists herself up on the counter. Her vagina is in direct contact with the concrete. She shifts a bit to spread her labia like an open-faced sandwich. Feels good. It’s the next best thing to frozen blueberries. “What do you have to drink?”

“I’m having scotch. But you might want a spritz?” He swirls a tumbler beneath his nose.

“No alcohol. I’m feeling dizzy.” The truth is that her body temperature increases dramatically when she drinks, which seems to exacerbate her UTI. Maybe the increased heat creates optimal conditions for bacteria to thrive.

“Wheatgrass?” He points to a masticator behind him. “Electrolyte water?”

He hands her a bottle of chilled electrolyte water from the sub-zero fridge. Reaching up, he snips a handful of wheatgrass growing in a flat on a shelf above the sink and shoves it into the masticator. He flicks on the switch and the sound of the machine fills the air.

Yuxi shrugs, wiggling her open-faced sandwich on the concrete griddle to itch. The extruder begins shitting out a dense green turd, as dry as any constipated bowel movement. Out another spout, green juice begins to drip. She feels her pee hole begin to water. Pull it in, tighten the valve. With every drip, she feels herself losing a private battle against herself. The thing about peeing is that, every time, it burns. And the more she pees, the more urgent it feels to keep returning to the toilet. On some days, she can’t leave her apartment, a small studio that she sublets with a toilet in the hallway, though the shower is in her apartment. She has an empty cat food container the old tenant left behind that she sometimes pees in. It has a wide mouth and a handle. It’s a fantastic container to pee in, the perfect height for her to squat over, and with a screw-on lid so she doesn’t have to empty it right away. Once she forgot to empty it when she went out of town for two months in the summer and it was so rancid when she returned that it smelled like what she imagined a dead body macerated in ammonia would smell like.

She leaps down from the counter. No holding it anymore. There is a huge splat of cream darkening the concrete. It is a Rorschach that looks uncannily like the llama the poly psychonaut nudged in her cunt. A bolt of terror floods Yuxi’s body. Had they forgotten the llama inside and this is its way of sending a distress signal? She rubs the Rorschach with her palm. It is like a moisturizer, penetrating into the pores of the concrete. Fuck. She splashes some electrolyte water on it. There. She can blame the water.

A glass beaker beneath the masticator is filling up. How much of this green shit does he think she can drink? He keeps feeding more into the spout.

“Down the hall. Third door on the left.”

She sprints to the bathroom. It’s breathtaking, the rose-veined marble sink, the hinoki bathtub. The aroma of the wood is full, warm, a counterpoint to the heaviness of the marble. No medicine cabinet here. She plops on the toilet and lets go of the muscle, a little bit of urine dribbling down her thigh. She spreads her legs wide and rips off some toilet paper to dab her thigh while the deluge continues in the background. It burns so good. Her eyes water.

She presses a button on the side of the toilet and it flushes soundlessly. Toilet envy! Yuxi didn’t even have her own private toilet, much less a silent one. This must be some Japanese import. The bar of soap is brand new. It has notes of oud, bergamot.

She had taken eight years off her dating profile. Asian don’t raisin. Who had told her that?

Back to the task at hand. The clock is ticking. If she doesn’t get more antibiotics by the end of the night, she will be in hell. It’s Friday night. The only places open tomorrow are urgent care clinics. And she has already racked up a huge file at the prevailing chain of clinics around the city. None of the doctors there will prescribe her any more antibiotics. She has been put on some blacklist. She has staggered into the clinic too many times begging for Bactrim, Macrobid, Cipro.

Will she have to take the PATH to Jersey to find some other clinic out of state that doesn’t have her records? Do different states have separate digital files for patients? Will she have to go to the ER?

Yuxi curses herself for lying to the anesthesiologist about her age. She had taken eight years off her dating profile. Asian don’t raisin. Who had told her that? She has more currency as a 26-year-old. It isn't her fault. She didn’t make the game. But she has to play it. Who cares anyway. But it’s the reason why she can’t just ask the anesthesiologist to phone in a script. It’s too embarrassing to call him with this request and then have to tell him her real birthday.

There is no medicine cabinet. No cabinets at all. The walls are flush.

This is the guest bathroom. That’s why there’s nothing in here.

She takes out her phone and types his address in the search bar. Bingo. Sold in 2018. 8.5 million?! She clicks on the old listing and swipes through the staged photos. The last image is a floor plan. Two baths. Just as she thought. The other is in the primary suite. A broker she met told her that master bath, master bedroom, is linguistic imperialism. And who wants to invoke the vestiges of slavery every day, he had said to her.

So, Yuxi will have to breach the boundaries of the bedroom. She doesn’t want to just go roaming around the apartment and get caught rifling through drawers. A place like this will have security cameras anyway.

Complaining about her tight shoulders and lower back pain does the trick every time. They start sitting on the couch. Then she lies down, face first, on the low modular sectional, her nose smashed flat into the saddle leather. Pedro is kneading his thumbs into her traps while perched on the edge of the sofa. She groans, then a little louder.

“… basically didn’t sleep last night… new film… leaked… Paltrow… cease and desist…”

He is extremely hot. Rakish, dark. And all this lawyer talk plus the massage is making her bacterial vaginosis extrude. Anyone who serves her fresh juice is already winning. She squirms, her thighs creamy and slick.

“This sofa is—I mean, it’s lovely—but it’s a bit uncomfortable.”

“I know better than to invite you to the bedroom.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” she says, twisting around to look up at him behind her. She pivots onto her side and props her head on a bent arm. “It wouldn’t mean anything. Just a change of locale.”

He leads the way, Yuxi trailing behind him to wipe off her thighs with the inner hem of her dress.

The massage doesn’t last long. Two minutes in, they are kissing, tongues wrapped around each other, seeking deeper passages to inscribe their desire. Pedro’s hand glides beneath her dress, pausing ever so briefly at her hip, a pause that lets Yuxi know that he has taken note of her pantyless state. His hand glides upward over her ribcage and finds its place on her breast. He squeezes it firmly, a message. She moans and he does it again, harder this time. Their legs are entangled; his linen pants are damp at the crotch.

Wait, control yourself, Yuxi tells herself. She cannot, absolutely cannot have sex with Pedro right now. She is riddled—no 

—with infections, multiple and acute. Maybe she even has an STD, who knows? The lab results would not arrive for another day or two. But she is doubtful of her own will to resist.

She pulls her face back, though the effort isn’t without difficulty. Her body keeps writhing, locked into his, like a beheaded snake whose flesh continues thrashing while the nerve endings in its muscles are still firing.

“Would you like to stop?” He is panting, belying his speech’s calmness.

“Not really.” Yuxi sighs. “It’s just that I have a flaming UTI.”

“Ah, I see.” He nods sympathetically. “Can’t be comfortable.”

Actually, Yuxi can no longer feel the pain of the UTI. All she feels is a different kind of throbbing. Pedro lets go of her breast, removing his hand from inside her dress. On the way out, he brushes her belly with his fingertips, the hair on her cunt, her cunt. The lightest touch. It sends her reeling. She attaches herself to his face again, doubling down on her desire. Mouth sucking tongue. Her hand travels down his back, circling his ass. An instinctual bracing for disappointment.

Things can be superlative until the moment of reveal. A dick that points sideways. A lumpy misshapen one that makes her feel as though she is being penetrated by a drunkard’s elongated nose. Sizes to elicit pity. Sizes to elicit pain. Women should get hazard pay for those.

Pedro’s dick is an iron rod on the other side of the damp linen. Touching it is an act of synesthesia. She can hear the sound of the iron pinging. It is perhaps the hardest cock she has ever heard.

“What would you like to do?” he murmurs into her ear. “Just tell me.”

“I want you inside me so deep that my ancestors from the Qing dynasty will feel it.”

“That deep? Ok.” He smiles at her, amused. “But what about your predicament?”

, and is the recipient of fellowships from PEN America, MacDowell, and The Center for Fiction. She teaches at Barnard College.

My Llama

 is a series of erotic stories that transgress the conventions of desire. Authored by artists and writers, each story offers its own perspective into the effects of passion, shame, lust, loathing––and all things sex-driven. 

There was a postcard stuck to the foot of E’s bed. A girl in a bikini doing a bridge on the beach. Her flat stomach stretched against a sedative sky. I dug in my underwear. I was him wanting her. I inhaled E’s pillow. It smelled like cat and dirty hair. It must have been washed several girls ago. I wanted it to smell like me. If I were him I wouldn’t like me. I would like the girl in the postcard. Light and fun and free.

I wiped my sticky hands on the bed, got up, and opened drawers. I had snuck into E’s room while he was at a party. I wanted to know what he did with his time, if he really was as boring and bored as he looked. He had a way of living without things which I found hot. His submissive approach to life didn’t seem to be a front. Still I wondered if there wasn’t some inner dimension that had yet to be unearthed.

On the floor, his cat sat on a pile of clothes. The cat looked just like him with dark hair and dark eyes. I sleuthed as she watched me. I had watched her too once, purring sluttily as he nuzzled her, his black hair entangled with hers while I stood there, watching him love someone else.

I wanted to fit in this room. To be indispensable. A mindless thing. Like the matchbox on his nightstand. Dumb and small. He could burn my little wooden limbs to light his cig. Or I could be one of the leggy fashion models in the soiled magazine hidden in the closet. My stiletto impaling a juicy clementine. The gothic arch of my foot crushing a perky grape.

In a week I’d be going to a monastery in Reims, where champagne is from. It was tradition, in this study abroad program in Paris, for students to study at a monastery, before exams, in exchange for work. E said he’d come too, which I doubted. We had been hanging out for ten days. He reminded me of my first crush, a strange feral boy who looked like a pencil and walked around looking like he’d just woken up. E was like that too, trapped in his impotence, waiting to be held so he could be of some use.

I didn’t believe in God but I believed outfits changed lives.

I had made the first move. I felt brave reaching out for his hand at a party. When he accepted, I clutched him as if he were a rare and precious artifact that had been passed down for centuries. I wanted to understand the archaeology of him. His soul was in need of excavation. I felt chosen even though I believed I had summoned him. Now I wouldn’t have to watch him from afar like I did with pencil boy.

I could even be cruel. I taunted E about his bad grades and his horrible tattoos and watched as his eyes lit up. My cruelty touched something in him. Some familiar carnal wound.

At the monastery, I thought I’d be making champagne-shaped chocolates with the nuns. Instead, when I got there, they gave me a bucket with vinegar and rags. In a long stiff dress I got on my knees and wiped the priest’s vintage pee off the toilet. I cleaned in silence. I didn’t believe in God but I believed outfits changed lives. I sang and prayed five times a day. Life was graceful this way. Sometimes I even believed I was good.

The nuns said I was pretty. That I should get baptized. They could even do it here. I never mentioned my mom was Jewish. They said condoms were bad. I didn’t use them anyway.

This one nun would wince at me in the halls. Like she knew I was a freak and a bad influence. But if she had sussed me out she probably wasn’t good either. I wanted to ask her what she prayed for. How I could forgive those who had hurt me.

Had she forgiven God for making her ugly and dry?

One of the students told me there used to be a gate that separated the nuns from the rest of the world. She said families and visitors could only talk to the nuns through the gate. This was in the 1930s, when the nuns read from a Bible with all the sex edited out. She said that in the garden there was a tunnel which led to a secret burial plot, filled with holes for the sisters’ unborn.

I texted E on my Nokia burner. Without internet or God, I was lonely. One weekend, he showed up. Sister Bernadette had asked me to rake the leaves in the front yard. E helped and we whispered behind trees. I told him to meet me in my room after last prayers. The Sister was surprised by how little we had raked.

E’s clothes came off. He was hard as I took off my uniform. We were naked now. I thought of Eve and how she must have been bored in the garden. Maybe she bit the apple because she knew the shame would turn her on. Maybe she just wanted clothes. I reached towards E in the dark.

 He isn’t supposed to see me naked. He hasn’t even courted me!

I held E’s D. Around him I forgot about me. All I was, was wet. It was me and E and the little Jesus above the bed. E kissed my neck with papery lips. I wanted to write something on them with mine. Every touch pressed a different place in my mind. My pussy was crying. I looked at E. He was more beautiful than me. Sometimes I felt like he was the girl.

I took his dick in silence so as to not wake the nuns.

E got on top of me like a spider. He was so light that for a moment I thought he would float away. I was ready to disappear with him too. But he seemed focused on staying hard and playing out what I guess he thought a man was supposed to be. I pretended to be faithful to his command, not knowing what might happen, like I was an innocent thing, like I was Eve.

I took his dick in silence so as to not wake the nuns. The nuns cultivated silence.

In the beginning, God’s word became flesh. I wanted that power. For my words to fill E up until they spilled out of him, until he couldn’t take it anymore, until he was transformed. I told him I could crush him. He was so skinny that I really believed I could. His body tensed up. His ears got hot. He put my legs on his shoulders then grabbed my left foot and started sucking on it fondly, tenderly, like it was another woman he was making love to. He seemed enraptured sucking on each manicured toe like it was the secret to his dewy skin. He moaned into my foot. My leg looked good wearing his head like a shoe.

After an awkward pause, I got on top. It was my turn to look at Jesus. How many nuns had fucked in this room and been surveilled by Our Father? I felt connected to them, riding E, assuming my duties in this lineage of spiritual sluts. I was getting more turned on picturing the covert acts they had committed since this old monastery had first been built. Maybe I did belong here after all. God had wanted me, and E, to come. E was under me like he was my little bitch. He seemed to like being subjected to my control, like it was penance for not being the man I wanted him to be. I looked down. My dainty thighs squeezed his waist like a corset. I didn’t want to be ladylike anymore. I wanted him to feel me. All of me. All the shit I had learned to hide. I was going to let him in.

Maybe the nuns were right about the body being bad and dirty because why did it hang so heavy on me, dragging me down into its depths?