Free Drowning Tucson by Aaron Morales

She’ll come crying to me, and I’ll have no explanation. She hadn’t done anything to deserve a husband like him. He pinched his eyes together as hard as he could, trying to make himself cry. But the dialogue in his head was an act, and he knew it. He couldn’t make himself truly care while he was lying in bathwater that smelled of sex.
    He wished he could tell Stella that he’d had this weird feeling, like an itch, ever since he was a boy. One day he simply woke up and felt strange inside. A dull buzzing. As if he had sucked a gnat into his lungs and it was beating its tiny wings against the walls, trying to get out. At twelve he had scratched the itch for the first time when he and his friend Cory were walking home from school one day and Cory had asked him you ever punched your clown? Manny tried to pretend heknew what that meant while Cory motioned for him to follow him into a cluster of bushes and pulled a magazine from his backpack with pictures of women on their backs with their legs splayed, one man drilling into her and two more standing by her head while she held a dick in each fist, smiling at the camera. Manny’s pants became very tight in the front. Cory flipped the pages and explained see, he’s fucking her and she’s sucking those other guys’ dicks, and Manny knew he understood because his body was flushed in a way that it had never been before. He tried to shift his feet and adjust himself so he would feel more comfortable, but it didn’t help. When Cory said do you feel it, Manny knew exactly what he was talking about and nodded and said yeah, so they’re fucking, but paying more attention to the three, sometimes four or five dicks in each picture rather than the woman and the revolting crack between her legs that looked to him like the honey ham his mom bought from the deli for his school lunches, and when Cory asked do you want to feel something cool, Manny nodded and watched in awkward silence as Cory placed the magazine down on the ground and pulled down his pants and palmed his joint and then said spit on your hand like this, don’t worry, I’m not a fag or anything, and he spat a glob onto his palm and rubbed it all over his joint and then wrapped his hand around it and started moving it back and forth and Manny watched in curious amazement, and Cory said damn, it feels good, you’ve got to try it, nodding toward Manny’s crotch until Manny thought why not, since he was dying to get rid of the weird tingling in his pants, so he did the same thing Cory had done, spitting and stroking and looking from Cory to the magazine to his own dick, proud that he was actually slightly bigger than Cory but eventually only staring at Cory and his thrusting hand and his scrunched-up face and his head tilting back with his eyes closed and his thighs starting to shake and then he gaped in amazement as a few drops of clear liquid spurted from Cory’s dick and left a strand hanging from the tip, swinging in the breeze and slowly stretching toward the ground, and Cory’s face was flushed and he was panting a little and saying goddam, goddam, over and over, while Manny watched him and kept spitting on his hand until he felt a surge of energy shooting from the tingling head of hiscock to all of his extremities, causing him to shake, and then with a burst it was over and Manny stood dizzy and breathless.
    That was the first time Manny noticed the dull buzzing in his chest leaving and being replaced by a pressure that slowly began to build from that moment. But that time had been an accident. The first time he had consciously attempted to alleviate the pressure was at the age of fourteen when Hallie, a girl from school who had been giving him looks since he first started the seventh grade at Carson, walked through a dried-out wash with him one day smoking cigarettes as they headed toward their neighborhood and asked are you a virgin? When he said yes, she smiled and said I am too, but I don’t want to be