Free Dermaphoria by Craig Clevenger

straight face for as long as I could, but you started laughing.
    I pulled away but you took my bottom lip in your teeth and held me there. You let go after a moment, looking over my shoulder to the Galaxie where Otto lingered.
    “Otto, stay,” you said, then kissed me again. “You too. Don’t worry, he’s on the couch.”
    I remember my hand on the sweat-slick small of your back, yourwet leg slung over mine and “hold still” hot-whispered into my ear and I did but you couldn’t and you moaned my name, lost in the teeth marks you left on my chest. I drank dark wine pooled in the cleft of your back and licked every inch of you, then held you until your breathing told me you were asleep, but you never let go of me.

    twelve
    T HE TYRANNOSAURUS HAD COLLAPSED INTO A MANGLED HEAP, ITS LEGS BLOWN from beneath it after decades of drunken target practice. Its bullet-pocked body lay in a pile of broken concrete amid spent shell casings, bottle shards, hubcaps and sagebrush, the exposed rebar skeleton baking under the desert sun. Otto emptied his bladder into the monster’s dead, frozen jaw.
    “Whaddaya think used to be here?”
    He shifted his stance to coat the face and neck while he spoke. The smell stung my nostrils and I moved upwind. Fifty feet from Otto, an empty swimming pool lay in front of a row of abandoned motel rooms.
    “A gas station,” I said.
    “That looks like a swimming pool.” Otto zipped up and walked to the concrete cavity half filled with tumbleweeds.
    “Swimming pools have water in them.”
    “Definitely a pool,” he said, surveying from the edge with the gravity of a plane crash investigator. “This was a motel of some kind.”
    “I envy your keen sense of the obvious, Otto.”
    “Dinosaurs ate all of the tourists, before target practice from the locals drove them to extinction.” He unzipped his pants again, and pissed into the layer of mud below. “Then for a while it was a tumbleweed brothel.”
    “What are you doing?”
    “Marking my territory.”
    We’d been on the road for over three hours, enduring the Mojave heat. The Galaxie had been painted with eight coats of factory crimson and loaded with four new whitewalls. With less than 8,000 miles on a rebuilt engine, it was in perfect working order, except for the air-conditioning. I’d brought a bag full of bottled water, sunblock and spare T-shirts, and had sweat through four of them.
    Signs throughout the desert had warned of the dangers of flash floods and hitchhikers. A truck tire had been submerged halfway into the dirt where we’d parked, then painted white, with B US S TOP in red letters. The road stretched to the horizon in both directions with nobody coming from either. Anyone expecting a bus would die waiting.
    “I don’t like being late,” I said, checking my watch.
    “Breathe, buddy.” Otto zipped up again. “We’re less than four miles away. Let’s toss the Frisbee.”
    “We’re four miles away but you couldn’t wait. Jesus. I don’t want to toss anything, I want to move. Are you finished?”
    “Maybe. I want to sniff around for a minute.”
    “There’s a chance you might find an actual toilet,” I said. “I’m going to make a call.”
    “From where?”
    A gas station stood adjacent to the motel, the parking lot more potholes than asphalt. One of four pumps lay on its side, ripped from the ground by a drunken dinosaur hunter behind the wheel of a pickup. Nobody had removed the G AS C OLD S ODAS I CE sign at the edge of the highway though someone had boarded up the windows and spray-painted F OR S ALE across the plywood. The phone booth, however, was pristine, with the receiver on the hook and not so much as a crack in the glass, as though it had been installed that morning.
    “There’s a phone,” I said. “Over there.”
    “It’s abandoned.”
    “I’m not getting an oil change. Wave when you’re done sniffing”
    Otto started toward the dilapidated motel rooms and shouted, “Watch for