Free Thrill-Bent by Jan Richman

is lopsided, fully purple now in the east but still as orange as a bitten peach in the west. I hop off onto the soft dirt, wave good-bye to the girls who have been gaping at my spirited swinging style, and head for home.
    A slight breeze brings up goosebumps on my bare forearms. As I pass by the court, I notice that the basketball game has dwindled to a few teenage die-hards who aren’t expected home for dinner: a strategic, fierce game of cutthroat. There are no shouts of camaraderie or encouragement now, just heavy breathing and the squeak of shoes across blacktop. I rub my arms and quicken my pace, and decide to take the route home that goes by Casey’s place. Walking up Dauphine until it hits France, I turn right at Lorenzo’s Pizza Parlor.
    I spent an hour in Lorenzo’s last Monday night, when it felt too lonely and pathetic to be watching the Academy Awards alone in my tiny soundproof vault, where my running commentary on Debbie Allen’s jazz-hands choreography would evaporate into the indifferent concrete. Casey was at a hockey game, and I was sure my rancor would be lost on him anyway. I have made no other friends here, certainly no one I’d feel comfortable enough with to adopt a spot on their den sofa. Then I remembered that Lorenzo’s had a big-screen TV, broadcasting gay porn whenever I’d been in to pick up a pizza. While it may seem strange for a pizza parlor in a semi-remote working-class neighborhood of New Orleans to be staffed and patronized largely by leather queens, the more I’d looked around, the more this seemed to be the case—and who better to join in dissing Gwyneth Paltrow’s bad taste in designer gowns than a bunch of pizza-loving, smut-respecting, bearded, buttless-chap-wearing gay men? Unfortunately, the place was (inexplicably) kind of dead on Oscar night, but I drank two beers and shared an unbridled, extended giggling fit with the bartender during the Elton John/ Eminem duet before returning to my lonely abode.
    Just past Lorenzo’s, I am thrown back a step by a sudden burst of stentorian barking from behind a tattered yellow house. A gargantuan black mastiff comes flying around the side yard and hurls himself at me. His heavily muscled body hits the wobbly chain link fence that separates us, and I am unable to move my limbs. He keeps jumping at me, launching himself again and again onto the swaying metal wall, snarling and roaring as his hard block of head showers drool in great arcs like a lawn sprinkler. I crouch on the sidewalk with my hands over my ears, paralyzed by the violence of the roar. I haul breaths from the deepest part of my lungs, and my whole torso heaves like a long-distance runner’s. I can’t believe I forgot to tiptoe by the yellow house so as not to awaken the wrath of the volatile beast. I want to get up and flee; I don’t know if the fence will hold; each time the heavy bulk of his black body advances, I think this time he will break it down, this time I will be invaded, overpowered by the rush of this animal’s desire. I can’t move. Looking up France Street, I long for some sign of Casey: the wheels of his bike displacing the dirt in the empty lot, or the thud of his basketball in the street. All I see are shadows and mirages. The mastiff’s eyes are trained on me, shining and wet in his head, twinkling like pilot lights.
    And then something happens: suddenly, night falls. The streetlight on the corner of Dauphine flickers three times, sluggishly, and then stays on, illuminating my frozen huddle. The white skin on my arms is as puckered as a chicken’s. Glancing around, I pick myself up and slowly cross the street, pretending not to be humiliated and shaken. The artificial light has flummoxed the beast’s impulses. I don’t think anybody noticed.
    Dear Chantelle, I scribble in my head, Can you stand as strong as a concrete tree in a hurricane? Survive a plunge down Niagara Falls in a ten gallon hat? Keep your cool when your wig collection catches