Free Seeing Red by Shawn Sutherland

wall and starts kissing me, occasionally biting down on my lower lip. Her mouth tastes like an ashtray, but it still feels good. Then she stops for a moment to survey the room.
    â€œWow, he is messy.”
    We start kissing again, and with my eyes closed I lead her toward the bedroom while trying to avoid all of the clothes and garbage on the floor. “Yeah, messy guy. That’s why I call him Tornado. He destroys everything in his path.”
    As I’m guiding her through the apartment, her foot catches on a pair of boxer briefs and she trips and falls to the hardwood floor. I expect her to wince in pain, but she just snorts and laughs it off. I help her upright and we continue the foreplay without missing a beat. Then I accidentally smash my knee on the metal leg of a table. “Fuck! My knee!”
    Damaged and bruised, we finally make it onto the bed. I worry I might be too drunk to engage in any carnal activity, which is often the case, but thankfully I’m not entirely numb yet. As her clothes come off, I feel that air of accomplishment and validation every man feels anytime he adds another notch to his belt. But when I start to fuck her—a married woman—the feeling is diminished, followed swiftly by an overwhelming sense of guilt, sadness and self-loathing.

—PART II—
    INTO THE NADIR

ELEVEN
    The audience has been lied to . That’s the first thought that flows through my mind as I wake. Lied to by books, television and movies, conditioned to believe that life and love can be explained in ninety minutes or less and that what happens here actually matters. It’s all just smoke and mirrors. In the real world there is no studio audience, no third act resolution, no storybook ending. We were lied to again and again: by the sycophantic politicians who sold us out for campaign contributions; the advertisers who bombarded us with imagery designed to feed off our insecurities; the priests who told us to be kind to others while they were busy sodomizing children; the anti-drug campaigners who warned us that smoking marijuana would be fatal; the economists who predicted that globalization would lead us all to prosperity; and the school teachers who taught us to believe we could be anything we wanted to be. Liars. All of them.
    I was too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I know what it represented: an opportunity to remake the world, to get it right this time, with freedom, equality and justice for all. The Doomsday Clock was set at seventeen minutes to midnight. Seventeen! But we squandered that opportunity. In a few short years we became fat and complacent and let a small group of wealthy CEOs buy the politicians, ruin the planet and kill the middle class, and now they’ve pit us against each other to fight over the scraps. If you, like me, had any delusion that your existence on this earth would amount to more than just a hill of beans, imagine your dismay when you begin to realize you were wrong from the very start. The game is rigged. There are no goddamn beans. And we’ve all bought into the lie.
    I’m lying naked on a mattress with my body only partially covered by a thin blue blanket. The balcony door is wide open and cold morning air is flowing into the room—I don’t know why I opened it last night. My head aches and my throat is dry and I can only remember the evening in fragments. I’m not even sure if I paid my tab—they might still have my credit card at the cocktail bar. Melanie is nowhere to be found. Did she leave already? I hope she did. The last time I brought a girl home, she didn’t leave until well into the afternoon. Just kept sleeping and snoring while I lay awake in bed staring at the ceiling. Eventually I had to wake her up and tell her I was going to be late for work. That was a lie. I went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of scotch and drank on my futon that day.
    Suddenly I hear Melanie rustling in the