MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION
The conversation resembles how a professor introduces a new topic: with great enthusiasm, fabricated and pandering, until a student interrupts with a crude though fair joke, and then the professor must deride the joke (and sometimes the student) to regain the students’ attention (and approval). The professor, for a brief moment, feels useless and questions the decision to become an educator (when he could have been a librarian like his brother). The student who made the joke will see this humiliation in the spasm of the professor’s lower lip, the pinch of his eyes, until frustration settles. The student will understand his own embarrassment (and frustration) when the professor harasses him, his choices, and (sometimes) the way he dresses. Their mutual destruction exists because the two men (though different in age and lived experiences) are the same man. The student will grow up to become a professor; the professor will die being able to count on one hand how many students he slept with.
TWO BOTTOMS IN A TOP’S WORLD
In preparation for their fourth date, both men avoided caffeine, showered twice, drank a pineapple and mango smoothie, trimmed their toenails, popped a little pill. A normal routine for bottoms in heat. Both men wanted to be fucked. I mean, tonight was their fourth date, which is too many without seeing each other naked. It should have happened sooner, perhaps the second or third date, though neither one would have opposed it if it had been the first date. If it didn’t happen tonight, then it would never happen, and they’d leave disappointed, testicles throbbing, in search of another last-minute cock.
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Cody Pease is a senior B.F.A. Creative Writing student at Truman State University, where they serve as a news writer for the university’s radio station. Their work is forthcoming in the March Issue of Brilliant Flash Fiction.
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