Katya chewed me out for bleeding into her sheets. They were some sort of special soft. A high thread count, whatever that means. She’d bought them online, forty percent off for Father’s Day. I hadn’t stained them intentionally. She said it was because I had bad skin because I didn’t exfoliate so I developed pimples which inevitably popped somewhere which made me culpable.
Culpable I had to look up. Deserving blame the dictionary told me. I said it was genetic and therefore not my fault. I come from a long line of badly-skinned peoples. My cousin gets cysts on his head the size of golf balls.
She didn’t want to hear it. Started leaving scrubs and tonics and loofahs at my place, even bought a special suction hook to hang one from in my shower. I said I was happy with my Irish Spring and Walmart washcloths but she said that showed my ignorance. First the soaps and scrubs, then the sheets, like my place was a weak state begging to be colonized by her enlightened empire. She said my sheets were too rough, cheap, barely cotton. I said a sheet’s a sheet. Again, ignorance. So she thought I bled into them on purpose. As if I lay there in the dark listening to her and my Yorkie Pickles’ snoring and quietly popping my pimples, gleefully pressing them into her Father’s Day discount sheets. They were nice, soft and cool. Why the hell would I stain them? For what reason? Talk about ignorance.
This went on for months. Blood, soaps, thread counts, arguments. Finally, one morning she lost it. Said if I wanted to end things, I should just end things, like a man, instead of taking it out on the sheets. She was tired of me being enigmatic, she said. I said I didn’t know what she meant, what that word meant. She said exactly.
She was naked when she was yelling this all, dressing me down while trying to get dressed—is that an expression? Dressing down? Just screaming and ripping the sheets off the bed with me and Pickles still in it. And it kind of made me horny, all this naked rage, the veins in her neck, the angry jiggle of her thighs. So I kissed her and apologized and squeezed her ass and we had one last enigmatic fuck on that unmade bed with Pickles sighing in the corner and afterwards Katya left with a garbage bag full of stained sheets.
Pickles was glad to see her go. I only have a twin so space is at a premium. Me, I’m not sure how I feel. Was Katya right about ignorance and culpability? She had a big vocabulary. I’ll admit I like the loofahs. My skin has never looked better.
Enigmatic. It means difficult to interpret or understand. Mysterious.
Sometimes I miss those sheets but thread count? No, thread count I never looked up.
Kent Kosack is a writer based in Pittsburgh. His work has been published in Bruiser, minor literature[s], L’Esprit, 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. See more at: www.kentkosack.com
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