Rank

innocent nostalgia for a simpler time

Idyll, mid-morning, getting hotter. Blackout curtains askew at the near edge, colour grading dust motes and fresh smoke like a foreign desert. An HDMI cable straining at the computer on George's knee, transmitting found horrors to the cheapest 65" money could buy. An hour ago he sat on Eamon's foot and had not apologised.

The rest were in the process of joining them, starting with a bleary shuffle to the toilet and emerging in a traumatised fugue. Not used to bevvies or darts, Eamon felt microwaved. He was fused to the vinyl by his bare legs, sulphur in his throat, disturbed that he could feel so injured without having suffered an actual cause. He hoped his trousers were nearby.

‘Fuck it smells bad in here,’ said Damo, falling into the centre of the couch with Chantal on his lap. A disarticulated memory—the two of them doggystyle on the playroom lounger, whispering venom. Eamon tried to rescue his blanket before it got trapped.

The laptop was open to Raaaank, with four As, and George did not bother to update the mood. It was how he had entertained them for most of the night, leafing through porn actresses vomiting on each other, obese men lowering themselves onto guideposts, genital self-mutilation. Now someone was carefully invaginating a full-sized baby doll.

‘So gross,’ said Chantal. Her nostrils flared. ‘It smells like jizz.’

‘Whose fault's that?’ George clicked next. A balding man with wideset eyes ate roaches from a jar.

’Yeah, like you two didn't.’

Another memory, bulldozing Eamon's guard. He had wanted to say goodnight to Lucy. Spare towels were the pretext, but he hoped to catch her apart from the others and induce her to talk till sunrise, in person for once, not by SMS. He waited for Damo and Chantal to settle into the lounger, and after confirming the bathroom light and fan were on he knocked at Lucy's door. But George had only forgotten to switch them off, and when she said come in he was there, semi-hard and recumbent, declining Lucy's cue to wrap his nude lower half in the duvet. Eamon asked where the spare towels were.

Next. A big woman, also bottomless, farting on a cake.

‘That's you,’ said Damo, pointing Eamon to the extreme close-up.

‘Do you like cake, Anus?’ asked George.

Lucy entered, hair up, wearing last night's shirt with high-waisted Everlasts. She scowled at the TV and folded up on the far arm of the sofa. Eamon would have offered her his spot if his trousers weren't missing. He would have kicked everyone out and made her breakfast, and tidied the house while she slept through her hangover. She glanced his way, avoiding facial detail, just enough to see that he was looking. 

Something fell and splashed by Chantal's foot—the cup of mixed liquids they had made Eamon drink from in an improvised daring game called Anus Gayness. Damo called Chantal a fuckhead, sounding angrier than he felt. He snatched Eamon's blanket to clean the spill. 

For a moment everything was suspended between pain and apprehension. Then they all noticed it at once, stale bleach vaporising in hot, thick lines. Lucy cast her eyes away. The rest snapped their heads like sleeper agents hearing the kill command.

‘Look at that,’ Damo pointed. ‘Look who's got wet undies.’

‘Anus wanked,’ said George, twinkling. 

‘He probably cummed his pants to us last night,’ Chantal squealed. ‘That had better be it, Anus. It's so gross if you wanked.’

Eamon pleaded with Lucy's eyelids. It was grotesque that the Damo-Chantal chimera now perched where she had, when she had hidden her movement in swallow song and squeezed him awake. They had watched each other in silence with her palm on his stomach, Eamon self-conscious of his evil breath until her stroking thumb lulled him into a single point of presence. After a glacial age her hand slid to where he strained at his cotton-polyester, and before he knew what had happened, the sacrament of his first touch unsealed him. Lucy chuckled once, but smiled into his eyes so he knew it was beatific. She kissed his brow before returning to bed.

His trousers were missing, Eamon explained, when their fun turned nasty and George ordered him to take his spermy dacks far away.

‘They're in the neighbour's yard,’ he said. ‘You'll have to climb the fence.’

The easiest thing in the world would have been for Lucy to offer him some trackpants, but she was locked in, trying to shatter the empty cup with her mind. Eamon wrapped the blanket around himself and went to climb an eight-foot fence in his underpants, on George's assurance that his trousers were definitely on the other side. An hour ago he had been idly embellishing the story of how he lost his virginity at a house party. Now he thought he should remain a virgin.

Next. A man with a cage on his penis was spreading his legs so a woman with stiff triceps could pummel his scrotum like a heavy bag. He did not seem to mind.