Flings by Justin Taylor Page A

excruciating minutiae of their lives. He reads through her old updates, starting with the day after he left and working his way back to the present. There’s not much there: a handful of promo posts for the film festival in the weeks leading up to it, a couple of embedded music videos, a link to a Times op-ed about peak oil, a little gallery of photographs from the festival’s after-party. He lingers on a snapshot of Ellen, drink-flushed and grinning, her arm around a bemused-looking Gus Van Sant. Her most recent status update is from last week, and all it says is “Fffrrryyydddaaayyy.” Five people “like” this—Percy Tomlinson, Kat Stokes, Rachel Duncan, Ellen’s great-aunt Marlene, and Danny Kramer, the guy who sent Scott the text message warning him never to even think Ellen’s name ever again. Scott clicks on Danny’s name and is unsurprised to see that Danny did unfriend him, which means the only parts of Danny’s profile he can see are those few tidbits that he leaves public:
    Danny Kramer
    Networks: Schmall College; Edgewater High School,
    Orlando, FL
    Music: Rilo Kiley, Wilco, Weezer (only Pinkerton —obvs), Neutral Milk Hotel, Mountain Goats, Hank Williams, Velvet Underground
    Employers: Not if I can help it.
    Danny’s profile picture is a close-up of him and Ellen in a staring contest, eyes wide open and nose tips touching, in what Scott believes to be the master bedroom of the house he fled.
    Scott’s DJ set is totally killer and he knows it. Sweat streaming down his bald head, the firm clamp of the headphones over his ears—he’s entering that zone where he’s both more and less himself than any other time: he is everyone dancing in the whole hot venue, and he’s the huge amps hung on shining chains from the black ceiling, and he’s the thunder being flung from the amps’ blind mesh faces. He’s all of it at once but also none of it—beautifully, perfectly, inexhaustibly nothing at all.
    Olivia comes over to him while he’s packing up, a rocks glass in each hand.
    â€œNice set,” she says, grinning. She nods at his equipment case. “Nice gear, too.”
    â€œMedical grade,” he says, giving her the same nod back. “One of those for me?”
    â€œThat depends.”
    â€œOn what?”
    â€œOh, I’ll let you know,” she says, and then they’re both laughing. Then they’ve finished their Jamesons, and he’s loading his gear into his trunk while she orders them another round. When the next DJ goes on, Scott pulls Olivia out onto the dance floor. The whole rest of the perfect night the lightning of success is wild in him—through the next set and last call and the smeary, invincible drunk drive home. Then they’re somehow in his room, and here’s his tall girlfriend on her naked knees as he explodes across her tits and chin.
    They lie on their backs, breathing deep and slow in the hot dark. Scott realizes that the universe is ungoverned: there is no law for him to be an outlaw from. He says to Olivia that he’s going to take the dog out for a walk. She tells him not to be long. He throws on the shirt that he was wearing earlier and a pair of jeans without underwear. He enters the living room on watery legs and flips the light on. Yreka, surprised by the sudden burst of light, whimpers pitifully but does not pause in her effort to eat her newest whelp free from its amniotic sac. If she doesn’t hurry, it will drown in there, and the next one is already on its way—a shiny purple oval like an enormous cold-medicine capsule or a small translucent dinosaur egg inching out of her distended vulva. The couch, of course, is ruined. Inside the emergent sac is something like a bald rabbit trapped in gelatin: squirming, blind, awake.
    Olivia, naked in the bedroom doorway, draws a sharp breath when she sees why Scott is frozen. She sidles up behind him, her belly