Savage by Nathaniel G. Moore Page A

and Liz, and some garbage snacks. She’s in town for the week from Vancouver. Haven’t really seen that much of her since Christmas."
    "Drunk drivers of Canada."
    "Oh, Mom says we’re going to see Grammy tomorrow, not today."
    "Why?"
    "They’re having some potluck thing, and Mom is taking over a card or something and then coming back. She said there was only room for one at the potluck last supper. I wasn’t really listening."
    "Oh."
    "I just wish she’d come here for the weekend. I don’t understand why it’s so political. She can sleep in my room, and I can crash on the couch."
    Friday night was a high-energy session for me, filled with oddly lit solo driveway hockey marathons, homework and queuing up what was now a clunky fortress of videotapes; their meticulously noted labels the only way to discern unique content.
    I cued up the porn I’d dubbed from Andrew and turned the volume down, watching the blonde-haired woman in the blouse with the bulbous honey bun bob her head up and down on the second generation VHS copy. She appeared to be sucking off a man back from the war, or an airline pilot. The moans and slurps were digitally muffled and garbled by the video degeneration of piracy. I watched his thick dick glisten in and out of her mouth, her large eyes opening and closing. I thought of Andrew and I, our sessions, his torso leaning over me, descending himself and sliding his tongue around my shaft until eventually enveloping my shy dick in his hot mouth as I closed my eyes and rolled my head back until a familiar chorus rang through my entire body.

    *

    Late Saturday morning, Holly was telling me about her new boyfriend, Steve, when the videotape in the VCR began to make a garbled ruckus. Steve had a car and was sort of hysterical and really smart, but most of the time they fought about everything . "He’s a year older than me and thinks he knows how the world really works , he tells me, and all this other garbage—but he can’t even change a flat tire or fix my shelves, or spell Michigan."
    I blurted out, "Who cares about spelling Michigan?"
    "I care, dickless!" Holly laughed.
    The VCR motored past the glitch and jumped back into frame. It was a popular film about a dead rock star. The bearded lead actor twisted the cap off a bottle of alcohol and took a noisy swig.
    "You can die from just about anything," Holly said. "My humanities class has shown me this, you know, that collective deaths of a group of people or random individual deaths and the way we react as a society and individually, IT’S MIND BLOWING! A town will mourn the death of a small-town football hero but some big-city taxi driver or a family wiped out by a drunk driver or mother of ten in Cambodia gets stabbed, it can be tucked into the back of our psyche forever."
    "That’s a class?"
    "Yeah, I love it."
    Holly came in and out of the living room. The telephone, left off the hook, went into a big pulsing headache. "Why is the phone off the hook?"
    "I don’t know."
    "What movie is this?"
    "I think it’s The Thing or The Blob . The something." I didn’t answer her. She rattled her cup of ice water.
    In the film, a bright-eyed wino saw an asteroid. His dog was equally disturbed before the film cut to two varsity boys at a drugstore planning their sexual escapades for the weekend, when into the store walked the local priest.
    I hit PLAY. On a tape labelled Dec. 7, 1991 , I watched a recent rerun of my own life: Sunnybrook Park, the bucolic winter nothing, and me. In the video, I move through the thickets, the twisted thorns and burrs as I took my GT Sno-Racer down into the cement path, past the rippling woods on either side.
    "Swear to accomplish this task before nightfall!" Holly shouted, pointing her finger at me.
    "Huh?"
    "Mom wants you to vacuum your room. Do you know if we’re eating the midwinter boar for Easter or what?"
    "No idea," I said.
    "I’m sure there’s a big