THE POUT
by Christopher X. Ryan
The girl I’ve just lost my virginity to wants to show me some home videos. We get dressed from the waist down and sit up in bed, which is jammed against the cold wall of her dingy apartment over the family garage in Old Town, Maine. She presses play with a finger sticky with sex. The video leaps sideways and pops before settling. I am thusly introduced to her history.
The context is the local airport. The subject is soldiers returning from Operation Desert Storm. She refers to them as heroes (her eyes became glazed with these words). Cee-Cee herself appears in the videos; her mother or grandmother is the cinematographer. Once the men clear the gate, a babyfaced soldier with ragged hair takes leave of the procession to give Cee-Cee a hug. At the time of filming she is 17, an asthmatic track runner who never wins. She kisses this soldier on the cheek but lingers a beat too long. Even in the jittery and grainy VHS tape that has been played far too many times, a tendril of spittle can be seen connecting her soft pink lips to the soldier’s jowl.
Beside me Cee-Cee leans forward, the skin of her flat stomach bunching against her small breasts. Her gaze tracks herself onscreen where she is following the men out of the airport toward a gray bus decorated with yellow ribbons. In both the video and life Cee-Cee is knock-kneed and her ears jut from the side of her head, but there’s a sultry small-town poutiness to her. College freshmen adore it. Soldiers adore it. Old men make toothless sucking sounds at it.
“I wanted to show them how thankful I was for protecting us overseas,” she murmurs, borderline catatonic with lustful nostalgia.
Cee-Cee is a townie. She grew up in the shadow of the state university yet managed to be stunningly unclever. Our first date, which was chicken nuggets in the campus grill, she’d told me she had Native American heritage but had declined free admission. She’d also said Democrats were evil and hockey was sacred. She passes out at the sight of hypodermic needles. I am a freshman who is away from home for the first time. Cee-Cee is not just my first fuck but my first kiss.
When the video ends she gets up to use the bathroom. Because I can hear her piss hissing against the porcelain, I walk around, humming. Pictures of her boyfriend occupy the dusty dresser and card table where she eats Pop Tarts and sips Nescafe every morning. The boyfriend lives on an island about an hour away, a little blob of land a stone-skip from the mainland. He works on a lobster crew and, according to the photos, wears a leather jacket and rides a cheap motorcycle. I quiver at the thought of his pubes clinging to the sheets we’ve just soiled.
By the time the bathroom door swings open, I am dressed. We sneak down the narrow rickety stairs and slip into her grandmother’s Lincoln so I can return to campus. A light snow has fallen. “I’m thinking about pancakes,” she says, and that sounds good to me too. It’s weird how little politics matter when you’re young and desperate to fuck and eat. I can fall in love with a flag-waving bigot with a splash of Passamaquoddy blood in her veins and not even lose my appetite. I can ignore the fact that she is slinking around in the shadows with an inexperienced out-of-stater while her boyfriend is dunking his arms into a frigid eddy to retrieve a lobster pot. “Maybe some eggs too,” she says.
Our destination is Dysarts, a truck-stop that serves all night. We bypass the school and hurtle down a breathtakingly pot-holed back road, the town car’s shocks juddering so violently the noise drowns out the everyman radiorock that accompanies Cee-Cee wherever she goes. At the restaurant she parks at the edge of the vast lot, giving us a long walk in the virgin-white precipitation—like me, untrodden until now.
Cee-Cee wants to sit in the middle of the sprawling barren restaurant. A far-right pundit natters on TV somewhere behind us, and after pulling me close to nuzzle a moment, she turns her attention to it. I’m still thinking about the soldiers in the videos though, and the look on her face when they appeared. The pout. She said she had dabbled with modeling, and I believed it. Everyone loves sad girls who live near paper mills, even the knock-kneed ones.
A forlorn waitress who should have retired a decade ago shows up. “What’ll it be?” she asks without lifting her eyes from her pad.
I’m no longer hungry, but I order a short stack. Cee-Cee orders a platter full of carbs and meat.
“Ten minutes.”
Once we’re alone, Cee-Cee picks up her knife and presses the blade to the back of my hand. She saws back and forth until the skin gives, letting a single thread of blood weep out onto the Formica tabletop.
“You’re real after all,” she says, then turns back to the TV.
We’d met in an online campus chatroom a couple weeks earlier, but it turned out we were both sitting in the library. I liked her shy demeanor and of course the pout and she liked my eyes and posture or something like that. She didn’t tell me she had a guy and I didn’t tell her I’d never had a girl.
She wads up a napkin to staunch my blood just before the self-hating waitress returns with our food. We eat. The right-wing talking head changes topics. Now it’s about the auto industry, China, steel, etc. It quickly segues to hockey. Cee-Cee turns, tunes in. She squints with focus as the men ram into one another. Her eyes glaze over. I have tasted better pancakes.
Born on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Christopher X. Ryan now lives in Helsinki, Finland. His debut novel HELIOPHOBIA is forthcoming from Montag Press in late 2022. His stories have appeared in dozens of journals, including Grist, Baltimore Review, Pank, and Copper Nickel. He can be found at www.christopherXryan.com.