When left unsatisfied, lust becomes violence.

…girls were like poems: weird, incomprehensible and boring, but those “in the know” assured me that they were beautiful.

I’m trying to be an adult. I’m trying to be responsible. I’m trying not to call home crying. But it’s hard. It’s hard when every morning feels like a hangover. It’s hard when I hear voices every time I go to sleep. It’s hard when the only thing that would make me feel better is to crawl in bed with the one person who truly knows me, but I’m more afraid of her than the bears or the perverts or whoever the hell visits her when I’m away.

The scar rippled from the top of her bikini line down to her thigh. Where normal girls had hair, Ava had a quilt of mangled skin that required tweezers to de-fur. For ten months she tried joking about it (“Turns out sharks really CAN smell menstrual blood a mile away!”). She tried fixing it with a myriad of steroid injections and silicon gels. She even tried ignoring it. Her last hope was to confront it.

Trevor climbed once again to the land of the living, naked except for an antique gas mask strapped to his face. As he peered through glass eyes like a mutant fly and breathed through the alien snoot, a single thought coiled through the booby-trapped labyrinth of his brain:
I need to be alone.
I need to be alone.
I need to be alone.

Trevor could almost see the invisible gas leaking from the broken furnace, billowing around his body, wafting in his wake from the laundry room to the living room, seeking out the nostrils of the realtor, the yuppies, the toddler, and every other goddamn trespasser before seeping into their bloodstream and infecting their cells until they dizzied, ached, barfed, and fell to the floor like a bunch of—
He caught himself.
He breathed through his nose.
He pushed away the hate, calmed the tornado strangling his gut, and thought of HER.