You’re out of rock salt and coffee. The dark days are here, walkway demon-dark with hip-shattering black ice, bedroom darkening because the bureaucrats are saving up the daylight. You think about vacuuming all the pine needles burrowing into the carpet. Think about them browning there into tinder. Green and red glitter flakes off cards from people you no longer know. Your present is a sleepy blowjob from your wife that is all teeth. The ceiling fan’s blades are covered in dust thick as ash. Cracks spider the sheetrock. She swallows your come like expired eggnog, chases it with flat seltzer from a grimy mason jar on her bedside table. Merry Christmas, you say, watching your erection shrivel. Something catches in her throat, a word, an insult, a cry, holiday anguish. She takes another sip, says, Will you make the coffee? You think about burning down your house, torching your life. The flames high and bright. Noxious fumes billowing in the dark. Neighborhood dogs salivating to the sweet char of human flesh. But the corner store is open and it’s almost a new, or at least another, year.

Jon Doughboy’s prose has been praised by Ottessa Mushfuck “sentences echo like the moans of derelicts masturbating inside Richard Serra sculptures” and Jorge Saunders “stories so full of empathy…like you’re soaking your balls in pure oxytocin.”

Visit him for a soak and a stroke @doughboywrites