Pretty Girl

You know the kind. She takes her panties off but you’re scrubbing at the pie tin, the aluminum pie tin, because you don’t want to be wasteful. You’re scrubbing at the pie tin with steel wool, and she’s yelling at you about scratching up the pie tin, because she doesn’t want to be wasteful either, even though she told you the steel wool would do the trick best. She’s yelling at you, but she’s still dropping her panties. You can’t afford to be wasteful, you get it. All you have in the house is soybeans and Frito-Lays and neither of you can afford to buy another pie tin. If you should need one.
The glamour is all gone, even when she’s taking off her panties. Especially when she’s taking off her panties.
So she’s letting her panties slink down to her feet, and she’s whining, and you’re trying to keep yourself out of that distraction, and her eyes are glow- ing with that sexy glow she gets, and you turns around and kiss her but now you’re thinking how she looks like her yes, her nose, her mouth, how they’re all on fire like a jack-o-lantern. Her skin, glowing orange around the mouth because she ate all the pie and some of it is left in the corners of her mouth, on her cheeks. She still looks beautiful. You push her away and clean up some more.
Everything is a damn mess. You don’t want to sleep with her. You’re tired, and the dropping of panties in the kitchen is growing tired too. You wonder if you could walk outside and keep walking until you hit the horizon, until you fall off the earth; until you find yourself floating, up into the sun. You’re wondering why on earth God didn’t make the world flat after all, so that if you wanted, if anyone wanted, they could just walk right off it.

Amanda Montei’s fiction has previously appeared in The Northridge Review and Word Riot. She lives in Los Angeles and is a contributing writer for http://IAmThatGirl.com. She is currently earning her MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts.