Sex and the Cyrillic

A drunk named Sergei said that St. Petersburg is a museum of sex and suffering, which at the time I thought profound, but we were all drunk on cheap beer and Sergei spoke poor English, so there’s a good chance I said this and attributed it to Sergei, who, come to think of it, never could have uttered such a phrase, being passed out in the street. Back to sex. Dear Mom, I am tingling in Russia. I am starring in a commercial for my penis. It features me dancing on bars in a suit made of thousand dollar bills, an explosion in the background, and then my penis rising, which, luckily, is attached to me. In all seriousness, when I was fourteen and a prisoner of puberty, I would lie awake like an old-time flying machine unable to lift from the ground, throbbing in my body, writing in the secret journal of the night. Dear Night, I wrote, let there be a place where women walk like tigers, where their eyes are steel and ice, where their spiked heels wound the ground they walk on.

Ryan Griffith is currently living in Iceland. His stories have appeared in elimae, Night Train, DogzPlot, FictionDaily, and the Wigleaf Top 50 of 2012.