Self-Starter

His parents were quiet about it. Slick as Crisco, belly buttons bobbing up against each other the way I’d pictured Oreos getting made. We stood and watched for a bit, calmed and tarnished by the rocking.

“We just saw your parents fucking,” Josh said.

Tommy looked up.

I nodded to confirm things.

“BFD,” he said, looking straight at me. “I see yours all the time.”

To make some extra cash, my parents set up a porn site where for fifty bucks a month you could make them do anything. One guy wanted to see them with boots on. Another asked for an airplane scenario, complete with barf bags.

I got out of the house when I could. I loved to build shit and found myself crafting life-size fuck-dolls out of silicone and polyester resin. They were durable and I sold them online for big cash.

“You fuck,” Tommy said, examining my latest model. “That’s my fucking mom!”

Josh gawked at the doll for a while then laughed.

I stood back, for the first time seeing the resemblance. “Fuck,” I said. “Sorry. She must still be in my head from last week.”

Tommy swung at me, but I moved, and his fist went right into his mother’s breast. Then things got awkward, so I said, “Hey, don’t take it out on her,” which was pretty cheeky considering the state of things.

Tommy pulled his hand from his mother. “Well,” he said, “as long as you don’t sell it.”

“Of course I’m gonna sell it,” I said. I could feel Tommy’s eyes on me, hot like wet candles. “It’s business, buddy,” I said, putting a fatherly hand on his shoulder the way my old man had when he explained business to me.

Sophie Rosenblum was the 2008 – 2009 Rice University Parks Fellow. She received her MFA from the University of Houston in 2008. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Saint Ann's Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Dossier Journal, Avery Anthology and Gulf Coast.