Full Frontal Fiction by Jack Murnighan

he is looking down, down to the place where their bodies are joined. With a gasp and a grunt, he collapses on top of her. Jennie can feel his heart through her chest. Eddie Fish’s heart! She will remember this moment, she promises herself: the faded blue summer sky, the worm inching along the edge of a pale yellow leaf, the soft smell of dirt. She will color it with a patina of great beauty. She thinks about Eddie’s question—Are you using anything?—and her fingers grow icy. She wonders if it can happen the first time, if the grassy mess oozing between their legs can grow into something more complicated—a punishment, a life sentence. She closes her eyes and prays: just this once, never again, please not now.
    â€œWhat?” asks Eddie, looking down at her.
    â€œSorry?”
    â€œYour lips were moving.”
    â€œOh, it’s nothing.”
    â€œYou’re not getting weird on me, Jen, are you?”
    She doesn’t answer. Getting weird. Eddie’s words echo and bounce through her skull. She twists her neck once again, her cheek resting on the cool earth, and stares at the empty heart carved into the base of the tree. She imagines her own initials there, and then, like a stack of cards flipping through the wind, a hallucination, she sees the initials of every man who will ever become her lover. There are so many—perhaps dozens! More than she can possibly imagine. She is filled with the knowledge of what she does not know.
    Eddie kisses her throat, his lips dry and papery, then jumps up and rummages for his briefs beneath a pile of fallen leaves. He looks down at Jennie and she squints at him, blinded by the sunlight behind his shoulder. From where she lies, he seems like a giant.
    â€œI—I didn’t use anything, Eddie,” she falters.
    He stumbles on one leg, awkward as he pulls on his underpants.
    â€œWhat did you say?” he asks, stopping.
    â€œI’m sorry—I didn’t use anything,” she says, this time with greater conviction.
    â€œJesus, Jennie!” He punches the air. “How could you—”
    â€œI didn’t know.”
    â€œBut I thought you were—”
    Tears stream down her face. The light, the woods are refracted, kaleidoscopic.
    Eddie Fish’s face becomes a blur.
    â€œYou bitch!” she hears, as if from a great distance. He is walking away from her, heels crunching against the leaves. “If anything happens, it’s not my problem, do you hear me?”
    Slowly, she gathers her things. She pulls her bra from the branch, stuffs her panties into her knapsack, buttons her blouse and yanks on her shorts. She sits back down against the tree and searches the ground for a sharp twig. When she finds it, she begins scratching her initials into the empty heart, digging deep into the bark. She works carefully, with the precision of an artist. She fills the whole perimeter, so there will be no room for anyone else.

For God’s Sake, Forgive Your Mother
    BY DARCEY STEINKE
    IN THE TAXI, on the way in from the airport, objects moving at her through the windshield had the ability to harm. The green shamrocks painted on the diner window, the Angelina billboard. She could handle artifice, third-rate holidays, giant stylized breasts. It was the everyday objects that hurt, the pay phones, the mailboxes, the 7-Eleven in the strip mall. Fuck them. Fuck the purple bougainvillea twining around the metal fence. She would put each blossom inside her mouth and chew. Fuck flowers. Fuck the moon, the stars. She hated the blue awning on a place called Communication Station. She hated anything that reminded her of that lovely internal configuration created by sex.
    In the hotel room, absolutely everything a dull pink, she got out the tiny bottles of bourbon from the mini bar. Closing the curtains partway, she lay out over the bed. Planes, no bigger than floaters in the corners of her eye, moved across the column of sky between