Short People by Joshua Furst Page B

music that he should deny himself its pumping beat? Why shouldn’t he do whatever he wants? Why not? There are no reprisals. There’s just him gazing out at the phone lines and streetlights, the brown matted grass, the houses and houses that look just like his.
    That night, Shawn tempts himself to break taboos, to somehow become a normal boy like the ones chasing girls on the soccer field. He searches the family bookshelves for anything that might contain a dirty part, and finding nothing, imagines the girl with flaxen hair stepping into his room on her tiptoes. He knows now that there are no minions; there is only himself. Shawn no longer resists. He lets himself be overcome with impure thoughts and onanizes late into the night. The sex clenches his body, but as it does, his impure thoughts gallop around in his mind. They don’t take control of him, though, not this time. Now he’s in control of them, spurring them on, until he’s just body with no mind at all, eighty-eight pounds of sensation. Proudly, triumphantly, he makes the stain. It looks and tastes like snot.
    There’s no reason to feel guilty, but he does anyway. He’s not sure what to do with this feeling. Guilt is just another something caught in space with him. He has no hierarchy in which to place himself, no gameboard on which to move two spaces ahead or be penalized back to Start; he no longer even understands the objective of the game. There is no reason for anything. Good or bad, right or wrong, none of it really matters. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, this thought keeps rolling back into his head: what does it matter? It doesn’t. He’s at Wal-Mart coveting a cd, and what if he stole it? It wouldn’t matter. The only reason he doesn’t slip the cd under his shirt is that if he’s caught he’ll get thrown in jail. He plays with the condom he took from his dad, rips open the package, unrolls the rubber, tries it on, takes it off, blows it up to watch it fly around his bedroom. He wonders how many hundreds of millions of condoms the condom company makes every year. An entire industry exists solely to sheath people’s things, what’s wrong with that? Nothing, that’s what. He stops folding his clothes. He parts his hair differently, and sometimes, he doesn’t part it at all. He wears dirty underwear now sometimes, and more and more often he doesn’t bother to wash his hands after he pees. What does it matter? Nothing matters.
    The night before Easter, he stays up late and, after his parents have gone to bed, he slinks into the living room, turns the TV on mute and scans the stations. Showtime and Cinemax are the forbidden fruit he has on his mind tonight. The kids at school who know this kind of thing believe Cinemax is better—Skinemax they call it. He gives it a try. His family doesn’t subscribe, so it’s scrambled, but that doesn’t stop him from watching. A greenish-gray bar divides the screen horizontally and a pulsing line of colors divides it vertically, cutting the picture into four pieces, each in the wrong place, like one of those plastic slide puzzles. The image flips and squiggles, but every few seconds it catches and he can make out what he’s watching. Three hands, one red, one green, one blue, mirror each other in a sliding motion over a smooth surface. As the fingers massage this surface, sharp white lines streak behind them like barbs. The picture cuts to a different shot and Shawn sees two green nipples on a blue breast. A man with green lips leans in to kiss them and suddenly there’s only one nipple. The picture breaks up into jerky spasms, then goes back to the flips and squiggles. If he concentrates, Shawn can slow the images down. The parts that are scrambled can be inferred. A man with blue hair is having sex with a woman with green hair. Their lips are white and float free from their bodies. Shawn touches his thing and stares at the screen. He doesn’t go to bed until three-thirty a.m.
    His parents drag him