He asked if he could touch my breast, and I clamped his hand around it. Everything inside of me twinged, pleasurably.

He lay on top of me and we made out for a while. He smelled like yeast and the top notes of expensive cologne.

He kissed me, his face rough with stubble. He said, “My hands are getting tired.” I said, “Oh,” and turned toward him. (I didn’t wear a costume he was dressed as Barbarella.) We drank in his apartment. I had known him for almost a year, since the previous October, when we’d met at a Halloween party. So skinny I could see his pelvic bone, which I found strangely sexy. Now, all I can think about is fabric softener. It’s weird to me how much I miss that oral, chemical smell of clean clothes. My boyfriend’s mother found my underwear behind the bed weeks later, and handed them to him, laundered, without a word. The mixture had stripped the marble finish bare. I padded down into the foyer, and saw someone had knocked a vodka lemonade onto the floor. When I woke up, my bladder was tight as a fist. The boys made out with each other, and we watched them for a long time, bored but too drunk to stand up. We drank lemonade mixed with vodka and he encouraged me to make out with his friend’s girlfriend. His parents were out of town, so we threw a party at his house. I moaned and writhed, and hovered on the edge of coming for whole minutes, though no one was touching me there, not even me. They batted their eyelashes against my skin and breathed into my ears. I felt like a guitar and someone was twisting the tuning pegs and my strings were getting tighter. She buried her face in my neck and said “Like this” to my skin. Like it’s all intense.” He nodded in agreement. “What I like about you,” she said, “is your reactions. We laughed and talked and passed around the bottles. We drank stolen wine coolers in my room, on the vast expanse of my bed. My heart fluttered below my belly button, but I worried about daddy long legs and her parents finding us. I pulled up my shirt, she pulled up hers, and we just stared at each other. “I’m the dad, and you’re the mom,” she said. Her parents were upstairs we told them we were watching Jurassic Park. We lay down next to each other on the musty rug in her basement. She has been nominated for a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award. Carmen Maria Machado’s work has appeared in Granta, the New Yorker, Guernica, Tin House, NPR, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. In this collection Machado demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. The following is from Carmen Maria Machado’s collection, Her Body and Other Parties.

The resident carmen maria machado