Jeremy Sigler

My age still

sits under the patter of rain and realization. The windows are still fogged by the heat of our youthful bodies. Once at a party off I went with a ballerina. To create an erotic memory. We escaped to a private place in the parents’ walk-in closet where I made an impression. And another. And maybe one more, before I slid the condom into the dark and hoisted my pants back up from their bunch at my ankles, and darted out to the parked Rabbit where the identical twins sat waiting in their bowl cuts. A few months later, I was informed by the boy who threw the party that his Mom had gone deep into her closet for an old pair of Uggs, and had discovered something strange and unexpected inside one of her shoes. It was a rubber. My rubber. Now a crispy relic from another time.

I’ve been having a hard

time breathing lately. And I mentioned this to my friend, who told me of an acupuncturist who once punctured her patient’s lung. By accident of course. Ugh. Now I’m paranoid that my neighbor punctured my lung! I interrogated her about it while we were in the park last weekend. “Did you puncture my lung?” I asked. And she explained that for my lung to have been punctured, the needle would have to have entered my back. She assured me that she was yet to stick a needle in my back. She’d only worked on my knee cap. When she stood up she was backlit by the sun. I squinted at her from my recline in the grass. I could see the perfect silhouette of her legs and frizzy pussy through the sheer fabric of her cotton sundress. There was a short little string directly between her thighs. I guess it was the string of her tampon. Hard to believe the sun could have produced that much information. That much drama. I’ve since questioned a few women about this sort of exhibitionism. They’ve all insisted that a woman knows the visibility of her pussy at all times relative to a man’s roving eyes. And so, the puppet show had to have been intentional. My acupuncturist — my neighbor whose little girl is best friends with my daughter — was well aware, in other words, that she was a walking shadow theater, with a puppet pussy, and that she was putting on a subtle play, just for me.