You’re Naked
a short story
“You’re naked,” said the fat man, surprise coloring his nasal voice.
“I’m aware of that,” I replied.
This was an awkward moment and, given my state of nudity and embarrassment, not much else came to mind by way of response.
He looked at me. A swollen doughnut sat wetly in his hand, a glob of strawberry jam bulging from its wounded side. Powdered sugar dusted the stubble on his chin — evidence of his lusty biting. For some reason, I found myself wondering if he had bitten into it before or after seeing me. An egotistical and shrill element of myself liked the idea that my exposed flesh had spurred him to gash his confection in a fit of desirous pique.
His dull eyes trickled down my body and I shuddered at the physical sensation this created in me. Like when rain runs down the back of your jacket. I could almost hear the machinery of his brain storing imagery for future use. The disgust on my face must have been audible because, like a rabbit at the crack of a twig, his eyes sprung back up to mine and in some sort of reflex action he took another bite of the doughnut. This shouldn’t have seemed leering and suggestive but it somehow was. And it was made worse by the fact that he bit the wrong side and the previously bulging glob of strawberry jam was expelled from the cavity in the doughnut and fell to the ground with an unexpectedly sexual ‘glop’.
I think I should explain something. I don’t hang out in hallways naked as a rule, or even as a fetish. This was an accident, a happenstance, a totally random ending to an unlikely series of events. In case I haven’t been clear enough, this was not intentional.
It started earlier that day when my phone rang, as it does so annoyingly often, while I was in the process of paying for a cappuccino in an insufferably hip coffee shop around the corner from my tiny apartment in which I live alone. It rang while I was fiddling with my purse to get change into it while also trying to take the receipt the guy with the ridiculously thin mustache was insisting on handing to me while also gripping precariously at the cup that constituted the center of our uncomfortable episode of commercial intercourse. The phone ringing was the seagull on the bonnet, so to speak (for those of you who have seen The Italian Job — the real one, not the remake with Marky Mark). My unbidden reaction to my ringtone is always to answer, immediately, no matter what. I did this, as I usually do, and the purse slipped, the receipt fluttered to the ground and the life-affirmingly hot and soothing cappuccino became an unsightly shit-shaded stain on my brand new jeans. Sure, it burned, but not as much as watching three dollars ruin forty dollars more and with no club soda to hand.
Flash forward to the sidewalk outside the aforementioned coffee shop, where I purposefully strode onwards to continue my day unfazed by the vagaries of fate. My temper, not the most placid at the best of times, had been moved up to a gentle roil, and I had that solid stomping feeling you get when you wear hard heels on concrete while being vaguely upset. That’s when I passed the piano movers.
“Hey baby, you look mad,” came the opening salvo.
“I hate to see you go but I love to watch you leave,” chimed in the smaller guy on the other end of the piano.
I’ve worn tight jeans in public before so I just carried on walking. Which is when the bigger carrier of weighty instruments muttered:
“Stuck-up bitch.”
To which I replied:
“Has it occurred to you that maybe being hooted at by two apes carrying an object they don’t know how to use isn’t my idea of an effective mating call?”
I couldn’t resist.
The smaller guy had the decency to look embarrassed, but the bigger one obviously felt that this was an appropriate time to defend his honor.
“You got a bad attitude, honey. You should get laid,” he snarked.
“If you see any men around here, let me know,” I fired back.
This apparently inflamed his masculine pride.
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you stupid dyke?”
I spun around with my arms spread out.
“Why don’t you -”
And that’s when the street-sweeping machine clipped me and I fell into the gutter. Filthy. Leaves, wrappers, cups, gum, god-knows-what, all sloshing around in fetid water. I was drenched and my many important things to do for the day were forgotten. Of course the street-sweeper didn’t stop. Why would he? This is a big city and he has a lot of streets to sweep. I fumbled my way out of the gutter in time to hear the bigger piano mover remark to his smaller colleague:
“Looks like somebody swept her off her feet.”
Scumbag. Chivalry is dead, at least in this town.
I squelched my way back to my apartment, covered in muck. Dirty fingers picking at the zip on my handbag and digging around for my keys, wincing as I felt the gutter water soaking into that lining that I liked so much. I got the door to the apartment open and closed it behind me. Bag dropped at my feet. Keys clinking to the floor. Head back against the door and I just had to let out a raw shriek that had been building in me since the coffee shop.
Shower. Hot, beautiful, blessed shower. I felt like the girl in one of those 1980s shampoo commercials where she’s naked under a tropical waterfall. Pure bliss. I washed myself for way too long at far too high a temperature. Red toes onto the shaggy bathmat and a nice big towel wrapped around me, warm from the towel rack.
I walked into the other room of my apartment, that is to say the room that isn’t the bathroom. It reeked of sewage. My filthy gutter clothes were still slumped in a heap by the door and my lengthy shower had allowed them to infuse the whole place with eau d’hobo. I opened the one window I have, a beautifully appointed view of a major traffic junction and fire escape. The sounds of the city immediately filled the room and I went to the cupboard to get a plastic bag for the clothes. I used a set of steak tongs to push the offending garb into the hopefully odor-proof receptacle. Success.
The radio-controlled weather clock that my parents had given me the previous year told me that it was still early afternoon, but in the absence of motivation or in fact necessity, I saw no reason why the remaining bottle of wine in my larder should go unopened. I twisted the bottle opener into the cork and popped it out with a satisfying tug. The wine glugged into the glass and then into my face, to lip-smacking satisfaction for all concerned, namely me. There is something very liberating about drinking before children get out of school, especially in your own apartment while naked with the window open. Somewhere into my second glass of wine I decided to drop the towel and enjoy my total adulthood as Nature intended. I was dry by that point anyway.
Some time later, fatigue overtook me. I was lying on the sofa with the dregs of the bottle of wine sloshing in my stained glass and just feeling the slow breeze move over my body, contrasting so well with the coarse fiber of the cushions underneath me. The chain of misfortune welled up inside me and I drifted off to sleep in the warm and fuzzy state of relaxation that only food, sex or booze can induce.
A shrill squawking awoke me violently and I opened my eyes to the intense glassy stare of a gigantic pigeon sitting on my chest. It was a moment or two before I fully processed what was happening and in that time my eyes and mouth opened very very wide and the scream I managed to suppress came out as a long whining wheeze like an asthmatic inflating a balloon. The pigeon glared directly into my eyes. I tried as hard as I could not to move. It shifted its head ever so slightly to one side as if sizing me up. I held my breath. It pecked at me and I flipped out, jumping to my feet and screaming like a maniac. I dived for the front door and threw myself into the corridor, slamming the door behind me.
The corridor was so silent that all I could hear was my own heaving breath and the faint buzz of fluorescent lights. I would have been soothed by the church-like stillness if I hadn’t looked down at myself and realized that I was naked.
And that’s when a fat man eating a doughnut stated the obvious.
