Stacy slept with Brandon on November 3rd, 2022. Stacy did not like sleeping with Brandon. In fact, it really messed her up. You see, Brandon was a bit of a shit. He had no job, no money, no therapy, (he desperately needed some therapy) a record of verbal abuse towards his mommy, and an unfortunate disregard of the profitability of a weekly shower. Of course, Stacy didn’t know any of this.
She didn’t think to give Brandon a fucking interview when they first met at the bar on a late Thursday night. Flushed her dead fish down her toilet with a solute to the sea a few hours before. She missed little Stevie, but it was his own fault for jumping out of his fish bowl earlier that afternoon. As she sat there drinking her third Long Island iced tea, her eyes drifted over across the pool table to the most unsettling creature one could imagine. A goblin in his own right, he stood disguised in the drunken haze of Stacy’s tequila reposado mixed with cheap rum and despair.
Stacy stared down the chasm of her glass, the little bubbles serving as a debilitating memory of Stevie’s final few gasps of life. The creature walked over somewhere in her periphery, interrupting the haze of memoriam catching in her throat. An introductory touch on her shoulder blade chased off all thoughts of her lost comrade, and the following quip about being too pretty to drink alone served as a welcome distraction to the painful memory of the final funeral flush. Stacy reached over to brush Brandon’s arm, doing her best not to inhale his musty scent and end all sights of her distraction. Tried as she might to focus on the gremlin at hand, Stacy couldn’t help but see Stevie’s golden scales and gasping mouth every time she glanced up at Brandon, and she knew she wouldn’t know the man from Adam if shown his picture the very next day.
Stacy woke the following morning in a haze of nausea and anguish, her eyes crusted shut with a piece of hair stuck to her cheek. When she realized there was no Stevie to get home to and feed, her stomach clenched with a new wave of queasiness. She tugged on a nearby sweatshirt and rushed out of the stale room and down the hall, not stopping until she made it back home to the scene of the burial. Her knees hit the cool tile of her bathroom floor and she heaved mouthfuls of tequila into the bowl, a few stray tears slipping out the corner of her eye.
She could still practically taste the sour nicotine of Brandon’s mouth from the night before and she spat into the bowl a few more times before realizing where she was and what exactly she was spitting into. Stacy fought through the resurfacing memories of her desolate night, and considered all the fishless days that lay ahead. She sat back on her heels and wailed in silence, embarrassed by her blatant disrespect of Stevie’s final resting place and overwhelmed by the lack of splashing sounds resonating in her home.
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