The crustached scrawn bod with a flutter of raven wing bangs, who gave me a ride to a friend’s to watch Wesley Snipes’ The Fan, fondling the knives nestled in his sun visor, watching their blades reflect the streetlights on our dead-end streets with deadened eyes, lacerating my earholes with the aural wet dream for misfit boys, Beethoven’s 9th a la A Clockwork Orange.
The goofy stock boy at Publix with the frosted tips and the Muppet smile, who shared a first name with the underage bag boy at Publix, and took me to Pep Boys on a first date to ogle rims and hubcaps and dine on Burger King in his cosmetic disaster of a Honda Who Gives a Fuck, who treated me to an evening of grilles and grill marks but never got me hot, left me with no marks of desire, just heartburn, never made a move, never asked me out again.
The underage bag boy at Publix, dark in both looks and disposition, baby blues brittle with unearned cynicism for someone so young, flirting by sending sardonic quips my way as I scanned and passed him other people’s midnight snacks, professing his love of Depeche Mode and AFI while blocking the pop tarts, ragging on the other bag boy chodes with their silver chains and sports talk, walking me out to my car while I wondered if he had one, baby blues sinking to a demure dim while backing away in earnest when I passed him a handwritten card filled with childlike crayon scrawl: You bring out the pedo in me, a crudely misguided attempt at jesting about our four-year age gap, knocking over his carefully stacked canned meats as he headed to another cashier’s checkout line, relieved to not be in on the joke.
The callous man with calloused hands, faceless but known by the way his fingers stretched up and inside my stretchy skirt, out of sight and barely in mind, obscured by the hushed violet corners of that big, dumb nightclub, my eyes open but unseeing, tequila and cocaine fogging up my crystalline acuity, while he laughed about how crazy I was, how much he liked it, and how much he knew I liked it too, his rough hands plying me into an amenable, horizontal form on something sturdy somewhere while the music moved through me and the people moved around me and I didn’t move anything but my mouth to his so he would shut up, so the silence would swallow the slowing of time, make me forget what I could already barely remember.
The bicurious volleyball player who fawned over my red snakeskin pants, said I looked like Kirsten Dunst in Bring It On, said that was a compliment, said why don’t we drink all this pineapple vodka and dance all night, dance as close as we can get, you’re a good dancer, you know?, and so we humped each other’s crotches to house beats, and on the drive home, he hurled out the window, spraying my roommate, Jerry’s recent wax job with effluvia of a rotted paradise, and back at my place, he stripped down on the couch to nothing but beastly boredom, so I did the same and kneeled and sucked while I thought of Kirsten Dunst’s eyes, and if they really looked like mine, until my other roommate fumbled with the lock, home from his Taco Bell shift, and I ejected his cock from my mouth, spewing Oh shit as I bolted into my room, leaving him alone naked and hard, but Jerry was in the room down the hall waiting for him, waiting to make him giggle and groan, all of which I heard as I tried to catch my breath, alone and naked and wet, behind my own closed door.
The porcine perv of a boss at the medical college notorious for scamming the student body, for demeaning the faculty and staff, including me, the lowly receptionist, the primary target of acute and uncouth focus on my tits, my legs, my tits, lecherous laughs from the pit of a gut inflamed by KFC Bowls, scarfed down at all hours in his open office while the treacly abomination of Wings’ Band on the Run drained my soul and left its blackest parts to clog up my eardrums, spit-gobbed, greasy-sheened mouth croaking, And Jet, I thought the major was a lady suffragette over and over, logging into my Friendster account while on my lunch break, writing racy come-ons to boys I rejected in high school, saying it served me right for using the internet on his dime, starting rumors that I was screwing an anatomy professor who I talked to twice about Six Feet Under, dismissing me, once I quit, as a bimbo, a ditz, a lowlife in earshot of anyone who could hear him over the maudlin sadism of McCartney.
The president of the fraternity at the art college, a Justin Timberlake doppelganger with an eyebrow ring, foosball pro and barstool regular at that pizza joint by campus, a keen observer of my good posture, a slick talker who said I could bum a cigarette if I came to some house party, tucking an American Spirit behind his ear with a lascivious smirk, smirking again when I arrived at the party, removing my cig from behind his unpierced ear and lighting me up, making out with me in the dark for hours like we were preteens, pressing play and repeat on the soundtrack to his favorite movie, The Last of the Mohicans, complimenting my choice of panties (leopard thong), peeling them off before telling me we could do everything but, something about his beliefs or values, one night ringing me up to ask me what I most wanted him to do to me and when I purred, bang me in a dive bar bathroom, he ignored my request, ignored my future calls, never spoke to me again.
The stocky, bearded-ass prick, the kind that look like they’re not wearing a shirt even when they are, stubbing out his cig on the sidewalk in front of a cheesy saloon, the kind named after an island nowhere near the downtown of that inland Florida shithole, who stepped down off the curb to get a better look at my ass, who described my ass to me in simple but effective language, the effect being I rolled my eyes and paid him no mind, and not able to fathom why I wouldn’t applaud his unimaginative ode to my ass, he took a big swing at my head with his meat tenderizer fist while calling me a cunt cunt, fucking cunt, as I ducked and stumbled and chuckled with latent terror past all the other cheesy saloons, musing on how he’d describe my cunt if given the chance and how many blows I’d suffer on the pavement while classic rock blared because anything but saying yes, take this cunt for yours because you’ve claimed it with your eyes and your words, would result in a wounding for both of us, and, at best, a few free Bahama Mamas for my troubles.
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Jillian Luft’s writing has appeared in XRAY, Hobart, Expat, Rejection Letters, Vlad Mag and many other publications. She’s currently finishing up her novel about Sunshine State scumbag romance. You can find her on Twitter (X) at @jillianluft or read more of her writing at jillianluft.com.
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image: Jade Hawk
Rejection Letters 