“THE PONY EXPRESS WANTED: young, skinny fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.” – Seen at the Buckhorn Saloon & Museum, San Antonio, TX

Orphans Preferred

So they ask me when. I say I don’t know because I don’t, and whoever knows when, ever? When what, asks the guy who is late, again, and who has just Xeroxed his ass, again.

When will you two finally get it on, they say, and I blush stupidly.

Back in the day, Xeroxed asses used to just go up on our cubicle walls. These days, they are facebooked, instagramed, tweeted. They are also instant messaged to Alicia, the executive assistant, who pretends that she’s liberal and open and not offended, though we see her visibly cringe each time she checks her phone.

With Alicia as the only woman in a team of fifteen, the post office has become an episode of Mad Men. We have spiked coffees, beer or wine with lunch, digestive shots, mid-afternoon aperitifs.

I casually pass by Alicia’s desk often, and I tend to linger, especially in the afternoons, when there’s already a lightness in my head. It is in these moments that she tells me about her life: her credit card debt, the abusive boss, the mercury in her teeth, her failed education, the osteoporosis she likely inherited from her mother and her grandmother.

In my lightheadedness I omit, censor, autocorrect. I look at her perfect bare calves and the lovely shape of her thighs and the firmness of her breasts and the softness of her hair.

Nothing else is needed, really, until the game continues. Until, again, they say: When, Jonathan, when? This time I awkwardly put my hand on her ass when she reaches over her desk. They whistle, and Alicia laughs it off, and I retreat again to the lightness in my head.

It’s not the pressure that I mind, the boyish encouragements. Rather, I wonder how this can be resolved, ever – not whether I can get her out of her clothes, but whether she can also be shelled out of these things; the things she carries around with her like a suitcase filled with lead.