Paranoid Polaroid

“Liz, you fat-titted bitch.” A smirk; a sultry weight creeps into Dignan’s voice. From the kitchen she hears the rush of the sink. 

“Liz, you fat-titted bitch,” Dignan repeats, louder this time. She’s not all mad, not really. All cheek, she slinks into the kitchen the way a cat slinks. 

She holds up the polaroid, waves the polaroid around with two fingers. Liz barely bats an eye, How she says, Dignan, yes, doll, I see you; Liz, at the dishes in a manner that says, Not now. 

Dignan does what she does, breathes down Liz’s neck to send a pleasant jolt up her spine; a soft, single pant that breaks and matriculates back down as soft tingle, the barest wisp that Liz straightens when she feels the prickling surge down to her snatch. Liz takes her eyes off the clutter in the sink. Eyes darker than Dignan’s Hazel eyes, almost black, Liz makes a face, a frown with a touch of, Dignan catches for a brief moment and is pleased to see, arousal. Liz first arcs the one brow, then the other. Liz, her gaze steady on the snapshot at hand, “Diggs, I love you, but we…hafta be less comfortable. You and me, I mean. Between us.” 

That the polaroid, snapped from behind, angled a smidge to the left - sheets thrown about, Dignan, planted firm, Kilroy jammed inside her, her toes curled, her back, all shine with sweat, hair matted, that shock of autumn red plastered about her shoulders; for a slim girl, her bare ass pleasantly molded by momentum - Dignan, her first thought when she had crouched by the couch cushions and slid out the polaroid was, damn, who’s this babe? What happened was, Tuesday morning, Dignan drifts awake. She balls up the sheets, folds up the mattress and replaces the cushions that match the couch. What she took to be a scrap of paper, the white edge peeked quietly out from the sliver of space between couch and floor. The same fold-out she had slept on, the same one under her and Kilroy here in the photo. Her brow creases. “Liz,” there’s doubt now. “Tell me you took this?” Both brows shoot up on that pretty pale face of hers. “Bitch, there’s better things I could be doing,” Liz, oh Liz got her claws out, “than drooling over you and your bitch-in-heat grab at getting knocked-up.” 

“Liz, darling, we don’t own a polaroid, do we?” 

Liz shuts her trap as she mulls that one. Pfft. “Diggs, babe, if I know - fuck me how Kilroy fucks you.” The truth is, these two broads somehow have too much junk and nowhere near enough junk. A set of outside steps reach up to their second-floor flat. The flat itself somehow manages to seem broader than the space really is, that, you gotta go outta your way and root around when there’s something to be found. 

How the photo is set up, it’s plain the snapshot came from the foot of the bed. When, What night? There’s Kilroy’s bed, his pad ripped straight outta Bojack Horseman, high on those hills there, not far off Mulholland - but, “the last time we had sex,” Dignan wonders aloud. She sees Liz, how a W starts to form on her lips. “Me and Kilroy, I mean,” duh, “that was here.” Liz, right, “had to be out, neh?” Dignan, tongue lodged in cheek. Night before las- no, three nights. “Three nights ago?” Liz asks. Diggs nods. “Three nights.” Liz zones out, reaches back… 

Me and Townes, down at Santa Monica? The pier? No, had to be a night or two before that. Oh, “Teaching Farley how to do donuts. That was the night she scraped the grill of this SUV against a lamp post-” 

Dignan gets the picture. “You were out, and I had the place to myself that night. That is, if that’s the same night.” So, our question, like a war criminal sent to the Spandau ballet, just hangs there. Who’s the shutterbug?     

“When, the money shot,” Liz pulls a dopey grin the way a school girl when she hears something dirty, “When was the money shot-?” 

“What time, is that what we mean? We go at it - I, I jackhammer Clem’s brains out -- three times a night, when we go at it.” Liz, her face sags, her eyes wide. What with the pair of them tearing each other a few nights a week - “That, uh, that’s on a good night-?” “No,” Diggs, innocently. “That’s what I call a bad night.” 

Uh-huh. Liz, what else? gives a small, polite golf clap. “Dignan Babbit, herself the pleasure principle. Freud would have a field day with you.” Dignan vogues in a cutesy way and blows her a kiss. 

…Their heads together, the list of suspects is slim. Kenny Riefenstahl, Kilroy’s weenie sidekick. Liz has it that he’s a perv, but Dignan, she can smell the sweet, sultry reek of sex on just about anyone. With Ken, there’s barely a whiff. Dignan shakes her head, and defends how she thinks Kenny is barely a notch above asexual - “Whoever snapped this photo,” Dignan deduces, “he’s either a creep, a stalker or a major horn-dog. Ken barely fits that first label.” 

…Boomer? Dignan posits. He’s blonde, he’s dirty, he’s got this golden caterpillar across his upper lip. Liz has her fun with that fat hog between Boomer’s legs and her thighs. 

Hm. Boomer Durst, tell me. Shacked up in a small podunk town in Appalachia; after that Seattle. He’s barely started on his thirties, but has that loveable stench of the ’70’s burn-out. 

Liz’s turn to shake her head. No, that may have been, the night Farley did a job on that fender, that may have been the same night, Liz explains, the night Boomer was foolin’ aroun’ with my ass down “at the go-kart track”. Here’s Dignan, tickled pink. Liz coughed a small, bashful cough. Um, she murmurs something -  how, what’s that? how Boomer closed down the joint and had her right there on the track - Dignan chews her lower lip, hops these small, jittery hops, ready to jump Liz’s bones right there. The brunette girl has to lightly thwack her firecrotched bosom buddy. Down girl, down.   

…Dignan, she rolls her shoulders before she comes to it. How the only other fling she’s had up here was Townes. Liz barely registers any shock. There was this time, this past winter, December it was, the pair of them, their chests puffed, all katty at the mall arcade. Dignan and Townes, snarky jabs, tennis-banter dialogue - Liz was sure, yup, sure there was the thinnest front of sexual tension between Dignan’s snatch and Townes’. Townes, she’s tall, she’s slim. How Townes does her best Pam Grier, how Townes nails Tamara Dobson, all those foxes- 

Two nights, Townes came up and snoozed on their couch. Dignan, bless her, couldn’t resist. Hell, let me show you - if we jump ahead, Townes’ cousin, a slight, wispy girl, this small coco-skinned broad, pretty as hell - this, a short flash-forward, mind - she eyes Dignan, Dignan eyes her, she eyes Dignan - ah well, that mattress gets a lot of mileage.   

…Diggs, Liz, How the pair spit-balled backen’forth… A good question becomes your wife - the question nags and nags and there’s no satisfying the question. Whatever. When we flash ahead, eight months and some change, we fix on the same apartment. Dignan wretches. Nausea, morning sickness. A week, maybe two, past the new year. Weeks before her twenty-fourth birthday, she has what she wants. Kilroy Clem you sonovabitch, 'bout fucken time. Bent over the can, she heaves her guts.    

With Kilroy, she gets blanks. When she does croak well into her nineties, Dignan Babbit will have squeezed out three brats, with only the first brat mustered from that bleach that passes for Kilroy’s sperm. Clean, she hops back into bed and sinks her claws into Kilroy and, no, Kilroy, your ass is mine. After, fold-up, cushions back in place, and this, after she chalked up the last one to cheeky fucken arounds, there’s another - oh come o- there’s another white edge, a flat, glossy, papery square almost as though winking from that sliver of space. A picture snapped from behind, Dignan’s back in that long white shirt; clasping the edges of the bowl, doubled over the can.