Old Familiar Things

The Backpack sits in the passenger seat. It directs me to the woman’s house and I'm its loyal driver, its accomplice, its spineless valet making turn after turn, merging onto the quiet highway, following its whims. But the Backpack wasn’t the one who made the initial contact, was it? The one who introduced themself, who took a firm grip on a soft hand, who nodded with a lopsided grin that spoke of hockey leagues and flirtatious winks between breasts, between legs, beneath feet. 

I had been the one who passed my calloused thumb over a naked, unpolished nail, knowing the Backpack was just where I had left it all those years ago: collecting dust in the back of the closet, much like myself. Years on, despite the ways in which my wife satiates me, I ache for the old familiar things. 

It’s not just the heavy-duty harness and its extra-large O-ring, or the piece itself, bigger and meaner than we had space to accommodate between us. It’s the way love-making leaves me feeling like a trapped animal, leaves me gnawing away at another person, because that other person is the only thing tethering me to personhood. 

So when the woman sat next to me in the bar that night, with a sundress kissing reddened knees, I ached. 

“Waiting for somebody?” Nope. Working late. Waiting for a brand new regret to brush fat, doughy fingers along my thigh. 

She introduced herself, tapping the lighter band of skin around my ring finger. “Oh, you’re bad.” Want to see how bad I can be? 

Something about the deep sapric hue of her eyes made me think of home, the way her ruddy, freckled chest did, the way her dress crept up her thighs. Home, not where my wife was, but home, those deep woods where I grew up, those jack pine barrens where I learned the meaning of lonely. 

And finally that ache, once twisted in the deep recesses of my married life, had a name with a course of action attached to it. 

“What would the missus say?” Nothing she hasn’t said before. 

†

Tonight she sent me an address and a picture of a dripping hole. 

The Backpack sits in the passenger seat, full of silicone promises to seal with a water-based kiss. 

The rainclouds move fast over the highway, but I move faster as the needle hits 105. 

I’m not racing the rain, I'm tearing into it. There’s another flood I have my eyes on, surging between thick, milky thighs. Thighs dimpled with fat awaiting the bruises I’m determined to leave there… 

The rain comes. 

…bruises the color of my own skin, like lingering handprints of a doting shadow… 

Thunder rumbles in the distance. 

…the rolls of fat that fold around her torso, her back, the round slope of shoulder, freckled with horse girl innocence. She’s cowboy boots and Daisy Dukes, crop tops with an apron belly. She has tits that swing like the udders she knows how to milk, and I am obsessed. 

The rain lands in cacophonous sheets across the windshield and I turn up the radio, trying to drown out the noise of the truck, the rain, the deep ambient hum of something. 

I skid up the ramp to a blinking red. 

The GPS stutters, searching, searching, searching. 

And just like that, the cracked pavement gives way to the monotonous rumble of gravel. Trees loom over the road, inviting me down its length, all lovely, dark and deep as the radio station cuts to static and the heavy reverberation that has accompanied me for miles finally breaks through.  

A crack and the hum lands in my gut. The sky is white for a moment as a tree smokes up ahead. 

The music trickles back and the storm eases. I find the entrance to her driveway off the dirt road. It’s a long, winding thing, illuminated by the headlights and nothing more. 

I turn into a clearing and there’s a lone flickering bulb on the façade of a small cabin. 

“Waiting for somebody?” Just you, baby. 

I adjust the Backpack over my shoulder and a wave of yellow light hits me as she stands in the doorway. 

†

I stink, the truck stinks, the Backpack stinks. I had done its dirty deeds, had I not? I fed that beast I trapped into the 13-inch cock. 

The light at her door flickers through the rain in my rearview mirror. I left her gaping and empty, still whispering the dreamy little oh fucks from when I tucked her back into bed. 

The deep hum of the storm settles back in, lodging itself in the back of my throat, somewhere behind that expanse of sweaty skin she lapped at like a thirsty bitch. 

The radio plays but her moans still fill my ears as I turn onto the road. 

That hum rises in my chest with the worsening storm, and I drive and drive, waiting to hit pavement. Instead the trees forever hang overhead, the storm growing ever louder. 

The GPS can’t decide if I’m in Michigan or Ontario. 

The storm creates its own undertow of bass as my heart races and my chest constricts. I unroll the front windows and take in a deep breath of sweet rot that mingles with the stink I’ve been marinating in for, how long. Five minutes? Forty? 

Lightning strikes the earth and I swerve to avoid it, or whatever it was that it shone in front of me. 

Ahead of me, the second tree tonight smokes after a lightning strike. And other than that, the road looks identical in both directions, sunken between the towering pines.

What the fuck am I doing here?

This isn’t home. These aren’t the woods I grew up in. She’s not a product of that place. But she fucked the way the woods back home made me want to fuck, to ingratiate myself to their kind, to the deer and the coyotes. And fuck. She was unapologetic and I craved craving a woman the way I had before my wife tamed me, before she rendered me something reasonable. 

I had craved her the way I craved the woods, the way the woods make my pulse sing and my legs ache as I explore them. She had that look, with those muddy eyes and big tits, something about the way her fat hung off her body; she was raw and unencumbered, and she smiled like she knew more about me than I would care to admit. 

So this road is not the dirt road I had grown up on, and these are not the jack pines of my youth. But this storm overhead is more familiar than anything as the thunder caresses my heart with its own incessant beating. 

Trees crack around me and the ground shakes. 

I saw her in that bar and that was all the spark I needed, that hint of smoke pulling me back. I spread her legs like I was splitting wood. She was kindling. She was fuel. And that ache that drove me to her, that had the Backpack prepped and ready to go, smouldered as tires hit the highway, ready to lay waste to all the untouched woodland before me. 

3:46 AM: Working late, hon? Be careful, it’s supposed to storm. 

© 2024 Bastian Hart

About the Author
Bastian Hart is a Michigan-based author whose work spans the breadth of speculative fiction, but ultimately indulges in the novelty of being human. Their stories have appeared in Baffling Magazine and Luminescent Machinations: Queer Tales of Monumental Invention. Bastian is represented by Shannon Lechon at Azantian Literary Agency. They can be found at graveyardslush.com.