In which Bald Guy meets superior sexual force.

 
Two Birds
 

It occurs to Bald Guy as she’s going down on him that he’s never been good with a gun and is only slightly better behind a bass boat on water skis.

Once after missing a bottle ten feet away on a fence post for the fifth or sixth time, he convinced himself that he turned and shot two birds flying by. He was a kid then. What that has to do with the motion of her short blonde hair against his chest and her grip and the sound of her mouth around, up and down, and the way all of it together feels, especially her mouth, he doesn’t know except that she’s an identical twin and right now his buddy Black Guy’s with her sister somewhere, maybe still at the bar, and Bald Guy hopes the memory of the two birds, sparrows or maybe starlings, swooping into his peripheral vision has nothing to do with the twins except that he knows he’s seen an old British movie or two in which women are referred to as “birds,” so he worries about what he might think of women and worrying isn’t helping his erection any or maybe it’s women in pairs or Austrian women or maybe Austrian women biathletes, twins, one of whom is not going to let him fail or maybe it’s not let herself fail, changing her grip as she is and angle of her, that, her wet, wet mouth, ohhh, because that’s what the two of them are, the twins who enjoy twin citizenship, Austrian and American, superior athletes spending the better part of the year training 20-30 hours a week, skiing, stopping, shooting, skiing, stopping, shooting, and he knows if he ever willfully makes the mistake of getting busy with the other sister one or both of them could hunt him down.

Armed.

On skis.

Proficient.

Damn, he’s standing at a crossroads, one direction the promise to himself he’s abandoning the twin project, the other the complete submission to superior sexy force, but that’s not really so much a crossroads as it is a nice patch of grass he’s lying down on, saying Take Me Female Jesus, saying Tear Down The Temple Because Bad People Sell Bad Stuff There And I Am One Of Them.

Black Guy might be pissed if he caught Bald Guy with his twin, but after a push, a shove, a punch or two, a wrestling match, a week or two of silence, they’d get past it. They always do. Brothers.

But these women. Dang. Not women, Neanderthal. Woman. Not Twin Project. One Woman.

The one who’s bearing down on his middle part, some days his best part, cock cock cock part, right now what would be his only part if it weren’t for his chattering brain, which isn’t shutting down even as she’s pumping it in the open air in front of her face, which he knows or imagines is still on the other side of her short-cropped blond hair.

“Cum,” she says.

He knows what she means. He knows she doesn’t mean “Come.” He’s already about as close as he can get to her, bending as he is over her beautiful hair and her beautiful Austrian profile, her lips and chin slick with spit, his cock pointing right at his face. He reaches under her head for it, grips the shaft, she cups the head, and they pump in unison.

“In your mouth or on your face,” he asks.

“On my face. I get flu symptoms when I swallow cum.”

In the thrilled confusion of those words, the surprising accuracy of her need colliding with the two birds that long ago swooped to his right, between the cornfield and his grandma’s house, and he whirled with that bb-gun, his cousin’s, and shot them, those birds, out of the sky, knowing in that split second that one of them must have lined up behind the other and that one bb went through both hearts and was that even possible? He knows he saw them fall or dive in unison over the fence past the bottle he couldn’t hit into short wild grass, where he couldn’t find either of them, and no one, not even his grandma, believed him.

Later, that time he was hunting with his father at the Griswold farm and trying to explain that there was something wrong with his vision, that when he looked down the barrel of his shotgun he wasn’t seeing down the barrel of it but slightly off to the side and that meant it shouldn’t be surprising if he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn and he proved it by whirling toward the one he knew was there, fired, and missed. Missed. The fucking broad side of a fucking barn.

“On my face,” she said. “I don’t need the flu.”

Flu’s bad, he thought, as he pumped and couldn’t help think that all this barn and bird and left-eye dominant for a right-handed guy means bad shotgun and shut up brain and then the soft trigger deep inside begins to fire whoosh and nothing peripheral or wrong-eyed important just shut-down uhh whoosh and maybe she moved at the last second, maybe he changed the angle, leaned too far forward at the key moment, something changed, trigger fired whoosh out the barrel where it aimed out and over her blond hair splat into the right lens of his glasses.

Like that time he got drunk and told a group of close friends, Black Guy one of them, that he’d never had a dick in his mouth but he kind of knew what one tasted like. Wondered if anyone else ever had a weird feeling like that, false memory. When no one offered any experiences or insights, Black Guy ordered another round.

Here in the now of cum splattering his right lens, covering it entirely, Bald Guy’s eyes were shut but he knew exactly what had happened, as if it had happened before, maybe in another lifetime because he knew this was a first. He knew.

Before she could turn toward him to see what had happened, that short blond hair of hers moving to reveal her pretty Austrian biathlete ski-and-shoot-with-extreme-precision face, he pulled his glasses off to make sure. He thought about dropping them behind the couch, saying something about firing blanks.

Truth is he was proud. He wiped stray cum from his face and head. He handed her his glasses like a trophy, like the broad side of a barn. Single shot. One bb. He just knew he shot those fucking birds.

First published in Volume 50 (2012) of The McNeese Review.