Shrimp

The girl on the webcam was named Brandy. She said her name was Brandy. I believed her. I choose to believe them. She was wearing kind of a lot of makeup and a lacy bra that was purple and graying, or maybe it was gray and purpling. She was in a small Easter-blue room that couldn't have been hers, with a beat-up wood nightstand and a framed picture of some herb or flower on an otherwise bare wall and a messy bed that was probably a plywood box with a duvet thrown onto it. She was just sitting at the computer screen, frowning. Every once in a while she would start typing and all of us in the chat would hold our breath like we were Moses waiting for the second tablet, but whatever she typed, it wasn't for us. She stared for minutes at a time at a point just below the camera; it looked like she was reading an article. Finally after maybe a full twenty minutes of just sitting there she stood up with a little sigh and puffed her chest out and skimmed her fingertips up her stomach to just under her breasts. Her nails were long and chipped red; her hair was asphalt black and flattened. She pursed her lips and then immediately sat back down and looked bored again. All of this is what we like about the camgirls -- the garish makeup, the bed none of us will ever sleep in, nothing authentic in the frame except the boredom. "Show a little ass, please," I typed into the chat box, but if she saw my message, she didn't respond to it.

I was playing Yahoo Pool in another window. It was my turn and my opponent was complaining I was taking too long. I asked "a/s/l" and they responded "fuck u go." I pulled the cue back and whapped the cue ball sideways at max power -- it didn't hit any other balls, just the wall a couple times. The other guy quit -- a ranked game, so, thank you.

I alt-tabbed back over to Brandy. One guy in the chat was calling her beautiful and asking for her MSN, he kept saying stuff like "i'm weeping watching you please." Everyone else was calling her a dumb bitch or a filthy slut except for one guy who probably wasn't a guy at all who was spamming coupon codes for fresh Black Sea shrimp. "FATTEST shrimp in the SEA," he spammed, "delvered fresh!! use coupon code shrimpJIZZ." Brandy stood up again and kind of puckered up her chest, to little effect. "Please show a little ass" I said and it looked like she was reading the chat but she didn't do anything and my request was washed away in a flood of profanity and shrimp coupons. I pasted the coupon code into a txt file just in case. One guy said "fuck your shrimp" and was swiftly kicked by the Administrator.

Brandy started speaking into the webcam. I rushed to jam the volume up in time to hear her say something about deep, undulating forests of kelp. My heart boiled with unrequited desire for a glimpse of ass. Brandy leaned back in her chair and put her feet up on the desk and wiggled her painted toes right in front of the webcam. The foot freaks were going nuts, going "HELL YEAH" and sending little high five emoticons to each other -- there are always a couple foot freaks in any chat and they always have each others' backs, and to see those guys, so brotherly and fulfilled, it always makes me kind of wish I was one.

In the other window someone had entered my Yahoo Pool lobby but wouldn't join the game. I told them "lets go" and "a/s/l" but they just replied with spam: "Black Sea Shrimp CHEEP strait to your door in discrete packages! dm for exclusive qr code." There used to be hundreds, maybe thousands of people playing Yahoo Pool at any given time, in each of dozens of lobbies. You could get a game whenever you wanted and a lot of those people had pics of young women in their profile, and whether the pics were really of them or not, you could always pretend they were, but they all moved on to other online pool games that were more realistic and more fun, or they just joined Facebook or whatever. But I didn't want realism or fun, I wanted the same pool I'd been playing. Now I only had Brandy.

When I clicked back over to her, she was looking dead-eyed into the screen again. Nothing moved for minutes, until the back wall of her room started to slowly tip backwards, and then gravity caught it, and it fell and landed with a whumph of puffed dust. We saw now that she was sitting on the deck of a small ship that was bobbing out on open water -- the camera and the furniture and, until now, the wall had been fixed to the deck so the movement hadn't been perceptible. She didn't look back at where the wall had been. Behind her the horizon was swallowed abruptly by a thick, sodden fog clotting the pubic gray sky. "Throbbing VEINY SHRIMP 4 sale now to PREFERRED CUSTOMORS," promised the adbot in the chat. Brandy moved to the bed and started to roll around. She wrapped herself up in the sheets as if deliberately going out of her way to avoid showing any ass. Sea sprayed onto the bed and onto Brandy's hair and back. She pulled a towel out of the nightstand and patted herself dry and then put the towel away and went back to writhing around on the bed, showing no ass whatsoever.

She started talking about kelp again, but it was hard to hear her over the sound of the ship hurling itself into the waves. A gull landed on the desk next to her webcam and started yelping right into the mic. Brandy, still on the bed, tried to shoo it away with her foot but the gull just waddled closer to the camera, so she had to get up and chase it off. Right as she did one of the side walls fell forward and landed on the bed, then kept sort of sliding until it slid all the way off and landed flat on the ground. Shrimp and ice skidded from offscreen across the deck near the nightstand and there was swearing in a language I couldn't identify -- you could tell it was swearing though. Brandy bent over to grab a bunch of the shrimp and toss it back to somebody off camera, but the desk blocked any ass that might have been otherwise visible.

Brandy moved back to her computer and did a little logy dance back and forth but wouldn't spin around. I asked her to show a little ass please but she didn't. Her hair was salty and wet; condensation was accreting on the inside of the webcam lens. "Please show us some ass," I typed. She pouted and said something, generally, about her tip jar. I rifled through my desk drawer and pulled out a prepaid debit card some aunt had given me and punched in the numbers. The card had a hundred dollars on it so I gave Brandy fifteen. It asked me if I wanted to attach a note, so I typed "For ass, please," and sent it off.

The money landed in her tip jar with a little digital ping. It got her attention right away -- she checked her account balance and smiled. She said thank you and said my screen name; a little bolt of sugary blood shot up my spine, but she still wouldn't show any ass. Instead she shook out her hair and stood up and bounced back and forth on the balls of her feet and pushed her breasts together and pouted. "More if you show ass," I said. People in the chat were pounding me with abuse and slurs now, which happens whenever someone tips the girls, I've been on both sides of it, it's just how it works. Brandy twirled her hair with her finger and I felt like I was going to cry or punch a hole in the wall.

It reminded me of a time I was out to dinner with my parents. I was maybe in high school, or it could have been when I was trying college. The waitress brought me the wrong soda and was very friendly with me in correcting the mistake. "Isn't she nice," my mom smiled at me. My dad's jaw closed on an onion ring like a mousetrap snapping shut: "She wants a tip," he said. My mom's name is Linda. I forget my father's name, or I never learned it.

Brandy started half-heartedly lip syncing a song none of us could hear. Behind her, men in yellow raincoats entered the frame and started squeegeeing water off the deck with big squeegee-mops, returning sea to the sea. Then people started yelling and the engines slammed on with a deep, grinding roar, so I turned the volume down. Brandy winked and puckered her lips, then winked again. There was a boat way off in the distance, flashing blue and red lights and getting closer; the crew members were pointing at it and arguing with each other and just generally freaking out. "Why won't you show me ass," I pleaded in the chat, and the other guys started dogpiling me again. Brandy leaned forward and said something and laughed -- if it was in reply to me, I couldn't hear, but whatever she said, no ass came of it. All of a sudden Brandy was lost in a wake of deep black smoke, only her glassy green eyes cut through. The ship lurched to a stop, or not a stop, because it was being tossed arrhythmically by the waves. The smoke started to clear and crew members were screaming, frantically dumping shrimp off the side of the boat; one guy took a railing to the gut and tumbled over the side and slipped below the surface of the water and no one noticed or went to help him. Brandy, visible again, cupped her hands under her breasts and bounced them up and down. I was tired of being polite; I pounded out "ASS," nearly busted my enter key sending it. The other boat had caught up fast, and behind Brandy, men in uniforms with long guns leapt on board and started tackling people in a mad rush and restraining them with zip-tie cuffs. Brandy seemed to be reading again, looking bored with us; none of the men with guns were bothering her. "EMERGENCY SALE, ALL SHRIMP MUST GO, ORDER NOW BEFORE YOU CUM" the adbot screamed.

There was a clang, it sounded like metal on metal, but one of the guys with guns screamed "SHOTS FIRED," and they all tried to find cover. A crew member tried to make a run for the back of the ship and someone must have mistaken the squeegee-mop in his hand for a gun because his chest popped open twice with pinkish bursts like puffed dandelions, and he slumped to the ground, right at the foot of Brandy's bed. The last wall fell over as the men with the guns tripped over themselves to subdue the already-shot guy. Brandy peeked down at him, with just her eyes. I got a DM from someone in the chat promising me shrimp "at an absurd rate that cannot be offered to the public." Downstairs, someone was ringing the doorbell frantically.

Why won't she show ass? I cried aloud, at my desk. Brandy looked full into the camera now -- "come to the sea," she said, and she used my name, my real name, not my screen name. A wispy gray smoke quilted everything behind her and all there was was her face -- the soft glow of her laptop screen reflecting off her pancake makeup, incandescent in the haze. I started to type -- "just speak," she said, "I can hear you." Everyone else in the chat was booted by the Administrator in one flicker, almost tangible, like a deck of cards shuffling itself. Blood sloshed through my heart like ocean rushing into a tidal pool.

"If I come to the sea," I asked, my voice shaking, "will you show me ass there?"

"Ass cannot be shown or asked for," she told me. "Only when you understand what a gift the ass is, and summon within yourself the love the ass deserves -- then you will see it, and then you will feel it. But if you demand the ass with entitlement, then all you will see is two vulgar cheeks."

Well, I got it. It was a metaphor or something. I don't have the patience for metaphors. I hear a metaphor and I think, my suffering, wounded heart leaks like a sponge, and here's someone who has decided to abstract it so the blood doesn't spill onto their shirt. I hear a metaphor and I think, here's someone trying to divide me by zero, when I am already zero. I hear a metaphor and I think someone's making fun of me. An explosion ripped through the hull behind Brandy and the ship began gulping salty water. The bed and the desk and the walls and everything suddenly fell towards the sea. Brandy slid on her back and dropped ass-first into the smoke and the black oily water churning around her. I recentered myself in the literal. I was not exploding, I was not sinking. I am here; I am alone; Brandy will show me no ass: what else can be known? I give Brandy love and she refracts it back at me as rejection and hate: what's left but to pay her back in kind? Brandy grabbed for the railing and tried to heave herself up; she was a bundle of flesh-colored pixels in a rectangle of metal gray sea-colored pixels in the middle of my laptop screen; I clicked away. Hell, let her sink.

The shrimp, when they came, were soggy and gray and rotten-smelling, and I ate them all very quickly over the sink, without putting them in the fridge, and without turning on a light.