Confessions of a Recovering Slut by Hollis Gillespie Read Free Book Online Page A

wraps so doctors could make more money. Bill doesn’t die, his practice is to build new life. That’s what he always does. Damn if he didn’t up and make his fifth fortune after my mother died, and with that he opened that bar in Costa Rica. Now he’s sitting here heartsick, with tourism practically at a halt, complaining that every cent is quickly getting sucked out of his life.
    I half thought I could talk him into coming home with me, because if Bill did end up dying, I didn’t want him to die in the jungle, but having been there and having seen him I know he will not die for awhile. “Stop complaining, you codger,” I cough. “You’re gonna outlive me, especially now that I have this tapeworm.”
    Bill beamed like a proud parent and then embraced me warmly. “A tapeworm,” he sighed, “maybe you’ll drop some of this weight.”

A Pink Line
    J ESUS GOD , I do not have a tapeworm after all. What I have, according to the majority of these eleven drugstore pregnancy tests, is a much more permanent problem. I keep going back to the store to buy more tests because sometimes the pink line isn’t all that dark, and I think it might need to be darker for it to be real. On one there was no pink line at all, but that was just the one. On the other ten there were definitely pink lines in varying degrees of darkness, and ten-to-one are odds you just can’t ignore.
    A week later the doctor confirmed the drugstore diagnosis, so ain’t life full of surprises.
    Like it was just last Sunday we noticed that the Local finally put tables on their patio, and what a refreshing change it was to spend a sunny afternoon on a restaurant terrace drinking margaritas and watching the crack whores and homeless shuffle by rather than sitting at the requisite Virginia Highland coffeehouse watching the parade of soccer moms pushing jog strollers. We did see one mom at the Local, though. She was tattooed and tiny, and we wondered how she pushed out that infant without having to cut herself in half. The first thing she did after sitting down was take the milk bucket out of her bra and feed the baby.
    “You see?” I said, “That’s why I’d make a bad mother.”
    “Why?” asked Grant.
    “I’m afraid I’d forget to feed it or something, and I’d come home one day and it would be dead on a bed of shredded newspaper like a neglected hamster.”
    Grant was speechless. Another surprise. “Girl,” he repeated, “you got issues.”
    He’s right. For example, rather than accept the possibility that I had no biological clock, I worried my clock was just not ticking loud enough for me to hear and the day would come in the future when the alarm would go off and I’d turn into some kind of maternal sperm junkie, suddenly desperate, wearing my uterus on my sleeve, hoping someone would inseminate me before cobwebs covered my ovaries.
    Which brings me to the whole childbirth bloodbath itself. Jesus, when my niece was born you’d have thought my sister was giving birth to a full-grown grizzly bear! I never saw so much blood and gore and . . . growling . I know I personally couldn’t go through that without an IV bag of drugs as big as the baby itself. In fact, I’d like to start the epidural retroactively from the date of conception.
    If I can just figure out when that was. Seriously, I’m so paranoid I can hardly have sex without wearing an entire scuba suit. So my theory is this: one night my uterus had an out-of-body experience while I was sleeping and latched itself onto the nearest man, who was probably right there in my bed, like a big fertile squid. That’s the only way I can explain it, other than all that acrobatic sex—but the armor , I tell you, was in place! It’s just that there must have been this minuscule, tiny, microscopic hole big enough for my entire future to fit through, that’s all.
    Lary did not shoot me, as he always benevolently offers to do when he sees me suffering. What he did, along with Grant and