Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting Read Free Book Online

on the phone and let the open dial tone be a sort of beacon-call, a homing signal for CT to return, bowels empty, groin hungry.
    I should mention that Sister is also my mother, somewhat. When Mother died, Sister was nineteen and I was four. As a teenager I used to love calling Sister “Smother” whenever she was overbearing—a perfect combination of sister and mother.
    “Sustainable,” replies CT, “so bitching.” We’re at the home of a fashion designer whose mansion is built into the side of a cave. One room of his house is actually filled with bats; when I grabbed a flashlight sitting by the door and shined it up to the ceiling, there were tons of bats instead of popcorn paint. The room has no furniture due to “Ze guano, yeesh, ze guano,” but there is a mounted television on the wall that plays looped footage of a young girl feeding a loaf of French bread to a Dalmatian dog over and over again.
    We came to the designer in order to get fitted full-body leather suits. “Ju can wear zees forever,” he said, “Drink en zem, sex en zem, die en zem.” They have zippers and ties all over the place so they can stay on during a variety of activities, like going to the bathroom or getting an immunization shot in the upper arm.
    CT raises his glass of wine up to the ceiling, a kind salute. The wine is red and has 10-15 drops of bat blood in each bottle; it’s from the designer’s own vineyard with blood from his own bats.
    CT, who is very pale and pretty always, lifts the glass to his mouth and sucks it in with his cheeks so the wine glass stays magically attached to his face as a sort of bulb-nose. He looks at the ground and puts his arms out in a crucifixion pose, then begins moving his arms. He looks like a hummingbird that has been transported to a different planet, one where the environment is harsh and there are no flowers so it has to fly around all the time with its own personal glass vase of nectar attached to its face.
    It strikes me that the cave home we are in is one such environment; a hummingbird could not live here without a nectar appendage-bottle.
    The designer disappears for a minute and comes back holding three pairs of night vision goggles. “Let us go back inside ze bat cave,” he suggests. He is no longer wearing a shirt.
    The goggles make everything green and give us all emerald eyes, the bats and CT and the designer. Several battery-operated floor cleaners roam around the cave’s paved cement and eat the guano. They remind me of sting rays or giant moving sand dollars, very flat and white.
    “It’s like we’re underwater,” I say, “an underwater cave.” But in the cave, as in water, my voice does not seem able to travel.
    The designer kneels down onto the floor and begins untying CT’s new leather suit-fly. For a moment there is a sting of panic in my stomach; my mellowness is suddenly a balloon full of water being poked with a stick. I’m not sure if it’s going to burst open or maybe just spring a tiny leak or perhaps not puncture at all. The free love of the Worm Eternal instructs us to see one another as fellow worms, genderless, openings identical and indistinguishable.
    But sometimes I fail the Worm and grow jealous.
    CT hands me a bottle of bat blood wine. “My cherished one, please pour this on top of Gustav and me, pour it slowly so that he and I shall be like a primordial fountain flooded with the blood of cursed statues, unholy stones.”
    And then the stick poking my balloon turns into a feather, and I am tickled. I feel my Inner Worm remind me that the Intensity comes when I forget that life is art, and Intensity is what clogs the path to enlightenment. As CT likes to say, “The boy at the top of the mountain of knowledge, the one standing like a flamingo with one leg straight and one leg bent. He is a mild child.”
    As I ready the bottle at the top of CT’s golden locks, dead center in the middle of his part, Gustav’s head lifts up and he gives a half-hearted