Featured in ‘The Paul Cave Prize for Literature 2023 Anthology’, Donna Costello uses second person prose to immerse the reader in a story about how love can take you to the worse place imaginable.
You lie there smoking a joint in a bedroom, you’ve never slept in and stare at the ceiling watching the smoke curl into the air. The man you’ve just fucked is already pulling on his clothes, the door clicking quietly behind him as he leaves.
You know you should get up, that you should move but you can’t bring yourself to. The money on the nightstand glares at you and you ignore it because you have to make five hundred more before the night is over and he’s just the first in the parade of men who will come through this room over the next eight hours.
This is what love has done to you, it’s made you a vessel of pleasure for men whose depravity is too much for their wives in their neat little houses.
Outside the sirens echo through the motel, the blue and red lights flashing through the slits in the battered blinds as police car hurtles down the main road. There’s another knock on
the door, another man and once again you feel yourself detaching from reality.
Love is used condoms and bruises on your throat and inner thighs.
It’s the taste of a stranger on your tongue and his scent clinging to your skin before you wash it off in the sink because a shower takes too long between johns.
Love is paying your boyfriend at the end of the night and realising six months too late that he’s become your pimp.
Love is lying flat on your back, getting fucked for a fee.
Just another whore, wrapped up in filthy sheets.
DONNA COSTELLO 