The flaking light-green walls of the hotel room reflected my feelings. The surface of the mattress stretched ominously flat to its sharp edges except where Nora's doughy butt dented the crimson spread. Even the musty cigarette smell was more romantic than I felt.
Nora had taken off her clothes and was sitting awkwardly in practical-looking underwear, pretending not to feel ridiculous. I was still in my pants, fumbling with the belt, but looking at her face I knew I couldn't do it.
It wasn't just that she was ugly. Out of her stiff clothes, her body made more sense and had a dignity of its own, despite the posture. It wasn't even that she was kind of dumb, though that was harder. What we had in common was simply desperation.
Looking at her face I could see her determination to go through with this regardless of the fear and embarrassment, not just to get laid but to honor her commitments, not just to me but to life. I couldn't help thinking she could do better.
"Look," I said, "Uh, you know, I'm not sure, this is kind of weird."
"What?"
"It's not feeling right to me, somehow."
"You don't want to any more?" She had that expression like a kid about to be hit.
"Uh, not really."
She stared at me for a while, her face blank, and then suddenly burst into tears. Without putting her hands over her face or anything, she just rocked back and forth, pouring out the most amazing grief. I stood helpless. Would this be what it was like with women? Meta-impotence?
Finally after a while her crying slacked off. I started putting on my shirt. She looked around for her blouse and I handed it to her from the chair.
Then for no particular reason I sat down on the bed and stared at her blotched ugly face. "Sometimes I know things," I said. "Sometimes I'm sure of things without understanding why. I'm mostly right, too."
"What?" she said in a flat, quavering voice.
"Your dreams'll come true," I told her. "What seems impossible right now is hard, but it's actually going to happen. You're going to meet a good guy, fall in love and get as much sex as you want." I said it a little bitterly, I admit, but I meant it.
"What do you mean?" she asked. "When?"
"Soon," I said. "No point in giving up."
She began to cry again but this time she put her face in her hands. After a while she put on her blouse and skirt and clunky shoes.
Down in the lobby she grabbed my arm, blurting, "Thanks." She must have thought that sounded strange because she looked really embarrassed and hurried away with her funny duck walk.
So that's how I ended up in the bar of Pottersfield Inn on Halloween, thinking about getting drunk and trying to write bad poetry. Any real man would have put away a fifth of Scotch, but after ordering my second schooner of beer I realized I just didn't want to. The problem with clarity is how deadly it is.
I'm skinny, of medium height, stoop-shouldered, with a pimply unattractive face, and I'm clear about all of it. I'm also smart. I'm trying to be a poet but I have to steer clear of stationery stores to avoid the seductive allure of pocket protectors. On sunny afternoons when my spirits are high I find myself thinking joyfully of astrophysics problems.
And I'm very, very horny. God, how much jism I pumped out in high school, dreaming desperately of actually touching a woman! I hoped college would change everything, but after a couple of months as a freshman, that was clearly a pipe dream.
A group of frat boys came into the bar wearing Halloween costumes. Among them was a guy named Todd who routinely harassed me at the gym.
I'd made a resolution to take up weight lifting so as to change my slender frame into the hulking torso of a body builder. Intellectually, I knew that all it would take was self-discipline, one day at a time, to transform me from a 98-pound weakling into Mr. America. Maybe.
It's not that I didn't get the weight-training thing. Watching a climber do effortless chin-ups for what seemed like hours (I could hardly do a single one), watching well-formed biceps flexing as some football player curled 150 pounds, watching the ripple of a gargantuan back as some crew guy did dead lifts, waves of homoerotic admiration would sweep through me. If I didn't want girls so badly I'd be sure I was gay. Then some voice within would tell me I was a different species, a pasty feeble unlovable species. Forget it, the voice would say, give it up. You can't be like them. Anyway you wouldn't want to be. But I did.
Most of the guys didn't bother me at all, somewhat to my surprise. A fair number of them actually went out of their way to encourage me. At first, I was embarrassed, but when I realized they actually meant well and found nothing ridiculous in my efforts, I was warmed by their friendliness.
Todd, on the other hand, was horrible. He was a junior, one of those golden-boy athletes -- handsome, coordinated, a second-string end on the football team, dating a cheerleader while boasting about the girls he screwed behind her back -- and just delighted to have me to make fun of.
It went beyond making fun. In some horrible way, he was attuned to my self-betrayal. All his jokes and put-downs were informed by a loathsome complicity with that voice inside me whispering I was hopeless. I couldn't keep from listening. He made me mad, but inevitably his sniping sapped my will. And a lot of the guys who'd been indifferent before started following his example. Needless to say, I was not fond of Todd.
He was with four or five other guys that night, and a red-haired girl. Instead of football pads he had on cheap fake armor. The girl though -- she took my breath away. Very Goth, in full Victorian drag with pale makeup, she looked so beautiful I wanted to die. Despite the fact that she was talking to Todd and even smiling at him, something in the pattern of her expressions suggested intelligence.
I contemplated terrorism. Nursing my beer, I watched the group surreptitiously. The girl was certainly chummy with Todd. He leaned forward and whispered something in her ear. She blushed and looked bashful but pleased. I wanted to throw up but still had the feeling she knew better.
She leaned toward him and they whispered together a while. Then she stood up with a shy smile and they went out together.
I'd been imagining things. She was just another bimbo with the hots for Mr. Frat Boy the football player. I picked up my pen, hoping to turn this nauseating spectacle into some kind of satirical verse.
The trouble is, I want to be a poet because I can't. Most academic things come easily to me, but not poetry. It's agony. With rare exceptions, I fail miserably.
The mood I was in made it worse. I struggled for half an hour, ending up with four bad lines and the better part of a third beer. Now that I was palpably tipsy I gave up and scribbled an incoherent paean to that goddess of a girl, even if she did leave with terrible Todd. What was her name? I decided to call her Victoria. Vicky.
Having covered a piece of paper with frank and direct expressions of lust unmarred by literary restraint, I glanced up in time to see Todd lurching back in the door of the bar. He looked ghastly. His friends laughed at him, then after a bit, one of them left with him.
Perhaps my girl was discerning after all! I turned to a new page in my notebook, and waded in with half-drunk enthusiasm where I'd left off. Tucked away at a corner table, I knew I could keep this up undisturbed 'til closing time.
As I was writing a particularly lurid, tender passage about our imagined sex life, I became aware that someone was standing behind me. I willed them to go away. When I'd concluded the scene with explosive mutual orgasms that transported us into a mood to start all over again, I finally looked up. It now appeared suicide was my only course: The girl of my dreams was leaning over my shoulder, reading as I wrote.
She sat down across from me without ceremony. "Pretty steamy," she said.
"Do you always wander around peeking at other people's private journals?" I squeaked.
"Listen," she said in a bored voice. "You're not my type. But you're writing about me, yes? You saw me talking to that boy, Todd, and you're pathetically lonely, and you took refuge in impossible fantasies."
Master of the quick comeback, I said nothing for a moment and then remarked with studied eloquence, "Yeah, so what?"
"So," she said in a soft voice, leaning forward, "What would you do to have me?"
"Nothing," I said. That stopped her. I gazed longingly at the tops of her breasts, framed in dark green velvet as she leaned towards me. "Look, I may be pathetically lonely but I'm not particularly stupid. If you hang out with people like Todd, as beautiful as you are, you'd be a nightmare for me, whatever my hormones are telling me."
"Listen," she said. "Tonight I go with three people. It's sort of traditional. Your friend Todd was the second, though I don't think he liked it much. If you want, you can be the third. Or," she looked away with studied indifference, "you can spend the rest of your life wondering what you missed."
I thought about the idea. "Sounds good to me," I said. "I've got a good imagination, and I can probably get 10 or 20 years of masturbatory fantasies out of this conversation. I don't think I'll spoil it with a sordid sorority initiation fuck."
"You coward!" she hissed.
"I am afraid," I told her slowly, to reassure myself. "That's not why I won't do it, though. Out of love, I'd do anything for a girl like you. But this doesn't have to do with love, right?"
She smiled at me. It was a nice smile. It wasn't angry, or critical, or dismissive, or haughty. Its friendliness broke into my heart, effortlessly, and waves of love gushed out. I was soaked, awash, drowning in love. "Why not?" she said.
"I'd do anything to help you," I found myself croaking. "But not fuck you. Not unless you loved me back. Which I get you can't." It was hard to speak coherently through the infatuation.
"Really?" she said. "Well, let's see. Men are so quick with empty promises." She got up. "Come on."
In a daze, I gathered my notebook and coat and followed her through the bar and out of the hotel. A dry early snow was dancing across the streetlights. Her footsteps burned through the fine dusting on the sidewalk, leaving a lonely storybook trail for me to follow. She crossed the street and went in the gate of the cemetery on the other side.
That made my skin crawl. Was this a Halloween prank Todd had thought up to make me look stupid? Thinking about it, I was pretty sure it must be. He'd seen me in the bar, and talked this girl into humiliating me.
Still, there was something mesmerizing about the slender hips swaying ahead of me. With all my heart, I wished that smile was for real and really for me. Some masochistic part of me was willing to go through anything as long as she was watching. What would they do? Strip me, leave me naked in the cemetery? My skin crawled. I might freeze to death before I'd be willing to walk back into the hotel with no clothes on. It was like a horrible dream.
"Hey," I said, but she gave no sign of hearing.
I stopped. "Hey," I said more loudly. "I'm onto you. The guys are waiting behind the gravestones. They jump out and grab me. You get to watch. It makes you feel powerful to see some little asshole humiliated. I'm afraid not."
She stopped and turned around. I couldn't see much of her face any more, but her voice was clear in the silence. "You said you'd do anything for me."
"And that includes being molested by a bunch of drunken frat boys in a cemetery, losing what little self-respect I've got?"
She nodded slowly. "Sure."
I thought about it. Already my feet were getting cold. But she was standing there, not talking me up, just waiting to see what I'd do. It's true I'd said that to her. On the other hand, I hadn't meant to sign up to be the evening's entertainment for a bunch of jocks. There was no point.
"Okay," I said, "if that's what you want." Whoa, wait a minute -- it was my glands talking, as my mom would say. But I wasn't backing down in front of this girl.
She turned and kept going. I followed reluctantly, feeling like such a fool.
The cemetery road curved around to the right and then went down into a little valley where there were a lot of big tombs. I figured that's where they'd jump me. As we started up the other side, though, I began to get really nervous. We didn't have to go this far unless they were very paranoid. What were they planning to do to me? I thought of four of them holding my arms and legs while another whacked my naked ass with one of those frat paddles. I began to feel sick to my stomach, and the same time my dick started to get hard. This was embarrassing.
Fear roared through me as my imagination got going. Supposing they started swinging that paddle up between my legs? I could almost hear the sick thud, thud, thud as they turned my balls to mush, laughing as I choked and gagged in agony. I pictured their drunken fear when I fainted and they realized they'd really injured me. I pictured them leaving me unconscious to freeze in the darkness, my scrotum bloated with blood like a shattered baby's head, while they staggered off to try to pretend it hadn't happened.
I was having trouble walking. I realized I was shivering hard. My teeth started to chatter. I could just make out her back in the darkness ahead of me. Run! I thought to myself. You still have a chance. You don't have to do this.
I kept going. I thought of Nora sitting on that bed, determined to live no matter how afraid it made her. Yeah, some part of me shouted, but that doesn't mean you have to be stupid.
I heard voices behind me. I turned around. Figures were jogging toward me on the road. A flashlight lanced in my eyes. "There she is," I heard Todd's voice.
"Who's this?" came a girl's voice, kind of tough.
"A pencil-dick she was going to give the same treatment to," said Todd.
"Trick or tree-eat!" sang out another girl in a kind of nasty voice. I was catching glimpses of their faces in the glow of their flashlights. They seemed to be focusing mainly on my Victoria. They were all wearing masks. One was a silver angel mask, with little wings on the sides. One had on a white hockey goalkeeper mask, like in that horror film, and two others were wearing ski masks, like hijackers. It was creepy.
Except for Todd, they seemed to be girls. I realized he must have gone and gotten sorority backup, which meant he wasn't after me.
"Hey, bitch," said a voice in that horrible tone pretty girls sometimes use. "Surprise. Now you pay. Strip."
I glanced behind me. Vicky was standing in the light of three or four flashlights, just looking bored.
"You wouldn't want to ruin that nice dress, would you?," the voice went on. "If you don't take it off in a hurry, we'll fucking rip it off you."
They were moving closer. I was caught between them and Vicky. There looked to be six of them, mostly big. I guessed some were rowers or something. The one doing the talking was in the silver mask, maybe Todd's cheerleader girlfriend.
"Hey," I piped up. "No rough stuff. Nobody wants to get expelled, right?"
It didn't work. I hadn't really thought it would.
"Hey, fuckwad," said one of the girls, "maybe we should start on you."
Todd grabbed one of my arms and the goalkeeper mask grabbed the other. I struggled manfully and we slid around in the snow.
"Stop it, you little twerp," said the girl in the hockey mask. She was big, but she didn't sound all that mean. She slipped and fell backwards on her ass, pulling me and Todd with her.
"Is this what you want?" It was Vicky's voice. I looked back at her. She'd unbuttoned her coat and now shrugged it off, letting it fall at her feet. In the dim light, it looked like a puddle in the snow.
The flashlights were on her again. She reached behind her back and unfastened her velvet dress. I could see it loosen up the front.
"No," I said.
She glanced at me without stopping, bringing her arms forward, letting the straps slip over them.
Her skin was as white as the snow swirling lightly around her. She wasn't wearing a bra. Her breasts were perfect, but so white that the nipples looked like drops of blood. She pushed the dress over her hips so it fell to the snow around her feet and almost seemed to dissolve there. She wasn't wearing panties either. She looked like a marble statue. It was scary. Her pubic hair was light and pale but still made a bold V at her crotch in contrast to her skin.
She held up her hands over her head. The flashlights weren't steady on her.
"Jesus," somebody said.
She looked at them for a couple of moments and then laughed.
"Grab her," said the girl in the angel mask.
They rushed her. The big girl on the ground got up and joined them. Todd held me down. "Like that, you little shit?" he asked. "Closest you've ever come to a woman, huh?" I tried to hit him but he twisted my arm behind my back hard. I tried not to yell, it hurt so much. "Watch," he said. "This'll make your pitiful dick hard."
Two of the girls held Vicky's arms out straight. The one with the angel mask came up behind. She was carrying a paddle in one hand and a tennis racket in the other. "Okay, honey," she said. "We're going to teach your pretty little derrière not to play games in the dark with our boys."
Vicky was so harsh and beautiful, it scared me. She seemed to have no fear at all. Angel mask dropped the tennis racket and took up a pose like a baseball player at bat. She looked at Vicky, who returned the stare over her shoulder. Angel mask swung incredibly hard, putting her shoulders and back into it. My stomach turned. The paddle connected without a sound. There was nothing. The girl stood up straight and pulled off her mask. It was Todd's girlfriend. She looked at Vicky blankly. Her face began to curl in terror like paper in a fire. Her lips pulled back as she tried to scream. Her legs were shaking, and a wet patch spread at the crotch of her sweatpants. She fell in a fetal position on the ground, rocking back and forth.
The other girls let go of Vicky's arms. They looked like children beside her. She seemed to have gotten taller by several feet. Everyone ran but they made no noise, except for one girl who was letting out a shrill keening shriek. The sound of their athletic shoes slapping on the road faded behind me.
I stood up. Todd had let go of my arm. I glanced at him but he was gone too. Vicky was now a dark shadow maybe twelve feet tall. I decided Victoria was the wrong name for her. She looked like death but more beautiful.
I shivered violently. I felt terror rising in me like the tide. Todd's girlfriend lay motionless at her feet. I felt my balls retracting. For some weird reason I thought of Nora's face again.
"What's your name?" I heard myself croak. I was surprised but it slowed the rising flood of terror.
Her voice came to me like a heavy truck out on the street. "You can go now. She counts."
I looked at Todd's girlfriend. "Hey," I said, "She's a jerk, but she doesn't know better."
"She chose," rumbled the voice. I realized the dark figure was still growing. I estimated her height at nineteen or twenty feet now.
"No!" I said stubbornly. "She probably doesn't know how to choose."
"You do?" The sound was like granite boulders in a rock slide.
"Certainly," I said without hesitation. I couldn't believe what I was saying but I knew I was right, the way a proof sometimes just comes to me.
Todd's girlfriend stirred and sat up. After a moment or two she hobbled past me, her face contorted. I don't think she knew I was there.
"Shall we?" I said to the darkness towering over me, whose ankle now appeared 10 or 15 feet across. The world began to spin.
I found myself looking up through swirling snow at a street lamp. I was on my back. Vicky's face, full of concern, was looking down at me from one side.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
I sat up and everything spun some more. I was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the gate to the cemetery. "What happened?" I asked.
"You slipped on the snow and fell backwards. You must have hit your head -- you've been out cold for maybe a minute."
I felt the back of my head. It sure was sore. I tried to get up, but I felt like I was going to barf. I waited on hands and knees, staring at the pavement, hoping it would settle down. "Are you real?" I asked. There was no answer. I looked up slowly. She was gone.
A few minutes later, I managed to get to my feet. I leaned against the lamp post for a bit. There were no tracks going into the cemetery. None at all. The snow was undisturbed. A couple of cars went by. Finally, I felt like I could cross back to the hotel. I was shivering violently.
I'd made it to the front door when she came out holding a paper cup in one hand. "Oh good," she said. "Come on in." When I got inside she handed me the cup. There was whipped cream on top and the cardboard was way too hot for my fingers.
I looked at her and she held up a key. "I got us a room." she said. "It's so cold out there."
I staggered after her. In the grimy elevator I looked at her austere face and sipped the drink. It was some kind of Irish coffee. It tasted wonderful.
The elevator stopped and we got out. Only when we came to a shabby door and she unlocked it did I realize it was the same room I'd been in an hour or two before with Nora. I could even see the slight depression in the bedspread where she'd sat.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"I'm your Vicky, don't you remember?" she said, taking off her long black coat and tossing it carelessly over the cheap wooden chair. "I wonder if your head's okay."
"No," I said, "That's only a name I made up for you." I felt for my notebook but it wasn't in my coat pocket.
She was reaching behind her back, unfastening her dress.
"I've seen you do that before," I said.
"Really," she said.
Again she slipped out of the dress. Again, she was naked beneath it. Again her skin was far too white, her nipples far too red, her pubic hair a pale, compelling V that held my eyes. This time she was right beside me. If I moved I'd touch her.
"Why don't you make yourself comfortable," she said, taking the coffee from my hand and putting it down on the trashy bedside table. Then she reached around my shoulders, pulling my coat off behind me, her naked breasts at my chest, her strange eyes looking straight into mine. "Just relax," she said, unbuckling my belt. She slipped down my pants, leaving them around my ankles, and began to unbutton my shirt.
My dick hurt, it was so stiff. I was in a fog of longing. My head throbbed unmercifully, and I kept feeling dizzy.
I sat down on the bed, exactly where Nora had been. I was aware of my erection making a silly tent in my underpants. "Do you love me?" I asked her. "I won't do this if you don't love me." I felt so ugly.
She laughed. It was a beautiful laugh, but not very kind. "Never mind," she said, and pushed me backwards on the bed. "This is only a blow job." She pulled my underpants down over my hips. My dick sprang out and slapped against my belly. She knelt down on the floor between my feet and was going to take it in her mouth.
"No," I said. Her smile was cruel. Her hands were on my thighs, and I noticed how long and red her nails were. She would enjoy my pleading. "No!" I said urgently. "At least make it 69."
I could tell I'd shocked her. She stared up at me, savage but unsmiling. She stood. I tried to scrabble back away. She crawled swiftly onto the bed, swinging her thigh over my head. Her crotch was above my face. I felt her engulf my penis in her mouth. As she took it deeper and deeper in, her teeth felt like needles biting down the shaft. The pain would have been awful if I hadn't been so turned on. She got to the base. It was ecstasy. I felt her suck my balls into her mouth. How could she do that? I felt the sharp points of her teeth on my scrotum. I realized I was not far from orgasm.
Desperately, I pulled at her hips. They were like stone. I dragged myself up with all my one-chin-up strength until my face was between her thighs, and gagged. Her crotch smelled like shit, worse than that, like a sewer, rotten animals, pus. Her labia flapped on either side of my head like wings, oozing over my ears, wrapping themselves like hands around the back of my head. Blind things writhing from her vagina whipped my cheeks. Drips of semi-liquid green-brown shit oozing from her asshole fell in my eyes and burned away my sight. I forced my tongue into her slit. Something told me this was not safe sex, but I had to reach her.
Her cunt was a swampy chasm filled with debris. I slogged through horror. I had to find her clitoris without ever having touched one. I was naked, waist-deep in fetid pools, my bare toes bursting the rotting flesh of bodies lodged just below the surface and snapping brittle bones I couldn't see. I could hardly breathe, my mouth was clogged with foul-smelling paste. Leeches hung from my lower body like leaves.
Hour after hour I stumbled on, vaguely aware I was looking for something important. Fever raged in me. I began to vomit great chunks of flesh, parts of my organs. I was freezing. My sight came and went. On either side of me, great cliffs rose impossibly high into the night sky, and a sliver of a moon floated overhead like a gutting knife.
Some sense of urgency from another world pushed me ahead. I felt myself, far away there, teetering on the brink of orgasm as her teeth teased. Racked with despair, I threw myself forward and clawed into the filth. Running out of air in the darkness as things crawled up my nose and down my throat, I kept pulling myself deeper. Almost too late, my tongue touched a tiny pearl. My heart sang it the love she had roused in me, as I felt myself elsewhere erupt into her mouth and her teeth bit through me, deeper than I knew I existed.
Someone was shaking my shoulder. I picked my head up from a hard surface and became aware I'd been sleeping on the table in the bar. As I turned, my arm dragged my notebook off the edge of the table and it fell to the floor with a whack. I had a hard-on and a bad headache. Vicky was looking down at me.
"Excuse me," she said, "you were snoring."
I looked at her. Her cheeks seemed to have a bit more color. Perhaps mine now had less.
"Hello," I said.
"Hi," she said. "May I sit down?"
"Sure." She sat across from me again. This side of the room was pretty dead, though there were still plenty of people at the bar.
I looked at my watch. It was ten to one.
"About an hour left," she said. "Until closing."
"Clearly time for me to go home," I said. "Unless there's something I can do for you."
She slouched down in her chair and looked at me, amused. I never expected her to slouch.
"You are different," she said. She sat up and leaned onto the table again, facing me. She knew my eyes couldn't help ogling her beautiful breasts, pressed together and presented to me in their velvet frame. I managed to look into her eyes after a while.
She was smiling at me, the same smile. I lost myself in it. It was like standing under a waterfall. I felt piece after piece of myself loosen, break off and wash away. Soon, I thought, I'll all be gone.
I wanted to say I loved her, but I couldn't. It was okay, though, she could tell.
"I love you back," she said. I knew she did, she couldn't lie.
"Then have me," I told her.
She shook her head. "Your fear has a bittersweet taste, like the smell of hay, not that fleshy terror I crave. But if you like, there is a little time."
I stood up. Her eyes were gentle, and she rose as well.
I gave her my arm and we went back upstairs to the same room, except there was no mark on the flat expanse of the bedspread now. Her body this time was whiter than before, and gave off a pale light, like the moon. More and more, it was a dream.
I refused to let it be a dream. She was kneeling over me on the bed, about to take me into herself which I wanted above everything, but I made her stop. I turned her on her back and went down on her again. This time I plunged into a warm sea, clear and full of light. Her clitoris was an island that I caressed with waves. As the wind rose my lapping on its beaches and rocky cliffs became a pounding surf of lava and the wind became a neutrino flux in the plasma center of the star of her orgasm.
Finally, I let her pull me up on top of her. The bed was broken and burning, the flames licking around us. I remember her guiding my aching penis to the entrance of her vagina. I remember the sweet feeling as I started to slip inside. That's all.
In the morning I woke on the floor beside the bed, fully dressed. The crimson bedspread lay utterly undisturbed on the sharp-edged mattress. My head was fine; there was no trace of a lump or bruise. The room had changed color, though -- the walls were now a slightly darker green.
I looked for my notebook down in the bar but I never found it. No one remembered seeing a pale girl in a velvet dress, either. Eventually I even asked Todd. He just looked at me like I was crazy and said he'd never, ever seen a woman like that. His girlfriend had broken up with him by then, and he'd stopped bothering me, but I'd stopped caring too.
I've had a couple of girlfriends of my own since that time, with ups and downs. Nora is getting married. She asked me to the wedding but hasn't spoken to me otherwise. I find it a little easier to write poetry than before. The light seems different -- colors are richer, in general.
I haven't been back to the Pottersfield Inn in almost a year, but Halloween's coming up again in a couple of weeks. I'm going over for a beer to see if maybe she's lonely.
Copyright © 2006 by the article's author