Girls' Night.

Dec 29, 2025

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

The kid’s out of school, which means I haven’t written anything this week. Instead, I’m posting my short story, “Girls’ Night,” which appeared in the October 2024 issue of Black Sheep Magazine.

I’ve already used this story for a Substack post, but that was in the early days of the newsletter and it garnered almost no views, so I’m posting it as a rerun. Apologies if you were one of the few who read it before.

As always, I have high hopes that you’ll consider purchasing one (or two, or ten) of my books: https://tinyurl.com/7m9e5tf6

Girls’ Night

She looked the way she did, but that didn’t bug me. I just felt sorry for her. She was quieter than anyone else, and so stood out. She would only participate in the conversation when Linda made a point of drawing her in. Britney was just shy, I figured. Only sometimes you’d catch those aloof hooded eyes looking down at our laughter and margarita-greased gossip like we were a bunch of hooting monkeys. And yet she wouldn’t have come to our Girls’ Night Out on a semi-regular basis just to sit and feel superior, regardless of what Gina thought. She must have needed the company. So I tried to be welcoming.

Once when Linda and I were grabbing a drink after work, just the two of us, I screwed my features into an apologetic grimace and said, “So, your friend Britney—I’m not trying to be rude, but did she have an accident, or some sort of condition, or…?” I left unsaid the last possibility: or is she just ugly? Linda mugged a don’t-ask-me face, mouth pulled into a straight line, cheeks puffed out like a monkey’s, eyes wide. Maybe she didn’t know anything about it—maybe she did, but had been told in confidence. Now, of course, it’s too late to ask Linda, and I have no clue how to find Britney again even if I wanted to.

Her face: the first time you saw it, you thought, What happened to her? The left half of it was puffy with tough-looking mounds, like big smooth zits; the hair on that side of her scalp was thinner than on the rest of her head. She sometimes made me think of burn victims. But her skin wasn’t glossy, or discolored. Her nose was bulbous, and looked like it might have been broken once, or twice; it twisted a tiny bit, stretching towards the bumpy side of her face. Her teeth were crooked, and two of the top-row teeth near the front of her mouth were slightly blue, and ever so slightly fuzzy. Why didn’t she get them fixed? That annoyed me. I don’t know what her job was, but we gals used to run up some hefty tabs with our jumbo margaritas, and she always put her credit card in the pile without flinching. Surely she could afford to fix her teeth. Maybe she figured that with the skin condition and her nose, it didn’t matter. Or maybe she honestly didn’t care.

Her figure was pretty good, although a little rangy. Not that I ever saw her wear anything that would show it off. And she had arresting eyes, startling eyes.

The night Britney made an enemy of Gina, we were as usual sitting in the garden section of Paquito’s, under the festoons of Christmas lights, separated from the Lower East Side by a vine-clogged wooden fence. We’d all had enough margaritas to laugh at most anything, except of course for Britney, who never drank more than one, and who was picking at her enchilada. Gina had the rest of us in hysterics, me and Rachael and Linda, not because anything she said was so funny, but because we were in a mood to laugh, and because we all felt we’d sort of made a tacit agreement to laugh at each other’s jokes. Except Britney. Even when something was really funny, good luck getting more than a polite smile out of Britney.

Sometimes that made things awkward. But it also could be kind of refreshing. The honesty, I mean.

Gina, who loved being the center of attention, had a whole little comedy routine she’d clearly rehearsed. A whole spiel about these Polish movies, ten movies called The Decalogue, a long excoriation of how pretentious, boring, and depressing they were, complete with her rubber-faced, hammy impersonations of all the unkempt Polish people slouching through the films. Even as I laughed and egged Gina on, I thought to myself that these movies sounded pretty good.

Like I said, Britney rarely laughed. But this time she went beyond mere non-amusement, giving Gina the side-eye, mouth curling into a sneer like a piece of meat slowly curing in the sun. I saw the moment Gina noticed, when her gaze fell and then locked on Britney; I saw Gina’s ever-ready combativeness quicken as she realized she was being judged. “Do you know the movies I’m talking about?” Gina asked, like a schoolyard challenge.

“Yeah. Those are some of my favorite movies. They’re great.”

“Oh. Well, I guess I’m just not sophisticated and intellectual enough to rise to their level.”

“Guess not.”

And that was it. Enemies for life.

A few weeks later, at another Girls’ Night, Gina went after Britney’s face. Not directly, of course. What we were actually talking about was dates, the worst dates we’d ever been on.

Nothing too wild. I told about a guy I met through OKCupid, who smelled like rotted socks; the first thing he’d said to me, even before hello, was that he hadn’t been able to find his wallet before leaving the apartment, and could I spot him. Of course I wasn’t going to recount my real worst date—talk about buzzkills! Rachael’s: in a movie theater, on a third date, during a quiet scene, her guy had whispered to her, “Hey, check this out,” and she turned to see his erect penis out of his fly and in his hand. She’d marched out of the theater and he’d followed her for two blocks, aghast and mortified that she’d gotten upset. Gina’s story didn’t have much to it, but of course it took her three times as long to tell, with all her mugging and hand-waving and funny voices. Rachael and I laughed. We were there to laugh, and Gina wore herself out feeding us cues to do so, so we were grateful. Britney didn’t laugh. Linda wasn’t there—she’d texted us all an hour before our reservation to say she’d gotten held up at the office and couldn’t make it. Maybe Britney hadn’t gotten the text until she was almost at Paquito’s, and had decided to go ahead and join Girls’ Night because she had nothing better to do. But without Linda there, to occasionally cast the life-line of a remark or a question Britney’s way, she was even more isolated than usual. I never had anything against Britney; she intrigued me, and she seemed lonely. I would have liked to have taken over Linda’s role, to have thrown her some life-lines. But I didn’t know where to aim them, somehow. And, well, she intimidated me.

Once again, Britney couldn’t be bothered to muster even a polite smile for Gina’s theatrics. And Gina noticed. In fairness to Gina, that hooded side-eyed look of Britney’s could make you feel maddeningly small. Britney dropped her eyes under Gina’s mouth-bunched glare, like she’d realized she was being rude. Too late. Gina kept her glare on Britney, working up steam, breathing like a bellows. Rach and I shifted in our seats, wanting to break the silence, but gripped by a temporary social paralysis. Finally, Gina said, “How about you? Tell us about one of your dates.”

Sounds innocuous. But I’m convinced Gina meant it as a jab at Britney’s face: Have you even had a date in your whole life, you ugly cow? Maybe that’s just my imagination, but the embarrassed way Rachael looked away tells me she interpreted it the same. Britney returned Gina’s challenging glare with cool amusement.

I watched Britney turn something over in her head. Consider something. Then she smirked, and said, “Sure.”

And told us the story that follows:

* * *

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” That was what the guy kept screaming at her, the one who could still drive. Evan. The one with the broken leg made the trip back home in the bed of the pick-up, howling every time they hit a bump. That was Keith. Even with his leg, he’d agreed that Britney should take the cab—she was worse off. “Nothing was going to hurt you! Nothing was going to hurt you! Why didn’t you just go with it?!”

Britney didn’t answer. Just slouched there, feeling the nerves inside her face and mouth fizzle, pop. Just waited till they dropped her off at an emergency room. Not that anyone thought it would help. The guys shot away from the hospital as soon as Britney was out of the truck. Presumably to another hospital, for Keith’s broken leg. Apparently they felt too guilty to share one with Britney. Possibly, too scared.

These two guys and Britney had gone way the heck out in Long Island to do a working—past the Hamptons, almost to the Sound. (Pretty early in Britney’s story it became clear she was saying she was a witch. Not, say, a Wiccan—more like the girls in Charmed.) Technically, what they had in mind was a type of sex magic.

Evan and Keith were a couple of douchey warlocks that Britney had gotten in touch with via whatever network these folks use. She didn’t know them super-well, wasn’t super-impressed with them … but they had this working they wanted to do, and Britney thought it sounded interesting.

Not that it didn’t make her nervous, going off alone with these two douchey strangers to an isolated spot at night, squeezed between them in the cab of Evan’s pickup truck. After all, at that time she was a young and, according to her, attractive woman. But she shrugged off her worries. The life of a witch just comes with risks, as her story was about to make clear.

They got to the BQE, left Brooklyn. For a while they talked shop, went over the details of the plan. (Or, rather, of the plan as Keith and Evan presented it to Britney.) Then they rode in silence, till Evan flipped on the radio. A satellite station, that played nothing but Pearl Jam or Pearl Jam’s side projects, twenty-four-seven.

Crunched and dwarfed between the two men, Britney watched the land spool by. She’d never really quite realized how big Long Island was, although she didn’t mention her surprise to the two guys, because she’d been living in Brooklyn for a couple of years and didn’t like to admit being so ignorant of her surroundings. After an hour and a half or so they got off the big road. Turned into the woods, leaving behind the silent expanses of night-shrouded vineyards. Wound through back roads. Britney kept waiting for Evan to wonder aloud where they were, or tell Keith to unfold a map, or turn on the GPS, and she was discreetly impressed that he didn’t need to. The pickup worked its way up one slope and down another, slope after slope, deeper and deeper into the woods. They wound up at the rounded, packed wet earth of a stream bank.

Keith cut the ignition. The doors opened and the two guys scooted away from her; Britney felt like she was emerging from a submarine. A breeze passed through the cab and dispersed that clotted, stale smell. Her flesh expanded back out to its natural borders. Yet she couldn’t manage to savor the relief. Too nervous. She might talk the talk in front of these guys, but the truth was she’d never before been involved in a working this dramatic.

Thick luminous mist wafted over the stream and crawled up the banks, like dry ice on the set of some cheesy old horror movie. Light reflected up from the mist, allowing them to see quite clearly even with the headlights off: a dark blue, silvery light. Britney couldn’t understand how mere starlight and moonshine could produce so much light. “I even wondered if the light might be supernatural,” she told us. “Like, the mist might actually be some sort of manifestation of the spirits we’d come to contact. But then again, I’ve never spent much time in nature. I know it’s filled with wild and crazy shit; maybe this was some of that.”

The two warlocks also seemed taken aback by the spectacle of the mist. Or maybe they were just hesitant about going ahead with the working. One of them—Evan—waggled his eyebrows at the other two and said, “Ooo, spooky,” thus breaking the spell. (So to speak—obviously he hadn’t broken the real spell, they hadn’t started casting that yet.) They got down to business.

According to Britney, there’s a good chance she was right about the spooky glowing mist being a pseudo-ectoplasmic manifestation of the spirits they’d come to contact. Those spirits were all in this vicinity, bunched up together over and around this very stream. So claimed the occult maps and barstool lore, anyhow. Maybe not for all eternity, but for centuries and centuries, or anyway as long as the stream had been there and for as long as it ever would be, each soul like a sugar filament in a big vat of cotton candy, its individuality so subsumed as to have become meaningless. Yet, even though their individualities had been dissolved into a great clump untold stretches of time ago, the clump retained its femaleness. For all these spirits had once been female, back when they’d been whatever else they’d been (human or otherwise), and now, that shared gender was one of their most defining attributes. Nowadays, when I recount Britney’s tale to myself, that’s one of the details I get most caught up on. What would it mean, to have lost my identity, my self, and yet retain my femaleness? What would “femaleness” even be, divorced not only from the body but from everything else that makes up a human being? An incarnate being, even? Sounds like an absurdity. But, for the sake of Britney’s story, I’ll take it on faith.

As I said before, they were there to do a bit of sex magic—that’s the term Britney used. It made me think at first of some sort of Tantric orgy, or of a blood-soaked Satan-worshiping sex-scene from the low-grade horror movies I secretly indulge in. But apparently “sex magic” is a term of art; in this particular case it had nothing to do with the sex act.

At least, that’s what the two warlocks had told Britney, to get her out here. And it was true that nobody was planning on having any actual sex.

Evan took three thermoses out of his knapsack, kept one for himself, and passed one to Britney and one to Keith. “We’ll drink this, and then I’ll start the introduction ritual. And then, if I can manage to establish a rapport, hopefully we’ll be able to ask them stuff.”

They were standing in a triangle, roughly equidistant from each other. Britney took her thermos, eyed the other two. She really didn’t know these guys. She hefted the thermos to judge how much liquid it contained: only a few swallows. “How come we don’t just drink out of one thermos?” she asked. “Scared of cooties?”

“Because the ritual says we gotta all take a drink at the same time,” said Evan. She gave him a look. He rolled his eyes, and said, “It’s the same thing. I mixed the potion all in one pot, and then I poured a third of it into each thermos. I can’t even tell the thermoses apart. Look, you wanna switch?” He reached out with one hand to take her thermos, with the other to offer his.

“Naw, that’s all right.” Later, Britney would often ask herself what hijinks might have ensued if she’d called his bluff. But Evan really sold it. And she didn’t want to wimp out in front of these guys. People who are scared of their own shadows shouldn’t wander out into the wilds of Long Island to try to contact the spirit world.

Still, she admitted, it had been stupid to just trust Evan about the thermos.

Seconds after swallowing, she writhed on the moist earth, unable to stop herself from sliding toward the water, gasping for air through the horny fire sweltering in her guts and chest, smothering her. Under the din of her own crashing pulse, she heard the guys solemnly intoning the rite. Intoning the words she was supposed to be reciting along with them.

What had they slipped her? Something magic? Not a roofie. What rose in her like a flood, washing away her embankments, was not numbness, or sleepiness, or wooziness. It was gasping, yearning, clawing horniness, desire, sexual desire but also desire so intense it made a mockery of sexuality—or else it exposed everything she’d ever believed to be a sexual feeling as little more than schoolgirl pantomimes. From within the voluptuous aching cloud smothering her she made out Evan and Keith. In a way she longed to have both of them down in the mud with her, both inside her at once; but at the same time her spirit turned from them with groaning disdain, because their frail flesh wasn’t enough; they were men but just barely; she needed guys who would be the essence of manhood, their flesh swollen with the quality as hers was swollen with desire, their minds too; and she needed a whole long horny line of them; creatures devoid of the prissy workaday interests that motivated Evan and Keith, as they stood there chanting with their palms up and out and their eyes closed; she craved men so manly they had ceased to be human, as the maw of feminine desire splitting her open had started by engulfing her personality and ambition before hunting around for men to engulf.

Something tickled at her. Not the masculine presence she craved; the opposite, perhaps, if “female” is the opposite of “male;” but she welcomed the newcomers anyway, because even if they could not ease her torment, she sensed they could understand it. Wisps of spirit stroked at her flesh to ask admittance. On the verge of opening herself to them, so as to at least share communion with fellow-sufferers, Britney heard some corner of her desire-stunned mind wonder who these entities were.

She jerked herself back under control. Yes, who were they, and what? The female spirits haunting the stream—had to be. The ones they’d come to seek. The ones Evan and Keith were at this moment trying to contact, with their chants. Britney made weird animal barking noises, trying to clear her head.

What she worked out later, when the main struggle had ended and she had room to think, was that Evan and Keith had used her. They’d tricked her into believing they only wanted to make the most minimal contact with the fabled female mist. Communication of a very limited sort, barely above the level of a table-turning. What they’d really had in mind was the in-depth conversation they could have if the spirits were admitted into a bodily vessel. So they pulled a fast one on Britney. Evan doctored her thermos with a debilitatingly powerful supernatural aphrodisiac, strong enough to knock out her powers of reasoning, powerful enough to light up her flesh and draw to her the female spirits, moth-like, strong enough to compel her to invite her hungry sisters in, to allow them to share her carnality until Evan and Keith exorcized them at the end of the ritual. To me that all sounds pretty nasty: a spiritual version of rape, basically. But from what limited research I’ve managed to do since hearing Britney’s story (not an easy subject to research—that is a tight-lipped little world), it sounds like this kind of ruthless advantage-taking is par for the course, and anyone who stays in the game for very long, male or female, has to accept that sooner or later they’ll probably wind up the victim and, as probably, the perpetrator of this kind of trick. Seems hard to stomach. But then, I’m not accustomed to such high stakes.

So: Evan and Keith meant no harm, or little harm at least. They expected Britney to be angry once the ritual ended and the shock of the exorcism wore off, but everyone in this little world knew they were always risking this kind of double-cross, and the boys expected to placate her afterward by buying her dinner and a few beers and telling her all the cool shit they’d learned.

They didn’t know who they were dealing with.

If they’d been straight with Britney from the beginning, she might have gone along with it. After all, she craved occult knowledge as much as these douchebags did, and she likely would have been willing to sacrifice some dignity for it, if she’d known the deal and thought it over beforehand. Instead, she found herself waylaid by crowding spirits trying to peel open a breach that they could flood into, trying to board her body like a bunch of pirates. And her gut reaction was that they could go fuck themselves.

Only a few seconds had passed since she’d collapsed in a horny stupor. Barely any time at all since the spirits had begun to lick at her ears and she’d turned toward them and started to open herself up to the entities, grateful to share her suffering. It didn’t take long for her to recover her willpower, if not yet her reason, and muster up a No; but by then the spirits had begun to edge their way in. They weren’t yet at the core of her, they weren’t yet riding the cerebrum, weren’t yet able to use her voice and tongue to answer the warlocks’ questions; but they were in her flesh, bonding to it in some non-physical way. Britney, through an unthinkable effort of will, found them, isolated them within her psyche and body, began to round them up and push them out. They didn’t want to go. So Britney pushed harder.

Very far away was Evan’s surprised voice: “Hey!” Even if she’d wanted to acknowledge him, her straining effort couldn’t spare the attention for it. She pulled, pushed, strained at the invading spirits; screamed, not knowing whether the scream left her throat or stayed only in her mind. She couldn’t know that Evan had stopped the ritual and was desperately trying to aid her in expelling the spirits, knowing that with her muddled head she’d never be able to do it in a safe, controlled way. Forcing those invaders from her body that way was the supernatural equivalent of chewing off your leg to escape a trap. Agony lightninged down her nerves. Unlike when chewing off a limb, the struggle wasn’t contained in one neighborhood of flesh. It was the entirety of her carnality that the spirits wanted to take, to ride; it was the entirety they fought for, and at the start of the battle there was no telling where its collateral damage would be centered.

In her face, it turned out. Britney was managing to force them out, straining as the spirits tried to crush their way back in. Then she felt a sudden give as they went pouring out. Later, she worked out that the sudden give was thanks to Evan’s aid.

A scream of blue light blotted out all her perceptions, blinding her, choking her. The spirits exited her body through her face, jetting out her mouth, the pores of her cheeks, her follicles, her nostrils. They didn’t blind her, but they did twist around and grab for purchase at her body as they went, howling at the cruelty of the eviction, leaving in rage and bitterness. Howls were heard not just on some metaphysical plane but there in the mundane night air beside the stream, and Evan and Keith couldn’t distinguish Britney’s agony from the unearthly, physically impossible wails of the ejected spirits. Blue light flashed and illuminated the patch of nature in strobes. Keith fell as the ground shook. The fall wasn’t bad enough to break his leg, and yet his leg broke.

Evan moaned. “Oh Jesus Christ, look at her face.”

* * *

Britney finished her tale. Silence. Not a stunned silence while everyone took it all in—just a socially awkward silence. As if the story Britney had just told had gone unheard, as if she hadn’t even told it, as if we were all sitting in the middle of a long silence and waiting for something to pull us out of it. Britney regarded us all with her not-quite-smirk. I thrashed around in my head, looking for something to say, something that would politely convey to Britney that I took her seriously but would also let the rest of the table know I was still a normal person.

Rachael finally spoke. She said, “You know, your story is a little gender-essentialist.” Which I guess was true, but seemed beside the point.

Later, after the conversation had gotten cranked up again, Britney rose to go to the bathroom. I wasn’t completely sure she wasn’t just up and leaving. No one had addressed a word to her since she’d finished her weird tale, except for Rachael’s remark, and she didn’t speak to anyone as she left the table. I waited to follow her, just long enough not to be too obvious.

When she came out of the ladies’ room, she looked at my eyes and nodded in faint acknowledgement, then had already looked away and started to step past me before I could find my voice: “Hey, those spirits, from the stream.” She paused, waited with mild interest to hear what I’d say. “When they were inside you, buzzing around, humming…. What’d they say?”

She gave me a wry half-smile, one corner of her mouth poking up into the flesh of her cheek. Not unkindly.

Embarrassed, I said, “Okay, I guess I wouldn’t really even begin to be able to understand what they said, I know I don’t have the frame of reference, but … what did their femaleness feel like? What is femaleness, if you take away the body and the personality and everything?”

But she just shook her head. Didn’t tell me I wouldn’t understand, that I had to have been there, or had to be a witch myself. Just shook her head.

I nodded quickly, flustered, said, “Oh, of course.” She’d already left—wound up going back to the table and staying till the end, although I don’t think she exchanged another word with anyone. I ducked into the bathroom, locked the door behind me, stayed there a credible length of time. I guess I’d assumed she would tell me just because we were both women, and because I’d been passably civil with her, but now that idea seemed ridiculous.

But as time goes by, I realize just how many things her story left me wanting to ask. It’s not really that I care about femaleness, not really. Maybe it’s just the idea that there’s something underneath it all, underneath our bodies and mundane personalities and all that—something deep, like I guess a soul maybe. And I sometimes think it was mean of her not to talk to me about all that, and to be so exclusive and clubby about it. I mean, I’m sorry, but I just get so fucking lonely is all.

That was the last time she ever came to Girls’ Night, even when Linda was there. The cancer killed Linda really fast; I only saw her the one time after her diagnosis, and of course I wasn’t going to ask about Britney during a conversation like that. She was only barely into her thirties. Once, after Linda died, I did go scrolling through her Facebook page, looking through her friend list, but I didn’t see Britney. Maybe she doesn’t have a Facebook account. I don’t know her last name.

Girls’ Night is disbanded, I guess. Anyway, I never see any of those women anymore. Little social circles like that aren’t really meant to last, anyway. A few years ago Pacquito’s closed its garden and in-door dining. You can still get take-out.

* * *

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The Switch: https://tinyurl.com/mtmbtmcp

The Man Who Fed Myagg’daggeth: https://tinyurl.com/a46r2nv5

Ironheart: https://tinyurl.com/bddm7epd

Tusk: https://tinyurl.com/4vjrjjmn

Resilient Creatures: https://tinyurl.com/mvnkxvde

Stewart and Jean: https://tinyurl.com/ywmmtuea

Daughter Of the Damned: https://tinyurl.com/3hx2bt27

Raw Flesh, Cold Air: https://tinyurl.com/3vvrpa2p