6 Quotes by Matt Orlando

Two weeks.  He’d only been here two weeks.  Five weeks ago, he was a cop.  Now he was staring at the manicured toes of a pretty decent looking cougar as they swayed back and forth three feet off the ground.  She was wearing that light blue silk robe.  Maybe it was silk.  He didn’t really have a clue.  But she had looked good in it.

The sex wasn’t even sex.  It was a cover job, like bad paint over a door ding.  A boredom comb over.  Assisted masturbation.  Anyhow, you get the point.  But it was good in its innocence.  Not in the cheating on your husband innocence.  That wasn’t innocence.  But the pure playful almost unapologetically silliness of it all like two adult kids playing hide and go seek but with their genitals.

Nick heard the glass set down on a hard surface.  His inclination was to turn.  To watch.  But there was something in the manners of it all.  Like he was bound by tradition.  He couldn’t turn to the man who’s wife he was fucking that he found dead days later.  Nick wondered if the guy could have done it.  Slipped into the property and hung her.

Nick wasn’t used to dealing with rich powerful men.  There weren’t many in Santa Ana.  There were some.  Every town had them.  He’d just never had to deal with them.  He didn’t like dealing with this one.  He’d had power in money.  Evidenced in the will it took build some sort of empire and have a house like this.  Nick was a barely graduated high school cop that was really just a cop so that he could surf and drink on his days off.

And so we danced around like that in circles, my arms flailing at the bird and me in a shredded hospital gown with a dog latched onto my foot who wouldn’t let go. And I was screaming and trying to get them off when all of a sudden they just took off. I stood their dazed, not sure what just happened. My animals had just kicked my ass.

We camped in an RV parked in the middle of an intersection on PCH and Mahar Avenue. We laughed, we drank, I told them stories, and even dipped their chips in dog food for them. If you’ve never seen a drunk crow, It’s hilarious.