Caring (Fiction)

In Jowita Bydlowska's short story, an awkward, online hookup encourages the protagonist to reconsider her life choices. Don't miss this one!

By Jowita Bydlowska

He looked exactly the same as he did on the Apps, in the picture with the baseball hat.

He ordered a slice of bread with a vegan thing on it. It came with sauces that showed up in small fussy containers. The waitress wore her hair in a ponytail, straight like a blade. There was a smell of chocolate in the air from the former Nestle factory in the area.

I liked his nose, the wide nostrils.  I talked too fast because I was a nervous person or I was just like most people on a first date. I briefly wondered if he thought I was desperate. He said the age thing on the Apps was a glitch.  He was 10 years younger. I didn’t mind that, I didn’t mind any of it.

 The chocolate factory had recycled itself into a modern art museum, the kind of a place you could pay $20 to see films of people screaming silently, or stare at pebbles arranged in piles and patterns in rooms with metal lockers lining up walls. I brought up the museum because it was nearby and I didn't know what to talk about with  someone his age. Art was always safe and made you look smart even if you weren't, which I wasn't.

Isaac had not been to the museum, yet. But we could go, he said, as if we’ve known each other for 12 years and I was exhausting him. I wondered what his penis looked like.

The restaurant had concrete walls that echoed coughs and clinking glass. I took a picture of the lighting fixture above our table. I wanted to look up what those light bulbs were called. They’re great little things, really energy-efficient, Isaac said. His father was in real estate. I knew this. I looked everything up prior to the date just like any normal person would. On Instagram, Isaac’s early pictures showed him with a girl who was a model in Hong Kong. I also found an obituary: Isaac’s grandfather died the year before and he had 12 grandchildren one of whom was named Halina, which was an unusual name. I liked it.

They’re called filament bulbs, Isaac said, about the lights after a long pause. He seemed too young and too polite to be the kind of a man who liked to explain things to women, yet he had lied about his age so I knew I shouldn’t assume things about him. I reached out for a piece of bread from his plate. I’m not sure if I did it to show dominance. I am not particularly dominant.

 I asked him to drop me off at my niece’s daycare. I wanted him to consider that children happened. It was better than having to ask him if he had a condom, later, not that a condom would prevent anything child-related at that point. I wasn’t sure if someone so young would know to have condoms. It was too embarrassing to have them myself—it was a lot more embarrassing than it was to have sex with a new person who could have all kinds of opinions on your body.

I saw him again, on Friday. At his place you clapped your hands and a wall lit up in a neon design that looked like a formula of a chemical equation. He said it was called nanoleaf. I said I couldn’t wait to see what kind of lights he had upstairs. He looked at me.

I said, I thought you were good at lights.  

Ha ha, he said. He pulled out his phone and started answering texts or maybe comment on tiktokers making smoothies, I couldn’t see. His dog slobbered over and sat beside me, all teeth and a wool face. I remembered the dog from the pictures on the Apps. She was named after a flower or a pastry, I couldn’t recall.

He told me to pick a movie. I felt he’d think me presumptuous for saying that stuff about lights upstairs. What if he wanted to have sex with me but on the couch?

He had tattoos, and posters of tattoos on his walls. He was in cryptocurrency. I knew nothing about that.

I picked a movie about alien plants. There was a famous actress in it whose nose turned pink when she cried. In the movie, she was married to a man with a beard and they had no chemistry even though she cried extra hard after he died.

Shortly after the movie started, Isaac placed his hand on my breast. Instantly, I turned to face him, as if he pressed a button. I felt obliged. We started kissing. His dog made a noise that sounded approving. I once slept with a guy whose dog liked to watch us have sex. I decided I would ask Isaac if he could put his dog in a crate or in her own bedroom once my top was off—I wasn’t sure where she slept but she probably had her own bedroom.

We took breaks to watch the flick in-between kissing. I thought of those queue machines that spat out numbers in government buildings. That’s what it felt like to be sticking out my tongue whenever he would press on me as the people on the screen kept dying horrible, green, sticky deaths.

Later on, upstairs in his bedroom, he undressed as if he was in a locker room at the gym. He folded his clothes. I guessed he was a sociopath. He wasn’t my first sociopath. I didn’t come. On the way out, I took a picture of his dog and then of the neon lights on the wall.

After that date, I wished I had a dog. I don’t have close friends. The dog would go with me everywhere and I would teach it not to slobber all over me like Isaac’s dog.

We were having a really nice fall this year. I hated my job less. I talked to my mother on the phone and she asked me if I had a good coat. I had a good coat I bought from a second-hand store.

I ran into Luke there and he complimented me on my hair. I hadn’t cut it in months. I’ve always loved Luke’s hands and watched them as he paid for his purchases, a silk scarf, probably for a girl. Men moved on quickly. Luke owned a shop, a place called Twilight, that sold useless items like lunchboxes with faces of actors from the 80s television printed on them, or porcelain piggy banks that weren’t pigs but pineapples or small houses. Also Polaroid cameras. Everybody was obsessed with Polaroid, Luke had boxes of pictures of ex-girlfriends—mine included—and people’s feet and blurry, desolate landscapes. I debated telling him that I missed my period. The sales girl asked him if he wanted the scarf wrapped up. He said no.

Are you getting that coat? He sounded friendly and tired. He had probably been up all night fucking his new girlfriend. One time we didn’t leave the bed for 24 hours. Afterwards, he had a rash on the back of his thighs.

His apartment was full of objects that nobody played with any more like typewriters and toy trains. And Polaroid cameras, of course.

How is the shop, I wanted to ask as we stood in the lineup but instead, I said I was getting the coat. I thought he liked it. It was wool. The sleeves were too short.

Good seeing you, he said. Have a nice day.