I've got a short story in a new book, Smut: Volume 1, from the editors at Nerve and published by Chronicle Books. "Finally, erotica you'll still respect in the morning. The first in a series of annual anthologies, Smut presents 22 pieces of Nerve.com's most talked-about fiction. More fearless, forthright, and provocative than typical 'erotica' and less blockheadedly masculine than your standard 'pornography,' Smut collects cliché-shattering stories from some of today's most talented writers. In the hands of celebrated authors such as Robert Olen Butler, Aimee Bender, A. M. Holmes, Jay McInerney, and Alice Sebold, seductive entanglements become not only salaciously steamy, but finely wrought. It's literature of the highest order: intelligent, undeniably hot, and in a package to die for. Really, what more could a person ask for in bed?" The cover of the book features the photography of Clayton Cubitt. The story that I contributed is called "The First Time She Died While Having Sex."
The fifth time she died while having sex, it was the last time, for, my God, she was an old woman now, and she had done so many things, and she had been with the same man for so many years, when, because of sex, they had been ticketed by the police for making love in a car parked near the ocean, and, because of sex, she had given birth to their children holding his hand, and, because of sex, they had refused, through these yawning years, to ever let each other go, and he had grown old, here, beside her, as she had, and they had watched each other's bodies slide down their fronts, at first, gasping in horror, then admiring the great slow landslides they were, for it was beautiful, really, to watch somebody you loved in the nude, having dodged cancer, and softly pruned, it was a gift, so, over time, the sex had become something else altogether, from what it had once been, between them, for it was no longer about the way they did it, or how much they did it, or how well they did it, it was about how they could not not do it, they could not let each other go, they could not bear to be parted, and, in the sex, they held on to one another, through the years, and the wars, and the changes of the guard, and she was in his arms, having sex, but not having sex at all, really, when she died, and she didn't mind it at all, not a bit, actually, because she knew, even when she did so, he would never let her go.
