MAUI BABE BROWNING LOTION by RYAN PETERSEN
February 20 2025I admired the hairs on my chest. Gathered together in a small tuft. Made flaxen with applied bronzer. And from a small slit in the blinds—my Dad watched me. I saw my half-naked image in the lens of his Oakleys.
Good god my son is tanning, he probably thought. In nothing but his briefs. The downstairs thermostat was set to a chilly sixty-eight degrees. And outside? Another scorcher. Chimes, hung from the awning, nuzzled each other in the weak breeze. To my ear, they sounded like smut synths. The kind of trembling music you’d hear in a retro porn clip.
My Dad looked down at the tablet on his lap and drafted a player to his fantasy team. But there was still a slight twinge, wasn't there? The world didn’t sit right with him that morning. The extra cup of coffee had tattered his nerves a bit. He was stuck inside a slow-mo replay. Caught within the sap of an Indian summer. And tortured by a low-grade migraine. A protracted yawn cracked him wide open. Like a speckled egg. Dark yolk spilled out of him, at the far corner of his mouth. I could tell the old lug was in trouble.
A broken down piece of meat—a line from a half-remembered movie, one that toyed with my Dad ever since hearing it. He would always say the phrase under his breath, in apropos of nothing. A broken down piece of meat: a string of words that behaved like an errant tongue, held firm against a dead tooth. My Dad wanted to pull the quote from his psyche. But pliers were never handy when you needed them, huh pops?
The dog walked past the patio door, her uncut nails dragging against the vinyl parquetry. Last summer there’d been a bird’s nest up in the rain gutter. One day the dog was sniffing around and found a handful of pink little baubles in the astroturf. Hatchlings, torn apart by the desert crows. My Dad threw their entrails over the fence. The pool boy found three more of them when he emptied out the filter. The baby birds had turned blue, their stomachs distended in the chlorine. They looked like how I imagined testicles to appear, if ever removed from the ball sack.
I finally retreated inside, the backyard heat unbearable. My blurred-out reflection in the freezer door was one of inarguable strength, the broad shoulders and vascular forearms of my upper body still visible in the stainless steel. I put a large scoop of creatine into my plastic Big Gulp and mixed it with Arctic Blue Gatorade. 200 pounds was the end-of-summer goal. I wanted the deli man to squeeze my bicep and ask me how much I bench pressed.
The ice machine started to sputter, wheezing like an old cartoon engine. The temperature-controlled calm of the house was in flux. The dog began to growl, already on edge. A sonic boom from Camp Pendleton shook at the ceiling, dusting my hair with white stucco. “Can you put some clothes on?” my Dad yelled out to me, from the half-opened door of his office. “For chrissakes put some clothes on, will you?”
Ryan Petersen is a writer based in NYC, previously published in Car Crash Collective Anthology, The End Magazine, and Expat Press.