Hot Stuff
by Aleksia Mira Silverman
There’s a mattress on the curb—a moonscape expanse of piling fabric and springs and stains. By noon, a group of teens with no masks circles hungrily. They are rich kids, bad kids, come to escape their parents. They nudge at the mattress’s plush corners with their toes, wonder how they can destroy it.
I watch from my bed. I’m eating buffalo wings, waiting for a text from the Realtor. The mattress belonged to me for many years. The stains are from razors cuts, mosquito bites, menstrual blood, red wine. I dragged it to the curb yesterday, along with three bags of clothing and a spindly side table. Since March, I've gotten into tidying. I’ve deep-cleaned the carpet, I’ve waxed the floors. On my bar cart, there are halos of empty wood in place of gin bottles.
I bought new things so I could see delivery people. The man from Sleep Number had rosacea peeking from his beaked mask. I stood close, but he was skittish. He left me with nothing but a mattress.
“Hello, Martha,” The Realtor texts. “How is your business doing? How is Vegas.”
I lick some yolky buffalo sauce from my fingers. “My business is doing well,” I write back. I send a message about the desirability of home offices. He tells me that things are not doing well in Miami. I apologize for his troubles.
We start politely, but I wait. The Realtor has been asking for photos of me—sexual photos—for a week, and I am ready to do something with my body besides crouch to wax floors or haul furniture to the curb.
I text while I watch the teens. A girl with too many freckles pulls a marker from a hoodie pocket and draws a dick on the mattress with a wavering hand. Everyone goes wild; a dog the color of sand rises from a yard and starts to bark.
“The conference should have been this Monday,” the Realtor says. “I was looking forward to seeing you there.”
There might never be a conference again. The thought of unused halls—empty and eerie like prairie fields—makes something inside of me wilt.
I like the hotels on the Strip. All that marble. All those fountains. Last year, I met the Realtor at the Sands Exhibition Hall at the Venetian. Together we squeezed through throngs of other Realtors to examine swag—stress balls painted to look like globes, stiff T-shirts, tote bags. We took dutiful notes in the breakout sessions. At night, we visited art galleries to admire polite desert landscapes. He was forward. He bought me a Lemoncello, flirted by wiping my lips clean. All that touching seems ridiculous now, when I’ve only touched my own skin for weeks. Memories like that belong to a different person. Maybe to a character I’ve seen on TV.
I lick my fingers again. I pull an onion-skin layer of cling film over the remaining wings. If I had a child early, my kid would have been about the age of the Mattress Kids. I think this neighborhood is a nice place to grow up. We are almost in the desert—close to the putty-colored mountains, far from the Las Vegas strip. There are a million rubbery lizards zinging around, and proximity to nature should make kids curious and thoughtful. The Mattress Kids are in deep concentration.
The girl with too many freckles has no eyelashes. The boy next to her has chapped lips and curls that remind me of a ceramic angel’s hair. I can’t remember the Realtor’s face. I remember him in glimpses—a stack of gelled hair, a leather watch, a blue suit.
At last, the Realtor writes, “Can I please have a photo of you? Like we’re at the conference?”
Shaky with anticipation, I change into a pencil skirt that shows the bird-wing swoops of my pelvis, a blouse with ruffles at the neckline. I arrange my name tag to nestle in my cleavage. Hopefully, he won’t notice the way my hair’s grown in. No hairdressing for months—I’m all split ends and dark roots.
I make sure he can see my new mattress. It is soft and downy and frighteningly white, the best thing I own.
“This is what I’m wearing right now,” I text the agent.
“Sexy.” He sends a series of emojis—fruits and hearts and smiley faces. “Video?”
I take one last look outside. The teens have drawn dicks all across the mattress. The pattern looks like crop circles, abstract and gorgeous. They cling to each other, cackling. My hands sting with jealousy when they high-five.
On my TV, Netflix is advertising a show about dating in quarantine. Its slogan, printed in comforting sans font: when you’re staying in, branch out.
Through trial and error, I have learned the right angles to show the firmness of my thighs, the swoop of my hips. I unbutton my blazer. I pop my starched collar, shove my sleeves to my elbows.
Conferences always end with a big concert that reminds me of prom, of losing my virginity. Last year, the Realtor and I went to the concert together. If I close my eyes, I can see glinting teeth, the streaky light of glow sticks. I think of the elevator ride to his room. I think of laughing with my knees pressed together, my feet flared. I think of his creaky headboard, the wiry hair on his chest.
When I finish, I am sweating, and my fingers are cramped.
“Did you like that?” I text the Realtor. “It’s my first time…”
I wait for the Realtor to text me more emojis. I wait for a video of my own.
Fifteen minutes later, I have scrubbed the baseboards and checked my email, and I still have no new messages.
“Hello? Hello?” I send more texts to the Realtor. More texts into the ether. He’s gone cold. He’s taken my videos and sent me nothing back.
I look outside and see the teens trying to set the mattress on fire. A boy with about a mile of split ends fiddles with a neon lighter.
Even after chicken wings, I am hungry and thirsty, and everything looks like food. The teen’s shoulders are turning to grapefruit in the sun. The lighter fluid could be lemonade.
A teen pulls out what I think is a gun before I realize it's an old camera. A film camera, worn and hefty, passed down through her family like blonde hair or an underbite. She raises it to her face. Of course, they aren’t bad kids. They are young artists with big dreams. If they could figure out the lighter, they would dance in the flames of my burning mattress.
I think of the Realtor’s hand on my own. I think of other hands—dozens on my back and shoulders, congratulating me, wishing me hello and goodbye.
I have a lighter, somewhere. In a drawer? Stuffed into a sock? I find it nestled in a pair of underwear.
The teens are giving up on the mattress. I run outside, holding my lighter aloft.
Aleksia Mira Silverman (@AleksiaMira) is a content strategist and freelance writer based in Florida. She graduated from Bowdoin College in 2019 where she co-founded and served as co-editor-in-chief for The Foundationalist. You can read her fiction in Tart Magazine’s newsletter, The Winnow Magazine, Rejection Letters, and The Daily Drunk.
