The Steps. By Joey Comeau The woman they send to landscape my lawn has mud all over the front of her tank top. She has a shaved head and from this distance her eyes are black like an animal's. There is a smear of brown dirt up the side of her neck. Her pickup truck is filled with tools, a lawnmower, and three thin trees, each with a ball of dirt and roots wrapped in canvas at its base. I watch her from the front step as she raises the pick axe over her head and brings it down. She isn't muscled, but she's strong. Her skin is tanned the color of wet stone. The ground comes up in chunks where the pick goes in. She lifts it again. I want to run my hands up her body when it is stretched out in that way. I want to push my fingers into her skin. I have to be to work in a half an hour. "Hey," I call to her, and she looks up. "Do you want a beer?" I say. She watches me for a minute, and I realize that she didn't know I've been sitting here, watching. She drops the axe on the ground. "Yeah," she says, "All right." I grab two beer bottles inside, and I can't help smiling. I wonder what her name is. I wonder whether she will let me run my fingers over her shaved head. I can already feel the bristles. I have to finish crunching numbers today at the office. There are discrepancies. The totals don't work and someone, somewhere down the line must have made a mistake. All I can think about, though, is her bristled head. I open the front door and step outside. My foot catches, and I fall forward down the steps. There is no sound when my skull hits the cement at the bottom. It feels like someone is pulling very gently at my hair. The ground underneath my head is a stack of numbers, profits and costs and taxes and interest rates on loans. It scrapes at me. It doesn't add up. There's something wrong. I can see one of the beers pouring out next to me, and then I can see her kneeling down to peer into my face. She looks terrified. I lick my lips once, and reach out for her. The bristles tickle at my fingertips, and her dark eyes go soft. I can hear her breathing, now. Sound rushes back, and I pull her toward me, and we kiss. She rolls me over, and it hurts like hell when her hand presses against my shoulder. She pulls at something, and I feel faint. Her hand comes away with blood and a chunk of broken bottle, and she tosses the glass and wipes the blood on her shirt. She straddles me, and when she leans forward to kiss me again, I press up against her. I pull her shirt up to expose her breasts, my hand leaving dirt and my own blood on them. She bites my neck, and she presses against me in return. She grabs my arm by the cut and squeezes, and I feel like I am emptying. When she pulls her hand away, and the pain is gone, I realize that she's undone my pants with her other hand. She wipes her hand through her hair, the dark blood streaking her shaven head. She rolls off me, onto her back and pulls her pants down and off. I close my eyes and wonder whether my neighbors are watching. I wonder how much time has passed. She climbs onto me and takes my stiffness in her hand. She presses the tip against herself, and slides it once through the dry hair and then down into wet folds of skin and back out through hair. She presses me through again, sliding me against and around the mouth of her cunt. She masturbates with me, pressing her forehead into my gashed arm and her breasts into my chest, breathing hard. She begins to rock against me, harder and harder, and then she stops, pressing my cut harder and harder but not rocking, and she says "I'm going." The ground underneath me is still numbers, and the world seems to spin. She takes me inside her, slides down on me, wet and warm, and she raises herself up again. She is a mirror in the sunlight. Her tank top is pulled up over one of her breasts, and I know that she knows the answer, the way you know things in dreams. Her second breast is covered. There is blood all over her. She is dark like a forest. I am nowhere but right here. I am inside her and then I am coming. The numbers all make sense. When she climbs off me, my come is running down the side of her thigh. The End