DOMINION by Bentley Little (best chinese ebook reader .txt) 📕

She had always had a hard time talking to boys and had never really made that leap of socialization that most of her peers had made during the awkward years of junior high. At night, in bed, when she masturbated, she liked both the way her fingers felt on her vagina and the way her vagina felt against her fingertips. She enjoyed the pliant softness, the warm wetness, even the subtle pressure of the vaginal walls against her middle finger when she occasionally slipped it into the opening. She could not see herself ever touching another girl’s body the very thought was revolting—but wasn’t the joy she felt when fingering herself enough to make her a lesbian?

She wasn’t sure.

Maybe the fact that she had trouble imagining herself in a romantic situation with anyone, boy or girl, meant that she was asexual. She splashed her reflection, dissolving her face in a fluid ripple. Why was it all so complicated? There was a knock behind her, and she turned around to see Mother Felice at the window, waving. She waved back, then looked down, opened her journal, clicked her pen. “Today,” she wrote, “was the first day of my senior year…”

5

As one, the four grandfather clocks lined along the wall next to the door chimed six, and Vic Williams stood up, shut off the cassette player, and moved from behind the counter to lock the door. It had been a long day, a boring day, and not a very profitable one. Tourist season had pretty well run its course, and only five people had come into the shop since he’d opened this morning, all of them browsers, not buyers.

It was a taste of things to come, he knew. School had started, vacations had ended, and from now until mid-October business would be pretty much hit-and-miss.

Time was when the antique market was bullish all year, when he didn’t have to depend on outside trade, when even local women wanted stained glass windows to decorate their living rooms and conservative middle-aged men bought Victrolas for their wives’ anniversaries. But antiques were out these days. People bought Nagels and Neimans now, mall art for their walls, and anniversary presents consisted of televisions or VCRs.

Vic pulled the shade on the window. He was hungry and wanted to grab a bite to eat, but there were still three cartons of Depression glass he’d purchased at an estate sale a few weeks back which needed to be catalogued. He could have, and should have done that earlier today, during the long slow stretch between lunch and closing, but he hated going through purchases during business hours. Somehow, the ritual of examining, appraising, and pricing items seemed more suited to evening than morning or afternoon.

He’d pick up a burger on the way home.

Vic retreated behind the counter once again and walked through the beaded doorway into the back room. The three cartons were on the floor, and he hefted the largest onto the long metal table which ran the length of the side wall. He took a razor blade out of the desk drawer and cut two cross slits through the layered masking tape which sealed shut the top of the box. Dropping the blade on the table, he pulled up the cardboard flaps and, one by one, began unwrapping the individually stacked plates. The pieces were good. Rose glass from the mid-thirties.

He held each up to the light, checking for flaws and chips and scratches before setting it carefully down on the tabletop. After unwrapping, examining, and setting down the last plate, he looked into the box. At the bottom, lying as if thrown there by accident or afterthought, was an old water-stained paperback. In Watermelon Sugar.

In Watermelon Sugar.

Richard Brautigan.

Whoa, did that bring back memories. He picked up the book, flipped the pages. Half of them were stuck together, glued by the hardening of some spilled beverage. The photo of Brautigan on the front was almost completely obscured by a brown stain, although the woman next to him stared out of the picture undamaged. It saddened Vic to see the book in such shape. It had been originally purchased, no doubt, by a member of what had then been called “the counterculture,” someone young and enthusiastic, hungry for new ideas. Now that person was probably balding and overweight, dully establishment, interested only in interest rates and IRAs, the book and its fallen idol author now not even a memory.

Vic dropped the book in the wastepaper basket and sighed heavily.

He had come to Napa as a college student in the late sixties, and though he now wore his hair short and dressed respectably in the fashions of today, he still aligned himself with the sentiments of that era, still considered himself a part of that generation. Of course, those days were long gone, even here in northern California, where small conclaves of ex-hippies still lived in converted Victorian houses amidst the faded relics of psychedelia. People these days were harsher, harder, more willingly insensitive. The pace of life was faster now; there was less time to talk with friends, less time to be kind to strangers, less time to stop and smell the roses.

It made him feel depressed.

A lot of things made him feel depressed lately.

Last night he had watched a television program on the Vietnam War which, straight-faced, had portrayed the army as an upright organization of highly moral men bravely doing their patriotic duty despite the protests of an obnoxious and misguided crowd of drug-crazed college students. He had turned the program off before it ended. If there was one thing that really drove him crazy, that made him absolutely furious, it was the revisionist history now fostered by the media which characterized the sixties as an anarchic aberration, a decade in which the traditional values of America had been trashed by rioting long-haired, dope-smoking freaks. Jesus, couldn’t people even remember what it had been like? What the hell had happened to the nation’s short-term