Résumé | Lee Anne Sittler
Black lights curdle the edges: blue milk mewing around a catwalk where spider-silk beads of sweat cling to a dancer’s leg. Her body plays one string on a sad violin. The dancer’s arms multiply through the gin, a four-armed goddess, as a girl in the pit straddles a man’s lap like a back-turned chair. He says: you dropped out of school, didn’t you. With a finger, she opens his lips, the seal of an envelope, and she pours her tequila heart out from a clear plastic tube. I went to college, she replies. I graduated last spring. He hands her the five dollars, which she sticks in her garter, and she picks up her tray of tequila, jäger and rumplemintz. You must’ve had an abusive father. She sets down the tray again, straddles his leg. I’ll give you the next one for three. She holds the butt end of the shot in her throat, lifts the lip of the tube to his mouth. His clean-shaven face feels like latex. Both hands press into the small of her back; her knees clutch his waist, and she leans into him. The dancer behind her slow hulas and then quickens to shoot spider-silk in a man’s face. Ain’t no shooter girl go to college. His nails are clean, trimmed; he scratches lightly on the skin of her catsuit. She stands up and doesn’t wait for his money.