Said the Lesbian to Her Lover
Combining FilmStack Challenge #9 and STSC Symposium: Fiction
Her gut drops as low as the bass shaking the very pavement outside the house they just pulled up to. This situation here is definitely not looking like the best place to take Sophia on their third date. What had Benny gotten her into?
She opens her map app. “Maybe this isn’t the right place?”
“Looks like it,” Sophia said. “You said it was a house party.” Pointing. “THAT, right there, is a house party.”
And so it clearly is. Among the lines of parked cars are dudes of already staggering drunkenness smoking, vaping, leaning back on cars, leaning over against cars, trying to lean on cars and falling right on their sides, mostly laughing. As Sophia and Alexa meander toward the front door, a couple boys pry the hands of a third dude off the side of an F-150 truck bed until he spins away, glaring at them intermittent to each turn and spitting, “You betrayed me!” until tripping backwards into a hedge.
“He thought the ground was a void,” shrugs the blonder boy of the truck bed, before tossing back an Irish trash can.
It is not yet dark out.
“So I presume,” Sophia asks plainly upon reaching the entrance, “this isn’t a gay party?”
No.
The door opens. Bros everywhere. In fact, all bros. A nightmare of bros.
“What the FUCK, Benny?” shouts Alexa to Benny himself, over the window-shaking bass, once he’s clocked their arrival and squeezed through the drunk-sweat meat, acquiring tallboys of Goose Island somewhere along the way and handing one to each girl.
“I can’t hear you!” he grins back, “There’s less noise on the lower levels, c’mon!” and proceeds to part the crowd for them, making his way to a staircase that winds down a couple of floors until they meet a sort of building-wide rec-room area. Seems the landing floor was actually the top of what turns out to be one of those cascading stilted cliff-side mansions, and in the twists and turns of the hilly roads Alexa had simply not grokked that the distance that grew between houses the further up they went was not a factor of ruralness but rather wealth.
“What the FUCK, Benny—” shouts Alexa to Benny himself, again, despite the music being now much reduced, the upstairs bass still massaging the walls but a regular old blu-tooth speaker spouting bro rap over guys lounging around video games, a pool table, individual bar in the corner. Relative to the party upstairs, one could consider this the breather room, only shouting other than Alexa’s coming from the beer pong championship already quite competitive beside the windows, which would be looking out over a deck to a nice view of the city if there wasn’t a particularly heavy-weight bro currently pressing his dick onto each windowpane in turn, leaving a greasy print right in center: “—is this?”
“I told you it would be a wild party!” Benny still shit-grinning. “I don’t even think that dude’s drunk yet. He started up pretty much right after he arrived.”
“Benny, there are no girls here,” Alexa gesticulating.
“Thought you said you’d bring your girl friends.”
“My girlfriend, moron.”
“Oh, is that what we are already?”
Alexa turns to see Sophia, looking far less put off than Alexa expected, eyes narrowed at her sarcastically before taking a half-tallboy series of gulps from her can and smiling. “We’ll talk about it. Benny, nice to meet you. Does this party have any drugs more interesting than alcohol?”
“Let me take you to the kitchen!”
They head back down the stairs. Alexa leans into the moment of quiet, “So you’re into it?”
“Us, or the party?”
“Oh. Uh, I was thinking…, but it could be—”
“Yeah, let’s do it.” Sophia finishes and tosses her first empty soldier down the stairs as they land on a new floor. Us, or the party?
“Wow, you’re wild!” Benny grins, watching the can skip and clatter out of sight.
“Sophia!” Alexa with a bit of panicked edge.
“Hardly less cleanup than they’ll need after the penis-print guy,” Sophia shrugs as they enter the kitchen, where a man in a unicorn onesie is throwing whatever others hand him from the refrigerator an industrial-grade food processor with a steady stream of grapefruit Svedka, handing out the resulting purees to the people surrounding him, who are either holding their noses and drinking, egging them on, or wiping their mouths after vomiting into an empty beer pail next to the counter and getting in line to give it another go, having unfortunately sobered themselves up a little bit and wanting immediate counter-headache access to that cheap vodka.
“Want one?” Unicorn guy calls to Alexa, “I think we’ve nearly emptied the fridge.” And sure enough the double-doored fridge is so large that they can see over the shoulders of two dudes scraping around the back for the dredges of almost melting abandoned vegetables, high end serving containers of substances increasingly fuzzy and strange shades of orange, something paper-wrapped that either got freezer burned or the freezer ice got infected with foodstuff, and all the other detritus homo refrigeratus has learned to filter out of their own sight in order to keep it from equally spoiling their peace of mind.
As if to close the pitch, a jock next to him finishes off his glass of something only just greener than his face has become, and hurks in place for a moment while everyone watches in anticipation. The jock almost tosses it, then, with a mighty swallow and gripping the marble counter hard enough to break his own fingers, manages to center himself. “Three,” he rasps, and the audience cheers.
“What are you gonna do after the food runs out?” Benny asks, amazed.
Unicorn guy shrugs and points at the vomit pail. “There’s probably enough vodka in there to keep us going for a few hours.” The audience, again, cheers, soon drowned out by the food processor grinding back to life.
“Benny, drugs,” Sophia says, punching him on the arm.
“Ow! This way.”
And beyond the kitchen, beyond an elaborate dining room where a bunch of bros are trying to pile themselves into a human pyramid on top of a sturdy but concerningly groaning oak table, they enter a pot-fogged lounge where the curtains are drawn against the sunlight (still!) and the vibe has less shifted than plunged into counter-vibe. Here they are all hippies, skaters, and nerds who think they’re skaters. Except still no girls.
“Shrooms, or molly?” Head Skater clocking Sophia immediately. Sophia looks at Alexa. Alexa, for a stunned moment, thinks Sophia is looking at her for an answer. “No, we’ll stick with shrooms for now, but let me know if the molly is still available later,” Sophia says. Ah, looking at Alexa an answer, not for her answer.
Distribution. Sophia hands a twist to Alexa. Maintaining eye contact, they both eat. Sophia smiles and kisses Alexa on the cheek. “Far out,” says some doofus left of Alexa’s blindspot. Alexa chooses to chase that musk dirt taste with her own as-yet untouched tallboy.
“Let’s explore.”
Now Benny is behind them, as they wind around what is proving to be an architecture so expansive it’s becoming befuddling. After several twists and turns, they determine that the one direction to keep oriented is downward, as stair-case after stairwell after flight of stairs introduces them to yet unnumbered floors like some sort of Dantean descent into bro-hell.
“Whose party is this?” Sophia asks to a wall.
“I don’t know, I was invited by a friend of a friend,” Benny answers behind her.
“Haha, you’re wild!” Sophia says and slaps the wall as if a high-five.
“Uh, Sophia?” Alexa is meant to warn, but what does she know. Concerning her less than Sophia talking to a wall is that the wall is either lemon pink or bluegreen, and Alexa is torn between trying to figure out how to explain to Sophia that she’s probably hallucinating someone in it or figuring out how to distinguish those two colors which surely her brain had been clear and squared about before. Why in their difference was there so much sameness? Something about wavelengths, or the brain processing them. Now, she remembers perceiving them differently before, but she can’t figure out how to perceive them differently like before, and so is she hallucinating the colors or the idea that the colors should be different?
They find themselves on a dance floor. The party lights would be popping, yet it’s (still!!) light outside. The music is as thumpy as the steady heartbeat of bass the building constantly emits, but at least it’s better than that loud shit on the first floor.
Two dudes shimmy in close. “Wanna dance with us?” one manages not to slur.
“Sorry, we’re lesbians,” Alexa says.
“Awesome, I love pussy too!” says the second bro, his arm raised for a fistbump. The music, the buzz, maybe the shrooms: Alexa’s feeling connected and chill. She fistbumps him and he sort of shimmy melts in a slide around it until he’s wrapped both arms around her and bawling his eyes out. “I’ve wanted to meet a girl-bro all my life! I need somebody to talk to!”
“There there,” Sophia somehow peeling him off like a children’s Band-Aid. “You’ll get a girl-bro of your own to go womanizing with someday.”
“You promise?” he says, all wide eyes and innocent.
“I do. Now shoo.”
And he backs away smiling as if he’s just found bliss, and in fact fades off like fog before he’s in danger of colliding with any of the flailing limbs these dudes seem to think is ‘dancing,’ much to his friend’s chagrin.
“Hey, where’d he go?” his friend, wide-eyed.
“Relax,” Alexa mumbles, “It’s just the shrooms.”
“I’m not on shrooms!”
Which, Alexa has questions. But now Sophia is heading off somewhere and Benny is trying to step in, and like, “What the FUCK, Benny?”
“C’mon, let’s dance.”
“No, I have to catch Sophia.”
“She’s headed downstairs.”
“You sure?”
“Come with me.”
Now, Alexa could have sworn that lemon pink or bluegreen hallway was straight before, but now it’s become a little serpentine, which she actually appreciates because, well, it fits. And anyway it conducts Benny and her as such, like they and the colors are a channel of electricity, and suddenly they’re no longer going downstairs but outside, the lowest level the highest achievement: the gardens at the base of the mansion. Jesus, it’s bright.
Here the bros are milling, sitting in lawnchairs, and grilling.
“I like you.”
“What?”
“I like you,” Benny repeats.
Alexa is wayyy too high for this. “Benny, I brought my girlfriend here.”
“I didn’t know you meant that.”
“When have I ever not meant that?”
“I don’t know. I just sort of hoped…”
And that’s why he was invited here, she thinks to herself. This weirdo bro Purgatorio.
“You realize he likes you?” Sophia, in passenger seat, had asked on the drive up.
“You’ve not met him. He’s a long time friend.”
“He invited you to a party he was barely invited to himself. Like, it’s not his party or a friends’ party. He wants to party with you.”
“I told him I was wondering what we could do this weekend and he said he knew a thing.”
“He knows you’re a lesbian?”
“Of course!”
“But you talk about it.”
“I mean, sure, I’ve mentioned it plenty of times, but we don’t talk about it.”
“And he looks away or changes the subject?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. We don’t talk about each other’s… we don’t talk like that.”
Right now the main thing going through Alexa’s mind is a conflict between being angry at herself or being angry at Benny. She knew that Sophia was right, but she also didn’t know, or didn’t expect because she didn’t want to know, or thought that if she didn’t have to know she could expect, Benny was actually so dense, or if he was that fucking dense maybe he’d get over it, and if she just acted casual it would never be a thing, but it wouldn’t be “acting” casual because she didn’t actually know, right? and there he is messing up that fine little balance of cognitive dissonance she was quite happy with, but then again how happy could she have been, since she always had a gut-sinking feeling vis-a-vis their friendship and the way he attended to her interests and the way sometimes she had to make clear, or at least she thought it was clear, with cold shoulders and stone face, her lack of interest in any mere suggestion he would make of wanting more than their lunch-, after class- and other brief hangs, and that gut-sinking feeling was the damned fucking gut-sinking feeling that went Earth core-bound when she heard the music in the driveway and realized what sort of bullshit fucking party this dumbass invited her and her girlfriend to, damn it I want her to be my girlfriend, we have to have that conversation now and maybe so premature that it sets things off on the wrong foot, and it’s all this dense jerk’s fault, though let’s cop to a little anger roiling around with Sophia, too, for that whole thing about talking about the relationship later, to seeming to enjoy the party and not give them an excuse to walk away, worst of all to being right about Benny without even knowing him, locking down in Alexa’s mind the need to prove her wrong, if only Benny had kept to the rules, had been a normal person inviting them to a normal party, had not been literally all the things she forced herself to ignore so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings, say it again with me,
“What the FUCK, Benny!” shouts Alexa.
“I just wanted to… hang out … more. And you had this new friend you were, well, you did saying ‘seeing,’ but I don’t know, I guess I thought if I could talk to you before it got more serious…”
And the worst part is she can see in his dumbass face not just real contrition but some of that same circular thinking she’s got writhing inside her cranium, his leaking through the hole of disappointment he just blew into his own head. He probably convinced himself that hurting himself in public was better than aching in private, and, knowing what she did about his tendency for rationalization, probably told himself he is exhibiting virtue “by being honest and truthful” or some shit. Seriously, she should strangle him.
Surprisingly, there’s something more attention-grabbing going on behind Benny. As he’s blabbering, a bush that was moving strangely forms into a woman in a camouflage ghillie suit creeping towards the house’s steel struts. But Alexa can’t let mere hallucinations get in the way of this friend breakup, she really has to lock in and keep her thoughts straight.
“Stop,” she says, and he does. “You broke the rules.”
“Rules?”
“My boundaries.”
“We didn’t… you never said… Well, yeah, I know. I just had to say something, finally.”
Why is this going just as bad as she expected? Why didn’t she let herself expect it? Why did she shove aside the understanding that there was nothing gained by ignoring it?
Where is Sophia?
“I’m leaving.”
Alexa barely takes two steps towards the house when the world explodes in a shrill grinding sound and blinding light. Her hallucination, the bush woman, seems to have taken a plasma cutter to the steel struts. Benny must have shroomed a little too, because he cowers down with his hands over his ears from the surprise of sound and light.
Then again, the bros in the garden seem agitated, too? Wait…
The woman madly cackles, and she runs to the second strut. The first has been severed clean through, and is now slipping. The bass-thump of the house, by this point become background ambience, quickens, and sliding glass (dick-stained) doors part along the levels with verandas and decks filling with bros of all kinds, whose weight start pushing the severed strut forward…
“Alexa!” calls Sophia three levels above. She’s grinning and waving, still having a good time.
“Sophia! Get out! She’s—” But Alexa’s call is squelched under the shower of sparks from the mad ghillie woman now cutting through the second strut.
“Get back!” Benny pulls Alexa backward. Turns out he’s good for something, as this helps Alexa keep her eye on Sophia as the whole front half of the mansion starts tilting forward.
“See how you like that, Mr. Danielson!” the ghillie woman screams before whooping off sideways along a ridge. Alexa’s attention is still Sophia-focused despite the garden bros having gone philosophical beside her:
“Who’s Mr. Danielson?”
“What did he do to her?”
“Is this even his house?”
“Who’s house is this?”
“I don’t know, I was invited by someone already here. Who invited you?”
“You did!”
“Oh. Does anybody know whose house this is?”
And the house answers with a crack as the top split of the struts fall to the ground, throwing a few men overboard the decks, though that’s of secondary concern considering the volume of dead soldiers now raining down onto the garden.
“Run!” Bros below tumbling down the hillside. Bros above scrambling vertically up what used to be floor. Lots of dangling, not always of bits you want to see.
And Sophia, still grinning, calling out, “Alexa, stay there. I’ll come get you!”
“Are you crazy, how are you—?”
But Sophia runs into the house just as it opens up, the interiors sliding down the mountainside with bros riding on top, screaming, to Alexa and Benny’s left, right, and, caroming off an overturned supersized grill into an impressive amount of airtime, even above their heads, the two of them basically paralyzed with animal freeze response, until Sophia comes riding a door like a surfboard on the top of the avalanche and snatches them up, angling the door left or right to avoid the larger obstacles such as furniture, moving, or trees, not. After a moment she even gets a hang on which parts of the falling mansion ride smoother, the dead soldiers ideal for their slick surfaces and ability to roll ball-bearing-like underneath the door, but there’s something to be said about the powdery quality to some of the mansion’s long strips of concrete.
Annddd BLATT. It all falls into a hole at the bottom of the mountain that was supposed to be an upscale mall development until the developer disappeared on a yacht trip to Costa Rica with all his investors’ money. There are a few injuries, but mostly bros sit clinging to whatever solid mass they managed to hang onto during the descent, or are already picking through the debris looking for any alcohol that hasn’t broke open or spilled to nurse pains they don’t want to deal with until tomorrow.
The sun, blissfully, sets.
“Are you okay?” Alexa throws her arms around Sophia.
Sophia, above all, is nonplussed. “Are you okay? I’m the one that saved you, geez.”
“Ugh, I should have never invited you to that party,” Alexa finally parts, darting a poisonous glance at Benny. He shrugs and sadly smiles farewell, and starts picking his way through the debris to find a way out, alone.
“I actually thought it was super fun. It’s too bad the place fell apart, I wouldn’t have minded going back to another one.”
Alexa gawks. “Why? It was so…”
Sophia responds in mock-bro voice, “Brah. Like, I have five brothers who are, like, total brah. You should totally meet them, brah, they’d like, brah all out with you, brah.”
They start picking their way out. Much of the mansion has piled up on the far side of the hole, its struts, internal pillars, and rafters creating some lattices that look climbable.
“I guess I never will,” says Alexa glumly.
“Will what?”
“Meet your brothers.”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Well, you know, we didn’t talk about the girlfriend thing…”
Sophia shushes her. “Well with today’s intensity, you can handle them fine. Let’s make that date four.”
Alexa has suddenly realized the thumping bass is gone. With neither that nor the sun, the twilit sky has gotten quite light and breezy.
“So is that our conversation?”
“Sure, works for me.”
“Wow. I didn’t expect us to go so deep on just our third date,” [title].
This post is a response to 2X SUBSTACK COMMUNITIES AT ONCE:
The Soaring Twenties Social Club’s end-of-year Symposium is always “Fiction.”
The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme.
If you are a writer, you should consider joining us.
Meanwhile, the FilmStack Monthly Challenge #9 was handed off to Jon Stahl, who prompted us:
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write something funny. Something that makes someone laugh.
Normally I put the prompt at the top, but since nothing kills laughter more than telling someone you’re trying to be funny, I figure if I failed above, then the fact that I was trying to be funny will be the real joke. But no seriously, Jon went on to say:
Note the word “someone” – It’s not enough to make yourself laugh. You can’t have Siri or ChatGPT tell you how funny your joke was. You have to attempt to make another human person laugh.
Verified laughter is preferable – So if someone replies “LOL,” you should check with them to confirm that they did, in fact, laugh out loud. This will inevitably lead to a very awkward conversation that could end up being funnier than the text itself.
So, if you laughed without knowing you’re the target of a challenge and you could verify that for me, clicky-poo:
However, Jon, if you’re reading, I did nab this receipt on December 3rd, 2025 already:
But anyway it didn’t solve the STSC Challenge, because those jokes had to be fiction. Hey-ooh!
To experience my previous FilmStack Challenges:
To read my previous STSC Symposium submissions:
Writing is brain fuel intensive, send me coffee money:
I laughed.