Sparks Alive Through Severed Phonelines by Evan Noren

"The phone sex only starts to get interesting after the chainsaw comes into play." | Micro #3 → Love & Sex

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, June’s Micro of the Month theme was Love & Sex because June is stupidly hot (unless you’re in New Zealand and Australia…or I guess the North Pole…anyway). And well, boy did y’all deliver. Evan’s micro below rose to the top of our heated (pun very much intended) discussions because of just how wonderfully wild it was. By now, you might have picked up that we here at Strange Pilgrims love the outrageous and…uh…strange….Alright, get on with reading this fantastic piece and don’t miss out on the new theme announcement for July on Tuesday!

The phone sex only starts to get interesting after the chainsaw comes into play. Months of long distance burns quick through the vanilla until all that’s left is the fun. It’s the last thing that Demi wants to wrap his hands around, but his boyfriend Arman whines about it, “want to hear the purr, honey. Taste the exhaust through the receiver. You wear it like perfume, y’know? When I’m there with you, we’ll hookup behind the sawmill, and I’ll lick the dust off your throat.”

So, fuck it.

In his moment of rest after jumping across continents, Arman sheds his flight attendant’s uniform and rests in the mess. He tangles the hotel’s landline between his fingers and presses the plastic to his ear until the cartilage is flat and flush. “I want the blades.”

Demi kneels in his bed, the phone laying before him adrift in a sea of white sheets. He holds tight despite sweat-slicked palms and hovers the whirring belt above the microphone. Veins throb as the two-stroke engine hums. He can’t hear his love from so far away, but he must be close. The blades are singing to him.

When his grip slips the choir crescendos as they cleave through glass and black plastic.

They don’t even get to say goodbye, goodnight.

Contributor’s Note

There’s a certain romanticism to a desire left unsatisfied. It keeps us hungry. Demi and Arman are starved, and desperate to circumvent the barriers between them however they can. They each, in a way, em

body these specific sexual tropes and the elements that draw them together and keep them apart are derived from the professions that define them—the lumberjack and the flight attendant. That’s the kind of dysfunction that I find interesting, the kind that makes my mind spiral, and it works well for a micro. The form allows you to erect new barriers, and it invites the reader to linger in the lust alongside your characters.

From there, Arman brings the distance, and Demi the toys. Together, they make the phrase “fuck me with a chainsaw” into a nice fantasy.

Evan Noren (He/They) is a queer father and librarian that writes weird and dark fiction. His writing has appeared in various magazines and horror anthologies such as Dead Fox Publishing's "Twisted Trysts", and is slated to appear in Baffling Magazine and Dread House Publishing's “Poisoned Folk Tales” anthology. You can follow him on Threads to stay up to date on his work—@evannorensense—or you can watch his latest writings appear in your fogged bathroom mirror.