Bestiality can make you feel weird. First, the animal fur does not make sense with the human "fur," if that's what you want to call it.

I am watching a dog fuck a girl from behind on TV. The girl is Swedish — pretty enough — and I wonder what went wrong, and how she ended up in a barn with her dress above her waist.

The scariest thing about the film is that you can begin to forget. Soon all the holes seem the same, all the penises seem like they're just doing their job. Bestiality brings out the beast. It can get you scared just looking at your lover on the verge, his lips and face almost angry, almost suffering. He can look like an ape, with his chest puffed up big. He could look like a dog if a dog could smile.

I got bit by two dogs once. They were thick, short rottweilers and they left a scar on my back that keeps piling up new skin like sheets at the end of a lover's bed.

My boyfriend, at the time, would not take me to the hospital. He lay in our bed, drunk and sad.

"I can't," he said, "I have work early tomorrow."

There I was with a bleeding bruise after midnight. It hurt a little so I pretended to cry. I walked around the house after he fell asleep, smoking cigarettes and trying to find a nice, comfortable space.

Each room felt too big, but in the closets I started to feel stifled. Nothing fit inside me like him.

When the animals come like humans come on the TV screen it makes me gag. When real men come on the TV screen it also makes me gag.

I watch the women push the faces of the dogs into their crotches and wonder what the dogs are thinking. Is that what women mean when they call men dogs: That it doesn't matter what pussy their face is stuck into?

My mother says, "This is why no one loves you."

She says, "If you think like that, men will be scared away."

I ask her, while she is lying in bed with my father, if my dad has ever cheated on her.

"Daddy," she laughs, "have you ever cheated on me?"

"No," my father, my daddy, says.

I have decided to like little boys. To take them under my wing like stray pups. To hold them in my arms like a mother hen.

Little boys are so new you can bite them, the skin on their cheeks like fresh dough.

The boys on the high school football team I imagine running past the goal line and onto the blanket I have laid out for us on the grass. I will take them one at a time, making them undress, examining them, before they are able to enter me.

I wish I could feel bad for them and let them live out their nature. The men — I mean — the dogs. There they are again, scratching at the door. I feed them like my mother does. Then I let them in.