The following is an excerpt from Sam Cohen’s novel SARAHLAND forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing in March 2021.

Themes in this story include: surrealism, erotic moments with girls with cat heads, sex with an ex-bully with a penis

Here you go, driving down the highway, short shorts riding up, thick thighs spread and sweaty on the leather of the driver’s seat. It’s the desert but not the gorgeous rocky kind. Instead it’s the all-tan kind, barren except for some dinky brush. You’re covered in a layer of grease from when you force-opened your tin of lip balm and, melted to liquid, it splashed all over you.

Now you feel like a plump and juicy bird, like your skin might bubble up crisp. Your AC broke, and you’re pouring water all over yourself every two minutes. Your lipstick is bubblegum pink and you’re wearing sunglasses. Your CD keeps skipping and you can’t get a signal out here in the desert, radio or cell. You’re running away, untethered, a girl and her car and a thousand dollars you’ve saved from tips. You want to start over you think and why not do it this way. Occasionally, you pass signs for fireworks, guns, porn, and then hours of emptiness, a single cactus, a bunch of sand.

You see a sign that says DREAM PALACE. The sign is connected to an enormous building, a building that is like a superstore or a mini-mall covered in silver tinsel fringe.

You love palaces, and dreams.

You walk and walk around the building but you don’t see a door. It looks like the entire building’s been gift-wrapped, and so maybe if there is a door it’s covered up. You’re convinced the building’s shininess is reflecting the sun back at you so you’re getting it double-strength and also your thighs are rubbing together and chafing and right when it feels like they might actually bleed and you can’t take it anymore you see a place where the wall ripples into what looks like steps, leading to two inflated bubbles nestled against one another.

You take a swig of water and then climb, pleased to see finger notches in each of the ripples, making you feel safe, like this is the right way to do things. When you get to the top, the bubbles are touching but, instinctually, you hurl your head against the crack between them. The bubbles do not open for you. You try again. On the second head-hurl, you’re sucked between the bubbles by some kind of slurpy force and thank god for your lip balm spill plus all the sweat because once you break through, you slide right in. Only now you’re stuck. You’re in a tight cavity just a bit larger than your body with red walls that look layered and tissuey and alive.

You feel around you, and the walls are soft with little bumpy protrusions. You realize you’ve done it: you’ve made it back inside the womb. You feel both comforted and turned on even though you don’t know how you’ll ever get out. You want to be naked in the womb so you work to get your shorts off and then push your crotch against a bumpy protrusion which, you’re surprised to find, responds as you push against it, kind of swaying against and into you. You think of the stuff that lives at the bottom of the sea, the stuff that might be agentive or might just be landscape. Everything kind of sways and pulsates around you, and you’re swaying and pulsating, too.

Illustration by Lauralee Benjamin

Time stops. It might be minutes or days that you’re just suspended, pulsing. One of the algal protrusions extends and lengthens, undulating toward you until it nabs you in the belly button. You have a deep innie and it’s a little jarring as the protrusion burrows and then roots, but also it feels good to be connected to the swaying pulsating space around you, to look down and see your skin turn into something that looks like a red seaplant or mammalian tissue. It feels good to be connected completely to this pulsing world. All thinking has ceased but you sometimes see images: a tutu-ed alligator, a swirling galaxy, a rocking horse with your mom’s face.

When the womb opens, you’re sure you have become something else. Whatever is now you is pushed along down a membranous pink slide, still tight and pulsing. The algal finger you’re connected to comes with you, a thick eel now, which you wrap your limbs around.

You and your eel slide into a chamber wheee and in the chamber are two nestled girls with thick thighs and cat heads. They’re fetal and head to foot. This chamber is made of plush red-velvet-sofa material, ruched and gathered with hunks of rose quartz, cushion all the way around. When you slide in, the girls unnestle and immediately home in on your navel. They lick their lips and lunge forward. One digs with both sets of claws as the other kind of butts her head into where eel meets belly and sucks. It hurts, but it feels so precise and hungry that it’s like it’s what’s supposed to happen and you surrender to it.

Anyway you know how birth works — you can’t keep your eel forever even if you might wish to. “You will stay in the Sucking Chamber three days,” one cat girl whispers in a German accent once you are loose. You look down and see a green-black iridescent hole at your center. The other cat girl is still licking it clean, gathering the last loose bits of iridescence with her rough tongue. She butts her head against you, rubbing it along the length of your body. She purrs. Everyone purrs, including you. The girls keep licking you, prodding everywhere with what you understand now are paw pads. They push and sometimes claw you, drawing blood. You grab at their bellies when you’re in pain from the claws and they push sweetly at yours.

The girls have human mouths and several rows of human tits shaped like balloons and little cones and droopy tubes. You suck all of them. Some release something like a smoothie that tastes of banana and salt. Others contain something like a lollipop liqueur that sends your mind floating on a pink sea. Others are filled with something like seawater. You think I am being primordial and then you don’t think at all, you are just sucking at the sea-smoothie and feeling blurred. At the end of what you guess is three days, the girls bathe you completely with their cat tongues and push you on your way.

WHOOSH you slide and slide straight into a chamber that is a room and in the room you can only crawl on the scuffed wood floor. You are surrounded by flat leather slippers, neat ankles, billowing coral skirts. You hear high-pitched laughter and tinkly clicks of glasses above. You want a glass but you can’t stand, you realize. You plop down fetal and suck your thumb. Doing so, you collide with an ankle. The owner of the ankle bends and says “googoogoo” and “coochie coo” and tickles you. A woman with a severe bob bends then and scoops you. “What are you doing down here?” she shouts. “This is not where you’re supposed to be.” She tosses you over her arm and spanks you before carrying you to a dark pulsing opening that swallows you.

You’re pushed along in a controlled, muscle-y, intestinal-feeling way with putrid liquid sloshing around you until you’re crawling down industrial carpet, slowly growing as you crawl and then walk. The hallway smells like mildew. You walk into a room with dingy once-white kindergarten tile and computer parts everywhere. A tall, long-haired butch turns around. “Hey slut,” she says. You’re immediately turned on. What’s weird, you realize, is this is the class bully from your elementary school, grown up. She grabs you by both straps of your sports bra and wraps her fingers around your throat as she jams her other hand down your shorts. You’re super happy about this turn of events.

She shoves her fingers in you and as she fucks you, she keeps holding you around the throat. When she drops her pants you’re confused by her cock because you feel sure she didn’t have one as a kid when she peed on you at recess. “Where’d you get it?” you whisper. “That kid in our class who died left it to me in his will,” she explains. “He was a feminist, it turned out.” She flips you over then, into a crouching position on the desk covered with wires and old computer parts. “Why?” she says, “You want one?” and then she laughs and laughs. She uses the wires to secure your hands and then fucks you. It seems like days that she fucks you and also too soon when she pulls out and demands, “Crawl.” You crawl back down the mildewy industrial carpet hallway while the elementary school bully hits you with a riding crop and cackles, and then at the end, drops you down a sterile-seeming hole, a laundry chute.

You fall and fall down the chute like you’re falling in space and it’s dark and a little scary but stardust swirls in the pitch black around you and two giant slugs in space suits grab you under your arms and you swirl slow, too. Somehow you feel relaxed.

You’re set gently on an operating table and what look like cartoon aliens in surgeon masks unzip your belly (which is now a kind of semi-translucent jelly material) and remove a similarly semi-translucent jelly goat, a burgundy leather pump, and a thrashing iridescent fish with smooching red cartoon lips. You’re placed on a stretcher and wheeled through total darkness. The wheeling’s fast and it makes you nervous and you’re going up up up until eventually you’re in a white airy room, a room that is breathing. There’s a high, vaulted ceiling and wood beams and plush pastel objects everywhere — throws and poufs and pillows, lots of knitted things. It smells like lemon balm, sage.

Your ex is on the bed under patched and patterned blankets. “Hi,” you say. “Hi,” they say. You crawl under the blankets. You’re both wearing white cotton gowns like it’s the hospital or you’re babies or in Peter Pan. As the room breathes around you, you start breathing in sync with it and therefore with each other. You feel like twins in an incubator and you think, my ex is so beautiful and then after hours or days they just look neutral, like any other person. “I have to go now,” you say and you notice for the first time that one of the knit things around you is a pair of touching knit bubbles against the wall. You walk over to it, push your body easily inside its knitted chamber, grab onto some handles, and whoosh down a metal slide, straight to your car. You get in and know exactly where you want to go.

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