Unlawful Entry
Playboy Sweden|May 2018

Trespassing, larceny and crime-scene sex — romance is alive and thriving

Chuck Palahniuk
Unlawful Entry

Back in the world you still know… back in Before Times, here’s how Walter Baines had always dreamed of doing it.

On Shasta’s 25th birthday he’d suggest taking a bus, the bus going uphill, the one that most days carries her mom and the other house cleaners to work. He’d wear his lucky Lamborghini scarf even if it’s so old it’s turning back into dirty wool.

The two of them would catch the last bus of the night, following the route past that house. Not the house Mrs Shasta cleans but the one with Scarlett O’Hara columns lining the front porch and the rooflines and lightning rods and red-brick chimneys rising above the ancestral oak trees. It’s the house Shasta has always gawked at the way a dog eyeballs a squirrel, like that pile of bricks and ivy is her pornography. One stop past the house in question Walter would step off the bus and walk back to where the windows would be dark. When she pulled away, he’d get her, tight, around one wrist and tug, gently, saying, “It’s a surprise,” leading her past a statue that creeps him out.

It’s a monkey made out of that metal where if you touched it on a cold day you’d be touching it forever, and anyone who touched you would stick, as would people who touched them until everyone in the world would be trapped together like ice-nine in Vonnegut. The little statue brings to mind a little monkey dressed as a clown, maybe to ride a horse only with his face painted white. Like in Japan.

Walter would cross the damp grass, beyond the Kabuki-faced monkey-clown statuette, past the little yellow sign for the alarm company.

To mark the occasion, Walter would pull out his lucky pipe and tamp the bowl full of Hindu Kush. Ever the gentleman, he’d offer Shasta the first hit.

This story is from the May 2018 edition of Playboy Sweden.

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This story is from the May 2018 edition of Playboy Sweden.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.