After taking a blue raspberry edible and watching a cult classic film from 1973, Jinx finally begins to remember her past lives. It doesn’t hit her like a train, or a truck, or a zeppelin, or any form of transportation. Instead, the memory comes soft—like a feather brushed against the palm.

The first thing she remembers: in nearly all her past lives, she was a woman. She wonders if this lineage is to blame for her acne-scarred cheeks and her anxiety, for how every passing acquaintance has some secret to share with her. She wonders if it is for this reason she so easily reaches orgasm—so many lifetimes of practice in bodies that feel like this.

As her toes tingle in the second hour of her Thursday night high, she rubs her clit through the thin cotton of her underwear. Two fingers press down. She closes her eyes against the light running through the window on the opposite wall. Her past selves turn her on.

Or maybe it is remembering itself that makes her horny. Nostalgia slips through her skin like a lover’s breath in her ear. It toasts the tips of her ears, makes her conscious of the inside of her mouth, soft and wet as a peach. How once, long ago, she slept with her mouth open under the stars, so all the desert might wander in. In that life, a medicine man told her that sleeping thusly she’d receive life changing news.

In that life, she was born bored. Ached for the winning lottery ticket, an affair, a fall from a wild horse. She imagined her mouth a cosmic cup, waiting to be filled.

The medicine man’s prophecy turned out to be true; that night a scorpion wandered in. When her muscles involuntarily spasmed with the movement of its legs kneading her skin, the scorpion dug its tail into the pink of her inner cheek. She woke screaming. She begged her handsome sister-in-law, sleeping next to her on the sand, to suck the venom out.

But now, in this life, with her tongue cotton-dry, a nagging desire for white cheddar cheese-its and her underwear moistening under her hand, her memory fails her. She cannot recall what happened after. Maybe, she thinks, she isn’t ready to receive this ending. Tonight, she isn’t ready to receive anything but her own quick pleasure, then a night of dreamless sleep.

Who she was or why she was so ready to be filled with poison remains a mystery. Only the useless details remain, like how Virgo was high in the sky that night, the curves of the sandhills against her back, and the peeling layers of her sister-in-law’s chapped lips against her face, sucking. So hot from the venom. So hot from the desert air.

She brings herself to climax. The high begins to fade. Outside her window, illegal Fourth of July fireworks flash red and white and red. In this life, she doesn’t wait for messages. Turns the fan higher to cool herself down. Shuts the blinds tight. Locks her jaw closed. Cocoons in the darkness.

Tori Rego is a queer writer from Charleston, South Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago. Her work can be found in The New River, La Piccioletta Barca, Red Noise Collective, and elsewhere.