Courtney Young

Lay Your Head Down

His lover is fictitious but he has no regrets. She has no name, so we’ll call her Bluff. Bluff is no more than an image locked in a 3 x 5 popup that settled into the top right-hand corner of his computer thirty minutes before 5:00. At the beginning, she was nothing more than a stain, a smudge, blotting the report that had clouded his desktop for the past half hour. She gazed at him like the Mona Lisa, as if she had a secret. He clicked off.

The next day, she appeared an hour before five and the next day and the next and the next, a truncated body of primary-color pixels, with the words FOR YOU floating above the hint of her bosom.

Bluff, more than a stain, a specter, haunts the cubicle in which he sits. She campaigns relentlessly, her skin of varying shades of corn, her hair flooding over her shoulders, black and straight but for tiny wisps of curls that cup her chin, her smile slight and her eyes firm.
By the nineteenth day, he can’t take it any more and softly clicks the popup to see Bluff unfold, full-bodied as Merlot.

The gamine flows across the computer screen in lush grape-like tones less the Mona Lisa and more Gauguin, richer in form, erotic, elicit. For the next month, he courts Bluff, breaking dates with the mousy girl in HR and the feline girl in legal. Bluff never talks back, never laughs at him, smiling in perpetuity with no demands other than that he return, which he does.

He begins to change his dress, favoring more formal over more casual. He joins a gym, his belly rather quickly collapsing into ridges of muscle. His arms grow larger, and he stops shaving the hair off his chest. He stops smoking and only drinks on special occasions.

When his boss begins to suspect their relationship, he takes Bluff home. It’s the right time, anyway. There she goes to live with him, and live they do, separated only by a screen. Before he goes to bed each night, he calls her, enlisting her to his dreams.

Originally from Lafayette, Louisiana, Courtney Young is now a certified New Yorker. She received her B.A. in English and Management from Spelman College in Atlanta, and her M.A. from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She recently completed a collection of essays entitled Big Black Dogs, and is working on her first collection of short stories.