For this special online issue, we asked for your dirtiest work: scandalous rivalries, dirty jobs, meditations on the muck and mire of everyday life, plain old sediment, and musings on humanity’s more inconvenient bodily functions.

A themed online issue tailored for the sophisticated consumer of online smut and similar, interested in elevating their online browsing habits to the highest level.

Are peanuts good for you

Is it good to eat peanuts everyday

What is the downside of too much peanuts

It was Victor, the married man I was dating, who showed the Pornhub video to me. The two-minute clip showed a girl splayed out on the end of a white-sheeted bed wearing a black thong with frilly white lace, her legs spread and draped at the knees over the wooden footboard. The video began with the girl touching herself over the top of her underwear, softly rubbing her covered vulva. “I can tell by the fingers,” Victor said. I could tell by the fingers, too. Even though her face was never visible, the girl in the video was unquestionably me.

I signed up for the trial because it paid well. I saw it online, the ad. Participants needed for a biomedical research study. Details were sparse, even after my phone call with them. Even after my initial interview, where I kept my expression obediently neutral as they had me take off my shoes and itchy jumper so they could weigh me, and I lied about my smoking habits.

She unrolls me on the sheet

in the dim light of the hallway, a bed

sheet prone to pulling and without six legs,

a little lonely. Drips of protest stain the sides of

the mattress, as in

For my 27^th birthday, the only present I want is to fight Gerard Butler, possibly to the death. Romantic music will play in the background, a playlist made special for this occasion, because he must be the reason I am unlucky in love. He will be confused the whole time.

By the time you get to the city you won’t have a penny to your name. Also someone’s gonna steal your duffel bag out of the bus station when you’re in the bathroom. It’s gonna be a bummer. Real desperate times. You’ll wander off through the city destitute, past all the beautiful people with their pennies. You’ll turn away from them, embarrassed. The crowds will thin and disappear and, late that night, you’ll come to a neighborhood with no one in it at all. An empty city.

I could have drowned this couple in the kidney bean-shaped swimming pool.

Except I’m not the killing type, I have a sensitive stomach, always have, it’s a thing that’s plagued me my whole life. I wait for the Ramseys to finish their hunt and poke of the garish entertaining room that doubles as a pool room in the warmer months—but let’s not kid, it’s the same thing, the warmer months in LA are every month, it’s no colder than sixty-five degrees in January, not like where I’m from. I give them the appropriate amount of time while I stare through the sliding glass doors, and I picture her: a woman not unlike Norma Desmond floating face down, arms like goalposts, her black and gold housecoat billowing in the crystalline blue water, her headwrap half-undone, a tendril tugging her towards the deep end.

Sunny, mid-afternoon Friday. Before all our fathers came home with belts, before pissing into manhole vents for kicks, before ghosts in the graveyard, our neighbor, Jerry, at whose wall we’d thrown and watched shatter bricks, GI Joes, and rotten walnut rinds, finally moved out. He piled all of his trash on the street and left rapture fast. An hour or two at most. I’ve never packed up and split that fast in my life.