The First Time I Had Sex, Aliens Was on TV by Timothy C Goodwin

You want a great horror movie? Alien. You want a great war movie? Aliens. I say this to my date to sound normal: it’s normal to have the TV on in a hotel room—to comment on the art, to sniff the complimentary soaps—even if you’ve booked this room for Prom Night, and I have to show how little I’m concerned about what we’re going to be doing here. Earlier, at the front desk, I make up a story about needing the room for the very adult issue of traveling for work to a hotel attendant who doesn’t care. Who knows. It’s normal for him, I’m sure, to have high schoolers getting rooms during prom season, posturing as adults but unable to avoid looking like kids going through an infinite stumble of Firsts: dealing with jobs instead of chores, parties with alcohol, a future not presented as a class schedule, the discovery that your parents are made of mistakes too. Sex. And you can’t look like you’re behind everyone else, you can’t look like a junior—or worse—a sophomore. But when she takes my shaking hand in hers to lead me towards the bed, I correct to a chair by the TV to say, Oh hey, wait, this is my favorite part.

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TIMOTHY C GOODWIN — Timothy has work in HAD, Trash Cat, Twin Pies, Dishsoap Quarterly (Best Small Fictions 2025), and elsewhere. timothycgoodwin.com

Art by LAURIE MARSHALL — Laurie is an award-winning writer and collage artist in Northwest Arkansas. Her stories have been longlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, selected for Best Small Fictions 2022 and awarded the 2021 Lascaux Review Prize in Fiction. Her art has been featured in Fictive Dream, Rejection Letters, Mayday Magazine, among others. She is currently in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. Find examples of her work at www.SeeLaurieWrite.com.