Nowadays, if you wanted a man to notice there was pussy right in front of his face, you had to broadcast it to a screen. Gone were the days when you could put it on full display IRL. Or, in Effie’s case, on full display behind a window. Which was where she had spent the last few years after the lockdowns of COVID had ended. And though she had been told by all the girls who worked “the scene” that it couldn’t have been a worse time to get into the tangible business, she didn’t want to listen. Something in her was just too oddly determined to engage in a more “old school” form of sex work. Almost as if, to her, it was the more honest way to do it. And that to do otherwise would be an insult to the profession. The art. Needless to say, no one else in her age bracket felt the same, were all perfectly content to yuk it up on OnlyFans the easy way.

Granted, Effie knew that OnlyFans was its own kind of grind, of hustle—the kind she didn’t possess at all. Besides, she was much more at ease with the tactility of in-person encounters, which somehow made the work feel more meaningful, genuine and honest to her. Almost as if the incorporation of a screen into the mix took away something fundamental to what people, er, came to sex workers for in the first place. That’s when one of her friends would chime in with a quip like, “Yeah, well, the ‘screen’ takes away the possibility of STDs.” Which, yes, Effie knew was a major plus. Yet, even so, she couldn’t help wanting it this way. This “analog” way, for lack of a better term. And she got it in spades when she moved to Amsterdam after marrying a Dutch man named Hendrik. The two weren’t really in love (not romantically anyway), but had sustained a close but “from-a-distance” friendship after Hendrik had been an exchange student at her high school in the spring semester of junior year.

As Effie was the only one in her school who treated him like a real person instead of an anomaly, she began to gain Hendrik’s trust and favor, and even visited him rather regularly in the years after he returned to Amsterdam. When she asked why he bothered to leave his far more interesting city of residence to come to their backwater town in Washington, Hendrik shrugged and said, “I wanted to experience a true slice of American life.” And that he did. For it didn’t get more “Americana-loving” than Darby. A town where the “most exciting” thing a teenager could do was try to scale the water tower. The host family that took Hendrik in was undeniably the most “cosmopolitan” in town. In the sense that they used to live in Seattle before moving to Darby (that is, back to Darby). In fact, until they organized it, the local high school hadn’t even considered that an exchange program was an “option.” Probably because it never occurred to them that anyone would ever voluntarily spend any protracted period of time in Darby if they didn’t have to/weren’t originally from there. Yes, Darby was just such a town. The type of place where only those who were born there would ever deign to stay there.

Effie was not one of those people. In fact, from an early age, she was determined not to be one of them. And from what she could tell early on, as she “grew into” her looks, was that sex work would be the quickest way to gain financial independence, ergo a ticket to fleeing permanently. She first discovered as much when she started driving about an hour out of town to a strip club that had a reputation for looking the other way about hiring girls who were blatantly underage so long as they had a decent fake ID (it made her feel kind of like Laura Palmer working at One Eyed Jacks). The manager of the place, Irv, was of some unclear Eastern European descent. And, in keeping with the stereotype of such men, he had a perennial five o’clock shadow, a paunch and, despite going bald, was sure to continue showcasing his “virility” by allowing long tufts of mostly gray hair to grow from the sides of his head. In short, he was a quintessential sleazeball. But a sleazeball who gave Effie her first foray into the world of sex work. And it was an education she couldn’t have gotten anywhere else, she imagined. For only at that young age could she fully understand that what men really wanted was to feel young themselves. To be made to feel that way by a woman who was actually young…or could at least “present” as such. The way that Effie continued to when she finally moved to Amsterdam after getting Hendrik to marry her.

For it was only though marriage to a Dutch person that she could gain the necessary citizenship to become a legally-working “window girl” in the De Wallen district. Something that had been a fantasy of hers ever since she started stripping. And yes, part of the reason she found out about the illustrious red-light district in the first place was from being curious about Hendrik’s city. And the first thing that tends to come up when doing any research about Amsterdam is this particular “aspect” of it. Still a novelty to so many of the travelers that…blow through.

Except that, after COVID, Effie had to admit something had fundamentally changed with regard to the erstwhile excitement about the area. It wasn’t just that businesses in general continued to suffer even after they were allowed to open again, but also the fact that the entire human psyche had ostensibly been altered. No one seemed to know how to even be tactile anymore, let alone express that kind of desire for touching and being touched. Not when everything had been so firmly wrapped up in “the screen” for a period of roughly two years. It was as if it had caused a complete structural shift within the human mind. One that meant a person could no longer even “receive” what was right in front of their very eyes in the real world. It had to be processed solely through a screen, even if it was something meant to be titillating and, thus, better enjoyed in the real world.

Effie couldn’t stop noticing this palpable alteration in humans. How they were constantly looking not at the windows with the red lights (and, more importantly, the undressed women) in them, but rather, continuing to stare at their screens as they walked past. Sometimes even pausing and standing right in front of those windows with their back turned to them as they scrolled or swiped through their accursed phones. Because the men and women alike who were trolling for sex wanted to, in essence, “prescreen” and “prearrange” it through a phone rather than taking the kind of time to more literally “shop around.”

Being forced to witness this day in, day out in those post-Covid years began to wear on Effie to the point where it was becoming impossible to contain her rage. Indeed, it was practically begging to burst forth from the very window she stood behind, striking her best poses and even making “subtle” “sexy” facial expressions designed to entice as much as her body was supposed to. And, at first, the apparent lack of interest in said body made her feel as if the problem was her. Had she gotten too “old,” therefore too “ugly” to be perceived as “arousing” anymore? But no, by and large, none of the “window girls” were getting much attention. Save for the few that had cultivated long-standing “on the hook” relationships with mostly much older men who probably couldn’t work any of the sex- or dating-related apps to save their erections. Effie hadn’t been able to do that because she had only just started working in De Wallen right before Covid obliterated her chances of nurturing such connections.

So now, here she was, ever closer to fully losing it and letting that rage that kept threatening to bubble to the surface do so in a way that was far more literal than metaphorical. Night after night, seeing the same indifference to her earthly, right-in-front-of-their-faces flesh was pushing her to the brink until, finally, she tipped right over it. It was the sight of a thirty-something tech bro type who had the gall to post up right in front of her window and not only block her visibility from any passersby, but also make visible to her what he was looking at on his phone. And that was a lot of scantily-clad women he might be able to meet in the area.

The two-pronged affront was too much for her to withstand and so she broke through the single-pane glass by kicking through it with her stiletto heel, shattering it so that shards hit both her and the tech bro, who probably wouldn’t have noticed anything at all were it not for the fact that blood was dripping from his head and onto his Carhartt jacket. He managed to look up from his screen and seethe, “What the fuck is wrong with you? Fuckin’ whore!”

That’s when her anger and resentment was activated to its fullest as she stepped out of the box, so to speak, picked up one of the shards and sliced him across the face with it. “Can you feel that, you fuckin’ whore? Can you feel anything at all? Do you even still have a fucking part down there?!” She then tossed the shard on the ground, grabbed the stunned tech bro by the back of his head and shoved his face into her crotch before she started running through the streets screaming at the top of her lungs like a banshee. Except, instead of those shrieks being intended to warn of the death of a family member (as was the case in Irish folklore), it was Effie’s attempt at warning everyone still interested in tactile and tangible sex that it was dying before their very eyes. But they were eyes that could not see past the tits and ass that were so readily available for consumption on their screen.