Editor’s Note (PLEASE READ):

We received a submission from someone who we believed to be Matthew Davis, but learned shortly after publication that it was not. We were tricked, and we’re very sorry that we were stupid enough to fall for it. Whoever submitted used an email address which we assumed to be from his personal site, but after more research, we discovered that the submission came from an email address designed to delete itself after sending.

One of our editors spoke on Discord voice call to who we all assumed to be Matthew, but it turns out that this was whoever had tricked us. We would like to sincerely apologize to all of our readers, and to Matthew. 

Going forward, we will do our best to vet our submissions more carefully. Embarrassingly, this already happened once before with the Sebastian Corvette story we published in Issue One, though he wanted us to keep it up, so we did.

We would take this story down, but we were asked by Matthew to instead do several things: First, we will note again that this is not Matthew’s story, but per Matthew, a “vulgar Matthew Davis pastiche.” He would also like us to note that his book, Let Me Try Again, features no curse words at all.

We have also been asked to promote Matthew’s book. We had already advertised him in the writer’s bio, but he asked us to place it more prominently at the top, so here you go: https://www.amazon.com/Let-Me-Try-Again-Novel/dp/1648210740


We would once again like to apologize to Matthew Davis and extend our thanks for having the grace to let the piece stay up.

I was feeling so sorry for myself because of the way that I felt. Awful. Horrible. The stark and unyielding sadness that caused you to be sad about how sad you were. I actually felt so bad that I felt so bad about feeling so bad that I felt terrible. And that was just the start of it.

By the time I had downloaded a bunch of porno (Amateur, Lesbian, Double-Penetration) I had already downloaded six different dating apps and a few different apps designed to tell me what was correct to say, in a political sense. I had been worrying for a while what the difference was between what could be said (everything) to what should be said. That was, at least, my theory, and it was what Co-Star told me every morning. When I drank the wine that one of the apps recommended me to pair with the steak I sizzled up on my pan— using butter to emulsify with the fat— I discovered, no, found, no, looked, no, discovered that emulsifying myself would have been better, considering the circumstances. I had to let it be known, so I contacted everyone I knew and showed them pictures of the residue left in the pan, and showing them what remained of my meal on the plate. Not much. Just bits. Little charred bits. Bits, basically, nothing more. Tiny. Little. Just bits.

I jumped up and headed on to the next place on the road, the place where I planned on killing myself, a bed and breakfast where a rhinoceros was directly outside of the window watching you at all times, a tempting thing for someone like me, someone suffering and masturbating and swiping on dating apps despite having no photographs of myself on my profile (only memes, pictures of grass, quotes from Tristan Tate.) I wanted to try to fuck the rhinoceros. No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to. But I thought about fucking the rhinoceros, and I was scrolling on AirBNB and thought about fucking the rhinoceros while masturbating to the pornography I had downloaded, so I was close to cumming while looking at these photos of the rhinoceros. What a big horn it had. Enormous. Gigantic. Fascinating. When I looked at six apps, one after the other, I was still close to cumming, looking at these apps, and I felt terrible. I felt awful. I felt bad.

I felt the way that some people might feel about good things that other people did about bad things. Bad things were one thing to me and good things were another— that is to say, there were value judgments to be made that I couldn’t make. And pornography was one of those things. Alexis Texas was long gone, but there were others. Abella Danger, Abella Anderson. Riley Reid, Little Caprice, Sasha Gray. James Deen. I’m not gay, but he’s iconic. Infamous. Innocent. Ah, Kim K, Paris, Chyna— the tapes which should never have been released. Mia Khalifa. India. Asa Akira. April O’Neil. Midori. Maxi Mounds. Stoya— I wasn’t ever on Tumblr, but I knew Stoya intimately. Goth Charlotte. Bailey J— I’m not afraid to say it. August Ames. How many more would die to suicide? Death by their own hand? Me? Perhaps. I planned on it, so perhaps. Maybe.

I arrived at the bed and breakfast in my 2016 Honda Accord, watching a compilation of Cumshots from different pornographies with many different pornographic actresses. Serenity Cox, Sunny Leone, Sweetie Fox. Michelle Ferrari. Mya Diamond. Angelica Bella. Wiska. LaSirena69. The Red Fox, Nina Hartley, Nicki Hunter, Jenna Haze. Capri Anderson, Nicole Aniston. Tori Black, and Belladonna, and Ginger Barks. And Candy Barr. Amber Lynn. Ts Madison— ignore that. Brittni De La Mora. Alexis Fire. Noname Jane. Morgpie.

Morgpie, who took Twitch by storm. I knew all about Twitch. I actually spent a bit of time pogchamping in Hasan’s chat back in the day, but for every minute of my time doing that I spent another minute doing other things (masturbating to Cumshots, Lesbian, Double Penetration.) I had a girlfriend as well.

I opened the door, still rock hard and close, and greeted the old man at the door with nothing short of a woody. Hard. Rock-hard. Close to orgasm. I thought about Bobbi Starr, Gina Rodriguez, Kirsten Price— and yes, I even thought about Siouxsie Q. But then I thought about Tatum Reed, Jessie St. James, Andrea True. Everything came so close that I started to see stars, which for a moment stopped me from feeling bad, and when I didn’t feel bad that managed to feel bad because I didn’t feel bad and then I came— I came on the old man, because I had at some point pulled down my pants, as if my body were an automatic process and not my own.

The old man did not in any way resemble the porn stars I had been watching ever since I downloaded all of those pornographic videos (Lana Rhodes, Felicia Tang, etc.) but he did have a face, and when my semen shot up into the air and landed all over his face it did in some way resemble the pornographic actresses that I watched in the pornographic videos of Cumshots that I saw. Witnessed. Observed. Closely. I received a Push Notification from the Shake Shack app that told me I had a new deal on ShackBurgers, but I wasn’t anywhere near one of their locations, so I thought about when I might cash it in.

The old man, to say the least, was unpleased. I felt bad about that, because I wanted him to be happy— or at least, I wanted him to be unhappy for his own reasons and not because I had made him unhappy.

But what was happiness? Was happiness even good? What was good, and what was bad? I had apps to tell me all kinds of things about what might be or might not be good (Johnnie Walker with Tristan Tate, John Pork, Labubu), but I didn’t know what was bad, meaning I didn’t know what was good. And his face, plastered in cum, it might have been good or bad, but how would I have known either way? Maybe Google AI could help. I snapped a picture and fed it into the Google AI app, and it brought up similar photos of old men whose faces had been came on. Glistening cum. White, shiny cum. Cum that didn’t even look like cum because it was so excellently shiny. Almost mechanical. Glistening.

These old men’s wrinkles, cum sticking into the slight crevasses, created a new kind of beauty which I had never seen— but when I looked up at the old man in front of me’s face, the one who I had cum on, my cum still dripping off of his face, I saw nothing of that same beauty. Actually, I saw the cum emulsified with his sweat. “Wow,” I said. I looked back at the app, and saw no such thing. The cum was pure in these pictures. I received three notifications all at once, and those notifications were a part of my life and meant something.

I ran towards the rhinoceros enclosure, hoping to get gored to death as quickly as possible, but something from deep within stopped me. I stopped and looked around the room, trying to anchor myself to something (the carpet, the fireplace, the couch)— when I saw the rhinoceros outside of the window, grazing back and forth, I only thought about how big that horn was and how small the second horn was. The second horn was so easily forgotten, wasn’t it? Tiny. Little. Just a little bit. Bits. Just so tiny, just like those steak bits from earlier. Charred, smoked, burnt. Bits. Speaking of, I rolled a joint and lit that shit, sitting down on the edge of my bed.

The old man came into the room and asked for the J, so I passed that shit. “Hey, man, I’m sorry about the cum,” I said.

“That’s okay, sonny,” he said. He exhaled and passed that shit back. “If you could send me the pictures, I’d like that.”

“Give me your insta handle,” I said. I got it and sent the photos over, then went into my DMs, where I saw all of my previous conversations, and maybe it was just because I was high or maybe it was because I was feeling bad, but I started to feel bad about the way that everything was again. I posted the pics up on my story. And people had been liking my previous story quite a lot, which I had forgotten I even uploaded. A suicide note. No, threat. But what was the difference, when everything shook out? And why had no one replied?

“You know what the THC content is on this?” the old man asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s 28% THC-A, 8% THC, 8% CBD.”

“That’s pretty high THC-A content. It’s a sativa, right?”

“You’re right,” I said. “This is a half gram pre-roll, which I got from a dispensary on Central Street called Za Central.”

“Ah, I see. What other information can you tell me about this?”

“Well, it’s a strain called OG O’Banana Kush. It’s a mix of OG4, Banana Kush, and Obama Kush. The reason it’s not a sativa-indica mix, despite the Obama Kush DNA, is because it’s only the half of Obama Kush that’s a sativa. Obama Kush is a hybrid.”

“Right, I knew that,” the old man said. He got a notification on his phone. “Oh, look at this,” he said. He held his phone out. It was from Quora, a small child asking a question about what they should do if their father beat them.

“Who could ever answer that?” I asked.

“Beats me,” he said. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and pulled strings of my cum off of his face.

I had this sudden thought about everything all around me when I looked around, and then I felt the need to share the fact that I knew about what was happening. I saw things around me and I had to say that I knew about the things that were around me, so I took to my phone and looked around and began typing all of the things that I saw around me, but I put my other hand into my pants and grabbed my cock, and I was getting soft— and yes, there was still a bit of semen drizzling out of its end. Like a faucet. A spigot. A waterfall. Little bits of meaning, swimming out. I decided not to end my own life via getting gored to death by a rhinoceros.

— Matthew Davis, 9/2/2025

Matthew Davis is a fiction writer and novelist. His book, Let Me Try Again, is available on Amazon. He is incredibly appreciative to Sentenced for platforming diverse political viewpoints.