Orgy: A Short Story About Desire

By Kaitlyn Greenidge

“A story so funny and alive with the moment. Orgy is rich with the absurdity of the world and ripe with the reality of our collective longing. Kaitlyn Greenidge has once again written something you won’t forget. Brilliant and sexy and aware and exactly what you need.” — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of FRIDAY BLACK

“If sex is your chosen way for you to know yourself and others, what happens when a pandemic comes—and you discover it is as essential to your survival as a vaccine? Maybe more so? Sharp, affectionate, bawdy fun, a story as wise as a new best friend found on a spring night at an orgy. And Kaitlyn Greenidge continues to expand her literary terrain with this playful, masterful new work.” — Alexander Chee, author of HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL 

Novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of one of The New York Times’ most anticipated books of 2021, Libertie, and We Love You, Charlie Freeman, has been hailed as a “literary force to be reckoned with” (Buzzfeed). In her forthcoming Scribd Original, Orgy, she draws on the audacity that so often defines her work, imagining a day in the life of a young woman starved for connection and adventure in a city shut down by the COVID pandemic.

Nessa knows she’s a hot mess. She’s strong and impulsive and won’t apologize for it. She moved to Brooklyn from Baltimore to study nursing—or that was the plan. Instead she used the money her mom’s church group raised for her schooling to rent her first place in Brooklyn. Twenty years later and she has zero regrets: She loves her apartment even if the ceiling sags and the heat won’t shut off, even if her chronically uptight cousin Laurie lives with her now, and even if being stuck in it during the pandemic is slowly robbing Nessa of what makes her feel most like her: desire, skin on skin, finding the secret parts of a lover’s body.

When she’s invited to a party downtown, she knows she shouldn’t go but can’t resist. The invite’s subject line billed it as an “orgy,” thrown by some furries she knows. She outfits herself accordingly—pig nose and tail, black leotard, and fetchingly torn stockings—and, despite the disapproval of her cousin and the white boy who’s been camping in her cousin’s bed, she puts on her protective mask and walks out into a city transformed. It may be a lovely summer night, but she can’t help but see all that she and those around her have been missing during quarantine. At the party, she keeps confronting vestiges of her younger self, someone people noticed and who noticed others in reply: men, women, Black and white, gay and straight, nonbinaries, you name it—Nessa could see their beauty and reached to touch it. Now she feels like a ghost.

Who and what she encounters next will make her confront how far she’s willing to go to feel like herself again, to encounter the desire that made the city feel real—and sometimes tantalizingly surreal—for her, and seize that rare and “pure glory of having a body and being alive.” Orgy is a provocative, unforgettable, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny take on lust and longing in the time of corona, from one of the most exciting writers working today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Jul 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781094419398

Kaitlyn Greenidge

KAITLYN GREENIDGE’s debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, was one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016 and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Greenidge is a contributing writer for the New York Times, and her work has also appeared in Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal and other publications. She has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Kaitlyn Greenidge lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Book preview

NESSA IS TRYING TO DECIDE between the bunny ears, the duck’s bill, or the pig nose and tail. The bunny ears are too basic, she knows, but maybe there’s a way to style them that brings them back around to daring. The duck’s bill is fun, but she wore it to a winter solstice party six months ago and it is still dusted in purple glitter and sticky with dried beer. She had liked wearing it for its glamorous absurdity, but after half-heartedly scrubbing it under a dribble of steaming water in her bathroom sink, she has to concede that she’s let it sit for too long. The bill is irrevocably stained, and a discolored fowl’s mouth is not exactly the look she wants for tonight.

So the pig’s nose and tail it is. It could be good. She says it out loud to her room, heavy with the heat of early June and the jammed radiator in her bedroom. It could be good.

Pink is expected. The black leotard instead. She puts it on, pinches the fabric over each nipple, and lops off the cloth with a pair of nail scissors—hacking, struggling cuts that leave, to her, a pleasing jagged edge. The tail, of course, goes on her ass. She straightens and takes up the shears again, to get the nylon of her translucent black stockings to ladder fetchingly.

She could do full drag on her face—huge red circles on her cheeks, pancakes around her eyes—but she is too impatient to get out tonight and so she settles for two pairs of false lashes, a dusting of powder, and deep red lipstick, applied directly from the tube, no brush, artfully waxy. She adds brass bamboo earrings and opts for the black and curly mermaid wig, the ends dipping down past her back, brushing the tip of the curl of her pig’s tail.

In the wavy grime of her vanity mirror, she looks a fright. An obscene Miss Piggy; an especially vulgar art project; a fantasy of a very dirty child’s mind. It’s all she’s ever wanted, really. She leans forward till her lips hover just over the mirror’s dusty surface and blows herself a kiss. Then she throws open her bedroom door.

Laurie is on the other side. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over her laptop, laboriously pecking at the keys, a blinking white screen in front of her. Nessa knows what Laurie is doing—writing an essay on the microaggressions inherent in white women wearing yoga pants— instead of fighting with her white boyfriend, who is probably asleep in her bed right now.

Laurie is a freelance writer, and every single piece she produces is about microaggressions from clueless and damningly nice white strangers.

Reviews for Orgy

[Mark Underwood · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

+1 for what she "reworked into a map of herself"

[Jessica Robin Aldridge · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amazing short story. I hope she goes on to write some novels with vibes like these.

[cynthia stout · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

What in blue blazes was that? It is a terrible short story, not worth any time to read.

[sarah · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Kaitlyn is one of the best fiction contemporary writers this decade. This was a brilliant short piece.

[Dena Wilson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a wonderfully hopeful and heartbreaking piece. I’ve been Nessa…