Summary

Inventory is a story in 20-parts detailing sexual encounters between the unnamed, first-person female narrator and a myriad of lovers. The first three encounters detailed are childhood or teenage moments of sexuality and sexual expression. Starting with the fourth encounter the items entail relationships or acts of sex between the narrator and other men, women—at times individually, at times in small groups. Toward the tail-end of the story, the encounters become less directly sexual and more physically intimate—kissing and straddling as opposed to penetration and coming. In this way, the encounters maintain an arc to them which progresses toward a peak of sexuality and then descends toward a plateau of intimacy.

The primary antagonist and motivator within this story is that, in the background of every encounter, there is the beginning, spreading, and devastation of an epidemic occurring across the U.S...