Monthly Archives: October 2015
“Another one is dead,” she said flatly. I rolled my eyes: “Well, go get a new one.”
“If you neglect them, they’ll die.”
I wasn’t listening. Her engagement ring caught the light and cast her every word in doubt. Despite my harsh tone, she grabbed her Burberry and left for the pet store.
I approached the birdcage. The remaining birds had pecked the third one to death. It was new, a replacement for my first bird, which died of old age. The birds were huddled together keeping warm in the winter air. I nudged the birdcage with my hip and made my way to the coffee table.
She came home empty handed. “Sorry, K. They’re out of birds.” She wasn’t sorry. She didn’t understand my affection for things that die easily. “It’s fine,” I murmured, pressing my chai to my lips. “Get in the cage.”
She went to the closet and fished out last year’s Halloween costume.
I reminisced fondly of ripping the parrot head off in lusty urgency, pulling the zipper the length of her body. She opened the birdcage and crawled in.
She and I used to be like those birds. I closed the cage and locked it.
Leave a comment | tags: affair, affect, bird, birdcage, death, flash fiction, parrot, pet, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“If I had anywhere better to be, I’d be there. Believe me.”
The bartender shrugged. “Get yourself a girlfriend or something. You’ve been here every day this week. It’s getting pathetic.”
It was my turn to shrug: “I’m too narcissistic. I wouldn’t know what to do with a girlfriend. I mean, I’d have to stop thinking about myself so much.”
She scoffed. Then she took her arm off and put it on the countertop. “Problem solved.”
I was amazed by her insight. With her arm, I was free to indulge my deepest narcissistic desires and find comfort in a woman’s touch without giving anything in return. I snatched her arm up and left a bigger tip than usual.
Back in my apartment I caressed the arm and pressed it to my face. I kissed the back of its hand. I put its fingers in my mouth.
“Fuck me,” it moaned. Instinctually, I ripped my right arm off and threw it to the floor.
……….
“What’s wrong,” it asked disappointedly.
……….
“I don’t want this.” I put her arm back on the countertop. “It wanted to have sex.”
“And?”
“Sex leads to complications,” I huffed, proud that my ego was still in tact.
3 Comments | tags: affect, alcohol, bar, bartender, body, ego, flash fiction, narcissism, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me
The first time I saw her sunbathing was during high summer: a nearly naked body prostrate and baking on a frayed beach blanket.
Through autumn and winter, everyday she was out there on her blanket. Even under the oppressive winter sky she darkened. Over time I memorized her skin—its gradations, flaws, and changes.
One evening I saw her out at a restaurant. Winter was lifting but it was still cold. I was sitting alone at a table when a woman appeared in my periphery. I didn’t know her face, but I didn’t need to. The hue of her skin betrayed her identity.
“Excuse me,” I called from my seat. She turned.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t mean to startle you, but I see you sunbathing everyday. Won’t you sit with me?”
She slid her face into a smile and sank into the offered chair. I extended my hand, hoping she would allow me just one touch of her bronzed hand. She obliged.
It was an exquisite appendage—soft, smooth, slightly toned—and in spite of myself I grew excited.
Unfortunately, with her other exquisite appendage she pulled pepper spray from her coat and wasted no time in shooting me with it.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, autumn, body, flash fiction, love, pepper spray, relationships, restaurant, seasons, Short Fiction, short story, skin, summer, sun tan, tan, violence, winter | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
The problem was this word “anti-venom.” It sounded made up, like it was from a comic book.
“I’m sorry, but we just don’t have anti-venom,” the doctor said mockingly. “We would have to order some.”
“I’m going to die,” I groaned, but she was unforgiving. I removed my scarf to reveal a collection of impressive lacerations, bruises, and bites.
The doctor’s face clouded. She crossed her arms. “Whatever kind of snake did that—you’re lucky to be alive. And to not be in jail. It’s illegal to keep snakes like that.”
I put my scarf back on and sighed. “My girlfriend did it.”
The doctor misunderstood. “When she gets mad she turns into a cobra,” I clarified. In gruesome detail, I told the doctor about her metamorphosis: how her soft skin turns to icy scales, the dead gaze in her otherwise expressive eyes, the expansive hood that frames her face when she is particularly agitated, the disgusting hiss and forked tongue leaking from her mouth, the sinister way she slithers and thrashes about.
The doctor uncrossed her arms and leaned toward my ear. “You’re already dead,” she whispered, a subtle rattle emanating from somewhere deep inside her white lab coat.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, change, cobra snake, comic book, death, doctor, metamorphosis, rattle snake, relationships, snakes, venom | posted in Her, Me
She was certain that we would either get caught and arrested or piss off the spirits of all the people in the ground.
“Look,” I implored, arms spread wide, “this place is so big nobody will ever find us if we choose the right spot.”
“And the ghosts?”
“The spirits aren’t going to be here—unless all these people were buried alive.”
She offered a strained smile of defeat. I took her hand, leading her away from the sunlight, tour busses, and plots of important people.
“Over there.” I gestured toward a gloomy stone that had the rejected air of being cast off by the other stones.
She bent over and gripped the top with both hands while I yanked her pants down.
“Um, wait.”
“Why?”
“This stone has your name on it.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m serious. Look.”
I leaned over her, my now flaccid penis brushing against her bare ass. I rolled my eyes and scoffed.
“That doesn’t concern you?”
“Why would it?”
“It says you die today.”
Just before my gruesome death, I felt a figure lurch in my periphery and heard her scream—“K! Stop it!”—as the jealous knife of her husband sank repeatedly into my flesh.
Leave a comment | tags: affair, affect, cemetery, death, flash fiction, ghosts, grave yard, graves, husband, jealousy, knife, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, spirits | posted in Her, Me
She had a constellation of shitty stars tattooed on her body. They were cartoonish and lumpy, the shape of holiday cookies. I followed them down her spine and around the bottom of her left torso, where they then descended and coiled loosely the length of her left leg.
“These are awful,” I said. She shrugged and rolled out of my bed, complaining about needing to “wash [my] scent” off. That was our first and last conversation. I closed my eyes and when I opened them—evidently much later—she had left. My wallet was gone and I found a syringe in my bathroom.
I drove to the crumbling neighborhood where I first saw her only a few hours prior. But now I saw only drug addicts milling around and a woman bobbing her head to an inaudible rhythm. I called from my vehicle, interrupting the woman. She swore at me and displayed something sharp. I drove off, fretting.
At a loss, I slithered into a tattoo shop and demanded my own constellation from the worst artist on staff. He readied his inkwells. “I’ll give you an extra thousand if you tattoo me with this,” I said, offering him the syringe.
Leave a comment | tags: addiction, affect, art, drug addict, drugs, flash fiction, ink, money, needle, prostitution, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, syringe, tattoo shop, tattoos | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
K, though dying, was in the best shape of his life. “The TSA agent asked if I was a gymnast,” he boasted the other day. “I told him I was just a narcissist.”
K wasn’t just a narcissist. I don’t remember the name of his illness, but it was fatal. Still full of vigor, he paraded around in his Under Armour, revealing every crevice and striation in his torso, like an aspiring Mister Universe. In another several months, he would become hollow, like a drug addict. What would the TSA agent say then?
When he took too much medication, K would rant about “beauty in decay.” Then he would hit the gym extra hard. K read too much philosophy—chubby men expounding on a reality they know nothing about. Have you ever watched somebody die, I hissed once, angrily. We disagreed a lot these days.
But K was right. He had more girlfriends than I could count. “Do they know you’ll be dead soon,” I asked after he regaled me with a story of a hefty blonde.
“Of course. They wouldn’t be interested in me otherwise.”
For the first time in a long while, I found myself agreeing with him.
Leave a comment | tags: addict, addiction, affect, death, drugs, flash fiction, gymnast, illness, Mister Universe, narcissism, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, TSA, women | posted in Him, Me, Short Fiction
“We don’t know what happened to the dinosaurs,” she said. She was too attractive to be a paleontologist. I nevertheless listened to her lecture. But I didn’t believe her.
I whispered to K: “Bullshit. She knows exactly what happened to them.”
K brushed me aside and marched toward the paleontologist, much swagger in his step. “She wants to have sex with the two of us,” he reported back, smiling as though he were staring in his own porn. I would have fucked her, but the idea of three bodies heaving and groaning together was off-putting.
K left the museum with the paleontologist. “I’ll find out what happened to them,” he said in my ear on his way out.
I visited K in prison six months later. He was wan and sickly. “What the fuck,” I said.
“I cut her head off.”
“Why?”
“She would’t tell me what happened to the dinosaurs, so I killed her.”
I couldn’t say anything, so he kept talking.
“But the weird thing was,” he said with piercing eyes from behind plexiglass, “I looked down her neck after I cut her head off. I saw a bunch of dinosaurs grazing.”
“On what,” I asked, genuinely curious.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, dinosaurs, eating, flash fiction, museum, orgy, paleontologist, prison, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Him, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
