Monthly Archives: June 2016

Universal Values

She was born hungry and she died hungry.

But her hunger was in name only, for never once did she, between her birth and death, feel hungry. She ate things – delicious and exotic and expensive – but she did so only to be social, like a casual smoker casually smoking among friends. Alone, she did not eat; she felt no desire to do so.

She felt the effects of starvation. But she thought that this was her disposition. Indeed, she grew concerned when she did not feel this way.

She died, only, because I ended our relationship. She died, only, because I was not there to eat.

It took her but a week to starve.

During that same week, I feasted on the bodies of women as a display of sexual rebellion and fear. During that same week, my taste in disposable women became increasingly stringent: thinner and thinner, I demanded.

She died on a Friday, the same day that I unearthed and climbed into a coffin to lay with the skeleton of a woman, the same day I was shot for breaking the law, the same day I sold our companion burial plots to a young, attractive couple in love.

 


The Lamella

To exorcise your anxieties, you invent a woman, draw her portrait, and then dream about her. You’re supposed to ask her questions, in your dream, and, after you wake, write her responses in your “dream journal.”

 

But when I present her portrait to K, he becomes enraged. “This is your woman? This is your animus?” He balls her up in his left hand and drops her to the floor. “Try again.”

 

I again draw the woman, the locus of my anxieties and erotic fantasies. She is my life’s work, the climax of my existence. I don’t ask K for his approval before I begin dreaming about her.

 

K is jealous of my animus, I feel. He wants to dream about her, ask her questions, and write about her in his own “dream journal.”

 

I dream of K instead of my animus. I ask him where she is. He says that she has left me because I’m “too unstable.” I tell him that’s why I drew an animus, to stabilize. He says that it’s too late and that she’d rather be with a rich guy besides. I can’t disagree.

 

I wake up but don’t bother to write any of that down.


Those Who Have Nothing Have Only Their Bodies

The sommelier scoffed when I asked for a bottle of her boldest red. “It’s very exclusive,” she said with arrogance.

I found her whole performance to be off-putting. But I held my tongue.”I’ll take it,” I said, holding her gaze.

The sommelier disappeared momentarily before returning with a dark bottle splayed on a fluffy white towel, like a newly born aristocrat being presented in court.

“This way, sir,” she said, indicating a private room. “As I said, this bottle is very exclusive.”

The sommelier led me into the room, which contained only a small table and corkscrew. There was no wine glass.

“Take your time,” she said, disinterest hanging in the air long after she closed the door behind her.

I corked the bottle and a woman climbed out.

“What can I do for you,” she asked.

“Put things back how they used to be,” I pleaded. I wanted her to fix everything that went wrong. I wanted her to make me someone deserving of the love of the woman who haunts my dreams.

“Very well,” she said, misunderstanding, and disappeared back into the bottle of wine.

I fell to my knees in despair, but hoping for a refund.