Category Archives: Man
The door creaked open. The bald florist on the other side offered K the same expression he offers him every year on the thirtieth of December – looking somewhat like a vet explaining to a crying child the fate of her shar-pei.
“Happy anniversary, K,” said the florist, presenting the same maudlin bouquet of half-dead flowers he presents every thirtieth of December.
“Thanks,” replied K heavily, reaching one arm through the gap in the door. “No card, I suppose?”
The florist shook his head. “I’m afraid not.” He looked at K with no expression: “Why do you keep putting yourself through this?”
K propped the rotting flowers on his hip. “I don’t know. I keep hoping that maybe this year it will be her knocking instead of” – he paused – “well, you. Not that I don’t like you.”
“It won’t, K. It’s been five years. She’s not coming back. At least she remembers your wedding day, I guess.” The florist shrugged and took his leave.
K closed the door and set the dying flowers – her favorites – on the kitchen table.
He then marked in his calendar exactly 51 weeks into the future, when he would place his next order with the bald florist.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bouquet, break up, calendar, flash fiction, florist, flowers, heart break, marriage, relationships, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
K designed a high rise in the likeness of his favorite girlfriend. She wasn’t actually his girlfriend, however – more of a fetish object, a “girlfriend.” In fact, he had gone out with her only once.
She had agreed to a second date and then proceeded to stand him up. He waited for two hours at the fanciest rooftop lounge in the city.
That’s when, staring absently at the skyline over a double shot of something expensive, he decided to design a building in her image. Every Tuesday at 9 pm – the day and time of the second date that never was – he ascended to the rooftop lounge to watch poorly paid workers labor over the construction of his favorite girlfriend.
But one night, after too much expensive alcohol, he got angry at her and ordered her demolition.
He watched with coldness in his eyes as the wrecking ball tore holes in her half-completed body. He thought he heard her cry out – from somewhere under all that concrete, glass, and metal.
He was sad to see her fall. He knew he would miss her. But he was also sad because he knew that, next Tuesday at 9, he would have nothing to do.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, architect, bar, body, City, death, demolition, flash fiction, love, relationships, romance, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Him, Man, The Woman
She was gone, leaving only a photo of her chubby adolescent daughter wearing a Batman mask and her collection of gilded objects. A cherub, a horse head–“found objects” is what she called them even though she bought each one at the mall.
Due to her interest in “DIY” there had been a permant cloud of spray paint in our apartment and empty cans of gold spray paint next to the trashcan. After she left I opened all the windows.
I put the photo of her child on my desk and moved her “found objects” into a pile by the door. It started to rain. I closed the windows. That night I dreamed she cut my torso open and gilded my insides.
I woke to a thick haze of spray paint.
I opened the windows. Once the haze lifted I found that everything in my apartment had been gilded: chairs, desk, mirror, toothbrush. Her “found objects” were gone.
The venomous scent of spray paint assaulted me. I clutched my stomach and fell to the floor.
“Don’t be such a jerk next time.”
I looked up. Her chubby daughter was standing above me, a disapproving look peeking from behind her Batman mask.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, art, Batman, daughter, DIY, gold, love, relationship, sleep, spray paint | posted in Her, Man, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
K had heard it before, from other women less attractive than the one whose tongue was slowly constricting his neck:
“I just love your eyes. They’re so dark–I can’t even see your pupils.”
She flexed her tongue and K’s eyes bulged a little further from his face. She brought her face–eyes green, I think, but maybe they were blue–to meet his. “Amazing. Your eyes are just these black puddles.” She brought a well-manicured fingernail to his face. Then she tapped it on his left eye, creating mild undulations.
He had heard that last line before, too. As K lost consciousness he envisioned all of the women who got lost in his eyes. He thought of the woman who climbed in his left eye and drowned in the darkness. Her name was in the paper for a while and on TV. He thought of the woman who ran screaming from his apartment–underwear balled up in her fist–because she was convinced K’s eyes betrayed a darkness of a different sort.
From the depths of asphyxiation, he heard her jaw unhinge. Then he heard him being swallowed hole. “I guess I’m finally inside her,” K muttered as her digestive system pulled him down.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, asphyxiation, cannibalism, darkness, eating, eyes, food, jaw, love, murder, pupils, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, snake, tongue, TV, underwear | posted in Her, Him, I, Man, Short Fiction, Woman
K always said goodbye in the same way: detached yet sympathetic, like a vet telling a child that her dog has died.
Some cried. Others seemed relieved. The woman sitting on the edge of his new gray couch was somewhere in the middle. She muttered something obligatory about “stay[ing] friends” but she snatched up her things and left in a decidedly unfriendly manner.
K was finally convinced: No woman, regardless of beauty, charm, or material wealth, could measure up to the stunning creature that was engraved on his forearm in bold lines and colors. She understood him. She would never hurt him.
He ran his fingers across her face.
……….
K had gone to the tattoo parlor on a whim one day, taking with him an editorial spread from a men’s magazine featuring some exotic model from South America. K watched her take shape, grimacing with each thrust of the tattoo artist’s needles yet anticipating the end result. When the woman was finally complete, K just knew his lovelife would never be the same.
……….
K glanced at the woman on his arm. Then he climbed into his skin next to her. Taking her hand, “We can finally be together,” he whispered.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, art, beauty, body, body modification, dog, flash fiction, love, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, tattoo, tattoo parlor, tears | posted in Her, Him, Man, Short Fiction, Woman
The woman, whose heavy foreign eyes and striking hair/eye composition give her the air of a sleepy Scarlett Johansson or a strung out Courtney Love, will kill him.
Here is how:
She will go home with him.
He will tear her gown from her body. Then he will realize that she has wooden legs.
He will not know how to proceed but he will notice that she has grown uncomfortable. He will know immediately that she has become self-conscious.
He will think back to their “dates” and her countless long dresses.
He will recall the way she hobbles about.
Briefly, he will get mad at her (“You could have told me!”).
Then he will compose himself and gaze into her eyes, uttering romantic things. They will have sex. She will stay over but vanish by dawn.
In the morning he will find a splinter in his hand. Rubbing it, he will think fondly of her until his hand becomes infected.
As the infection spreads, he will not wonder if she planned the whole thing; but he should. Then he will die.
But he will not mind. For he will have fallen in love with the woman and her wooden legs.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, dating, death, hands, infection, legs, love, murder, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, wood | posted in Her, Him, Man, Short Fiction, Woman
“My name is K. And I’m an addict.”
He didn’t elaborate on the nature of his addiction and nobody bothered to ask. The people in the room probably presumed that his addiction was some permutation of theirs: drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, whatever. K had been attending these meetings for several weeks now, hoping that being part of a community of junkies would somehow cure his junkiness. Today was the first day he bothered to speak.
“Hello, K,” said a mass of voices. K sunk into his chair, knowing that his addiction was his alone, and that all the other addicts could never understand. Vulnerability suddenly exposed, K needed a fix. Fuck this place, he muttered to himself, as he snuck out during a coffee break.
……….
“It’s been a while,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, as though it knew K was on the brink of relapse.
K apologized and then pleaded for a fix up. “Pretty ones this time, please,” he added. As K reveled in the remorse and worthlessness of relapse, he envisioned the drug taking its effect: countless microscopic women riding his veins, soothing his pain with their kisses.
A knock at the door.
Leave a comment | tags: addiction, affect, drugs, flash fiction, pain, rehab, relapse, relationships, short story, syringe, women | posted in Him, Man, Short Fiction
Ever since K woke up dead, or so he was convinced, he had turned into a bit of a jerk.
That won’t do at all, he said in a huff. That’s how you choose to remember me? He snatched up his eulogy and tossed it in the garbage. I tried to feel sorry for him, because whatever mental affliction he was suffering from seemed to be rather burdensome. Then I began writing a new one.
Help me, he pleaded several weeks ago. I’m dead. I could see the fear in his eyes, and though I didn’t believe him, I was sure that he at least believed he was dead. I made a joke about zombies. But that only irritated him.
As the weeks went by he lost interest in everything that used to be meaningful. The only thing that seemed to jolt him to life–so to speak–was discussing how the life that was now, according to him, over would be remembered.
But the novelty of having a dead friend was eroding quickly.
Are you done yet, he barked? I lunged from my desk and sunk my pen into his neck.
Thank you, he said, as he died a second time.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, eulogy, fear, friendship, irritation, life, murder, pen, zombie | posted in Man, Me, Short Fiction
I’m sorry, she said. I can’t help it.
I rolled off of her and looked at her in a soft way, pleading silently for a logical explanation. She looked away. Don’t be mad.
K warned me to stay away. But that only encouraged me. You know how guys are: they think they’re the exception to the rule.
She was nice enough to let me try, but it was obvious that I was too alive.
She spoke calmly, knowing I needed to be told something grand: I went to a party once and my boyfriend at the time told me to meet him in the bathroom. It was completely dark in there when I pushed the door open. I couldn’t find the light switch. I groped around until my hands landed on what I thought was his erect penis. So I got on top, fucked him, and snuck out. Very erotic. I found out later that it was actually a dead man with rigor mortis in all the right places. My boyfriend broke up with me and I haven’t been interested in the living since.
After a moment, I said: I’m going to hang myself in the bathroom.
She only smiled.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bathroom, death, life, love, party, relationships, rigor-mortis, sex | posted in Her, Man, Me, Woman
“Seeking new husband. Must meet the following criteria:…”
K wanted to apply for the position. But he knew he wouldn’t make the cut. While he had loved her for years, he was not as robust or as rich as the new man he needed to be.
One morning K, her neighbor and life-long “friend,” watched as a line of men began materializing in front of her house. Soon the line of men stretched the length of the street.
At 2 pm, she opened her front door. For the next 10 hours, men entered the house, men left the house. By 1 AM the line had dwindled. Having nothing to lose, K got in line—the last candidate.
“K, what are you doing? You know you can’t apply. Plus, [Redacted] wore J Crew exclusively.”
K frowned. He marched into the bedroom and examined the deceased’s wardrobe.
“The new one has to wear J Crew too.” She was behind him.
“Was that in your ad?”
“Toward the bottom.”
“ I hate J Crew.”
“I know.”
K put his hand to her cheek and she pressed back into it. Then he left, but not before stealing a pair of the deceased’s J Crew socks—which he kinda liked.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, clothes, death, fashion, flash fiction, friendship, husband, interview, J. Crew, love, marriage, relationships, socks, stealing, wife | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
K danced with the woman with the metal hook hand who lost her original hand while defecting from an impoverished nation K knew nothing about. She placed it, her metal hook hand, gingerly on his shoulder. He held firmly to her other fleshy hand, and, with an equally firm grip around her waist, paraded her through a room of riff-raff who were focusing their attentions on K and the woman with the metal hook hand and had stopped their own dance floor rituals almost entirely.
“Why are they watching us,” K asked.
“Because you’re not from around here. And they don’t like strangers, especially when strangers touch the local women.” K hardly considered the ways in which he was touching the woman with the metal hook hand to be “touching” in the sense that she meant.
He felt the riff-raff tighten their grip. Pressing his mouth to her ear, he whispered:
“I like your metal hook hand.”
She whispered back, “They don’t like it when strangers whisper things into the ears of the local women.”
……….
K woke up in a hospital bed a day later with two metal hook hands of his own. He didn’t like them so much.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, dance, flash fiction, metal, relationships, riff-raff, stranger, violence | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
“Tell me a story or I’ll shoot her.” He raised his gun. The pretty brunette made indistinct noises from behind the bandana in her mouth.
So I did. I told him about this aspiring writer who decides to do something crazy because he only knows how to write about “what actually happens.” He decides to rob a bank but falls for the bank teller. While he intended to write a note demanding all the money, he ends up writing her a poem. They go on a date a few days later. They go back to his place for a nightcap. There’s a knock on the door. The aspiring writer opens it and finds a man holding a gun. The man barges in and, for reasons unknown, ties up the aspiring writer and the bank teller.
“What happens then?” The man with the gun asked.
I told him how, in the story, the man with the gun forces the aspiring writer tell him a story.
“And then?” The man with the gun asked.
I told him how the aspiring writer doesn’t know how to finish the story and how the brunette begins to fear, more than ever before, for her life.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bank, date, fiction, flash fiction, gun, hostage, relationships, robber, story, thief, writer | posted in Her, Man, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
So he ripped his heart from his chest. Thrusting it into the hands of the woman he loved, “Make me rich,” he said. She said nothing in reply–an ominous sign, potentially–but nodded slightly in implicit agreement.
[A risky investment, indeed, he had heard (though he couldn’t remember from where). But if it paid off, it really paid off, he also heard (same as above).]
Always one to never shy from opportunity and the possibilities of increased wealth, regardless of risk, K eagerly awaited payoff. Yet he wondered how long he could survive without his heart. He passed the days and nights trying not to think about the woman he loved and what she was doing with it.
As it turns out, the woman he loved was careless with his heart, squandering all of its worth in illicit ways. “Sorry,” she said over martinis one night, hands empty. “I lost it.” She showed him her empty hands.
Left with nothing, K naturally hurled himself from the top of a building, a trail of desperation following him to his death. Which is unfortunate, because a hot woman is going to find his heart tomorrow in the most unlikely of places.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, heart, investment, love, martini, opportunity, relationships, risk, romance, stock market | posted in Man, Woman
He had heard that in order to become a master perfumist you absolutely needed an advanced degree in chemistry. You absolutely needed to know how chemicals react with other chemicals, and stuff.
The secret to his masterful bottles of perfume (which retailed for $200 per bottle) was not in his knowledge of chemistry (he was actually quite inept in the sciences during college, demonstrating instead an unfortunate fondness for literature) but in the words of women who hated him.
……….
I fucking hate your guts, K. She said in a surprisingly even tone, leaving the door ajar as she left. Before her words fell to the floor and broke into sharp shards, he hurriedly bottled them. He stored the bottle among other bottles of spite and venom, spat by a variety of women over the past year, knowing that his next great scent was only another heartbreak or two away.
Two months later, amidst great praise and acclaim, he released his new perfume. Then he went home to break up with his girlfriend. His career, it seems, depended on it.
She was unfortunately very understanding about everything. So when she left, he let her words fall to the ground.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, fashion, perfume, relationships, scent, smell | posted in Her, Him, Man, Woman
I love you but I’ve chosen darkness he said to the tree as he chopped it down. He held back tears.
He used to play in the tree as a child. He used to run around it and kiss girls under it. He used to climb it and fall off of it. He used to cry under it when his parents fought. Or cry for it during thunderstorms. He lost a basketball under it. And found a human skull buried near it. He once got stuck in it. Bees built hives in it. He never got stung but his Vietnamese friends did. Birds lived in it and nursed their young in it. The neighbors were always afraid the tree would fall on their homes and expensive cars, temporarily upsetting their upper-middle class suburban dreams until their insurance agents showed up. There had even been a petition signed by half of the members of the neighborhood association demanding its immediate removal. (Two-thirds of the members were required to sign.) He carved haiku into its bark and never read them to anyone. He read them to the tree. He loved the tree. It loved him.
But the lumberjack’s daughter was irresistible.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bark, bee, dream, haiku, love, lumberjack, relationships, suburbs, thunderstorm, tree, Vietnam | posted in Man, Short Fiction
The truth she didn’t want him finding out was that she and her shadow had had a falling out some time ago. So when K asked her out, she demanded a midnight rendezvous somewhere beyond the furthest reaches of the urban phosphorescent nightscape. (K obliged because he is a gentleman and because she was totally hot.)
But that sort of thing can only sustain itself for so long. K began to question her sanity and, secretly, his own. So after yet another 1AM stroll through that park they often strolled around, he broached the subject.
She resisted the urge to lie. My shadow left me, she said. He asked why and she said because shadows by their very nature thrive on evil. And she just wasn’t evil enough–apparently it had gotten bored with her. He seemed to understand and moved to kiss her. She resisted that too. And then he really understood.
Not long after he got home, her shadow knocked on his door. They had sex and her shadow spent the night. When he woke up, accosted way too early by the morning sun, her shadow was gone. But his own shadow seemed longer than usual.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, darkness, love, morning, night, relationships, sex, shadow, urban | posted in Her, Him, Man, Woman
He had heard the rumors since childhood-the ones that circulated among day laborers and the working poor: during the blood moon at such and such landfill a womanish creature could be seen swimming in the vast reservoir of refuse, junk, and discard. There was no evidence to validate the rumor, but to a child that hardly matters.
As K got older, he constructed an elaborate fantasy around the stories he had heard as a child. He imagined falling in love with the landfill mermaid. He imagined growing fish parts of his own and swimming off somewhere with her.
During the most recent blood moon he broke into the landfill. Standing on the edge of the abyss, he waited. Soon enough he saw her.
K called to her. He shouted his undying love to her. She swam to him. She was beautiful. Join me, she said.
K shed his clothes and jumped into the landfill.
He was later pulled from the landfill, his body plagued by cuts and blood-borne diseases. I’ve seen love, he whispered to someone who cared about him. Then he died. Then things slowly went back to normal, no one ever really figuring out what he meant by that.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, disease, garbage, gossip, landfill, love, mermaid, relationships, rumor, trash | posted in Her, Him, Man, Short Fiction, Woman
K’s father was becoming annoyed with his adolescent son’s word choices. First “duvet,” then “loofah.” Until recently K’s father enjoyed their weekly Scrabble games, even though K’s vocabulary far surpassed his own. But the words that had begun to enter the young boy’s Scrabble lexicon were unsettling. K’s father thought back to K’s winning word last week: “exfoliate.”
K’s father imagined letters swirling in K’s head; he further imagined letters bumping into other letters to create effeminate words. After K’s father offered a word hardly worth mentioning, K played his next word: “chanteuse.” K’s father didn’t know what that word means.
K’s father stared at his remaining letters, feeling betrayed by the father-son time he so desperately wanted. K’s father scanned the board. If he were more of an “intellectual,” K’s father could have countered his son’s suspicious vocabulary with his own manly version: bolts, beard, fortress, chainsaw, dirt. While those words hardly count for anything in Scrabble, at least compared to “chanteuse” or “exfoliate,” they would have at least meant something to K’s father. But K’s father’s intelligence aside, it was too late for that. K’s father was going to lose.
It was just as well: he preferred Battleship.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, Battleship, bolts, chainsaw, chanteuse, dirt, exfoliate, family, father, femininity, fortress, masculinity, Scrabble, vocabulary | posted in Man, Short Fiction
Thus he woke to find that the woman’s name he gleefully got tattooed on his arm was now a different woman’s name. (I love you, he had said gazing into her eyes as the needle pierced his skin. He grimaced. But not because he loved her.)
Did you do this? He woke her up. It was of course impossible to alter something as permanent as a tattoo. But she was understanding as she absorbed his accusation. I didn’t. She rubbed her eyes and tamed her hair.
He studied the name. Then he kicked her out, proclaiming undying love for the woman whose name now inexplicably graced his arm.
That night he went to a karaoke bar. What’s your name he asked a lot of women. Then he went home.
Several weeks later he was at a steak house when a woman touched his arm saying that’s my name. She was fat, but it was probably a life lesson he told himself. He invited her to sit down. They talked. He found her pleasant but she was still fat. So when she politely excused herself “for a moment” he grabbed a steak knife and began digging at his tattoo.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, fat, inscription, karaoke, knife, love, relationships, steak, tattoos | posted in Man, Woman
K was convinced that she was the one hurting him during the night, that she was the one leaving knives in his body while he slept.
“She’s going to kill me,” he said to a friend once, refusing to elaborate.
She didn’t kill him. But one day she woke to find K dead, his head thoroughly severed from his body and covered in lipstick. She sighed. You men, you have no self control.
K had gone to the Isle of Women again.
He never told her of his dreamscape philandering. But he didn’t need to. Every night he went to the Isle of Women and every night from within her own dreamworld she watched him go.
The police told her he died by his own hand. Which would make since: those marks on his body he attributed to her were also self inflicted. One night she woke to find him pummeling his own face, shouting remorseful things about “the nature of men.” She never brought it up.
So she believed the police. She also kinda believed he killed himself out of guilt. But she also kinda believed he killed himself so he could stay on the Isle of Women forever.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, dream, love, men, relationships, sleep, suicide, women | posted in Her, Him, Man, Woman
At the end of the famed Savile Row there’s a small men’s clothier called K’s. Although it claims to specialize in men’s bespoke clothing (as every men’s clothier on the famed Savile Row does), those in the know know K’s true specialization to be things made of silk. They know, too, of the proprietor’s prominent role in the black-market silkworm trade. But they don’t care. People much more important than you visit K’s from far away places.
K used to have an apprentice: a former leftist intellectual who turned his back on a career in “the academy” because of a profound distaste for its increasing corporatization and residual and unwarranted snobbiness. And because he was totally into fashion. Rumors suggest that K’s apprentice fell in love with a woman who worked someplace nearby, a former cocaine addict who was not very pretty but nevertheless attractive for indiscernible reasons.
Some say K was jealous of the couple. They also say that he fed them to his silkworms and that he subsequently offered an exclusive collection of extra fine silk handkerchiefs called “LoveLost.” An edgy enough name for a collection of handkerchiefs, but they weren’t worth what they cost.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, capitalism, fashion, handkerchief, intellectual, love, Savile Row, silk, silkworm | posted in Man, Short Fiction
Thus he decided to put himself in the freezer.
Wanting to stop time, but not knowing how, he reasoned that freezing himself would almost be the equivalent of freezing time.
He wanted to stop time because things were finally good in the usual ways that people mean when they say that. But he knew life to be a constant negotiation between the good life and the opposite of the good life. The trick was to stop time when life was good so it would always be good.
He had envisioned casting a spell or whispering magic words or waving a magic wand to bring time to a stop. But that’s impossible. Which is why he decided to put himself in the freezer.
Before doing so, he went shopping. I want to look nice forever, he told himself. He bought a nice suit and a really expensive watch. He charged the shit out of his middle class credit card–since time was coming to an end it didn’t really matter.
He got in and closed the door.
He wasn’t dead when somebody opened the freezer a day later. But his watched stopped. So his plan kinda worked.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, credit card, debt, freezer, shopping, suit, time, watch, wrist watch | posted in Man, Short Fiction
K enjoyed the night shift because it was quiet. You’d think suicidals (as they called them) would be most active at night when you’re alone with your thoughts. You’d be wrong, though. The serious suicidals do it during the day when everyone else is busy.
K enjoyed the nightshift because at 11:45 PM every night a woman would call. The first time she called, she was patched through at random. “Hello, my name is K.” etc.
Every night thereafter, she would ask for K, telling whoever might answer her call that she felt most comfortable talking to K and, do you really want to risk not letting her talk to him?
K anticipated her call even if he was otherwise preoccupied. Her life being at stake and all, he looked forward to talking her down from the ledge every night.
One night, she didn’t call. K should have presumed the worst. Instead, he presumed that she was mad at him or that she didn’t “need” him in that way anymore. He tracked down her phone number and called her, not finding anything ironic.
She answered after one ring, an unfamiliar cheer in her voice. K hung up immediately, his worst fears confirmed.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, emotions, fear, intimacy, phone, suicide | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
He orders a Kyoto cold brew because, served as it is in a snifter, he thought it was a cocktail of some sort.
……….
Two young people are sitting across from each other, he notices, conversing in strained registers. The guy has on an Interpol T-shirt and wears a barcode tattoo on his left forearm. The woman is carefully tanned and obviously out of his league. She is drinking something from a straw. She tells him about chiropractic school and drug addiction. The guy doesn’t say much. The woman continues to tell him about how intellectuals often suffer from some sort of spinal disorder because they’re hunched over “all the fucking time.” She seems nervous; it’s probably their first date, or whatever. The guy doesn’t seem like much of a swearer–despite his Interpol T-shirt and tattoo.
……….
How did these two people find each other, he wonders from the other side of his Kyoto cold brew. They’re togetherness is off-putting, he decides. Nevertheless, it’s probably interesting–whatever happened to bring them together. But of course, it is totally not happening. Silence envelops the pair.
She looks across the room and her eyes settle on a man drinking a Kyoto cold brew. She smiles.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, cafe, coffee, date, drug addiction, Interpol, Kyoto, relationships, tattoo | posted in Him, Man, Woman
“Why did you bring that thing back,” she asked, knowing the answer. “What would you have done,” K replied, reminding her that she had been present that evening at the fat man’s house; reminding her that she had been present when the fat man forced the painting on them, exclaiming, “This one is my favorite and I want you to have it.”
How the fat man could tell “this one” apart from the others was anyone’s guess: countless framed images of Nordic women in various states of ecstasy–heads cocked, hair tousled, etc.–and undress adorned the walls of his modest middle-class home.
(Although she pretended not to overhear, she had heard the fat man whisper something like, “This one reminds me of your girlfriend,” before handing K the painting that now occupied a prominent space in their alcove.)
“It’s creepy,” she huffed before marching into the bedroom.
“I’ll throw it out tomorrow,” K said meagerly.
When K woke up in the morning his girlfriend was gone from their bed. He found her in the painting next to the Nordic, face in a frozen, forced smile, eyes pleading but also seductive, body contorted erotically and unnaturally.
He decided to keep the painting.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, art, domesticity, erotic, fat, Man, Nordic, painting | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
