Category Archives: Short Fiction
Green-eyed Monster
I used to tease her–“Your skin is so soft,” I’d say, “I want to peel it off you and wrap myself in it.” She would smile in reply, but her eyes were now cautious and alert as though I might actually do that.
When she invited me under her skin, I figured she was joking–all things considered. But she grabbed at the tattoo on her wrist and pulled up, revealing a small cavern.
I stuck a finger in. Then two. Then my left hand.
“Well,” she said blankly.
“Sorry,” I replied and climbed into the opening in her wrist. It was claustrophobic, and everything was tinted red.
I met a guy named “K” there. He was nice enough. “How long have you been here,” I asked this “K.” A long time, he said. He spoke of her fondly and of her wrist tattoo. I grew suspicious–because I was with her when she got that tattoo.
I attacked him in masculine rage. Then I felt myself being pulled from her skin.
“Look,” she said with disappointment. “I think we should see other people. Jealousy is so unattractive.”
The Abyss of Freedom
Something possessed him to enroll in a woodworking class at the community college. Which was fine.
Ever since she introduced him to the male members of her family – all tall, rich, and unfaithful to their wives and girlfriends – he sought to “up his man game.” She rolled her eyes whenever he said this and was secretly sad that he felt the need to be different. Nevertheless, every Wednesday for the past eight weeks he came home late. Which was fine. He was making her a clock.
When he climbed in bed – after showering, naturally – he dutifully whispered in her ear his progress. “It’s done,” he said softly. “It’s on the table.”
She jumped up, not bothering to put a stitch of clothing on (this did not bother him), and dashed to the dining room. It was an awful thing – uneven and splintery.
“K,” she said like a homeroom teacher, “it’s not even telling the right time.”
“I know,” he replied proudly. “It’s set to when we first kissed.”
She looked at him incredulously.
He explained. “Your eyes were closed and I looked at my watch. I wanted to remember.”
She began to cry, and he glanced down at his watch.
An Attempt to Come to Terms
Lying in the dark, a thought dances along the edges of his mind, carefully gliding over the puddles of vodka and sidestepping the scattered SSRIs.
He had always been careful to turn music on; it was the only way he could get her to sleep. He preferred a tomb-like enclosure. She was the opposite, but she was also loved by him. So he cued up gentle piano music and let it lull her to sleep. During the early days of their relationship, he slept very little, distracted by the sound and unable to settle down because of the presence of someone in his bed. He grew accustomed and eventually dependent on her body being next to his. But he never trained himself to sleep through the music, faint though it was.
When he woke to find her gone, he recalls now, there had been a power outage, or else he had been too wasted. Either way there was no music. There was, instead, silence. But it wasn’t the silence he wanted. It claimed her, unjustly.
He feels her in the silence. But he can’t sleep. So he turns her piano sounds back on. But he can’t sleep that way either.
The Fantasy of Being Absolved
In her dreams, he was elusive and distant, staring at her with grave eyes. How she longed for his words, his words, once so sweet but now – when he did bother to open his mouth – unruly and hardened. But he said nothing, in her dreams, while she murmured something over and over again, inaudible to them both. Even she didn’t know their contents or intent.
Her dreams were her reality’s inverse. During her waking hours it was she who refused to speak, drifting through the long, masculine corridors of their home like a ghost ship. Her last words to him, spat from the foyer on her way to exercise class: “It is what it is.”
It was one of her favorite sayings. It made him cringe; he considered that turn of phrase a worthless tautology. In the days since she decided to stop speaking (thirteen and counting), he gradually forgot why she said that anyway.
He still tried, mildly and with condescension, to engage her in conversation. But to no real end. He, too, dreamed. He dreamed not of her words, or even his, but rather of an implicitly understood and forever sweet silence that needed no words at all.
The Blood Reemerging
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.
The Small and the Invisible
Even the cruelest and most random moments of the turbulent past year and a half failed to upset the fragile stability they found that snowy night, exactly 729 days ago, in some shabby Italian restaurant in some equally shabby track mall. She was in rare form, babbling sweetly – in hushed tones; for all its dilapidation, the restaurant was undulating with working-class Christmas Eve romance – into his ear.
She was, he reasoned, still high on the adrenaline that washed over the two of them when his new Lexus spun off the road and into a snowbank – where it was fated to remain until the roads were properly cleared and salted. They wanted to interpret every extraordinary thing as fate drawing them (back) together, as some force telling them that everything would be okay. If only they would only almost die whenever their relationship seemed beyond resuscitation.
She ordered french fries (somewhere near the end of the menu with stuff like friend chicken, just in case) and a glass of red wine. He ordered red wine, too, but spent the next several hours, until the only other patrons were two drunkards attempting courtship, watching her and worrying that the snow would eventually stop.
At His Irrepressible Best
The dazzle of the evening – fancy cocktails, lots of cleavage, rolled up sleeves – was eclipsed by the weight of inevitable failure.
She took me to a french restaurant, where we sat rooftop and looked out at the decaying skyline. Ever the portrait of dark sophistication, she sat contemplatively in the embrace of the day’s remaining shadows, her gaze drawn to something beyond my right shoulder.
“There’s a building on fire over there,” she said, removing the olives from her martini. “It’s pretty bad.” When I first met her, she was, to me, impossibly unapproachable. I made up a bullshit story about wanting to adopt her dog.
“Is there a lot of smoke,” I replied, losing myself in her eyes.
“Yeah.” She lifted her martini. “People are jumping.”
“I imagine it’ll spread soon.”
She scrutinized the scene behind me. “Probably. We’re the only ones left up here. At least we won’t have to pay. But my martini is almost gone.”
She was right. I could feel an uncomfortable warmth biting at my neck.
“Do you want some of this?”
“I think mezcal is disgusting.”
“Are we in trouble?”
She nodded silently, took my hand and pressed her lips to my knuckles.
The Gloomiest Antidote
She had been a robust child.
Years later, however, she found herself prone to serious illness and disease. On Christmas several years ago, I nursed her through pneumonia, strep throat, and a host of other dangerous afflictions.
As terrible as it all was, watching her die (It was inevitable. If not this illness, then surely that one, or that one.), we benefitted handsomely on, as we came to call it, PharmDay. We would put on our best farmerwear – a hard thing for a couple of middle-class snobs to accomplish – and head to the pharmacy. The whole thing was terribly fun.
Back at home, we would dump her medicine on the kitchen table and play with it. Small pills became stones from which we erected mighty pyramids; other pills became grenades as we tried to blow each other up. Still others we simply abused with alcohol.
She maintained until the end that she would rather spend her time this way than filling little boxes – one for each day of the week – with medicine.
And so we did. And one day she overdosed on a little green drug.
I tried carrying on the tradition without her. But it just wasn’t as fun.
Colonial Elitism
I made myself a drink with his expensive scotch and lay on his expensive couch. For some reason, I felt uneasy. “K?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “K?” I asked again, deciding that he, under the influence of too much alcohol, passed out somewhere out of view. I turned on the television and watched a show about winter in upstate New York.
I fell asleep.
When I woke up, my coat had been thrown over me. K was banging around in the kitchen.
I sat up. “What time is it?”
“Five,” he called from behind me.
“What are you doing up?”
“Making waffles. Want some?”
“I guess,” I whined.
He dropped a plate of waffles on my lap, returned to the kitchen.
We hadn’t spoken about what had happened several nights prior, and amidst the lunacy of the waffle conversation, I felt the need to speak up.
“K,” I said from his couch. “I’m going to kill you.”
“Huh,” he replied cooly. “I feel the same way.”
I didn’t get the joke he was trying to make. He continued: “How are the waffles?”
“Fine,” I replied, not yet aware of what had just happened.
Then an uncomfortable silence settled in.
Processes of Abstraction
For a moment neither of us spoke. She had taken up smoking, was practiced in exhaling through her nose. It was cool, I admit. She leaned hard on her elbows, took a moment to glare at me, and jammed her cigarette violently into its ashtray. Music from a neighbor’s stereo was stirring somewhere outside.
“It’s a terrible thing, what happened,” she sighed, lighting another cigarette.
I couldn’t disagree, but I said nothing. She had painted her apartment this odd shade of light blue. Through the haze (she had been smoking all night), the walls took on a dinghy, worn look – like a discarded Tiffany’s bag.
“What did you expect,” she said abruptly, pissed that I wasn’t listening. “You left. I had to stay here. I threw out all your shit and painted over your poems. They were good, really good. But they had to go.”
My eyes burned from the smoke, and from fourteen hours of driving. I swallowed the rest of my martini.
“I write fiction now,” I said in a way that I found impressively detached. Then I walked to her desk and unearthed a Sharpie from under a pile of cords, papers, and letters (unopened) from me.
Philosophical Acumen
I must have fallen asleep, for I don’t know how long – at some point she had lit her favorite candle (shaped like a man’s bashed in skull), so I had probably slept a while. She was as I remembered: arms hugging her legs, book in her hands. The flame of her favorite candle looked like a man trying to shake off his own immolation. He writhed, casting her profile in varying depths of black.
She smiled. “Someone was tired.”
I rubbed my eyes. “I guess.”
The house was shadowy and cool.
“It’s snowing,” she said, eyes returned to her book.
I looked behind me. “Jesus,” I said, transfixed by the vast white on the other side of the window. “How long was I asleep?”
She shrugged. “A few days. It hasn’t been snowing this whole time, though. Just since yesterday.”
Yesterday?
I swung my legs off of the couch and stared at her. She caught my gaze, momentarily, before the shadow cast by her favorite candle swelled again.
“What,” she said from somewhere in the shadow. “I wanted to finish my book. But your friend K came over instead.”
The shadow receded from her face and she was still smiling.
I Shall Be With You
The photographer called again. “Just checking in. Are you okay?”
He had been calling everyday for the past week, leaving the same message: “It’s terrible. Just terrible.” I answered today, figuring that if he hadn’t caught his error by now, he never would.
“Are you sure you have the right number?”
“I’m sure. How are you holding up?”
“Um. Excuse me?”
“And this close to the wedding,” he continued to himself. “I’ll return your deposit. You’re dealing with enough.”
“We got married in December of last year.”
He paused: “I don’t think so…” His voice trailed off into confusion.
“I’m positive. You took our photos. My favorite one is on my desk.” Her head on my shoulder, my hand creeping up her dress; we looked like models in a perfume advertisement. The me in the picture stared back at me. Was he as confused as I was?
“Look, K,” the photographer whined. “It was on the news.”
I hung up and read on the internet about my wife’s death. I read, too, about our imminent vows.
I looked back at our picture. The me in the photo looked upset now, his hand continuing it ascent up my wife’s wedding dress.
Formalities Among Us
This wasn’t how things were supposed to be.
She was the whore – fallen, despicable.
Yet here she sat, poised on the edge of the bed like an angel, ever the image of one neither fallen nor despicable.
“Are we doing this or not?” Her disdain filled the room. She wrapped her arms around her knees, sighed, looked toward the carpet.
I said nothing, leaned harder against the door.
She was the whore, repository of failure. But the intensity in her eyes compromised her expendability. Had I known then, when I let her into my luxury car, that she was not, in fact, human waste, I would have driven elsewhere, looked elsewhere for whatever it was I was looking for.
I didn’t want to fuck her because of carnal desire. I wanted to fuck her to debase her, to make myself feel better. I was the upright citizen; she was the whore.
I had ruined lives, trashed futures, lost everything.
She was supposed to absorb, affirm my failures, allow me to start anew.
But her body radiated goodness, filled the motel room with oppressive optimism.
“You’ll still have to pay me,” she said, oblivious to the worth I saw in her.
Complicated and Enlightening
The train’s repetitive click-clack wakes her every night.
“Did you hear that noise,” she asked the morning after she first stayed the night, nose pressed against my cheek, head sunk deep into her pillow.
“It was the train,” I replied, feeling myself fall in love.
“Charming. Does it come through here every night?”
“It does.”
“Great. You’re lucky I like you.”
I propped myself up on my elbow, glanced around the room: wine bottles, condom wrappers, and empty chocolate boxes. “We should do something else some time.”
“Why?” She climbed on top of me.
She moved in with me several weeks later, complaining about the train. Then we started to fight, and our nightly bingeing on wine, sex, and chocolate gave way to heavy silence and passive aggression.
As our relationship worsened she took to walking the train tracks at night.
“I’m not going to kill myself, K, relax,” she said.
I was unconvinced. So I walked with her, behind her, like a scolded but loyal pet. I bought her expensive earrings, tried to cheer her up. She pushed me in front of the train.
Now she sleeps in my bed, wakes with a smile whenever the train rumbles past.
No Time For Small Private Pleasures
I refused to finish the bottle of sake she brought over.
I didn’t like her much, and neither did she care for me. We were bored, worn out by too much solitude. So I cooked her dinner, touched her elbow. She left before dark and before I could touch her in better places.
“Keep the sake,” she said with false candor.
“Gladly,” I replied, flatly.
Alone in my apartment, I snatched up the glimmering green bottle of alcohol, held it close. My distorted reflection mocked my equally distorted existence.
Then, following protocol, I wrote her name on the bottle before putting it in the refrigerator with the other unfinished bottles of refrigerated alcohol other women had brought over and left behind. Countless kinds of cheap white wine, expensive vermouth, decently sophisticated beer, pretentious red wine. Now fancy sake.
I examined each bottle, touched carefully and purposefully each bottle, as though handling the delicate women whose feminine names adorned each bottle.
Satisfied that my record of romantic failures was still in tact, and indeed growing, I closed the refrigerator and spent the night – just like every night – curled up next to it, lulled to sleep by its gentle and accusatory hum.
Indifference Toward the Mad Dance
Experience taught me that antidepressant medication keeps the world’s miseries at arm’s length. Like living in a bubble, or being strung out all the time.
Experience also taught me that emotional invincibility is a dangerous pursuit, the limit too easily pursued. In my lesser moments I fell in love with women just to break their hearts. Their tears, spite, and venom had no effect. I betrayed friends, family; I did terrible things so the women I loved would vanish from my life. Just to see.
Alone and unfeeling, I swore off love and antidepressants. Without love and its complications, I wouldn’t need an escape. Without the sharp, poisonous women I crave, I would have no reason to protect myself from the consequences of my desires.
I met a woman, demure and caring, fragile. All bangs, yoga pants, and pumpkin spice lattes.
She stayed over. She stayed over a lot. I hid my pills away.
I woke one morning to find her in the bathroom, huddled over the sink. Her hair was disheveled, frightening. She turned toward me, exposing her demon within.
I backed away and hurriedly fetched my dusty vial of antidepressants. I was ready to fall in love again.
Blatant Self-Plagiarism
“You know,” she said, curling up in the passenger seat and pressing her cheek against its red leather, “I had this dream last night. You were made of pizza and I ate you.”
She reached across the console and rested her hand on mine, concernedly.
She continued: “It was awful. I felt like calling you, but I knew you were sleeping.”
Bullshit, I thought. She hadn’t called me in months. She only agreed to go out with me tonight because I told her – to my karma’s horror – that I was dying. We drank too much wine, and, in her drunken state, she decided that her dream portended my demise. Then she asked if I thought she had gotten fat.
In our months apart she got a new boyfriend and I got a new car. I stuffed her in the passenger seat and drove her home.
My car idling in her driveway, its headlights glaring at the back of an unfamiliar vehicle, she refused to remove her hand. Her house was dark.
“If K is so great,” I huffed, “where is he tonight?”
She sighed, said nothing. Then she moved to kiss me but sank her teeth into my face instead.
Memorabilia
K sold the ring his fiancee had given him. Some guy in the parking lot of a sandwich shop gave him $400, claiming that it was identical to the one he lost, a gift from his own fiancee.
K spent the first $100 at a strip club, folding his stack of dollars into paper airplanes and cascading them into the air, like a little squadron of warplanes, toward the pretty but malnourished stripper.
K spent the remaining $300 on a fat prostitute. He had no desire to sleep with the fat prostitute. Instead, he wanted to ride her, like she was a horse.
K used to be a skilled equestrian and won many awards. K fell in love with a pretty lady, also an equestrian, skilled. They were to marry, but things fell apart; K never rode again. K moved away and decorated his meager apartment with his awards. The urge to ride was strong, but he refused to return to horses.
K demanded the fat prostitute remove her clothes. Then he climbed atop her. He rode her vociferously, until they both collapsed into a heap of flesh.
K slept heavily. When he woke, the prostitute was gone, and so were his awards.
An Urgent Telegram
She sent herself to me, in a box wrapped with celebratory wrapping paper. By the time she arrived on my doorstep, a day late, the wrapping paper was badly tattered and you could see that the box she stuffed herself into was a shoe box that had contained men’s shoes, size 8.
She had a bow in her hair that was, in spite of the rough journey, relatively still in tact. Probably at one point positioned just so atop her head – like a halo – the bow barely clung to her forelocks.
She smiled at me when I opened the box and something unintelligible leaked from her badly distressed lips.
“That’s from stress you know,” I said, falling immediately back into my long neglected role.
“Fuck off,” she whispered playfully. Her makeup was smeared against the insides of the box and missing from her face almost entirely.
I picked her up from the box and kissed her, bristling against her dry lips.
Then I frowned, peered into the empty box. “Where’s the rest of you?”
It was her turn to frown. “It’s not important.”
I tucked her under my arm and marched inside. “I wish you would have told me you were coming,” I said. “I would have tidied up.”
“Happy birthday,” she said, changing the subject. She uncoiled her tongue to offer me a shiny tungsten ring. It was the one I wanted.
“How long are you staying?”
“Until I bleed to death.”
Then she sunk her teeth into her tongue.
The Frail
I lost the needle I used to sew her mouth shut. That also meant that I couldn’t sew her hands back onto her arms, or reattach my tongue – which I bit off, impulsively, after I swore I’d never speak to her.
Some time later, she asked me to cut her hands off and sew her lips together so she wouldn’t be tempted to sing me songs or write me poetry. I obliged, though her voice and her words sustained me.
I kept the needle on a chain, which I wore around my neck. When she was ready, I promised, I would unsew everything – when she was ready to nourish me again.
But I was mugged one day, coming home from the store. During the struggle the chain came off my neck and the needle disappeared. The eggs in my shopping bag also cracked and yolk got everywhere.
She smiled at me when I got home, but all I could do was cry and hide my bruises. When I opened my mouth, incomprehensible consonants tumbled out. She only gestured and flailed in return. I took a pen and wrote everything down: the mugging, the eggs, the needle. She shrugged, accepting the forever silence.
All I could do was write. All she could do was read.
But we discovered solace in each other’s gaze – and love, compassion, understanding. The silence would heal us.
Until I found her in the kitchen, her left eye dangerously close to the flame of her favorite candle.
The Great Below
He marched out to sea, leaving his luxury tennis shoes in a pile on the sand. While the other beachgoers retreated in light of the approaching storm, K surged forward.
She had returned. Now was the time.
He waded deeper into the water, felt the currents tug at his body.
She vanished into the sea during their honeymoon. Upset about something trivial, she threw herself into the water to spite K, to punish him, full of violence and rage. And it worked. He slid into cocaine addiction and ridiculous shopping sprees. He retreated into himself, blamed himself, cursed himself. He tried to kill himself. Then he bought luxury tennis shoes.
Yet rumors swirled: the sea was different now, violent, unforgiving, merciless. Ships were lost sometimes; people drowned sometimes; jellyfish and sharks and sea urchins attacked sometimes.
He dismissed the rumors at first. But love got the better of him. For he loved her still, after all this time.
One day he went to the sea, to see for himself, this violence, this rage. But the sea was calm, compassionate. He returned the day following, etc.
With each day, his desire for her violence and rage grew. And he waited – always at the edge of the water, always in his luxury tennis shoes.
It was her, today, churning the sea, tempting the weather. He ran his fingers through the seaweed, thinking of her muddy brown hair.
“All of this for you,” he muttered to nobody as the sea pulled him down.