Category Archives: Short Fiction
Never did I think I would love, for love was a ridiculous, childish concept.
But I loved, finally, in spite of myself. I loved, I knew, because I thought only of her, always. Because she was my default, my origin.
She says, “Fuck you, K,” in a voice that craves verbal violence, disappearing from view even though I can see her, touch her. I reach, she recoils – a perverse dance. She looks at me with the eyes a stranger, yanking her engagement ring from her finger, throwing it out the window.
I go outside and sift through the bushes. I find her ring floating in a dog’s water dish.
I pretend I am not relieved and go back inside. She is dead, having swallowed my pain killers.
I put her ring on her lithe, cold finger. I press her lithe, cold finger to my lips.
Then I go to sleep, taking the same pain killers. I dream of our wedding. Our families are present. We are happy.
I wake up, see her dead body at the kitchen table, coax myself back to sleep. Again our wedding, our families, our happiness.
I wake, finish my pain killers, kiss my phantom bride.
1 Comment | tags: affect, death, dog, drugs, flash fiction, love, marriage, pain, relationship, Short Fiction, short story, sleep, water, wedding | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
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.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, cemetery, coffin, death, flash fiction, grave yard, love, relationships, romance, sex, Short Fiction, short story, starvation, thinness, trespass | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
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.
3 Comments | tags: affect, alcohol, bar, fiction, flash fiction, love, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, sommelier, wine, women | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
I found the angel dangling from the end of her halo, her limp body suspended by the prettiest cloud in the sky.
She was still alive, I noticed, as I hurriedly untied the knots in her halo.
I collected her wispy body and crinkled halo and vanished into my apartment. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the angel. I wanted to nourish her but I also wanted to eat her. So I placed her on my blue velvet couch and watched her.
She slept the way you sleep after something traumatic happens. Was her trauma her attempted suicide or all that preceded it? I could never know.
The sky darkened because it wanted its angel back. It crackled and groaned, but still she slept, her chest rising and falling slightly in response to some life still stirring inside her.
The rain came and her cloud pounded on my window. “Don’t make me go back there,” she whispered. “I hate it.”
I pressed my vial of antidepressants into her hand. She sat up and forced a smile.
Then she took her halo and smoothed it out before placing it several inches above her head, where it stayed.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, angel, antidepressant, cloud, death, depression, flash fiction, halo, heaven, life, rain, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, spring, suicide | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
Overcome with self-loathing, K nevertheless continued to coax the girl. He sighed to himself, wondering what he got out of these rituals. He sighed again, then ordered her another martini.
A practiced man in this regard, K already knew what she would look like underneath her top. Her breasts would be decent, her stomach would be tight. She would have a tattoo decorating some body part. This did not excite K. But he pressed on. He had already determined that she was wearing a thong and made inferences about her grooming customs that were probably correct.
He knew what it would feel like. The bodies of women are always the same on the inside. He knew that she would thrash and moan and that he would respond accordingly. She would say amazing things under his spell. He would do the same in kind.
The charade bored K. It even disgusted him. Yet after tonight, he would do it again. He was probably already thinking about it.
“Be rough with me,” said the girl. K sighed and retrieved a knife from the kitchen, eliciting a frown from the girl – not that rough!
K handed her the knife and closed his eyes.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, body, boredom, flash fiction, knife, martini, masochism, sadism, sadomasochism, sex, sexuality, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Him, Short Fiction
My girlfriend’s body wanders off at night. I’m not sure where it goes. But every night it leaves our bed to go…elsewhere.
My girlfriend’s head always stays behind, perched on the expensive pillow my girlfriend (formidable in her wholeness) demanded I purchase.
Lately I’ve grown jealous. My girlfriend’s body always comes home before morning, but it’s different. When it gets back in bed, I reach for it but it recoils. It smells like exciting places we’ve never been.
Over breakfast, my girlfriend’s head (her eyes, really) and I exchange knowing glances. We look at my girlfriend’s body, which seems all too aware of our judgmental gaze. It fidgets in its chair. It touches my hand and I reach for its pussy. My girlfriend’s body stands and leaves the room.
“Sorry,” my girlfriend’s head says sympathetically.
I grow restless at night, after my girlfriend’s body leaves again.
I stroke the hair on my girlfriend’s head. My girlfriend’s head knows I want to have sex. My girlfriend’s head hates giving blowjobs.
I grow frustrated. So I put my girlfriend’s head in a sack and tie it tightly.
My girlfriend’s body doesn’t come back. So now sex is completely out of the question.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, blowjob, body, breakfast, flash fiction, head, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“Draw me a picture,” said the woman, sliding me pencil and paper.
“Of what?”
“Draw my portrait.” She brushed her hair from her shoulders and posed in mock grandiosity.
I drew a jellyfish fighting with a human skeleton. I was impressed with my technique and wanted, momentarily, to keep the picture for myself.
“What the fuck, K,” she said, putting her clothes back on. “Not really what I had in mind.”
I wanted to point out the imperfections in my sketch. I wanted to tell her that because the ship was swaying rather violently, my lines here, here, and here were imperfect.
“It’s just as well,” she bellowed. “A storm is coming.” She knocked me over as she left my cabin, letting my picture float to the ground.
Against my knee, I smoothed out the wrinkles of my discarded drawing, hoping that I might frame it after all.
Climbing to my feet, I locked eyes with the jellyfish and human skeleton outside of my porthole. I shrugged and the skeleton shrugged back.
With a bony finger the skeleton beckoned me over. “Careful,” it mouthed through the glass, “you’re next.”
A knock at my door. I already knew who it was.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, art, body, death, flash fiction, jellyfish, murder, relationships, romance, sex, ship, Short Fiction, short story, skeleton, storm, window | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“I feel her perfume on me still,” K said, fidgeting and gasping. “I don’t know, it’s just…on me.”
The date he went on went poorly. The woman sat politey in her chair and drank the expensive drink K dutifully purchased. Then she went home while he was busy paying the tab. He never touched her – the goal of any date, unachieved. Not even a handshake.
Later, not entirely sure what happened and not necessarily upset about it, he began to feel the effects of her perfume. It was pleasant to the nose (expensive, K could tell), but heavy on the skin, like a flak jacket or the lead thing you wear at the dentist during x-rays.
K spent an agonizing evening on the floor of his modest apartment, air seeping in fits from the holes in his body. She was beautiful and K would have pleasured himself over the toilet, making up for intimate contact denied. But the weight was crippling. So he left even himself untouched.
Sitting in front of me, K’s body leaned like a dying flower.
“Can I have her number,” I asked.
“Fuck off,” he replied with his last breath. “I think she likes me.”
1 Comment | tags: affect, alcohol, body, death, dentist, flash fiction, masturbation, perfume, relationships, romance, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction
“What are you reading,” I inquired in my best disinterested voice.
Silently, she held her book to her face to reveal its title: An Exegesis on Repressed Masculinity.
I suppressed an eye roll. “Is it interesting?”
“Interesting enough,” she shrugged. “It’s probably the story of your life: sex and anguish, sex and decay, sex and self.”
“That sums it up.”
She smiled.
“May I?” I extended a hand across the bar top.
My name, in elegant font, was printed along the book’s spine. And my photo – an old one, taken with my now dead dog – was on the back.
“Where did you get this?”
“That guy over there. He’s the author. And” – she raised her ring finger – “my husband.”
He kissed her on the cheek and drank the rest of her martini. “Ready,” he asked in my voice.
She nodded, and then addressed me: “Keep it. I’ve read it eighteen times.” She had written her number on the first page.
We had sex two days later.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she breathed heavily afterward, “but my husband would like to join us now. Come on out, K.”
I watched in terror as I stepped out of her bedroom closet.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, bar, book, dog, flash fiction, martini, masculinity, picture, relationships, sex, Short Fiction | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
“May I please have my eyes back,” asked the angel. I wasn’t sure how she knew I had them (I found them in the gutter; the dazzling green of the iris caught the sun and blinded me), but her voice was stern. I reached into the breast pocket of my jacket and handed over her eyes. The angel and I had sex and I fell in love.
Sometime later the devil came to my door, offering a cure for my heartache. “Take this,” the devil offered, extending a hand that gripped a small pill. “She will leave your mind as will the sorrow she has caused.”
I retrieved the pill from the devil’s outstretched palm. “It’s a special compound just for you,” the devil said. Small and rectangular in shape, the pill had a “K” in its center.
The devil saw me hesitate. “Or take this” – the devil produced another pill – “and be haunted by her memory until you die.”
I retrieved the additional pill and placed it on my palm next to the first pill. They were identical.
“But you may not have them both,” said the devil impatiently, glaring at me with eyes a penetrating shade of green.
2 Comments | tags: addiction, death, devil, drugs, eyes, green, love, relationships, romance, satan, sex | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction
“You have the most charming way of eating,” I cooed on my way past her table. “I don’t mean for that to sound creepy or anything,” I stopped to clarify. “You just caught my eye and I couldn’t look away until you were done with your spaghetti.”
She smiled and dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin: “Thank you.”
She said nothing further so I exited the café.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I stared at the ceiling and watched her eat her plate of spaghetti. “Is she as dainty when she eats a medium rare hamburger,” I wondered, “or oysters on the half shell?” I closed my eyes and dreamed of the woman.
Every night thereafter she infiltrated my dreams, always seated at a table with a white tablecloth and always eating.
After a week, I grew concerned that she was growing fat.
I returned to the café. “Has the woman who eats spaghetti in a womanly way been in recently,” I asked the maître d.
“You’re the eighteenth man to ask of her today,” he scoffed before gesturing to the dining room, which was occupied by single men all waiting for the woman who ate spaghetti.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, cafe, dream, eating, flash fiction, food, hamburger, love, oysters, relationships, romance, Short Fiction, short story, sleep, spaghetti | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, The Woman
We hadn’t seen each other since college. Our friendship ended abruptly because we were in love with the same woman. He wanted to fight over her. I politely declined and wished him well.
I wasn’t surprised when he told me of their breakup. Everybody knew that this particular woman had been adamant about remaining a virgin until marriage.
“You lucked out, K,” he said with a mouthful of vodka. “She never caved.”
The way he described their sexless courtship – hours of cuddling and making out – was rather charming.
His eyes lit up. “I saw her last week. She called and told me that she’s married now. Then she invited me over. Before we broke up, she promised to have sex with me once she was married – even if she wasn’t married to me. I guess she was serious.”
“Did you?”
“Of course.”
“And her husband?”
“She told me that you’re her husband and that you’ll probably kill me. She said you’ll have a sharp knife with you.”
I put the knife on the table and shrugged. “I’m not going to kill you with this.” I nodded toward his empty martini glass and watched his throat tighten. “Thanks for the drink.”
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, bar, body, death, flash fiction, love, marriage, martini, murder, relationships, romance, sex, Short Fiction, short story, virgin, virginity, vodka | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction, Uncategorized
I know this artist who is also a taxidermist. Naturally gifted in art, he found that he could only accurately sketch living creatures if he killed them, stuffed them, and manipulated their bodies into wildlife scenarios.
In his home, which I borrowed for the first time in high school to rob my girlfriend of her virginity, are lots of taxidermied creatures and accompanying artistic renderings. They’re perfect renderings and also that girl and I broke up shortly after because the dead animals, which seemed very alive, made her uncomfortable.
I had the opposite reaction and haven’t been able to have sex not surrounded by dead animals ever since.
“K, I need your house,” I implore a little less often than I like. With each visit, I find that his home is a little more overrun by his animals and his art. Last week, I had sex with a girl inside the mouth of a large shark. She cut her hand on one of its teeth and won’t return my calls.
I kinda want him to kill and stuff her. But he would probably want to sketch her and that would make me uncomfortable because I like her a little bit.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, animals, art, artist, body, death, flash fiction, love, murder, relationships, sex, shark, Short Fiction, short story, sketch, taxidermy, virgin, virginity, wildlife | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction
For Christmas I wanted a prostitute. “A good one, for an hour, no more,” I promised Dad.
On Christmas day I bounded toward the tree expecting a card with cash, and an encouraging note from Dad: “Money is power, son,” or something. Even an actual prostitute with bows covering her private areas. Instead, all I got was a piggy bank. “Save up and buy one for yourself,” Dad said, patting me on the shoulder.
As I dropped my only quarter into the pig’s backside, I heard the pig mock my lack of masculinity. I stole $50 from K. He sold drugs to the other kids at school, so I didn’t feel bad. I offered a girl in my Japanese class $50 to have sex with me. A poor, trashy sort, she could hardly refuse. “Money is power,” I exclaimed when I was through with her, tossing a dirty $50 bill on the bed.
Two weeks later I approached her again, having nicked another $50 from K. “It’s $100 now,” she replied.
When I was finished with her, I grumbled something about money being power, but now I was less sure. “See you next week,” she asked, an unfamiliar confidence in her voice.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, Christmas, christmas tree, flash fiction, money, piggy bank, prostitution, relationships, school, sex, Short Fiction | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
My girlfriend was the most beautiful woman in history. So when she was blown up by insurgents, the world’s museums went to extremes to collect her parts, divvy them up, and house them behind expensive glass in expansive rooms.
I didn’t realize this at first. “You know,” said K, recently returned from abroad, “I saw your girlfriend’s torso at a museum in Paris.” He handed me a replica, a souvenir he purchased in the gift shop. I had read of her death – “Most Beautiful Woman in History Killed by Terrorists” – and lamented. But my thoughts shifted as soon as K handed me her mini torso. I punched him in the face and stole it.
I traveled the word, collecting her replica body parts from museum gift shops throughout the world. In Tokyo I acquired her tongue; in Tel Aviv I acquired her womb. And so on.
After a year of travel I had all of her body parts, inside and out. Standing a mere four inches, she was as exquisite as I remembered. I carried her to my bed and we had sex. Unfortunately my erect penis broke her in half. I lamented my girlfriend’s death for the second time.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, art, body, death, flash fiction, gift shop, murder, museum, penis, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, terrorism, terrorist, torso, womb | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
Climbing the fire escape, I thought about all the times I’ve been rejected: elementary school kickball teams, high school dances, college orgies, post-college job interviews. The higher I climbed—certain that she was in the apartment on the top floor and not “catching happy hour with a colleague”—the lower into despair I sank. The sun was descending and my shadow lagged further and further behind, as though it didn’t want to accompany me on my quest for vindication.
The knife in my pocket suddenly felt heavy.
Once, a girl broke my heart and I slashed her tires. As a peace offering I gave her some pears that I found in the middle of the highway, the result of a crashed fruit truck. I told her they came from the mall.
I heard her laughter through the door. Peering between the blinds I saw tangled bodies. Overcome with rage, I charged the door.
“K,” she screamed, “what are you doing here?”
I looked for my shadow, which had decided to wait outside. I readied my knife but paused when I realized she was in bed with a woman.
Arousal overtook me and my shadow shook its head from the doorway.
Leave a comment | tags: affair, affect, apartment, cheating, crash, flash fiction, fruit, knife, lesbianism, orgy, pears, prom, relationships, sex, shadow, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“Why are you here,” I asked in an accusatory tone.
“I loved him,” she moaned, extending a finger toward the coffin. She had dirt under her fingernail. “We were going to marry next August.”
“See that brunette in front? That’s his wife. So, why are you here?” I was calm.
“I don’t know.” Her eyes were red. She grabbed the lapels of her miniskirtsuit and pulled them tightly to her chest. “Do I have to leave?”
“Well, no. But you’ve been at every funeral for the past month. So I’m curious.” The authority with which I spoke prevented her from realizing that I was guilty of the same.
“I just prefer the dead.” She glared at me.
I was overcome with passion.
“So do I,” I gasped, grasping her hand. It was like ice. She recoiled but I refused to let go. “It’s okay. I understand.” She was obviously dead and found comfort in those like her. I, however, was just a deviant with a fetish for dead bodies. “Give me a chance,” I implored. “I won’t let you down.”
I took the flower she had tucked behind her ear (symbolizing life, perhaps) and sank its stem into my neck.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, coffin, death, fashion, flash fiction, flower, funeral, love, relationships, Short Fiction, suit | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
I spent much of her insurance money repairing her body (no easy feat after the body dies), filling bullet holes, sewing lacerations, reattaching her head. The embalmer thought I wanted an open casket (he made her beautiful), not knowing that there would be no funeral.
I cashed in the rest of her policy to have her body encased in ice and stored in my newly-purchased freezer. “You said I could,” I muttered the first time I laid her frozen body on the bed and, with my newly-purchased icepick, chiseled out her sex organs.
She was at the height of physical perfection when she was murdered. And thus in preserving her body, I preserved her sexual attractiveness. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I wheeled her out of the freezer, liberated the parts I needed, performed the acts I needed to perform, and wheeled her back in.
Yesterday she escaped from her block of ice. I placed her body on the bed but received a phone call. My mom. “K! Why don’t you call anymore?!”
When I went back to the bedroom she was gone. So was the icepick.
If you’re reading this, whoever you are, help! There may still be time.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, death, flash fiction, freezer, funeral, help, icepick, mom, money, murder, organs, relationships, saturday, sex, sex organs, Short Fiction, short story, thursday, Tuesday | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“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
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
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
When K told me that he was going to kill himself if I stole his girlfriend, I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think that I could steal his girlfriend.
K was wealthy and educated, and what girl would refuse such a man? I was the opposite in every respect; had I found myself on the Titanic or an equal vessel I would have had to steal my way aboard. I began flirting with her simply out of spite, as if to insinuate to K that although he could have whatever he wanted, I could take it from him with ease (rich men have large egos, which is a huge turnoff).
I didn’t enjoy fucking her. Indeed, I courted her out of spite. And she, the caged bird of a wealthy birdist, allowed me to court her for the same reason.
She and I were upstairs when K’s telegram arrived, announcing his imminent demise—“…by the time you read this I will be dead.”
“Shit. K’s dead,” I said after reading the telegram. She, still in my bed, feigned sadness.
“I guess you’ll have to marry me now.” She coiled my blanket snuggly around her.
K, from somewhere safe, probably smiled.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, ego, flash fiction, marriage, money, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, spite, telegram, wealth | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
As she choked me, I wondered if she had murdered anyone before. Her grip was confident. She showed no concern that she might take things too far–as though she knew the right moment to stop.
Had she not been so attractive, I may not have followed her home that night–out of curiosity, I assure you. She may not have approached me: “Why are you following me?” She may not have invited me to her home to debase and fuck me. But the intensity of her presence was hypnotic. I was truly under her spell.
Get the fuck out of here. I was used to the way she spoke to me. It chilled me but kept me alive. I balled up my clothes and headed toward the door. Catching a glimpse of myself in the reflection of her glass liquor cabinet, I rubbed at the red striations on my throat. Anybody would be able to guess what happened.
Use that. She nodded to a purple Armani draped across the sofa.
“Madam, have you ever killed anyone?”
All the men who come here. And with that scarf, in fact. Now, come here and let me tie it for you before you go.
1 Comment | tags: affect, Armani, death, fashion, flash fiction, masochism, relationships, sadomasochism, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
