Category Archives: Short Fiction
There was one bottle of wine in her wine thing that was off limits. Other wines would be bought, drank, bought again; but this particular wine was not to be quaffed unless the most spectacular occasion presented itself. She waved away his contention that the opening of a nice bottle of wine was its own occasion, offering instead: “Do something deserving of recognition, and I will open this bottle. Just for you.” An obstinate sort, he committed to doing not one “…thing deserving of recognition,” but rather many:
He cured cancer. He deflected that big meteor that was projected to destroy earth. He saved poor children. He repaired her ugly relationship with her family. He was, like, totally okay with her guy friends. He fought with rebel forces.
She was impressed by the things he did and readied to open said bottle of wine, one evening, over candlelight. “Wait,” he said, touching her hand. “Everything bad is in there–poverty, jealousy, illness. If you open that bottle the world will go back to how it was.”
She set the bottle down and moved to kiss him. But she set it too close to the edge of the dining room table.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, cancer, family, poverty, romance, wine | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
I didn’t have much money–in fact, but a lowly cog in the T education system, I still don’t. So after my parents were cremated I kept their ashes at my local temple; temples allow you to “temporarily” stash remains there if you can’t afford a decent(ish) burial plot. See, when death happens, it is customary to offer proper closure. Which seems to require an expensive whole in the ground.
I didn’t really need closure–it’s such a subjective concept, besides. But, you know, closure is what’ done. So whatever; I stashed my parents in the corner of my aforementioned local temple until I had enough money for closure.
But my particular profession promises no riches–in contrast to, say, selling drugs or sex–so I had to find other means.
I called K.
“Kill these people.” He named three people. “I’ll give you X dollars and you’ll be able to put your parents to rest.”
So I did. And I was handsomely compensated, thus. But on my way to get my parents I passed in front of a particular department store that sells things I like.
Three hours later I phoned K again. He seemed to understand. Then he named two more names.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, buddhism, burial, capitalism, class, death, money, temple | posted in Me, Short Fiction
The florist was clear: you needed the petals from 450 roses. Just perfect, she thought, for she had always planned on asking for K’s hand approximately 450 days after their first date–thus one rose to commemorate each day spent together. Ever the progressive sort, she forbade K to ask her to marry him: When I’m ready, I’ll ask you, she said 300 days ago.
150 days later, she did just that. At a restaurant way out of her price range. It was romantic, if financially ill-advised. They swiftly made plans to marry and she dutifully began plucking the petals from 450 roses. See, she had this grand idea of spreading the petals over the floor of the catherdral where they would claim ownership of each other; a floral walkway from entrance to alter.
She coaxed her vision to fruition, successfully scattering the petals of 450 roses like the ashes of 450 dead things the morning of their wedding. Then she customarily hid herself away until the appropriate time.
But that time never came because K slipped on her rose petal path and broke his neck in an overdetermined fall.
The florist had said something about that possibility. But she pretended not to hear.
Leave a comment | tags: church, cremation, death, florist, marriage, petals, roses, wedding | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
The tattoo artist was a master of his craft, but what his customer asked for proved difficult. The problem, he later justified to himself, was that “[he] just didn’t know what a woman being attacked by a school of jellyfish looked like.”
Matters were worsened by his extremely demanding customer who, wealthy indeed, was used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted. The tattoo artist could have waved him away with a curt flick of the wrist. But the sum of money offered was just too grand to pass up: “Come back at such and such date, and I will have your design.”
While the design seemed intimidating from the outset, the tattoo artist had been confident in his abilities. But time grew short, and the tattoo artist grew anxious.
He reached for his phone, only a few days left.
“Hello, K, I need to draw a woman being attacked by jellyfish.” Plans were made.
The next day he showed up at Q beach at the designated time, pad and pencil in hand. He sketched furiously, creativity liberated, until he realized that the woman in the water was his sister.
Besieged by anguish, he decided to double the price.
Leave a comment | tags: artist, fiction, jelly fish, money, sea, Short Fiction, tattoos | posted in Him, Short Fiction
K wondered why she kept herself in the dark,why she never bothered to turn on a lamp or overhead light or why she never lit one of the countless candles with which she had peppered her upper-middle class residence. Indeed, when he joined her for an evening cocktail or whatever, they were never alone, for the darkness kept them company until the sun (he often stayed the night because there were totally serious) chased it away.
He asked her once: “Why don’t we light a candle?” She rebuffed him: “Those candles are all made from the bodies of former lovers. For obvious reasons I don’t want to burn them.” It kinda made sense. To sit in the darkness, indeed to embrace it, seemed to suggest to K’s petulant intellect that her world was–figuratively–lighted by the affections of men.
But K grew uncomfortable with the idea of old flames hanging around during their intimate moments. He talked himself out of burning her house down. Instead, after dinner one evening he doused himself in her finest vodka and lit himself on fire. She was probably impressed with his devotion; but she never found jealousy to be an attractive quality.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, burn, candle, fiction, fire, flame, love, relationships, romance, tundish, vodka | posted in Her, Him, Short Fiction
It took him much too long to realize that his new tufted-back chairs were eating his other pieces of furniture. In fact, it was not until the girl he, like, was totally in love with said to him one morning, K, your dresser looks sad, that he realized the ordinariness of his world was creeping toward impasse.
Or whatever.
She was right, the girl he, like, was totally in love with: his dresser did look sad. An inquisitive sort, she pried further: Why did you get such a sad dresser? She figured it was some sort of high intellectual thing to surround oneself with negative affect–K being a high intellectual and all. The truth was that K’s dresser was less sad than afraid–fearful that today would be the day that K’s new tufted-back chairs would decide to eat him. K hadn’t really noticed that his furniture was slowly disappearing: he was in love and when one is in love, one doesn’t really notice things.
But there is one thing K will notice: tomorrow his tufted-back chairs will decide to go after the girl he, like, is totally in love with. He’ll notice, too, tears falling from his dresser’s eyes.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, chairs, dresser, fear, furniture, intellectual, love, Man, melancholy, sadness, woman | posted in Short Fiction, Woman
She was sitting on a mound of flower petals, crying out of one eye because, she said, she couldn’t find her other eye. She had taken it out to do something and it must have rolled away.
K didn’t like to see people in pain: Take one of my eyes, he said, climbing to join her atop the mound of flower petals. He gave her his right eye because she was still in possession of her left one, from which tears stopped falling in light of K’s generosity. She said thank you. K smiled in return. Take this as a token of my appreciation, she said, as she dislodged her rightfully-owned left eye to extract a handful of rods and cones. Popping her eye back in, she handed them over to K. He smiled again: Would you like to have dinner with me?
Later that night, they ate her rods and cones for dinner. They drank glass and lit their clothes on fire. I would like to disappear into your empty eye socket, she said romantically. K was moved, but also worried. She would find her missing eye in there. Then he would have some explaining to do.
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The clerk scrawled something on my receipt before stuffing it in its pretty envelope and handing it to me: her phone number. Call me. She made the shape of that with her mouth before guiding me to the door in that way that clerks do at snobby retail joints.
……….
Hello? You could tell she wasn’t used to talking on the phone.
Hi. This is K. From earlier today. You gave me your number.
I let her lead the conversation since this was her doing. She asked who the scarf was for. I told her. She asked how long we had been together. I told her that too. She asked if I loved her. I told her yes very much.
Then she told me about the flood. The poor are liquifying, she said. We don’t have much time.
She told me about the tallest building in the city. All the exclusive retailers are moving to the top floor so our most special clientele can continue shopping. The poor won’t rise that high. She was confident. We appreciate your business and look forward to your continued patronage. She hung up.
How thoughtful, I thought. But I don’t know how to swim.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, capitalism, class, flood, luxury, poor, relationships, shopping | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
She took off her clothes and slid into my bed wearing nothing but a black and gold watch. She kissed me and closed her eyes, burrowing into my body. Snow began to fall. I coiled myself around her to shelter her from the cold. Winter is coming, she whispered, I’ll keep you warm.
She took her watch off. I breathed her in and felt her coat my insides.
She sang softly, that song I like, from somewhere inside me, until I fell asleep.
“If I could start again…”
When I woke up she was beside me. You were dreaming, she said, her eyes closed. She smiled a smile with something behind it, maybe, or else I think too much when it comes to stuff like that. It’s getting worse, she said, smiling still, nodding toward outside, and you’re cold. That won’t do at all…Close your eyes.
I did as instructed and took a breath. She sang to me again, that song we like. I slept.
When I woke, she was gone.
I pulled her skin over my head and went back to sleep. Warm, still, for the first time in a long time.
“…a million miles away…”
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A sheet of paper, littered with menacing and indecipherable scrawl, plastered itself to the windshield of her luxury automobile. She should have turned around and gone back home. But she pressed on because she loves adventure and whispered threats of danger. Another sheet of paper, littered with the same scrawl, viciously wrapped itself around the hood ornament of her luxury automobile. She cursed because she curses often. It’s sexy. But that’s irrelevant to this story, probably.
The paper blew thicker and with greater force, like the churning ash left by nuclear explosion though less awful. Her phone buzzed. She ignored it. Because she already knew what happened: her 70-story office building was gone, and in its place a love letter standing 850 feet high had been left by someone obviously insane.
The first time this happened she sought to make amends with the author and convinced him to put the building back. Be reasonable, K, she had implored. That was a long time ago.
She approached the letter and lit it on fire with a fancy lighter she received from somebody not insane. She watched it burn for a moment, a flicker of satisfaction in her eye.
Leave a comment | posted in Short Fiction, Woman
There was something sinister waiting for K. He sensed it when he pulled up to the woman’s house. He sensed it when she greeted him at the door. She gave K a warm hug, and though he was outwardly receptive to it the way heterosexual men are always receptive to any sort of physical contact with attractive women, his insides recoiled from her touch.
He didn’t understand. While there had always been something incongruous about the woman, K had attributed it to the fact that she owned a hideous scarf that forestalled otherwise sartorial perfection. Worse, she insisted on wearing it.
The woman led K to the kitchen where she was readying a stilted romantic dinner. Wine? she offered, uncorking a bottle of Q.
She handed him a glass. K jostled its stem and watched the red liquid agitate. He used to drink Q regularly because it matched some girl’s lipstick. After she killed herself, he stopped drinking it for that reason. The woman offered a toast, her smile smeared with the perfect shade of red.
K put his wine on the counter and dove inside. The undertow pulled at him, as the woman brought his glass to her lips.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, date, lipstick, relationships, scarf, suicide, wine | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
Once a year I go to the bank vault. Once a year I am greeted by the woman in black and white and tell myself that next year I’m going to ask her out. We make small talk as she leads me to my lockbox. She leaves me in privacy. I open my box and let all of the memories out.
The bad ones. The ones that cause harm and hate. I deal with them, in the lockbox room; I relive them. They can’t escape; neither can I. Then after a while I put them back in my lockbox and leave. Then I go to Starbucks.
……….
I went to my lockbox yesterday. One of my memories was missing. I considered summoning the woman in black and white and demanding an explanation, but that might ruin my chances for a date next year. So I reconsidered. Plus: she’d never understand. She’d ask what was missing and what would I say? I closed my lockbox and went home, worried. Where is my memory?
At 3 this morning there was a knock on the door. A woman was on the other side. She seemed familiar though I didn’t know why. I invited her in.
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She told me to go to a bookstore on the corner of this street and that one. She knew I liked to read. I’ll meet you there, she texteded.
Men were milling around inside, perusing pedantic books they’d never read or understand. I approached a bookshelf and pulled on a tome called The History of Madness. I opened to page whatever. In the margins somebody had scribbled in red pencil: you can never go back.
She saddled up next to me. I shut the book and gave her a platonic hug. She was impressively dressed in black and white: I missed the memo–I was not in any decent color scheme. Do you know what this place is, she asked. It’s a speakeasy. She smiled.
A man emerged from behind the poetry section to lead us into the bar, where we both got really drunk. I told her about my problems: money, cocaine, you. We drew inane pictures of interspecies struggles. Then it was time to go.
I gave her another platonic hug. She faded into the night and I thought about that anonymous red message. Then I didn’t go after her. To do otherwise would have been madness.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, books, bookstore, cocaine, Foucault, history, literacy, madness, Michel Foucault, poetry, relationships, speakeasy | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
He refuses to believe that the world has changed. That’s an unfortunate thing to do, really, and dangerous. He fucks recklessly, convinced that a simple dose of penicillin will disarm the worst of whatever afflictions brood inside women’s bodies.
I don’t really care about that.
What I find interesting is that he never locks his doors—car, house, whatever. He should. But he doesn’t. Because he refuses to believe that the world is a place where you kinda really should do that. I asked him about it once. He said the world is good and decent. He also said that a MARINES CORPS sticker on his windshield would garner him respect from criminals who, after seeing his patriotic sticker, would go steal someone else’s shit. I asked him what if you get ripped off will you lock your doors. He said no because I believe the world is good even when at times it isn’t.
………………..
When the new girl—made out of silicone just as I like—told me that she wasn’t in it for the money, I believed her. The old girl had said the same. But she had been lying. But the world is good. So I went to the ATM.
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She asked what I wanted for, as she called it, ExMass. I knew she wouldn’t get me anything, but her asking me that particular question was her way of denying her own faults to herself. Which was fine. A necktie, I said. She didn’t say anything. She simply smiled a downcast smile and I kept my expectations in check, having known her long enough to know to do so. (Whenever a girl asks what I want for any gift-giving reason, I always say, A necktie. Because I like the feeling of being repeatedly strangled by domesticity and love.)
I knew what she wanted for ExMass without having to ask–something (anything!) expensive, because in her mind the more money a guy spends on her, the more she is “loved” by him. She has a bunch of pricey male-authored gifts that she clings to in the name of “nostalgia and memory” but really because they remind her of the commercial value of her subjectivity: I am worth this much in white gold, Dolce & Gabanna, and Lululemon leg warmers.
She began to assemble the fake ExMass tree, and my throat began to tighten under the grip of a thousand neckties.
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Women claim that they wear thongs so that continuity is not disrupted (something about panty lines). But as the woman tried in vain to dislodge her thong from her ass, her continuity was disrupted in a most unanticipated way. She picked at it through her tight leather pants, and had she not been so focused on her discomfort, one would have thought she wasn’t wearing underwear at all–sublimating any presumption of propriety (which research suggests is the “real” reason women wear thongs these days). (Don’t ask me how I know that.) (I’m paid to know a lot about a lot of things.)
K nudged me. Get her to stop doing that, he said. You do it, I countered.
The woman spun around to face us, having evidently overheard our conversation. With a focused gaze, she kicked off her shoes and slithered out of her leather pants. Then she took off her thong and crammed it in her mouth. She chewed and swallowed with minimal effort.
Giving us both the finger, she marched off, leaving her shoes and leather pants behind.
I glanced at K. That was weird.
I know, he replied. I’m wearing the same exact pair.
Leave a comment | posted in Me, Short Fiction, Woman
The man who lives next door took my old girlfriend.
I had propped her up against the dumpster in the alley. But not five minutes later I saw him sauntering toward his porch with her tucked under his arm and a grin on his face.
It’s just as well, I thought with good reason, for I had thrown her out. Yet I caught myself thinking about them. (Guys get like that so it’s fine, really.) I also thought about her two dimensional curves and her icy eyes–her best feature.
I had to see her again. Under the cover of night I crept over to the man’s house and peered through a window. He was on the couch uttering things to her. She was leaning against the wall, staring at him. Those eyes used to fixate on me, I said to myself, consumed with rage probably.
The next day while the man was out, I broke into his house. She was in the bedroom. I pounced and ripped her to shreds. Then I lit her on fire. But I don’t understand fire. So the fire spread to the rest of the house.
I ran back to my house and dialed my realtor.
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“No man is going to care about that. I mean look at me.” She was serious when she said this, though later she would protest that she had been joking. (Which might have been true in the way that a man “jokingly” asks his lover if she wants to have a threesome with her twin sister.)
He did look at her. In fact, that’s all he did. Because she demanded his gaze, subtly threatening to place herself at the mercy of another man’s lecherous and lustful stare if he ever looked away. As awful as that sounds, maybe, to you, her demands were mutually beneficial: as much as she claimed that she didn’t need his gaze, she did for various unimportant psychoanalytic reasons; he needed his gaze too, because for superficial men such as himself, looking at women who live only to be looked at was the only reason they lived.
But one cannot sustain oneself on looks alone. So one night he threw himself from the window (there were probably other reasons too). But before he did that, he took his eyes out and set them on the nightstand. She’d add them to her collection, no doubt, in the morning.
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Dismissing another invitation to socialize, K knew that rumors were festering. K is addicted to porn, his friends hissed to each other. They were not entirely wrong. But they’d never understand.
……….
He had decided to indulge himself one evening after his pretty girlfriend dumped him for some reason only pretty girls can get away with. K cued up a video and readied the things men need when they watch porn (I wouldn’t know). But as the video uncoiled itself, as the woman on the screen said and did the things women in those videos say and do, K’s arousal turned to disbelief. She was saying and doing the very same things that his pretty girlfriend had always said and done. Even the filthy things that oozed from her mouth in the name of anonymous male sexual desire: it was all the same. K could not look away. When the video ran its course, he started it over. K stared-transfixed-at this woman who was engaged in a twisted reenactment of every intimate moment he had had with his pretty girlfriend.
……….
With tissues close by, K turned off the lights and pressed play. It didn’t take long before he began crying.
Leave a comment | posted in Him, Short Fiction, Woman
Have you eaten, asked the woman I found out in the rain. She made herself at home in my kitchen.
I nodded.
She knew I was lying. Still, she took the food from my cupboard and ate it as though she were entitled to do so. How long she had been out in the rain, I don’t know; neither do I know why she had been out there without coat or umbrella.
I’m still hungry, said the woman I found out in the rain. I had already sold what was supposedly valuable to make it through the winter. I didn’t bother telling her that she had just eaten all of it.
I went into my study to get my mother’s emerald ring. Her husband had given it to her before dying. Which is what mother did: When you marry, give her this, she instructed me once from her sickbed. It’s just as well, I mused, as I took the ring from its drawer, that’ll never happen now anyway.
……….
I brought back bread, charcoal, poultry, and rice.
That’s it? asked the woman I found out in the rain.
I was beginning to understand why I found her out in the rain.
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Fatness doesn’t photograph well. That’s what I told her when she asked to be my muse. She shied from my gaze after that, hiding herself under blankets and layers of clothes. I walked in on her when she was in the bathroom doing something naked in front of the mirror. She screamed at me. That was in the summer.
She fucked somebody while I was away, somebody who liked fat women. I didn’t care. I fucked a skinny woman while I was away. She cared. She screamed at me. That was in the fall.
In the winter she approached me, wanting to be my muse again. Take your clothes off. I hadn’t bothered to look at her in months; her body–barely a body at all now–both horrified and aroused me. Let me get my camera. She fucked somebody again, recently. I cared this time. I hadn’t fucked anybody since the last time I did that, but that wasn’t why I cared.
In the spring she died of starvation. I took one last photo before having her buried.
3 Comments | tags: affect, body image, cheating, death, deception, fat, photo, photography, relationships, romance, seasons, skinny, starvation, thinness | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
What are you reading?
I lifted my eyes to meet hers.
I could tell by the way she deliberately leaned over the bar to place my glass of designer vodka Just So that she wanted a large tip. You learn quite early on in life not to look down a stranger’s shirt when she entices you to do so. You learn later on that there’s no practical reason to do that anyway.
Nothing. See? I showed her, because even I didn’t really believe me. For the past two weeks, I had been coming here every Tuesday after work to sip expensive vodka and sit and stare at one particular blank page in a book of blank pages.
She smiled awkwardly and sorta went away (because why would she not?). I went back to my blank page.
………………..
She returned to my side of the bar.
Here, she said. Write something meaningful and important.
I lifted my eyes to take the pen from her hand. She smiled in a meaningful and important way this time, maybe, and then went away again. I thought for a moment before pressing pen to blank page.
The ink was blue. Like her eyes.
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She came over to give me a rose that wept Ambien tears because, she said, it would help me sleep. Which I hadn’t been able to do for quite some time. It was blue like her eyes and thorny like her soul and smelled good like her body during the winter.
She hadn’t been sleeping either. I knew because neither countless layers of make-up nor looming “cosmetic procedure” could hide the tired in her eyes. It was always the same nightmare that woke her up: acid thrown on her face by a bitter lover, and a lifetime under a burqa and sex with blind men.
The person that throws acid on my face is you, K. Her therapist apparently helped her figure that out, because last I had heard his identity was still a mystery. But I always had my suspicions.
(I didn’t tell her that the same dream was preventing me from sleeping. But in my version she throws acid on her own face and demands that her lover gouge his eyes out as “a testament of [his] love for [her].”)
She left and I ate her blue rose.
Then I went into the kitchen to find an icepick.
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I woke up in a bag of cocaine.
Endless white dunes of addictive sand–coarse against my skin, but also soothing in the way that cocaine is. Like swimming in money–unpleasant, probably, but the idea feels good.
I propped myself up on my elbows. There was a woman sitting cross-legged at my feet, a woman whose blue eyes were bluer because we were imprisoned in white and whose body seemed to be an unsustainable fantasy masking a grotesque reality, I thought.
Where am I?
In a bag of cocaine.
I was worried, and she could tell–as though she had been my lover for many years and knew my expressions and silences and gestures from countless moments of trial and error. Her eyes were familiar, maybe.
Relax. Other than the occasional nosebleed, it’s not that bad here. Just don’t get the cocaine wet. You know what happens when cocaine gets wet, right? It gets angry, sticky, and inhospitable. It’s also really expensive.
The woman uncoiled her legs and climbed on top of me. Pressing her lips to my ear, she whispered something in a voice used to whispering enticing things to men.
I began to sweat, and the ground began to quake.
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She was my favorite client. She wasn’t very pretty and her body was grey with age, and what she asked for was creepy. But she never tried to touch me or to get me to fuck her in weird ways.
K and I would compare stories once in a while. He would go on about So-and-So demanding him to do Such-and-Such. I had rival stories, and I shared them with enthusiasm, but I always kept her and her request to myself.
The first time she asked me to drink her urine I thought she was joking. Then she pulled a jar out of her Bottega and handed me $800, double my hourly rate.
She came every Wednesday. And every Wednesday she pulled the same jar out of the same Bottega. And every Wednesday I drank her urine for $800.
She came yesterday. I drank her urine.
I’m going to die tomorrow, she said, after I was done.
I know, I replied.
She wanted to know how I knew. So I told her I could taste it in her urine.
She wanted to know what death tastes like. So I told her death tastes like many things, but her death tastes like tears.
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