Category Archives: Woman
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.
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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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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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With concerned fingers she traced the wounds on K’s back. What happened?
…
He made up his mind some time ago to stop lying to women, even to the ones who lied to him and to the ones who lied to themselves.
So he told her about the woman who had evil in her skin, the woman who dug her fingernails–always immaculately manicured and long enough to make Trent Reznor jealous–into his back whenever they groped and pawed at each other. The marks the woman left always turned into festering sores that gave way to sinewy scars. He saw a doctor once. A woman did this? He never went back.
He told her how he stopped taking his shirt off in hot yoga classes or going to the beach or otherwise appearing half naked in public (men like to do all those things). He told her how intimate moments with subsequent women ended before they began because his refusal to take his shirt off when he fucked them bespoke serious mental problems.
…
I like this scar the best, she said, and bit into it.
K jerked away, but by then it was too late; she had already disappeared into his wound.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, beach, doctor, hot yoga, masochism, Nine Inch Nails, romance, scars, wound | posted in Her, Him, Woman
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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As I tossed the smoldering Hallmark card into my kitchen sink, I thought back to that crazy girl K told me about.
Does this make me crazy, I wondered, as I watched the flames eat away at the image of Sleeping Beauty that adorned the front of the card. Certainly not. K’s crazy girlfriend set things on fire to prove a point to K, I rationalized, while I am burning this card to prove one to myself.
The card curled and crumbled into an unseemly mess and I found myself wondering what would happen to Sleeping Beauty now that her beauty was gone. Would the prince still want to kiss her? Would she sink into obscurity because, to paraphrase some feminist scholar, every woman knows that she is an unspeakable failure if she is not beautiful?
I doused the remaining flames.
……….
The next morning there was no trace of the Hallmark card. Does this make me crazy?
(Several years later I would hear the story of a burn victim who walked into a plastic surgeon’s office and fell in love with the doctor, who worked painstakingly on making her beautiful. Once he succeeded, he, too, fell in love.)
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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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K lay in bed wondering if he had dreamed the whole thing (if he had, this little story would naturally be over), and also wondering if the sound in the distance was really what it sounded like (it was, for the same reason) . He sat up and peered out the window.
Then he turned on the TV.
The woman in the pantsuit was visibly concerned–as though concerned specifically for K–and as she spoke, she did so in the manner of a soloist singing a sad song on a sad occasion: Women are in the immediate vicinity; take shelter now.
He hadn’t taken the appropriate precautions against more women. He managed to survive the last onslaught–though the toll had been considerable–and just sorta figured there wouldn’t be any more for a while. They had taken everything already; what more could they want? what more could they take?
They were getting closer. He needed provisions–food, water, nails, wood, knives.
K got dressed and fled down the stairs (he slept upstairs) and opened the door. But it was already too late.
Excuse me…
Her eyes were blue and she was beautiful.
Can I use your phone?
His head started to swim.
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I sent a glass of vodka over to the woman like they do in the movies, primarily because she didn’t have a drink in front of her but also because men do those things hoping for sex. She was sitting at the bar in an expensive dress probably purchased by a guy no longer around. The bartender set the glass down in front of her and gingerly gestured my way while saying something appropriate. The woman said nothing and neither did she raise her gaze from where it was–down. The bartender shrugged her shoulders and went about her business.
The woman took the glass in one well-maintained hand and with eyes still downcast poured it [the glass of vodka] out all over the bar top. She then set it [the glass empty of vodka] back down in front of her. What she did next was odd: she rose from her bar stool, unzipped her dress, and let it fall from her shoulders. She was wearing Agent Provocateur; I could tell because I once bought the same matching underwear set for a girl no longer around.
She turned and walked away from the dress at her feet and also, from me.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, bar, bartender, emotions, lingerie, prosthetic, vodka, woman | posted in Me, Short Fiction, Woman
She was black and white while the rest of the world was color. He met her because he wanted to take a picture of her because she was interesting looking. So he walked up to her and said, I’m putting two dollars in your can and then I’m taking your picture because you’re interesting looking. She hadn’t been looking at him but after that she was, he noticed. He took her picture. He could have sworn she smiled a little.
He went back the next day to where she had been the previous day and there she was, in black and white. He put money in her can again and she looked at him again. Whatever it is people say with glances and looks, they said those things, he thought. He didn’t take her picture. Rather, he introduced himself and made small talk. She said nothing but probably smiled a little again. She didn’t look away. He ran out of things to tell her so excused himself. Until tomorrow.
He wondered later if she would continue to look at him if he didn’t put money in her can.
He was not rich so didn’t want to fall in love.
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23:26……….
I didn’t know what to do until midnight. So I began making shapes out of the sleeping pills I had dumped out all over my table. I made a heart. I made a pig. I made an OM symbol. I made a beautiful woman. Why I chose midnight, I didn’t really remember. Probably to prove some sort of postmortem point to myself.
I waited. And I closed my eyes.
23:31……….
Hey. What are you doing? I opened my eyes kinda.
It was the woman. I told her I was waiting till midnight. She asked why, and I tried to explain that I really didn’t know anymore.
You’re going to change your mind if you wait. Just do it now.
Her voice was feminine, but also measured and mildly coercive. She seemed upset, though because she was made out of oblong sleeping pills it was hard to read her expression.
I told her I wanted to wait till midnight.
Just do it now. (I refused.)
23:35……….
If you do it now I’ll give you a blowjob. (………….)
I gobbled her body, washed it down with vodka, and unzipped my pants. I’m not sure if she ever followed through.
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She squinted in a half-unconvinced manner at the surgeon, and as she listened to him describe the state of K’s mangled and tortured but still breathing body she became more and more unconvinced. She knew K’s body better than anybody (a bold claim but a true one nonetheless); she worshiped it like an idol still, after all these years, and whoever the surgeon was describing wasn’t K. Couldn’t be K.
But where was K? He didn’t come home last night. And then the phone call this morning from the hospital asking her to come immediately.
She had just assumed. But now…
The surgeon, face creased with detached concern, excused himself and she slumped back in her chair to flip through the imaginary Rolodex of male bodies she had accumulated during her “reckless years.” Countless bodies, but each distinct in its own way, even memorable.
Then it dawned on her: of all the men whose suffering might be assuaged by her presence but whose body was unfamiliar–her father.
So she stood, straightened her skirt and left.
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The same four people continue to come to my funeral no matter how many times I die.
The man with the elk tattoo on one of his arms. The woman who’s prettier than your wildest dreams. The other two who aren’t really worth mentioning.
At my first funeral the man with the elk tattoo on one of his arms sat in the back of the church and the woman who’s prettier than your wildest dreams sat in the front. But with each subsequent funeral the man with the elk tattoo moves a little closer to the woman who’s prettier than your wildest dreams as though he isn’t doing it on purpose. He likes her because she’s prettier than your wildest dreams–which is a weird way to describe her beauty but whatever–and that’s really all men care about. She could be a wicked individual; she may have killed me for all he knows.
I don’t want him to go near her because I don’t like him and it bugs me that he’s doing that (it also bugs me that he keeps coming to my funeral). But if I keep dying because she keeps killing me, maybe I do after all.
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The things she did she said that she did them out of love (the violence, the conflagration). Which is to say, the things that she said that she did not do to those other men (nothing much at all) were things she had been able not to do because she did not love those other men, she said.
In other words, K thought to himself, she cannot harm somebody she does not care about.
They had much in common, which is why they loved each other.
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K had a pretty wife who died of tuberculosis. They say that TB is a pretty disease (befitting a pretty wife, then). Life seeps from the body like air from an unused football; it isn’t wrenched violently from the body in the manner of any of those other afflictions that end in “plague.” Over time, the body grows pale, fragile, until it ceases to be a body and becomes a corpse. This was so in K’s pretty wife’s case. Watching her die–which he did, of course–was like watching a light bulb go out. K cried when she died.
K leaves all the lights on in his house now, and changes them every Wednesday because his pretty wife died on a Wednesday.
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He knocked on the door to the girl’s “private studio” but really her shitty mezzanine level apartment. As he waited for her–he didn’t know what she looked like; she was thin and probably attractive based on the blurry photos he saw on the website and that’s all that really mattered because men are like that–he had a passing thought: this is probably a bad idea. He always had passing thoughts like that, though, so whatever.
Then the girl opened the door.
She held her composure better than he did (he was poor at doing that in general). Professor, she said, what an unexpected surprise. They both just sorta stood there. He, sartorially perfect as always, and she in a silk robe and nothing on underneath, probably.
He didn’t really know what to do. He tried to think back to the teacher-student etiquette seminar he took several years ago, but they didn’t cover situations like this one.
I should leave he said, proud of himself. But she dropped her robe to the floor, there, in the doorway.
What’s the worst that can happen, he thought to himself as he followed her inside, because men are like that.
Leave a comment | tags: Her, him, Short Fiction | posted in Man, Woman
A tattoo artist by trade, but also a bit of a creep, the woman had long fantasized about kidnapping an unwitting man, drugging him, and tattooing a large cock on his back. She theorized that in doing so, the man would absorb the qualities of the animal. She was also totally into astrology.
She envisioned the perfect man: he was neither too tall nor too muscular; he was probably not very nice, and probably did not have a tattoo on his back already. As fate would have it, she spied such a man one night at a bar. Pressing her breasts together, she approached him….
….sucking face, or whatever, as they danced across her foyer, she extracted from her back pocket a cloth soaked in chemical and pressed it to the man’s face. He then fell to the floor.
She readied her tattooing things and began undressing the man. Removing his shirt, she frowned, for there on the man’s back was a tattoo already–an erect penis and accompanying testicles. [You saw that coming.]
What a dick, she muttered with a sigh. [That too.] A naturally pleasant woman, she called him a cab and rolled his body out to the curb.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, artist, astrology, chickens, relationships, sexuality, tanizaki, tattoo, tattoos | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
When she sleeps, the woman’s tattoos come to life and chase each other around her body–the coyote, the school of fish, the Asian woman, the frowning Venus Flytrap, the pirate ship with torn sail, the fighting octopodes, the moth, the letters in appetentia. Sometimes they rearrange themselves just to see if she’ll notice: the moth, before on her shoulder blade now on her torso; the octopodes, once an aggressive tangle now friends embracing. But she hasn’t looked at her body in years, so she’ll never notice.
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