Tag Archives: affect
“Seeking new husband. Must meet the following criteria:…”
K wanted to apply for the position. But he knew he wouldn’t make the cut. While he had loved her for years, he was not as robust or as rich as the new man he needed to be.
One morning K, her neighbor and life-long “friend,” watched as a line of men began materializing in front of her house. Soon the line of men stretched the length of the street.
At 2 pm, she opened her front door. For the next 10 hours, men entered the house, men left the house. By 1 AM the line had dwindled. Having nothing to lose, K got in line—the last candidate.
“K, what are you doing? You know you can’t apply. Plus, [Redacted] wore J Crew exclusively.”
K frowned. He marched into the bedroom and examined the deceased’s wardrobe.
“The new one has to wear J Crew too.” She was behind him.
“Was that in your ad?”
“Toward the bottom.”
“ I hate J Crew.”
“I know.”
K put his hand to her cheek and she pressed back into it. Then he left, but not before stealing a pair of the deceased’s J Crew socks—which he kinda liked.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, clothes, death, fashion, flash fiction, friendship, husband, interview, J. Crew, love, marriage, relationships, socks, stealing, wife | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
K danced with the woman with the metal hook hand who lost her original hand while defecting from an impoverished nation K knew nothing about. She placed it, her metal hook hand, gingerly on his shoulder. He held firmly to her other fleshy hand, and, with an equally firm grip around her waist, paraded her through a room of riff-raff who were focusing their attentions on K and the woman with the metal hook hand and had stopped their own dance floor rituals almost entirely.
“Why are they watching us,” K asked.
“Because you’re not from around here. And they don’t like strangers, especially when strangers touch the local women.” K hardly considered the ways in which he was touching the woman with the metal hook hand to be “touching” in the sense that she meant.
He felt the riff-raff tighten their grip. Pressing his mouth to her ear, he whispered:
“I like your metal hook hand.”
She whispered back, “They don’t like it when strangers whisper things into the ears of the local women.”
……….
K woke up in a hospital bed a day later with two metal hook hands of his own. He didn’t like them so much.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, dance, flash fiction, metal, relationships, riff-raff, stranger, violence | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
K started smoking, apparently, though given the way he coughed and convulsed after each drag, his starting was not, also apparently, that long ago.
“Put her crab rangoon on my bill,” he told the waiter, stubbing out his cigarette just the way he practiced at home. The girl should have sat somewhere else while she waited for her takeout. But it was too late for all that.
“Thanks,” she said, awkwardly.
“Do you smoke,” he asked, flashing his pack of cigarettes like a P.I. flashing his badge.
“I don’t.” She was going to be mean. But he did, after all, buy her crab rangoon. “You don’t really see too many people who smoke,” she offered, feeling bad about the crab rangoon.
He was going to tell her that when he smokes, the fumes become people he used to care about, and that, in smoking, he was trying to re-establish bonds long severed. The first time he took a drag, the air around him took on the form of that girl he liked in 5th grade who died in a car accident.
He had sadness in his eyes.
“Wanna take me home?” she asked, feeling bad, still, about the crab rangoon.
Leave a comment | tags: accident, affect, bar, car, Chinese food, crab rangoon, death, eyes, relationships, sadness, sex, smoke, smoking | posted in Uncategorized
“Merry Christmas,” said the white haired lady, thrusting a jar of honey in your hands. “It comes straight from her hive,” she continued, gesturing to another white haired lady near the tree who, evidently, was an apiarist.
The lady’s words sounded oddly perverse, to you, and you laughed. Your girlfriend, along for the ride since it’s the holidays, gave you a proper slap on the shoulder. The white haired lady looked crookedly at the two of you before going elsewhere to, probably, deliver more honey “straight from [the] hive.”
You had no interest in this particular jar of honey, having plenty of honey at home and very little room in your suitcase. Nevertheless, the next day you gently wrapped the jar of honey in an old necktie and buried it in your carry-on. Maybe she’ll let me do something sexual with it: you pictured your girlfriend covered in bees.
You hear a few days later that the white haired apiarist is dying of cancer. You don’t really know her, but you’re still sad a little.
You decide to watch a documentary about bees. They’re dying in large numbers throughout the word, you learn. But they probably aren’t dying of cancer.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, cancer, Christmas, death, flash fiction, gift, holidays, honey, neck tie, relationships, sex, travel | posted in Short Fiction, Woman, You
“Tell me a story or I’ll shoot her.” He raised his gun. The pretty brunette made indistinct noises from behind the bandana in her mouth.
So I did. I told him about this aspiring writer who decides to do something crazy because he only knows how to write about “what actually happens.” He decides to rob a bank but falls for the bank teller. While he intended to write a note demanding all the money, he ends up writing her a poem. They go on a date a few days later. They go back to his place for a nightcap. There’s a knock on the door. The aspiring writer opens it and finds a man holding a gun. The man barges in and, for reasons unknown, ties up the aspiring writer and the bank teller.
“What happens then?” The man with the gun asked.
I told him how, in the story, the man with the gun forces the aspiring writer tell him a story.
“And then?” The man with the gun asked.
I told him how the aspiring writer doesn’t know how to finish the story and how the brunette begins to fear, more than ever before, for her life.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bank, date, fiction, flash fiction, gun, hostage, relationships, robber, story, thief, writer | posted in Her, Man, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
“She likes you,” her little dog said. “But here’s what’s going to happen: sometime soon she’s going to offer to make you soup. She’ll ask your favorite kind. You’ll tell her. Then she’ll show up with groceries and wine and you guys will cook your favorite soup and drink nice wine. You’ll sit down to eat but you’ll die. I’ve seen her do it countless times.”
“Why? You said she likes me.”
“She does. But like will turn to love which will eventually turn to hate. Kind of makes sense if you think about it.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I like you too…. She’ll be back soon. So just act normal.”
I did.
“Know what,” her voice was sincere. “Let’s make dinner tomorrow. Why not soup?”
I glanced down at her little dog, which was avoiding eye contact.
“What’s your favorite kind?”
“Clam chowder,” I said confidently, knowing that clam chowder takes all day.
“Great. I’ll take the day off. Clam chowder takes all day, you know?”
I was somehow okay with such an extended death ritual. Her previous boyfriends probably hadn’t received such preferential treatment.
We smiled at each other. Her little dog probably rolled its eyes.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, boyfriends, chef, cooking, death, dinner, dog, flash fiction, girlfriends, hate, love, murder, relationships, soup | posted in Me, Short Fiction, Woman
“You’re an idiot.” Sometimes she wakes up with FUCK YOU emblazoned across her forehead. I’m not sure why. Perhaps in my sleep I set her car on fire. Accusations of stupidity (etc.) fly from her mouth with ease. Such was the case yesterday. We haven’t spoken sense.
—
This morning I ate a young man’s brain. He came to my office, in the basement of X University where I am a professor of Y. “Professor,” he inquired through the wooden door, “are you in?” I beckoned him inside. An extremely intelligent young man who is probably also wealthy (X University caters to smart and wealthy students and, as any reasonably smart person will tell you, the two traits are often mutually exclusive), he was fidgety like an old man but dressed like a young hip person.
“Could I ask you about our next assignment?” The young man spoke in a quivering voice. I nodded. He sat down. Then I struck him hard across the face. He went limp almost instantly and I set to eating his brain.
What are you doing, I asked myself in a moment of hesitation.
Becoming smart, I replied, as I took another bite of his brain.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, brain, cannibalism, food, intelligence, professor, relationships, student, university, wealth | posted in Me, Short Fiction
I hate discount retailers. But I go begrudgingly to the discount retailer because I do things for the pretty girl I love who always loves a bargain.
The discount retailer offers nothing of value for anybody. The girl I love marches off to the women’s things and I find myself in the men’s section, dodging lower-class people as they clamor for cheap stuff. Two men argue over a leather jacket.
I make my way to the men’s shoes. I fantasize about seeing the girl I love naked as my eyes gloss over countless pairs of misfit footwear that seem like death row inmates awaiting imminent execution.
But I spot, accidentally, in an unmarked shoebox, a single Ferragamo loafer that, presumably, even I can afford. My X-rated fantasy vanishes and I excitedly snatch up the loafer. I search for its mate. I search everywhere. I ask an unhelpful sales associate to find its mate. He rolls his eyes: “Sorry, I guess it’s lost.”
I attack the sales associate. The police arrive and I’m arrested. I don’t know where she is–the girl I love.
I’m issued prison garb–shirt, pants, loafers. The shirt and pants are awful, but the loafers aren’t so bad.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, Black Friday, clothes, discount, Ferragamo, leather, loafer, love, police, prison, relationships, shoes, shopping | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
I had been hit by a train so went to Q Resort to convalesce for a week. The doctor said the damage wasn’t bad, but had urged me to take time for myself. So I made the journey to Q Resort.
I spent most of my time at Q Resort sitting out on my veranda and staring absently at the world beyond. There were mountains covered in snow. There was a stream, partially frozen. Etc. I reflected on my brush with death.
One day I found a dead cockroach in my room at Q Resort. I didn’t tell the Hispanic maid; I left the cockroach where it died because it seemed peaceful. The Hispanic maid must have found it because two days later it was gone. I was bereft, a little, but made due, and used the experience to reflect further on the nature of living and dying.
Convincing myself that all life culminates majestically in death, I jumped from the edge of my veranda one night.
Because my room at Q Resort was on the second floor, however, I ended up only with a badly sprained ankle. Unable to walk, I extended my stay at Q Resort another week.
Leave a comment | tags: accident, affect, cockroack, death, hotel, life, resort, shiga naoya, train | posted in Me, Short Fiction
“She was my heroin,” I said gazing into the pond. “I was addicted,” I continued the metaphor, as I continued gazing into the pond. A few ducks nodded in tandem. Most swam away, bored, no doubt, with the same story told by every guy who sits alone on a bench by a pond.
One duck spoke. “Tell me more,” it said, and by the by, we got to know each other. I invited the duck over for dinner. It accepted my invitation, probably out of sympathy.
……
I told K about my unexpected friendship. “What should I serve for dinner,” I asked him.
“Duck,” K replied feigning seriousness. We laughed in that way you laugh about things like cannibalism.
I served pasta instead. The duck was a gracious guest. We ate mostly in silence, each unsure how to proceed. “You know,” the duck finally said, “I thought you invited me over so you could eat me.”
We laughed in the way K and I laughed earlier. “I’m a vegetarian,” I explained. Then I attacked and killed it.
……
I called her for the first time in a long time. “I made you duck,” I whispered to the voice on the other end.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, appetite, cuisine, death, dinner, drugs, duck, food, heroin, murder, pond, relationships, vegetarian, water | posted in Her, Me
So he ripped his heart from his chest. Thrusting it into the hands of the woman he loved, “Make me rich,” he said. She said nothing in reply–an ominous sign, potentially–but nodded slightly in implicit agreement.
[A risky investment, indeed, he had heard (though he couldn’t remember from where). But if it paid off, it really paid off, he also heard (same as above).]
Always one to never shy from opportunity and the possibilities of increased wealth, regardless of risk, K eagerly awaited payoff. Yet he wondered how long he could survive without his heart. He passed the days and nights trying not to think about the woman he loved and what she was doing with it.
As it turns out, the woman he loved was careless with his heart, squandering all of its worth in illicit ways. “Sorry,” she said over martinis one night, hands empty. “I lost it.” She showed him her empty hands.
Left with nothing, K naturally hurled himself from the top of a building, a trail of desperation following him to his death. Which is unfortunate, because a hot woman is going to find his heart tomorrow in the most unlikely of places.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, heart, investment, love, martini, opportunity, relationships, risk, romance, stock market | posted in Man, Woman
He had heard that in order to become a master perfumist you absolutely needed an advanced degree in chemistry. You absolutely needed to know how chemicals react with other chemicals, and stuff.
The secret to his masterful bottles of perfume (which retailed for $200 per bottle) was not in his knowledge of chemistry (he was actually quite inept in the sciences during college, demonstrating instead an unfortunate fondness for literature) but in the words of women who hated him.
……….
I fucking hate your guts, K. She said in a surprisingly even tone, leaving the door ajar as she left. Before her words fell to the floor and broke into sharp shards, he hurriedly bottled them. He stored the bottle among other bottles of spite and venom, spat by a variety of women over the past year, knowing that his next great scent was only another heartbreak or two away.
Two months later, amidst great praise and acclaim, he released his new perfume. Then he went home to break up with his girlfriend. His career, it seems, depended on it.
She was unfortunately very understanding about everything. So when she left, he let her words fall to the ground.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, fashion, perfume, relationships, scent, smell | posted in Her, Him, Man, Woman
I love you but I’ve chosen darkness he said to the tree as he chopped it down. He held back tears.
He used to play in the tree as a child. He used to run around it and kiss girls under it. He used to climb it and fall off of it. He used to cry under it when his parents fought. Or cry for it during thunderstorms. He lost a basketball under it. And found a human skull buried near it. He once got stuck in it. Bees built hives in it. He never got stung but his Vietnamese friends did. Birds lived in it and nursed their young in it. The neighbors were always afraid the tree would fall on their homes and expensive cars, temporarily upsetting their upper-middle class suburban dreams until their insurance agents showed up. There had even been a petition signed by half of the members of the neighborhood association demanding its immediate removal. (Two-thirds of the members were required to sign.) He carved haiku into its bark and never read them to anyone. He read them to the tree. He loved the tree. It loved him.
But the lumberjack’s daughter was irresistible.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bark, bee, dream, haiku, love, lumberjack, relationships, suburbs, thunderstorm, tree, Vietnam | posted in Man, Short Fiction
The truth she didn’t want him finding out was that she and her shadow had had a falling out some time ago. So when K asked her out, she demanded a midnight rendezvous somewhere beyond the furthest reaches of the urban phosphorescent nightscape. (K obliged because he is a gentleman and because she was totally hot.)
But that sort of thing can only sustain itself for so long. K began to question her sanity and, secretly, his own. So after yet another 1AM stroll through that park they often strolled around, he broached the subject.
She resisted the urge to lie. My shadow left me, she said. He asked why and she said because shadows by their very nature thrive on evil. And she just wasn’t evil enough–apparently it had gotten bored with her. He seemed to understand and moved to kiss her. She resisted that too. And then he really understood.
Not long after he got home, her shadow knocked on his door. They had sex and her shadow spent the night. When he woke up, accosted way too early by the morning sun, her shadow was gone. But his own shadow seemed longer than usual.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, darkness, love, morning, night, relationships, sex, shadow, urban | posted in Her, Him, Man, Woman
He had heard the rumors since childhood-the ones that circulated among day laborers and the working poor: during the blood moon at such and such landfill a womanish creature could be seen swimming in the vast reservoir of refuse, junk, and discard. There was no evidence to validate the rumor, but to a child that hardly matters.
As K got older, he constructed an elaborate fantasy around the stories he had heard as a child. He imagined falling in love with the landfill mermaid. He imagined growing fish parts of his own and swimming off somewhere with her.
During the most recent blood moon he broke into the landfill. Standing on the edge of the abyss, he waited. Soon enough he saw her.
K called to her. He shouted his undying love to her. She swam to him. She was beautiful. Join me, she said.
K shed his clothes and jumped into the landfill.
He was later pulled from the landfill, his body plagued by cuts and blood-borne diseases. I’ve seen love, he whispered to someone who cared about him. Then he died. Then things slowly went back to normal, no one ever really figuring out what he meant by that.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, disease, garbage, gossip, landfill, love, mermaid, relationships, rumor, trash | posted in Her, Him, Man, Short Fiction, Woman
K’s father was becoming annoyed with his adolescent son’s word choices. First “duvet,” then “loofah.” Until recently K’s father enjoyed their weekly Scrabble games, even though K’s vocabulary far surpassed his own. But the words that had begun to enter the young boy’s Scrabble lexicon were unsettling. K’s father thought back to K’s winning word last week: “exfoliate.”
K’s father imagined letters swirling in K’s head; he further imagined letters bumping into other letters to create effeminate words. After K’s father offered a word hardly worth mentioning, K played his next word: “chanteuse.” K’s father didn’t know what that word means.
K’s father stared at his remaining letters, feeling betrayed by the father-son time he so desperately wanted. K’s father scanned the board. If he were more of an “intellectual,” K’s father could have countered his son’s suspicious vocabulary with his own manly version: bolts, beard, fortress, chainsaw, dirt. While those words hardly count for anything in Scrabble, at least compared to “chanteuse” or “exfoliate,” they would have at least meant something to K’s father. But K’s father’s intelligence aside, it was too late for that. K’s father was going to lose.
It was just as well: he preferred Battleship.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, Battleship, bolts, chainsaw, chanteuse, dirt, exfoliate, family, father, femininity, fortress, masculinity, Scrabble, vocabulary | posted in Man, Short Fiction
Thus he woke to find that the woman’s name he gleefully got tattooed on his arm was now a different woman’s name. (I love you, he had said gazing into her eyes as the needle pierced his skin. He grimaced. But not because he loved her.)
Did you do this? He woke her up. It was of course impossible to alter something as permanent as a tattoo. But she was understanding as she absorbed his accusation. I didn’t. She rubbed her eyes and tamed her hair.
He studied the name. Then he kicked her out, proclaiming undying love for the woman whose name now inexplicably graced his arm.
That night he went to a karaoke bar. What’s your name he asked a lot of women. Then he went home.
Several weeks later he was at a steak house when a woman touched his arm saying that’s my name. She was fat, but it was probably a life lesson he told himself. He invited her to sit down. They talked. He found her pleasant but she was still fat. So when she politely excused herself “for a moment” he grabbed a steak knife and began digging at his tattoo.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, fat, inscription, karaoke, knife, love, relationships, steak, tattoos | posted in Man, Woman
K was convinced that she was the one hurting him during the night, that she was the one leaving knives in his body while he slept.
“She’s going to kill me,” he said to a friend once, refusing to elaborate.
She didn’t kill him. But one day she woke to find K dead, his head thoroughly severed from his body and covered in lipstick. She sighed. You men, you have no self control.
K had gone to the Isle of Women again.
He never told her of his dreamscape philandering. But he didn’t need to. Every night he went to the Isle of Women and every night from within her own dreamworld she watched him go.
The police told her he died by his own hand. Which would make since: those marks on his body he attributed to her were also self inflicted. One night she woke to find him pummeling his own face, shouting remorseful things about “the nature of men.” She never brought it up.
So she believed the police. She also kinda believed he killed himself out of guilt. But she also kinda believed he killed himself so he could stay on the Isle of Women forever.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, dream, love, men, relationships, sleep, suicide, women | posted in Her, Him, Man, Woman
We drink wine as the world ends around us.
“And to all the destruction in men,” she says, raising her glass. “And to all the corruption in my head,” I rejoin, touching my glass to hers.
Another explosion. Another scream in the distance. It’s only a matter of time before those screams ostensibly become ours, which is why tonight we drink the good wine, the wine she is supposed to be saving for a special occasion–a promotion, accolade.
As rock falls from the sky I think back to when I first met her.
———-
She had been smoking on her veranda and talking to the night sky. She had been doing it every night for months. Every night I would watch her from the darkness of my own veranda, imagining a conversation with a dead lover or maybe a confrontation with God.
“What are you doing,” I asked once, emerging from the darkness.
“I’m talking to Orion.” She remained focused on the stars. “I’m trying to convince him to take off his belt.”
She started sweet talking him when she was a teenager, she said. And men can only resist for so long.
———-
“I guess you were right,” I say.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, apocalypse, death, God, meteor, Orion, relationships, romance, sky, smoke, space, stars, wine | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
For my birthday, my girlfriend gave me something she made. Last year it was something she constructed from forks and spoons.
This year it was a flower pot, out of which a hand was growing. I recognized the hand; I had bought it for her to hang jewelry from.
“You don’t have to water this kind of plant.” She laughed.
I watered it everyday after she left for work. It didn’t take long before the hand grew a wrist.
Under some pretense, I took my potted hand from her apartment, claiming it would look good in my house, which I hardly called home at all these days.
There I watered it dutifully, spoke to it, played it pleasant music. The wrist grew a slender arm, which grew a graceful shoulder.
A woman! I grew excited and pulled on the arm. A beautiful woman emerged from the soil. Our eyes met. We embraced. Then she pulled me back into the soil.
Later that day my girlfriend came by. She didn’t find me. But she found a flower pot with two hands in it. Presuming I had made it for her, she took it back to her apartment. Her birthday is tomorrow.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, birthday, gardening, gift, hand-made, jewelry, plant, relationships | posted in Me, Short Fiction, Woman
At the end of the famed Savile Row there’s a small men’s clothier called K’s. Although it claims to specialize in men’s bespoke clothing (as every men’s clothier on the famed Savile Row does), those in the know know K’s true specialization to be things made of silk. They know, too, of the proprietor’s prominent role in the black-market silkworm trade. But they don’t care. People much more important than you visit K’s from far away places.
K used to have an apprentice: a former leftist intellectual who turned his back on a career in “the academy” because of a profound distaste for its increasing corporatization and residual and unwarranted snobbiness. And because he was totally into fashion. Rumors suggest that K’s apprentice fell in love with a woman who worked someplace nearby, a former cocaine addict who was not very pretty but nevertheless attractive for indiscernible reasons.
Some say K was jealous of the couple. They also say that he fed them to his silkworms and that he subsequently offered an exclusive collection of extra fine silk handkerchiefs called “LoveLost.” An edgy enough name for a collection of handkerchiefs, but they weren’t worth what they cost.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, capitalism, fashion, handkerchief, intellectual, love, Savile Row, silk, silkworm | posted in Man, Short Fiction
Thus he decided to put himself in the freezer.
Wanting to stop time, but not knowing how, he reasoned that freezing himself would almost be the equivalent of freezing time.
He wanted to stop time because things were finally good in the usual ways that people mean when they say that. But he knew life to be a constant negotiation between the good life and the opposite of the good life. The trick was to stop time when life was good so it would always be good.
He had envisioned casting a spell or whispering magic words or waving a magic wand to bring time to a stop. But that’s impossible. Which is why he decided to put himself in the freezer.
Before doing so, he went shopping. I want to look nice forever, he told himself. He bought a nice suit and a really expensive watch. He charged the shit out of his middle class credit card–since time was coming to an end it didn’t really matter.
He got in and closed the door.
He wasn’t dead when somebody opened the freezer a day later. But his watched stopped. So his plan kinda worked.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, credit card, debt, freezer, shopping, suit, time, watch, wrist watch | posted in Man, Short Fiction
The cabin was perfect–miles beyond the reach of the last dirt road. It was well-tended; spaghetti sauce and crackers in the cupboard and an old but functioning television set in a makeshift upstairs bedroom with a cute little window.
He unloaded his provisions: barbed wire, nails, an axe, a gun, bullets.
He ate a meager meal. Then he set the barbed wire and secured the front door. Then he waited, crouched against the refrigerator, gun in hand. He waited more.
A knock at the door. He aimed and fired two bullets. Another knock. He backed away, aware that his little war was coming to an end, aware that he was going to lose. He ran upstairs to look out the window.
More assailants arrived. He fired from the window. His defiance only agitated them.
“You can’t win,” Opportunity called from behind the door. “You might as well give up,” Success shouted from somewhere in the darkness.
He listened to the noise of the front door being kicked in. He listened to footsteps ascend to the second floor.
He looked Happiness in the face. He surrendered, and he smiled a smile he had been running from for far too long.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, axe, barbed wire, cabin, camping, escape, gun, happiness, opportunity, spaghetti, success | posted in Him, Short Fiction
“You got your renewal in the mail,” she called in a flat voice from the foyer. She was uncomfortable. She handed me the envelope. Renewal time already, I asked myself, it seems like I just renewed.
I wasn’t going to open it; maybe after dinner. But until I did, I knew things would be tense. I opened it. She frowned.
Dear K:
Thank you for your continued patronage. (. . .)
You have six months remaining on your current contract. We therefore ask that you start thinking about renewing your girlfriend. As always, we have a variety of payment plans and togetherness options to suit your needs. Please feel free to renew online by logging in. . .
I went to my computer. I wanted to keep her, at least a little longer. I mean, she wasn’t getting fat, she liked my jokes, and she wore high heels around the house. But I had been using my credit card a lot lately–most recently for a pair of Valentino stilettos that matched the tile in the kitchen–indeed too much.
As feared, my credit card was declined.
“Cheapskate,” she growled as she marched out the door, the echo of Valentino stilettos piercing the night air.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, capitalism, credit card, love, money, relationships, shoes, stiletto, Valentino | posted in Her, Me
The clerk leaned across his counter and whispered: “Did you know that if you send the US Treasury a $2 bill, they’ll send you back $2.15?” He went on to whisper related information, but I stopped paying attention.
……….
When I was a kid my father stockpiled $2 bills in the basement of our house, sure that one day $2 bills would be the only viable currency. After he disappeared, I took his cache of $2 bills and folded things out of them.
I folded boyhood things: submarines, rocket ships, best friends. After boyhood, I folded my father’s $2 bills into weapons and electric guitars. Most recently I folded a woman and fell in love with her.
I promised to provide for my origami woman. She dismissed my masculine posturing, however, and asked only that I never unfold her, echoing a promise I had already made to myself.
………
I unfolded her that night, the clerk’s whispers of “profit” ringing in my ears. But not before taking her out to an extravagant dinner–like, candlelight and oysters flown in from faraway. It was out of my price range, but, envisioning the money I would get for my origami woman, I wasn’t too concerned.
I ordered us another round of martinis.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, candlelight, capitalism, family, martini, money, origami, oysters, relationships, shopping | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
