Tag Archives: cheating

2015/11/17

So Many Scattered Signs

By dsholloway

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.

 

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2015/04/08

Playful and Complex Hierarchical Systems

By dsholloway

K claimed to be an author, having written famous works I had never heard of. Whenever we met he always had a package tucked under his arm, which he refused to set down or otherwise let out of his site. His latest work of brilliance, evidently. 

Motherfuckers are trying to rip me off, he growled once by way of explanation. He had taken to saying “motherfucker,” or its permutations, whenever he could. I figured he was writing a novel on youth culture. I tried reasoning with him, but that made him suspicious. He said that he came home once to find his papers in disarray. Thus, he explained, his “extreme caution” was justified. 

I believed him. Then I killed him. I snatched the package and tore it open: a ream of printer paper. Then I ransacked his apartment–blank pages and mounds of paper reams. But in the trash can under his desk I caught a glimpse of a scrap of paper: a phone number.

 

I called. 

 

My girlfriend’s voice. 

 

I threw my phone at the window, sending shards of glass in every direction. Then I folded the scrap of paper into a crane and sailed it into the breeze. 

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2015/04/07

Organs Without Bodies

By dsholloway

Her boyfriend sold sex toys. He was probably nice enough, though I tried not to think about him too much–all things considered.

She got out of bed and cascaded over to her closet. “Check it out,” she said, as she began chucking vibrators at me: red ones, blue ones, pink ones, grey ones. “I have tons.”

“Do you use them,” I asked, genuinely interested.

“Yes,” she said evenly. “He won’t have sex with me. He just gives me these.” She threw another on the bed. “He always has.”

“How many do you have?”

“I’ve lost count. He’ll come home, give me one, and demand I use it then and there.”

He was obviously crazy. But I kind of admired his twisted bravado.

“Have you ever had sex?” I needed to know.

“With him—no.”

She flittered back to bed and we had sex amidst her rainbow of vibrators—countless reminders of her weird relationship with her weird boyfriend. One after the other her vibrators turned on, as if controlled by some unseen being: Humming, buzzing, mocking.

“He’s here,” she whispered later on. “You need to go.”

I slipped out the back door, one of her vibrators firmly in my grasp.

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2013/11/03

The Medium of Immobilization

By dsholloway

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.

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