Tag Archives: eyes

2016/01/29

An Overdetermined Result of Textual Practices

By dsholloway

“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.

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2015/05/01

Communal Spaces

By dsholloway

K had heard it before, from other women less attractive than the one whose tongue was slowly constricting his neck:

“I just love your eyes. They’re so dark–I can’t even see your pupils.”

She flexed her tongue and K’s eyes bulged a little further from his face. She brought her face–eyes green, I think, but maybe they were blue–to meet his. “Amazing. Your eyes are just these black puddles.” She brought a well-manicured fingernail to his face. Then she tapped it on his left eye, creating mild undulations.

He had heard that last line before, too. As K lost consciousness he envisioned all of the women who got lost in his eyes. He thought of the woman who climbed in his left eye and drowned in the darkness. Her name was in the paper for a while and on TV. He thought of the woman who ran screaming from his apartment–underwear balled up in her fist–because she was convinced K’s eyes betrayed a darkness of a different sort.

From the depths of asphyxiation, he heard her jaw unhinge. Then he heard him being swallowed hole. “I guess I’m finally inside her,” K muttered as her digestive system pulled him down.

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2015/01/23

Ideological Fantasy

By dsholloway

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.

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