Tag Archives: fiction

2023/06/16

Pioneer to the fall

By dsholloway

It was the middle of the night in autumn. In one room of a house located on the Street of X in the city of Y, a pale young prostitute sat behind an old table, his chin in his hands, tediously chewing on the seeds of a watermelon that lay on a tray before him. A lamp on the table emitted a faint light. The light seemed less to brighten up the room than add to its gloom. In one corner of the room, the wallpaper had started to peel off. An old chair had been set as if abandoned on the opposite side of the table.

Despite the barrenness of the room, the young man would, from time to time, stop chewing on the seeds and lift his cool gaze to stare at the wall facing the table. Hanging unpretentiously from a bent nail on the wall was a small brass crucifix. The worn contours of the artless figure of the suffering Christ. Each time the man, let us call him K, looked at this carving, the tinge of loneliness behind his long eyelashes faded away for a brief moment. However, as soon as K shifted his gaze, he would invariably heave a sigh and once again begin chewing on the seeds in the tray.

K welcomed clients into his room night after night in order to pay off large sums of debt owed to creditors around town. Unlike his fellow ladies of pleasure, K could not lie to or swindle his clients; nor was he willful. Rather, each night with a pleasant smile he dallied with the various individuals who called on him in this cheerless room.

Certainly K’s nature was inborn, but if there was another reason to be found in his actions, it would be in the fact from his childhood he adhered to the Catholic faith he had inherited from his late mother, as evidenced by the austere crucifix hung on his wall.

This past spring, a willowy tourist from an Eastern European country had come to the horse races and ended up spending a capricious night in K’s room.

“Are you a Christian,” this tourist asked through thickly accented English.

“I am.”

“And you’re still pursuing this profession?”

“I am.”

“Don’t you think that by doing such despicable work you won’t be able to go to heaven?”

“No.” K cast a quick glance at the crucifix. Then he continued: “It’s because the Lord knows what’s in my heart.”

The tourist smiled, then reached into a briefcase and extracted a glass flamingo. “I bought this as a present for my child, but I’m going to give it to you in memory of tonight.” The tourist set the pink figure on the table, adding color to the edge of a grey existence.

Since the night he entertained his first customer, K had taken comfort in this assurance that Christ knew what was in his heart.

Sadly enough, this pious prostitute had been suffering from a violent strain of syphilis. Other harlots in the house heard of K’s affliction and offered various potions and pills. But K’s affliction grew no better. “Since you got this from a client,” a fellow whore said in passing, “you need to pass it along as quickly as you can. That’s the only way you’ll get better.”

K was pleasant enough to this whore, but in his heart he said a prayer, vowing to remain chaste on every occasion and asking to be delivered from every temptation. Having set himself to this resolution, K stubbornly refused every client.

“I have a terrifying disease. If you get too close to me you’ll catch it,” he admonished every potential visitor, even regular clients. As a result, little by little clients stopped visiting him and his household budget grew simultaneously tighter with each passing day.

Again this evening K sat munching absently on seeds and staring at the flamingo on his table that glowered in the dim light of the lamp. At that very moment, his door was flung open and a tall figure stumbled in. Due to the darkness of the room, K could not make out this figure’s features. The way the figure tottered, eventually leaning against the door, gave K the impression that he or she was drunk.

“Is there something you want,” K asked into the shadows.

The visitor silently raised a hand and held out two indistinct fingers. K was used to such impropriety. But the visitor did not strike K as improper.

Indeed, the visitor was familiar, gave K a sense of warmth, as though they had met before.

K crossed his arms across his body and shook his head. The visitor held up a third finger, then a fourth, and finally a fifth. K had never received such a sum of money from a visitor before. Nevertheless, K remained absolute, shaking his head at every turn.

This haggling with gestures and body movements continued for a long while. Toward the end, the visitor tenaciously increased the offer to ten. This was an enormous sum for a prostitute.

K was growing weary and stamped his foot repeatedly. As he did so, it chanced that the crucifix slipped loose and fell with a slight clang to the stone floor at his feet.

He quickly reached down to retrieve the precious object. When he snatched up the crucifix, K was overcome with the same sense of warmth that assailed him when the visitor first burst into his room.

When K looked up, he was startled to find the figure looming directly above him. K did not have a chance to move before he was ensnared in the visitor’s clutches.

* * * * *

Several hours later, the faint chirping of crickets added a forlorn autumnal tone to the breathing of the couple on the bed. But K’s dreams drifted upward like smoke from the dusty curtains of his bed and into the starry nighttime sky.

In his dream, K was in Jesus’ house, sharing a plate of Chinese food with the mysterious figure. Despite the luminosity of heaven, this figure remained indistinct. This is because in his dream, K was going blind from syphilis.

K awoke from his dream of heaven with a start. “If I’ve infected him with my illness.” K’s feelings were clouded with that thought, and K rushed to waken the stranger.

But to his surprise, other than his own self covered by the blanket, there was no sign of the visitor. Perhaps a dream wondered K. Still, the bed’s disarray suggested to K that it had not been a dream.

K stumbled out of bed and knelt on the cold stone floor to offer up an earnest prayer, just as had the beautiful Mary Magdalene who spoke of the risen Lord.

* * * * *

One night in the spring the following year, the willowy European sat across from K. “You’ve still got that crucifix,” the European laughed.

K then launched into the strange story of the mysterious visitor, the mysterious night and, most mysterious of all, the disappearance of his illness.

As K spoke, the European’s mind was occupied by the following thoughts:

I know that individual. I can’t place the name, but I am certain we are acquaintances. I hear this individual has gone mad, perhaps from syphilis.

Should I enlighten dear K? Or should I say nothing and leave him forever to dreams that are no better than old Russian legends?

When K finished his story, the European smiled and spoke: “How unusual! But you have never been sick since then?”

“No, not once,” K answered without any hesitation, his face glowing as he crunched on the melon seeds in his mouth.

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2023/06/07

Coalescence

By dsholloway

The black cocktail dress I bought her for her birthday hung in a lonely way. A spackling of dust coated its neckline and bulges from its wire hanger were beginning to protrude at the shoulders. The garment was exquisite, classy, tasteful. Yet there it hung, neglected from day one simply because it had the misfortune of being the wrong exquisite, classy, tasteful cocktail dress. Indeed, in my haste to procure for my wife her most desired item, I overlooked the ostensibly most important criteria: the designer.

“This isn’t Givenchy,” she whimpered when I presented her her dress. Then she glared at the label before lamenting: “It’s Chanel.” To me the issue was negligible, even laughable – hardly an issue at all. But to her, on this special occasion, my opinion on the matter mattered not. Because I did not understand her fixation with the black Givenchy cocktail dress, I felt it best to remain silent and allow her to fret. This is what I did.

“I’m sorry,” she eventually said in a calm manner. “It just has to be Givenchy.” Then she handed me the dress and descended the stairs to the living room. I thought briefly of returning the dress to the boutique from which I bought it. But pride got the better of me. So I cleared space in the bedroom closet and hung the dress among countless other black cocktail dresses. Perhaps next year, thought I, pulling the closet door shut.

Next year never came. We divorced four months after the Chanel incident. And while I would have liked to think that the dress had nothing to do with our inability to reconcile, when she moved out, she left the black Chanel behind. She left also a note that read only this: “One day you’ll understand. And then you’ll understand women.” I threw the note in the garbage but left the dress hanging on her side of the half-empty closet.

I was lonely, like the dress. And I began talking to it, explaining to it my sorrows, fears, failed ambitions. I asked it why she left. I asked it what was so great about a Givenchy dress anyway.

The dress never answered of course, but when the bedroom window was open it did sway a little in the breeze. The dress and I grew old together, grew vintage together. I refused to meet women because I still did not understand the import of my failure. Therefore, I presumed that I did not understand women.

Then one day, without the slightest warning, I fell in love. Lithe and graceful, yet intimidating and assertive she exuded an aura of dark sophistication that I found irresistible. I thought of the dress, its classic silhouette immune to the fits and starts of fashion. I imagined her wearing it. Then I imagined her stepping out of it.

On our fifth date I asked her to marry me. She agreed, and my long period of loneliness came to an end. I didn’t dare mention the dress, afraid I was of being rejected because of it. But she was a reasonable sort, and this put my heart at ease. We started blowing coke, drinking heavily, and abusing amphetamines. The two of us found a twisted equilibrium in this cornucopia of self-destruction. We would get ourselves high on drugs and delve into our fears and anxieties. It was thus only a matter of time before the topic of the dress. When I broached the issue, she listened with much compassion. Then she spoke: “I would love to wear the Chanel, K.” I smiled, and she continued: “Women love the Givenchy because of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Every girl simply dreams of being Holly Golightly. They get very upset when that dream doesn’t come true.” As she spoke, I thought back to my ex-wife’s mild obsession with Audrey Hepburn and it all seemed to make sense. How stupid I had been.

That night, my fiancé put the dress on. For my part, I wore my best suit, and we stayed awake all night long, blowing more coke in the kitchen and exchanging stories. Then we danced slowly and romantically. The dress, once a hallmark of my failures as a man was now transformed into an expression of masculine success.

And so I bought her more and more cocktail dresses. At least twice a week I returned home with a new one tucked under my arm. We would blow coke and dance romantically; this was our ritual. Our closet bulged; I moved my garments to the little guest bedroom closet to make room for my fiancé’s expanding wardrobe. One day when she was out, I counted the number of dresses: 132. When she got home I made a bold promise: “Your next dress will be the Givenchy.”

I didn’t get the chance. Three days later she died in a car accident and I was left with a room full
of size zero black cocktail dresses. After the funeral I shut myself up in the closet and took in the
sea of black. “What am I to do with all of these,” thought I. These dresses had once clung to my
fiancé’s body, which had endowed them with the warm breath of life and made them move.
Now, however, what hung before me were mere scruffy shadows, cut off from the roots of life
and steadily withering away, devoid of any meaning whatsoever.

Ten days later I placed an ad online for a female housekeeper. Against political correctness, I listed the physical specifications of the housekeeper I required: five-feet-five, size zero. One woman responded to my ad. When I interviewed her the following day, I explained: “I’ve recently lost my fiancé, and I have a huge amount of her clothing. Most of what she left is new or almost new. I would like you to wear her things as a kind of uniform while you work here. I know this must sound strange to you but, believe me, I have no ulterior motive. It’s just to give me time to get used to the idea that my fiancé is gone.”

“I think I understand,” she said. “And I think I can do what you are asking me to do. But, first, I wonder if you can show me the clothes I will have to wear.”

“Of course,” I said, and took the woman upstairs and showed her the closet. She had never seen so many dresses gathered together in a single place except in a department store. Each dress was obviously luxurious and of high quality. The taste, too, was flawless. The sight was almost blinding. The woman could hardly catch her breath. Her heart started pounding. She began crying.

The woman fled my bedroom and rushed down the stairs. “I’m sorry, K” she shrieked, “I can’t. It’s just too much to bear.” Then she left, and I found myself alone with my dead fiancé’s dresses.

I returned to the bedroom and opened the closet door. I stared at the dresses – countless flawless garments arranged just so, standing at attention as though readying for battle. Their rich blackness danced in space like dark pollen rising from evil flowers, lodging in my eyes and ears and nostrils. The frills and buttons and lace and epaulets and belts sucked greedily at the room’s air, thinning it out until I could hardly breathe. Liberal numbers of mothballs gave off a smell that might as well have been the sound of a million tiny winged insects. I hated these dresses now, it suddenly occurred to me. Slumping against the wall, I folded my arms and closed my eyes. Loneliness seeped into me once again, like a lukewarm broth.

In the end, I had a used-clothing dealer take away everything that my fiancé had left behind. The dealer gave me less than a twentieth of what I had paid for the clothes, but that hardly mattered. I would have let them go for nothing, so long as they were going to a place where I would never see them again.

Once in a while, I would go to the empty room and stay there for an hour or two, doing nothing in particular, just letting my mind go blank. I would sit on the floor and stare at the bare walls, at the shadows of my dead fiancé’s shadows. But, as the months went by, I lost the ability to recall the things that had been in the room – they became shadows in the truest sense.

Sometimes I could barely recall my fiancé’s face. What I did recall, though, was the woman, a total stranger, shedding tears in the room at the sight of the dresses that she had left behind.

I clung to her memory, whoever she was, as a life line to my fiancé’s memory.

A year went by in this way, and I gradually lost interest in the woman and what she represented. I let her slip through the cracks in my mind and with trepidation embraced the emptiness that remained.

Finding myself truly alone, I uncharacteristically set out for the cinema: a midnight showing of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

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2023/06/03

The Magic Pencil

By dsholloway

“No, that’s not right. Try again.” The artist grew angry with my unsteady hand and untrained eye. He yanked my paper from me and balled it up in his fist. “I don’t believe you,” he spat, before tossing my work on the floor where it coalesced with my previous work. Also less than satisfactory.

Then he continued: “That is not how you draw a woman.” The artist then labored over his own craft, explaining to me just how, exactly, one draws a woman. Then, at the end of the lesson, he took from his utility tray his most prized pencil and handed it to me. “Here,” said he, “this will help you.”

Thinking nothing of his words, I snatched his pencil and jammed it into my pocket.

Returning to my modest apartment – soggy with roof leaks and cooking vapors – I then tossed my book bag onto the drab carpet that carpeted my modest apartment.

The small room, nine-feet-square, appeared to be larger than it was because it contained nothing but a single desk and a single chair set against the wall. Everything else had been sold for scrap to support my fledgling career in art.

Dinnertime drew near.

The fact is, I hadn’t eaten anything all day. With a pale face, a wrinkled brow, an Adam’s apple that rose and fell, a hunched back, a sunken abdomen, and trembling knees, I thrust both hands into my pocket and yawned three times in succession.

My fingers found a pencil in my pocket.

“Hey, what’s this? A pencil. I don’t remember it being there.”

Playing with the eraser between my fingers, I produced another yawn.

My thoughts drifted to the gumbling in my stomach.

Without realizing it, I began scribbling on the wall with the pencil. First, an apple. One that looked big enough to be a meal in itself. I drew a paring knife beside it so that I could eat it right away. Next, I drew bread. Jam-filled bread the size of a baseball glove. Butter-filled rolls; a loaf as large as a person’s head. Beside the bread, then, a stick of butter as large as a brick.

“Damn it!” I ground my teeth and buried my face in my hands. “I’ve got to eat!”

Gradually, my consciousness sank into darkness. Beyond the windowpane was a bread and pastry jungle, a mountain of canned goods, a sea of milk, a beach of sugar, a beef and cheese orchard— I scampered about until, fatigued, I fell asleep.

A heavy thud on the floor and the sound of mashing crockery woke me. The sun had already set. Pitch black. Bewildered, I glanced toward the noise and gasped. The pictures I had penciled on the wall had vanished.

“How could it…?”

Suddenly every vein in my body was wide awake and pounding. I stealthily crept closer.

“No, no, it can’t be. But look, it’s real. The bread is smooth to the touch. Be bold, taste it. K, don’t you believe it’s real even now? Yes, it’s real. I believe it. But frightening. To believe it is frightening. And yet, it’s real. It’s edible!”

The apple tasted like an apple. The bread tasted like bread. The butter tasted like butter (not margarine). The sugar tasted like sugar. Ah, they all tasted like the real thing. The knife gleamed, reflecting my face.

By the time I came to my senses, I had somehow finished eating and heaved a sigh

of relief. But when I recalled why I sighed like this, I immediately became confused again. I took the pencil in my fingers and stared at it intently. No matter how much I scrutinized it, I just couldn’t understand what I didn’t understand. I decided to make sure by trying it once more. If I succeeded a second time, then I would have to concede that it had actually happened. I thought I would try to draw something different, but in my haste just drew another familiar-looking apple. As soon as I finished drawing, it fell easily from the wall. So this is real after all.

Joy suddenly turned my body rigid. The tips of my nerves broke through my skin and stretched out toward the universe, rustling like fallen leaves. Then, abruptly, the tension eased, and sitting down on the floor, I burst out laughing like a panting goldfish.

I tried to sleep, but I was unable. So I toiled throughout the night with my newfound tool. I drew a windowpane that looked out onto an expansive scene. It all materialized before me as if by magic. The world is at my fingertips, thought I, and I drew and drew, turning my modest apartment into a world unto itself.

Yet I was overwhelmed. There was so much to create, and all from the beginning. I had to fill this desolate land with mountains, water, clouds, tress, plants, birds, beasts, fish. I had to draw the world all over again. Discouraged, I collapsed onto the bed. One after another, tears fell unceasingly.

But what was I forgetting? My mind drifted to my art class and to the crotchety teacher. I thought about the woman he drew – perfectly proportioned, perfectly pliant.  I cried out: “This is what I forgot. It’s time to begin everything from Adam and Eve. That’s it—Eve! I’ll draw Eve!”

Half an hour later Eve was standing before me. Startled, she look around her.

“Who are you?” Her voice was cold.

“I am Adam,” said I. “You are Eve.”

“Bullshit,” she retorted with authority. “I’m a crude drawing.”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“No, you are Eve,” I explained. “I have created you. Look.” I proceeded to draw us a pair of wedding rings which materialized from the wall. I reached for her hand, yet she recoiled. I continued: “I created you just as I created these rings we are to wear.”

She held my gaze: “Do you wish to marry me?
“Of course.”

“Do you love me, Adam?”
“I do, Eve.”

She extended her hand. “Then come with me.” She gestured to the wall.

I hesitated: “But what of the world I have created for you?” I guestured to the rich foliage that populated my once-meager apartment. I guestured, too, to the sublime radiant sunshine that I also drew specifically for my Eve. “This is all for you,” I pleaded.

She shook her head. ”I do not want….all of this.” She gestured to my pencil. “Please,” said she.

I did as instructed and handed over to her my pencil.

I watched as she snapped the pencil in two and tossed it on the ground.

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2023/06/03

Tequila and Ashes

By dsholloway

As is well known, K was a stubborn old buzzard. After he died – which happened not so long ago, really – he was cremated and his ashes submerged in his favorite bottle of tequila and then consumed by citizens of the small New York town where he resided until his death. Or so is said.

Some days ago I stopped into the bar where the famed bottle is said to reside. When I asked the dark haired bartendress about the bottle, she furrowed her brow and narrowed her heavy European eyes. “K!” She spat. “I hated him. There’s no way I would ruin a perfectly good bottle of tequila for that monster. Maybe the bottle of which you speak is at a different bar. Try across the street.” She jammed her finger against the window, leaving a smudge.

I did as she suggested. At this adjacent bar I found the bottle of tequila. To my surprise it was full. The bartender, observing my confusion, interjected, “There is also this bottle. It contains the ashes of one of K’s servants, I think.” He then sauntered off, apparently satisfied with himself.

I examined the small bottle, which was a much lesser tequila. I swished around the liquid and watched the ashes agitate and then settle. So this is the final resting place of K’s famed servant, I thought to myself. The fact that this bottle was smaller and inferior in quality demonstrated to me that K’s servant wished to remain humble toward him even in death. After observing the bottle, I returned home and dusted off my copy of The Life and Times of K, which his servant published posthumously, or so my investigation has concluded. The text has no identifiable author, though I am sure it was penned by K’s servant who, herself, had no name.

To quote from the text:

K had no family. Although there were whispers of relatives stirring and scavenging someplace in the developing world, K never spoke of others in the affectionate manner often reserved for family members. His ascent to wealth and fame was unrivaled in the small town he came to call home and, owing to his modest upbringing, he was never ashamed to showcase his success.

Supposing the source of this information is true, K’s servant certainly idolized him. The book contains one photograph of K, taken before he died. In the photo, despite the terrible events surrounding his loss of sight, he merely looks like a man who has closed his eyes. He appears graceful, philosophic even, kind. As you probably know, K hated having his picture taken and so this may be the only picture of him left in public circulation. It occurs to me that the date stamped in the corner of the photo – January 14, 2018 – was near the date that K’s nameless servant herself became blind. Her last image of K must have been something like this picture. Did she remember him as a benevolent philosopher? Or did she create an image in her mind to counter those vicious rumors regarding his comportment and treatment of those in his stead?

The Life of K goes on to state: Although not much is known about K, it is common knowledge that he lost his eyesight early in life, after which he devoted himself to capitalistic pursuits and the acquisition of material possessions. The book does not mention his eyesight again, and so we are left to speculate on the cause. I have heard, however, that he was blinded by the sun during an eclipse. This doubtful. But I know of no other explanation.

In any case, it need only be noted here that K lost his sight at the prime of his youth. And it was because of this unfortunate incident that he invested himself in the enterprises that eventually made him rich, egotistical, and beyond reproach. Or so is written in his biography. We know, however, that nobody is beyond reproach. K’s favorite servant may be exaggerating here.

K’s servant also writes that it was shortly after his blinding that she came to work for him. Yet as long as she lived, this nameless soul considered herself fortunate not to have seen the light of his eyes. Had K seen her, she may have been thought somehow imperfect – lumpy and pale and reproachful. But thanks to his blindness her features could only have seemed ideal. She could only ever and always be a phantom.

K suffered from terrible class anxiety and felt himself above those of lesser means. As his worth climbed, he brought on more and more servants in order to degrade and ridicule them. His sense of inferiority was no double exacerbated by the loss of his sight. He kept his mansion forever wrapped in the dim twinkle of twilight, just bright enough for the servants to avoid bumping into each other as they traversed the cold, masculine corridors of his space.

One wonders why K took a liking to this particular servant above the others. Perhaps he felt her adoration. Perhaps she was simply an easy target who absorbed every insult like a loyal dog. Spoiled by his success in the markets and embittered by his blindness, he never gave her a moment’s rest.

“Why is he so hard on you,” the others would ask her. But to her credit, she never wavered. Perhaps she took his extreme waywardness as a warped form of flattery.

Not long after she arrived in his estate, she began playing the market, enamored as she was by anything K did. In the dark, she would pour over facts and figures almost by touch alone. K is ever in the dark, she would tell herself, inspired. She was no good at the markets and lost what money she earned from K. The other servants began to whisper. One day, K surprised her by giving her insight into the most reliable stocks to follow. Under his tutelage, she did well and earned herself a small fortune. She remained loyal to K, however, and stayed on as his servant even though she hardly needed to.

But once, she ignored his advice, risked everything, and lost. K was especially severe to her then. “You fool,” he shouted, and struck her across the face. K had never hit any of his servants before; if the book is to be believed, he had never hit anyone from any station before. The rumors, though, always the rumors…they paint a picture of a sadistic figure whose violent hand was but a pretext for perverse sexual games.

Unfortunately, this first time of violence led swiftly to others, and soon enough K would strike his loyal servant with regularity. She would walk to her room crying, earning looks of concern from the other servants who encouraged her to seek other employment. But if K was stubborn, so was this servant and she was always by his side in spite of – or perhaps because of – the verbal and physical assaults. She eventually controlled her tears, which enlivened K. This strange admixture of devotion and violence drew K and his servant closer and their relationship became less of master – servant and more of husband – wife. According to The Life of K, K decided from the time he was a boy that he would never marry. If that were true, then this particular servant softened his heart in an unanticipated way. Always one to eat alone, he began to dine with her. The blind do not dine with others; so this was a large gesture that gave way to others.

The poor girl, she thought all of this fanfare gave her reprieve from her duties. K would ring for her and she would arrive late, if she bothered to arrive at all. “You bitch,” K admonished! “Don’t forget, you belong to me!” Then, according to the text, he hit her badly. I suppose that K’s awareness of his wealth and greed had something to do with the malicious, if not sadistic treatment he administered. That is, because he was known for his cruelty he was forced to become cruel all the more. Gradually, becoming more and more vain, he ended up losing all control.

Given K’s reputation and the foul ways he treated everyone in his estate, it is reasonable to assume that his attacker was one of his servants. One possible perpetrator could be the Korean man he kept in his home as his gardener. After K trampled freshly planted lilies, numerous individuals overheard the Korean make a threat against K’s life. Another incident, one which I personally witnessed, happened with a handsome Puerto Rican. Still, because K had so many enemies it is hard to say who it was who snuck into K’s bedroom one fated night and threw acid on his face.

This is all the book says about the incident: K’s screams filled every floor and every room, and he shooed away all of his attendants except the one he prized most. She tended to him tenderly throughout the rest of the night. The others overheard through the door: “Don’t look at me! I’m hideous”! The servant responded: “My eyes are shut, K. I see nothing. Like you.

The event caused K to retreat further into his mind. He fired all of his servants except this most special one who tended to him with eyes always clamped shut.

“You mustn’t open your eyes,” K implored time and again. “You can never let my appearance now diminish how you used to see me.”

“Fear not,” she responded time and again. Then, one day, the servant moved from K’s side and into the kitchen where she cut her eyes out.

“Where did you go,” K inquired.

She answered: “I am blind now. I will forever see your radiance in this darkness of mine. I shall never see your face again for as long as I live.”

“I am touched, K” said sheepishly. He put a hand on hers and blind lovers embraced.

A local writer of fiction is the only person with intimate knowledge of how these blind lovers spent their remaining days. K stopped accumulating wealth and the two of them rarely ventured beyond the estate walls. Nevertheless, I am told, the couple lived happily until K’s death. The woman supposedly said that even if the gods offered her her sight back she would refuse. But who really knows what to believe?

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2023/06/03

Agent Provocateur

By dsholloway

She wrapped both hands around my wrist and lifted my attention away from the tiny zipper on her equally tiny hotshorts. “Just so we’re clear, I don’t plan on having sex tonight.” Her words startled me. That sentence, so economical and precise, sounded like something from a pamphlet on sexual assault prevention. It sounded like a warning, an admonition, a heading off at the pass. In that moment I pictured her collecting brochures on sex and rape from the university clinic. “Sex happens on your terms,” one of her brochures probably exclaimed in bold capital letters. “Not on anyone else’s.”

Women my age treated sex like you treat a stray dog: if it hangs around long enough you’ll let it in and keep it with the others. To these women, sex wasn’t this event, this decision, this dance. It was more of an occurrence, a thing that happened. My immediate reaction to her bourgeoning feminist identity was a mixture of confusion and hostility: “Why the fuck not?” I wanted to ask in response to her declaration. I smiled instead and kissed her boringly on the mouth.

I knew very little about the pale twenty-one-year-old girl who, even as she so powerfully disavowed even the thought of sex, was busy slithering out of her tank top and wrinkling my Restoration Hardware duvet cover in the process. Until a week ago – when she emailed me to ask if I wanted “to get a drink sometime” – I considered her to be nothing more than another fidgety coed who took too many pictures of herself in the bathroom mirror. And now here she was, stripped down to nothing but her little white shorts and an expensive padded bra that simply accentuated the hollowness of her barely-legal chest. She came from a wealthy family and her bra – red and frilly and simply out of place on her as yet childish body – reflected a socioeconomic height I would never be able to reach. I recognized its signature fabric immediately: Agent Provacateur. I dated a rich British girl for a while who wore the same brand. We dated for about six months until she tried to kill me. We used to fight about her expensive lingerie: Wear something nice tonight, I would demand; What’s the point – you don’t keep my clothes on long enough to notice, she would counter.

The spry girl on my bed was not, I was confident, going to try to kill me. But I was slightly unnerved by her presence. She was a threat to my career, to what modicum of middle-class stability I had managed to scrape together since graduate school. She was a threat to my sense of self-worth. Is this what I had been reduced to? Really? Nevertheless, her vitality was invigorating, her innocence charming. I saw none of the anger, hurt, spite, and mistrust that mars the faces of women I meet in bars or on dating websites. She had no idea what was waiting for her. And I liked that. She was just beginning to understand the sexual power that women like her command and that they desire. I liked that too, even as I tried to ignore this growing sense of powerlessness within; thank God she’s leaving her shorts on I said to myself, while unhooking her expensive bra with a single gesture from a shamefully practiced hand.

Yet she, too, seemed practiced. With each item of clothing she tore from my body I felt increasingly exposed and vulnerable, like prey, like a chicken being trussed up in a butcher’s storeroom. She, the skilled predator, had exploited fears and insecurities in my masculine edifice. Otherwise I would have just turned down her invitation like any other adult would. Otherwise I would not have invited her over several days later, cooked for her, made a move on her that she had been patiently waiting for me to make.

            “This isn’t a date,” I said in a professorial manner the first time we went out, when I picked her up outside her dorm. She smelled way too good, her legs were way too shiny, and her skirt way too short. She nodded in understanding. “You get why, right?” I continued. She nodded again. “Nothing can happen. It just wouldn’t be right,” I said, attempting to convince myself of my words of prudence. Her ghostly white skin, held gently by my car’s red leather interior, was the carnal canvas of my dreams. Her aura, young and dangerous, coiled itself around my neck before diving down my throat and reaching into my lungs.

My anxiety that night was unwarranted, probably a figment of some twisted fantasy I harbored. Every heterosexual man hopes to be destroyed by a beautiful woman, of course, and surely my time would come. This girl just wasn’t the type to end lives, at least not yet. Of that I was sure. She tended to show up in class cloaked in oversized gray hoodies and swallowed up by baggy gray sweatpants, giving her the appearance of a retired cartoon mouse nobody liked anymore. And that was precisely how I saw her – as some creature that scurried in and out of my 1 pm class two days out of the week. I saw nearly all of my girl students in this light. When friends or even girlfriends would ask if I ever got hit on, I would always laugh: “Girls who study literature don’t have vaginas.” This explanation seemed to make a lot of sense to those who asked, and they never broached the subject again. This was pure hyperbole, naturally; literary girls have literary vaginas, and they typically use them to develop intellectual crushes on figures like Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, or Salman Rushdie. I took her far from campus that first night, someplace beyond the mundane shadow of academic life, someplace I wouldn’t run into any of my colleagues or, worse, any of her 1 pm classmates.

What would they say, my colleges; her classmates? They would, in their little huddles behind closed doors or sprawled out catlike on dorm room furniture, gossip and speculate. What was he thinking? In the minds of naysayers, there would have been little question of my questionable character. Exactly what sort of questionability would have left everyone for a loss. Just who is he, they would wonder to themselves, to each other, deciding that they didn’t know me and that I obviously didn’t know myself.

Twice, since the early 1990s, two male professors had been busted and subsequently dismissed for sexual misconduct. But these were old scandals, the parties concerned long retired or simply uninteresting – fat, dumpy sorts who invited no gossipy fantasy whatsoever. My student and I were different. She, almost coquettish in her asexuality, and me, obviously able to get action whenever I wanted, were the types you wanted to slander. Every now and then a case turned up, almost always a fat male professor professing his affection for an uninterested female student. As student advocacy groups and HR departments were quick to point out, these cases were always lopsided and easily parsed into instances of harassment or manipulation. Extreme actions usually never needed to be taken. But university administrators were always eager to make an example of out of anyone who would dare violate what amounted to the first commandment of university professordom.

But those who might mock or criticize my intent did not understand. Surely they had never experienced the life-giving qualities of skin so refreshing and effervescent. Otherwise they would keep their mouths shut. It wasn’t necessarily that this girl was a virgin per se (maybe she was maybe she wasn’t), so much as that she represented something ever unattainable, something ever past tense. Her body had yet to traumatized by childbirth or years of endless drinking and empty conquests. She had yet to live dangerously and recklessly and regretfully. Pressed against me, her bony, protuberant body offered me reprieve from my own sense of decay and deceit. She didn’t know what to do with her mouth or her tongue or her hands – but it didn’t matter. Her body’s youth leveraged my decay against me, slathered me in sadness and missed opportunities.

I jammed my fingers in her mouth, then I yanked her hair. I took her by the throat. I stirred with a strange desire to mark her body, to deface this virginal tribute, to make up for something lost, something missing within me.

“Is this okay,” I offered, my fist full of her blonde hair.

She nodded only, before pulling hard on my arm and sending her chin into the air. She let out a small sound, adorable and cartoonish. “Do that again,” she whispered, eyes closed. The cartoon quality of her voice was gone now, replaced by that of an individual groping for a sense of the topography of some undiscovered country.

She wrapped her hand around my fist and squeezed tightly. “Harder,” she demanded. I did as she ordered and took a worrisome pleasure from the way she twisted her child-like face into a snarl of sexual perversity. She dug her shoulder blades into my duvet cover. “Harder,” she huffed.

The British girl was the first one who ever asked me to knock her around. Yet inexperienced, I cowered and dithered in response. “Why,” I asked, rather like an idiot. She shrugged. “I like it, I guess. I was with this guy who was rough and it just, I don’t know, did it for me.” I didn’t respond well to any of that, especially not her opaque yet blatant reference to someone else. What kind of guy just does something like that to a woman’s body, I wondered. At the same time, I admired this stranger, this conquistador. His bravado was still written on the body of the woman I was with; it was in her skin. He owned her, whoever he was, in a way I would never be able to replicate. I was angry at her words and my own cowardice. So I tore her lacy thong from her hips and stuffed it in her mouth. This was the wrong thing to do. “What the fuck, K?” she yelled, pushing me off of her and spitting her thong out on my bed like a cat expelling a hairball. “That was expensive. It’s Agent Provocateur.” It wasn’t long after that that she stopped wearing things like that.

After the British girl was the forensic psychiatrist who entertained fantasies of rape and domestic violence. By then I was better at donning the mask of the aggressor. I always felt a little strange afterward, guilty and misogynistic. But those feelings eventually passed.

Other women came and went, executives, yoga teachers, cashiers, each with their own indulgent narrative in which I was merely a supporting character. I always did as I was asked, figuring that the day would come when I wouldn’t be able to take the mask off so easily, when I would be the man who grabs a girl by her neck without asking, with the haughty presumption of consent. I would be the man to whom all other men would be compared and measured.

Was I supposed to do that now, to the girl presently stifling her screams? Was I supposed to rob her of the very thing that made her different from the Brit, the psychiatrist, and all the others? At first, it was frustratingly boring to me that she didn’t want to have sex. But it made sense now, at least from my perspective. I didn’t want to be responsible for who she would be tomorrow, for the ruination to come. I didn’t want to be responsible for who I would be tomorrow. I didn’t want to take that experiential process – so baffling and confusing and arousing – away from her. I was the wrong person to do this with her.

I let go of her throat. “What the fuck,” she snarled. “Grab my bra and wrap it around my neck.” The moment I would forever return to in my memory was the moment I did as she asked. I snatched her Agent Provocateur from the floor and strung it around her neck and pulled. Its fine fabric was smooth between my fingers. I pulled again and she cried out.

“Take my shorts off,” she moaned, as my heart sank in sorrow for the both of us.

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2017/01/06

Inconsistent Argumentation

By dsholloway

 

For the rest of her life, she would blame herself for the death of all that could have been because she decided that the risks, whatever they were (she didn’t know), were too great.  She said nothing on the phone, really, the first time they had spoken in months, while he tried to convince her (bless his heart) that the risks, whatever they were (he didn’t know), were not insurmountable.

They were both dissatisfied by the course their relationship had taken, and were equally frustrated in their inability to right things. They had been the best couple: fashionable, catty, glamorous. (They could only be those things independently now.) They loved each other deeply. She felt that she should have done more to alleviate the stress that built over the years. She felt she should have said I love you more.

Now was her chance to do that, to turn over a new leaf or whatever. But she didn’t, and instead told him that she would do nothing to fix what seemed so, so broken.

“I just want to put things back how they were,” she said, before hanging up.

So did he. But she meant it in a different way.

 

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2017/01/04

The Abyss of Freedom

By dsholloway

Something possessed him to enroll in a woodworking class at the community college. Which was fine.

Ever since she introduced him to the male members of her family – all tall, rich, and unfaithful to their wives and girlfriends – he sought to “up his man game.” She rolled her eyes whenever he said this and was secretly sad that he felt the need to be different. Nevertheless, every Wednesday for the past eight weeks he came home late. Which was fine. He was making her a clock.

When he climbed in bed – after showering, naturally – he dutifully whispered in her ear his progress. “It’s done,” he said softly. “It’s on the table.”

She jumped up, not bothering to put a stitch of clothing on (this did not bother him), and dashed to the dining room. It was an awful thing – uneven and splintery.

“K,” she said like a homeroom teacher, “it’s not even telling the right time.”

“I know,” he replied proudly. “It’s set to when we first kissed.”

She looked at him incredulously.

He explained. “Your eyes were closed and I looked at my watch. I wanted to remember.”

She began to cry, and he glanced down at his watch.

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2017/01/02

An Attempt to Come to Terms

By dsholloway

Lying in the dark, a thought dances along the edges of his mind, carefully gliding over the puddles of vodka and sidestepping the scattered SSRIs.

He had always been careful to turn music on; it was the only way he could get her to sleep. He preferred a tomb-like enclosure. She was the opposite, but she was also loved by him. So he cued up gentle piano music and let it lull her to sleep. During the early days of their relationship, he slept very little, distracted by the sound and unable to settle down because of the presence of someone in his bed. He grew accustomed and eventually dependent on her body being next to his. But he never trained himself to sleep through the music, faint though it was.

When he woke to find her gone, he recalls now, there had been a power outage, or else he had been too wasted. Either way there was no music. There was, instead, silence. But it wasn’t the silence he wanted. It claimed her, unjustly.

He feels her in the silence. But he can’t sleep. So he turns her piano sounds back on. But he can’t sleep that way either.

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2016/12/31

The Fantasy of Being Absolved

By dsholloway

In her dreams, he was elusive and distant, staring at her with grave eyes. How she longed for his words, his words, once so sweet but now – when he did bother to open his mouth – unruly and hardened. But he said nothing, in her dreams, while she murmured something over and over again, inaudible to them both. Even she didn’t know their contents or intent.

Her dreams were her reality’s inverse. During her waking hours it was she who refused to speak, drifting through the long, masculine corridors of their home like a ghost ship. Her last words to him, spat from the foyer on her way to exercise class: “It is what it is.”

It was one of her favorite sayings. It made him cringe; he considered that turn of phrase a worthless tautology. In the days since she decided to stop speaking (thirteen and counting), he gradually forgot why she said that anyway.

He still tried, mildly and with condescension, to engage her in conversation. But to no real end. He, too, dreamed. He dreamed not of her words, or even his, but rather of an implicitly understood and forever sweet silence that needed no words at all.

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2016/12/30

Inconclusive Stability

By dsholloway

Still not used to her new glasses, she reached behind the lenses and rubbed an eye. “Why did you make me get these?” she asked. “I can see fine.”

She kept the windows open even in the winter, and a sharp frozen breeze blew in. I retrieved her favorite cashmere throw and draped it over her shoulders. “Thanks,” she said with surprising sweetness. She extended her hand as I walked back to the kitchen, grazing my arm. It was the first time in three weeks she had touched me.

I asked her how many eggs she wanted and she said two.

Her touch, though faint, stayed on my skin. As chilly as it was inside, I felt myself growing warm and the kitchen seemed stuffy. An eerie quiet settled in and I could hear her measured breath.

“Are you okay, K?” she asked from the kitchen table where she was reading a fashion magazine.

Without warning, I toppled to the floor. I heard her scream with an unfamiliar urgency as she rushed to my side. Her hair was messy and the lenses of her new glasses were fogged up. I closed my eyes, stung by the life in her breath.

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2016/12/18

The Merits of My Defects

By dsholloway

By degrees, the night swallowed us, leaving her luxury SUV to grope its way to civilization. Her relatives didn’t live far, but in the rural midwest it doesn’t take much to transport you to the edge of the world.

“I need a drink,” I said, taking her hand. “Let’s never do that again. Until next year of course.” I glanced at her profile.

She was crying inaudibly, eyes focused on the crisp white beams of light projecting from the front of her Volvo.

“You need a drink, too,” I said gently.

When the city emerged later,  we were dismayed to find nothing but empty streets and solemn lampposts.

Still we drove, desperate for an alcoholic reprieve from our holiday traumas. We settled on a kitschy hotel on the border of the bad part of town. In the bar was a handful of middle-class refugees like us. The bartender, the Death Star tattooed on his forearm, looked inexplicably tragic in his vest and bowtie.

I ordered our drinks and followed her to the end of the bar. Less than ten minutes later I ordered two more drinks. This was a blatant attempt at escape. She put her head on my shoulder.

 

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2016/12/15

Convergence and Coincidence

By dsholloway

And so we went to Thirsty Thursday, as her short-haired friend liked to call it. Thirsty Thursday was the cutesy name for the four of us gathering around her friend’s dining room table making stilted, domestic chit-chat and drinking poorly made gin-and-tonics.

Thirsty Thursday used to just be three, but her friend went and got herself a boyfriend – bald, midwestern, decently friendly. He worked in a train yard, kept a tally of how many vagrants he busted riding the rails.

I drank six poorly made gin-and-tonics, slept until 2 pm. I woke up with a terrible headache and a half-baked plan to take up model railroad.

“Enjoy yourself last night?”

Her voice rattled against the insides of my skull, causing me to wince. “I always do.”

“You wouldn’t shut up about trains and” – a dramatic pause – “their symbolism as great modernity or some shit.”

I dropped my head back on the pillow. “Sounds like something I’d say. Trains are always going forward after all. Progress.”

“Whatever.”

I closed my eyes. “Remember how I used to live next to some tracks?”

“Yeah. I used to fantasize about your death by train.”

She heard me sigh, then added: “Now that would be progress.”

 

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2016/12/14

He Cannot See Himself as a Young Man

By dsholloway

I was walking home that night, paying little attention to my surroundings, when a woman – slight, fashionably dressed, dark eyes – approached me.

“Are you K?”

I said that I was, trying to ignore the incredulity of the moment. It was dark, but I knew her voice.

She looked at me, then punched me in the face, sending me backward. Her punch had knocked her off balance, so the force of the blow was relatively tame. Still, my right eye began to swell.

“Stay the fuck away from me!” she shouted.

Too stunned to reply, I grimaced at her. She took a knife from her back pocket. “And give me your fucking watch.”

I did. Then she flipped me off before tottering off into the shadows.

In a daze, I tripped and had to limp home in the dark.

I woke the next morning on the couch, and you were sitting next to me.  “Sorry,” you said with resignation, handing me my watch. “I’ve always kind of liked it, I guess. We met the day you bought it.”

You were leaving for work.

“At least you didn’t try to run me over this time,” I said, watching the front door close.

 

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2016/12/13

Processes of Abstraction

By dsholloway

For a moment neither of us spoke. She had taken up smoking, was practiced in exhaling through her nose. It was cool, I admit. She leaned hard on her elbows, took a moment to glare at me, and jammed her cigarette violently into its ashtray. Music from a neighbor’s stereo was stirring somewhere outside.

“It’s a terrible thing, what happened,” she sighed, lighting another cigarette.

I couldn’t disagree, but I said nothing. She had painted her apartment this odd shade of light blue. Through the haze (she had been smoking all night), the walls took on a dinghy, worn look – like a discarded Tiffany’s bag.

“What did you expect,” she said abruptly, pissed that I wasn’t listening. “You left. I had to stay here. I threw out all your shit and painted over your poems. They were good, really good. But they had to go.”

My eyes burned from the smoke, and from fourteen hours of driving. I swallowed the rest of my martini.

“I write fiction now,” I said in a way that I found impressively detached. Then I walked to her desk and unearthed a Sharpie from under a pile of cords, papers, and letters (unopened) from me.

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2016/12/12

Philosophical Acumen

By dsholloway

I must have fallen asleep, for I don’t know how long – at some point she had lit her favorite candle (shaped like a man’s bashed in skull), so I had probably slept a while. She was as I remembered: arms hugging her legs, book in her hands. The flame of her favorite candle looked like a man trying to shake off his own immolation. He writhed, casting her profile in varying depths of black.

She smiled. “Someone was tired.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I guess.”

The house was shadowy and cool.

“It’s snowing,” she said, eyes returned to her book.

I looked behind me. “Jesus,” I said, transfixed by the vast white on the other side of the window. “How long was I asleep?”

She shrugged. “A few days. It hasn’t been snowing this whole time, though. Just since yesterday.”

Yesterday?

I swung my legs off of the couch and stared at her. She caught my gaze, momentarily, before the shadow cast by her favorite candle swelled again.

“What,” she said from somewhere in the shadow. “I wanted to finish my book. But your friend K came over instead.”

The shadow receded from her face and she was still smiling.

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2016/11/23

I Shall Be With You

By dsholloway

The photographer called again. “Just checking in. Are you okay?”

He had been calling everyday for the past week, leaving the same message: “It’s terrible. Just terrible.” I answered today, figuring that if he hadn’t caught his error by now, he never would.

“Are you sure you have the right number?”

“I’m sure. How are you holding up?”

“Um. Excuse me?”

“And this close to the wedding,” he continued to himself. “I’ll return your deposit. You’re dealing with enough.”

“We got married in December of last year.”

He paused: “I don’t think so…” His voice trailed off into confusion.

“I’m positive. You took our photos. My favorite one is on my desk.” Her head on my shoulder, my hand creeping up her dress; we looked like models in a perfume advertisement. The me in the picture stared back at me. Was he as confused as I was?

“Look, K,” the photographer whined. “It was on the news.”

I hung up and read on the internet about my wife’s death. I read, too, about our imminent vows.

I looked back at our picture. The me in the photo looked upset now, his hand continuing it ascent up my wife’s wedding dress.

 

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2016/11/12

Formalities Among Us

By dsholloway

This wasn’t how things were supposed to be.

She was the whore – fallen, despicable.

Yet here she sat, poised on the edge of the bed like an angel, ever the image of one neither fallen nor despicable.

“Are we doing this or not?” Her disdain filled the room. She wrapped her arms around her knees, sighed, looked toward the carpet.

I said nothing, leaned harder against the door.

She was the whore, repository of failure. But the intensity in her eyes compromised her expendability. Had I known then, when I let her into my luxury car, that she was not, in fact, human waste, I would have driven elsewhere, looked elsewhere for whatever it was I was looking for.

I didn’t want to fuck her because of carnal desire. I wanted to fuck her to debase her, to make myself feel better. I was the upright citizen; she was the whore.

I had ruined lives, trashed futures, lost everything.

She was supposed to absorb, affirm my failures, allow me to start anew.

But her body radiated goodness, filled the motel room with oppressive optimism.

“You’ll still have to pay me,” she said, oblivious to the worth I saw in her.

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2016/11/03

Contaminating Our Gaze

By dsholloway

“Sorry,” she said, lunging at her eye which was lodged between the floor and the heel of my left shoe. “I can’t get it to stay in.”

The casualness with which she spoke of her abnormality offended me. She glanced at me with her one good eye, looked away in feigned innocence.

I retrieved her eye, offered it to her from my open palm. I figured she rolled her eye in my direction on purpose. She figured, I figured, that since I’m a retard she could become my retard friend, sister in arms.

“How did that happen,”she asked. Everybody else pretended not to notice. But she spoke with the confidence of a retarded Other, identified some sort of twisted commonality between us.

I looked her up and down, decided I would try to fuck her. I answered. “You did this.” I traced the hole in my chest, pointed to where my heart used to be.

She stared at me with her one good eye, the other eye now in her hand. “No I didn’t.”

I responded with a sigh: “Then who did?”

She shrugged, answered, “You did,” offered me the knife I gave her for her birthday, stained red now.

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2016/11/03

Fabricating the Fake

By dsholloway

I make a cocktail every night, stir it with the long helixed spoon she gave me the night she killed herself.

It was a birthday present, I think, the spoon. Or maybe her suicide. She jumped from our veranda at 8 pm central time. So at 8 pm central time I always make a cocktail, toast her, toast the life we used to have.

I cue up Interpol first, good Interpol, not their recent shit, and irritate my upstairs neighbor. Then I mix my cocktail – often vodka because she loved vodka, but sometimes something jingoistic because she hated jingoism.

Then I sit in the dark and drink. I cry, too, in the dark, let the good memories carry me away for a while. I think about how we used to listen to Interpol in the dark, went so far as to get matching Interpol lyrics tattooed on our bodies some snowy night some November.

We sat next to each other, grimaced in unison as our bodies accepted their tattoos. We healed our tattoos together, put expensive lotion on our tattoos, defended our tattoos from cynics who questioned our devotion.

To Interpol?

To each other?

It’s hard to say.

I make another drink.

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2016/09/24

Exercises in Neo-Mercantilism

By dsholloway

“Would anyone like a vanilla latte,” said the woman to a mass of early-evening cafe customers who were only partially listening. “They made two by mistake.”

“I’ll take it.” I met her gaze.

She smiled. “Have a nice day.” She handed me a white paper cup, brushing my fingers as she did so. Then she walked off, her towering boyfriend matching her stride.

I hate vanilla lattes. But having just purchased a new luxury car, my finances weighed heavily on my mind.

I took a seat in a dark corner of the cafe and pressed the paper cup to my lips. Her name  was written on the side of the cup. In that instant, I felt an intimate, indeed too intimate, connection to this generous stranger.

I sat for hours with my vanilla latte, refused to drink it. Even after the last customers trickled out the door, I remained in my wooden chair cradling my latte like an injured animal and staring at the empty space across my table.

“Excuse me.”

Her languid voice roused me. I smiled.

“I’m glad you’re still here.”

I smiled again. “I’m glad you came back.”

She settled into the vacant chair across from me.

 

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2016/09/20

Techniques for Intervening

By dsholloway

“Anything at any price,” read the inside of the card, which featured a cat sleeping in a martini glass.

The attending package – displaying no return address – contained a cylindrical fish tank, complex instructions, and laudatory remarks:

Congratulations! Your new jellyfish will arrive tomorrow. Make sure your tank is calibrated to the appropriate temperature. Jellyfish are temperamental creatures, so handle your new friend with care!

I assembled the tank, placed it on my dining room table. I filled it with water and spent my evening hours envisioning various scenarios occurring within its narrow walls. In my mind, I saw her treading water, face creased with deceit, anger, and hatred. I saw her puff her cheeks up before descending toward the bottom of the tank for no reason in particular. I saw her begin to convulse and spasm, unable to ascend to the surface. I saw myself jump into the tank to retrieve her from the bottom.

The creature arrived the next day. It was dead already. I placed it in the tank and watched its tentacles gently keep it afloat. Then, thinking I could revive it, I jumped into the tank and pressed my lips to the top of its hood.

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2016/09/20

Between Bureaucracy and the King

By dsholloway

“My father left us to build corn mazes in Japan,” the woman said, letting her knobby knees brush against my torn denim. Lost, as I was, in the smoothness of her legs, I was only half listening to her story, which I figured she had made up anyway.

“The Japanese do like corn,” I finally offered, willing my eyes toward her face. “They put it on everything. Pizza, salad, whatever.”

She smiled, looked away, unamused by my joke.

“I mean,” I struggled to ward off the encroaching silence, “who doesn’t like corn?” I felt like a bad stand-up comedian.

“Thanks for the drink,” she said, sliding her glass toward me. “Let’s do this again.”

She didn’t mean it.

I drove to the store and bought all 160 cans of corn that were in stock.

“Looks like someone really likes corn,” cooed the cashier with a sly grin. I smiled and invited her over.

“After my shift. It’ll be late. I hope that’s okay.”

She knocked on my door at 11 pm and the two of us worked till morning building an impressive, winding maze out of my cans of corn.

“I have to go,” she said, suddenly aware.

“Good luck,” I replied.

 

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2016/08/30

Memorabilia

By dsholloway

K sold the ring his fiancee had given him. Some guy in the parking lot of a sandwich shop gave him $400, claiming that it was identical to the one he lost, a gift from his own fiancee.

K spent the first $100 at a strip club, folding his stack of dollars into paper airplanes and cascading them into the air, like a little squadron of warplanes, toward the pretty but malnourished stripper.

K spent the remaining $300 on a fat prostitute. He had no desire to sleep with the fat prostitute. Instead, he wanted to ride her, like she was a horse.

K used to be a skilled equestrian and won many awards. K fell in love with a pretty lady, also an equestrian, skilled. They were to marry, but things fell apart; K never rode again. K moved away and decorated his meager apartment with his awards. The urge to ride was strong, but he refused to return to horses.

K demanded the fat prostitute remove her clothes. Then he climbed atop her. He rode her vociferously, until they both collapsed into a heap of flesh.

K slept heavily. When he woke, the prostitute was gone, and so were his awards.

 

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2016/08/14

An Urgent Telegram

By dsholloway

She sent herself to me, in a box wrapped with celebratory wrapping paper. By the time she arrived on my doorstep, a day late, the wrapping paper was badly tattered and you could see that the box she stuffed herself into was a shoe box that had contained men’s shoes, size 8.

She had a bow in her hair that was, in spite of the rough journey, relatively still in tact. Probably at one point positioned just so atop her head – like a halo – the bow barely clung to her forelocks.

She smiled at me when I opened the box and something unintelligible leaked from her badly distressed lips.

“That’s from stress you know,” I said, falling immediately back into my long neglected role.

“Fuck off,” she whispered playfully. Her makeup was smeared against the insides of the box and missing from her face almost entirely.

I picked her up from the box and kissed her, bristling against her dry lips.

Then I frowned, peered into the empty box. “Where’s the rest of you?”

It was her turn to frown. “It’s not important.”

I tucked her under my arm and marched inside. “I wish you would have told me you were coming,” I said. “I would have tidied up.”

“Happy birthday,” she said, changing the subject. She uncoiled her tongue to offer me a shiny tungsten ring. It was the one I wanted.

“How long are you staying?”

“Until I bleed to death.”

Then she sunk her teeth into her tongue.

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2016/08/08

The Frail

By dsholloway

I lost the needle I used to sew her mouth shut. That also meant that I couldn’t sew her hands back onto her arms, or reattach my tongue – which I bit off, impulsively, after I swore I’d never speak to her.

Some time later, she asked me to cut her hands off and sew her lips together so she wouldn’t be tempted to sing me songs or write me poetry. I obliged, though her voice and her words sustained me.

I kept the needle on a chain, which I wore around my neck. When she was ready, I promised, I would unsew everything – when she was ready to nourish me again.

But I was mugged one day, coming home from the store. During the struggle the chain came off my neck and the needle disappeared. The eggs in my shopping bag also cracked and yolk got everywhere.

She smiled at me when I got home, but all I could do was cry and hide my bruises. When I opened my mouth, incomprehensible consonants tumbled out. She only gestured and flailed in return. I took a pen and wrote everything down: the mugging, the eggs, the needle. She shrugged, accepting the forever silence.

All I could do was write. All she could do was read.

But we discovered solace in each other’s gaze – and love, compassion, understanding. The silence would heal us.

Until I found her in the kitchen, her left eye dangerously close to the flame of her favorite candle.

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