Tag Archives: fiction

2016/06/05

Those Who Have Nothing Have Only Their Bodies

By dsholloway

The sommelier scoffed when I asked for a bottle of her boldest red. “It’s very exclusive,” she said with arrogance.

I found her whole performance to be off-putting. But I held my tongue.”I’ll take it,” I said, holding her gaze.

The sommelier disappeared momentarily before returning with a dark bottle splayed on a fluffy white towel, like a newly born aristocrat being presented in court.

“This way, sir,” she said, indicating a private room. “As I said, this bottle is very exclusive.”

The sommelier led me into the room, which contained only a small table and corkscrew. There was no wine glass.

“Take your time,” she said, disinterest hanging in the air long after she closed the door behind her.

I corked the bottle and a woman climbed out.

“What can I do for you,” she asked.

“Put things back how they used to be,” I pleaded. I wanted her to fix everything that went wrong. I wanted her to make me someone deserving of the love of the woman who haunts my dreams.

“Very well,” she said, misunderstanding, and disappeared back into the bottle of wine.

I fell to my knees in despair, but hoping for a refund.

 

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2015/07/26

An Irruption of the Real

By dsholloway

For my birthday, she took me to a fancy restaurant. “Here,” she said, sliding a package across the table during the intermezzo course. The rectangular shape of the package betrayed its contents.

She knew I knew.

“So you can carry it with you,” she continued without invitation. “And so you can stop writing on bar napkins.”

Later, she let me fuck her in the ass (my “third gift”) and then went home (my fourth gift?), complaining about the pain she would be in tomorrow.

I shook myself a martini and opened the package–a pocket-sized journal, as I had more or less expected. I grabbed a handful of pages at their lower right corners and flipped back to front. Then I noticed writing–black ink, feminine–her writing. I looked closely. Each page was full of details from my life.

I began reading about things she had no business authoring: drugs, prostitution, suicide attempts. I read further: my birthday, anal sex, a journal with its curious contents. On the last page I read about my death–prolonged and messy. I didn’t get it. “I don’t have AIDS,” I said to myself.

My cell buzzed. “Um,” she sighed, “there’s something I should have told you.”

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2014/12/15

To Become One’s Own Cause

By dsholloway

“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.

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2014/06/09

Antinomies of Postmodern Individuality

By dsholloway

The tattoo artist was a master of his craft, but what his customer asked for proved difficult. The problem, he later justified to himself, was that “[he] just didn’t know what a woman being attacked by a school of jellyfish looked like.”

Matters were worsened by his extremely demanding customer who, wealthy indeed, was used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted. The tattoo artist could have waved him away with a curt flick of the wrist. But the sum of money offered was just too grand to pass up: “Come back at such and such date, and I will have your design.”

While the design seemed intimidating from the outset, the tattoo artist had been confident in his abilities. But time grew short, and the tattoo artist grew anxious.

He reached for his phone, only a few days left.

“Hello, K, I need to draw a woman being attacked by jellyfish.” Plans were made.

The next day he showed up at Q beach at the designated time, pad and pencil in hand. He sketched furiously, creativity liberated, until he realized that the woman in the water was his sister.

Besieged by anguish, he decided to double the price.

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2014/06/05

Tundish

By dsholloway

K wondered why she kept herself in the dark,why she  never bothered to turn on a lamp or overhead light or why she never lit one of the countless candles with which she had peppered her upper-middle class residence. Indeed, when he joined her for an evening cocktail or whatever, they were never alone, for the darkness kept them company until the sun (he often stayed the night because there were totally serious) chased it away.

He asked her once: “Why don’t we light a candle?” She rebuffed him: “Those candles are all made from the bodies of former lovers. For obvious reasons I don’t want to burn them.” It kinda made sense. To sit in the darkness, indeed to embrace it, seemed to suggest to K’s petulant intellect that her world was–figuratively–lighted by the affections of men.

But K grew uncomfortable with the idea of old flames hanging around during their intimate moments. He talked himself out of burning her house down. Instead, after dinner one evening he doused himself in her finest vodka and lit himself on fire. She was probably impressed with his devotion; but she never found jealousy to be an attractive quality.

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