Tag Archives: flash fiction
“Another one is dead,” she said flatly. I rolled my eyes: “Well, go get a new one.”
“If you neglect them, they’ll die.”
I wasn’t listening. Her engagement ring caught the light and cast her every word in doubt. Despite my harsh tone, she grabbed her Burberry and left for the pet store.
I approached the birdcage. The remaining birds had pecked the third one to death. It was new, a replacement for my first bird, which died of old age. The birds were huddled together keeping warm in the winter air. I nudged the birdcage with my hip and made my way to the coffee table.
She came home empty handed. “Sorry, K. They’re out of birds.” She wasn’t sorry. She didn’t understand my affection for things that die easily. “It’s fine,” I murmured, pressing my chai to my lips. “Get in the cage.”
She went to the closet and fished out last year’s Halloween costume.
I reminisced fondly of ripping the parrot head off in lusty urgency, pulling the zipper the length of her body. She opened the birdcage and crawled in.
She and I used to be like those birds. I closed the cage and locked it.
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“If I had anywhere better to be, I’d be there. Believe me.”
The bartender shrugged. “Get yourself a girlfriend or something. You’ve been here every day this week. It’s getting pathetic.”
It was my turn to shrug: “I’m too narcissistic. I wouldn’t know what to do with a girlfriend. I mean, I’d have to stop thinking about myself so much.”
She scoffed. Then she took her arm off and put it on the countertop. “Problem solved.”
I was amazed by her insight. With her arm, I was free to indulge my deepest narcissistic desires and find comfort in a woman’s touch without giving anything in return. I snatched her arm up and left a bigger tip than usual.
Back in my apartment I caressed the arm and pressed it to my face. I kissed the back of its hand. I put its fingers in my mouth.
“Fuck me,” it moaned. Instinctually, I ripped my right arm off and threw it to the floor.
……….
“What’s wrong,” it asked disappointedly.
……….
“I don’t want this.” I put her arm back on the countertop. “It wanted to have sex.”
“And?”
“Sex leads to complications,” I huffed, proud that my ego was still in tact.
3 Comments | tags: affect, alcohol, bar, bartender, body, ego, flash fiction, narcissism, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me
The first time I saw her sunbathing was during high summer: a nearly naked body prostrate and baking on a frayed beach blanket.
Through autumn and winter, everyday she was out there on her blanket. Even under the oppressive winter sky she darkened. Over time I memorized her skin—its gradations, flaws, and changes.
One evening I saw her out at a restaurant. Winter was lifting but it was still cold. I was sitting alone at a table when a woman appeared in my periphery. I didn’t know her face, but I didn’t need to. The hue of her skin betrayed her identity.
“Excuse me,” I called from my seat. She turned.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t mean to startle you, but I see you sunbathing everyday. Won’t you sit with me?”
She slid her face into a smile and sank into the offered chair. I extended my hand, hoping she would allow me just one touch of her bronzed hand. She obliged.
It was an exquisite appendage—soft, smooth, slightly toned—and in spite of myself I grew excited.
Unfortunately, with her other exquisite appendage she pulled pepper spray from her coat and wasted no time in shooting me with it.
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She was certain that we would either get caught and arrested or piss off the spirits of all the people in the ground.
“Look,” I implored, arms spread wide, “this place is so big nobody will ever find us if we choose the right spot.”
“And the ghosts?”
“The spirits aren’t going to be here—unless all these people were buried alive.”
She offered a strained smile of defeat. I took her hand, leading her away from the sunlight, tour busses, and plots of important people.
“Over there.” I gestured toward a gloomy stone that had the rejected air of being cast off by the other stones.
She bent over and gripped the top with both hands while I yanked her pants down.
“Um, wait.”
“Why?”
“This stone has your name on it.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m serious. Look.”
I leaned over her, my now flaccid penis brushing against her bare ass. I rolled my eyes and scoffed.
“That doesn’t concern you?”
“Why would it?”
“It says you die today.”
Just before my gruesome death, I felt a figure lurch in my periphery and heard her scream—“K! Stop it!”—as the jealous knife of her husband sank repeatedly into my flesh.
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She had a constellation of shitty stars tattooed on her body. They were cartoonish and lumpy, the shape of holiday cookies. I followed them down her spine and around the bottom of her left torso, where they then descended and coiled loosely the length of her left leg.
“These are awful,” I said. She shrugged and rolled out of my bed, complaining about needing to “wash [my] scent” off. That was our first and last conversation. I closed my eyes and when I opened them—evidently much later—she had left. My wallet was gone and I found a syringe in my bathroom.
I drove to the crumbling neighborhood where I first saw her only a few hours prior. But now I saw only drug addicts milling around and a woman bobbing her head to an inaudible rhythm. I called from my vehicle, interrupting the woman. She swore at me and displayed something sharp. I drove off, fretting.
At a loss, I slithered into a tattoo shop and demanded my own constellation from the worst artist on staff. He readied his inkwells. “I’ll give you an extra thousand if you tattoo me with this,” I said, offering him the syringe.
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K, though dying, was in the best shape of his life. “The TSA agent asked if I was a gymnast,” he boasted the other day. “I told him I was just a narcissist.”
K wasn’t just a narcissist. I don’t remember the name of his illness, but it was fatal. Still full of vigor, he paraded around in his Under Armour, revealing every crevice and striation in his torso, like an aspiring Mister Universe. In another several months, he would become hollow, like a drug addict. What would the TSA agent say then?
When he took too much medication, K would rant about “beauty in decay.” Then he would hit the gym extra hard. K read too much philosophy—chubby men expounding on a reality they know nothing about. Have you ever watched somebody die, I hissed once, angrily. We disagreed a lot these days.
But K was right. He had more girlfriends than I could count. “Do they know you’ll be dead soon,” I asked after he regaled me with a story of a hefty blonde.
“Of course. They wouldn’t be interested in me otherwise.”
For the first time in a long while, I found myself agreeing with him.
Leave a comment | tags: addict, addiction, affect, death, drugs, flash fiction, gymnast, illness, Mister Universe, narcissism, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, TSA, women | posted in Him, Me, Short Fiction
“We don’t know what happened to the dinosaurs,” she said. She was too attractive to be a paleontologist. I nevertheless listened to her lecture. But I didn’t believe her.
I whispered to K: “Bullshit. She knows exactly what happened to them.”
K brushed me aside and marched toward the paleontologist, much swagger in his step. “She wants to have sex with the two of us,” he reported back, smiling as though he were staring in his own porn. I would have fucked her, but the idea of three bodies heaving and groaning together was off-putting.
K left the museum with the paleontologist. “I’ll find out what happened to them,” he said in my ear on his way out.
I visited K in prison six months later. He was wan and sickly. “What the fuck,” I said.
“I cut her head off.”
“Why?”
“She would’t tell me what happened to the dinosaurs, so I killed her.”
I couldn’t say anything, so he kept talking.
“But the weird thing was,” he said with piercing eyes from behind plexiglass, “I looked down her neck after I cut her head off. I saw a bunch of dinosaurs grazing.”
“On what,” I asked, genuinely curious.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, dinosaurs, eating, flash fiction, museum, orgy, paleontologist, prison, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Him, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
When K told me that he was going to kill himself if I stole his girlfriend, I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think that I could steal his girlfriend.
K was wealthy and educated, and what girl would refuse such a man? I was the opposite in every respect; had I found myself on the Titanic or an equal vessel I would have had to steal my way aboard. I began flirting with her simply out of spite, as if to insinuate to K that although he could have whatever he wanted, I could take it from him with ease (rich men have large egos, which is a huge turnoff).
I didn’t enjoy fucking her. Indeed, I courted her out of spite. And she, the caged bird of a wealthy birdist, allowed me to court her for the same reason.
She and I were upstairs when K’s telegram arrived, announcing his imminent demise—“…by the time you read this I will be dead.”
“Shit. K’s dead,” I said after reading the telegram. She, still in my bed, feigned sadness.
“I guess you’ll have to marry me now.” She coiled my blanket snuggly around her.
K, from somewhere safe, probably smiled.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, ego, flash fiction, marriage, money, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, spite, telegram, wealth | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“Nervous much? Or do you always never look a girl in the eye?”
Her grammar—not necessarily incorrect—bugged me. It reminded me of the way a graduate student would address some pressing social concern.
“Sorry, habit I guess.” I attempted to elaborate on a study some sociologist conducted that proves men are poor at maintaining eye contact.
She rolled her eyes. “Here,” she said, grabbing the expensive vodka from my bar cart without asking. I had upset her. Moments earlier she had gone on a rant about how women shouldn’t wear underwear when they wear tight dresses. I, naturally, hadn’t minded the conversation, though I did wonder about sanitation.
But now she sat before me with her head cocked way back like you do when you catch the rain in your mouth. She filled her mouth with vodka and waited for me to drink from it.
I didn’t want to, having the day prior watch a documentary about birds feeding their young. I made a joke about liking “my martinis dirty.”
She displayed two fingers, reached under her dress, and then used them to stir the vodka in her mouth.
She tried to meet my gaze. I looked away.
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As she choked me, I wondered if she had murdered anyone before. Her grip was confident. She showed no concern that she might take things too far–as though she knew the right moment to stop.
Had she not been so attractive, I may not have followed her home that night–out of curiosity, I assure you. She may not have approached me: “Why are you following me?” She may not have invited me to her home to debase and fuck me. But the intensity of her presence was hypnotic. I was truly under her spell.
Get the fuck out of here. I was used to the way she spoke to me. It chilled me but kept me alive. I balled up my clothes and headed toward the door. Catching a glimpse of myself in the reflection of her glass liquor cabinet, I rubbed at the red striations on my throat. Anybody would be able to guess what happened.
Use that. She nodded to a purple Armani draped across the sofa.
“Madam, have you ever killed anyone?”
All the men who come here. And with that scarf, in fact. Now, come here and let me tie it for you before you go.
1 Comment | tags: affect, Armani, death, fashion, flash fiction, masochism, relationships, sadomasochism, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
Six months had passed since I put her portrait in the trunk of my car.
“Why is this still in here,” she asked not long after, her hands full of groceries. “So I always have you in my trunk,” I replied.
But her portrait–all glamour and heavy eye make-up–soon became covered in dust and the fine wood frame in which she was encased became scuffed.
Still, I was so used to her back there that the thought of hanging her on the wall was mildly unnerving.
We had a fight two days ago. She accused me of stealing her old wedding ring to finance my cocaine habit.
I called her three times. I sent twelve text messages.
Silence.
I opened the trunk yesterday morning to fetch my umbrella. I gave her portrait a knowing look, thinking, “What the fuck is your problem?” That’s when I noticed that her previously immaculate smile was now twisted into a scream.
“Well if she’s dead,” I said to myself, “now’s the time to steal her wedding ring.”
When she was found this afternoon in the trunk of a new Mercedes I felt mildly guilty, though I didn’t really know why: Fucking rich people.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, car, drugs, fight, flash fiction, mercedes, picture, portrait, rain, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, wealth | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
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.”
2 Comments | tags: affect, AIDS, anal sex, birthday, death, fiction, flash fiction, journal, present, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, writing | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
I stole my neighbor’s luxury hatbox.
Repair men were in her apartment replacing the floor. They left the door open and when I walked past I saw the hatbox resting on an ugly sofa.
I walked past again. And again. The repair men were probably taking a break. I ran in and snatched the hatbox. After reaching my apartment, I took in my new acquisition. I didn’t know why I decided to steal her hatbox. Perhaps I wanted to sell it. Perhaps I just wanted something nice.
I inhaled and opened it, not really expecting to find anything inside. (Who keeps a hat in a hatbox?)
There was a note inside–something scribbled on the back of a receipt in an oval, feminine hand. It was the beginning of a love letter to me. “Dear K,” it began. She had written nice things about me, but entirely in past tense as though I were dead: “You were this, you were that.”
I had the sudden urge to return the hatbox. Then I turned her love letter over and inspected the receipt.
Rope, tape, saw, shovel, bleach, trash bags.
I decided not to return the hatbox after all. I locked the door.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, fashion, flash fiction, hat, letter, love, murder, neighbor, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, sofa, theft | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“Did you know people sell these?” K took a tablet from the orangish vial on the counter and held it between two fingers the way you inspect a small bug. “They call it ‘hillbilly heroin.'”
“Yeah, but I need those,” I said. “You know–for pain.”
K wasn’t listening. “One of these can go for, like, $20.”
I rolled my eyes: “Can’t you find something else to sell illegally?”
“No,” he retorted. He snatched my perscription and left.
I sank into despair, knowing that my doctor would never buy the story I needed to sell him.
……….
K came to my door a few days later, smiling widely.
“Can I have my medicine back now?” I asked.
“I sold them. We need more.”
“That’s not going to happen. There are rules to guard against this exact thing.”
“Yes it is.” Then I noticed the hammer in his hand.
“Wait,” I screamed. I pleaded. But K insisted it was the only way. I backed away. Then he pulled a handful of money from his pocket, thrusting it into my hands. “This is your half.”
He raised the hammer.
I closed my eyes and envisioned prostitutes and Rolexes. I don’t remember what happened after that.
Leave a comment | tags: addiction, affect, drugs, flash fiction, hammer, heroin, hillbilly, money, pain, relationships, Rolex, sex, Short Fiction, short story, women | posted in Him, Me, Short Fiction
“I’ll have that ‘up’ please,” I said, shooting my thumb into the air as though I were a hitchhiker. The bartender smiled. I watched her limbs labor over my cocktail.
“Would you like a garnish,” she asked, transferring my cocktail from shaker to glass.
“A woman. Blonde. Green eyes. Thin.”
Without a word, the bartender snatched my cocktail and disappeared somewhere behind the bar, leaving me with a muted TV broadcasting the finance channel and a juke box that played only Soundgarden songs.
She returned a moment later. “Here you are sir,” she said through grated teeth, slamming my glass on the bar top.
I felt her eyes on me.
I grabbed the stem of the glass and readied to swirl the liquid inside.
“Careful sir,” the bartender said. “She might drown if you do that.”
Bringing my cocktail to my face, I looked closely at the woman inside: blonde, light eyes. She was treading water and growing tired. I looked at the bartender.
“Will there be anything else, sir?” She forced the words.
I scrutinized the woman swimming in my cocktail. “Actually,” I began, “she looks a little fat. I hate to be difficult, but would you remake this?”
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, bar, bartender, body, cocktail, death, drink, flash fiction, Short Fiction, short story, Soundgarden | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
She was topless, staring at a tattoo on her right ribcage–flowery script, four lines deep. A towel was in a pile at her feet; she had been readying to take a shower.
We locked eyes in the mirror.
“This wasn’t here last night,” she said to me but probably more to herself.
I grew defensive. “What do you want me to do about it?” I left the bathroom, shutting the door behind me–shutting her in there with her new and nonconsensual tattoo.
……….
I knew that tattoo. It was the same one my ex-girlfriend got on her right ribs. A verse from some obsequious poem. “It reminds me of you, K,” she had said.
When we were breaking up she bragged of planning to have it removed: “It’ll be like taking off a dress.”
……….
The sobs from the other side of the bathroom door continued. I slid a business card under the door (tattoo removal; complements of my ex-girlfriend, who left a pile in front of my door the day she moved out) and left.
……….
Two months later a shrill scream woke me. I knew what it meant. I fished a business card from my wallet and reached for my keys.
2 Comments | tags: affect, art, bathroom, body, business card, flash fiction, flower, poem, relationships, removal, ribs, Short Fiction, tattoo, verse | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
We got matching tattoos because that’s what you do when you run out of impermanent declarations of love and commitment. We decided on some words that, together, formed a pretty phrase.
We decided on body parts. She, reserved and corporate, chose some hidden spot safe from scrutiny. I, artistic and unstable, chose a much more public location.
Our tattoos bled together. They healed together. They started to fade together.
……….
“You’re not going to keep that, are you,” she asks as though she is talking about an ugly painting I refuse to throw out.
“Of course I am,” I say, rubbing my tattoo affectionately, trying to protect it from her ridicule.
“You aren’t?”
“No. I’ll get it covered up or removed.”
I try to imagine a design there: a chubby girl dressed as Batman, a trashy porn star sitting on a cupcake. “
You should really get rid of it,” she says, taping up the last of her boxes. “What would your next girl think?”
She pulls a knife from her back pocket and offers it. Before I begin cutting the tattoo from my skin, I briefly wonder why she had a knife in her back pocket in the first place.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, flash fiction, ink, knife, love, relationships, Short Fiction, tattoo | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
K always said goodbye in the same way: detached yet sympathetic, like a vet telling a child that her dog has died.
Some cried. Others seemed relieved. The woman sitting on the edge of his new gray couch was somewhere in the middle. She muttered something obligatory about “stay[ing] friends” but she snatched up her things and left in a decidedly unfriendly manner.
K was finally convinced: No woman, regardless of beauty, charm, or material wealth, could measure up to the stunning creature that was engraved on his forearm in bold lines and colors. She understood him. She would never hurt him.
He ran his fingers across her face.
……….
K had gone to the tattoo parlor on a whim one day, taking with him an editorial spread from a men’s magazine featuring some exotic model from South America. K watched her take shape, grimacing with each thrust of the tattoo artist’s needles yet anticipating the end result. When the woman was finally complete, K just knew his lovelife would never be the same.
……….
K glanced at the woman on his arm. Then he climbed into his skin next to her. Taking her hand, “We can finally be together,” he whispered.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, art, beauty, body, body modification, dog, flash fiction, love, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, tattoo, tattoo parlor, tears | posted in Her, Him, Man, Short Fiction, Woman
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.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, blank, broken, cheating, crane, flash fiction, girlfriend, origami, package, paper, phone, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, window, writer | posted in Him, Me, Short Fiction
“That’s her,” I gestured with my chin toward a woman sitting at the end of the bar. I watched her order a martini. If she noticed me, her neighbor, she pretended otherwise.
I turned back toward K. “She brings me a cucumber every so often–she has ever since I moved in. Winter, spring, summer–whatever. And never anything else. And always just one cucumber. She leaves them in front of my door with a note attached: FOR YOUR HEALTH.”
I could tell by the way K was eyeing her that he was interested. “Don’t,” I said. “Every man she gets involved with goes missing.”
K scoffed.
“That’s the gossip, anyway,” I clarified.
K waved away my warning and marched over to her. K was good with women. She smiled at him. I finished my drink and left. I never saw him again.
……….
A few months later an article appeared in the newspaper. K’s body had been found in a shallow grave along with the remains of ten other men. Their penises had all been severed.
What a shame, I thought, still pissed at K for ignoring my advice, as I bit into my freshly delivered cucumber.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bar, cucumber, death, drink, flash fiction, food, gossip, health, love, martini, murder, newspaper, relationships, sex, vegetables | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction
“My name is K. And I’m an addict.”
He didn’t elaborate on the nature of his addiction and nobody bothered to ask. The people in the room probably presumed that his addiction was some permutation of theirs: drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, whatever. K had been attending these meetings for several weeks now, hoping that being part of a community of junkies would somehow cure his junkiness. Today was the first day he bothered to speak.
“Hello, K,” said a mass of voices. K sunk into his chair, knowing that his addiction was his alone, and that all the other addicts could never understand. Vulnerability suddenly exposed, K needed a fix. Fuck this place, he muttered to himself, as he snuck out during a coffee break.
……….
“It’s been a while,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, as though it knew K was on the brink of relapse.
K apologized and then pleaded for a fix up. “Pretty ones this time, please,” he added. As K reveled in the remorse and worthlessness of relapse, he envisioned the drug taking its effect: countless microscopic women riding his veins, soothing his pain with their kisses.
A knock at the door.
Leave a comment | tags: addiction, affect, drugs, flash fiction, pain, rehab, relapse, relationships, short story, syringe, women | posted in Him, Man, Short Fiction
I grimaced at my reflection, fixated on the red streaks creeping down my jaw.
“Why don’t you go to the doctor,” she said, worriedly, from behind the bathroom door. “It’s too late for that,” I hissed.
She thought I blamed her for the infection. Before our relationship became serious, and even in the weeks following its serious turn, she begged me to get a tetanus shot. I refused. There was something romantic in the risk.
The first time she kissed me, she held back. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. But one night she kissed me without thinking. I remember the sound of the nails in her mouth grinding against my teeth. I remember the taste of blood running down the back of my throat and down the sides of my mouth. “Sorry,” she said. “Don’t be,” I replied, still believing in romance. She urged me to go to the hospital. “What if it gets infected,” she asked. I muttered something about fate, trying to smile with my mangled orifice.
I continued staring at myself in the mirror, convinced the red streaks were getting longer by the second, making their way to someplace vital. Probably to my heart.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, flash fiction, heart, hospital, infection, kissing, love, mirror, mouth, nails, pain, relationships, romance | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
“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
“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.
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