Tag Archives: girlfriend

Blatant Self-Plagiarism

“You know,” she said, curling up in the passenger seat and pressing her cheek against its red leather, “I had this dream last night. You were made of pizza and I ate you.”

She reached across the console and rested her hand on mine, concernedly.

She continued: “It was awful. I felt like calling you, but I knew you were sleeping.”

Bullshit, I thought. She hadn’t called me in months. She only agreed to go out with me tonight because I told her – to my karma’s horror – that I was dying. We drank too much wine, and, in her drunken state, she decided that her dream portended my demise. Then she asked if I thought she had gotten fat.

In our months apart she got a new boyfriend and I got a new car. I stuffed her in the passenger seat and drove her home.

My car idling in her driveway, its headlights glaring at the back of an unfamiliar vehicle, she refused to remove her hand. Her house was dark.

“If K is so great,” I huffed, “where is he tonight?”

She sighed, said nothing. Then she moved to kiss me but sank her teeth into my face instead.


Playful and Complex Hierarchical Systems

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. 


Organs Without Bodies

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

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

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

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

“How many do you have?”

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

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

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

“With him—no.”

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

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

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