Tag Archives: relationships
“Be careful with these,” I instructed, handing the shoe cobbler a very expensive and badly scarred pair of high heels.
……….
I lit them on fire last week, after our most recent fight, but came to my senses before the damage turned irreparable. Dousing the shoes in water, I put them with her other shoes.
I fished them out, carved the letter K into the sole of the left shoe. Then I put them back again, pleased.
“Let’s go out,” she said later, apparently ready to be a loving couple again. “Somewhere fancy. I’ll wear my Louboutins.”
“Wait,” I said, steeling myself for something awful…
……….
“Call me when they’re fixed,” she texted later, having left angrily.
……….
The shoe cobbler was young. She was too pretty, her nails too long and skirt too short to be someone who toiled over footwear all day. But whatever. I handed her the shoes.
……….
That night the shoe cobbler came to my door wearing only the Louboutins. “I’m sorry for the way I’ve been acting,” she said in a voice that belonged to someone else. She moved to take the shoes off, as is customary in my house. I grabbed her hand: “You’d probably better not.”
Leave a comment | tags: affect, destruction, fashion, fire, Louboutin, relationships, sex, shoes | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
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
I glared at her from the other side of my martini.
Having wanted to break up with her for the past three weeks but not really knowing how, I convinced myself that she did something very malicious and harmful. That she deserved to be dumped. Bitch.
I took another drink and waited for the right moment. She prattled on about this and that. Her career. Her new tattoo. Her near death experience.
“A man threw me out of his living room window once. I fell thirteen stories.” I was suddenly intrigued. I reached across the table and took her hand. I married her two weeks later.
She tried to kill me a week after that. I pushed her in front of a bus shortly after. I dropped my wedding ring in the gutter and moved away.
Yesterday I overheard a man in a bar talking about his new girlfriend. “It dragged her for at least fifty feet. Can you believe it?”
“Sorry to interrupt, ” I said. “She’s wicked.” I offered a knife. “You’ll need this.”
There was a news report today about a man killing his girlfriend with a knife. Her picture flashed on the screen. I didn’t recognize her.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, break up, death, knife, love, marriage, news, relationships, ring | posted in Her, Me
I spoke in a paranoid manner, like someone dealing coke on a playground.
“She always wears the same pants–high-waisted, the color of mustard,” I explained.
K furrowed his forehead. “So what?”
He didn’t get it. She and I had been out six times, and while she was attractive, her sartorial choices revolved around that high-waisted, mustard-colored pair of pants.
K continued after an uncomfortable pause: “When are you seeing her next?”
“Tonight. She’s coming over for dinner.”
……….
I made her pasta and got her drunk. We groped at each other–unhooking, unzipping.
I reached for the button on her pants.
“Wait,” she gasped, clutching my hand, “we should stop.”
……….
“I’m ready” read the email. Twenty years had passed. But I knew what it meant.
She still lived at the same place. She seemed too old–a disease, she would explain later in the bedroom. She still had on the same pants. They were faded and badly worn in the knees.
“Fuck me,” she hissed. I grabbed her by the waist and yanked her pants to the ground. Her torso toppled from her hips with a thud. “Thank you,” she said before dying.
“For what,” I wondered. I hadn’t fucked her yet.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, clothes, dating, death, disease, fashion, mustard, pants, pasta, relationships, sex, wine | 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 had heard it before, from other women less attractive than the one whose tongue was slowly constricting his neck:
“I just love your eyes. They’re so dark–I can’t even see your pupils.”
She flexed her tongue and K’s eyes bulged a little further from his face. She brought her face–eyes green, I think, but maybe they were blue–to meet his. “Amazing. Your eyes are just these black puddles.” She brought a well-manicured fingernail to his face. Then she tapped it on his left eye, creating mild undulations.
He had heard that last line before, too. As K lost consciousness he envisioned all of the women who got lost in his eyes. He thought of the woman who climbed in his left eye and drowned in the darkness. Her name was in the paper for a while and on TV. He thought of the woman who ran screaming from his apartment–underwear balled up in her fist–because she was convinced K’s eyes betrayed a darkness of a different sort.
From the depths of asphyxiation, he heard her jaw unhinge. Then he heard him being swallowed hole. “I guess I’m finally inside her,” K muttered as her digestive system pulled him down.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, asphyxiation, cannibalism, darkness, eating, eyes, food, jaw, love, murder, pupils, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, snake, tongue, TV, underwear | posted in Her, Him, I, Man, Short Fiction, Woman
She yanked at her roots, both fists tangled in brownish/blonde hair. She had been doing it for weeks, eyes locked on herself in the bathroom mirror–tugging and pulling with all her might, until her eyes swelled with tears and her face twisted into a grimace.
“It’s not going to grow any faster,” I said in the most sympathetic way I could.
“You just don’t get it, “she spat, glaring at me in the mirror.
Everything changed the evening she came home with her new hair cut, the recommendation of an inept stylist whose theories of hair design have no place in reality. She hated me now. Not because I did anything wrong, but rather because I was part of the world in which she, now seven inches shorter, so to speak, had to live.
“Just go away.” She pulled on her hair again and slammed the bathroom door.
“You were wrong, K.” I woke in the morning to find myself floating in a sea of her hair. Her voice continued to utter ominous things, but, because of the mass of hair, I couldn’t locate the source.
I felt myself being dragged under. It was either the undertow or something else.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bathroom, death, hair, hair cut, mirror, relationships, sea, style, swimming, undertow | posted in Her, I, Me, Short Fiction
I didn’t ask–you don’t ask women about their bodies. But she obviously felt like explaining. She put her martini down.
“I adopted this bird–a macaw. Birds are really affectionate, and she loved to cuddle. But whenever I tried to set her down she’d get upset and latch on. I had to take her back.”
The blackish rings looked like railroad tracks traveling from wrist to shoulder. They were too symmetrical and evenly spaced to be the work of an animal. But her story seemed reasonable.
We went to her apartment. I saw an ugly green birdcage on the floor.
“I’m going to paint it black,” she said proudly. “Then I’ll keep my victims in it.”
I smiled.
Another martini. Her body invited me in. I turned it down. She seemed feeble, breakable, all of a sudden. She said she “like[s] it rough.” But women always say that, especially when you don’t really know them.
I went home.
At 3AM someone knocked on my door. I hoped it was her (men always hope for this). It was a gray bird. Slightly taller than I am. Probably stronger too.
We locked eyes.
“Stay the fuck away from my woman,” it said.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bird, bruises, drinking, macaw, martini, pets, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, violence | posted in Her, I, 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
The woman, whose heavy foreign eyes and striking hair/eye composition give her the air of a sleepy Scarlett Johansson or a strung out Courtney Love, will kill him.
Here is how:
She will go home with him.
He will tear her gown from her body. Then he will realize that she has wooden legs.
He will not know how to proceed but he will notice that she has grown uncomfortable. He will know immediately that she has become self-conscious.
He will think back to their “dates” and her countless long dresses.
He will recall the way she hobbles about.
Briefly, he will get mad at her (“You could have told me!”).
Then he will compose himself and gaze into her eyes, uttering romantic things. They will have sex. She will stay over but vanish by dawn.
In the morning he will find a splinter in his hand. Rubbing it, he will think fondly of her until his hand becomes infected.
As the infection spreads, he will not wonder if she planned the whole thing; but he should. Then he will die.
But he will not mind. For he will have fallen in love with the woman and her wooden legs.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, dating, death, hands, infection, legs, love, murder, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, wood | posted in Her, Him, Man, Short Fiction, Woman
She opens her briefcase. “Why you keep doing this,” she asks in accented English. I can’t tell if she really wants to know.
“All I have left are fat ones. If you wanting pretty ones, you must ask early. They go first. Bitchy ones gone next for whatever reason–I don’t understand why. Then nice ones, girl next door. And so on. You wait till end of day, you stuck with fat women. Sorry. I told you before, you know?”
She readies her syringe.
I feel them flood my bloodstream. At this point it doesn’t matter what they look like, or if they’re nice or whatever. I collapse in a heap of myself, knowing that I’ll have to get off the floor momentarily. Knowing that, because the real pleasure is not in the high but in the anticipation of it, the fun is over.
“You need real woman,” she says as she collects my money.
I shrug, wondering if she’s flirting. “But what will you do without me,” I ask by way of humor.
“Don’t need you,” she replies. “All men are pathetic. Many customers.” She leaves.
I touch the hole in my arm and nod emphatically at nobody in particular.
Leave a comment | tags: accent, addiction, bitchy, disease, drugs, fat, girl next door, language, men, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, syringe, voyeurism, women | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
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
Holding my chocolate peanut butter cups in a gingerly fashion–the way you might handle an injured pigeon–, I waited patiently at the register. I was the only customer, and the cashier was nowhere in sight. Having no urgent business to tend to (except, of course, my chocolate), I felt no real need to shout for attention. I had never been in before today. But K, who already calls himself a “regular,” told me that the cashier was pretty.
I thought about just stealing my peanut butter cups; who would know? My devious train of thought was interrupted, however, by a quiet sobbing coming from somewhere toward the back of the shop, from behind a curtain that was ostensibly where employees sought refuge from their customers.
I pulled the curtain back. It was the cashier, her back toward me, her shoulders heaving. Her cellphone, still illuminated, was in her hand. Not wanting to startle her, I dutifully scurried back to my spot at the register. Moments later she emerged. Her eyes were red and vulnerable. I wanted to say something bold and heroic. I wanted to buy her a drink or offer a tissue.
Instead: “Just these peanut butter cups, please.”
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, candy, cashier, cell phone, chocolate, desire, love, relationships, retail, sadness, tears, thief, tissue | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
“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’m sorry, she said. I can’t help it.
I rolled off of her and looked at her in a soft way, pleading silently for a logical explanation. She looked away. Don’t be mad.
K warned me to stay away. But that only encouraged me. You know how guys are: they think they’re the exception to the rule.
She was nice enough to let me try, but it was obvious that I was too alive.
She spoke calmly, knowing I needed to be told something grand: I went to a party once and my boyfriend at the time told me to meet him in the bathroom. It was completely dark in there when I pushed the door open. I couldn’t find the light switch. I groped around until my hands landed on what I thought was his erect penis. So I got on top, fucked him, and snuck out. Very erotic. I found out later that it was actually a dead man with rigor mortis in all the right places. My boyfriend broke up with me and I haven’t been interested in the living since.
After a moment, I said: I’m going to hang myself in the bathroom.
She only smiled.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bathroom, death, life, love, party, relationships, rigor-mortis, sex | posted in Her, Man, Me, Woman
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
K started smoking, apparently, though given the way he coughed and convulsed after each drag, his starting was not, also apparently, that long ago.
“Put her crab rangoon on my bill,” he told the waiter, stubbing out his cigarette just the way he practiced at home. The girl should have sat somewhere else while she waited for her takeout. But it was too late for all that.
“Thanks,” she said, awkwardly.
“Do you smoke,” he asked, flashing his pack of cigarettes like a P.I. flashing his badge.
“I don’t.” She was going to be mean. But he did, after all, buy her crab rangoon. “You don’t really see too many people who smoke,” she offered, feeling bad about the crab rangoon.
He was going to tell her that when he smokes, the fumes become people he used to care about, and that, in smoking, he was trying to re-establish bonds long severed. The first time he took a drag, the air around him took on the form of that girl he liked in 5th grade who died in a car accident.
He had sadness in his eyes.
“Wanna take me home?” she asked, feeling bad, still, about the crab rangoon.
Leave a comment | tags: accident, affect, bar, car, Chinese food, crab rangoon, death, eyes, relationships, sadness, sex, smoke, smoking | posted in Uncategorized
“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.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, cancer, Christmas, death, flash fiction, gift, holidays, honey, neck tie, relationships, sex, travel | posted in Short Fiction, Woman, You
“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.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bank, date, fiction, flash fiction, gun, hostage, relationships, robber, story, thief, writer | posted in Her, Man, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
“She likes you,” her little dog said. “But here’s what’s going to happen: sometime soon she’s going to offer to make you soup. She’ll ask your favorite kind. You’ll tell her. Then she’ll show up with groceries and wine and you guys will cook your favorite soup and drink nice wine. You’ll sit down to eat but you’ll die. I’ve seen her do it countless times.”
“Why? You said she likes me.”
“She does. But like will turn to love which will eventually turn to hate. Kind of makes sense if you think about it.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I like you too…. She’ll be back soon. So just act normal.”
I did.
“Know what,” her voice was sincere. “Let’s make dinner tomorrow. Why not soup?”
I glanced down at her little dog, which was avoiding eye contact.
“What’s your favorite kind?”
“Clam chowder,” I said confidently, knowing that clam chowder takes all day.
“Great. I’ll take the day off. Clam chowder takes all day, you know?”
I was somehow okay with such an extended death ritual. Her previous boyfriends probably hadn’t received such preferential treatment.
We smiled at each other. Her little dog probably rolled its eyes.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, boyfriends, chef, cooking, death, dinner, dog, flash fiction, girlfriends, hate, love, murder, relationships, soup | posted in Me, Short Fiction, Woman
“You’re an idiot.” Sometimes she wakes up with FUCK YOU emblazoned across her forehead. I’m not sure why. Perhaps in my sleep I set her car on fire. Accusations of stupidity (etc.) fly from her mouth with ease. Such was the case yesterday. We haven’t spoken sense.
—
This morning I ate a young man’s brain. He came to my office, in the basement of X University where I am a professor of Y. “Professor,” he inquired through the wooden door, “are you in?” I beckoned him inside. An extremely intelligent young man who is probably also wealthy (X University caters to smart and wealthy students and, as any reasonably smart person will tell you, the two traits are often mutually exclusive), he was fidgety like an old man but dressed like a young hip person.
“Could I ask you about our next assignment?” The young man spoke in a quivering voice. I nodded. He sat down. Then I struck him hard across the face. He went limp almost instantly and I set to eating his brain.
What are you doing, I asked myself in a moment of hesitation.
Becoming smart, I replied, as I took another bite of his brain.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, brain, cannibalism, food, intelligence, professor, relationships, student, university, wealth | posted in Me, Short Fiction
I hate discount retailers. But I go begrudgingly to the discount retailer because I do things for the pretty girl I love who always loves a bargain.
The discount retailer offers nothing of value for anybody. The girl I love marches off to the women’s things and I find myself in the men’s section, dodging lower-class people as they clamor for cheap stuff. Two men argue over a leather jacket.
I make my way to the men’s shoes. I fantasize about seeing the girl I love naked as my eyes gloss over countless pairs of misfit footwear that seem like death row inmates awaiting imminent execution.
But I spot, accidentally, in an unmarked shoebox, a single Ferragamo loafer that, presumably, even I can afford. My X-rated fantasy vanishes and I excitedly snatch up the loafer. I search for its mate. I search everywhere. I ask an unhelpful sales associate to find its mate. He rolls his eyes: “Sorry, I guess it’s lost.”
I attack the sales associate. The police arrive and I’m arrested. I don’t know where she is–the girl I love.
I’m issued prison garb–shirt, pants, loafers. The shirt and pants are awful, but the loafers aren’t so bad.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, Black Friday, clothes, discount, Ferragamo, leather, loafer, love, police, prison, relationships, shoes, shopping | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
