Tag Archives: romance
Even the cruelest and most random moments of the turbulent past year and a half failed to upset the fragile stability they found that snowy night, exactly 729 days ago, in some shabby Italian restaurant in some equally shabby track mall. She was in rare form, babbling sweetly – in hushed tones; for all its dilapidation, the restaurant was undulating with working-class Christmas Eve romance – into his ear.
She was, he reasoned, still high on the adrenaline that washed over the two of them when his new Lexus spun off the road and into a snowbank – where it was fated to remain until the roads were properly cleared and salted. They wanted to interpret every extraordinary thing as fate drawing them (back) together, as some force telling them that everything would be okay. If only they would only almost die whenever their relationship seemed beyond resuscitation.
She ordered french fries (somewhere near the end of the menu with stuff like friend chicken, just in case) and a glass of red wine. He ordered red wine, too, but spent the next several hours, until the only other patrons were two drunkards attempting courtship, watching her and worrying that the snow would eventually stop.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, flash fiction, french fries, italian, italian food, lexus, red wine, relationships, restaurant, romance, Short Fiction, short story, snow, wine, winter | posted in Him, Short Fiction
“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.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, capitalism, coffe, fiction, flash fiction, latte, love, relationships, romance, Short Fiction, short story, stranger, women | posted in Her, Me, Woman
“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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“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.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, bar, corn, divorce, fiction, flash fiction, Japan, love, maze, relationships, romance, sex, Short Fiction, short story, super market, women | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
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.
Leave a comment | tags: addiction, affect, awards, body, capitalism, fat, fiction, flash fiction, horses, love, marriage, money, relationships, romance, sex, Short Fiction, short story, women | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
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.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, capitalism, death, fiction, flash fiction, love, marriage, pain, relationships, romance, shoes, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
When there was no further recourse, I sent her flowers, expensive specimens hand selected by a homosexual man on the other side of the phone who liked to bind twigs around his vases – his natural signature. When there was no recourse, she would call me, thank me. Then we would renew again, our flawed courtship.
I never specified the flowers, leaving everything to the nice man on the other end of the phone, only demanding that he charge me no more than the maximum cost for purchase and delivery. She never told me, the many times I sent her flowers, what flowers she received, only that she liked them very much.
She told me always what she did with the vases, after the expensive flowers died. She broke them and chose the large shards of glass to construct a sharp, unforgiving version of myself, without my wicked tongue and unforgivingly passive personality. She looked forward to my flowers, she said, so that she could add to her jagged rendition of me. She loved it, she said, because it was nice to her and forgiving of her flaws. I am, too, I implored from my prison cell; by then she had hung up the phone.
She came to visit recently, wounds up and down both arms, also on her face. I asked what those are from. She said she fell in love with the other me, made love to the other me.
She smiled, her lips bloody. I’m lonely, she said.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, broken, death, flash fiction, flowers, gay, glass, love, prison, relationships, romance, Short Fiction, short story, vase | posted in Her, Me
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.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, candle, death, eggs, fiction, flash fiction, love, needle, pain, reading, relationships, romance, Short Fiction, short story, writing | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
He marched out to sea, leaving his luxury tennis shoes in a pile on the sand. While the other beachgoers retreated in light of the approaching storm, K surged forward.
She had returned. Now was the time.
He waded deeper into the water, felt the currents tug at his body.
She vanished into the sea during their honeymoon. Upset about something trivial, she threw herself into the water to spite K, to punish him, full of violence and rage. And it worked. He slid into cocaine addiction and ridiculous shopping sprees. He retreated into himself, blamed himself, cursed himself. He tried to kill himself. Then he bought luxury tennis shoes.
Yet rumors swirled: the sea was different now, violent, unforgiving, merciless. Ships were lost sometimes; people drowned sometimes; jellyfish and sharks and sea urchins attacked sometimes.
He dismissed the rumors at first. But love got the better of him. For he loved her still, after all this time.
One day he went to the sea, to see for himself, this violence, this rage. But the sea was calm, compassionate. He returned the day following, etc.
With each day, his desire for her violence and rage grew. And he waited – always at the edge of the water, always in his luxury tennis shoes.
It was her, today, churning the sea, tempting the weather. He ran his fingers through the seaweed, thinking of her muddy brown hair.
“All of this for you,” he muttered to nobody as the sea pulled him down.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, cocaine, drugs, flash fiction, jelly fish, love, ocean, relationships, romance, sea, sea urchin, shark, shoes, shopping, Short Fiction, short story, suicide, water | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
She was born hungry and she died hungry.
But her hunger was in name only, for never once did she, between her birth and death, feel hungry. She ate things – delicious and exotic and expensive – but she did so only to be social, like a casual smoker casually smoking among friends. Alone, she did not eat; she felt no desire to do so.
She felt the effects of starvation. But she thought that this was her disposition. Indeed, she grew concerned when she did not feel this way.
She died, only, because I ended our relationship. She died, only, because I was not there to eat.
It took her but a week to starve.
During that same week, I feasted on the bodies of women as a display of sexual rebellion and fear. During that same week, my taste in disposable women became increasingly stringent: thinner and thinner, I demanded.
She died on a Friday, the same day that I unearthed and climbed into a coffin to lay with the skeleton of a woman, the same day I was shot for breaking the law, the same day I sold our companion burial plots to a young, attractive couple in love.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, cemetery, coffin, death, flash fiction, grave yard, love, relationships, romance, sex, Short Fiction, short story, starvation, thinness, trespass | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
To exorcise your anxieties, you invent a woman, draw her portrait, and then dream about her. You’re supposed to ask her questions, in your dream, and, after you wake, write her responses in your “dream journal.”
But when I present her portrait to K, he becomes enraged. “This is your woman? This is your animus?” He balls her up in his left hand and drops her to the floor. “Try again.”
I again draw the woman, the locus of my anxieties and erotic fantasies. She is my life’s work, the climax of my existence. I don’t ask K for his approval before I begin dreaming about her.
K is jealous of my animus, I feel. He wants to dream about her, ask her questions, and write about her in his own “dream journal.”
I dream of K instead of my animus. I ask him where she is. He says that she has left me because I’m “too unstable.” I tell him that’s why I drew an animus, to stabilize. He says that it’s too late and that she’d rather be with a rich guy besides. I can’t disagree.
I wake up but don’t bother to write any of that down.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, animus, drawing, dream, dreams, flash fiction, journal, Jung, love, psychoanalysis, relationships, romance, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Woman, You
K designed a high rise in the likeness of his favorite girlfriend. She wasn’t actually his girlfriend, however – more of a fetish object, a “girlfriend.” In fact, he had gone out with her only once.
She had agreed to a second date and then proceeded to stand him up. He waited for two hours at the fanciest rooftop lounge in the city.
That’s when, staring absently at the skyline over a double shot of something expensive, he decided to design a building in her image. Every Tuesday at 9 pm – the day and time of the second date that never was – he ascended to the rooftop lounge to watch poorly paid workers labor over the construction of his favorite girlfriend.
But one night, after too much expensive alcohol, he got angry at her and ordered her demolition.
He watched with coldness in his eyes as the wrecking ball tore holes in her half-completed body. He thought he heard her cry out – from somewhere under all that concrete, glass, and metal.
He was sad to see her fall. He knew he would miss her. But he was also sad because he knew that, next Tuesday at 9, he would have nothing to do.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, architect, bar, body, City, death, demolition, flash fiction, love, relationships, romance, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Him, Man, The Woman
“Draw me a picture,” said the woman, sliding me pencil and paper.
“Of what?”
“Draw my portrait.” She brushed her hair from her shoulders and posed in mock grandiosity.
I drew a jellyfish fighting with a human skeleton. I was impressed with my technique and wanted, momentarily, to keep the picture for myself.
“What the fuck, K,” she said, putting her clothes back on. “Not really what I had in mind.”
I wanted to point out the imperfections in my sketch. I wanted to tell her that because the ship was swaying rather violently, my lines here, here, and here were imperfect.
“It’s just as well,” she bellowed. “A storm is coming.” She knocked me over as she left my cabin, letting my picture float to the ground.
Against my knee, I smoothed out the wrinkles of my discarded drawing, hoping that I might frame it after all.
Climbing to my feet, I locked eyes with the jellyfish and human skeleton outside of my porthole. I shrugged and the skeleton shrugged back.
With a bony finger the skeleton beckoned me over. “Careful,” it mouthed through the glass, “you’re next.”
A knock at my door. I already knew who it was.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, art, body, death, flash fiction, jellyfish, murder, relationships, romance, sex, ship, Short Fiction, short story, skeleton, storm, window | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“I feel her perfume on me still,” K said, fidgeting and gasping. “I don’t know, it’s just…on me.”
The date he went on went poorly. The woman sat politey in her chair and drank the expensive drink K dutifully purchased. Then she went home while he was busy paying the tab. He never touched her – the goal of any date, unachieved. Not even a handshake.
Later, not entirely sure what happened and not necessarily upset about it, he began to feel the effects of her perfume. It was pleasant to the nose (expensive, K could tell), but heavy on the skin, like a flak jacket or the lead thing you wear at the dentist during x-rays.
K spent an agonizing evening on the floor of his modest apartment, air seeping in fits from the holes in his body. She was beautiful and K would have pleasured himself over the toilet, making up for intimate contact denied. But the weight was crippling. So he left even himself untouched.
Sitting in front of me, K’s body leaned like a dying flower.
“Can I have her number,” I asked.
“Fuck off,” he replied with his last breath. “I think she likes me.”
1 Comment | tags: affect, alcohol, body, death, dentist, flash fiction, masturbation, perfume, relationships, romance, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction
“May I please have my eyes back,” asked the angel. I wasn’t sure how she knew I had them (I found them in the gutter; the dazzling green of the iris caught the sun and blinded me), but her voice was stern. I reached into the breast pocket of my jacket and handed over her eyes. The angel and I had sex and I fell in love.
Sometime later the devil came to my door, offering a cure for my heartache. “Take this,” the devil offered, extending a hand that gripped a small pill. “She will leave your mind as will the sorrow she has caused.”
I retrieved the pill from the devil’s outstretched palm. “It’s a special compound just for you,” the devil said. Small and rectangular in shape, the pill had a “K” in its center.
The devil saw me hesitate. “Or take this” – the devil produced another pill – “and be haunted by her memory until you die.”
I retrieved the additional pill and placed it on my palm next to the first pill. They were identical.
“But you may not have them both,” said the devil impatiently, glaring at me with eyes a penetrating shade of green.
2 Comments | tags: addiction, death, devil, drugs, eyes, green, love, relationships, romance, satan, sex | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction
“You have the most charming way of eating,” I cooed on my way past her table. “I don’t mean for that to sound creepy or anything,” I stopped to clarify. “You just caught my eye and I couldn’t look away until you were done with your spaghetti.”
She smiled and dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin: “Thank you.”
She said nothing further so I exited the café.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I stared at the ceiling and watched her eat her plate of spaghetti. “Is she as dainty when she eats a medium rare hamburger,” I wondered, “or oysters on the half shell?” I closed my eyes and dreamed of the woman.
Every night thereafter she infiltrated my dreams, always seated at a table with a white tablecloth and always eating.
After a week, I grew concerned that she was growing fat.
I returned to the café. “Has the woman who eats spaghetti in a womanly way been in recently,” I asked the maître d.
“You’re the eighteenth man to ask of her today,” he scoffed before gesturing to the dining room, which was occupied by single men all waiting for the woman who ate spaghetti.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, body, cafe, dream, eating, flash fiction, food, hamburger, love, oysters, relationships, romance, Short Fiction, short story, sleep, spaghetti | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, The Woman
We hadn’t seen each other since college. Our friendship ended abruptly because we were in love with the same woman. He wanted to fight over her. I politely declined and wished him well.
I wasn’t surprised when he told me of their breakup. Everybody knew that this particular woman had been adamant about remaining a virgin until marriage.
“You lucked out, K,” he said with a mouthful of vodka. “She never caved.”
The way he described their sexless courtship – hours of cuddling and making out – was rather charming.
His eyes lit up. “I saw her last week. She called and told me that she’s married now. Then she invited me over. Before we broke up, she promised to have sex with me once she was married – even if she wasn’t married to me. I guess she was serious.”
“Did you?”
“Of course.”
“And her husband?”
“She told me that you’re her husband and that you’ll probably kill me. She said you’ll have a sharp knife with you.”
I put the knife on the table and shrugged. “I’m not going to kill you with this.” I nodded toward his empty martini glass and watched his throat tighten. “Thanks for the drink.”
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, bar, body, death, flash fiction, love, marriage, martini, murder, relationships, romance, sex, Short Fiction, short story, virgin, virginity, vodka | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction, Uncategorized
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
So he ripped his heart from his chest. Thrusting it into the hands of the woman he loved, “Make me rich,” he said. She said nothing in reply–an ominous sign, potentially–but nodded slightly in implicit agreement.
[A risky investment, indeed, he had heard (though he couldn’t remember from where). But if it paid off, it really paid off, he also heard (same as above).]
Always one to never shy from opportunity and the possibilities of increased wealth, regardless of risk, K eagerly awaited payoff. Yet he wondered how long he could survive without his heart. He passed the days and nights trying not to think about the woman he loved and what she was doing with it.
As it turns out, the woman he loved was careless with his heart, squandering all of its worth in illicit ways. “Sorry,” she said over martinis one night, hands empty. “I lost it.” She showed him her empty hands.
Left with nothing, K naturally hurled himself from the top of a building, a trail of desperation following him to his death. Which is unfortunate, because a hot woman is going to find his heart tomorrow in the most unlikely of places.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, heart, investment, love, martini, opportunity, relationships, risk, romance, stock market | posted in Man, Woman
We drink wine as the world ends around us.
“And to all the destruction in men,” she says, raising her glass. “And to all the corruption in my head,” I rejoin, touching my glass to hers.
Another explosion. Another scream in the distance. It’s only a matter of time before those screams ostensibly become ours, which is why tonight we drink the good wine, the wine she is supposed to be saving for a special occasion–a promotion, accolade.
As rock falls from the sky I think back to when I first met her.
———-
She had been smoking on her veranda and talking to the night sky. She had been doing it every night for months. Every night I would watch her from the darkness of my own veranda, imagining a conversation with a dead lover or maybe a confrontation with God.
“What are you doing,” I asked once, emerging from the darkness.
“I’m talking to Orion.” She remained focused on the stars. “I’m trying to convince him to take off his belt.”
She started sweet talking him when she was a teenager, she said. And men can only resist for so long.
———-
“I guess you were right,” I say.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, apocalypse, death, God, meteor, Orion, relationships, romance, sky, smoke, space, stars, wine | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
There was one bottle of wine in her wine thing that was off limits. Other wines would be bought, drank, bought again; but this particular wine was not to be quaffed unless the most spectacular occasion presented itself. She waved away his contention that the opening of a nice bottle of wine was its own occasion, offering instead: “Do something deserving of recognition, and I will open this bottle. Just for you.” An obstinate sort, he committed to doing not one “…thing deserving of recognition,” but rather many:
He cured cancer. He deflected that big meteor that was projected to destroy earth. He saved poor children. He repaired her ugly relationship with her family. He was, like, totally okay with her guy friends. He fought with rebel forces.
She was impressed by the things he did and readied to open said bottle of wine, one evening, over candlelight. “Wait,” he said, touching her hand. “Everything bad is in there–poverty, jealousy, illness. If you open that bottle the world will go back to how it was.”
She set the bottle down and moved to kiss him. But she set it too close to the edge of the dining room table.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, cancer, family, poverty, romance, wine | posted in Man, Short Fiction, Woman
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.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, burn, candle, fiction, fire, flame, love, relationships, romance, tundish, vodka | posted in Her, Him, Short Fiction
Fatness doesn’t photograph well. That’s what I told her when she asked to be my muse. She shied from my gaze after that, hiding herself under blankets and layers of clothes. I walked in on her when she was in the bathroom doing something naked in front of the mirror. She screamed at me. That was in the summer.
She fucked somebody while I was away, somebody who liked fat women. I didn’t care. I fucked a skinny woman while I was away. She cared. She screamed at me. That was in the fall.
In the winter she approached me, wanting to be my muse again. Take your clothes off. I hadn’t bothered to look at her in months; her body–barely a body at all now–both horrified and aroused me. Let me get my camera. She fucked somebody again, recently. I cared this time. I hadn’t fucked anybody since the last time I did that, but that wasn’t why I cared.
In the spring she died of starvation. I took one last photo before having her buried.
3 Comments | tags: affect, body image, cheating, death, deception, fat, photo, photography, relationships, romance, seasons, skinny, starvation, thinness | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
With concerned fingers she traced the wounds on K’s back. What happened?
…
He made up his mind some time ago to stop lying to women, even to the ones who lied to him and to the ones who lied to themselves.
So he told her about the woman who had evil in her skin, the woman who dug her fingernails–always immaculately manicured and long enough to make Trent Reznor jealous–into his back whenever they groped and pawed at each other. The marks the woman left always turned into festering sores that gave way to sinewy scars. He saw a doctor once. A woman did this? He never went back.
He told her how he stopped taking his shirt off in hot yoga classes or going to the beach or otherwise appearing half naked in public (men like to do all those things). He told her how intimate moments with subsequent women ended before they began because his refusal to take his shirt off when he fucked them bespoke serious mental problems.
…
I like this scar the best, she said, and bit into it.
K jerked away, but by then it was too late; she had already disappeared into his wound.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, beach, doctor, hot yoga, masochism, Nine Inch Nails, romance, scars, wound | posted in Her, Him, Woman
