Tag Archives: short story
The train’s repetitive click-clack wakes her every night.
“Did you hear that noise,” she asked the morning after she first stayed the night, nose pressed against my cheek, head sunk deep into her pillow.
“It was the train,” I replied, feeling myself fall in love.
“Charming. Does it come through here every night?”
“It does.”
“Great. You’re lucky I like you.”
I propped myself up on my elbow, glanced around the room: wine bottles, condom wrappers, and empty chocolate boxes. “We should do something else some time.”
“Why?” She climbed on top of me.
She moved in with me several weeks later, complaining about the train. Then we started to fight, and our nightly bingeing on wine, sex, and chocolate gave way to heavy silence and passive aggression.
As our relationship worsened she took to walking the train tracks at night.
“I’m not going to kill myself, K, relax,” she said.
I was unconvinced. So I walked with her, behind her, like a scolded but loyal pet. I bought her expensive earrings, tried to cheer her up. She pushed me in front of the train.
Now she sleeps in my bed, wakes with a smile whenever the train rumbles past.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, chocolate, condom, flash fiction, love, murder, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, suicide, train, wine, woman | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
I refused to finish the bottle of sake she brought over.
I didn’t like her much, and neither did she care for me. We were bored, worn out by too much solitude. So I cooked her dinner, touched her elbow. She left before dark and before I could touch her in better places.
“Keep the sake,” she said with false candor.
“Gladly,” I replied, flatly.
Alone in my apartment, I snatched up the glimmering green bottle of alcohol, held it close. My distorted reflection mocked my equally distorted existence.
Then, following protocol, I wrote her name on the bottle before putting it in the refrigerator with the other unfinished bottles of refrigerated alcohol other women had brought over and left behind. Countless kinds of cheap white wine, expensive vermouth, decently sophisticated beer, pretentious red wine. Now fancy sake.
I examined each bottle, touched carefully and purposefully each bottle, as though handling the delicate women whose feminine names adorned each bottle.
Satisfied that my record of romantic failures was still in tact, and indeed growing, I closed the refrigerator and spent the night – just like every night – curled up next to it, lulled to sleep by its gentle and accusatory hum.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, date, dating, failure, flash fiction, red wine, refrigerator, relationships, sake, Short Fiction, short story, vermouth, white wine, women | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
Experience taught me that antidepressant medication keeps the world’s miseries at arm’s length. Like living in a bubble, or being strung out all the time.
Experience also taught me that emotional invincibility is a dangerous pursuit, the limit too easily pursued. In my lesser moments I fell in love with women just to break their hearts. Their tears, spite, and venom had no effect. I betrayed friends, family; I did terrible things so the women I loved would vanish from my life. Just to see.
Alone and unfeeling, I swore off love and antidepressants. Without love and its complications, I wouldn’t need an escape. Without the sharp, poisonous women I crave, I would have no reason to protect myself from the consequences of my desires.
I met a woman, demure and caring, fragile. All bangs, yoga pants, and pumpkin spice lattes.
She stayed over. She stayed over a lot. I hid my pills away.
I woke one morning to find her in the bathroom, huddled over the sink. Her hair was disheveled, frightening. She turned toward me, exposing her demon within.
I backed away and hurriedly fetched my dusty vial of antidepressants. I was ready to fall in love again.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, antidepressant, demon, depression, drugs, flash fiction, love, medication, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, women | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“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.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, boyfriend, break up, cannibalism, dream, flash fiction, girlfriend, house, leather, love, new car, pizza, relationships, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, 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.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, death, fiction, flash fiction, jelly fish, love, martini, pain, relationships, romance, Short Fiction, short story, suicide, tank, water, women | posted in Her, Me, Uncategorized
“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
Never did I think I would love, for love was a ridiculous, childish concept.
But I loved, finally, in spite of myself. I loved, I knew, because I thought only of her, always. Because she was my default, my origin.
She says, “Fuck you, K,” in a voice that craves verbal violence, disappearing from view even though I can see her, touch her. I reach, she recoils – a perverse dance. She looks at me with the eyes a stranger, yanking her engagement ring from her finger, throwing it out the window.
I go outside and sift through the bushes. I find her ring floating in a dog’s water dish.
I pretend I am not relieved and go back inside. She is dead, having swallowed my pain killers.
I put her ring on her lithe, cold finger. I press her lithe, cold finger to my lips.
Then I go to sleep, taking the same pain killers. I dream of our wedding. Our families are present. We are happy.
I wake up, see her dead body at the kitchen table, coax myself back to sleep. Again our wedding, our families, our happiness.
I wake, finish my pain killers, kiss my phantom bride.
1 Comment | tags: affect, death, dog, drugs, flash fiction, love, marriage, pain, relationship, Short Fiction, short story, sleep, water, wedding | 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
The sommelier scoffed when I asked for a bottle of her boldest red. “It’s very exclusive,” she said with arrogance.
I found her whole performance to be off-putting. But I held my tongue.”I’ll take it,” I said, holding her gaze.
The sommelier disappeared momentarily before returning with a dark bottle splayed on a fluffy white towel, like a newly born aristocrat being presented in court.
“This way, sir,” she said, indicating a private room. “As I said, this bottle is very exclusive.”
The sommelier led me into the room, which contained only a small table and corkscrew. There was no wine glass.
“Take your time,” she said, disinterest hanging in the air long after she closed the door behind her.
I corked the bottle and a woman climbed out.
“What can I do for you,” she asked.
“Put things back how they used to be,” I pleaded. I wanted her to fix everything that went wrong. I wanted her to make me someone deserving of the love of the woman who haunts my dreams.
“Very well,” she said, misunderstanding, and disappeared back into the bottle of wine.
I fell to my knees in despair, but hoping for a refund.
3 Comments | tags: affect, alcohol, bar, fiction, flash fiction, love, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, sommelier, wine, women | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
I found the angel dangling from the end of her halo, her limp body suspended by the prettiest cloud in the sky.
She was still alive, I noticed, as I hurriedly untied the knots in her halo.
I collected her wispy body and crinkled halo and vanished into my apartment. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the angel. I wanted to nourish her but I also wanted to eat her. So I placed her on my blue velvet couch and watched her.
She slept the way you sleep after something traumatic happens. Was her trauma her attempted suicide or all that preceded it? I could never know.
The sky darkened because it wanted its angel back. It crackled and groaned, but still she slept, her chest rising and falling slightly in response to some life still stirring inside her.
The rain came and her cloud pounded on my window. “Don’t make me go back there,” she whispered. “I hate it.”
I pressed my vial of antidepressants into her hand. She sat up and forced a smile.
Then she took her halo and smoothed it out before placing it several inches above her head, where it stayed.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, angel, antidepressant, cloud, death, depression, flash fiction, halo, heaven, life, rain, relationships, Short Fiction, short story, spring, suicide | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
Overcome with self-loathing, K nevertheless continued to coax the girl. He sighed to himself, wondering what he got out of these rituals. He sighed again, then ordered her another martini.
A practiced man in this regard, K already knew what she would look like underneath her top. Her breasts would be decent, her stomach would be tight. She would have a tattoo decorating some body part. This did not excite K. But he pressed on. He had already determined that she was wearing a thong and made inferences about her grooming customs that were probably correct.
He knew what it would feel like. The bodies of women are always the same on the inside. He knew that she would thrash and moan and that he would respond accordingly. She would say amazing things under his spell. He would do the same in kind.
The charade bored K. It even disgusted him. Yet after tonight, he would do it again. He was probably already thinking about it.
“Be rough with me,” said the girl. K sighed and retrieved a knife from the kitchen, eliciting a frown from the girl – not that rough!
K handed her the knife and closed his eyes.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, alcohol, body, boredom, flash fiction, knife, martini, masochism, sadism, sadomasochism, sex, sexuality, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Him, Short Fiction
My girlfriend’s body wanders off at night. I’m not sure where it goes. But every night it leaves our bed to go…elsewhere.
My girlfriend’s head always stays behind, perched on the expensive pillow my girlfriend (formidable in her wholeness) demanded I purchase.
Lately I’ve grown jealous. My girlfriend’s body always comes home before morning, but it’s different. When it gets back in bed, I reach for it but it recoils. It smells like exciting places we’ve never been.
Over breakfast, my girlfriend’s head (her eyes, really) and I exchange knowing glances. We look at my girlfriend’s body, which seems all too aware of our judgmental gaze. It fidgets in its chair. It touches my hand and I reach for its pussy. My girlfriend’s body stands and leaves the room.
“Sorry,” my girlfriend’s head says sympathetically.
I grow restless at night, after my girlfriend’s body leaves again.
I stroke the hair on my girlfriend’s head. My girlfriend’s head knows I want to have sex. My girlfriend’s head hates giving blowjobs.
I grow frustrated. So I put my girlfriend’s head in a sack and tie it tightly.
My girlfriend’s body doesn’t come back. So now sex is completely out of the question.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, blowjob, body, breakfast, flash fiction, head, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
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
“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 know this artist who is also a taxidermist. Naturally gifted in art, he found that he could only accurately sketch living creatures if he killed them, stuffed them, and manipulated their bodies into wildlife scenarios.
In his home, which I borrowed for the first time in high school to rob my girlfriend of her virginity, are lots of taxidermied creatures and accompanying artistic renderings. They’re perfect renderings and also that girl and I broke up shortly after because the dead animals, which seemed very alive, made her uncomfortable.
I had the opposite reaction and haven’t been able to have sex not surrounded by dead animals ever since.
“K, I need your house,” I implore a little less often than I like. With each visit, I find that his home is a little more overrun by his animals and his art. Last week, I had sex with a girl inside the mouth of a large shark. She cut her hand on one of its teeth and won’t return my calls.
I kinda want him to kill and stuff her. But he would probably want to sketch her and that would make me uncomfortable because I like her a little bit.
Leave a comment | tags: affect, animals, art, artist, body, death, flash fiction, love, murder, relationships, sex, shark, Short Fiction, short story, sketch, taxidermy, virgin, virginity, wildlife | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction
