Tag Archives: violence

2016/12/14

He Cannot See Himself as a Young Man

By dsholloway

I was walking home that night, paying little attention to my surroundings, when a woman – slight, fashionably dressed, dark eyes – approached me.

“Are you K?”

I said that I was, trying to ignore the incredulity of the moment. It was dark, but I knew her voice.

She looked at me, then punched me in the face, sending me backward. Her punch had knocked her off balance, so the force of the blow was relatively tame. Still, my right eye began to swell.

“Stay the fuck away from me!” she shouted.

Too stunned to reply, I grimaced at her. She took a knife from her back pocket. “And give me your fucking watch.”

I did. Then she flipped me off before tottering off into the shadows.

In a daze, I tripped and had to limp home in the dark.

I woke the next morning on the couch, and you were sitting next to me.  “Sorry,” you said with resignation, handing me my watch. “I’ve always kind of liked it, I guess. We met the day you bought it.”

You were leaving for work.

“At least you didn’t try to run me over this time,” I said, watching the front door close.

 

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2015/10/23

To His Detriment

By dsholloway

The first time I saw her sunbathing was during high summer: a nearly naked body prostrate and baking on a frayed beach blanket.

Through autumn and winter, everyday she was out there on her blanket. Even under the oppressive winter sky she darkened. Over time I memorized her skin—its gradations, flaws, and changes.

One evening I saw her out at a restaurant. Winter was lifting but it was still cold. I was sitting alone at a table when a woman appeared in my periphery. I didn’t know her face, but I didn’t need to. The hue of her skin betrayed her identity.

“Excuse me,” I called from my seat. She turned.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t mean to startle you, but I see you sunbathing everyday. Won’t you sit with me?”

She slid her face into a smile and sank into the offered chair. I extended my hand, hoping she would allow me just one touch of her bronzed hand. She obliged.

It was an exquisite appendage—soft, smooth, slightly toned—and in spite of myself I grew excited.

Unfortunately, with her other exquisite appendage she pulled pepper spray from her coat and wasted no time in shooting me with it.

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2015/04/21

A Malfunction of Evolution

By dsholloway

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.

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2015/01/27

It is Important to Remember that Every Desire is Accompanied by Anxiety

By dsholloway

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.

 

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