“I owe her. One day.”
“Until midnight,” Thanatos said.
“You’ll bring us the girl at midnight, not a second more.”
“You knew this.”
On the day of her fifteen returns the girl’s parents had thrown her a ball. She had been showered with gifts and compliments from the highest members of society, courted by many suitors and envied by her peers, for her beauty was captivating and talents vast. Around midnight, feeling faint from the constant dancing, the girl had excused herself from the party to seek fresh air. Outside, under a clear sky, a woman had crawled through the earth and whispered a prophecy against the girl’s mouth.
“You will not love until you meet my son,” the woman had said.
“He will speak of nightmares,” out of her hair, covered in flowers and dry blood, so blonde the moon’s light made it look ghostly white, the woman had taken out a knife.
“And you will cut out his heart.”
Hand in hand the young couple walked back into the city.
“You’re like a mare.” The boy smiled, fondly, as the girl watched him cook liver for their first and only meal together.
“Do you think I’m a demon?”
“Quite the opposite. But a mare can easily enter someone’s house through the tiniest of cracks in their walls. Then, it mounts their prey’s chest and gives them terrible nightmares.”
“I don’t give you nightmares.” She said, pouting.
“You will.”
At least I’ll have you there, they thought.
Bows + Arrows
I made the best of it.
I made the best of it.
I made the best of it.
“everyone who pretend to like me is gone” the walkmen
the German lookalike
Will said I should visit her, he said “You should visit her,” and I said “Why.” and he said “You know.” but I really don’t and now I’m here and she won’t even look at me. The place smells like rotten fruit, cigarettes and blood. I wonder if she’s on her period. I wonder if she’s just bleeding on the couch. The door was open, I said “Can I come in?” and she was already like that, staring at the window. I haven’t seen her in several years. I was eighteen and she had a crush on me. I know this because she told me, she said “I have a crush on you.” and I laughed because I was eighteen and she was drunk. She gave me a poem by Frank O’Hara, “Having A Coke With You.” She said, “It’s my favorite poem.” It was my birthday. Her pajamas seem two sizes too small, I can see the hairs on her legs; her toes are curled like when you're having an orgasm or a seizure. She seems cold. I saw her outside my building once, laughing with an older girl every guy in campus wanted to fuck. They were laughing behind a bush outside my building at eight in the morning. I thought she was crazy. I say “Hey,” and she turns around. We look at each other for what feels like a very long time. I am very aware of my appearance. I wonder if she remembers me at all. I want her to remember me. She shrugs and looks away again. I would spend hours looking at her from the non-smoking area, looking at her looking at me. A cloud of smoke and people always covered her. I spent hours looking at her friends looking at her. She had a crush on me. I realize the same song has been playing since I got here. I say “Hey,” and her lips curl like her toes. I walk to the couch and sit next to her. She says, “You remind me of a German actor.” She’s looking at my left hand, the one almost touching her leg. I say ”Ich heiratete sie.” The song starts once again. I say “I was a boy” and it sounds like an apology. Her eyes rest on my mouth, “Don’t.” I tell her I want to. She tells me she doesn’t need it. All I can smell now is her blood. After two weeks half of the town’s population hated me for not giving in to her. I know this because they would tell me. Strangers would stop me on the street and poke my chest with their fingers. “Do you have a problem or something?” they would ask, all bile and disgust. I would say “I have a girlfriend” and they would ask “So?” and I hated them. I hated her. I tell her this and she laughs. It’s a distorted laugh like she doesn’t know how to do it anymore. I used to spend hours watching her laugh. She was always drunk. We’re quiet for a moment. The man on the stereo repeats his cry about a dream he had. I want her to look at me like she did when I was young and slim and nervous, I want her to dig up that boy with her tongue.
the dreamer
This chubby, bald man corners me on the street. His eyes are bloodshot red like he has been crying or has myxomatosis. His twitchy nervous fingers dig into my arms as he talks, impossibly fast, like he's running out of air. I manage to understand he left something in the building in front of us and, for whatever reason, can't retrieve it. Something about “her” and “blood.” He begs me to go and get it, says he can't stand to be seen by her like that. As I walk up the wood stairs I consider calling the cops, I could be walking into a murder scene. The door is half open, I can hear someone singing, a girl. I see her then, changing the vinyl on the stereo. Her cheekbones are sharper, her face more angular. Older. Her lips are swollen like she has been kissing.
“Is it really you?” My dumb fooled expression couldn't hide how I had dreamed of seeing her again. I call her name, “Please tell me it is you,” She nods once and I close the distance between us, pulling her into my arms, holding too tight, possibly, hopefully bruising. I've always felt a hungry need to leave marks on her body. I wanted people to look at her and see that my hands had been on her, that I was the sort of person she would let touch that skin, oh that creamy white skin, impossibly soft, smelling of faint sweat and sex and apples. I tell her about the fat man outside, the wallet, the blood. She sighs, apparently exhausted, but as the music fills the air around us she takes a deep breath through her mouth and swallows, like she ate a piece of it. Crimson color fills her cheeks.
“Seems like everyone decided to visit me today,” she says.
“I didn’t decide anything at all. This was a coincidence. Fate.”
“Fate,” she laughs, “You decided to help the man outside. You decided to walk up the stairs. You decided to enter my house.”
I forgot how mean she could be.
I don’t even live that far from here.
“Are you not happy to see me?”
A shrug.
She walks away from me and lies down on the sofa, an old beige thing. In seconds her eyes go glossy and unfocused, lips mouthing the words to the song like poetry. Looking around I feel as if I am barely twenty four again, completely enchanted by this girl and her divine possessions, by the charm that so effortlessly surrounds everything she does or touches. We could’ve been. This could have been my house as well. There’s a rocking chair by the window, I sit down trembling. I think she forgot I was here. She still speaks, now about a red moon. We used to feel the same things, or at least I thought we did. I was miserable at all times. She was lost and I dreamed of us being lost and miserable together. I stayed after she said she was still in love with someone else. I stayed and fed off her heartaches. I was her friend, I listened, and I cared. She used to say she felt certain parts of her were missing. We used to feel the same things. I didn’t want to find those parts, I wanted us to keep complaining, because those missing parts made us special and unique and not put together. I tried to make her jealous by pursuing other women and sometimes it worked but mostly it didn’t. I was dirt on her winter boots. Better than being nothing, I say.
the Jewish werewolf
My parents were simple people who worked simple jobs and thought simple thoughts. I grew up in a village not too far from a town where a miracle had been performed. I read books translated to my mother’s tongue. At night, during my teenage years, I had wet dreams of sucking my best friend’s cock. I blinked a lot. My clothes were a plain palette of grays and dark greens. In college I shared a house with some of my classmates. I got high, french kissed them and blamed it on the cocktails. In the mornings I laughed about it, in the afternoons I would long for those nights to come.
She wasn’t capable of falling asleep without music on which I didn’t particularly mind since I could fall asleep during an earthquake. Sex didn’t work out between us, for obvious reasons I hadn’t spoken out loud, but she would still stay in my bed and I would still kiss her and we still kissed other boys and laughed about it in the mornings.
the architect
I recognized the name instantly. I couldn’t put a face to it, not clearly, and while driving my bike to the address Kyle had given me I tried to draw her in my head. Rosy chubby cheeks. Crooked teeth. She had been blonde when we were children but I remembered seeing her hair black and red at times, when we were no longer friends. Thinking of her brought some memories of an ex girlfriend, they were close for a period of time before we dated, who I had also lost contact with. I parked outside a small building of two or three floors, took my helmet off, combed my hair, and this guy came up to me.
“Where are you delivering that?”
I didn’t like his attitude. “Unless it is for you, and it’s not, I don’t think it should concern you.”
The guy didn’t blink. He reach out for my arm but thought better of it. I stepped aside and walked to the door. He followed me.
“What’s your problem?”
“I need to get in.”
He didn’t struck me as a burglar, more like a lunatic creep, and I chuckled at the thought of my little classmate, whose only concern was finishing her work before I did, causing such effect on men.
“Do you live here?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“What’s the deal then.”
“An old friend of mine lives in this building and I need to see her, that’s all.” He looked in serious need of a nap. I quickly scanned the mailboxes, all men but her. I didn’t have many options. I figured that even if I buzzed some other apartment he would still get in and we would find ourselves in an awkward situation. Besides, this guy was clearly unstable, for whatever reason, and she might need help. I buzzed her apartment and we both waited.
“Yeah?” It wasn’t her voice, not that I remembered it, but I knew for a fact it wasn’t her because it was a man’s voice.
“Pizza delivery.” I looked behind me and the guy was still there.
“Right, come in.”
I felt a little relief; she wasn’t alone. The guy was closely behind me all the way up, like a shadow. It started to piss me off. When we got to her door it was half open but before I could knock a guy came into view. “Hey,” he said, same voice as before. He looked at me nicely then rolled his eyes when noticed my shadow. I felt like I needed to explain the situation, I didn’t want to be associated with that character at all.
“This guy was outside. Said his friend lives here,”
“Will,” my shadow said, “Just let me see her.”
The Will guy seemed to think about it for a couple of seconds. Then, without a word, he walked back in and out of the house with a jacket in his hands. “Let’s go for a drink and talk, okay.”
It wasn’t a suggestion, his tone was firm. He patted lunatic guy’s back and gestured for him to start walking down the stairs. Then he looked at me, “Sorry, man.”
“Oh no, it’s fine.”
“There’s twenty on the kitchen counter, leave the box there, okay. Keep the change.”
I nodded, “I appreciate it, man.”
I did as Will said. The apartment was small but cozy; it struck me that she would have so much art hanging on the blue painted walls. Dozens and dozens of frames held all sort of drawings, paintings, textiles… It was like being inside a brain, like I had suddenly shrunken and flew up through her nostrils. A stunning Azerbaijani carpet I would, most literally, kill for covered most of the living room’s floor. My interest on this childhood friend peaked but she was nowhere to be seen. A long, narrow corridor led to a single door, the bedroom, I presumed. As I took a couple of steps in its direction I heard music, a sort of lullaby, the sound of a drunken woe, and there she was, half naked. She had her back to me. This room had only a white mattress on the floor and a porcelain vase with fresh yellow daisies next to it. Her naked back was covered in moles and her hair was as I remembered it from our childhood, long and blonde, and her hands ran over it. She did a twirl and I took a frightened step back but her eyes were closed. A cigarette hang from her lips. She was dancing, I realized. A sort of silly dance you would only dance in the privacy of your room. She danced and danced and danced and my dick got so hard from watching her it started hurting. There was something profoundly hot about her movements, her saggy breasts, the orange peel skin like of her legs, the hairs on her armpits, and the decadence of all of it.
I’m trying, she sang.
I’m trying to wake up.
I left with no intention of ever seeing her again.
the singer
“The cloak of love is only a shadow - the naked empirical ego, self-love, the oldest love, remains at the core.” This is what Karl Marx had to say about the matter, something I strongly agreed with, the selfishness of love, when she came into my life. I was twice her age with a broken ego. You should have seen the way her eyes lit up when I spoke. She hang to my every word, earnest to truly know the man she thought she was madly in love with. I wasn’t interested in her thoughts or opinions and she rarely interrupted me to share them. There was never a chance of us ever being together but it took me some time to make that clear, if I ever did… Even when she begged me to say the words, her hand gripping my arm, to free her from this idea of love that was eating her inside, this demonic hopefulness, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was selfish, a coward. I thought that if I became cold and detached, if I stopped speaking (and how hard that was for me!), she would understand I didn’t want her like she wanted me. I didn’t want her as a friend, either. I wanted to wake up, get dressed, go out for breakfast and see that glow in her eyes as she waited, sitting alone at a table, writing on her notebook about the things she wanted us to do together, and think “That girl would probably throw herself out off a cliff for me.”
She was very respectful and kept her distance. But she did things, things my friends made fun of, and I would call her crazy and complain because I didn’t want them to know I enjoyed the attention, and we would laugh; sometimes she would find us laughing about her and she knew it was about her and she would look at me with those huge green eyes and I would feel like complete shit. But she never really stopped doing those things. My favorite word in red on my building’s sidewall. My favorite drink on my doorstep. The mix tapes she would play when my windows were open. Letters.
She wrote beautifully for someone her age. I imagined her penning the words down with those eyes. The things she wanted to do with me. Never sexual things. She wanted to hold me and listen to what I had to say for I had fooled her into thinking my intellect was vast, so vast that this was what she wanted most; to lay in my arms and learn, like cradling an encyclopedia. Through those letters, and something else not worth mentioning, I understood I was a mere vessel for all these naive and romantic ideas of the man she wanted to have. She didn’t want me to be real.
I drank beer and thought, “Screw it.”
I drank beer and thought, “Let’s use each other.”
I drank beer and thought, “I will be the man she wants me to be and she will pray at my feet.”
I drank beer and thought, “She will not be able to find my flaws.”
I drank beer and thought, “I will let this sixteen year old girl rot.”
the flow
ering top of a cabbage
Yeah, I heard about that. I actually knew her once. I’m telling you, man, I know exactly who you’re talking about. Yeah, that’s her name. She was into me. Ha ha ha, listen, it’s true! Someone told me she said I looked at her like I wanted to punch her. Maybe she was into that sort of thing, I don’t know. We never became friends. What was the point?
the ballerina
“I heard the most bizarre story today,” my wife says with excitement, a piece of Kobe steak halfway to her mouth.
“Tell it to me then.”
We are having dinner at one of our usual restaurants, where the personnel treats us like nobles and a table awaits us every night, even when we don’t come.
“Do you remember my friend, uh, the architect?”
“Your boyfriend from college.”
“Well, yes.”
“The architect who delivers pizza.”
“Oh yes, that’s the one. I ran into him this morning.”
“Was it magical?”
“For him, certainly. He told me only yesterday he had been thinking of us because he had to deliver a pizza to the house of a common friend.”
“The odds!” I cried, not interested.
“I haven’t thought about this people for so long, God.” She wipes her forehead like she is fever dreaming. “Turns out, and this is the bizarre part, our common friend simply decided to stay at home.”
“I don’t follow.”
“She doesn’t leave her house! He says she has a man taking care of her in some sort of way, financially most likely, she isn’t disabled.”
“Lazy then.”
“Extravagant! All she does is listen to records and, I don’t know, really. Can you imagine doing nothing? I would go mad.”
SHORT STORIES vol i Page 2