I buried my lover in a hole. He didn’t struggle much; he blinked and furrowed his brow as the sand rose over his cheeks. He’s been stuck in there for a while now, waiting for a change of scenery.
He always told me he wanted to be buried when he died. He told me so often it started getting morbid.
“Bury me,” he’d say.
“Right now?” I’d ask.
He said that this way I would always know where he was. And I do. I feel him pushing down from underneath me. Sometimes I’ll see a patch of grass growing up through the cracks in the cement. “Be quiet,” I whisper and squash it down with the sole of my shoe.
We went to the beach. We made love in the sand. He asked me if when the waves crashed onto this shore they were receding on the other end of the ocean. “You know,” he said, “because it’s just one continuous body of water.” I told him I didn’t know and brushed globs of mud out of my hair.
He told me he could stay there forever. “Right here” he said like he had seen all the other places in the world and decided that this was the nicest one. “Forever,” I said, “is a very long time.”
That’s when I knew I had to leave. Leave where I was and where I’d been. Leave things behind. I hope I can go back, some day when I’m ready, when that beach is a place where I can stay forever too.
I laid his body out, carefully, over the beach. Then, I just kept cupping handfuls of sand and drizzling it over his body. I tried to hide every piece of my lover’s body, everywhere I’d kissed and everywhere I’d known. He spit when the sand got in his mouth, but other than that, he stayed pretty still. Like I said, he didn’t struggle much. I sat at his side and covered him up. Sand collected in tiny mounds over his body, all different shapes and sizes, like a new world ready to be explored.
The next morning, his little neck popped out of the sand like a helpless turtle. I lied down and pressed my face up close to his. I smiled. I kept smiling this big, ridiculous smile that showed all my teeth. I figured I had to keep smiling or he’d start screaming or crying. I gave him seven big wet kisses, one for each day of the week. I styled his hair like a rock star with some gel I had in my purse. Then, I combed it back flat so he looked like a gangster. We talked about poetry and sang his favorite songs in rounds. We played “I spy.” I spied the sand, he spied the sea. We moved on. I tried to talk about anything except being buried in the sand. I tried to talk over him whenever he started to open his mouthI put on my clothes and brushed his cheek with my sand covered hand, exfoliating it. I put a bucket and a shovel a few feet from his head. I took a few steps backwards, holding eye contact, and smiled when I waved goodbye.
I went to the biggest cities in the world. London, Paris, Tokyo, New York. I bought him shot glasses. I got him one from each of the duty free shops at all the major international airports. I put in a little sand from the shore or some loose gravel from the street. What else do you get a man who’s buried in the sand? One time I took a picture of the coast in Ireland where a wave was drawing back into the sea. Someday, I’ll ask him if he remembers what the waves were doing on the other side. About half past noon on a Tuesday, I’ll tell him, and place the photo on the ground in front of him.
I liked to imagine he wasn’t alone. Like some woman was walking down the beach and saw him and fell madly in love and decided to keep him company for the rest of his life. That is, the rest of his life in that hole. Or maybe she saw him and decided it was a good idea. Like I started a trend; burying men. I couldn’t help but smile imagining him and a couple of other guys stuck on each side with all the time in the world to complain and wonder where their lovers are.
Sometimes I thought, maybe he’s not even there anymore. But I doubted it. I don’t know anything about geography, longitude or latitude, but I knew I could feel him, on the other side of the world, pulling at me with gravity. Sometimes, I’d dig my finger in the sand, only an inch or two and I could feel myself getting closer to him. Sometimes, I’d make tiny circles and think I might loosen up the dirt just enough so that the dirt under that moves the dirt under that and I can see this long, beautiful chain reaction, loosening the earth from around him just enough so he could squeeze out. I’d close my eyes and feel the vibrations biting at my fingertips. Sometimes, I’d watch the wind blow layer after layer off the surface of the beach and imagine a day when his little feet popped out of the ground.
“There you are!” I’d say and lift him up by the ankles.
I thought about it for a while; grabbing a shovel and heading home. I thought about taking the next flight out of Venice while I was sipping cappuccino at a coffee shop. I thought about taking the train back from New York when I thought for a second that I could see him with my binoculars from the top floor of the Empire State Building. I held myself back as best I could. That’s when I started freeing things. I liberated everything I could find to take my mind off him; caged, stored away and preserved. I bought packs of cigarettes just to unwrap them, took the lids off trashcans as I walked down the street and pulled the sheets off the bed one by one. I got thrown out of a bodega for unscrewing the caps off the soda cans. I whispered inspirational maxims while the carbonation squeezed free. A portly Korean man told me either I bought them all or he’d call the cops. I bit the skin off my lips until they bled while a pile of peanut shells lay at my feet.
And then the first letter came. The first letter was written in sand. I found it one day on a beach on the other side of the world. No address, no stamp. A pensive group of seagulls looked across at one another and nodded. Inside I found a blank sheet of paper and a couple of handfuls of sand in the bottom of the envelope.
It could have said anything. It could have been the most articulate, most thoughtful, most beautiful letter ever written. It could’ve said everything I’ve ever wanted to hear, and I let it. I let it say that he’s getting along beautifully, missing me terribly and safe, right where I left him. Some days it explained and some days it consoled. Some days it complimented my legs. It said I have the sexiest legs he’s ever seen in his life, and goes on to detail every moment he couldn’t take his eyes off them, lost in the curves of my calves. I sprinkle some sand onto the page and spell out ‘legs,’ while precious tops of letters ride away.
I lay naked on my bed in a hotel in Athens, covered with millions of granules of sand. I closed my eyes and saw him forming words that can’t be written in ink, words that can’t stay on a page for too long. And then I felt him writing my body, pushing with all his might against the walls of his hole, skin pressed against the earth.
Then, after a while I ran out sand. Luckily, it happened right around the time I ran out of things to tell myself. The last word I wrote was ‘goodbye’ and then I brushed it into the trash. A little sand in the bed, a little sand in the trash, A little trail of him behind me to stay in all the places I’ve left.
That’s when I got the second letter. It washed up on the coast of Greece and landed on a pad of shells. The second letter was written in water. It was wrinkled, hardened and tasted like salt. The second letter said everything else; a letter unwritten. White-washed, fresh start, clean slate. I could imagine him writing horrible things, cursing me for leaving him there, stuck in the ground like that, and then, right before he stuffed it in the envelope, he looked over it, remembered me and my sky-blue eyes and washed it all off. Crackling beneath my fingers, it seemed to say no hard feelings, no harm done. The clear ink filling the page to the borders.
A letter in water says everything unsaid. It loves ambivalence and begs a reply It says to keep going and come back home. And I did, I went right around the world and then one day I stood in front of him, right back where I started.
“Hello,” I said, dusting off his brow.
“Hello,” he said, spitting sand from his lips.
“Did you miss me,” I asked, knowing full well the answer.
“How long have you been gone?”
“I’m not exactly sure, years I’d imagine.”
“Years?” He asked, “really?”
I expected him to jump out. No, I waited for him to jump out. I waited for him to show me he could have gotten out whenever he wanted. Sly fox, I’d say, smirking as he shoved his way out in a giant explosion of sand with his fists held high in the air. We’d embrace and be happy and go home to clean each other off and tell each other about our dreams.
“Can you help me out of here” He asked me after a while, his tired eyes gazing up, helplessly, admiring shot glasses.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Friday, November 14, 2008
Dreaming in Logarithms
“So when you look at me,” She asks on our third date “you see logarithms?”
The answer would probably bore her to death, and she expects a one word answer. I want to answer her in numbers. I want to go back and trail every movement that led us up to sitting here, numerically, like breadcrumbs in binary. That's what's so great about numbers, they interact only on a level of pure certainty. There's never anything unexpected with numbers, nothing extraordinary or new. Nobody has to buy flowers or candy or spritz cologne on their jacket sleeve. There's no planning out what they'll talk about at the restaurant, or who makes their first move. When a 7 meets an 8 they know instinctively what's going to happen. They see each other and bam, they become 15. They're happy with that. Spontaneity has it's downfalls.
I sit trying to put the equation 32x+b into language while she spends what will be our last moments together thinking about her fish in coconut sauce, the #71. This is to be expected. Of course, what I can't seem to tell her is that everything is to be expected. When the check comes she'll offer to pay the tip. She'll miscalculate by over a dollar. I'll look at the waiter and shrug, and in about 20 minutes, he'll understand.
And this has been going on for over 23 years. 23.4 to be precise. It started with 9s. I sat under the monkey bars for hours, admiring them, running my fingertips over freshly pencil pressed 9s. I searched for perfect 9s, the way they occur in type, pirouetted on empty floors, tail curled into themselves. There's nothing that matches the simple beauty of the 9 table. Everything in a 9 table says 9. 9x9 is 81. 8+1=9. 9s just know that they're 9s. They stand proud in a number line, the last of the single digits, overseeing everything before them, obstinate and final, like fancy parentheses.
I tried to stay 9 for as long as I could. The night of my 10th birthday I prayed with all my might
not to turn 10. I wouldn't touch my birthday cake, I wouldn't wear the hat. I didn't open my very obvious bicycle or the slightly less obvious striped turtleneck sweater. I buried myself in my room and took all the batteries out of all the clocks. When my parents finally gave up and went to sleep I snuck downstairs in my footie and carefully lit 9 candles. “Please,” I asked God, “stop tomorrow.”
10. I hated 10. I hated how 10 got to represent perfection with oversimplification. 10s made for easy calculations with a whole bunch of nothing at the end of them. Not impressive. Especially to somebody who had very recently been 9.
According to most child psychologists, 6 is the age where you begin to recognize patterns, but 10 is the age where you learn to apply them. This is why the IQ test psychologists administer to dyslexic kids and geniuses changes dramatically once they hit 11. The patterns all change, the test becomes 5 times harder, but the final scores stay roughly the same.
What most people don't understand is that once you start to see patterns, you immediately begin to ignore them. There's a whole part of your brain that has the sole function of prediction. It detects normalcy and executes it on site. If something isn't surprising or new, your brain won't process it. It's seen it all before. And the only reason it's there is to keep our brains safe. And being as the average person sees 2904 images every day and remembers only 4, ignoring the expected is the only thing stopping us from going insane.
And if you exercise that muscle, you can see forever. You can anticipate patterns using patterns, and see new patterns coming from miles away. You can eliminate the element of surprise, until you're just forecasting in formulas. And then time becomes irrelevant, it's really more of a waiting game. And everything is a little more boring because you already know everything that's going to happen. And then one day you go to sleep and find yourself dreaming in logarithms.
In fact, the last time I saw something new was the end of math. My graduate level math seminar in the last year of undergraduate. The last seminar in the pamphlet. The instructor was the chair of the program and had math awards that other math people had given her, all basically saying that she was the best math person of all of them. The plaques decorated her mantle like a jury in hung agreement.
She slid her chalk across the board underlining the last formula on the board. “Well, that's math folks” she said, putting her chalk down. “I hope all of you enjoyed it.”
“There are two weeks left of the semester,” I whispered to myself. “It's too late to learn Latin.”
So Math ruined everything. I can tell you how a book ends when I read the first line. I can walk into a drugstore and tell you how much they earned last year. I can call an earthquake from a butterfly landing on a patch of grass. I can tell you when you were born to the nearest hour and dress for the weather next April.
You can kill at parties with a trick like that. A couple of guessed drink orders, a friendly bet on when the waiter will drop his tray and, poof, you're a star. Kissed napkins and matchbooks overflowing out your pocket. And then, well, you know what happens after that. And that's what takes all the fun out of it.
The biggest problem with a trick like that is not using it. It's waking up naïve every day and pretending that there's something you don't know. Someday soon I promise myself I'm going to trick reality. Just out and win. Predict one level further, one level faster than reality can go. I'll charge past the known and into the lingering. I'll do it when nobody expects it, when even I don't see it coming.
“Stay,” I tell her. “Stay and have coffee and let's do the craziest thing you can think of, something you...”
“I can't, I have to...”
“No, please, I already know what you're going to say. Just instead, do the opposite, or the opposite of the opposite, do anything unexpected. Throw a fork at the waiter, or better yet don't...”
“Listen,” she says, like it's me that doesn't get it, “it's not that I don't like you.”
“But I already know that it is. But if you could hear me out, you could, you would if you...”
“Stop.” I give her a second and try to clear every thought from my head.
“I know I sound crazy, but please, have some faith.”
“I understand what you're trying to do but I'm just not...”
“You're not a guinea pig.”
“Precisely.”
I already know I can't argue with that. As expected, these are our last moments together.
“Have faith.” I whisper. She can hear it, she's just pretending not to. Our lazy waiter drops off the check. 120 dollars for bad fish and over cooked steak.
“Thank you for dinner” she says, and leaves a 20.
The answer would probably bore her to death, and she expects a one word answer. I want to answer her in numbers. I want to go back and trail every movement that led us up to sitting here, numerically, like breadcrumbs in binary. That's what's so great about numbers, they interact only on a level of pure certainty. There's never anything unexpected with numbers, nothing extraordinary or new. Nobody has to buy flowers or candy or spritz cologne on their jacket sleeve. There's no planning out what they'll talk about at the restaurant, or who makes their first move. When a 7 meets an 8 they know instinctively what's going to happen. They see each other and bam, they become 15. They're happy with that. Spontaneity has it's downfalls.
I sit trying to put the equation 32x+b into language while she spends what will be our last moments together thinking about her fish in coconut sauce, the #71. This is to be expected. Of course, what I can't seem to tell her is that everything is to be expected. When the check comes she'll offer to pay the tip. She'll miscalculate by over a dollar. I'll look at the waiter and shrug, and in about 20 minutes, he'll understand.
And this has been going on for over 23 years. 23.4 to be precise. It started with 9s. I sat under the monkey bars for hours, admiring them, running my fingertips over freshly pencil pressed 9s. I searched for perfect 9s, the way they occur in type, pirouetted on empty floors, tail curled into themselves. There's nothing that matches the simple beauty of the 9 table. Everything in a 9 table says 9. 9x9 is 81. 8+1=9. 9s just know that they're 9s. They stand proud in a number line, the last of the single digits, overseeing everything before them, obstinate and final, like fancy parentheses.
I tried to stay 9 for as long as I could. The night of my 10th birthday I prayed with all my might
not to turn 10. I wouldn't touch my birthday cake, I wouldn't wear the hat. I didn't open my very obvious bicycle or the slightly less obvious striped turtleneck sweater. I buried myself in my room and took all the batteries out of all the clocks. When my parents finally gave up and went to sleep I snuck downstairs in my footie and carefully lit 9 candles. “Please,” I asked God, “stop tomorrow.”
10. I hated 10. I hated how 10 got to represent perfection with oversimplification. 10s made for easy calculations with a whole bunch of nothing at the end of them. Not impressive. Especially to somebody who had very recently been 9.
According to most child psychologists, 6 is the age where you begin to recognize patterns, but 10 is the age where you learn to apply them. This is why the IQ test psychologists administer to dyslexic kids and geniuses changes dramatically once they hit 11. The patterns all change, the test becomes 5 times harder, but the final scores stay roughly the same.
What most people don't understand is that once you start to see patterns, you immediately begin to ignore them. There's a whole part of your brain that has the sole function of prediction. It detects normalcy and executes it on site. If something isn't surprising or new, your brain won't process it. It's seen it all before. And the only reason it's there is to keep our brains safe. And being as the average person sees 2904 images every day and remembers only 4, ignoring the expected is the only thing stopping us from going insane.
And if you exercise that muscle, you can see forever. You can anticipate patterns using patterns, and see new patterns coming from miles away. You can eliminate the element of surprise, until you're just forecasting in formulas. And then time becomes irrelevant, it's really more of a waiting game. And everything is a little more boring because you already know everything that's going to happen. And then one day you go to sleep and find yourself dreaming in logarithms.
In fact, the last time I saw something new was the end of math. My graduate level math seminar in the last year of undergraduate. The last seminar in the pamphlet. The instructor was the chair of the program and had math awards that other math people had given her, all basically saying that she was the best math person of all of them. The plaques decorated her mantle like a jury in hung agreement.
She slid her chalk across the board underlining the last formula on the board. “Well, that's math folks” she said, putting her chalk down. “I hope all of you enjoyed it.”
“There are two weeks left of the semester,” I whispered to myself. “It's too late to learn Latin.”
So Math ruined everything. I can tell you how a book ends when I read the first line. I can walk into a drugstore and tell you how much they earned last year. I can call an earthquake from a butterfly landing on a patch of grass. I can tell you when you were born to the nearest hour and dress for the weather next April.
You can kill at parties with a trick like that. A couple of guessed drink orders, a friendly bet on when the waiter will drop his tray and, poof, you're a star. Kissed napkins and matchbooks overflowing out your pocket. And then, well, you know what happens after that. And that's what takes all the fun out of it.
The biggest problem with a trick like that is not using it. It's waking up naïve every day and pretending that there's something you don't know. Someday soon I promise myself I'm going to trick reality. Just out and win. Predict one level further, one level faster than reality can go. I'll charge past the known and into the lingering. I'll do it when nobody expects it, when even I don't see it coming.
“Stay,” I tell her. “Stay and have coffee and let's do the craziest thing you can think of, something you...”
“I can't, I have to...”
“No, please, I already know what you're going to say. Just instead, do the opposite, or the opposite of the opposite, do anything unexpected. Throw a fork at the waiter, or better yet don't...”
“Listen,” she says, like it's me that doesn't get it, “it's not that I don't like you.”
“But I already know that it is. But if you could hear me out, you could, you would if you...”
“Stop.” I give her a second and try to clear every thought from my head.
“I know I sound crazy, but please, have some faith.”
“I understand what you're trying to do but I'm just not...”
“You're not a guinea pig.”
“Precisely.”
I already know I can't argue with that. As expected, these are our last moments together.
“Have faith.” I whisper. She can hear it, she's just pretending not to. Our lazy waiter drops off the check. 120 dollars for bad fish and over cooked steak.
“Thank you for dinner” she says, and leaves a 20.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Where Holes End
When I was 13 years old, I dug myself a hole. All the other kids in the neighborhood had treehouses. They stared down at me and waved a handful of splinters.
I remember the first time I dug my shovel in and scooped out a clump of fresh, sticky ground. I sat beside my tiny hole for hours, running my fingers around the edges.
“I can stop now if I want to.” I thought to myself. That's the great thing about holes, once you've started it, it's already done. A whole hole. When I was thirteen that was funny.
I kept digging and now I could cover my hole with a blanket topped with leaves and catch stray children with it. It's as big as a walk-in closet, I could walk in if I were so inclined. These days, I rarely play with my hole. Sometimes I'll do some edging or put a tarp over it if the weatherman say it's going to rain. I never go into my hole, it seems vulgar now. To me, it's not the same hole is started digging eight years ago. It's much to deep for a thirteen year old.
I used to spend all day in my hole when I was younger. My face always filthy, constantly smiling, mud stuck in my dimples. My mother stayed inside all day, kneeling at the washing machine with her head in her hands. My older sister used to sit on the rim and brush pebbles down at me. “This is so heavy handed” she would say and peer through the darkness to see me flipping her off.
“This is my hole,” I'd tell her, “You can't come in.” I told this to everyone. Nobody cared. No one wants to go in a hole.
I was 14 the first time I brought anybody into my hole. My friend Lawrence lived next door. His tree house had a couch in it. He seemed ready. He asked. He said he was sick of treehouses, how they were up high, removed from everything. He said he wanted to explore deeper things and I agreed to take him in.
We climbed down and stared at each other uncomfortably for a few minutes before he burst out crying.
“Let me out” he yelled, over and over, and his voice beamed back and forth against the walls of the hole.
“There's no way out” I said. “Once you're in a hole, you just keep digging.”
He tried desperately to climb out but, having never been in a hole before, kept pulling out chunks of soil and falling backwards.
“Here” I said and lifted him from the thighs. “Now stay out.”
He scurried away and wiped the back of his pants.
“Nobody goes in my hole,” I said to myself, and it echoed in dirt.
When I was fifteen I put a kitchenette set in my hole, complete with two chairs and placemats. I put out a package of oreos and some daffodils ina jelly jar. I marveled at my domesticity and then took it all out in order to fit back inside.
“Man creates holes” I said proudly. “And holes are intended for man.”
Manholes. When I was fifteen that was funny.
When I was 16, I rejected holes. I was digging eagerly at my hole when I spotted the mound a few feet to the left that at one time was my hole.
“I have created nothing,” I said to myself. “i have brought new, fresh nothingness into the world.”
I stared blankly at my accomplishment and its inverse.
“That's it, I'm going nowhere.”
My mother stared at me throughb the storm door.
“What are you doing out there?” my mother asked over a turnkey sandwich on rye.
“Nothing,” I said, eyeing my shovel. “I'm making nothing.”
And when I was sixteen, there was nothing funny about it.
When I was seventeen, my physics teacher taught my class about black holes. “A hole can go on forever,” she said. “A hole is the absence of everything.”
I ran home that day filled with newfound enthusiasm. Then I did something that I'd never done in the four years I'd had my hole: I cleaned it. I took out all the rocks and sticks and packed the dirt down with my hand. I cleaned until the floor was so clean you could eat off it. I kissed every inch of my clean hole and licked my lips. “My hole,” I sighed, and the taste of dirt filled my mouth.
I decided then and there that I would finish my hole. A complete hole. It was the first time in four years I'd believed in such a thing. That night, I dreamt that my hole went on forever. I dreamt that I jumped into my hole and fell right through. I passed through the center of the earth and kept going until the ground below me burst open and I flew, feet first, into the other side of the world. The people on the other side of the world crowded around, staring angrily. I tried to explain that my intrusion was accidental, that I'd dug too deep and hadn't considered where a complete hole would end. As I started looking around, I saw holes everywhere. The holes all looked the same as the bottom of my hole and at first, I thought they were all just like me. That we had all kept digging and ended up together, here.
“Here,” I said to myself, “must be where holes end.”
Then the man at the front fo the group swept his hand over the landscape. He told me they had started many holes but the holes went nowhere. He told me they had tried to fill these holes but only made more holes in the process. He told me holes came out into other holes and now they were certain they were doomed to stay there.
Finally, he told me they didn't appreciate some digger flying out of the ground any time he liked.
“I understand of course,” I told the man. “It's so easy to mistake a tunnel for a hole.”
He told me they were going to take my hole for themselves. The top half, previously the bottom half, was now in their soil an rightfully belonged to them. I solemnly agreed, but asked if I could jump down their half of my hole to get back to my own half. The man shook his head, refusing. I tried to explain that I needed to return to the other side of the world, to my family, to my hole. I told them half a hole is useless, because of gravity, because you can't just stop halfway down a hole. I argued until my cheeks turned red and my eyes teared uncontrollably, but the man insisted that if i wanted to go back it would be over topsoil.
“Where do I go to get back?” I asked.
“If we knew,” he said, “we'd never have to dig.”
I laid down and poked my head over the edge of my hole, peering into pure blackness, and spit towards home.
I was eighteen the last time I brought anybody into my hole. It was four years since the disappointment with Lawrence. “It's so much bigger now,” I thought, shoveling eagerly towards the bottom. “A hole built for two.”
Kathryn, the girl I set next to in math class, always asked why I drew circles in my notebook, why I always came to school late, and why my fingernails were always filled with dirt. Then, she spotted a shovel in my locker and I told her everything.
“How big?”
“Big,” I told her, “big big.”
“big enough for a person to live in?”
“Big enough for people to live in.”
“You have to show me.”
After school we walked to my house and went to my back yard. I pointed at it, modestly, as if she could have missed it.
“Shit,” she said.
“I've been working on it for years now.”
“Can i try it out?”
“Sure,” I said nodding. “Tell me when you're ready to come up and I'll throw you the rope.”
After a few minutes she looked straight up and gestured towards me with her finger. I tossed down the fat end of the rope.
“Not that, silly, you.”
“I told her I couldn't go in, that the hole had a limit, one at a time. I told her about Lawrence, about his drippy tears getting all over my hole.
“Salt of the earth,” I said and she stared back blankly. When I was eighteen, puns lost their humor.
“Very funny. Now come down here!”
I tied the rope to the end of a tree and jumped in with the other end. The moment my feet touched the bottom she pushed me down hard and kissed me even harder. She pulled my shirt over my head and unbuttoned my jeans. She lifted her skirt up, just enough, and there, under the rest of the whole world, Kathryn made love to me on a floor of dirt. I looked up at the world above me, looking down at me. “Poetry,” I said to myself under Kathryn's moans before she jammed her dirt cake palm into my mouth. Her cries were louder than any of Lawrence's.
“Gross,” I said, spitting.
Later, as I stared down from above ground, I could still see the marks our bodies made in the floor of my hole. Snow angels without the snow. “Dirt angels,” I said to myself. Not funny, but true.
When I was nineteen, my hole got sick. There was a terrible strom on the morning of my nineteenth birthday. I sat in the house all morning, lighting and blowing out candles one by one, as the sky applauded in delight. My mother pulled my present out of the closet and placed it in front of me. The box came up to my neck and was wrapped entirely in brown paper.
“My favorite color,” I said and kissed my mother on the cheek. I slid my hand along the crease, undressing it with my fingers. Inside the box, under a pool of stryrofoam, was a brand new stereo, complete with two tape decks, a CD player, and a remote control that works through walls. I kissed her again, thanking her.
“You thought it was a new shovel, didn't you?” She asked. I sighed and nodded yes.
That night, after everyone else was asleep, I took a handful of styrofoam peanuts and headed outside. My hole was like a magnificent puddle, overflowing with rain. I rolled up my jeans and dangeld my feet in the freshly formed pool. I reached out my hand, sprinkling the contents over my hole. I watched as each sailed its individual course toward land, raindrops crashing like bombs all around them.
The next morning, my hole had a hole in it.
“Calm down,” I said, as if the news would be very upsetting for a lot of people and it was up to me to keep things under control. “I'm sure there's a rational explanation for this.”
Gophers, I thought, rabbits, or giant worms. Maybe it was related to drainage after the storm, like the rain had eaten away some of the dirt. Or maybe stryrofoam simply wasn't supposed to go in a hole. Maybe styrofoam is for holes what coffee is for ulcers. The word 'ulcer' swam around in my head and plummeted down into my chest.
“Maybe stryrofoam is hole poison.”
Or maybe somebody is digging in my hole.
“That's one thing about digging holes,” I said as if I was releasing a statement on the status of my hole, “Anyone can do it.”
It was scary, realizing that at any time anybody could dig their own hole right into mine. Some person I'd never even met could come chargining with their own shovel and ruin eight years of hard work.
“I will find this hole digger,” I told the ground, “and I will set him straight.”
Then again, I thought, maybe me hole is leaving me.
When I was twenty years old, I watched my hole crumble before my very eyes. It had been months since the new hole had infected my hole, and now, every day, more and more holes made their pilgrimage to mine. The roofs of some of these new holes poured into my hole, paving the way for new ones. “Are you alright, my little hole?” I asked, and it burped and bellowed as it reassembled itself.
I tried holding my hole together with every means possible. Every night, I bordered the sides of my hole with huge boulders or planks of wood. The next morning they had fallen down, exhausted, onto the dirt floor. I tried filling my hole with all sorts of stuff, things I didn't want anymore like old toys and clothes that didn't fit. I hoped that it would form to the structure inside it and keep its shape.
I talked to my hole. I told it to stay. I said “please hole, please stay.” But my hole, wizened with cracks and weak with loosened skin, insisted on splitting and collapsing as I stood nearby, stricken with grief.
The wost part was that by the time I turned twenty one, my hole was deeper than I ever could have dug in a lifetime. It simply kept digging itself. “Bottomless pit” I loaughed, and jokingly leaned over the edge, my hole waving goodbye as it plowed towards its bottom.
I remember the first time I dug my shovel in and scooped out a clump of fresh, sticky ground. I sat beside my tiny hole for hours, running my fingers around the edges.
“I can stop now if I want to.” I thought to myself. That's the great thing about holes, once you've started it, it's already done. A whole hole. When I was thirteen that was funny.
I kept digging and now I could cover my hole with a blanket topped with leaves and catch stray children with it. It's as big as a walk-in closet, I could walk in if I were so inclined. These days, I rarely play with my hole. Sometimes I'll do some edging or put a tarp over it if the weatherman say it's going to rain. I never go into my hole, it seems vulgar now. To me, it's not the same hole is started digging eight years ago. It's much to deep for a thirteen year old.
I used to spend all day in my hole when I was younger. My face always filthy, constantly smiling, mud stuck in my dimples. My mother stayed inside all day, kneeling at the washing machine with her head in her hands. My older sister used to sit on the rim and brush pebbles down at me. “This is so heavy handed” she would say and peer through the darkness to see me flipping her off.
“This is my hole,” I'd tell her, “You can't come in.” I told this to everyone. Nobody cared. No one wants to go in a hole.
I was 14 the first time I brought anybody into my hole. My friend Lawrence lived next door. His tree house had a couch in it. He seemed ready. He asked. He said he was sick of treehouses, how they were up high, removed from everything. He said he wanted to explore deeper things and I agreed to take him in.
We climbed down and stared at each other uncomfortably for a few minutes before he burst out crying.
“Let me out” he yelled, over and over, and his voice beamed back and forth against the walls of the hole.
“There's no way out” I said. “Once you're in a hole, you just keep digging.”
He tried desperately to climb out but, having never been in a hole before, kept pulling out chunks of soil and falling backwards.
“Here” I said and lifted him from the thighs. “Now stay out.”
He scurried away and wiped the back of his pants.
“Nobody goes in my hole,” I said to myself, and it echoed in dirt.
When I was fifteen I put a kitchenette set in my hole, complete with two chairs and placemats. I put out a package of oreos and some daffodils ina jelly jar. I marveled at my domesticity and then took it all out in order to fit back inside.
“Man creates holes” I said proudly. “And holes are intended for man.”
Manholes. When I was fifteen that was funny.
When I was 16, I rejected holes. I was digging eagerly at my hole when I spotted the mound a few feet to the left that at one time was my hole.
“I have created nothing,” I said to myself. “i have brought new, fresh nothingness into the world.”
I stared blankly at my accomplishment and its inverse.
“That's it, I'm going nowhere.”
My mother stared at me throughb the storm door.
“What are you doing out there?” my mother asked over a turnkey sandwich on rye.
“Nothing,” I said, eyeing my shovel. “I'm making nothing.”
And when I was sixteen, there was nothing funny about it.
When I was seventeen, my physics teacher taught my class about black holes. “A hole can go on forever,” she said. “A hole is the absence of everything.”
I ran home that day filled with newfound enthusiasm. Then I did something that I'd never done in the four years I'd had my hole: I cleaned it. I took out all the rocks and sticks and packed the dirt down with my hand. I cleaned until the floor was so clean you could eat off it. I kissed every inch of my clean hole and licked my lips. “My hole,” I sighed, and the taste of dirt filled my mouth.
I decided then and there that I would finish my hole. A complete hole. It was the first time in four years I'd believed in such a thing. That night, I dreamt that my hole went on forever. I dreamt that I jumped into my hole and fell right through. I passed through the center of the earth and kept going until the ground below me burst open and I flew, feet first, into the other side of the world. The people on the other side of the world crowded around, staring angrily. I tried to explain that my intrusion was accidental, that I'd dug too deep and hadn't considered where a complete hole would end. As I started looking around, I saw holes everywhere. The holes all looked the same as the bottom of my hole and at first, I thought they were all just like me. That we had all kept digging and ended up together, here.
“Here,” I said to myself, “must be where holes end.”
Then the man at the front fo the group swept his hand over the landscape. He told me they had started many holes but the holes went nowhere. He told me they had tried to fill these holes but only made more holes in the process. He told me holes came out into other holes and now they were certain they were doomed to stay there.
Finally, he told me they didn't appreciate some digger flying out of the ground any time he liked.
“I understand of course,” I told the man. “It's so easy to mistake a tunnel for a hole.”
He told me they were going to take my hole for themselves. The top half, previously the bottom half, was now in their soil an rightfully belonged to them. I solemnly agreed, but asked if I could jump down their half of my hole to get back to my own half. The man shook his head, refusing. I tried to explain that I needed to return to the other side of the world, to my family, to my hole. I told them half a hole is useless, because of gravity, because you can't just stop halfway down a hole. I argued until my cheeks turned red and my eyes teared uncontrollably, but the man insisted that if i wanted to go back it would be over topsoil.
“Where do I go to get back?” I asked.
“If we knew,” he said, “we'd never have to dig.”
I laid down and poked my head over the edge of my hole, peering into pure blackness, and spit towards home.
I was eighteen the last time I brought anybody into my hole. It was four years since the disappointment with Lawrence. “It's so much bigger now,” I thought, shoveling eagerly towards the bottom. “A hole built for two.”
Kathryn, the girl I set next to in math class, always asked why I drew circles in my notebook, why I always came to school late, and why my fingernails were always filled with dirt. Then, she spotted a shovel in my locker and I told her everything.
“How big?”
“Big,” I told her, “big big.”
“big enough for a person to live in?”
“Big enough for people to live in.”
“You have to show me.”
After school we walked to my house and went to my back yard. I pointed at it, modestly, as if she could have missed it.
“Shit,” she said.
“I've been working on it for years now.”
“Can i try it out?”
“Sure,” I said nodding. “Tell me when you're ready to come up and I'll throw you the rope.”
After a few minutes she looked straight up and gestured towards me with her finger. I tossed down the fat end of the rope.
“Not that, silly, you.”
“I told her I couldn't go in, that the hole had a limit, one at a time. I told her about Lawrence, about his drippy tears getting all over my hole.
“Salt of the earth,” I said and she stared back blankly. When I was eighteen, puns lost their humor.
“Very funny. Now come down here!”
I tied the rope to the end of a tree and jumped in with the other end. The moment my feet touched the bottom she pushed me down hard and kissed me even harder. She pulled my shirt over my head and unbuttoned my jeans. She lifted her skirt up, just enough, and there, under the rest of the whole world, Kathryn made love to me on a floor of dirt. I looked up at the world above me, looking down at me. “Poetry,” I said to myself under Kathryn's moans before she jammed her dirt cake palm into my mouth. Her cries were louder than any of Lawrence's.
“Gross,” I said, spitting.
Later, as I stared down from above ground, I could still see the marks our bodies made in the floor of my hole. Snow angels without the snow. “Dirt angels,” I said to myself. Not funny, but true.
When I was nineteen, my hole got sick. There was a terrible strom on the morning of my nineteenth birthday. I sat in the house all morning, lighting and blowing out candles one by one, as the sky applauded in delight. My mother pulled my present out of the closet and placed it in front of me. The box came up to my neck and was wrapped entirely in brown paper.
“My favorite color,” I said and kissed my mother on the cheek. I slid my hand along the crease, undressing it with my fingers. Inside the box, under a pool of stryrofoam, was a brand new stereo, complete with two tape decks, a CD player, and a remote control that works through walls. I kissed her again, thanking her.
“You thought it was a new shovel, didn't you?” She asked. I sighed and nodded yes.
That night, after everyone else was asleep, I took a handful of styrofoam peanuts and headed outside. My hole was like a magnificent puddle, overflowing with rain. I rolled up my jeans and dangeld my feet in the freshly formed pool. I reached out my hand, sprinkling the contents over my hole. I watched as each sailed its individual course toward land, raindrops crashing like bombs all around them.
The next morning, my hole had a hole in it.
“Calm down,” I said, as if the news would be very upsetting for a lot of people and it was up to me to keep things under control. “I'm sure there's a rational explanation for this.”
Gophers, I thought, rabbits, or giant worms. Maybe it was related to drainage after the storm, like the rain had eaten away some of the dirt. Or maybe stryrofoam simply wasn't supposed to go in a hole. Maybe styrofoam is for holes what coffee is for ulcers. The word 'ulcer' swam around in my head and plummeted down into my chest.
“Maybe stryrofoam is hole poison.”
Or maybe somebody is digging in my hole.
“That's one thing about digging holes,” I said as if I was releasing a statement on the status of my hole, “Anyone can do it.”
It was scary, realizing that at any time anybody could dig their own hole right into mine. Some person I'd never even met could come chargining with their own shovel and ruin eight years of hard work.
“I will find this hole digger,” I told the ground, “and I will set him straight.”
Then again, I thought, maybe me hole is leaving me.
When I was twenty years old, I watched my hole crumble before my very eyes. It had been months since the new hole had infected my hole, and now, every day, more and more holes made their pilgrimage to mine. The roofs of some of these new holes poured into my hole, paving the way for new ones. “Are you alright, my little hole?” I asked, and it burped and bellowed as it reassembled itself.
I tried holding my hole together with every means possible. Every night, I bordered the sides of my hole with huge boulders or planks of wood. The next morning they had fallen down, exhausted, onto the dirt floor. I tried filling my hole with all sorts of stuff, things I didn't want anymore like old toys and clothes that didn't fit. I hoped that it would form to the structure inside it and keep its shape.
I talked to my hole. I told it to stay. I said “please hole, please stay.” But my hole, wizened with cracks and weak with loosened skin, insisted on splitting and collapsing as I stood nearby, stricken with grief.
The wost part was that by the time I turned twenty one, my hole was deeper than I ever could have dug in a lifetime. It simply kept digging itself. “Bottomless pit” I loaughed, and jokingly leaned over the edge, my hole waving goodbye as it plowed towards its bottom.
Hair Care
Mossy, furry, bushy, hirsute, pseudo-falliculitis Barbi, she called him every name in the book before she settled on ape. Ape had that brutish connotation, that biting, monosyllabic thrust she was looking for, like chump or dope or creep or any word where the meaning was all in the tone. She scowled at his hairy body sprawled out over the couch and snarled, “You look like a filthy ape.”
He nuzzled his head into the arm of the couch, and stroked the hair on his arm with his hand, comforting it. After all, as she would often point out, it wasn’t really him she was talking about. He wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was the foot-long ingrown hair that spiraled around his Adam’s apple, tucked under his chin millimeters below the surface of his skin, and popped out, just barely the tip of its tail, under his bottom lip. That smug little curl teased her.
For days he argued it was just a weird shadow; later, he was sure it was spider veins, and then ringworm. In the meantime, she nodded and waited eagerly for the skin around it to die so she could finally grab a piece long enough to pluck it out. It would take hours to wind it out from its secure home, wedged in Herculean follicles gripping at the root, guarding them for dear life against predators. Hours of her time devoted to his constant maintenance and never a ‘thanks’ in return. The thought infuriated her to the point where she couldn’t hold it in anymore, and it just came out as “How can you breathe!”
Under his breath he would swear her to hell, point out her every flaw, from her stubby toes to her bony cheeks. Mouthing his every vengeful thought over and over again to himself, squinting and gritting and clenching and making it obvious any way he could everything he did not say.
“You know it’s not you,” she’d say calmly, petting his back. “I wouldn’t be here if it were you. It’s the hair, it’s those disgusting little black piles of it you shed all over the house, even when it’s not the hair it’s because of the hair.”
Her frustration went beyond clogged drains, shampoo expenses and rope burns. She was always calm and understanding. She’d brush the back of her hand against his cheek and trace her initials in his chest with her finger. She didn’t get angry the time he was gone for almost a week and she hadn’t heard from him. No phone call, letter, nothing. She didn’t even get angry when she found him that Friday on the hat rack in the basement, hanging by a loop of an ingrown so fierce that when she pulled it from the back of his neck a chunk of his noodley insides came out with it. She only said “It looks like an artery!”
And he grumbled, “It is.”
And even when those same ingrowns started getting lost under fresh, massive growths, she grinned and told him “I love you, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a little hair come between us.”
But what really flamed up inside her was his disinterested, frank discussion of it, of how he would calmly accept his malady, stroking her forehead, gently, annoying her.
“I’m okay with it,” he assured her, “let’s just let it grow out and see what happens.”
It was the fact that she hadn’t been to her job, if she still even had one, in over a month, because she knew they’d grow faster if she wasn’t around. She knew he would let them, and that she was the only one who cared enough to pluck them. Most of all it was small, seemingly petty details every second of the day, the grinding squeak he made rubbing against the green velour couch, like right now. Nails down a chalkboard.
Hair was everywhere; sticky and determined. It clung to his chest, and no amount of discussion or plucking, petting or potions was going to convince it otherwise. It matted his back; it was all over his hands, the joints of his toes and in-between them. It was all over his shitty apartment, and her professionally decorated condo. It got stuck in the splotches of dried soda on his kitchen tile, and got lost in her Bauhaus chairs.
Eventually, it covered his body so completely that they figured it had finally reached its end, and she happily announced “That’s has to be it, there’s no more skin!”
But follicles shot out second and third hairs and they corkscrewed around each other into braided rapiers. And then hairs grew out of hairs. They stood one on top of the other, climbed out of his skin only to weave back in inches later. She tried to direct them, she even put up blockades on all sides so they couldn’t grow anywhere but up, but they curled over everything she put in their way. She spent nights studying their patterns, considering all possible modes of attack.
She’d had dreams before this, she’d had hopes and ambitions, and none of them involved picking clumps of residual wax off her hairy lover’s chest with her fingernail. He always had hair, for as long as she’d known him, at first she called it manly or sexy or cute, later it was just there or present, and now it was simply “in need of removing.” Now she could dream only of smooth skin. Every dream was a different swatch of hairless skin, bald and moist. Hairless skin with no specific gender, skin with no sexuality attached to it.
She’d made a good living as a nurse practitioner. It was easy, especially early on, when most of the time all she did was call in the doctor for the actual diagnosis. Unless, of course, she was absolutely certain of what the problem was, and after a while she was almost always sure. Gradually, she mastered her special collection of treatable ailments, confident in her doctorless pointing and explaining of conditions, diseases and cures. During the first three months she worked at the practice, the doctor saw three men complaining of some white substance between their legs. By the fourth one she sat on his desk and lipsynched the entire discussion,
“Has it been flaking for over a week?” She mouthed, bobbing her head from side to side as she switched from doctor voice to patient voice, “Why yes doctor, how did you know? And would you describe it as more of a dry itch, or more of a moist itch? Oh, definitely dry, Doctor.”
When the fifth patient walked in she declared “Jock itch? Ben-gay!” flung her index finger into the air and told him to pull his pants back up. When the doctor came in ten minutes later, she told him it was all taken care of and if he’d like to take lunch she could probably finish off his afternoon appointments by the time he got back. She cut the examination Q & A time from the average forty minutes to as little as three. Dizziness and fatigue? Anemia, take iron supplements. Frequent hives? Hydrocortisone cream. Dry cough? Zinc tablet. And the sniffles? Well, it’s just that time of the year again.
But now she watched, puzzled, as hairs wove through his skin like hungry parasites, carving his body into segments until he looked like he’d been shattered into tiny pieces and carefully glued back together. Hungry, skillful parasites, searching desperately, for what? She had no idea.
Half-Italian, half-Russian, at first he figured ethnicity should be enough to explain it. Then for a while they came in waves, growing steadily, with flowing movement obvious even to his naked eye. Day after day, he’d trim them and wonder if everybody else secretly had the same problem but knew how to hide it better than he could. Then it ate his wristwatch. Hair poured out like rabid ivy, circled the band, and dove back into his skin, taking whatever was in its path along with it. “It was just a Fossil watch,” he told himself, “and not too high up on the Fossil line anyway.”
It didn’t matter much anyway. He bought another one, just like it, and kept it in his pocket. He was down forty-five dollars to the hair. He would trim it in the next few days anyway. He was willing to admit it was a problem, since the first time he measured its progress every fifteen minutes with a ruler. He chewed on his thumbnail and thought, “This could turn out to be a problem.”
He still went to work. He sat in the small cubicle at the back of the bank and tried to convince young children he wasn’t a werewolf while he opened their mother’s savings accounts. He’d been a solid worker, he never took all his personal days, he was never sick, they rarely went on vacation. He didn’t start missing work until she quit tweezing and started waxing.
Waxing began with little sections, trouble areas and tough-to-reach spots.
“It’ll be so much quicker; we’ll just dab a little wax on and yank it all off. So much better than tweezing, right?”
They couldn’t agree more, why tweeze when you can wax? But soon she got carried away with efficiency. She bought honey wax in pint-sized bottles and poured it over his shoulders, dousing him in a bubbling goo from head to toe. She wrapped his tarred body in bed sheets and laid his mummified body on the floor. She tugged the cloth from under him as hard as she could and he rolled along the floor and collapsed in the corner.
“Now that’s something I can work with!” she’d say proudly, stroking the porcupined sheets. He’d shudder away from her, fearful, and she’d spend half an hour trying to convince him that the pain was over for the night. After, she’d kneel by his side, glide her fingers over his smooth head, and tell him,
“You know I love you, I wouldn’t go through all this if I didn’t.”
But the rolling, the cowering, the wailing and trembling in pain- it was too much exercise for a work night. He figured he could take a few days off, this couldn’t go on forever.
But after a while, waxing simply wasn’t enough. She sat by his side nightly, with a satchel full of tweezing instruments with serrated edges and one, which turned into cones at the end. She had a Ginsu 2000 switchblade, a pair of scissors with a tungsten alloy insert, a saw that you plugged in, a t-square, a top-of-the-line, do-it-yourself home electrolyses kit, at least a half dozen waxes, three of them sugar based, two natural and one with a number for Poison Control on the label. She had a curling iron, a spray bottle of WD-40, some Crazy Glue and nail polish remover, a bag of sunflower seeds, and a full bottle of valium.
It consumed her and every hour of every day. She went out weekly to stock up on supplies. She asked the pharmacist if he had any new recommendations, and that was the extent of her socializing. Every day she would pick him into a respectable human being, clean as a cue ball, and sigh with victorious exhaust as she flopped into bed. Each morning she’d wake to find him in an apathetic slumber, devolved once again from man to ape,
and covered in hair from head to toe.
They didn’t talk anymore, just tweezed. Tweezing was a language they could both understand. Tweezing accomplished everything talking had before, and at first it seemed almost erotic, kind of like apes picking bugs off each other’s back. It was foreplay, a little S and M to get the heart racing, a little build-up, a little distraction from the act.
“That was when tweezing meant something,” he thought, doubled over with his chin pressed into his palm.
“Can I do you after?” He asked meekly.
“What?”
“Can I do you after, we used to take turns.”
“Do I look like an ape?” She asked, “No. I was trying to be nice with the whole you-do-me-I-do-you-thing, but really, honey…”
“It’s okay,” he said, acquiescent, “it was just a thought.”
Then he felt the heel of her shoe stab into his lower back
“What the hell are you doing?” He yelled.
“Trying to get some leverage!” She yelled back.
“Alright, that’s enough for tonight. Why don’t you just come here? We can hug a little…”
“Ha,” she cried, “I haven’t even gotten below your rib cage yet, and then we have to do all your front…”
“I’d really like to quit for tonight,” he cut her off, “I’m tired and I’d like to get some rest.”
What he really wanted to do was push her down and make love to her all over the bed. He realized that wasn’t exactly an option, especially as his penis was still buried under an overgrowth of brush, and she liked to do that part last. He watched her jam a sewing needle she had sterilized with her lighter into his back. She didn’t really seem to be in the mood. He estimated the routine would last another two and half hours or so. Maybe she’d get all worked up by then and he could give it a try.
She pulled out a hair from his shoulder, which turned out to be connected to another hair on his head through some complex subcutaneous hair network, and so the whole thing came out at once in a massive, spirally weave.
“Jesus Christ” he screamed.
“Fine! Here,” she yelled as she walked towards the bathroom, tossing him the tweezers, “do it yourself. It’s not my body.”
“Lay off, alright. I don’t feel like doing this tonight.”
As soon as she turned around she realized she wasn’t nearly as close to being finished as she’d thought. The process took so long now, that by the time she got to his back, the hair on his chest had all grown back. She’d tried everything, every wax, every formula, every tweezer to stop him from looking like he did now; like a Christmas tree with eyes. She was always hopeful, insisting that there had to be an end to all of it, a mother hair, one key filament, some shimmering strand waving around somewhere, somewhere she’d never thought of, below a nail, inside a wrinkle, underneath a mole. She was sure someday she’d find it and pull it out and he’d unwind into one long strand of hair coiled on the floor.
Now, when she looked at him, she saw only a pair of eyes, some teeth, and holes where his nose should be. Other than that he was all hair; hair with no apparent end, and then she realized that she wasn’t even sure if there was anything under it. For all she knew, she was talking to a six-foot tall, well-organized collection of fuzz. It made it much easier to tell him things she’d been meaning to tell him, things that had been too tough to say to lips or faces, or anything pink or flesh-toned.
“Don’t worry,” She told him, “I’m not doing it anymore. Grow, grow for all I care, just see how little I give a shit! Grow your fucking hair and don’t do a damn thing about it! Do you realize I can’t even find your skin under that mess? We can’t make love until the end of the day when I’m exhausted. I can’t live like this anymore.”
She grabbed a few essentials; a bottle of water, her contact case, her cell phone and the car keys, and headed for the door.
“I’ll be back to get my stuff. In the meantime, why don’t you try taking care of yourself?” She spoke softly, pouting as if the very thought of leaving were so tragic that she couldn’t stay angry. She didn’t slam the door. In fact, she left quietly.
Once he heard the garage door hit the cement he put his shirt back on and headed into the bathroom. He sat on the toilet and massaged his temples for half an hour, going back and forth between justifying himself and trying not to think about it.
He couldn’t get a moments peace. He was constantly inundated with the sight of shelves of hair doodads and hair thingamabobs. A few minutes later, he got so fed up that he took a tweezer in both hands and snapped it in half. He didn’t stop there either. He cracked his electric razor against the tile and shoved every piece— gears, guards, batteries and all— into the toilet, cackled, and flushed. He demolished every plucker, picker, shaver and cutter, to whatever extent he could conceive of, without the aid of a blowtorch.
He opened the box where she kept all her favorite creams, sprays, gels and pastes and poured them into the tub by the liter. Epil-Stop Spray, Epilady, Shave No More, Ultra Hair Away and Veet, even the prescription stuff with the skull and crossbones on the label. One by one, he emptied them out until the tub was so full you could take a bath in it, and then he did. He put the little black plastic stopper in the drain, sat down in the sea of coffee-colored slime, laid back and dipped his head under, hair first.
He lined the tub with the empty containers and laughed as he read the warnings on the back of the bottles
CAUTION: Do not leave in contact with skin for a period exceeding fifteen minutes.
Lying back in the tub submerged up to his neck, he mocked the trivial burn and watched, eagerly waiting to see some effects. He stared at his outline through the glistening muck and didn’t see a thing for over two hours until his hair started to float to the surface. For a while, that seemed to be the best it could do. Then, eight hours later, his skin began to turn white, tan, and finally green, and it stayed green until it seemed like days went by, and he found he could actually pull out his follicles whole. His body kept getting mushier until, twenty minutes before she returned to his apartment, his skin was so soft he could peel it away with a fingernail.
When the door creaked open he rose from the tub, toxins clung to his body and yellow guck dripped to the floor.
“I figure I have an hour, perhaps an hour and a half.”
“Then we shouldn’t waste any time.”
She laid him down on the sofa, and she made passionate love to his melting body, and when she touched him parts of his body rubbed off onto her hands, and when she kissed him his lips stuck to hers. Her pelvis swiveled back and forth harder and harder as his body gelled into the couch, and before the hour was up, most of his skin had been stripped away and developed into a waxy layer over the velour.
“I love you,” she whispered, gripping his exposed muscle in a despairing hug. Afterwards, she collapsed, exhausted, onto a puddle of his marmaladey remains, her head where his chest should be, her tears mixing with his white liquefied skin and tumbling down into bare, quivering residue.
He nuzzled his head into the arm of the couch, and stroked the hair on his arm with his hand, comforting it. After all, as she would often point out, it wasn’t really him she was talking about. He wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was the foot-long ingrown hair that spiraled around his Adam’s apple, tucked under his chin millimeters below the surface of his skin, and popped out, just barely the tip of its tail, under his bottom lip. That smug little curl teased her.
For days he argued it was just a weird shadow; later, he was sure it was spider veins, and then ringworm. In the meantime, she nodded and waited eagerly for the skin around it to die so she could finally grab a piece long enough to pluck it out. It would take hours to wind it out from its secure home, wedged in Herculean follicles gripping at the root, guarding them for dear life against predators. Hours of her time devoted to his constant maintenance and never a ‘thanks’ in return. The thought infuriated her to the point where she couldn’t hold it in anymore, and it just came out as “How can you breathe!”
Under his breath he would swear her to hell, point out her every flaw, from her stubby toes to her bony cheeks. Mouthing his every vengeful thought over and over again to himself, squinting and gritting and clenching and making it obvious any way he could everything he did not say.
“You know it’s not you,” she’d say calmly, petting his back. “I wouldn’t be here if it were you. It’s the hair, it’s those disgusting little black piles of it you shed all over the house, even when it’s not the hair it’s because of the hair.”
Her frustration went beyond clogged drains, shampoo expenses and rope burns. She was always calm and understanding. She’d brush the back of her hand against his cheek and trace her initials in his chest with her finger. She didn’t get angry the time he was gone for almost a week and she hadn’t heard from him. No phone call, letter, nothing. She didn’t even get angry when she found him that Friday on the hat rack in the basement, hanging by a loop of an ingrown so fierce that when she pulled it from the back of his neck a chunk of his noodley insides came out with it. She only said “It looks like an artery!”
And he grumbled, “It is.”
And even when those same ingrowns started getting lost under fresh, massive growths, she grinned and told him “I love you, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a little hair come between us.”
But what really flamed up inside her was his disinterested, frank discussion of it, of how he would calmly accept his malady, stroking her forehead, gently, annoying her.
“I’m okay with it,” he assured her, “let’s just let it grow out and see what happens.”
It was the fact that she hadn’t been to her job, if she still even had one, in over a month, because she knew they’d grow faster if she wasn’t around. She knew he would let them, and that she was the only one who cared enough to pluck them. Most of all it was small, seemingly petty details every second of the day, the grinding squeak he made rubbing against the green velour couch, like right now. Nails down a chalkboard.
Hair was everywhere; sticky and determined. It clung to his chest, and no amount of discussion or plucking, petting or potions was going to convince it otherwise. It matted his back; it was all over his hands, the joints of his toes and in-between them. It was all over his shitty apartment, and her professionally decorated condo. It got stuck in the splotches of dried soda on his kitchen tile, and got lost in her Bauhaus chairs.
Eventually, it covered his body so completely that they figured it had finally reached its end, and she happily announced “That’s has to be it, there’s no more skin!”
But follicles shot out second and third hairs and they corkscrewed around each other into braided rapiers. And then hairs grew out of hairs. They stood one on top of the other, climbed out of his skin only to weave back in inches later. She tried to direct them, she even put up blockades on all sides so they couldn’t grow anywhere but up, but they curled over everything she put in their way. She spent nights studying their patterns, considering all possible modes of attack.
She’d had dreams before this, she’d had hopes and ambitions, and none of them involved picking clumps of residual wax off her hairy lover’s chest with her fingernail. He always had hair, for as long as she’d known him, at first she called it manly or sexy or cute, later it was just there or present, and now it was simply “in need of removing.” Now she could dream only of smooth skin. Every dream was a different swatch of hairless skin, bald and moist. Hairless skin with no specific gender, skin with no sexuality attached to it.
She’d made a good living as a nurse practitioner. It was easy, especially early on, when most of the time all she did was call in the doctor for the actual diagnosis. Unless, of course, she was absolutely certain of what the problem was, and after a while she was almost always sure. Gradually, she mastered her special collection of treatable ailments, confident in her doctorless pointing and explaining of conditions, diseases and cures. During the first three months she worked at the practice, the doctor saw three men complaining of some white substance between their legs. By the fourth one she sat on his desk and lipsynched the entire discussion,
“Has it been flaking for over a week?” She mouthed, bobbing her head from side to side as she switched from doctor voice to patient voice, “Why yes doctor, how did you know? And would you describe it as more of a dry itch, or more of a moist itch? Oh, definitely dry, Doctor.”
When the fifth patient walked in she declared “Jock itch? Ben-gay!” flung her index finger into the air and told him to pull his pants back up. When the doctor came in ten minutes later, she told him it was all taken care of and if he’d like to take lunch she could probably finish off his afternoon appointments by the time he got back. She cut the examination Q & A time from the average forty minutes to as little as three. Dizziness and fatigue? Anemia, take iron supplements. Frequent hives? Hydrocortisone cream. Dry cough? Zinc tablet. And the sniffles? Well, it’s just that time of the year again.
But now she watched, puzzled, as hairs wove through his skin like hungry parasites, carving his body into segments until he looked like he’d been shattered into tiny pieces and carefully glued back together. Hungry, skillful parasites, searching desperately, for what? She had no idea.
Half-Italian, half-Russian, at first he figured ethnicity should be enough to explain it. Then for a while they came in waves, growing steadily, with flowing movement obvious even to his naked eye. Day after day, he’d trim them and wonder if everybody else secretly had the same problem but knew how to hide it better than he could. Then it ate his wristwatch. Hair poured out like rabid ivy, circled the band, and dove back into his skin, taking whatever was in its path along with it. “It was just a Fossil watch,” he told himself, “and not too high up on the Fossil line anyway.”
It didn’t matter much anyway. He bought another one, just like it, and kept it in his pocket. He was down forty-five dollars to the hair. He would trim it in the next few days anyway. He was willing to admit it was a problem, since the first time he measured its progress every fifteen minutes with a ruler. He chewed on his thumbnail and thought, “This could turn out to be a problem.”
He still went to work. He sat in the small cubicle at the back of the bank and tried to convince young children he wasn’t a werewolf while he opened their mother’s savings accounts. He’d been a solid worker, he never took all his personal days, he was never sick, they rarely went on vacation. He didn’t start missing work until she quit tweezing and started waxing.
Waxing began with little sections, trouble areas and tough-to-reach spots.
“It’ll be so much quicker; we’ll just dab a little wax on and yank it all off. So much better than tweezing, right?”
They couldn’t agree more, why tweeze when you can wax? But soon she got carried away with efficiency. She bought honey wax in pint-sized bottles and poured it over his shoulders, dousing him in a bubbling goo from head to toe. She wrapped his tarred body in bed sheets and laid his mummified body on the floor. She tugged the cloth from under him as hard as she could and he rolled along the floor and collapsed in the corner.
“Now that’s something I can work with!” she’d say proudly, stroking the porcupined sheets. He’d shudder away from her, fearful, and she’d spend half an hour trying to convince him that the pain was over for the night. After, she’d kneel by his side, glide her fingers over his smooth head, and tell him,
“You know I love you, I wouldn’t go through all this if I didn’t.”
But the rolling, the cowering, the wailing and trembling in pain- it was too much exercise for a work night. He figured he could take a few days off, this couldn’t go on forever.
But after a while, waxing simply wasn’t enough. She sat by his side nightly, with a satchel full of tweezing instruments with serrated edges and one, which turned into cones at the end. She had a Ginsu 2000 switchblade, a pair of scissors with a tungsten alloy insert, a saw that you plugged in, a t-square, a top-of-the-line, do-it-yourself home electrolyses kit, at least a half dozen waxes, three of them sugar based, two natural and one with a number for Poison Control on the label. She had a curling iron, a spray bottle of WD-40, some Crazy Glue and nail polish remover, a bag of sunflower seeds, and a full bottle of valium.
It consumed her and every hour of every day. She went out weekly to stock up on supplies. She asked the pharmacist if he had any new recommendations, and that was the extent of her socializing. Every day she would pick him into a respectable human being, clean as a cue ball, and sigh with victorious exhaust as she flopped into bed. Each morning she’d wake to find him in an apathetic slumber, devolved once again from man to ape,
and covered in hair from head to toe.
They didn’t talk anymore, just tweezed. Tweezing was a language they could both understand. Tweezing accomplished everything talking had before, and at first it seemed almost erotic, kind of like apes picking bugs off each other’s back. It was foreplay, a little S and M to get the heart racing, a little build-up, a little distraction from the act.
“That was when tweezing meant something,” he thought, doubled over with his chin pressed into his palm.
“Can I do you after?” He asked meekly.
“What?”
“Can I do you after, we used to take turns.”
“Do I look like an ape?” She asked, “No. I was trying to be nice with the whole you-do-me-I-do-you-thing, but really, honey…”
“It’s okay,” he said, acquiescent, “it was just a thought.”
Then he felt the heel of her shoe stab into his lower back
“What the hell are you doing?” He yelled.
“Trying to get some leverage!” She yelled back.
“Alright, that’s enough for tonight. Why don’t you just come here? We can hug a little…”
“Ha,” she cried, “I haven’t even gotten below your rib cage yet, and then we have to do all your front…”
“I’d really like to quit for tonight,” he cut her off, “I’m tired and I’d like to get some rest.”
What he really wanted to do was push her down and make love to her all over the bed. He realized that wasn’t exactly an option, especially as his penis was still buried under an overgrowth of brush, and she liked to do that part last. He watched her jam a sewing needle she had sterilized with her lighter into his back. She didn’t really seem to be in the mood. He estimated the routine would last another two and half hours or so. Maybe she’d get all worked up by then and he could give it a try.
She pulled out a hair from his shoulder, which turned out to be connected to another hair on his head through some complex subcutaneous hair network, and so the whole thing came out at once in a massive, spirally weave.
“Jesus Christ” he screamed.
“Fine! Here,” she yelled as she walked towards the bathroom, tossing him the tweezers, “do it yourself. It’s not my body.”
“Lay off, alright. I don’t feel like doing this tonight.”
As soon as she turned around she realized she wasn’t nearly as close to being finished as she’d thought. The process took so long now, that by the time she got to his back, the hair on his chest had all grown back. She’d tried everything, every wax, every formula, every tweezer to stop him from looking like he did now; like a Christmas tree with eyes. She was always hopeful, insisting that there had to be an end to all of it, a mother hair, one key filament, some shimmering strand waving around somewhere, somewhere she’d never thought of, below a nail, inside a wrinkle, underneath a mole. She was sure someday she’d find it and pull it out and he’d unwind into one long strand of hair coiled on the floor.
Now, when she looked at him, she saw only a pair of eyes, some teeth, and holes where his nose should be. Other than that he was all hair; hair with no apparent end, and then she realized that she wasn’t even sure if there was anything under it. For all she knew, she was talking to a six-foot tall, well-organized collection of fuzz. It made it much easier to tell him things she’d been meaning to tell him, things that had been too tough to say to lips or faces, or anything pink or flesh-toned.
“Don’t worry,” She told him, “I’m not doing it anymore. Grow, grow for all I care, just see how little I give a shit! Grow your fucking hair and don’t do a damn thing about it! Do you realize I can’t even find your skin under that mess? We can’t make love until the end of the day when I’m exhausted. I can’t live like this anymore.”
She grabbed a few essentials; a bottle of water, her contact case, her cell phone and the car keys, and headed for the door.
“I’ll be back to get my stuff. In the meantime, why don’t you try taking care of yourself?” She spoke softly, pouting as if the very thought of leaving were so tragic that she couldn’t stay angry. She didn’t slam the door. In fact, she left quietly.
Once he heard the garage door hit the cement he put his shirt back on and headed into the bathroom. He sat on the toilet and massaged his temples for half an hour, going back and forth between justifying himself and trying not to think about it.
He couldn’t get a moments peace. He was constantly inundated with the sight of shelves of hair doodads and hair thingamabobs. A few minutes later, he got so fed up that he took a tweezer in both hands and snapped it in half. He didn’t stop there either. He cracked his electric razor against the tile and shoved every piece— gears, guards, batteries and all— into the toilet, cackled, and flushed. He demolished every plucker, picker, shaver and cutter, to whatever extent he could conceive of, without the aid of a blowtorch.
He opened the box where she kept all her favorite creams, sprays, gels and pastes and poured them into the tub by the liter. Epil-Stop Spray, Epilady, Shave No More, Ultra Hair Away and Veet, even the prescription stuff with the skull and crossbones on the label. One by one, he emptied them out until the tub was so full you could take a bath in it, and then he did. He put the little black plastic stopper in the drain, sat down in the sea of coffee-colored slime, laid back and dipped his head under, hair first.
He lined the tub with the empty containers and laughed as he read the warnings on the back of the bottles
CAUTION: Do not leave in contact with skin for a period exceeding fifteen minutes.
Lying back in the tub submerged up to his neck, he mocked the trivial burn and watched, eagerly waiting to see some effects. He stared at his outline through the glistening muck and didn’t see a thing for over two hours until his hair started to float to the surface. For a while, that seemed to be the best it could do. Then, eight hours later, his skin began to turn white, tan, and finally green, and it stayed green until it seemed like days went by, and he found he could actually pull out his follicles whole. His body kept getting mushier until, twenty minutes before she returned to his apartment, his skin was so soft he could peel it away with a fingernail.
When the door creaked open he rose from the tub, toxins clung to his body and yellow guck dripped to the floor.
“I figure I have an hour, perhaps an hour and a half.”
“Then we shouldn’t waste any time.”
She laid him down on the sofa, and she made passionate love to his melting body, and when she touched him parts of his body rubbed off onto her hands, and when she kissed him his lips stuck to hers. Her pelvis swiveled back and forth harder and harder as his body gelled into the couch, and before the hour was up, most of his skin had been stripped away and developed into a waxy layer over the velour.
“I love you,” she whispered, gripping his exposed muscle in a despairing hug. Afterwards, she collapsed, exhausted, onto a puddle of his marmaladey remains, her head where his chest should be, her tears mixing with his white liquefied skin and tumbling down into bare, quivering residue.
The Man With Stretchy Skin (incomplete/fractured)
The Man with stretchy skin read books about famous French philosophers, never by them. He could shmooze, smile and order wine. He could dance waltzes and he could play them. He could talk about anything, but never for very long; he was a master at changing subjects. He had practiced his attentive look to the point where you could almost hear him listening. He thought that people were charming and told them so. He excused himself halfway through every conversation; sighting someone he should ‘get back to’ and ended every meeting with ‘take care.’
As long as he could remember, his skin had no elasticity. The muscle and the skin had met, briefly, and rejected one another and now, he could pull his skin almost a foot off his body and it would simply stay like that, drooping, for hours. He walked around every moment of the day with intense caution; scared he might get caught on a tack or turn around to find himself stuck in the car door. Aware, always, that a part of him might be lagging behind.
Every night he went out in his fitted suit, to the most exclusive restaurants and took home a woman with skin so taut it looked it would snap right off with a bend of her knee. He would lay her down on his tight sheets, kiss every piece of her tight body with his tightly pressed lips and send her home, confused. Later, as he lied in the crease she’d made in his bed, kneading his arms like dough, he’d laugh ‘I’m falling apart at the seams.”
He knew her type, veiny with small pores. Tight, but with the slight pulls of aging. The type he knew he should make every effort to avoid. The type who thought there should be strict rules for poetry, and a few weeks later when he sat across from her at the newly opened Italian restaurant reading the description for the Veal Parmigiano he looked up to ask “Isn’t it poetic?”
“Not really,” she replied, and ordered fish in white wine sauce.
Under the table he pulled a piece of skin from his arm and buried the butter knife in the folds. He had a beautiful collection of silverware.
2: “Nobody is supposed to be able to kiss their elbow,” He told her as she lied on the bed, trying, “that’s why we need to find a partner in this world, we need someone to kiss our elbow.”
She smiled back at him, playfully, thinking it was the cutest observation any man had ever made, until he pulled the skin from under his elbow and held it to his lips. “I don’t need anybody,” he said, and left her naked in her bedroom.
It took a week of persistent calling to convince him she wasn’t afraid. He used to get a thrill from their reactions, their lips bunching anxiously as they tried to trap in their gasps. Like the time his fifth grade teacher sent him to the corner for making a comment on her yellowing teeth. “No skin off my back,” He told her and held a piece of it over his head. Or the time with his first love, when, after getting back from a night on the town he removed his coat, shirt, pants and underwear before attempting to take off his skin. He waited, held in his chuckle, fully expecting her to bolt from the room in a fit of terror, and then burst out laughing a few minutes later when she did.
These days he got to the point quick. He’d made all the jokes about being stretched to the limit or bouncing back. He’d grown old for parlor tricks. It was a relatively simple concept; pull the skin and the skin hangs.
“I could’ve given you the medical version, or the funny version,” He said, “but they all end the same.” He let go of the skin he’d gathered along the length of his wrist and it plopped down, flaccid, and draped down over his knuckles. “It goes back,” he said “eventually.”
She poked and prodded and pulled at his skin for proof. She held a chunk of it in her hands and felt it as if she was interested in buying it. She tried to think of a way to convincingly tell him she didn’t care. She wanted to yell out “I don’t care” and smile, as if she was overwhelmed with happiness at the fact that he had felt close enough to confide in her. By the glazed over green of his eyes, it seemed her reaction was being closely monitored, like he would consider anything that sounded consoling as pity, or anything affectionate as covering up. She wanted to at least say that it wasn’t gross, disturbing or, that word that echoed in her brain and seemed like an obstacle not to say, freakish. She wanted to laugh at the thought that she would ever be scared or anything less than supportive, but as she heard the scraping sound of papery skin against papery skin she could only think to ask “Can you do it?”
“Of course… more of me to love.” He said to her, while she watched in awe as he wrapped the skin from his hand slowly around his wrist.
“Does it affect that?” She asked without the least hint of interest in the answer and he laughed, harder than with any woman before her.
3: They had movie sex. She made love to him as he poured over the bed. She could feel the muscle inside him, unglued, disjointed, like parts that had been carefully laid out one on top of the other. Stacked, but loosely. She felt overcome with the desire to open him up, bury her hands deep in the creases of his body and pull his skin until it slipped off like wrapping paper. She wanted to tear him apart and rebuild him, stitch him, give him some structure and make a man out of him.
His skin cloaked her body, covering her ever inch with sweaty droplets like big, lipless kisses. She imagined getting trapped within him, lost under his folds. There, she’d meet at least a half-dozen other women with moist, tanned skin, they’d talk about devotion and ask each other if anyone had a lighter.
“Parts,” she said to herself. “He’s just parts.” Thinking of him as a man of parts made it easier to excuse the moans, the incessant tears and the sentimental pillow-talk monologues on vulnerability that should have begun with a quote from the dictionary. Parts had been an amusing concept when she was younger, something to mull over while she lied naked under the bed sheets with her legs crossed. Green eyes, brown hair, long legs, firm ass. “I’m over that” She thought, “I need a little togetherness in my life.”
The biggest problem, as far as she could see, was that there was really no problem. If there were a problem she would’ve told him. She would’ve flung her hands over his mouth when he was about to say, “I love you,” she would’ve pouted and made him notice it, when he asked her if there was a problem she would’ve said “yes, there is,” and then told him exactly what it was. “There’s simply nothing wrong,” she thought and bit open the canker sore on her lip.
They made love for hours, every time. When she got sore they would stop, share a cigarette and he would call her by his own name. “You are part of me” he told her while she wrestled her pinky finger out of his stomach fat.
As long as he could remember, his skin had no elasticity. The muscle and the skin had met, briefly, and rejected one another and now, he could pull his skin almost a foot off his body and it would simply stay like that, drooping, for hours. He walked around every moment of the day with intense caution; scared he might get caught on a tack or turn around to find himself stuck in the car door. Aware, always, that a part of him might be lagging behind.
Every night he went out in his fitted suit, to the most exclusive restaurants and took home a woman with skin so taut it looked it would snap right off with a bend of her knee. He would lay her down on his tight sheets, kiss every piece of her tight body with his tightly pressed lips and send her home, confused. Later, as he lied in the crease she’d made in his bed, kneading his arms like dough, he’d laugh ‘I’m falling apart at the seams.”
He knew her type, veiny with small pores. Tight, but with the slight pulls of aging. The type he knew he should make every effort to avoid. The type who thought there should be strict rules for poetry, and a few weeks later when he sat across from her at the newly opened Italian restaurant reading the description for the Veal Parmigiano he looked up to ask “Isn’t it poetic?”
“Not really,” she replied, and ordered fish in white wine sauce.
Under the table he pulled a piece of skin from his arm and buried the butter knife in the folds. He had a beautiful collection of silverware.
2: “Nobody is supposed to be able to kiss their elbow,” He told her as she lied on the bed, trying, “that’s why we need to find a partner in this world, we need someone to kiss our elbow.”
She smiled back at him, playfully, thinking it was the cutest observation any man had ever made, until he pulled the skin from under his elbow and held it to his lips. “I don’t need anybody,” he said, and left her naked in her bedroom.
It took a week of persistent calling to convince him she wasn’t afraid. He used to get a thrill from their reactions, their lips bunching anxiously as they tried to trap in their gasps. Like the time his fifth grade teacher sent him to the corner for making a comment on her yellowing teeth. “No skin off my back,” He told her and held a piece of it over his head. Or the time with his first love, when, after getting back from a night on the town he removed his coat, shirt, pants and underwear before attempting to take off his skin. He waited, held in his chuckle, fully expecting her to bolt from the room in a fit of terror, and then burst out laughing a few minutes later when she did.
These days he got to the point quick. He’d made all the jokes about being stretched to the limit or bouncing back. He’d grown old for parlor tricks. It was a relatively simple concept; pull the skin and the skin hangs.
“I could’ve given you the medical version, or the funny version,” He said, “but they all end the same.” He let go of the skin he’d gathered along the length of his wrist and it plopped down, flaccid, and draped down over his knuckles. “It goes back,” he said “eventually.”
She poked and prodded and pulled at his skin for proof. She held a chunk of it in her hands and felt it as if she was interested in buying it. She tried to think of a way to convincingly tell him she didn’t care. She wanted to yell out “I don’t care” and smile, as if she was overwhelmed with happiness at the fact that he had felt close enough to confide in her. By the glazed over green of his eyes, it seemed her reaction was being closely monitored, like he would consider anything that sounded consoling as pity, or anything affectionate as covering up. She wanted to at least say that it wasn’t gross, disturbing or, that word that echoed in her brain and seemed like an obstacle not to say, freakish. She wanted to laugh at the thought that she would ever be scared or anything less than supportive, but as she heard the scraping sound of papery skin against papery skin she could only think to ask “Can you do it?”
“Of course… more of me to love.” He said to her, while she watched in awe as he wrapped the skin from his hand slowly around his wrist.
“Does it affect that?” She asked without the least hint of interest in the answer and he laughed, harder than with any woman before her.
3: They had movie sex. She made love to him as he poured over the bed. She could feel the muscle inside him, unglued, disjointed, like parts that had been carefully laid out one on top of the other. Stacked, but loosely. She felt overcome with the desire to open him up, bury her hands deep in the creases of his body and pull his skin until it slipped off like wrapping paper. She wanted to tear him apart and rebuild him, stitch him, give him some structure and make a man out of him.
His skin cloaked her body, covering her ever inch with sweaty droplets like big, lipless kisses. She imagined getting trapped within him, lost under his folds. There, she’d meet at least a half-dozen other women with moist, tanned skin, they’d talk about devotion and ask each other if anyone had a lighter.
“Parts,” she said to herself. “He’s just parts.” Thinking of him as a man of parts made it easier to excuse the moans, the incessant tears and the sentimental pillow-talk monologues on vulnerability that should have begun with a quote from the dictionary. Parts had been an amusing concept when she was younger, something to mull over while she lied naked under the bed sheets with her legs crossed. Green eyes, brown hair, long legs, firm ass. “I’m over that” She thought, “I need a little togetherness in my life.”
The biggest problem, as far as she could see, was that there was really no problem. If there were a problem she would’ve told him. She would’ve flung her hands over his mouth when he was about to say, “I love you,” she would’ve pouted and made him notice it, when he asked her if there was a problem she would’ve said “yes, there is,” and then told him exactly what it was. “There’s simply nothing wrong,” she thought and bit open the canker sore on her lip.
They made love for hours, every time. When she got sore they would stop, share a cigarette and he would call her by his own name. “You are part of me” he told her while she wrestled her pinky finger out of his stomach fat.
The One Trick Pony
“Feet,” she whispered at the two silver hooves at the ends of her legs, “I would’ve looked great in feet.” Reaching down under the bed she picked up the bottle of nail polish she kept hidden along with the newspaper clippings of girls in strappy sandals and open-toed pumps. She painted five red toenails on the front of her left hoof and held a terrycloth slipper under it. She wrapped her right leg in sheets and set it to the side. “You’ll just have to wait your turn,” she told the hoof, and clenched her eyelids shut. She imagined what it’d be like to have arches and heels, pads that molded to any surface; she imagined stomping her feet when she got angry, and walking away whenever she felt like it. She imagined a life where balance didn’t take constant effort, where fleshy soles matched fleshy hands, where a girl could look in a mirror and say to herself “Damn, I look human!” She imagined a body wrapped top to bottom in skin like wrapping paper, like a little gift box that introduced its contents and said “Happy Birthday. Enjoy your fully completed, made-to-order, one hundred percent synthesized woman.” She imagined a finished female body, all done, top to bottom, walking around like it was second nature, and then she wobbled and fell on her side. The very thought of two feet firmly planted could topple her over if she got carried away. I’d dance, she told herself, and her eyes burst open, as if the very thought of dancing was trying to escape out her eyes. I’d samba and waltz and can-can over my head. They’d toss me up in the air and I’d land flat on feet. She looked over to her sleeping lover, his breath soft and peaceful, and hissed under her breath, “You never take me out dancing.”
She sat on the bed with her hooves in her hands, tired with disappointment. After weeks of scrubbing with pumice, filing and sculpting, they still looked like hooves, but worse; smaller, warped, homemade hooves. She’d known she couldn’t change completely, but she made the valiant effort for toes anyway, gritting her teeth and slicing through bone with a nail file, but at best they looked like metallic teeth. Exhausted, she considered telling him she’d been born with clubbed feet, which she figured could explain everything. ,
She knew how she would say it. Honey, I was born with clubbed feet and that should explain everything. It explained why she was so anxious about taking her shoes off, why she limped when she walked and why she always fell asleep after him. She’d find a way to fit in the sleep part; maybe she had to soak them in hot water to relax them before bed or massage them because they hurt so much from walking on them all day. She knew how she would fit it in. Honey, I was born with clubbed feet and every night after you fall asleep I soak them in hot water and massage them because it is so painful to be crippled like I am. She thought “crippled” would garner sympathy and make him feel bad about ever pushing her to take her shoes off or trying to slip his fingers under the elastic in her socks. He seemed to like the rest of her, he liked the human skin, the big blue people eyes, and especially the woman’s breasts she’d modeled after the girl on the soap opera. Maybe a little disfigurement would be a nice change of pace, as long as it looked human. Even then, she’d still have to show him clubbed feet and then he’d have to help out, massaging or soaking them himself. She thought of what was wrong with a life of eating dandelions and chasing squirrels. The feeling of fresh grass pressed against her hooves sure beat the boiling heat of a soldering iron. That had been a life of stability, a life with all four feet on the ground. Four legs had been more than a reassurance; they were something a girl could rely on. She thought of why change had seemed such a novel idea and whether it would have been better to stick to the old adage of letting the boy chase you. That would’ve been easy, she thought; then he never would’ve caught me. Instead, she’d gotten all caught up with her vague notions of love and being human, and before she knew it she was sawing off her horn in exchange for a forehead. She thought of being honest, of telling him straight out and not giving a moment’s thought to how he reacted to it. Honey, before I met you I was a unicorn, just like you see in the movies or illustrated children’s books. I ate dandelions and chased squirrels and then I saw you and loved you and wanted to be right for you. It’s just taking a lot longer than I’d expected.
That seemed to be the worst idea so far. That would only bring up more questions, more doubt. After all the effort and pain she’d already put into herself; shaving her mane, slicing and stitching, grinding and carving herself like a sculpture, she couldn’t just give up and come clean at feet. She’d had to leave something for last, and feet, being so low on her body, seemed the obvious choice. She’d turned hooves into hands without having hands to do it with, so there was no reason she could think of to tell him the truth simply because of feet. That would be giving up, she thought, and I’ve come this far, and so she turned to him in bed and whispered, “You’ll have your feet soon honey, I promise” and kissed him on the forehead, where his horn should have been.
“I have to finish them soon” she thought, “feet or no feet, I have to show him something.” She remembered how easy life had been before, as a unicorn, when hiding was second nature. She missed the time when she could just as easily hide in the brush or in fountains when she spotted men who’d lost their way, she missed myth and anonymity, but hiding was all in the past. Then, she’d had legs galore, and she could run or jump or make love barehooved and nobody asked her for feet. Now she just answered questions, over coffee, over soup, watching TV, and buying clothes. The pendant? A gift from an old boyfriend. How many old boyfriends? She didn’t remember. Why didn’t she remember? Drugs. What drugs? Feet drugs. That sounded good, drugs that make you grow feet.
In the morning, he made coffee, and asked “Feet today?”
“Just wait, I’m not ready. I need a little time and then I promise, I’ll take off my shoes.”
“And your socks?”
“We’re not there yet.”
Which was true, she thought, sipping at her coffee and watching his reaction from over the mug. She’d stenciled an outline of some feet she’d seen in ads for shoe sales and discounted pedicures and medicated anti-fungal creams. Even that had taken almost a week. Now, if she kept sanding and chiseling at least three hours a night while he slept, she’d at best have a prototype, no detail, just form. Form was something he could feel under socks if she let him, but soon she’d need a finished product, buffed and polished, with toenails.
“Give me some time before I take off my socks,” she requested.
“Why not,” he replied smugly, “we have all the time in the world.”
She knew he’d already spent a lot of time considering what she must’ve been like before him. He must’ve thought that lovers before him had gotten to see feet, but that they’d been careless, stepping on toes or playing footsy to hard. He always wanted to know because there were always questions she wouldn’t answer, so he asked them, and he kept asking until she was blue in the face, and then he asked why she was so pale all the time.
“I can’t help it, I have light skin,” she told him. She’d wanted to say “purity,” she’d wanted to hold his mouth shut and pull his ears open and yell “It’s because I’m very, very pure!” She’d wanted to tell him to look beyond the blonde hair and fair complexion, that she was white everywhere someone could be white, places he couldn’t see, just touch, and feel white. She wanted him to feel her deep inside, with more care and consideration than the rushed pace of foreplay he was used to. That just once he could sink his fingertips inside her and press into bleached curves, milky smooth curves he’d never taken the time to notice. She’d wanted to slide his fingers down her ivory body and ask him the questions. What’s wrong with white? What have you ever given up? And what did you think unicorns would look like?
She’d tried that once, but his hands had gotten lost around her chest and he’d never made it down far down enough to check anything out for himself. For a moment there had been a lovely silence, as if he’d had some profound realization that she’d been waiting for him to have, but he’d ruined all that with more talking and he made love to her on the floor while he asked her about politics. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” he told her afterwards as he lay beside her, fondling her ankles with his toes, “I’m going to find out what it is.”
He probably would, she thought. All the work she’d done for him, and only a couple of warped hooves to show for it. She figured she’d stay up all night for nights on end, making perfect feet for his enjoyment, and then when he asked her for feet the next morning, she’d shove her two little stumps in his face and say “See!” She wanted tell him how every question, lectures, talk and discussion dove into her body through her ears and lodged itself deep inside her brain and now she was so filled up with words that new ones couldn’t find a way in. She wanted to tell him how she was so filled up with his words that she had to stop making her own words and that every time a new one got stuffed up inside her, something else would have to come out.
It started by coming out of her head. She only noticed it after he asked her about it.
“Are you alright?” He asked, and he knew that she wasn’t because the spot on her forehead, larger than a pimple, softer than a scab, had started to loosen up and break apart from the edges. As the days went on it only opened up more, and the more it opened up, the more it itched. She knew she shouldn’t scratch it because it might spread like a rash, but it itched so badly that only scratching made it stop. She decided scratching might even help whatever it was along, so she pressed down into her forehead, piercing through the waxy veneer and squashing deep down into muscle, layers of jelly flesh blanketing her finger as it slipped in. She stirred the pulp with her fingernail, scratching and stirring and finding nothing. Then, she moved a millimeter or so in towards the center, making little concentric circles.
“Gross,” she whispered to herself with her finger still stuck in her forehead, “absolutely gross.”
Sharper than a migraine, the pain in her head was alive, pumping and twisting, searching for a way out before deciding that the best route was straight through the skull. She went to the hospital where the doctor told her it was “menopause.” She considered the word “menopause,” and how peaceful it sounded and then she imagined hormones trying to escape through her body, bubbling up into wrinkles or leaking through pores during hot flashes. “It isn’t menopause,” she told him, but signed the hospital bill anyway.
When she arrived home he was full of questions.
“Where were you?”
“The hospital.”
“What for?”
“My head.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“To get some rest, and it’d go away.”
“Did you get a second opinion?”
She didn’t need one. She knew what it was, her horn growing back, forced out from inside where she’d become too clogged for anything else to stay inside. She could feel it deep down inside her, she could almost get her fingers in far enough to touch it, to push it back inside her and make it stay there. She lay down on the bed with a fistful of aspirin and thought of when Pinnochio first realized his nose was growing and why he didn’t do something about it.
He crouched down next to her and asked if there was anything he could do and she said “No.” He asked if he could feel her forehead to see if she was warm and she said “Absolutely no.” He asked if she wanted him to leave her alone and she felt guilty because he was only trying to help, so she said “No,” then he asked if she still loved him and she said “Of course, why would you even ask that?” He asked her if she’d feel better if she took her shoes off and she said “Probably,” and he went to untie them and she said “No.” He asked her what was really going on and she said “I’m a unicorn.” He laughed and asked “What?” and she said “I’ll explain it later.” He asked what was coming out of her forehead and she said “A horn,” and she stood up to look in the mirror.
The long slice of spirally ivory continued to stab its way out of her head, fast and faster, until it was nearly a foot and half, about the same length as when she’d first cut it off.
He saw the shimmering coat rise out of her skin and he asked what was happening to her body and she said “Hair.” She watched a gleaming white mane make its way out of her scalp and poured out down to her hips, and he asked her to make it stop and she said “I can’t.” And her tail popped out and slung to the ground.
She toppled and asked him to catch her, but he stood, paralyzed, his eyes wide in disbelief as steel-colored bone wrapped around her hands, and she fell forward on them. She felt an overpowering release as she opened her mouth and seemed to free everything inside her with one giant sigh. The only thing left inside were wants and regrets. She was sad to see her human body escape in a breath of air, and wanted to go back and spend a last moment holding him in a parallel form. She was sad to have made such a mess during her transformation, and wanted him to at least try and see if there wasn’t a unicorn somewhere inside him. Most of all, she wanted him to realize what it had been like for her, that she hadn’t wanted it this way, but those questions jamming into her and cramming their way inside, what had he expected? In an instant she was filled with the urge to ram her horn into him and show him what it had felt like to be her. Just this one time, just this one horn, she thought. She wanted him to feel that horn like she had, shoved inside, still and unmoving, stuck where he didn’t want it to be. She held herself back with all her might. “Why? ” he asked softly as he traced her new body with his eyes, and she could barely hold her tears inside her as she galloped out the doorway.
She sat on the bed with her hooves in her hands, tired with disappointment. After weeks of scrubbing with pumice, filing and sculpting, they still looked like hooves, but worse; smaller, warped, homemade hooves. She’d known she couldn’t change completely, but she made the valiant effort for toes anyway, gritting her teeth and slicing through bone with a nail file, but at best they looked like metallic teeth. Exhausted, she considered telling him she’d been born with clubbed feet, which she figured could explain everything. ,
She knew how she would say it. Honey, I was born with clubbed feet and that should explain everything. It explained why she was so anxious about taking her shoes off, why she limped when she walked and why she always fell asleep after him. She’d find a way to fit in the sleep part; maybe she had to soak them in hot water to relax them before bed or massage them because they hurt so much from walking on them all day. She knew how she would fit it in. Honey, I was born with clubbed feet and every night after you fall asleep I soak them in hot water and massage them because it is so painful to be crippled like I am. She thought “crippled” would garner sympathy and make him feel bad about ever pushing her to take her shoes off or trying to slip his fingers under the elastic in her socks. He seemed to like the rest of her, he liked the human skin, the big blue people eyes, and especially the woman’s breasts she’d modeled after the girl on the soap opera. Maybe a little disfigurement would be a nice change of pace, as long as it looked human. Even then, she’d still have to show him clubbed feet and then he’d have to help out, massaging or soaking them himself. She thought of what was wrong with a life of eating dandelions and chasing squirrels. The feeling of fresh grass pressed against her hooves sure beat the boiling heat of a soldering iron. That had been a life of stability, a life with all four feet on the ground. Four legs had been more than a reassurance; they were something a girl could rely on. She thought of why change had seemed such a novel idea and whether it would have been better to stick to the old adage of letting the boy chase you. That would’ve been easy, she thought; then he never would’ve caught me. Instead, she’d gotten all caught up with her vague notions of love and being human, and before she knew it she was sawing off her horn in exchange for a forehead. She thought of being honest, of telling him straight out and not giving a moment’s thought to how he reacted to it. Honey, before I met you I was a unicorn, just like you see in the movies or illustrated children’s books. I ate dandelions and chased squirrels and then I saw you and loved you and wanted to be right for you. It’s just taking a lot longer than I’d expected.
That seemed to be the worst idea so far. That would only bring up more questions, more doubt. After all the effort and pain she’d already put into herself; shaving her mane, slicing and stitching, grinding and carving herself like a sculpture, she couldn’t just give up and come clean at feet. She’d had to leave something for last, and feet, being so low on her body, seemed the obvious choice. She’d turned hooves into hands without having hands to do it with, so there was no reason she could think of to tell him the truth simply because of feet. That would be giving up, she thought, and I’ve come this far, and so she turned to him in bed and whispered, “You’ll have your feet soon honey, I promise” and kissed him on the forehead, where his horn should have been.
“I have to finish them soon” she thought, “feet or no feet, I have to show him something.” She remembered how easy life had been before, as a unicorn, when hiding was second nature. She missed the time when she could just as easily hide in the brush or in fountains when she spotted men who’d lost their way, she missed myth and anonymity, but hiding was all in the past. Then, she’d had legs galore, and she could run or jump or make love barehooved and nobody asked her for feet. Now she just answered questions, over coffee, over soup, watching TV, and buying clothes. The pendant? A gift from an old boyfriend. How many old boyfriends? She didn’t remember. Why didn’t she remember? Drugs. What drugs? Feet drugs. That sounded good, drugs that make you grow feet.
In the morning, he made coffee, and asked “Feet today?”
“Just wait, I’m not ready. I need a little time and then I promise, I’ll take off my shoes.”
“And your socks?”
“We’re not there yet.”
Which was true, she thought, sipping at her coffee and watching his reaction from over the mug. She’d stenciled an outline of some feet she’d seen in ads for shoe sales and discounted pedicures and medicated anti-fungal creams. Even that had taken almost a week. Now, if she kept sanding and chiseling at least three hours a night while he slept, she’d at best have a prototype, no detail, just form. Form was something he could feel under socks if she let him, but soon she’d need a finished product, buffed and polished, with toenails.
“Give me some time before I take off my socks,” she requested.
“Why not,” he replied smugly, “we have all the time in the world.”
She knew he’d already spent a lot of time considering what she must’ve been like before him. He must’ve thought that lovers before him had gotten to see feet, but that they’d been careless, stepping on toes or playing footsy to hard. He always wanted to know because there were always questions she wouldn’t answer, so he asked them, and he kept asking until she was blue in the face, and then he asked why she was so pale all the time.
“I can’t help it, I have light skin,” she told him. She’d wanted to say “purity,” she’d wanted to hold his mouth shut and pull his ears open and yell “It’s because I’m very, very pure!” She’d wanted to tell him to look beyond the blonde hair and fair complexion, that she was white everywhere someone could be white, places he couldn’t see, just touch, and feel white. She wanted him to feel her deep inside, with more care and consideration than the rushed pace of foreplay he was used to. That just once he could sink his fingertips inside her and press into bleached curves, milky smooth curves he’d never taken the time to notice. She’d wanted to slide his fingers down her ivory body and ask him the questions. What’s wrong with white? What have you ever given up? And what did you think unicorns would look like?
She’d tried that once, but his hands had gotten lost around her chest and he’d never made it down far down enough to check anything out for himself. For a moment there had been a lovely silence, as if he’d had some profound realization that she’d been waiting for him to have, but he’d ruined all that with more talking and he made love to her on the floor while he asked her about politics. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” he told her afterwards as he lay beside her, fondling her ankles with his toes, “I’m going to find out what it is.”
He probably would, she thought. All the work she’d done for him, and only a couple of warped hooves to show for it. She figured she’d stay up all night for nights on end, making perfect feet for his enjoyment, and then when he asked her for feet the next morning, she’d shove her two little stumps in his face and say “See!” She wanted tell him how every question, lectures, talk and discussion dove into her body through her ears and lodged itself deep inside her brain and now she was so filled up with words that new ones couldn’t find a way in. She wanted to tell him how she was so filled up with his words that she had to stop making her own words and that every time a new one got stuffed up inside her, something else would have to come out.
It started by coming out of her head. She only noticed it after he asked her about it.
“Are you alright?” He asked, and he knew that she wasn’t because the spot on her forehead, larger than a pimple, softer than a scab, had started to loosen up and break apart from the edges. As the days went on it only opened up more, and the more it opened up, the more it itched. She knew she shouldn’t scratch it because it might spread like a rash, but it itched so badly that only scratching made it stop. She decided scratching might even help whatever it was along, so she pressed down into her forehead, piercing through the waxy veneer and squashing deep down into muscle, layers of jelly flesh blanketing her finger as it slipped in. She stirred the pulp with her fingernail, scratching and stirring and finding nothing. Then, she moved a millimeter or so in towards the center, making little concentric circles.
“Gross,” she whispered to herself with her finger still stuck in her forehead, “absolutely gross.”
Sharper than a migraine, the pain in her head was alive, pumping and twisting, searching for a way out before deciding that the best route was straight through the skull. She went to the hospital where the doctor told her it was “menopause.” She considered the word “menopause,” and how peaceful it sounded and then she imagined hormones trying to escape through her body, bubbling up into wrinkles or leaking through pores during hot flashes. “It isn’t menopause,” she told him, but signed the hospital bill anyway.
When she arrived home he was full of questions.
“Where were you?”
“The hospital.”
“What for?”
“My head.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“To get some rest, and it’d go away.”
“Did you get a second opinion?”
She didn’t need one. She knew what it was, her horn growing back, forced out from inside where she’d become too clogged for anything else to stay inside. She could feel it deep down inside her, she could almost get her fingers in far enough to touch it, to push it back inside her and make it stay there. She lay down on the bed with a fistful of aspirin and thought of when Pinnochio first realized his nose was growing and why he didn’t do something about it.
He crouched down next to her and asked if there was anything he could do and she said “No.” He asked if he could feel her forehead to see if she was warm and she said “Absolutely no.” He asked if she wanted him to leave her alone and she felt guilty because he was only trying to help, so she said “No,” then he asked if she still loved him and she said “Of course, why would you even ask that?” He asked her if she’d feel better if she took her shoes off and she said “Probably,” and he went to untie them and she said “No.” He asked her what was really going on and she said “I’m a unicorn.” He laughed and asked “What?” and she said “I’ll explain it later.” He asked what was coming out of her forehead and she said “A horn,” and she stood up to look in the mirror.
The long slice of spirally ivory continued to stab its way out of her head, fast and faster, until it was nearly a foot and half, about the same length as when she’d first cut it off.
He saw the shimmering coat rise out of her skin and he asked what was happening to her body and she said “Hair.” She watched a gleaming white mane make its way out of her scalp and poured out down to her hips, and he asked her to make it stop and she said “I can’t.” And her tail popped out and slung to the ground.
She toppled and asked him to catch her, but he stood, paralyzed, his eyes wide in disbelief as steel-colored bone wrapped around her hands, and she fell forward on them. She felt an overpowering release as she opened her mouth and seemed to free everything inside her with one giant sigh. The only thing left inside were wants and regrets. She was sad to see her human body escape in a breath of air, and wanted to go back and spend a last moment holding him in a parallel form. She was sad to have made such a mess during her transformation, and wanted him to at least try and see if there wasn’t a unicorn somewhere inside him. Most of all, she wanted him to realize what it had been like for her, that she hadn’t wanted it this way, but those questions jamming into her and cramming their way inside, what had he expected? In an instant she was filled with the urge to ram her horn into him and show him what it had felt like to be her. Just this one time, just this one horn, she thought. She wanted him to feel that horn like she had, shoved inside, still and unmoving, stuck where he didn’t want it to be. She held herself back with all her might. “Why? ” he asked softly as he traced her new body with his eyes, and she could barely hold her tears inside her as she galloped out the doorway.
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