Before Stephanie ate me, she asked
a simple question.
“Are you an animal?”
“No, human,” I replied, fingering
the duct tape tying my wrists together.
“I love evolution,” she said as she
cracked my head with a crowbar.
Relationships are difficult. One
holds the remote, one accepts whatever is on; one plays the first third of ‘Reign
in Blood’ at volume 8 on the dial to show off one’s new distortion pedal, one
wears earplugs throughout the house; one dry humps the other while the other is
asleep, one pretends to be asleep. Life happens: babies come out bald, blinded
by the cold indoor light of dozen fluorescent tubes. Sometimes these babies die
from malnourishment, a gray corpse that looks like a plucked bird with a too
large head. I tried to get Stephanie to feed it milk, but she refused, saying
that she was trying to establish ethics and morality early on. At the funeral,
I met Stella.
There’s a certain calmness that
comes after extreme violence. It’s like the devil gets light headed and sits
down. I remember lying face down in a pool of my own blood, part of my scalp
next to my nose. Maybe I was unconscious, and this was a dream. Or maybe I died
and this is the afterlife. All I know is Stephanie ate my left ass.
When a man limps around, everyone
thinks he has injured a leg or a foot. No one ever thinks it’s the ass. I limp
to the car and drive straight to Stella’s after work. There she tends to the
gauze and applies antibiotic ointment. The doctors say I am very lucky:
Stephanie stopped an inch from the bone.
Stella fingers the gauze gently. “What
a bitch,” she says.
“Exactly.”
*
When Stella announced she had
become vegetarian, I swallowed the hard lump in my throat. It was a couple of
days short of our first anniversary. I knew something was off; she started
closing the bathroom door while she flossed. It’s odd how a woman’s heart when
cold can burn. We tip-toed around each other’s feelings at dinner—she
with the roasted squash medley, me with the steak and beer. Slowly, surely, she
became less and less impressed with my Slayer riffs. She got skinnier, I got
fatter. When she turned vegan, cracked the other half of my scalp and ate my
right ass, I began to suspect maybe it was my personality.
Of course, neither Stephanie nor
Stella cracked my head open or ate my ass. It just felt that way. They simply
left, leaving the same lone key on the kitchen table.
It’s been lonely around here. The
apartment is covered in Cheetos, used tissues, and socks orphaned from their
partners. I watch reruns late into the night, trying to go backwards in time.
Men may be born to be alone, but they definitely are not born to live alone. In
bed I can feel mold in my lungs blossoming into a black bouquet.
*
I took a small road trip up north.
When you’re lost, sometimes a dot on a map helps. I stayed in a Motel 6,
flipping through the phonebook for an escort service. I fantasized about the
housekeeping lady, her soft hands on my sheets. The escort arrived fat and ugly
and I buried my face in her folds.
Driving back I passed cows grazing
near the fence, as if freedom was only in the head. They chewed and chewed, so
bovine and stupid. There’s nothing moral about it. God wants us to eat these
bastards. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a dickhead in my car. I
pulled off the side of the road and began taunting one of the cows.
“Moo,” I said. “Moo you asshole.”
The cow just looked at me. I got in
close and saw my reflection in its eyes. There were two of me. An old oak tree
in the distance claimed the century before me, silent. The long grass bent in
the occasional breeze. Some passing cars honked. One driver yelled ‘fag.’
That cow will not understand its
death like I don’t understand my life. Everything has a way of balancing out in
the end.
“Moo you asshole,” I repeat.
It licked my face, without
judgment, and I began to bawl.