Showing posts with label bad fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad fiction. Show all posts
You don't know what to do with her.
This was three days ago. She stood atop the toilet, shaking her hips in a little victory dance, celebrating her hard-won dominance over he ergonomic shower head that refused not to leak. The way you watched must have been amusing (you should really polish that poker face), because she halted the shimmy in favor of throwing her hands above her head. You broke from examining the finer details of her little cotton underwear to see where the hands went. Upward: navel, breasts, collarbone, neck, jaw, lips -- pursed in a coy half-smile, nose, sleepy coffee eyes, dagger eyeliner like a giallo actress, thick eyebrows plucked into submission that's really more a blend of containment and appeasement, equally full hair that she won't wash when she goes on tour ("for good luck"), little gold bracelets, wrists, fingers calloused from a decade of pulling at a bass guitar and a cello before that, all in a ball except for the middle ones. Not a bad way to get flipped-off. It made you smile back.
"Not before tour," she reminds you. You should tell her next time that its only a myth for boxers so it definitely doesn't apply to mid-level rockstars. Nevertheless, you comply.
The chivalrous thing to do is help her down, so you wrap your arms around her -- one at the waist, one mid-thigh, and gently raise her, being careful not to bump her head like last time ("Fuck! No, I'm fine."). She's lighter than expected, so you let one arm dangle. Now it's just you and her waist and that little cotton barrier that's riding up a little courtesy of your forearm, exposing a patch of warm, soft skin you imagine a thousand ways to touch. The kiss is imminent, but doesn't happen -- things lead to each other and it's better this way. Restraint. Your strength holds all the way to the couch, none of that damn shiver from straining a muscle group too hard, and you could even navigate the narrow hallway and its vinyl land-mines without breaking eye contact. It feels good, like you did something manly, like you're as strong as you should have been all along.
You sink into the couch and press play and Audrey Hepburn says something about being the "world's champion blind lady" and you wonder what Charlene would look like with Audrey's haircut. It's a little high in the back. Brings out her ears though. She's in your lap. The hairs on the back of her neck bristle, and you lean in to kiss her goosebumps away.
It's not as telling as you'd think.
Between us and Them.It starts with a flicker of emotion, a spark doused with the treacherous solace of good Mexican beer. It takes but a sip to rewind the embers into a profound blaze of doubt and meticulous scrutiny of faults at once both invisible yet achingly overt.
You may feel like there’s a joke going around. Smiling peach faces and round cream bottoms always out of grasp, taunting in their appropriate imperfection. They’ve got the punch line under wraps and it’ll take more than Markovik to charm those lips open.
Tragically, you will soon come to terms with the reality. You will never be a part of that circle, for you were destined to remain outside, looking in through the coffee shop window. You will never understand what makes them so special, or their shitty music so appealing. You don’t have the stage presence for it.
Give up. You’ll be happier that way.Dedicated to bad music.It ends with a question. "How could you hate someone so adorable?" You'd like to tell her that it's easy. All you'd need was love.He performed under the name Sheepskin Bogonis, his persona a ragged beard and matching, scraggly voice oscillating between nervous melody and Muppetish growl. Grover crying over a chai latte while masturbating into his copy of Gravity's Rainbow.Occasionally the veneer breaks (or maybe it just continues, who am I to tell?). He lets out a woman's giggle and adjusts his carefully unwashed bob. He tosses out self-deprecation like candy or Amyl.With music like that, songs written in the posthumous honor of a grandmother, he's sure to get plenty of adoring "ooh's" and "ahh's," not so dissimilar from a family reacting to a vomiting newborn. At most one of his fellow suburbanites will bed him out of a fiendish blend of pity and painful boredom. She won't think anything of it. He's as threatening as a kitten.
Unlike my previous adventure, this is more of a collaborative effort than a column. Share with us your bad fiction. Good stories, shitty stories, journal entries you're almost too embarassed to call your own. We'll keep it between us, a secret among friends. If anyone laughs, fuck em! We won't laugh.
We love it.
I'll start:
Circles and SquaresIn certain circles you can bend the rules of courtesy, good stewardship, even hygiene. Never fidelity. There’s only one way to skin a puss, and it doesn’t involve strange shears. Squares hate this sort of thing, this nonsense telling you where to focus your eyes and how to gird (maybe guard?) your loins against the outdoors. The outdoors is wild. (Squares hate the wild, you see.) The wild is dangerous. Danger is an aphrodisiac. Before you know it you’ll have her facedown into the pillows, drilling away at warm, wet shame. Good shame is always wet. Cicero knew this: it’s why he always washed his shirts before coming home. He knew his wife would smell the perfume, the delicate aroma of a good, long lunch. Thank God it doesn’t smell like pastrami. That would kill the whole damn event.
"AH, FUCK!"
"It’s natural."
"LIKE SHIT!"
Then you’d walk out and cream yourself out of pure frustrated agony. This all happened, to Cicero, of course (he never lived it down). Can’t skin a puss that feral.
Now friends, it's your turn. Send it in to myself (matthew.hayes.iii@gmail.com), Darryl (daratcliff@gmail.com), or Cody (coelder@gmail.com). If you send the file as an attachment, please format it as a Word document (.doc), and include your name in the file name, as well as the subject of the email. Do not just put "Bad" or "Fiction," as we want to be perfectly sure who to credit the piece to.
With love,
Matt
