by Moxie Mezcal
When we had finally worn each other out, I collapsed beside her, my muscles burning with exhaustion, my skin hot and sticky and grimy with sweat. She was still cuffed to the headboard, turned over on her belly with her back to me.
I slid in close, pressing my flesh firmly against hers, fitting our bodies together like puzzle pieces and gently draping my arms around her.
“I guess you’re wanting me to stick around,” she said while rattling the handcuffs.
I didn’t reply, but instead leaned in to plant a series of gentle kisses along the back of her neck. Then I slowly dragged my fingers down her back, gingerly tracing the soft curve of her spine. She shuddered, goosebumps appearing on her pallid skin.
I ran my fingers back up, jumping my index and middle fingers alternately from one butterfly tattoo to another, like frogs hopping across lily pads.
Each of the butterflies was unique in its pose and size, but their wings were all the same colors - vibrant yellow with thick black veins and orange tips.
“They’re Common Jezebels,” she said.
“What? The butterflies?”
“Yes.”
I snorted.
“Really, that’s what they’re called,” she insisted. “Common Jezebels, delias eucharis ”
“Eucharist?”
“ Eucharis . No t .” She shifted her around uncomfortably, trying to keep the blood flowing despite her awkward position. “I suppose it’s the same general principal, though. Chrysalis. Transubstantiation. Transformation. Turning something common or ugly into something beautiful.”
“Is that why you got them?” I asked. “Because you think of yourself as ugly? Because you think they will make you beautiful?”
She clicked a safety release on the handcuffs, sat up, rubbed her raw wrists through the gloves, and then left.
——
Sarah came home a few days later. There were no apologies from either side, no real acknowledgment that there had even been a fight. I just came home one day and she was there, just as she’d always been before, just as I assumed she always would be.
To an outside observer, it might have looked like things settled back to normal. There was something different though, something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on at first. Then it dawned on me - we weren’t fighting anymore. And since we weren’t fighting, in effect we weren’t speaking at all. It started feeling like we were two lodgers who happened to live in the same house, only marginally aware of the other’s existence, taking pains not to bump into each other too much.
The more detached Sarah became, the more intense things got with Vanessa. The handcuffs had just been the tip of the iceberg. Soon there were candles, whips, gags, toys, costumes. And it wasn’t just the props; the sex itself was getting rougher, darker. I’d be sore for days after encounters, and every time I caught sight of myself in the mirror after showering, I’d discover some new set of bruises, bite marks, or scratches.
One day I walked into the motel room to find her dressed like the pop star from one of her early videos, wearing a long platinum blonde wig, a zebra print dress, and a blue lightning bolt painted under her eye. The only thing that didn’t quite fit, of course, were her gloves.
As she led me to the bed, she quietly sang a lyric from the song. I couldn’t help but let out a chuckle.
“Why do you laugh?” she asked. “This is really what this is all about, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” I replied, perhaps a bit more defensively than I’d like to admit.
“Please,” she intoned reproachfully. “Are you really going to pretend that you’ve never fantasized about fucking her?”
She pushed me down to sit on the edge of the bed, then dropped to her knees between my legs. Casting a quick glance over her shoulder at the video looping on the TV, she added, “I bet you’ve jacked off to this before. There’s something subliminally erotic about it, isn’t there? That’s part of the appeal. The way she wraps her lips around that gun, like sucking a cock.”
She unzipped my pants and took me into her mouth, and it hardly took any time for me to come. I gripped her head and pulled down, my fingers tugging the blonde wig slightly askew as my body twitched uncontrollably and I felt myself getting ready to explode.
Bam!
Twenty-three seconds.
She pulled her hair back and wiped her lips with the back of her gloved hand. “Careful, tiger,” she purred as she fixed the wig. “Wouldn’t want to ruin the illusion.”
“It is a good costume,” I conceded. “But something doesn’t quite fit.”
I reached out and grabbed her arm, then started sliding off the glove. She didn’t protest, but just glowered at me darkly. I took the other one off, too, and then looked down at her bare forearms and the intricate webbing of jagged red scars carved into them.
“Isn’t the goth cutter chick a bit of a cliché?”
“Fuck you,” she spat and stood to leave.
Once again, I gripped her arm. She hesitated, turned to look at me, and smiled.
Suddenly we were back on the bed, ensnared in each other. I tugged my pants the rest of the way down and started hiking up her dress, but then suddenly paused, startled by what I found.
Strapped to her right thigh was a holster with a snubnosed .38.
She laughed in mischievous delight, savoring the expression on my face. Then she pulled out the revolver and traced it seductively across her chest.
“What’s the matter, don’t you find girls with guns sexy?”
I pulled back slightly like I was going to get off of her, and she quickly lifted the revolver and pressed its muzzle into my chest.
“That thing better not be loaded.”
She shrugged her shoulders, then with a giggle, cocked the hammer.
I held my breath.
She pulled the trigger.
Bam!
Behind me, the pop star’s brains exploded out of the back of her head.
Twenty-three seconds.
I quickly got up and left, ignoring her mischievous cackling as it followed me to the door.
I went back to work that afternoon unable to shake the feeling that we’d turned a corner somehow, that whatever was going on between us had just become a lot darker and decidedly unhealthy. Or perhaps it always had been, but now we were past the point where I couldn’t continue denying it to myself. Either way, I had an ominous feeling that things were about to start falling apart.
Luckily I didn’t have anything to do that afternoon that required much focus. The rest of the day was dominated by a marketing strategy meeting, and I spent most of the time picturing everyone else at the conference table taking out guns and blowing their brains out, one after another in a neat little circle, like dominoes.
Two days later, though, the knot I’d felt twisting in my stomach turned out to be unsettlingly prescient.
As I came into the house, I could hear Sarah’s voice coming from the room that had once been - but was still not quite restored as - our family room. Normally I’d have assumed she was talking to the contractors, but her voice was different - cheerier, more animated. I wandered in that direction, intending to just poke my head in while looking as aimless as possible, when a second woman’s voice joined in.
When I rounded the corner and saw the two of them together, my blood chilled.
Sarah and Vanessa sat on the floor, a notepad and an array of bridal magazines spread out on the coffee table between them. Sarah was wearing a long-sleeved v-neck and a pair of jeans, while Vanessa wore a tank top and a sari over a pair of jeans and a huge fucking rock sparkling on her left ring finger. Both of them beamed at me with diabolical glee.
I choked out some weak, perfunctory congratulations, then nodded politely and pretended to give a shit while they filled me in on their preliminary plans for the big day. As much as I tried not to, my eyes kept returning to Vanessa’s ring and from there drifted up to her bare, unblemished forearm. I looked away quickly, and Sarah’s gaze
caught mine. She broke our eye contact after only a few seconds, turning away and tugging absently on the cuffs of her sleeves, making sure they stayed pulled down all the way.
The next afternoon I was sprawled naked on another motel bed. She was earnestly tugging on my flaccid cock to no avail. I sighed loudly, starting to get a crick in my neck, and turned away from her.
“What’s wrong?” she said with the challenging tone of someone spoiling for a fight.
I didn’t answer.
“Is this about the wedding?”
Silence.
“What? So now you’re just gonna mope around because this delicate little fantasy you’ve dreamed up is starting to crack?”
“No,” I finally replied, then stood up. “It’s just, how can she… you be marrying Alex? I mean, how can you love him if you’re fucking me?”
She paused and, for the briefest of moments, looked hurt, like I’d just slapped her. “Well you’re fucking me, right? Does that mean you don’t love your wife?”
I got dressed in silence, keeping my back to her so as not to see the searing look of righteous indignation I could feel making the skin crawl on the back of my neck.
I had finished and already started for the door when she got her last word.
“Anyway, it’s only a matter of time before you get tired of me, too,” she said accusingly, each word ringing loudly like a slug exploding out of a chamber. “After all, you got bored with Sarah pretty fast.”
——
I didn’t see her for several weeks after that.
Actually, that’s not strictly true; in a way, of course I saw her all the time. Sarah put the remodeling on indefinite hiatus and left the house frozen in mid-metamorphosis in order to help with the wedding preparations, and Vanessa started coming around daily. But I only ever saw the two of them in passing while I drifted through the house like a phantom and the girls would just keep chattering on, willfully oblivious to my presence.
There were no more notes, no more motel rooms.
To add insult to injury, the more time the two girls spent together, the more frequently my path inevitably crossed Alex’s.
Every once in a while he strong-armed me into going out for beers, always insisting on paying, just to rub his money in my face. Mercifully, he didn’t talk much; we’d usually just kick back in the bar and watch the Giants.
One night, though, I could tell he had something on his mind. He kept trying awkwardly to make small talk, taking tentative stabs at various conversation-starters in the distinctive manner of a typical closed-off alpha-male who has something serious to talk about but is absolutely fucking terrified of talking about anything serious, ever .
“So how’s my sister been?” he ventured, desperately keeping his gaze averted from me and busying himself with methodically peeling the label off his bottle of Anchor Steam.
“She’s fine,” I replied, resolving to make this as difficult as possible for him in hopes that he’d just give up.
“She’s been looking pretty rough around the edges, lately,” he continued. “Is everything alright between you?”
“She’s fine,” I repeated. Then, after a couple nervous sips at my beer, I added, “She’s just been going nuts over the house - the remodeling. She does one room, changes her mind, has it ripped apart, tries again, changes her mind again, rips it apart and then moves onto something else. It’s like we’re living in a perpetual construction site. It’s impossible to live like that, not to mention the strain its putting on our budget.”
He nodded sympathetically. “Yeah, just don’t be too hard on her. It’s different for chicks than it is for us. We’re raised to go out hunting and exploring. They’re raised to create homes. I mean, look at the toys we played with as kids. They had doll houses and Easy-Bake Ovens and dreamed of being princesses living in castles, while we had guns and swords and dreamed of traveling to galaxies far, far away in search of action and adventure.” He paused, then added pointedly, “That’s why we cheat so much, you know.”
I sucked on my teeth dismissively. “That doesn’t sound very enlightened of you. You should’ve seen some of the girls I grew up with; they could play cowboys and Storm Troopers with the best of them.”
“I’m not saying it’s right,” he countered. “I’m not even saying it’s natural. I’m sure it has as much to do with conditioning as biology. It just is what it is.”
I shrugged. “Okay, whatever, so what’s the fucking point?”
He slumped in his seat, having finally succeeded at completely removing his beer bottle label and staring at it perplexedly, as if thinking, Now what am I supposed to do with this?
“I’m just worried about my sister, is all. You know how she gets. I know how she gets. When we were teenagers, she went through a couple really bad patches. She stopped eating, stopped talking to people, started withdrawing into her own little world, staying locked up in her room like wrapping herself up in a cocoon. That’s when she started with the therapy and taking her pills. Those were pretty tough times, there were a few scares - well, I don’t have to explain it all to you, you’ve heard the stories. Anyways, the point is just that my sister is a wonderful girl, very special, but in a lot of ways she’s also very fragile. I just hope you’re being careful with her.”
——
She came to see me one last time.
On the last night, it started with a bad dream that woke me up at around 2 am. I wandered out to the kitchen for a glass of water and found her waiting in the living room. It was dark and empty and covered in plastic, lit only by the moonlight through the large curtain-less window. She stood in the center of the room, nude and wrapped loosely in one of the clear plastic tarps. The pale blue moonlight imbued the tarp with an ethereal glow, like a fiber optic cocoon.
I walked up to her and began to slowly unwrap her. She bit her lower lip playfully while spinning around, letting the plastic shed off her. When she was finally completely bare, I noticed with surprise how much weight she had lost over the past few weeks. Her body looked spindly and frail. I also saw that her arms had fresh scars carved into them, a few of which were still wet.
Then I saw something in her hands, something that shined as it caught the moonlight. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized it was the Flip.
Within seconds we were on the floor, our bodies writhing together passionately atop the crinkly plastic. She held the camera up to film us kissing as I ran my fingers through her long raven locks and tugged hard.
“Careful, tiger,” she giggled playfully as she reached up and straightened out her dark hair. “Wouldn’t want to ruin the illusion.”
That night was different than the other times. We savored the topography of each other’s bodies like we were exploring undiscovered land. It reminded me of how it had been with Sarah when we first started dating - exciting and urgent and new. There was the sensation of melting into another person, melding your flesh, moving as one.
I fell asleep after we finished, and when I opened my eyes, it was Sarah I saw sitting in the far corner, naked with her back against the wall and her knees bent up to hold her legs close against her body. She was clutching something shiny in her right hand. At first I thought it was the camera, but then I realized I was holding that.
I raised the camera out in front of me until I could see her framed within the screen. She was mostly hidden in shadow, but the glossy red lacerations that crisscrossed her forearms stood out vibrantly in the moonlight.
I started recording.
Zero seconds.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I really meant it, but it seemed like the thing I was supposed to say, like lines in a script.
She flashed me a smile like the Mona Lisa’s, full of reproach and indulgence. It was the kind of smile a mother would have for her disingenuously-penitent child, the kind that said, Who are you trying to fool?
Nine seconds.
“You don’t have to be,” Sarah said. “You wanted t
o fuck someone else, and I wanted to be someone else. It made sense at first, but now I realize it’ll never work. Because no matter who I become, you’re always gonna want to fuck someone else, and I’ll always want to be someone else.”
I felt like I should defend myself somehow. But for once, mercifully, I had the good sense to keep my fucking mouth shut.
Seventeen seconds.
“In a funny way, it’s comforting,” she said, “to know that no matter what else happens in the rest of your life, at least I’ll always be your first. Your number one.”
Twenty-three seconds.
She lifted the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.
About These Stories
Two of these stories were written for the zizekpress.com blog, which consists largely of absurdist satire about celebrities and pop culture. The third was intended for an unrelated anthology project that fell apart, and while it is much darker and more personal in tone, it nonetheless shares a number of thematic elements with the other pieces.
This should go without saying, but any celebrities appearing, mentioned, or even hinted at in these stories are depicted for purposes of parody and are in no way intended to represent anything even remotely resembling actual reality. No endorsements are implied or intended. Similarly, the lyrics and dialog attributed to Lady Gaga in Gagapocalypse are mostly actual quotes that have been excerpted and re-contexted for satirical purposes as fair use.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
Moxie Mezcal
June 2011
San Jose, California
MoxieMezcal.com
About Zizek Press
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