After you leave me I clean out the fridge and think about someone else to fuck. Old collapsing peppers, a carton of mold, an order of szechuan beef that tasted of heat and sugar. Someone's out there, someone on whom I can unleash the tired months, the framed Klimt poster, the little midden of shoes in the hallway. The poster is gone. The cheese is pumpkin orange and the texture of paraffin. I pinch off a crumbled little corner and run it over my tongue.
After you leave me I move through the apartment, plucking out everything that marked our life together, photos and jewellery and bus tickets and the expired passport that took you to Europe and back. I put everything in a banker's box, except for a stray pair of dust-covered heels pinned against the back wall of the closet by a broken fax machine. I put those in an actual shoe box. The fax machine I throw into the dumpster. I stand at the dumpster and stare at the anonymous lumps and angles inside the bags other people have thrown in. The fax machine looks out of place on that bed of taut biodegradable plastic, and I wonder who I'll fuck next, when that will happen, whether we'll be in my bed or hers when it happens, or a car, or a hotel. Wherever it is people are fucking these days.
After you leave me I wonder who'll be next, the woman I find and fuck for days until I tell her that I love her, just as the silent moments begin to corrode the stretched surface of sex. She'll stay, bound by the shock and power of the word, until she understands my love more clearly. After you leave I wonder whether you'll be back, and I return the items in the box to their original places throughout the apartment. They wait for you. I drop off the shoes at a thrift store on my way to work.
I always suspected it was like this.
Posted by: Susan (Trout Towers) | Monday, August 30, 2010 at 09:13 PM
I never got rid of the shoes. I think therein lies some of my problems.
Also? Hell yes. This is perfect.
Posted by: foradifferentkindofgirl (fadkog) | Monday, August 30, 2010 at 09:30 PM
Yeah.
This is poetry -- regret, fax, chinese food.
Perfect.
I want to climb in and bathe. Or dive into the box high up in my closet that holds the old letters.
This is the piece I meant to write -- damn you. Love you.
Posted by: ms picket to you | Monday, August 30, 2010 at 09:55 PM
This is, obviously, a finely-wrought slice of bitterness and determination and the inability to relinquish hope... but it's your deadpan "Wherever it is people are fucking these days" that had me cackling inappropriately in front of my children this morning.
All hail the Palinode.
Posted by: TwoBusy | Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 04:36 AM
Rotten cheese. Yum . . .
Great writing. I would have enjoyed the scene in front of the closet more if you'd stretched it out a bit . . . Let it linger and percolate . . .
But that's just me . . .
Posted by: Tysdaddy | Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 04:59 AM
Fucking really does make the world go round, doesn't it?
God, we're such animals. Not that I'm complaining.
This is gorgeous.
Posted by: sweetsalty kate | Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 05:45 AM
I stand at the dumpster and stare at the anonymous lumps and angles inside the bags other people have thrown in.
Hello, there is riotous applause in my head for that line.
The whole piece, really, but extra helpings for that line.
Posted by: Jett | Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 07:38 AM
Absolutely outstanding.
This line?
She'll stay, bound by the shock and power of the word, until she understands my love more clearly.
This line is haunting.
Posted by: Skye | Thursday, September 02, 2010 at 01:46 PM
I laughed aloud at the first line. I felt sorry for the narrator by the last two sentences. That how it is in so many of our relationships, is it not?
Posted by: Kevin (Always Home and Uncool) | Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 01:34 PM
The Cat's Pajamas - same premise, same masterful artwork - charms me completely. Do his animal characters possess a smidge more expression? Are the compositions a titch less crowded? Are the idioms illustrated just a hair more commonplace? I don't know. I think so. What a treat. On a page captioned, "Wade had never driven a submarine before, so he couldn't wait to get his feet wet," a frog drives a Buck Rogers-y striped minisub past colorful reef fasdfish and a skeptical-looking octopus. The submarine has holes for Wade's legs, so his feet, indeed, are wet. As Camilla the Camel waits for the Oasis Express, she "cools her heels," with each foot plunged into a luscious ice cream cone, a blissed-out expression on her face.
Posted by: cheap jordan shoes 8 | Friday, May 20, 2011 at 01:04 AM
cheap north face through life just happy, discount north face boring is reading, north face denali reading makes a rich, denali northface experience is wide, the paper also is very good northface kids.
http://www.northfacehonsale.org/Posted by: northface | Friday, January 13, 2012 at 12:53 AM