Tired

"I am too tired to move", she said, but his lips were already working their way in between her breasts. "Burrowing", she thought, "like those beavers in Chronicles of Narnia", and she wasn't quite sure why she thought of the reference. "I don't love you", she said. He shrugged. "What makes you think I love you?". The only answer was the night's silence. She could see the stars hanging, frozen, off of the blue bed of a night sky. "I wish I were like the stars", she thought, "nestled in sheets that hugged my body", but of course, who needed sheets when you had a man's body? "Men make the best blankets", she said later, when they were both in bed. He nodded sleepily, and she felt grateful for his weight beside her.

And this is the point where the high of insomnia turns into sheer tiredness, like ripped lace, or something, in this giant book of metaphors I seem to have forgotten, in this longing for sleep the way virgins long for sex, and all I am thinking of now is the first chapter of kings, where david gets a young virgin to warm his aging body.

What did she think when she shared his bed? What did he think when he felt her beside him, and no longer felt the familiar rising between the legs? I want to hug him then, to let him cry, to put his cheek to my breasts and whisper that it will be ok, that he is king, that he is a man, because to be a man is to be more than king, because what could be more beautiful than to conquer the land of a woman's body?

Right now my land remains unoccupied - waiting for a new tenant, I suppose, or maybe an owner, even - baal. A word that means husband, owner, man, and god. In ancient near eastern society, were they not the same?

Enough with the feminist critique. It rattles my ears, like pearls left out in a cardboard box, being shaken by a young boy who does not understand their worth, but a woman'sn worth is beyond pearls, even - or maybe beyond rubies.

Who can tell? I wear neither to bed - only a strip of lace, and a blanket of tiredness to cover this body, these legs that have walked today, these hands that have held hands and this mouth that has smiled, these fingers that have typed these words, only to slowly disentangle from the keyboard like an abandoning lover before morning.

For the Sake of Full Disclosure

I did once discuss Georgia O'Keefee's armpit hair with a romantic partner when the two of us were in a cab on the way to the opera. In case you are wondering, our relationship survived the experience.

Disclaimer

I really resent it when people assume fiction is autobiography - yet, because I am a girl who enjoys sniffing (legal) things, and likes Georgia O'Keeffe, as well as a college graduate who has been mistaken for a lesbian and is in fact a feminist, I feel it necessary to post a disclaimer that the story from the previous post is fiction, not autobiography. I know I should not give in to the people who assume these things, but at the end of the day the thought of someone thinking that's a scene from my life, when its not, bothers me. Then again, a writer shouldn't really cares whether or not people think she's crazy, becaue it can discourage her from taking risks.

Sabotage (A College Romance)

"You have gorilla pits", he teased. She laughed. "I told you I was a lesbian." "Actually, you told me you were a feminist. I told you you were a lesbian", he said, reaching for her bra. "You are aware that lesbians don't take their bras off for men?" she asked, resisting. "Actually, I thought lesbians don't wear bras", he replied, undoing the clasp. " "Did you know there are these nude pictures of Georgia O'Keeffe, by Steiglitz, where she has armpit hair?" she asked. She could feel his lips on her nipple. "Would you fuck her?" He stopped, disentangled. "What? Who?" "Georgia O'Keeffe" "I'm not a necro", he said. "Good. Just checking", she teased, a smile playing in the corners of her mouth. She waited for him to resume, but he just stood there, still crouching slightly. "Get up" she said, in what she hoped was a sexy voice. He got up, and she kissed him, her left palm leaning on the rim of a sink that smelled of flowers and pubic hair.

The next morning, he would catch her sniffing the sheets when he went to brush his teeth. "I always wanted to know the smell of man-sweat on linen", she said. "You're crazy", he replied, but she knew from his laughter that he found it charming. She could not know that their breakup would smell of tears and strawberries.

Night Time

Your hands were bigger than the moon when they circled my thighs,
and my skin was soft in the light that spread over freshly laundered sheets
the color of butter and moonlight.

Like the tide, I drifted in and out of your shore.

The sand has dried up and the moon has fallen.

You have left me stranded, here on this island of metaphors,
as if words could encompass the pain that has fallen between us
like silence.

No Woman No Cry/Nao Chore Mais

A Short Preface: The Title is based on the Bob Marley/Gilberto Gil songs - the Gil song is a remake of the Marley song. Since some of you know a bit about my life, I feel it necessary to say that while this is very loosely based on my life, it is fiction, and in no way resembles my life closely enough to be called autobiographical. Also, for the record, I take the privacy of my relationships very seriously, despite my blogging habit. I wrote this to practice writing a short story that actually followed some kind of plot, since that is one of my greatest challenges as a writer. So its very much a work in progress that I might use as material to turn into something else later on.
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"What does it matter? We are dead to you", she said, turning away with a flash of her hair. In her hand, she held a remote control that was poised like a projectile missile, ready to attack the first who dared to approach her thinning body.
"This is real life Mom. Not some kind of telenovella." The voice was flat, like underbaked bread.
"Where do you think they get telenovellas from? Real life! This is real life!"
She laughed. "This is your life, not mine."
"And what is yours then?"
"Well, let's see...I think right now I'm going to take my bag and go fuck my Arab boyfriend. Then I'm going to go to a bar and get wasted, maybe a little high. You like it when I fuck Arabs mom, don't you?"
The remote missed its mark. She laughed. "You should be careful about throwing things. One of these days I might learn how to throw back. But hey, at least you're not hitting me anymore, right?"
The door slammed behind her. The night was cool, and she could feel the fall air ruffling her brown hair against her cheeks. She pulled her jacket tighter around her. The streets were full of laughing people coming back from the opera. The women were wearing heels, their hair done up in sleek bones her hands had never seemed to master. The men were wearing suits and the smiles of those who expect to get laid. She walked up the steps of Lincoln Center to look at the waterfall - the water was shaped like mermaids today, and she could see the waves dancing, showing off for a crowd of tourists to enamored of the photos they would put on Facebook to pay any attention to the way one stream was showing off her liquid-clear hips, while another bobbed her thighs. As for the opera-lovers, they were too enamored of each other to feel the life in the circles of water that stood in the center of the plaza. A breeze came up, and she rushed into the Starbucks across the street, where she ordered a vanilla latte, opened her laptop, and began pouring all of her venom onto Facebook. The flatness of her voice in real life was replaced by a virtual scream. She looked at her watch. Half an hour and she'd head over to Jerry's.

By the time she did so, she was feeling slightly calmer, as if her anger were a snake bite that Facebook had sucked the venom out of her, "the way Roberto Benigni sucks that woman's thigh in "Life is Beautiful"", she thought, feeling herself grow slightly horny - which on the whole, was not an inappropriate feeling to have on the way to one's boyfriend, she reminded herself. When she got to Jerry's however, she could tell from the minute he opened the door that he was pissed.
"Did you write about me on my blog?" he asked.
"Yeah. But no on reads that blog - its just like, my friends, and you."
"Oh good. Because it's not like I know your friends or anything, not like I might be embarrassed."
"I'm sorry, ok? I won't do it again."
"What the hell? That stuff was in cyberspace - who knows who read it - you can't just take that back! Is our relationships some kind of refuse that you need to shit out onto the world-wide web in your constant spasms of vebal diarhea?"
"Jesus, Jerry - that is probably the most disgusting metaphor I've ever heard. And I write porn for a living - I've read the Marquis de Sade, for God's sake!"
"Well I'm sorry my metaphor isn't up to your literary standards."
"That's not what I meant - I" she sat down on a chair and buried her head in her hand, "This isn't working. I don't know what this is - but it isn't working - and I want it to work, because I love you, but -" She was crying. He walked over to her and stroked her hair. "Shh!", he said, "Shh!" But they knew it was over, and when she walked out of his apartment half an hour later, she felt oddly free - and still slightly horny. "Damn. We should have at least had break-up sex", she thought.

When she got home, her mother was washing dishes. "What's wrong?" she asked.
"Nothing."
"Don't nothing me. I'm your mother. I know. Somebody hurt my baby." With that, she began to walk around the kitchen, soapy knife in hand, crying hysterically, "Somebody hurt my baby. Somebody hurt my baby.", like some sort of mantra.
"God, this woman should be meds", the daughter thought, but she pulled her mother to her breasts, and stroked her graying hair, whispering, "Shh! Nao chore Mae, nao chore", and she could feel the slight shivering of the head beneath her hands. She wondered if this was what Jerry had felt like, stroking the hair of a woman he no longer cared about in the way he had before, but she also knew that when she walked out of her mother's apartment, she would not be free of the bond that tied them - she would never be free, never move on to find a new mother, a new body to keep her warm at night. She felt her body letting go of her mother's body. "I'm going to bed", she said.
"You're my life. I don't sleep at night - I stay up, worrying about you." The words were feirce in their passion - "but what is passion if not posession", the daughter wondered? She walked away, not because she wanted to ignore, but because she could not think of an honest response.
"Frederico Fellini once said "Happiness is being able to tell the truth without hurting others", she thought bitterly, as she lay down and cried.

Noah (edited)

I remember the nights when you held me in the darkness. Now I lie alone, the straw smelling of sweat and semen. But I know that you have not lost it with me, this life-force, and then you complain of feeling depleted. Wash your hands, you pervert, and take a shower! Your skin smells of horse-shit, and you no longer let me run my fingers through you hair. Thunder peels down the sky, but I can not see the lightning, stuck here in the wooden box that floats. I turn over, praying the straw will smell better on your side of the mattress. It doesn't. I lay awake listening to the chatter of monkeys and the lonely cries of the nightingales, wishing you could hear my silence.

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"Camels are so not sexy", you said to me, when I came to your house for the first time. All the other suitors had horses. But over time, our lives became steady like the camel, you and I, long and drawn, safe and not needing much water. I always feared the day you would long for the swiftness of camels. Then the flood came, and I was releived - we were the only ones left now, you and I, in this wooden floating tomb.

But I have seen the way that your eyes turn down when I walk into our cabin, so I have chosen only to return once your eyes are closed. Are you lying there tonight, dreaming? Or are you thinking of the many men you could have chosen, and the freshness of their cold corpses? I rub my hand against the camel's fur; my palm slowly crawls into the spot where you hands once dwelt, and when it is over, the white stain on the wood is small. I will clean it up tomorrow, with the camel droppings. I will drop both into the waters that have learned to drown our silence, and it is only the rustling of the straw between us that reminds me you are real. I have replaced your kisses with a bucket of camel droppings.

Couldn't it at least have been horse-shit? Camels are so not sexy.

Scene

"It's a prose poem", she said.
"I don't know B. I'm a simple guy. Something's poetry, or it's prose. I don't like the in betweens".
'Sure you do.", she said, smiling. "You're in between me all the time", she said, playing with his fingers.
He laughed. "Yes, but that's a different kind of in between entirely", he said, drawing her closer.
She smiled, and their kiss tasted of the cherries they had had for breakfast that morning.
"Have I told you today that I love you?"
She shook her head.
"Well I do."
She laughed. "Thanks." she said, "I know."
He laughed. "Whatever happened to I love you to?"
"It gets boring."
He smiled. "You're so silly" he said.
She scoffed. "Silly is a word you use to describe puppies."
He groaned. The entire morning would be about appeasing her now. At least it meant they would spend the morning in bed.
"Your lips tasted of cherries" she said.
He looked at her.
"Just now", she explained, "did my lips taste of cherry too?"
He grinned. "Well that depends - do you like cherry?"
"I want an honest answer". She elbowed him, but he could tell she was growing softer. "I am melting her like a marshmallow before the flame" he thought, "and our relationship is one gigantic bonfire."
His kiss was slower this time, "more like cherry cordial because it leaves an after-taste", she thought, "God I hope I don't get hungover."

The morning was measured in suspended breaths and sunlight melding in and out of shadows that played on white sheets - and the rustling of thighs.

"Anytime you write about love it should involve the rustling of thighs", she said.
"Yes, you do like thighs", he teased.
"Why not?" she smiled. "Thighs are a perfectly respectable part of the body."
He laughed. "Maybe", he said, "but I also like lips and neck, and breasts...." and his hands were winding their way through her body.
"You're such a pervert", she teased.
"I'm a pervert! You're the one who writes porn for a living."
"But at least I'm good at it", she said.
He laughed. 'There's no denying that.", he said.
She smiled. "I see you're working on giving me new material", she teased.
He did not answer; his lips were pressed against her collarbone.

The night was meaured in the shifting of shadows and moonlight, the crumpling of sheets and the rustling of thighs.

Tonight, Walking Home from the Bus Stop

I am writing to write tonight, I think. I envision Argentinian soccer players, but that's not very poetic, even though one day someone will write a paean to their bodies -even though I have no idea what a paean is.

I wish I were more poetic, but how can I be when I no longer read poetry? I have been isolated from my sea of books, set apart to run adrift in a world of endless procrastination, when I would so much rather immerse myself in the pleasures of your body.

It's funny, the way I thought of you tonight, after so long. I didn't miss you, exactly - if you were here now, I would probably reject your advances. Maybe I'd even cry - did I ever let you see my tears? I don't remember - our relationship has become no more than a string of images:

The two of us sitting on a wooden bench, on a concrete block overlooking dying flowers.

The tree where you first told me that you love me.

Holding hands in an abandoned building, presenting you with a blue dente to match your t-shirt and the color of your eyes; fingering the necklace against your chest as we lie on my couch, your brown hair against the pink sheets of my bed, your glasses.

I even remember your eyes. That's odd - I don't usually remember men's eyes. I can remember other body parts, but the eyes always elude me. But your eyes pulled and tugged like a chain, and that morning, when I left your house, leaving my backpack behind like the ancient Israelites who forgot to bake bread on their way out of Egypt, it was the knowledge that I would not have to see your eyes that propelled me to lock the door behind me.

Did you call me then? I remember crying in a glass lobby, and falling asleep on the train. Or was it the next night? The days all blend together. But like Moses promising Pharaoh that he will no longer see his face, I kept my promise to myself that I would not see those blue torture-chambers that dot the space beneath your eyebrows. No wonder you thought it funny when I spoke of S&M, or the drunken readings of the Marquis De Sade that took place in my apartment.

I always preffered the works of Leopold Von Saccer Massoch - his name has an elegant ring to it, and the last line of "Venus in Furs" is devoted to gender equality. I bet they never bothered to read it - those people who haunt the BDSM clubs of Southern Tel Aviv, who drink semen and leather the way I drink coffee.

If only quitting coffee were as easy as quitting you - maybe then I would not have head-aches on the Day of Atonement - only tears.

Noah

I remember the nights when you held me in the darkness. Now I lie alone, the straw smelling of sweat and semen. But I know that you have not lost it with me, this life-force, and then you complain of feeling depleted. Wash your hands, you pervert, and take a shower! Your skin smells of horse-shit, and you no longer let me run my fingers through you hair. Thunder peels down the sky, but I can not see the lightning, stuck here in the wooden box that floats. I turn over, praying the straw will smell better on your side of the mattress. It doesn't. I lay awake listening to the chatter of monkeys and the lonely cries of the nightingales, wishing you could hear my silence.

*********************************************************************************************

"Camels are so not sexy", you said to me, when I came to your house for the first time. All the other suitors had horses. But over time, our lives became steady like the camel, you and I, long and drawn, safe and not needing much water. I always feared the day you would long for the swiftness of camels, and when the flood came, I was releived - we were the only ones left now, you and I, in this wooden floating tomb.

But I have seen the way that your eyes turn down when I walk into our cabin, so I have chosen only to return once your eyes are closed. Are you lying there tonight, dreaming? Or are you thinking of the many men you could have chosen, and the freshness of their cold corpses? I rub my hand against the camels fur, feel the knobs of his humps, hard and comforting. My palm slowly crawls into the spot where you hands once dwelt, and when it is over, the white stain on the wood is small. I will clean it up tomorrow, with the camel droppings. I will drop both into the waters that have learned to drown our silence, and it is only the rustling of the straw between us that reminds me that you are real, that once your body proved to me the reality of my body. I have replaced your kisses with a bucket of camel droppings.

Couldn't it at least have been horse-shit? Camels are so not sexy.

Battle

"What do you write?" she asked.
The red of the wine was reflected in the garnets that dotted her pale wrist.
"I write porn", he said.
She laughed, her hips swaying slightly, and in her smile he felt the undulations of purple waters.
"What do you write?" he asked.
"I write about sex", she said.
He laughed. She found the sounds too staccato for her taste.
"What's the difference?" he said.
"You write about body parts. I write about how people use sex to cover the loneliness inside them", she replied, and he saw her, sitting naked, crying, on an old floral couch by an abandoned guitar, as moonlight poured in from a white terrace. He pitied her then. She saw the pity, and put down the wine glass slowly. He remembered the day his mother sat him down when he was 13. "Pity is so unsexy", she said, right before giving him a slap. (God, even today, he shuddered at the oedipal implications - "Damn Freud", he'd always say, because it made the girls giggle.)

"I'm sorry", he said, as she pulled her seat apart from the table.
She shrugged. "For what?" she said, "You didn't do anything wrong."

Her shoulders reminded him of the second part of his mother's lecture: "All girls are liars", she had said, stirring the hot chocolate.

But by now he had learned to mix different kinds of drinks.

"I like you", he said, putting his arm on her white arm.

She laughed. "Am I supposed to find that flattering?"

"Yes", he said, and the look in her eyes changed for a moment.

He was reminded of the unsharpening of knives. He did not know, that at thirteen, her mother had sat her down, too. "All boys are liars", she had said, stirring sugar into the hot coffee, "but in bed they can be conquered."

She had grown to doubt the wisdom of this tale - too many nights had ended in tears - but in the tipsy vision of a piano-ed evening full of black satin ties, the little girl sharpened her battle knives.