Forte Da
The erotic worlds we build are a curious interweaving of language and images. Most of us have done a shit-ton of borrowing. From the first time our mothers speak to us, and from the moment we manage to get our unwieldy, infantile tongues to cooperate just enough to spit out that first word, we are enveloped in an alien language, not of our making. And while the pains and tickles and chills and comforts may be truly ours, we are all bound to use that foreign tongue to express what we feel and what we want.
The Travails of Dr. Linh: Neglected Gardens
Clever people say you can never truly go home but, in my experience, it’s almost depressingly the opposite. Too often, you can’t escape it. Standing in the humid midnight, beneath an old mango tree, I looked up at the pontianak dangling from a branch. It was a young one, with long, tangled black hair, wearing […]
The Sin of Words
She wished that she had a story to write about lovers who were so taken up in each other that they’d lost all words. Or a story about a passion quick and sharp like a piercing that heals but never completely disappears. Or a love triangle where she was the wounded one, or where the […]
The Flesh Web
It’s just sex, I tell myself. Again. Just nature doing what it must, working its fossil finger between the tight layers of accreted me and crooking a digit at him. The Helen Keller of my desire is oblivious to the futility of the coupling; she’d breed me until my womb prolapsed. She wants and wants, […]
The Perfect Monster
The flat of his furred thigh. The thin membrane between thumb and forefinger. The subcutaneous slug of vein just above a temple. A finger crooked on the sun-warmed metal of the trigger. The latticework of history. a web that skins his back. The sun-creased corner of an eye. An expulsion of breath that hitches before […]
Erotic Agony
Why do I write texts about people in agony? Why do you read them? I could say I don’t know why. I feel driven to do it and it feels right when I do. Lacan would surely say that it’s my symptom. The characters in my stories suffer, but not by accident. They are not […]
The Descriptive Passage
I am becoming the woman he imagines me to be: a strange, lithe creature beneath a foreign sun, dark hair whipped by a breeze that presages an afternoon downpour. A white linen dress, crisp in the cloud-scattered light, my eyes haunted by a despicable, unwarranted hope and, on my lips, the acid drop of some […]
Night Nurse
I loved a man whose wounds gaped so wide no sutures could close them. So deep that poison forever festered in their hollows, distilled in those dark crevasses. Some recent, some very old, and so many that he spent his time counting them, his dreadful possessions. He gathered them together and forged from them bright […]
Something More Than You
He made of her a thing. Not anything as superficially offensive as a pornographic thing – far worse. Something without even the solidity of image, without even the slippery worm of words. And yet he did not make her nothing because he would not let her go. He would not let go of her hair. […]
On the Cliff of the Moment
And then I knew, Like a resigned nod that prompts the stately closing of massive doors upon some fictive scene. And then I knew that delusions of proximity are like delusions of grandeur, only twice as laughable and five times as distant. And then I knew. despite saying I was cool with all of it, […]