Remittance Girl's Blog, page 19

So Close, And Yet So Far: POV and Head Hopping in Erotic Fiction

One of the most common mistakes I see new writers make is something called head hopping: the act of showing what more than a single character is thinking in a scene. Basically, what is happening is the writer is switching from the POV of one character to the other and back again.

If knowing what is going on in one character’s head is sexy, logically, it should follow that allowing the reader to see what is going on in the other character’s head would be double sexy.  That would make sense. The problem is that it has the exact opposite effect and, in fact, will leave a reader feeling unaccountably ambivalent over what should be a super arousing scene.

I was prompted to write about this after reading what should have been an immensely hot piece. The character development was fresh and tasty, the setting conspired to make the whole exchange ubersexy, the sex was just the way I like it – lateral and quirky, perverse and delicious. Moreover, the writer has a masterfully poetic approach to language and imagery. This story should, on so many levels, have had me reaching to unbutton my jeans. But it didn’t because the writer was forcing me into a place of cognitive impossibility.

What I mean by cognitive impossibility is that we cannot mind melt. Psychologically and emotionally, we cannot internalize more than a single point of view at one time.  We can intellectually appreciate many perspectives. But on that very intimate level of reality processing, we are alone.

Writers found they could perform a trick.  If the character and the situation are ‘reasonable’ to the reader (i.e. if it passes the suspension of disbelief test), a reader can take on the intimate point of view of a character.  We spend our lives experiencing a singular point of view – our own. First person and third person limited POVs that invite the reader to step into the mind of a character see out their eyes, and process their experiences, at least partially through their mental framework as it has been established in character development.

When we want a reader to see from another point of view, we need to press some kind of cognitive reset button: either by starting new chapter or a scene break to signal that, metaphorically, the reader needs to step on the clutch, slide into neutral and then over into another gear (another POV).

Without this mechanism, something curious happens.  When you show the feelings and thoughts of BOTH characters in a scene, suddenly all those delicious details, those arousal buttons that should work well and elicit a powerful and intimate response in the reader suddenly seem muted, distant and muffled.

You get left, as a reader, puzzling as to why you aren’t turned on by what, by all accounts, should have you dripping wet or hard as a baseball bat.  Most readers don’t know why the story isn’t working for them, because they’re not reading critically. They WANT to be immersed, but it’s as if something is making them too buoyant, forcing them to bob along the surface instead of getting sucked down into the yummy, sexy, hot goodness of the story.

Added to this, if you are the writer of the head hopping, you literally cannot see this. To the writer, it’s damn hot, and damn immersive.  That’s because ALL those POVs are actually YOUR POV. As writer, as creator of the POVs, they all originate with you and therefore you don’t experience the cognitive failure.

This is one of those very few times when I say ‘you’re going to have to trust me on this. Showing two POVs at once will not have the effect you are looking for,’ unless, of course, your aim is to force your reader to witness explicitness without allowing them to feel and immerse in it.

As a writer, you might want to play around with that effect, pushing them into a frozen zone of reading intellectually, but not merging experientially with the text. But for god’s sake, if you’re going to do it, do it on purpose. Not by accident.

Uncivil

He arrives home worse for wear. Battered and sheepish, a triumphant smile threatening to break through the mask of contrition.

“You’re such a guy,” I say, trying to look disgusted.

“I know.” He chuckles. “We’re all just big dumb animals.”

The cut on his cheek tears me in two. Right on the bone, the skin has split on impact. Tomorrow the bruising will be spectacular. Tonight, it’s swollen plump, angry red and the edges are held together with a thin butterfly strip.

I want to slide my splayed fingers up the back of his skull, fist them in his hair and press my mouth to the cut. I want to taste him. Sweat salted and coppery, the swollen skin is hot and tight against my lips. He smells of metal and spent stress. It makes me want to fuck, to indulge myself in his hurt flesh. At that precipitous, mindless place between the caress and the claw. Hunger and anger. My cunt muscles ache. My teeth itch with formless need.

But instead I pull ice out of the freezer, bag it in plastic and wrap it in a towel. Because the mother in me can’t bear to see him in pain.

We’ll have steak for dinner. One for him, one for his bruise and one to satisfy my need to bite into something that will bleed and give under the pressure.

“Women are so much more civilized,” he says with a shit-eating grin, cutting into the barely cooked meat. His knuckles are scored. The blood has clotted, but if he makes a fist, it won’t last long.

All I can think about is sliding my tongue over the knots of bone veiled in ravaged skin. grazing my open teeth across them till he winces and pulls his hand away. I see the cuts break open as he grasps my thighs to spread them. I see the strands of my hair caught up in the sticky thickness of the newly opened wounds.

“Of course we are, love.” I put down my knife and fork and sip at the almost empty glass of wine. “So, what does the other guy look like?”

 

 

 

The Duties of an Author and the Responsibilities of a Reader

There are aspects of the rise of online booksellers, e-books, reader-reviews and the general phenomena surrounding reading and the internet that I like very much. But there are also parts of it I abhor. Self-publishing, the rise of small e-book presses and the refusal of publishers to do the marketing they once did has meant that much of the promotion of a new book falls onto the writer. Personally, I find it deeply embarrassing. My job as I see it is to write as well as I can and inform potential readers of my books’ availability – in moderation! That’s it. There are writers who put a lot more effort into self-promotion; I respect them for their energy, but I just can’t do it. However, when writers get rude and pushy and demand not only reviews, but GOOD reviews, I draw the line. That’s beyond the pale.

I just read a rather disturbing blog post over at The Masquerade Crew, by @DianthaJones on some of the staggering harassment she’s had from writers: How not to piss off a book blogger.

To writers:

I commiserate with writers. If you’ve spent the better part of six months to a year carefully crafting a novel, lovingly bringing the story and characters to life, then it can seem very disappointing when your acclaim, sales and reviews don’t seem to reflect that effort. But I would like to be clear: just because you want to be a writer doesn’t mean anyone owes you anything. You don’t have a right to earn a living at it just because you think you deserve it. And if this isn’t tolerable to you, there are many other jobs and endeavors that are more likely to reward your efforts. You should find another. Either write because you love it and you feel a sense of accomplishment from doing it, or don’t do it at all.

You also don’t have the right to keep pushing your book down everyone’s throats on every social media platform available. Yes, please inform us when you publish something new. And please offer us some insight to your work and your craft. But for god’s sake, it has gotten to the point where I am loathe to follow writers on Twitter for fear my timeline will become nothing but a stream of ads of ‘buy my book’.

I’ve never requested a review and I won’t give a book away for free to get one. I know this is common practice, but it offends me to do it. If someone has paid for my book and then reviews it, I feel it is a supreme compliment, whether the review is good or bad. They’ve paid their money, read the thing, and have every right to have an opinion on it and to express that opinion – but not the obligation to do so. And, good or bad, a review means that a reader has gone above and beyond the call in not only spending the time to read the book, but the additional time and thought to give it a review.

Yes, I agree that the rise of the reader-reviewed sites and sales outlets has meant that the landscape of critical literary response has changed dramatically. Readers, as opposed to critics, have been empowered to have their opinions heard like never before. And yes, they don’t feel the same obligation to give anything but a gut-level response. Some reviews I’ve read are poorly constructed, unthoughtful and sometimes – I have heard through the rumour mill – strategically vicious. This is the price we pay for the rise of these technologies. But, keep in mind, prior to this, a writer had to cross her fingers and blindly hope that some professional critic would bother to peruse the book and give it some response.  Most writers published into silence and the only feedback they ever got was a sales sheet at the end of the year. Things aren’t perfect now, but they’re better.

However, the bottom line is: if you can’t take a bad review, don’t publish your book. Period.

To readers:

As I said before, readers now have a power to express their opinions, promote books they’ve enjoyed and criticize books they didn’t enjoy in a way that, even a decade ago, was unimagined. However, your public outlet comes with some responsibility. Whether your review is positive or negative, once you decide to air your opinion publicly, you do have an ethical obligation to give reasons for your opinion. Otherwise, it informs no one; it’s just an unthinking exhibition of your delight or your disgust. It doesn’t add to the debate and it turns the reader-review landscape into a mud-bath of unreasoned reactions.

Also, if you’re reviewing outside your favourite genre, then be big enough to admit it. Say you don’t usually read (insert genre here) and so your reaction is not one moderated by any great knowledge of other books within the genre. Well-considered reviews are contextual, so if you don’t have context, be kind enough to fess up. Your honesty adds legitimacy to what you say next.

To readers and writers:

We need to be respectful of the fact that we are all walking an unfamiliar path. Our ability to communicate with each other over published works has never been like this before. Readers want to read good books and enjoy them. Writers want to write good books and have them read. There are limits to what we can expect from each other.

No reader has the right to expect to read a work of considerable length for free, but they do have the right to expect a fair level of craft on the part of the writer. No writer has the right to expect that all readers are going to love their books, and they need to understand that for every person who loves it, there are probably an equal number of readers who didn’t.  Anything else is delusional.

Play nice, people. We need each other.

 

 

To Think or Not to Think… In Which Your Faithful Narrator Rebuts Palahniuk’s Banishing of the Thought Verbs

First, have a read of this very interesting essay by Chuck Palahniuk on ‘thought’ verbs and why you shouldn’t use them.

Hopefully, I haven’t lost you. I’m going to attempt to put together some robust arguments for why I think he’s wrong. Not completely wrong. A great deal of what he says is true, makes sense, and works for readers. Having said that, Palahniuk’s fiction doesn’t work for all readers. Although I recognize him as a tremendously accomplished writer, most of his books don’t work for me. About half-way through his books, I feel so ambivalent about his characters, I can’t work up the motivation to find out how the story ends.  At the same time, writers who flood their narrative with nothing but abstractions and emotional content are equally hard for me to engage with. I feel like someone is constantly trying to manipulate me. It puts my back up. I believe there’s a happy medium.

Concrete vs Abstract

It needs to be said: a narrative that deals with the tangible brings immediacy to the story for readers. They can see it, feel it, smell it, touch it. They can make up their own minds about how the characters feel or what they’re thinking by the way they act. No question.

However human experience isn’t constantly concrete. We walk around experiencing and processing. The processing part – the feeling and the thinking part – is as real as the concrete. In fact, I’d argue that the origins of consequences lie just as often in the abstract part of our experiences as they do in the concrete. “I didn’t get out of bed today because I didn’t feel like it” has real consequences, just as “I didn’t get out of bed today because the ceiling fan fell on me and cut my head off.” A lot of the things that motivate people don’t have concrete representations, and trying to do spectacular and long-winded back-flips to SHOW a series of concrete evidences of emotional or intellectual rationales is as artificial as leaving them out completely.

Show vs Tell

I know this has been the mantra for writers since the beginning of the 20th Century, and it is no coincidence. It coincides with the rise of visual mass mediums: photographs, films, TV, video. There is a lot of telling in novels prior to the 20th Century and that doesn’t make them bad.

Here’s Palahniuk’s take on it:

My personal theory is that younger readers distain most books – not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today’s reader is smarter.  Movies have made us very sophisticated about storytelling.  And your audience is much harder to shock than you can ever imagine.

I don’t think being so attuned to a single mode of storytelling (movies) makes a reader smarter. It certainly makes them less flexible, less tolerant of the modes in which they can consume stories. Nor do I think it’s my job as a writer to cure that handicap. I’d argue that the different modes in which a story can be experienced – through text, through visual media, through audio – come very close to making those stories fundamentally different stories. Not in plot, but in how the consumer experiences them. Lord of the Rings readers who saw the movies mostly have praise for its translation into the visual realm, but they will also tell you that their long-term emotional engagement with the story is to the text, not the films. This is, I think, because text requires a deeper investment, a greater interactivity with the story. That commitment  -  to ‘write’ as you read, to visualize internally – is what results in a long-lived relationship with the story.

Similarly, it’s incredibly easy to shock people visually. It’s easy to allow for a betrayal of perception. Now we have a dark room, next we have a horrific face 3″ away from ours. The sheer mechanics of reading make that kind of shock very hard to pull off in text. It requires a that the writer perform a betrayal of reason, instead. But when a writer can pull off shock in a reader, it doesn’t evaporate in the next scene. It lingers. Because they’ve been complicit in its formation.

So, in a way, I think Palahniuk is participating, rather than mitigating, the homogenization of how stories are consumed. And, as a person who likes choice, I don’t think that’s the way to go.

Writing Does Well What Film Does Badly

There is a reason why literature is full of interior narratives and film is not. The thought verbs allow the writer to show what is going on inside someone’s head. I’d even debate the premise that thought verbs are always a type of ‘telling’. They’re ‘showing’ thought and emotion, internally. Because words, unlike a camera lens, can actually do that. I’m not sure when this became an entirely illegitimate approach to storytelling, but Palahniuk clearly feels it is. When film tries to do this, it usually does an injustice to the glory of the medium and ends up boring you to death. I can’t think of a lot of examples of interior narratives done well in film. “Shame” comes to mind. But if you’re like me and find many Woody Allen films unwatchable, now you know why.

Yes, Readers are Smart, so Don’t Waste Their Time.

Not allowing a writer to ever say what a character thinks, in first person or third person proximate, requires a lot more text. Fictional time is not real time. But sometimes I read Palahniuk’s work and it damn well feels like it. Like I’m being dragged through the mundane, not to have a deep reading experience but in service of his writing ideology to SHOW me everything. Some things, you can tell me. Just get on with it.

Palahniuk writes:

Don’t tell your reader:  “Lisa hated Tom.”

Instead, make your case like a lawyer in court, detail by detail.  Present each piece of evidence.  For example:

“During role call, in the breath after the teacher said Tom’s name, in that moment before he could answer, right then, Lisa would whisper-shout: ‘Butt Wipe,” just as Tom was saying, ‘Here’.”

Well, he better tell me Lisa hated Tom, because knowing what I know about highschool, the evidence he’s presented me with is not obvious in the least. In fact, I suspect Lisa likes Tom very much indeed. Otherwise, she wouldn’t get in his face so often.

There’s a difference between ambiguity and confusion. One leaves open possibilities of interpretation, the other is just plain misleading. If this is all the evidence for Lisa hating Tom that Palahniuk has to offer, I’d argue that he IS treating his reader like they’re stupid; he’s assuming there’s only one way to read this piece of literary cinematography. In film, we’d see Lisa’s face, hear the tone of her voice, watch how she interacted with her friends, and get some idea. But text isn’t film. It can’t be, for better or worse, and so trying to approximate film in text is, in my view, a waste of time.

If I tell you that Lisa’s heart was racing, and her muscles were gnawing at her bones as she waited until the teacher called Tom’s name and, not being sure exactly how else to call attention to herself, she blurted out “Butt Wipe,” I’m pretty sure you’d realize she has a serious crush on him. Admittedly, she’s not a well-adjusted young lady, but who the hell is in highschool?

Please don’t get me wrong: read Palahniuk’s essay on thought verbs. It’s good, and we could all probably use a lot fewer of them (just as we could all cut out half our adverbs). It does help get the narrator out of the sightline of the story. It does allow for a natural flow of events in the narrative.

But don’t kill all your thought verbs. Some of them serve a very good, specifically literary purpose. They stop your characters from remaining utter strangers all the way through the story. I understand that Palahniuk seldom wants us to like his characters, but because he never lets us get to know them (through their thoughts and feelings), I find it hard to even give a toss what happens to them. So I don’t bother finishing the book.

Three Times Lucky

“What’s the R for?” I asked in an offhand way, hoping to convince her that I didn’t care all that much.

“Oh, that,” she drawled, then gave a soft laugh, turned her head to look over her shoulder like she’d forgotten it was there. “Dumb stuff you do when you’re young.”

Amalia sprawled on her stomach, naked save for the white sheet that had wrapped itself around one beautiful, tanned calf.  Her loose dark hair slid over her shoulder and the perfectly executed R of a scar was gone.

I wanted to ask her what the initial stood for, but she looked at me through hooded eyes, and quirked her lips. As if she wanted it again. As if we hadn’t just fucked. My dick told my brain to shut up and stop using up so much blood so I could get hard again. Amalia wasn’t one of those women who would hang around long if you didn’t give her what she wanted. I was pretty sure of that.

* * *

I’d met beautiful women before. Fucked a number of them, too. Some were very nice and some were walking train-wrecks. But there is a scale of beauty when it comes to women, and it’s unique to every man. Some are so far out of your league you can look away without a second thought. You are what you believe you deserve and I didn’t, in a million fucking light years, deserve Amalia.

I first laid eyes on her at a fundraiser for a worthy cause – damned if I can remember for what. Every other heterosexual male in the room saw her too.  Tall, lithe, dressed in a simple black sheath dress that plunged at the back to show an expanse of golden skin. Her hair was pinned up, dark tendrils trailed down the nape of her long, slender neck, but every one of us was mentally pulling out the pins and watching it cascade over her shoulders. High, perfectly proportioned breasts. Hips like a woman – not to narrow, not too wide – and an ass that could curve into the palms of your hands like glory.

If the body was stunning, her face was flawless. God – her mouth, her lips were hypnotic – made to surround the base of your cock.  But it was her eyes that trapped me. Big, dark almond-shaped with a little slant. Her mouth was all sex but her eyes were all innocence. That insidious combination forced me to overcome that sense of ‘out of my league’ and introduce myself.

When I did, and she responded with a slow smile and a languid handshake, I became the sort of asshole I can’t stand. I would have this woman. She was mine and she just didn’t know it yet. I’d do anything – utterly anything – to possess her. It was a strength of will thing, an absolute single-mindedness that should have frightened the fuck out of any sane, civilized adult. But the moment she didn’t turn her back and walk away, I was none of those things.

I held her hand too long. She gave me another half-smile and retrieved it. No wedding band. It wouldn’t have stopped me. Nothing would have stopped me.

“What brings you to this worthy gathering?” she asked, tease-heavy drawl in her words. She turned her head to scan the room grown crowded before I answered.

“I think I made a donation.”

Her laugh was moonlight on skin. “Good for you.”

“And you?”

“I designed the invitations. The organizers are friends.”

I had been relieved of my invitation at the door, so I couldn’t pull it out, look at it, and charm her with a compliment. Fuck it, I thought. “Do you have dinner plans?”

That’s all it took.  It turned out I didn’t have to do ‘anything.’ Just a donation to some charity and an invitation to dinner.

* * *

I watched her eat. Neat little forkfuls of the starter. But when the crab arrived, she picked up a shattered claw in her fingers and sucked the meat out with uninhibited relish. Just the sound of it made my eyes water. Her cheeks hollowed and my cock ached. Thank Christ for tablecloths.

I’m not an idiot.  When women do this, they know exactly what kind of game they’re playing. She did. I just didn’t fucking care. I’d play any game she wanted.

After the exchange of pleasantries and the requisite bits of personal information, halfway through the main course, I regained enough sanity to think strategically. I didn’t want to blow it with this woman. Yes, I wanted to fuck her, but I wanted more. More of what? No idea. Just more.  So I decided I wasn’t going to screw it up by asking her up to my place.

Instead, I drove her home like a gentleman, and she asked me up to hers.

* * *

She fucked like she ate.  Like all that golden skin was just pretty wrapping for a carnivore. Like she was born to be in porn, but the really high-end stuff.  The reality of her lips wrapped around my shaft blew what I’d imagined away. On her knees, looking up at me with those little doll eyes, leaving lipstick smears as she sucked.  It took everything I had not to lose it down her throat.

It was after I’d fucked her from behind that I found it.  After she’d spread her thighs wide and groaned over the meaty thuds of my hips meeting her ass.  After she’d arched her back and orgasmed, milking my cock until I was sure I’d go insane. After I filled her with cum.  I bent over to kiss her shoulder and felt the ridges of it against my lips.

The R. The fucking R.  With my half dead cock buried in her pussy and my muscles still twitching. I knew better than to ask.  I just couldn’t help myself.

She moved. The conditioned air chilled the fluids on my dick as if to remind me that, like everything else, pussy passes. Sprawled on top of the rumpled sheets, her skin dark against their whiteness, her hair a tousled mess. My fingers itchy to thread and clutch at the strands.

I asked. The answer was lame. So I fucked her again just to stop myself from asking another question.

* * *

It was fear that stopped me from phoning her the following day, or the day after.  I didn’t want to hear her turn me down. Didn’t want to consider the possibility that I’d never fuck her again. That I had been a disappointing one-night stand.  But I did finally use the number she’d given me.

“Hey there, It’s David.”

“Hey there yourself,” she said in a bored, neutral tone.

“I apologize for not calling sooner,” I said, and meant it. “Crazy week.”

“Sure.”

“No, I mean it. I’m sorry.” I tried to dial down the desperation. “I was hoping, maybe…”

“You could fuck me again?” The voice was still bone dry.

“Well, that, too. But maybe dinner? Or something else?”

“Hmm. I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Are you gonna make me beg?”

There was a pause on the line, then her laugh, glassy and wicked. “No. When?”

* * *

It took the advice of a friend to remind me of what I’d almost thrown away. I was up at the Skyline bar, having a few drinks after work with a buddy of mine, Chris. I’d just finished telling him about Amalia when she walk in with three other women. They were headed towards the far end of the room.

“That’s her,” I said, putting down my drink and nodding towards her.

“Holy shit.” That’s all he said at first.  Then he repeated it. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah.” And all I could think of was that it was a good thing she wasn’t there with another man because I’d have ripped him limb from limb.

“You fucked her?”

“Yeah.” I followed her progress to a table by the huge glass windows that overlooked the city. Her girlfriends were cute, but nothing compared to her.

“And you didn’t call her for two whole days? What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Chris snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Hey, over here. Are you shittin’ me?”

Then I was back. Wondering if I should go over and say hello.

“Don’t do it. If you go over there now, you’ll look like a desperate asshole.”

“I am a desperate asshole.”

Chris looked over at her again. She was haloed by the deep orange sun, as it set over the city.  “Sure. No call to wear a sign, though.”

* * *

I found the second one in the shadow of her right breast. This time I felt it with my fingertips as I was sucking on her nipple.

She was squirming beneath me, grinding her hips up against mine. I knew what it was before I saw it, and my mouth went dry, but I propped myself up on my elbow and looked.

Like the first, it was a raised scar. Not a burn, but cut into the skin. It was just as ornate, with a little curl at the leg of the R. Fancy. It had taken time to do. It must have been cut deep.

“What does the R stand for?”

Amelia threaded her fingers through my hair and tried to tug me back down her her tits, but I resisted.

She sighed and stretched on the bed. “Why do you want to know? Why does it matter?”

“I’m just curious. Two of them? It’s got to stand for something.”

She tisked like she was humoring a wayward child. Her hand skittered over my bare chest, over my stomach, and began to work the button on my pants.

“If I tell you…” she said, tease oozing over her tongue, fingers tugging down my zipper. “Will you stop asking silly questions and fuck me?”

Warm skin curled around my cock. It throbbed in her hand, and she laughed.

“Yeah.”

I was almost deaf by the time she spoke again. Sure, even strokes. My dick leaked precum and she used it like lube to stroke me faster.

“It stands for Robert. Old boyfriend. Satisfied?”

I didn’t answer her because I made a choice not to come in her hand. I got my pants past my hips, pushed the crotch of her panties aside and slammed into her. But the sensation of immanent orgasm faded. All I could think about was the name.  The fact that she’d let some other guy to cut his initial into her. Not just once, but twice.

I had to fuck it out of her. Fuck that image away. Of that fucking letter, and her lying there, letting him carve it into her. If I could only thrust hard enough, I could obliterate it.

“Fuck!” she sobbed, and pushed at my chest. “You’re hurting me.”

“Not like he hurt you, I bet,” I panted.

“Stop it. Fucking stop it.”

And I did. I apologized. I kissed her. I made her come and I fell asleep with my arms around her, because I didn’t know what else to do.

* * *

I found the third one as I was teasing her, kissing my way down her naked body. Her hands and legs bound to the bed frame with my ties. I smelled the musk of her heat, working my way down to her cunt.  And there, just above her mound was another one.  I stopped. This time, I didn’t have to ask. Same well formed letter. Same curl at the foot of the R.  It had to have hurt like a bitch.

“For god’s sake. Did you think I was a virgin when we met?” Impatience curdled her voice.

“No.” I hilted two fingers inside her swollen cunt, just to make the point.

Her muscles tensed and tightened around them. “Then what?”

“What’s his name?” I asked, pressing the pad of my thumb against her clit and circling it, watching her hips rise and fall as I fingered her.

“Why the fuck does it matter so much?” she panted.

“What’s his name again?”

“Rick.”

“Really?”

“Not this way,” she groaned. “Let me come on your cock.”

“I thought his name was Robert.”

“Jesus. Just let it go. Fuck me.” She was looking down at me, legs splayed, grinding her hips. She pushed herself onto my fingers with a wet, sucking sound.  “Just fuck me.”

The smell of her pussy was overwhelming. Thick and woody and rich.  It didn’t matter that I was hard. It didn’t matter that I wanted to be inside her. I had to know.

“Rick? Robert? Which is it?”

She stopped moving. “Untie me.”

“Why did you let him do it?”

“Unfucking tie me now.” Tears made her eyes glassy and unfocused.

“I need to know. Amelia.”

“I didn’t let him!” she yelled.

I sat back on my heels and looked down at her. “Three times? Bullshit.”

“You wouldn’t fucking understand. You’d never understand!”

One by one, I undid the ties. Amelia curled up into a ball and cried. Not loud, but in a way that shamed me. I lay beside her, wrapped my arms around her, and told her I was sorry. That it was fine. Everything would be all right.

* * *

First I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter. Everyone has a past. I’d been in love before, with a girl in college. Why shouldn’t it have been the same for Amelia? Of course, it was. But it didn’t matter how many times I tried to reason with myself, I couldn’t get those Rs out of my head. Every time we made love and I touched one of them or kissed one of them. I tried to push it down but it just kept coming back up.

Six months into our relationship, lying in bed on a lazy Sunday morning, I trailed a fingertip over the curve of her shoulder.

“God damn, I love you,” I whispered.

She turned onto her side, sliding an arm over my chest and hooking a leg between mine. “I love you too, baby.”

“Then tell me.”

Amelia giggled. “I just did.”

“No. Tell me about R. What’s his name again?”

She sighed and closed her eyes. “Riley.”

“Bullshit.”

“Then don’t keep asking.” She turned onto her back and sat up.

I grabbed her wrist, pulled her down, and rolled on top of her. “I need to know. I just fucking need to know.”

Her body went limp beneath me and she looked up at me with the coldest eyes I’ve ever seen. “The next time you ask me about this, I’ll leave you. I’ll walk out of your life and I’ll never come back. Understand?”

* * *

Amalia is the most beautiful, hottest woman I’ve ever known.  When we walk into a place, people change. Women look at her with envy and wish they were her. Men look at her with lust and wish they were me. I tell myself I’m the luckiest man alive to have her. That’s why I’m going to marry her.

If I tell myself that enough, I forget to wonder who R is, or what they had, or why she let him carve his initial into her skin. Three times.

Get on the Couch and Spread ‘Em

This morning, it was just there. There climbing up the back garden wall. I don’t think it was there yesterday. I’m damn sure it wasn’t there last week. It arrived while I wasn’t looking. I’d dropped my vigilance and there it was, in all its obvious, obscene phallic glory.

Don’t give me the ‘it’s just a gourd’ crap. It’s an enormous green donkey dick. It’s in my yard, acting all virile and fertile and cock-like. It doesn’t belong here.

My yard is full of orchids. Phalaenopsis in delicate whites, feathery pale pink Dendrobiums, seductive Cattleyas flushed dark reds. They’re beautiful. They’re my babies. But I noticed some black spots on the leaves of the Cymbidium. It’s the gourd, for sure. It’s infected them with something. Or, I don’t know, it’s spreading the wrong vibes.

When I first noticed the vine climbing up the wall, I thought, ‘Hey! That’s cool.’ Then it sprouted some nice, friendly yellow flowers. Still fine. All good.

Then this. Damn right, I’m hostile.

“If it bothers you so much, just cut it off. Slice it, grill it. Put it in a soup,” says my friend.

“Cut it off?”

Is he crazy? I can’t just CUT IT OFF. It’s erect, for fuck’s sake. It’s hanging there, unabashedly turgid. Rampant. Just the idea of cutting it off freaks me out. It’s not its fault it’s a dick. It’s not even its fault that it’s clearly over-excited. It would be castration! No – that’s for balls – isn’t it? Is there a word for cutting off someone’s penis at the root?

Maybe I could just ignore it. If I don’t look at it, it might wither and drop off. I’m not going to look at it again. I’m sure that looking at it only encourages it.

This is a comic, Freudian thing. It’s all very funny. There’s an hysterical Victorian spinster lurking inside me, having a ‘turn,’ screaming, sobbing and beating her little fisted hands on the carefully embroidered parlour cushions.

“How many flowers are there on the vine?” my friend asks.

I go out and count, trying not to look at the donkey-dick thing. “Six.”

“So, you could be in for a rough ride, babe.”

“What do you mean?” I demand.

“Well, you could end up with a whole dick tree.”

I ponder the prospect of six more monster cocks in my garden. And, strangely enough, that calms me right down.

 

Magic Lantern

Getting to know him was a pleasure. People often say that and they mean it as a politeness. So I’ll rephrase. Getting to know him was my pleasure, as is my continued knowing of him. It is my perversion.

Admittedly, I have a few others.

The reasons he manufactures to hurt me matter.  He’s got too much respect for me to say I’ve ‘been a bad girl.’ He owes me a more finely honed plot.  He weaves the narratives, beautiful and arcane:  fractal stories of slight, betrayal, corruption, dishonesty, infidelity in tight, bright rosettes of rage. They unravel, slowly at first; played out like a campfire telling.  Slips of the tongue, sins of omission, inadvertent insults, mistimings.

“You just can’t fucking help yourself,” he says, anger pressing up against his palate, turning his voice to paper.

He paints me in the fine colours of all the women I’ll never be. In mounting detail commensurate with his rising need to hurt me, he writes me as Messalina, Cleopatra, Salome, Mata Hari. I become spy, traitor, whore, gold-digger, betrayer, Kali, destroyer of men. My heart pounds. My chest constricts. My thighs tingle.  I’m wrapped in the royal silks of female iniquity.

Admittedly, I do my best to hide my arousal, because I don’t want to jinx what comes next.

The hiss of leather against wool. He draws his belt out with deliberation. Sweet spiderleg fear skitters up my spine, over my skull.  It tweaks at my tendons, threatening to cramp them.  He’s going to hurt me. He’s going to hurt me more than I can stand. I let the terror ride me.  It might not look like copulation to an onlooker, but it is to me. The fracturing mindfuck of anticipation. In the eternally hanging seconds before he hits me, I live my own destruction as a coward over and over. In that secret dark of time without tick or hands or face, I have forgotten who he is.  I’m irrational, intoxicated on the inevitability an imagined obliteration. It is only because I know him that I can trust him enough, in that moment, to forget who he is to me.

The slap, the tongue of fire, when it comes is like a relief. A reprieve from the nightmares I’ve so recently hatched.  This is pain. This is sting.  This is my flesh getting bruised or broken or cut. I’m back in my body.  I am a body in pain.

Some things, I only need to learn once. But there is, amidst the pain, a pleasure in the learning.  As if my brain cannot retain the lesson, I must learn it anew every time.  I am alive. I am flesh. I am weak. I will cry when it hurts. I relearn how to babble, how to beg, how to swear and rage in the face of the pain.  He pulls me screaming past the bravery. He pries my dignity out of my clenched fingers and makes me fall apart. And past it. Always past the point I’m sure I will say the word, fisted in the pit of my stomach like a talisman of reprieve.

Pain is a hilly landscape.  I travel it, panting up the inclines, breathing on the peaks, and sobbing like a madwoman on the downhill.  In the flatlands, I tell myself I can last it out. I can. I will.  Sweating, shaking, hanging on.

At the highest peaks, I leave myself behind. He’s hard and he’s drinking in my misery.  I hear it in his breath.  I know him. And beneath my skin, deep in the meat, a slow glow of pleasure spreads along the muscle fibers and lights up my brain. He’s going to despise himself for this afterwards.

It is the pleasure of possession of that knowledge and the anticipation of its arrival that prevents me from saying my safe word.

When he’s finished, he runs fingers over the marks he’s made – a cabinetmaker admiring his molding.  Memorizing in Braille the canted logic of the moment and reminding himself that there’s a deeper, rawer wound to penetrate.

My cunt is swollen and weeping. He pushes into me with ease – as if I’ve played some awful trick on him, as if I haven’t suffered enough – and grabs handfuls of my wounded flesh.  But the demons that haunt him don’t live in his cock, and he forgets to feel betrayed by my arousal.

“You hurt me,” I say. “You fucking hurt me.”

“I know.” On his breath, I smell the damp, earthy stench of a guttering fire, even as he comes.

I kiss him in the afterglow. Feel his faltering reach for solid ground. For redemption.  It’s what I have been waiting for. What I’ve feared, hurt, wept, screamed, struggled and begged for. No pleasure, no orgasm can compete with it. It’s the taste of guilt on his lips.

But I’d never tell him that.

How to Survive A Death by Drowning

The first breath is the hardest. On waking, it feels impossible to take in any air with my lungs still filled with the sea water of my dream. I’ve been sleeping, dreaming, floating beneath the surface for a long time.

I didn’t fly to another country; I traveled into the warm, deep green. At first I struggled, like the drowning body always does. I fought for air, for light, for the surface. I kicked and flailed, stupefied by the benthic pressure. I fought the dimming of the light. I held my breath until I was sure the blood pounding in my ears would burst through and turn the water red. The first breath was the hardest and, I was certain, the last. Resigned, drawing the thick strange atmosphere into my burning chest. I was where I was meant to be. Immersed in an alien landscape full of alien creatures who spoke in tongues I could not speak. The tinny sound and deep resonances of this other place. One day slid languorously into the next. Months did the same. Then years. The slow rhythm of endless sojourn.

I floated, numb in the soft, warm cocoon of the place. Unloved and unloving. No great pains and no great joys. The tepid miasma of time slid by. I told my stories in the safety of distance. I smoked my cigarettes, drank my coffee, lay in my broad Chinese bed and watched the rain make things grow and rot, and grow again. I dreamed away a decade.

The day I knew I loved you, I woke up. I rose to the surface like accusatory flotsam, buoyant, breaching into the harsh light and the raw air. Having forgotten I was never a native of the place I’d left, I almost forgot to inhale. And when I did – when I took the knowing of you into my lungs – it burned.

The first breath is the hardest.

 

 

 

Future Perfect

The blessing of a lover who never arrives is that you may wait forever in that state of delicious agony, anticipating a moment that will always float before you in splendid future perfect. You will not meet with disappointment or be faced with impossible choices. There will be no life-changing precipice to leap over. You may carry on, one day blurring into the next, growing older and less desirable, without the fear of having to confront the depressing realities of time’s mistreatment.

There will be no excruciating goodbyes because there will never be a glorious hello. You can dream about how it will unfold endlessly and never be wrong. That first kiss will be all you have ever desired, your first embrace will be the truest thing you will ever feel. His touch, his scent, his voice will always be, in that always yet to be future, sweet beyond imagining.

And there will be no others to compare with the lover who never arrives. They will have spent their arrivals in vain, squandered them on a woman who greeted them with a smile while glancing over their shoulder to the empty street beyond. She was only practicing on them. Only going through the motions. They will never be enough because they were present in the present, real and concrete in their hungers, hard in her hand. Already past. There is no adequate apology for their untimely comings and goings. They’ve betrayed her simply by being real, by allowing themselves to be caught in time and swallowed by its event horizon.

Never fall in love with a woman who is waiting. Especially if you’re the one who kept her waiting. Just like a little boy who, once in entranced by the woman wearing the shoe, learns to accept the impossibility of his desire and settles for the shoe, she has long since acknowledged the futility of you and has fallen hopelessly in love with waiting itself.

 

 

Ad Nauseum

You show me yet another clip of some hapless losers fucking and pass it off as transgressive. It’s about as transgressive as dogs mating. Less so. This endless repetition of some stylized version of what every adult in the world knows how to do without even being taught.

I’m with the censors. Ban it all: for boring me to death, for passing off yet another set of interacting genitals as some special event, for selling brainless drive as spectacle.

Sacks of dressed meat, humping, leaking, squealing in a banal parody of passion. Hollow tubes of skin to crawl into. Blind cocks and semen-daubed women artfully feigning some psychotic ecstasy at being sprayed on. What a fucking carnival of absurdity.

Your hard cock doesn’t interest me. Your leaking cunt doesn’t interest me. Your ejaculations, your gaping orifices, your overacted orgasms.

If it doesn’t hurt. If it doesn’t strip you bare to the core. If it doesn’t confront the part you most fear… I’m just not interested.

Anything else is just a baby-making misfire.