My Darling Dreadful Thing

by Johanna van Veen

“Nothing,” she told me, “appeals more to a man than a young girl who’s not been had yet, apart from a girl who’s not been had yet and gives the impression she’ll be had by him.” She made me think of myself as a piece of fruit and the act of sex like plucking a plum with a rough hand, bruising the flesh.

Agnes’s dark lipstick had stained the filter. Never before had I realized what an intimate thing it was to share a cigarette.

Eat her up and drink her in.’ Forgive me, but that sounds cannibalistic.”

“Mama always said Catholics like pain.”

“You know, you’re like a dog sometimes, Roos. You get kicked, and then you trail after the person who kicked you with your tail between your legs, trying to apologize and be forgiven, as if it were somehow right for them to kick you, when really you’re only a little dog.”

But that he was willing to go along with what was true to me, not indulging me as one might a child but with the reverence one might show another’s religion, well, that made me feel a stab of profound fondness for him.