Brutes

by Dizz Tate

We feel maniacal with hope.

We have always been afraid of being alone but we thought we knew the cure: being together. Now we are together and we still feel alone.

Our mothers call us brutes when they want us to feel bad. It is what they call men they do not like, like our dads.

We laugh. The laugh tastes so bitter it makes us spit. It is cruel because the want inside us is so pure, our jealousy so lethal, our shame so absolute.

My love for him had been so pure and desperate, like a smudgy gel pen heart.

I often prefer my son. He is simpler. He likes to run into things at a very high speed and then cling to me until the pain fades. He could do this all day long, it never bores him, the pain followed by the love. I wonder if he is onto something. He wants to experience the two extremes of life constantly. My daughter is doomed. She wants to understand them.

And we already believed in horror more than we believed in beauty.

Britney met a boy online who said he was a professional surfer in St. Pete. When he told her to get the bus out to see him, she freaked out and said she wasn’t thirteen, she was forty and divorced, and he told her she was a fucking perverted cunt. We enjoyed this and liked to say it to one another. “What’s up, you fucking perverted cunt?” We laughed until we got stitches.

Sometimes longing and love are equals, but the longing is much more exquisite than the love when it arrives.