You've Lost a Lot of Blood

by Eric LaRocca

I suppose we all do in some way even if we’re content, dangerously happy with the body we’re sleeping next to, with the body we use for sex, for companionship, for love. Little insects—barbed and dangerous with their glittering exoskeletons and their sharp pincers—circle inside my head and whisper indecencies to me. For once, I’d like to see myself outside of myself. If that even makes sense. I’d like to crawl outside of my head and look back at the horrible thing I’ve become, the soulless spirit residing inside my shell.

I killed him because if I didn’t, something might have tethered us together and that would have been a suffering far too unimaginable for me to even consider.

But I’m talking about oral history—stories that aren’t written anywhere, that are mythic, that belong to the mouths that share them. For instance, that story you just told, that became something else when you told it. You could’ve left out certain information, added what you wanted. Storytelling is an art form, and it belongs to no one.

Ever since the invention of skin, the human body has been a vessel of mystery—a purposeless shadow of oneself, something to be revered for its complexity but also never understood.

AMBROSE: It was a piece of exploitation trash. MARTYR: How can you say that? AMBROSE: You’d defend that film? MARTYR: It was a moving portrait of one of Japan’s darkest secrets—a dark stain on their history. AMBROSE: That film is a dark stain on their history. Exploitative. The work of degenerates. The same people who praise that film are probably the same people that cream their pants over anything Darren Aronofsky directs. MARTYR: You know full well mother! 2 was a cinematic masterpiece. AMBROSE: Try “surrealist trash.” MARTYR: You think a film that layered, that textured is garbage? AMBROSE: It’s a two-hour masturbatory session. Vapid. No substance. Bland at best. Most critics weren’t fooled by Aronofsky’s prowess as a director, instead calling him out for a film that’s so remorseless, so tasteless that it’s an insult to the viewer. MARTYR: Everybody’s a critic.

Finally, some mother! discourse between two murderous gay lovers

If relationships were physical things and not figurative constructs, then they would be parasites. Love between two people always changes who you are.

All those years being told I was a genius, that I would do such wondrous things in my life. Adults love to say those things to children. It hurts them more than they could ever know. Because when a child grows up to live averagely—to live a mediocre life—they think they’ve failed somehow. And perhaps they have. But it’s really the adults that have failed them. It’s the adults that have misguided them into thinking that they were special, that they were destined for such greatness that never came.