Work Text:
1.
She brings me her supermodel heart, and the bible she keeps on her shoulders. Novocain and sleeplessness and pregnancy tests, and I come home late and leave early and we grow old that way. I only live to 23 and she to 26, but we're well past ripe by then.
She is always beautiful and I never love her, but I grow used to her and that is the whole story. Nothing is ever good between us, but nothing is very bad, either. I grow frazzled and she loses consciousness and we pay the maid who comes twice a week to water the plants so that they don't die.
She, surprisingly enough, is the calmest tragedy.
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2.
He is stringent with his crossword puzzles, and always finishes at 10 AM on the dot, I am told. I am told everything I know about him, or else glean it from tucked away newspaper articles and office gossip. The whole of our relationship exists through an intermediary.
I don't know him at all, and I like him more than anyone I have known.
He sounds different in person than he does over the phone, or maybe it's just the high-notes that his voice hits as he watches me plummet to the floor, gasping and slavering desperately. I probably sound different, too.
He only stops worshipping me when I let him stop, and I only let him because I'm bleeding out from high-impact chest wounds.
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3.
If I could have loved anyone, it should have been her.
If I could have eaten dinner at anyone's table and traded jokes with anyone's aged relatives and taken on walks anyone's small, society-mandated dog, it would have all worked out perfectly. We would have gone to wine-tastings and I would have kept the devil in my back pocket and the world in my front, and things would have settled like that.
I didn't mind her lipstick on my mouth, but her fragile bones burned up too easy, and it wasn't her, even if it should have been.
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4.
He had spit in his mouth and clammy hands and the dirt tossed over his grave smelt earthy and fresh, like a park we could have walked through together, pretending to be unaccompanied and swapping mutually plagiarized theories about the state of world affairs.
I would have taken my jacket off at home and he would have walked straight back to work without shedding his shoes or hat, skin warming in the mechanized heat, eyes glassing over and out of the room I was in. We wouldn't have eaten dinner together. We wouldn't have eaten dinner at all.
I would sleep in a bed and he would sleep on a chair, or a sofa, or the floor, counting up and then down and then up again, unravelling all my puzzles and righting all my wrongs, or wronging all my rights. The sound of him shuffling through the kitchen to make a new pot of coffee would have woken me up before my alarm.
He would tell me his theories and I would tell him he was wrong. I wouldn't kiss him goodbye as I left for work, but I would want him to want me to.
None of this never happened, and it shouldn't ever have.