This is just a story.

Love and Eels:

On the final night they spent together, he made pasta. No one had ever cooked for her before. She was intoxicated by the comfort, the domesticity of the act. It was probably a symptom of something Oedipal, not enough care from her father or some shit. She’d tried to brush the thought away. Freud is an ideological recreational drug best used sparingly, and she was no first time user. Side effects: rage, diabolical wishes that ones vagina actually would grow teeth and initiate a spree of vigilante justice, the consumption of all the condiments in ones fridge (including an entire can of cake frosting and half a carton of sour cream) and occasionally the death of independent mental capacity. She’d concentrated instead on exploring the grooves of his bare back and shoulders hoping her hands or mouth might uncover a flimsy crack in his demeanor, a place to burrow up under his skin.

Freud spent a portion of his youth dissecting hundreds of eels in search of their reproductive organs, attempting to disprove Aristotle’s hypothesis that they birthed from the guts of the soil. He was unsuccessful and changed the direction of his studies, leading to his eventual explorations of psychoanalysis and sexuality. 132 years later, a woman holds a man, and she wishes for a knife, or an organ, capable of penetrating and infecting his body, dissolving him into a shuddering mass of adoring jelly inside a translucent sack of skin. This is what he has done to her, and they call him a man. She stays quiet and acquiesces to his pillaging hands and loveless kiss. Thanks to the elusive gonads of an eel, there are dangerous books about women like her, women who dream of reciprocating the piercing, destruction of their soul…

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That was my Love:

Part 1:

“Are you this ridiculous with every strange woman you meet?� I chide softly, smiling at him through the side curtain of my hair. His lip twitches with foreign emotion, reminding me of the consistent unreadable quality of his mouth. His cheeks subtly undulate and bulge, stretching to conceal the epicenter of this shaking. I wonder if he is meant to be appreciated without vision, like Braille, maybe his lips have to be touched. My heart is ringing obnoxiously loud and it’s probably only a matter of time before everyone catches on where the noise is coming from. I hate being the idiot who can’t remember to put her organs on vibrate.

He considers me out of the corner of his eye.
“You have the most astounding laugh,�, he replies quietly.

Part 2:

While engaged in a stare down contest with a pen he left on her desk, she makes a mental promise to herself to never again allow a man to fix or touch an object she can’t later dispose of after the inevitable fin. Unlike this pen, which will soon find residency in the garbage under the sink, the closet door he reattached is a little more permanent.

The objects he fixed for her tremor slightly under her gaze. If he’s gone will the lamp come loose? These surfaces pulse, rippling like waves with the echo of his thin fingers, as if he’d impregnated the walls with rhythms akin to his blood flow. Couldn’t she have changed her own light bulbs?
She turns off the lights and tentatively sits on the floor near the fridge, fearing what unearthed memories lurk beneath the tile. Do memories live autonomously? More importantly, are they subject to the laws of osmosis, capable of diffusing through the semi-permeable layers of her thighs? She considers phoning her mother to ask if her 9th grade chemistry notes are still boxed away in the basement. Someone must know.

Posted by Alissa McCourt at 4:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)