Two Stories
Sweeten
Almost sternly, disapprovingly he was saying it's so important to vote, you really owe it to all the women who struggled so that you could, you owe it to yourself. And although she didn't want to shatter this little world they'd created, this fort with walls of misspelled menus, this moat of black coffee, there just wasn't enough cake on her plate to choke back the words, and Voting is just the appearance of choice. There's no real alternative, it's just choosing who is the better liar.
And behind them someone's baby was screaming, and the radio in the kitchen was stuck between stations, and the waitress was coughing as steady as a metronome, and was there really any point in them adding to the noise?
Carefully, neatly, he was cutting his cheesecake with the side of his fork, the tines messy with crumbs, and he had to lick the fork so it was clean and tidy even though he wasn't hungry. He wanted to push the sugar bowl over to her half of the table because if she pushed it back it meant she didn't like him and if she pulled it closer it meant she did, but it would make the whole table unsymmetrical and he couldn't bear to see that, so he looked out of the smeared window as he did it. She picked up the sugar bowl and he smiled, it was more symmetrical now and it meant she must like him, and she poured a pool of sugar onto the fake-marble surface of the table and she licked her pinkie finger and she spread out the pool and she drew patterns in the grains, squares and stars and zigzags, and tiny white grains spilled over the edge of the table and he could not look, he could not stand it, he had to go.
When she stood up to leave she could feel her thighs stuck with sweat to the plastic chair, the throb of her heart from too much caffeine, the grit of sugar stuck to her fingertip.
The Gold In Her
She is your crowbar, your vodka chaser, the loudest fastest punk song you ever heard. She'd eat what you discard; she'd lick up your saliva, bathe in your sweat. She is a tick, thick on your blood, sickening on your scent. She'd drive across desert to get to you, even in this wet green land where she'd need a major detour to even find desert. She would, for you.
She is your mistake to make, and you know what you will do. You will detour around your life for a day, a week, a year. You will feed her on poetry, wine, engraved chocolates. You will let her grow fat on you.
You will consider staying. You will imagine life with this scattershot pillarbox muffin of a girl; you will wonder if she could fix the knife-edge cross-hair details of you. You will look for gold in her; scrounge through her insides for the glint of coins, so sure that there is treasure. You will find kidneys and anger and bent cogs and red blood cells and mixtapes and tarnished keys and bone marrow and everything except that glint of gold.
By then she will have scratched at your surface, pushed the dirt of your skin right under her fingernails. She will keep the bits of you there, pushed down with toothpicks so they won't wash away. You won't even notice that the dirt is gone, but she will. She will keep scraping that dirt away until your skins shines like apple-peel, until her face is reflected in it.
But then when she is too full to run, so gorged that she can only fumble around and grasp between her palms, you will let go. She will topple, this leech full to bursting. She will rupture like a glob of mercury.
Later, you will miss the taste of her: that sicksweet reek of lust and desperation. You will wonder if you could have glued the parts of her together; that cross-hair detail of yours would ensure that the cracks did not show. You could have made her softer, cooler, harder, hotter. You could have made her. You could.
But she wouldn't really be soft; she'd just be less hard. She wouldn't be hot; just thawed at the edges, frozen at her centre. She'd memorise all the words, everything you ever said, and she'd twist it around so it sounded clean and new, so you'd think that she was.
So the sun and the snow will fall, and you will sleep along with the day. Before sleep you will think about stopping and you will think about running. Finally you will realise that you had fun; and end-of-a-chapter fun is what it's all about. You have a party, you take a photo, then everyone goes home and it's another thing to think about in the endless moments before sleep.
Of course, you will forget that your dirt is still under her fingernails. You will forget that the taste of her still sticks to the inside of your cheeks.
Kirsty Logan is a writer (kirstylogan.com), editor (fracturedwest.com), teacher, grad student, and general layabout. Her writing appears in Polluto, Popshot, Pank, and some other places that don't begin with P. She lives in Scotland with her girlfriend.