Author S. K. Nicholas

Sometimes, I insert a bicycle pump into her vagina and pump her full of despair. I used to pump her full of my love stuff, but the days are cold, and I’ve grown to resent all that she stands for. I’m not sure if my actions are perverse or an attempt to humiliate. Maybe they’re both, but when she’s on all fours and drinking from a saucer, I take photographs without her knowing and masturbate over them while at work. Eating her like a peach, the acid in my stomach bubbles then resides much like the voices in my head. Spending entire days with my ear placed next to a seashell, my madness worsens to the point where I go three or four without sleeping. When she comes ’round and lays out the contents of her bag on my bed, I make her burn each object in turn. When she cries, it saddens me, and yet I can never bring myself to stop even when she falls to the floor and begs me not to go on. There’s something in me that thrives on corruption. It subsides for years, and then without warning, it rises to the surface and takes over. Placing her beneath me, I make her study her reflection in a mirror as I insert random objects into her. Sometimes they’re big. Metallic, perhaps organic. Other times, I slip in a few fingers smeared with oil and honey and laugh as she squirms at my touch. I’m not sure why, but in the heat of the moment, it always seems to make sense. Sitting in the garden drinking green tea, I’m listening to Motown with a tear in my eye as the heavens open and drench me in rain. Observing the blades of grass that sway in the harsh breeze, I think of Srebrenica and the eight thousand Bosnians that were massacred there in 1995. I see the corpses and the ashes of love that still linger when you least expect it. So many lives. So much inhumanity. Extinction creeps, and as the crows crawl to my feet and tap their beaks on my toenails, I know my time is almost up. With the voice of Gladys Knight filling me with an acute sense of longing, my place among the insects was never meant to be.