Two Stories
David Kuhnlein
I imagined finding him hanged beneath the creak of a taut rope as often as I didnt.
/pəˈzeʃ.ən/
One morning I woke up with my right scapula in my mouth. You would think that is physically impossible, but in the case of demonic possessions it is actually more normal than not.
A snag with Monday is I have to neck all three of my Subtext in one go. Each under the tongue. The man who administers, Sven, can’t be arsed to say why but he’s a pure archcretin.
There’s an impulse to reduce the Tommy and Pam love story to easy pop-psychology terms: they had a trauma bond, he had a Madonna/Whore complex after she became a mother.
We drank the acid. I immediately felt fucked.
I imagined finding him hanged beneath the creak of a taut rope as often as I didnt.
If, for instance, Jezebel had to use the men’s room for some reason, I would rather pee on myself.
That’s why we are “in relationship,” to deliberately alienate each other’s unhappiness—to build an incredible shrine to unhappiness that would be seen for miles in a flatland, if such a shrine could be visible.
I spent the next couple hours grooming myself and getting drunk. I was sick all the time back then.
Do you ever get mad
and want to
hit something?
I tolerated Marcus and Haley because I knew their drill. Marcus would pick me up with drugs coursing through his system
Hallucinated a flaming forest as if lucid dreaming around 9 p.m. Shit myself. Barfed orange slushy chunks.
I blast the airhorn before the lump on the floor knows what’s going on.
My wife watched me walk headfirst into a mirror.
Now there is a skeleton outside my window. And skeletons on all the dating app profiles.
The face in my mirror keeps getting older –
Into the face of the man who beat me
I reminded myself that I spent just as many lonely afternoons in the State Library of Victoria with a pile of international Vogues as I did at a Goodwill in the Valley.
I thought maybe I would learn something about how to be less judgemental, or something.
A few minutes later I was presented with a tall, condensation-covered glass, containing an opaque, dark-green liquid that looked like it had been skimmed off the surface of a stagnant pond. I took a tentative sip.
Every winter, the Jersey Shore freezes into an old car in the driveway, tarped and bricked until May.
How they stabbed me and got away with it!
I guess my approach is not to take myself too seriously, which sounds kind of dumb and obvious, and just to write the sort of book I most like to read, which is usually something heavy but also light on its feet, fast-paced and horny, and generally not too full of itself.
He came down my throat, I slurped it all up.
I didn’t want to write this essay, but I know somebody will publish it and feel good about themselves for platforming a disabled voice.
Our lovemaking is a demilitarized zone.
Shit, is this what the Zoom room people mean when they say fantasy addict?