Boy sober - part 2

A short story about dating burnout and dream logic

This is part 2 of this short story. Read part 1 here

‘Woman Lying’ by Pierre Boncompain

Desires were raging through her body, growing teeth, crawling all over the walls like spiders. She figured that if she stayed nonexistent for a while and didn’t act like the freak she was, then she could emerge in a year’s time and people would like her.

The loneliness was like a person to her now. It was no one in particular; a blurred face you pass in the street, a stranger you see in the supermarket, that body in the crowd that makes you remember that you’re on your own. It had been quiet and unassuming at first, then one day, it had become deafening and swallowed her world whole.

Earlier in life, she had welcomed it. She didn’t need friends, she told herself. But she did need love. Without that, something in her life had fractured and fallen apart. She was on hold, always on the fringes of what was supposed to be a normal human experience. She existed as the outline of a woman, but with nothing substantial coloured in between the lines.

She returned to the dread of the kitchen. The half-empty vodka bottle still sat on the blood-stained counter. The same cups were drying next to the kitchen sink. Dull light was coming in through the window. The screeching seagulls pierced through her like a warning siren.

The day before already possessed the half-real quality of a dream. If it weren’t for the pain where her finger had been, she would wonder if any of it had really happened.

She opened the freezer to check the evidence. It was still there. Her little finger. With its cluster of freckles, crescent-like wrinkles at the knuckles and chipped purple nail polish.

This last detail troubled her. If her finger were to be preserved in the freezer, it should look perfect. She went into the bedroom to fish out the bottle of purple nail polish she had used to paint all ten fingers the week before.

Returning to the freezer, she carefully slid the finger out of its ziplock bag. She held it down on the counter and carefully painted the nail, paying much more attention than she had done when she painted it before. Afterwards, she admired her work. That was better. Prettier.

She placed the finger back in the freezer and threw herself down on the sofa, her body like a bag of sand. She pressed play on a bad horror film and spent the afternoon daydreaming as visions of decapitated teenagers and masked killers danced across the screen. Her eyes glazed over as she let the romantic fantasies take hold. On screen, someone was chopping off their own leg to fill up a bucket with blood.

The stump where her finger had been throbbed. She understood how the absence of something could make it more present. How emptiness could absorb every moment until life was full of it.