by Max Tullio
"Murder me," she says. He tells her he's soft. One of his coaches used to say that about him. About how no amount of road games with cold showers and rickety cots would change that. She didn’t mind, even if he did still sleep with a top sheet, which men aren't supposed to do.
“What does that make me then,” he asks.
She tells a winding, circling, story without a point or an end about a rainstorm in April and reading Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity in the back of a Greek restaurant. She’d found it in one of those little libraries people put outside their houses, except this one was outside a strip mall with three dental offices. The book made her feel embarrassed for everyone in it, and then embarrassed for everyone getting their teeth whitened. It wasn’t sad exactly, but it was something.
He wonders how this was about him. And who he is.
She says it again. "Murder me.”
To him, the way she talks sounds borrowed. Like she learned from movies about prep-schools and being a woman on Reddit. She asks him how he knows a girl who got famous online for posting pictures of her self-harm scars. He tells her he's a scar-fucker, but doesn’t laugh. It's a bad joke, even if his own.
“Not my best work,” he quips.
Without much effort she’s on top of him, tracing the scars on his ankles. She’d been staring a while at the thin white lines and small ridges where the skin healed wrong. She maps one with her thumb.
For a second he imagines he's somebody else. Some novelist teaching at a small college in New Hampshire or Oregon. The kind of man who gets profiled in magazines. The kind of man young women travel to sleep with because of something he wrote twenty years ago.
Then she's scratching his back. Hard. Her nails cutting through skin.
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Afterward she turns him over and kisses the places that sting. Everywhere is quiet except for the eucalyptus branches braying outside.
He asks if she's ever seen Irma Vep.
"No."
"It's vampire spelled backward. Sort of."
She shrugs. He doesn't know why he brought it up.
——————————————————————————————————————————————
In the shower sopping his back with hand soap (he had long ago run out of body wash), he can feel the cuts. Raised and tender already. He reaches behind himself and traces them with his fingers.
Another scar. Not from him, though. And almost, probably, not big enough to tell anyone about.
****
Max is a writer and filmmaker born and raised in the southlands of Los Angeles. His fiction has appeared in publications including Forever, Bruiser, Burial, MidCult*, and Stimulant. He used to live in New York and shuck your happy hour oysters.