I am (Not) What I am Page #6

The Great Irritation

• Fiction
• Horror
• Short story
• Fantasy

								

 A couple were arguing outside of a bar, the fight growing more heated by the hour. At its climax, the man drove his partner’s skull into a brick wall. A group of men surrounded a homeless girl in an alleyway, pinning her to the ground. Pipes and rods were in their hands. They spread her legs. Her screams rang out for miles. Newscasters reported the disappearance of a young woman abducted just outside of a downtown nightclub. Days passed. Weeks. Then her body was found in an empty lot; dismembered, the parts deposited into a series of coolers. On an excursion to the city’s center, the young man spied a woman, scantily clad, bob-cut bouncing, being followed by a man for several blocks. He followed close behind the pair to assure her safety. When the man noticed his presence, he ducked around a corner; disappearing into the dark of a lightless street. On a bus barreling toward the city’s point, the young man saw a woman riding in the opposite aisle. She sat with a tote bag at her side, hollowed out to fit the frame of her tiny dog— a Chihuahua. A man accosted her the entire ride, growing angrier the longer she ignored him. He threatened to follow her off the bus when her stop arrived. At this threat, she took out a box cutter and pressed it against the man’s cheek, threatening to give him a “buck fifty”: a gnarly cut to the face. The man fell more silent than the grave— he left her alone. 

Flanks a tremble, eyes like saucers, it seemed that the whole gender stood armed to the teeth out of fear of the male element. Tasers in purses and pockets, mace, keys affixed to knuckles, knives ready to maim, cat ears fashioned into daggers, strobing flashlights, rape whistles, and beretta pistols nestled between compacts and lipstick. These were the concealed, mammalian venoms of women; the weapons of monotremes, lorisidae. Strategums perfected through a millennia of trauma— the underbelly of nature. The young man knew this. Many a night he saw the flash of retractable blades, heard the drum of a gun’s hammer pound through the air, smelt the iron stink of men’s blood drying in the street. Blind, foolish. Men’s urges were a clumsy practice. A sticky handed exercise in thoughtless passion. Indiscriminate, reckless; the idiot ache of a shotgun ready to spread itself as far as possible. Deleterious. Fumbling. Prone to error. Men’s lives were fixed in orbit around some invisible planet, a dim revolution; its pull impossible to define, its influence impossible to ignore. Reproduction, a life’s trap; shackling them all to sad and fallible systems. To what, then could he compare the people of this generation? What were they like? To him, they were like children in a crib dazzled by mobiles of jangling keys. Not that he fooled himself with ideas that he was more noble. Dimwitted. Hopeless. Perverted. In his mind, the young man was just another drooling goon gawking at girls on the street. He poured over every detail of their bodies— and yet, upon meeting their eyes, was not so delusional as to be overzealous. Hungry. He knew his place. The majority of his sex could not requite their feelings except through force or coercion. The young man stood among the ranks of the unrequited, but knew he could not cross the irreparable line of assent. More often than not, when he caught a woman’s eye, he blushed and looked away; the potential of his glance’s discovery, a great shame. He did not want to cause harm. He did not want to cause offense. And so he initiated a painful process of abnegation: wrenching himself away from the age-old mechanisms of copulation and companionship. 
Though, despite himself,  he still coveted what he saw everyday. Hair like silk; banded, straight or otherwise, always bouncing, luxurious; frame prim and proper, manicured to a tee, eyes like live coals— dazzling and hypnotic. Everything smoldered, glittered, burned at this sight. The scopic gaze electrifying his sex; glaring as lively as a penned animal behind his weary eyes— forever searching for a returned look, forever disappointed at its absence. Always searching, searching. Pinned to the body of a hope that would never be redeemed. Forever longing for the approval of a sex that avoided him with strict vengeance. His lack lifelong. At times, he thought he must’ve been born screaming; the banshee cry of a demon, wailing for comfort— begging for touch. He was unraveling, coming apart, torn to shreds by cruel mechanisms of  deficiency. A lead-lined yearning.  All he ever wanted was love. Love: the ghost of his life, lingering like a stain wherever he roamed. Always there, always beckoning— a tune louder than any music, more intangible than the most vicious apparition. A jawed fantasm clicking its teeth in the drum of his ear. Doom was on his mind— repeating incessantly. One of many ruminations clogging his thought’s chamber. All around him, he felt mechanisms of disintegration locking into place; cogs pounding, spring locks snapping. A series of prominences standing out to him like stalactites; the signs and wonders of the Wille— proofs of a curse he could not ignore. Happiness, he saw, was an exclusivity: reserved for the ranks of better Men. 

Couples flooded the sidewalks, flocking en masse to city centers and malls, glutting the air with the sound of their joy. At times, it seemed as though those bewitching pairs were laughing directly in his face: amused by the obvious sight of his suffering— thinking of him as trash. A clown meant to maximize their own delight. When he made eye contact with one of them, the woman would avert her gaze almost instantly, while the man would stare him down like a true and present danger— edging him as far from their partner as possible. Everyday was spent alone. Men, the whole race, saw him as an eye sore: a non entity, ripped from the context of material life, invisible and deserving of utter neglect. Seas of them parted on que at the sight of his negligible approach. They operated off of a vertebrate’s affection. Carnivory. Consumption. The spinal cognizant of a race defined by cardinal devotions. Sacred rules: who can I eat and who will eat me? Who can I dominate and who will dominate me? Who can I love and who will love me? Questions: their smallest parts exploded, fragmented— separated into the processes of  pleasure and elation defining all human existence. Socio-sexual politics. Resource acquisition. Grander designs. Who is, ultimately, good for me to associate with? The young man meant none of  Men’s criteria. He was the Un Heigen Messen Heit Uber Haut: the cosmic disappointment. Polite people fidgeted during their interactions with him: shoulders rocking, uneasy, eyes darting, hands rubbing, always self assuring themselves that they could make it through their temporary dalliance with the young man. That he would leave as soon as possible— before their stomach’s gave out, before their skin began to crawl. They thought they were subtle. The young man clocked them immediately; the Voices of the Wille, making their disgust more apparent. Some women had the decency to disregard him all together: a slight glance in his direction before averting their gaze from his blood-shot visage— sponging him from their memory all together. Others weren’t so kind. As they passed, he gleaned their grimaces of disgust in his periphery: despairing eyes, terrible as an old serpent. 

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