***
The bathtub is my coffin.
***
***
In the bathroom mirror I say to myself: "Every day, you are getting older, you are getting fatter, you are getting uglier, you are getting stupider, you are getting weaker, you are getting more boring. I miss the person you used to be. The you I used to know and love. That you."
***
Each of the 4000 women in the pool represents a single frame of the film, a series of 4000 freeze-frames in all, which depict the face of her mother as she changes in pitch and duration over time. The machine was programmed to produce this film by a series of code blocks placed by her father. When the playback is completed, the video dissolves into a frenetic series of stroboscopic flashes that give the impression of the pool emptying out. The women swim about the pool for a few moments then dive to the bottom and disappear from view, one by one, in the same order as they entered the water. We see a crenellated cutaway of the pool from an angle of 45 degrees. The bottom of the pool is lined with white-painted bricks. The top is capped with glass. The windshield wiper blades of the viewer's eyelids sweep the frames by as a strobe light begins to pulse, first with slow syncopation, then speeding up, and then slowing down again. When the last woman leaves the pool and the screen goes black, a series of cracks and pops begin to issue from the sound system, like the sound of a storm drain suddenly opening up or a series of fireworks going off or the sound of a broken typewriter throwing its broken alphabet into a vast, bottomless abyss.
***
I went to bed with you last night and when I woke up in the morning you were gone. I went to look for you in the places we used to go but you were not there.
***
Precincts of the end. A teardrop glistens on your lovely jawline.
***
The white hot pain is gone. The rats in my chest have stopped gnawing on my heart. I take off my bra and shoes and pants and tie the hair ribbons from my two plaits around my neck. The cogs of my sexual clock slip forward a little, much like those of the Lithuanian girl who was picked up by two naval cadets on shore leave at the railway station, in the hour between when the sun dips below the horizon and daylight's last rays are softly diffused and it is almost too dark to read.
***
All around us, the sound of crackling ice. Hideous beings with long, pus-coloured tendrils for arms and legs float around us in a kind of disgusting zero-gravity languor. He doesn't seem to mind. I molest his man-pole with the well-developed muscles of my downstairs mouth in the Amazon sex position with his legs behind his head like a girl who will do anything you ask her to if you ask her in just the right way. Finally, at last, after ten minutes of slow, agonizing, barely-controllable shudders of pent up emotion, I come. He comes a moment after. He groans in the crescendo of release. He cums and cums in 8 volleys for 37 seconds duration of lifespan. I thought only women had multiple orgasms, not men. "Most don't, but, I do," he informs me. I take my knife and he asks me to peel off pieces of my skin for him. So I do, handing them to him so he can use them to wipe up the cum. We are now outside. A kind of pale gold dawn-orange light surrounds us. The wind does too, or, not really the wind, but what feels like the wind, for there is little of the atmosphere remaining. You see some twigs of orange-ish light scattered around on the horizon. “All systems go,” I declare to my wild-eyed and bloody executioner who is none other than myself.
***
I wanted you and I didn't get you and I am pissed off and angry about it. Take it back. What you said. About releasing me and releasing yourself and letting the two of us go. I fucking forbid you to release me. I want you to come and take me and ravish me and rag doll me remorselessly like the morally-retrograded monster that we both know that you really are.
***
The ballerina who died in the bath at age thirteen after her performance as Eurydice. A tanned, emaciated arm dangling over the rim of the bath. The camera eye three-sixties the wrong-way-up. With the inverted view, her dangling, death-limp arm looks as if it is hailing a taxi. She's wearing the lampshade dress, the one from the final scene, it's stained with smutches of his saltspunk, ostensibly the famous choreographer's, me-too'd only six or seven months ago, declared a "super-predator," and already back on the prowl in the academies. We look down at her from the vantage point of a crack in the ceiling of the bathroom, like angels in Heaven or spiders in a web or a clutch of peeping toms catapulted end-over-end into the wild blue yonder. Her face is frozen in an expression of surprise. Incomparably beautiful. Her aureole of blond hair fanned out, gracing her cheeks. And all around her in the water are vials of Oxytocin, blister packs of Prozac, ampules of Dilaudid, used hypodermic needles, a bent spoon, an unopened bottle of Stolichnaya, and an unopened carton of Marlboro lights. Her unblemished, nubile body is shaped like an anoretic violoncello, and is being played with mastery and aplomb by the fast-moving, faintly-discernable, pre-dawn shadows. From our second-floor vantage point, we observe her ebullient young body, supine in the womb of the tub. A sonic stain is slowly spreading through her chest and is congealing and coagulating into a third nipple at the pyramidical apex of her Manipura chakra, the unwritten 8th sign of the Biblical End Times. There is a gaping hole where her cunt once was. We hear her voice call out and round on us through the Soviet-era radio set: "Still alive? Am I? Am I still alive? Please, someone tell me!"
***
A Russian girl on a night out in Stockholm comes home early, drunk and broken. She slides her stiletto heel in and out of her asshole. Repeatedly. In and out. One of the other Russians looks at her and says: "Alexei Navalny is dead." The girl begins to weep and sodomize herself with still greater vigour. Until she has had enough. She began to laugh. At first, it was a loud and resonant guffaw. Then her laughter died down to a series of quick, mirthless, exasperated breaths. I tried to move away from her and leave the room but she swiftly blocked my exit.
***
When had the same thought at the same time: If you put an "s" in front of "laughter," then you what you have is "slaughter."
***
You need to know how I truly felt about you. Let me reiterate. It was a form of love that I never felt for another. Let it kill me to say this. To remember it. I didn't want to let go of this thing inside me. I love how you made me feel like a nobody. Like if I wasn't around then everything would still go on happily for you just the same. Most of all, I never liked the fact that you could walk up behind me and stick a blade in my back and I wouldn't be able to do a goddamn thing about it but love you all the more. Bring on the monster! Show me the fear again. I want it. I need it! I need to be the one holding you back from the other girls with teeth and tendrils and razor-sharp talons. I won't release, not because you don't deserve it, I'm sure you do, but I'm selfish, you see, when it comes to you. In our brief, bloody history together, you made me feel helpless in a way that no other man or woman can claim to have done, but there are other reasons too. Don't you get it yet? I wish to hell that I could stand to hate you. Fuck me in my own bedroom and in the bathroom at my work and in the car at the red lights while I'm driving you to get drunk at those seedy bars that always have the really nice guys in drag getting tipsy on rum and coke in the back room who smell of mischief and cheap cigars and I wouldn't want it any other way than to be with you for always in any way you'd deign to have me at all. We are destined to destroy each other, while the universe screams in silent agony, and looks on from a safe and sound and sanitary distance. Take me now, you fucking bastard. I've had it up to here with your games.
***
I was standing there, dressed all in silver, my barefooted toes splayed over the freshly-wet, reptilian moss that carpets the entire floor and which fringes the perimeter with blue mollusks and glittering flitfish, the water like a skin stretching down, over the side of the lip and splashing to the ground below and pooling into crystal-brain-colored reservoirs for easy beached whale consumption. It has been raining constantly. On the 816th night that she spends locked in that tiny cell in the undersea labyrinth at the bottom of the whirlpool, her hair begins to lengthen into the water. The white corpulent worm which has taken root in her chest has tripled in size and weight and is growing another, vaginal eye. It watches with mild contempt as the end of her anoretic fingertip grows into a mermaid's fish's tailfin.
***
My grave is open in the sand.
My name is a watermark, smudged on my wedding ring.
My cry, submerged, under the surface of the lake.
A woman's face turning black outside the silvery blaze of moonlight.
The tapes that came by mail contain only hiss.
Unless something truly amazing happens, or God Himself intervenes, I'll be homeless in six days from today.
Either way, I'll be dead before then.
So, whatever.
***
