Category: flash fiction

How to Be a Bitch | By Najla Brown

Having a fur coat is a requirement. It doesn’t necessarily need to match the color of the hair you already have, but it makes the transition easier if it does. So stop shaving. Stop waxing. Stop plucking. Let your body hair be your first teacher. Watch as it makes your body its home like so many other things will try to. Follow its example. Make your body your home. Protect yourself, but stop hiding the wild parts of you. Grow wiry. Grow strong. Grow defiant.

Like the fur coat, you’ll want to get used to wearing it. To feeling it’s weight on your body and the way it wipes away your skin’s tears. Sweat is a necessity. It’s all a part of your natural musk, that blend of rust and fertile soil, and you need to smell untamable or people will mistake you for the average dog. They’ll try to pick you up off the street. Yell a mix of sweet and sour words from their car in an effort to coax you into their vehicle, their home, their bed. Keep walking, or better yet, start running.

Remind yourself how strong your legs are. How they’ll carry you wherever you want to go and back if that’s where you want to be, and when you’re ready, learn how to walk on all fours. It will feel like trying on your first pair of high heels, but you’ll get used to it. It’s all a matter of preparing yourself for the big night, so use this time to establish your boundaries and protect them. Piss at their corners if you need to remind people that this is your territory and bite when necessary. Don’t apologize. In fact, get a taste for blood. Start eating red meat.

A well-done steak is okay the first day, but by the time a waning gibbous hangs over your head at night, you should be walking out of the butcher store with a full stomach and blood dripping down your face. Use the brown paper as a napkin or don’t, but prepare yourself for how people will comment on your stained mouth and how it reminds them of lipstick. They’ll think you dressed up for them. Don’t accept this. Set the record straight. Practice saying all the things you’ve held back in order to be seen as amenable. Remember, you are not a dog. Listen to how “no” begins to sound like a howl the more times it crawls out of your throat, so speak loud. Play with your range. People may misinterpret your body, but they will understand your snarl, so bare your teeth. If you do it right, white foam will begin to creep out of the corners of your mouth and no one will confuse it for a smile. It’s too late in the cycle to be smiling anyways, so pay attention to nature. When animals begin to flee upon your approach, you’ll know your time is near.

Wait until the night before a full moon. Skip dinner. Download every dating app. and only swipe right on the men who describe themselves as alpha. Size them up by their pictures. Focus more on the ones who take gym selfies or body shots in their poorly lit bathrooms shirtless. Imagine what it feels like to have them inside of you. That fullness that only comes with total satisfaction. Invite your favorite over for tomorrow night. If you choose correctly, they’ll hit the gym before arriving at your place so their bodies pulse with just enough blood to make them look swollen in all the right places, like a berry just asking to be plucked. You’ll be able to smell them from down the street. That mix of machismo and Axe Body Spray will make them easier to track if you need to. You may need to.

It’s difficult to say how a man will react when he meets an actual bitch, so make him wait outside your door after he knocks. Let him stand there until you hear him call you by your name under his breath before turning to leave, then throw the curtains open. Strip completely naked. Let the moonlight kiss every part of you as it readies you to answer the door.

He’ll know he’s come to the right place by the slobber dripping from your muzzle.

Rabelais | By Tim Tomlinson

I once had a writing teacher who told me you can’t write about shit and piss and farts and vomit and I said oh yeah, why not? Didn’t Rabelais’s Gargantua let loose a torrent of piss over the city of Paris? And didn’t that piss drown “two hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and eighteen, not counting the women and small children”? And, in fact, didn’t that gargantuan piss give the city of Paris its name? The City of Lights, and the Louvre, and haute cuisine, and the ballet. But none of that was the point, I told this writing teacher. The point was: what I wanted to write about had nothing to do with shit or piss or farts or vomit. Well, maybe shit somewhat, but only incidentally, because, I explained, what I wanted to write about was this time I was in bed with a Barnard girl who would later become a famous psychiatrist. She made elaborate drawings of dragons and did extensive NSSI skin cutting up and down her forearms—she showed me their red, razor thin lines and it looked like a bunch of railroad tracks linking her wrist to her elbow. So we’re in bed, me and this Barnard girl, and, excuse the French, I have my finger up her ass, I mean buried in her ass, but that, too, wasn’t what I wanted to write about, but it was an important detail because at one point the tip of my finger encountered something like the tip of another finger, only it couldn’t have been a finger, I realized, unless this future shrink had been eating hand sandwiches, a thought that led to the understanding that what I was feeling was the tapered tip of this afternoon’s lunch—the turd first in line for her next evacuation and that really twisted me up. It was like the tip of a long carrot and I didn’t like imagining, no less feeling, the formation of a shit carrot in the digestive tract of this really lovely Barnard girl who at that time hadn’t ever professed an interest in a career in psychiatry. At that time she wanted to be a dancer. I met her in ballet class, and in a way she resembled New York City Ballet’s Suzanne Farrell, everybody’s ingenue, and that’s probably half or more than half of the reason I was in bed with her with my finger circling around the tip of her shit. I saw this living Degas in a tutu, en pointe, her arms en haut. I was attracted to her external grace, not her tube digestif, the contents of which, I had to admit, took me moderately aback, and the fact that I was taken aback took me further aback. I was aback squared, and I flashed on the postscript D.H. Lawrence added to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which he dissects Jonathan Swift’s lamentation about his divine Celia’s evacuatory habits. Was I some Swiftian reactionary, some delicate English toff recoiling at reminders of life’s funkier facts? Was I searching for the kind of woman who farts perfume and pisses champagne? But that’s not what I wanted to write about either, not even the part that still kind of amazes me of when I took out the finger and wiped it on the corner of the contour sheet covering my mattress, which was on the floor in that way we had back then of signifying we were in college, or grad school, which was the case with me, and where I met the annoying teacher who said I can’t or one can’t write about shit or piss or farts or vomit, not understanding that none of those things was even close to the point. And then later, once the Barnard girl had gone home and it was after four in the morning and my head was on the pillow maybe eighteen inches away from where my finger had wiped off her shit, how I just kept my head on the pillow as if actual shit wasn’t less than two feet away. In a way that surprised me. In a way I learned something about myself. I was the kind of motherfucker who would keep his head on a pillow eighteen inches away from shit. Not a pile of shit, a shit streak, shit residue, but shit nonetheless. If you did a chemical analysis of it, it would register as fecal matter, that’s the point, unless I was just compensating for being taken aback upon discovery of the shit’s existence. But that was still not the point I wanted to write about. Because what can you say of any interest about a callow graduate student with his head on a pillow eighteen inches away from the fecal residue of a pretty ballerina with his eyes half open half closed, halfway between sleep and unconsciousness, moderately buzzed on cocaine and gin and unable, therefore, fully to drift off and then it’s sunrise and the dawn is gray and blue then almost dazzlingly yellow, this dazzling yellow sunlight spilling down the hill from Broadway and I say fuck it and throw off the sheets and go to the window where, outside, I see a guy open the trunk of a Ford LTD and stare into the back of it. And I mean stare, like transfixed. At least that’s the way I remember him, that’s the way I see him in my mind’s eye: this guy staring into the trunk of the LTD transfixed, not moving, like he’s almost a picture, like he’s almost aware that’s he’s a picture not a real thing, just frozen in time and space, staring, staring, staring. And that’s what I want to write about: that guy, that light, that car, that morning, that paralysis. I mean, what in the world could he have been looking at for so long?