Fiction: THE END OF ALL FLESH

{photography: steven miller}

“flesh eating bitch,” he mumbled to himself.

“what the fuck? what the fuck did you say you ravenous piece-a-shit?” she yelled back at him, striking his woolly head as she did so.

“nothing, honey, i’m just talking to the baby…” his head was in her lap, lips kissing at her navel through the velour and random dog hairs that constituted her sweater, “i’m just asking it what kinda name it wants.”

“goddammit, you motherfucker. get out of there. i told you: there is no baby. there will be no baby. and if there was a baby it wouldn’t be your baby. i am in love with somebody and she left her sperm bag at home, too!”

the bitterness in her tone tasted like menstrual blood in his mouth. he was thinking now, quicker than normal, which is how it always was when they fought. his mind would explode in ways that speed, acid and x could never have pushed it. not even one of those cocaine suppositories he occasionally enjoyed could get him so activated as a good fight with the woman biggie smalls had taught him to refer to affectionately as ‘my bitch.’ but only when she wasn’t listening, of course.

she was sweet, smart, and beautiful in a canned corn kind of way. a little backwoods girl from a meth-trailer free trade zone, the backbone economy of america’s working poor. she was willful, well educated, tight and a freak. what else could he have asked for from god except that maybe she hadn’t turned out to be gay?

“what the fuck?” she yelled again and this time she threw his lazy, indigenous sperm-bag on the carpet and out of her lap. “you honestly think you can still say shit like that to me? where the fuck are you? i left, man, and i am not coming back. i left you, this town and shit; i don’t even talk to men anymore except for you, bus drivers, and my parole officer, that little bitch.”

he laughed at her joke; he was always amazed at the level of awareness she could maintain even in the most hectic, hellish, and high situations. no matter what, she could argue, insult, insinuate, lie, mind read, and seduce total strangers behind his back all at the same time.

sometimes he wished he could have gotten her to carry a gun. not because he was too freaked out by them himself (he was), but because he would have loved to have deep throated the barrel the next time she threatened to kill him.

the television was broadcasting some shit in the background about the terrorists having possibly used alien technology to stop all air traffic for the last few days, but he could barely make it out so intense was the sensation burning from the depths of his asshole to his nostrils with the stink of his own internal bodily processes and the abundance of lube still dribbling down his thighs.

“this is it, man; i am never doing this again,”she said quietly.

“bitch prolly crying,” he emoted on some deep level maybe right around his prostate gland. he was dreaming it now as nelson mandela and many girls from his highschool drug dealing phase licked his delicate, native-flavored weenie.

and she probably was crying, but it was also hot in the room with the tv on, him shaking and groaning, all these ghosts watching and her arm shoved further up his relaxed-as-only-a-negro-can-relax rectum. thanks to her anatomy classes she knew she couldn’t reach on through and crush his testicles, those vibrant factories of testosterone production, with a fuck-capitalism-and-screw-the-reds-too-post-literate-feminist grasp and once again she cursed her education and the institutions her parents had believed in that allowed her to even be able to string such concepts together in the skip rope chambers of her backlot mind while fisting her whatever-the-fuck-he-is-now at the same time.