I heard my own voice in my head. It was speaking too loud: You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t wanted more. You’re lying flat like a corpse on the ground. Your throat’s running open from sucking the cocks of all men. Your body is ripped into so many pieces. All you can do is scavenge yourself like a crow.
Listen to yourself, still talking! You haven’t stopped saying bad words and thinking bad things ever since your first time. If you can ever suck someone without looking for his love, you’ll stop running like a slut all lost for your cunt. Look at you. Look. Your temples are burning! Stuff is pouring out of you. Look, it’s coming …
Rolling around in the darkness, my face was scraping something flat. My cheekbones were poking like knives into the floor. I was calling for my lover. I was calling, I was calling, but my flesh had no sound.
‘I can’t do this, I don’t want to do this.’ I heard the guy talking from way up above me.
‘Why?’ I was crying now.
‘I just can’t. I don’t want this. I don’t want to do this to you.’
What don’t you want? What can’t you do? I was screaming in my head. But my fucking mouth was glued shut. I was never coming up for air. I dragged myself away from him on my stomach. My face pressed against the floor. Water poured from my eyes.
‘Stop.’ He was still over me. ‘Stop. Stop crying. I just can’t do this.’
‘Why, why, why?’
‘I can’t. I don’t know. Stop crying, please stop crying.’
‘You don’t love me. You don’t … ’
I broke open. I was gasping from the back of my throat. I couldn’t stop. I heard him walking down the hallway. He was leaving me like that! He slammed a door. Fuck you! Don’t leave me! I was crying, I kept pulling down the hall and toward the couch. Fuck it. Fuck it. I finally pushed my weight up. I rolled onto my back on the couch and sunk in. Pain kept coming and going in waves through my chest. Pain throbbed down the backs of my thighs, it burned my knees, it prickled all through my ribs. I’ll never be with you again. That was pain. My body was tight and packed into a tube. Over and over in my head it was playing: I don’t want this. You don’t love me. God I wanted it to stop. I wanted to fuck. I wanted to get rid of myself, alone like a fool at his chest.
TWO
Jupiter laughed aloud: ‘We have the answer.
There is a fellow called Tiresias.
Strolling to watch the birds and hear the bees
We came across two serpents capitulating.
He took the opportunity to kill
Both with a single blow, but merely hurt them –
And found himself transformed into a woman.
‘After the seventh year of womanhood,
Strolling to ponder on what women ponder
She saw in that same place the same two serpents
Knotted as before in copulation.
‘If your pain can still change your attacker
Just as you once changed me, then change me back.’
She hit the couple with a handy stick,
‘And there he stood as male as any man.‚Äô
‘He’ll explain,’ cried Juno, ‘why you are
Slave to your irresistible addiction