Kill Marguerite and Other Stories (14 page)

And Earl went for a fly and didn't come back, not for a long time.

Earl You Can't Leave, said Ed, wrapping Earl up in his leaves
.

*

Ed not knowing what to do grew lonely. There was no way he could know where Earl had gone, or how long it would be before she returned, or if she would even return at all. He communicated with vibrations in the air directed at his neighboring plants in an effort to find out if Earl
had been around. Having been shunned for choosing monogamy, he could gather no useful information.

Serves You Right, communicated Melpomene the distant azalea, For Screwing Up the Reproductive Food Chain. Wasphole.

Ed grew lonelier and lonelier and lonelier.

Earl How Could You Do This To Me. Earl I Wish I Would Die.

These were the thoughts running through Ed's head always and forever during this time.

*

Meanwhile Earl was on a fly, a very very long fly that allowed her to do some long and hard and needed thinking. She knew that things had gone sour but she also knew that nuptials could go sour and then turn ripe again. But sometimes nuptials went sour and stayed sour and never could turn back to ripe.

If Only We Could Be Ripe Again. But How Can We Know How To Do That? I Don't Know.

These were the thoughts running through Earl's head always and forever during this time.

*

The problem was that Ed was now long past due for pollination. Other insects stopped by hoping to join with him, but Ed unable to stomach the thought of another insect in his labellum closed himself off altogether from sex. Anyx the Butterfly would check in on him from
time to time and inform him of any Earl sightings. Such sightings were infrequent and speculative at best.

Ed continued to miss Earl deeply and hard. But Ed was becoming sick of missing Earl, and so Ed decided to do something about it.

What might happen, Ed thought, if he stopped waiting around for Earl who might never return, and did something just for himself?

And so Ed decided to self-pollinate. His own babies would come from himself and he wouldn't need Earl ever again because he would have his own babies around him, his own babies keeping him company in the long cold nights. Anyx would make sure Ed's seeds stayed close and didn't get carried away by the wind, and Ed would have a family and become happy again.

*

Time passed, and passed.

Until one day while Ed was bending down lovingly to observe his children's growth, he heard a buzzing familiar and close.

Ed! Ed! I Have Returned, My Love, To Find You So Pretty!

Ed being astonished and thrilled that Earl had returned but also angry and hurt that she had left, did not know quite what to do.

The anger and hurt won over. Earl Fuck You. I Have My Own Family Now Who Stays With Me And Never Leaves.

Earl gasped. Only then did she notice all the slender new infant orchids peeking up from around Ed lovingly.

But Ed Ed I Love You! I Needed to Think And I Thought! I Want To Be Together! I Want To Start Over, Get Back To How Things Were!

It's Not That Easy Earl. It's Never That Easy And It Won't Be That Easy For Us. Ed swerved his body around with finality, refusing to meet Earl's gaze.

Earl went sadly away. She returned daily to try and try again and again. She made friends with Ed's babies, playing games by dipping and diving in circles around them until they were twisted together and shrieking with delight, with Ed looking on in amusement.

And Earl would say as she had been saying every day since her return, I'm Sorry Ed. Please Can You Forgive Me?

Finally Ed Junior and Isabelle and Yahweh and Iffie who were old enough now to understand the situation nudged and nudged at Ed, yipping and yipping until finally he could only laugh and spread his leaves wide for Earl to embrace them.

And so they were Earl&Ed again, and happy.

*

Slowly or quickly things became strained. Earl loathed parenthood, all these new threats to Earl&Ed. Worse, Ed could not seem to stop jabbing at her as punishment for her long leaving. Over and over Earl rolled around the question of how she could fix the situation.

Ed Let's Exchange Symbols of Love, Earl said one evening as the children were dozing off. Ed Will You Commit To Me For Life?

Ed's petals perked up. Then wilted. He knew what Earl was up to. He sighed. We Can't Use Symbols As A
Band-Aid Earl. They Won't Heal Our Wounds. They'll Only Hide Them. Besides—

Ed was interrupted by Iffie, who screeched, Yahweh Pinched My Buds! Instantly Ed turned from Earl and bent down to take care of his offspring.

Earl's wings slumped. Watching Ed scold his children with devotion, Earl at last understood. Ed didn't love her; Ed just wanted to never be left. Earl had been wasting all this time for nothing, nothing. Now all she wanted was an escape and to be alone. Earl launched forward, desperate to go for a fly.

Ed popped back up, indignant. Earl You Get Your Wings Back Here! You Can't Leave Unless I Tell You You Can!

Earl was sick of this argument as she had never been sick of it before. Earl had wings and could fly, and all Ed wanted was to clip them. So she left.

Ed watched sadly, saying nothing, as Earl's body faded into a dot and then disappeared entirely. He had no idea where she went or when she would come back, or if she would ever come back at all. Maybe they had never really loved one another, he thought, if things could end this way.

Had Ed ever truly loved her?

Ed moved on with his life and reached a certain level of contentment by opening himself up to a number of trusted insects. But Earl lurked in his memory, his
actions, in the way he formed his sentences, and when the weather was beginning to turn Ed felt the shadow of Earl's impending death intruding upon his happiness. Ed could not ever shake Earl off.

Nor could Earl shake the Ed out of her. She heard his voice in her head, and began taking on his characteristics: the way he shivered in the wind, the way he stuck out two petals when he talked. Had Ed ever truly loved her? Or had he only wanted company and affection? Though she wished to, Earl could not get over the demise of their relationship. In a faraway oak tree during the first frost she ended up freezing to death.

THE GIRL WITH THE EXPECTORATING ORIFICES

1.

Once I was seeing this girl I knew. One night she came on really strong, was the reason I started seeing her. I had received a text that said “help. Eiunk.” I had called the next cab.

It was 2 or 3 a.m. in a late night goth club. I'd arrived to find her lurching out of the bathroom, having just vomited in the toilet. The vomiting was from mixing whiskey and absinthe, she explained. Too much whiskey, she reasoned.

Watery snot ran down her lip. She snuffled it back up and into her nostrils, where it rested for a breath, then went running down again, as she told me she was Very Attracted to me, with a wobbly smile. I offered her a Kleenex. She shook her head, hugged me hard. My t-shirt absorbed the snot.

The night we first attempted sex she had diarrhea several times before taking off her clothes. Nervous anticipation, she explained, only slightly mortified. She wanted it to go well. Soon she started crying, out of pain from her ravaged asshole. The snot came down again. Laughing overhard at her lunacy, she pissed on herself, then, during our fucking, which I commenced in an effort to distract her, ejaculated all over the bed.

She was so embarrassed by all of the liquids her body was expectorating, she started crying again, then laughing, and the cycle began anew.

It was like this for two months.

Twice during that time, she menstruated.

Artaud's screaming body is the original body without organs, screaming with suffering and the desire to end its suffering, though suffering is necessary for its survival.

The weeping body is similar, but not the same.

The weeping body is not important. What we have here is an expectorating body. This girl had orifices that expectorated at will.

Was the girl a trap? Would I fatally drown in her fluids? Is there a drowning that is not fatal? Why did she expectorate whenever I was around?

If I had answers, I would not be telling this story like a story, like this. Instead I'd develop a thesis.

Thesis: There is always a girl with expectorating orifices.

Though I liked her violently, was fully and wholly in love, I didn't know what to do with her, or with her body.

Though I also like violence, it was not a part of our relationship. She needed to be safe. She never felt safe alone, or in the streets which she said wanted to fuck her. I don't know how she lived her life from day to day when she was not with me. It's like that guy who had the enormous mutated colon, which contained thirty buckets of shit when he died, from a brain aneurysm. How did he live? But he did.

The girl I was violently in love with erupted all day, every day, and yet was highly functioning. She left home twice a day. She was on a tightly controlled schedule.

As much as I loved the girl and appreciated her extreme difference from others in the world, which made it seem like we were unique and beautiful soldiers whose passion for one another was more intense and worthwhile than any other passion in the history of the world or universe, I felt constantly guilty around her, as though the waves of fluid that erupted from her, that suffered her body, were my fault. Maybe they were.

The expectorating girl tried once to enter into violence with me. She told me she hadn't been straightforward, that she had had a boyfriend all this time, then wrapped my fists in duct tape and told me to punch her in the face.

Role reversal. I erupted in tears.

I was to leave for Germany in a few days. We decided to break it off.

2.

Deutschland. The trip marred before it began. I stewed with heartbreak and self-loathing, both states exacerbated by a festering wound under my nose, caused by the girl with expectorating orifices, who had chewed on my lips after vomiting, leaving a small cut filled with oral excrement, which had led to a mossy infection.

I was always absorbing her. She had told me her favorite novel was
Written on the Body
, which I absorbed on the train from Hamburg to Berlin. I decided she was giving instruction. We were participants in a sweeping and impassioned love affair. She was playing the role of Louise, the beloved, stuck in a dead relationship. I, the unnamed narrator-lover, was tasked with convincing her to leave. I would play the role I was given.

In Berlin, I met up with my first love, a filmmaker who was putting on an art show there. He was there with his boyfriend, who immediately started an argument with him about me. The boyfriend and I had arrived to the show at the same time, and the filmmaker had hugged me first.

It was Pride weekend in Berlin. We went to a club in the Kreuzberg district, where I ran into a dyke I knew from Chicago. She was a friend of a friend; we had sat next to each other during a movie some months ago. For weeks after, another friend and I had gone on about how interesting and attractive she was, and where could we find her again. And here she was, in Berlin, at the same night club, at the same time. She even remembered my name.