to our small and shabby hotel. She showered and changed as soon as we entered our room. I drank a lukewarm beer I'd bought at the store.
"How do you have sex in Hell?" she asked, sipping beer.
"I don't have sex in Hell."
"Liar. I think the only thing you do is have sex."
"Why do you think the only thing I do is have sex?"
"Because you make me sick."
"Then why did you sleep with me?"
"You know when you feel like throwing everything up? My stomach is always filled with weird things. That's when I feel the urge to have sex."
"What did you do after you quit your job at the department store?"
"I worked at a bar."
"Were you a bartender?"
"No, I was too young. They wouldn't let me mix drinks."
"Then what did you do there?"
"I was a mannequin."
"A mannequin?" I thought of the movie
Mannequin.
It was about a man who loved a plastic model who turned into a person. Are humans that much better than mannequins? Why do cartoon monsters and cyborgs want so badly to become human?
"I was a mannequin sitting on the bar. I wasn't sitting at the bar, I sat on top of it."
"What were you doing up there?"
"I was wearing paper clothes."
"Huh, that's funny."
"The clothes were made of pieces so that you could take them off, one by one. And each piece had a price written on it. People would drink, look at me, then pay to take off a piece of paper corresponding to that price. I wasn't supposed to say anything. People always wanted to talk to me. They wanted to see how my expression changed whenever they took off a piece of paper."
"I would have wanted the same thing."
"Yeah, but I was too young to understand. You know, humans are really strange. I became very different when I was wearing that patchwork paper dress. I didn't like it when guys took off a piece of paper, leering, but then I would wish someone would take off all the pieces. I was sad when there still was paper stuck to my body after we closed. I was the sum of ragged scraps of paper, and I was sitting there, a mannequin with pieces of paper that couldn't be converted into money. Do you get that feeling? I doubt it. It's hard to understand a mannequin."
"Uh-huh."
"One day this guy came in. From that day on, he sat in front of me every night and drank. He didn't talk to me once. He drank a beer and took off a piece of paper from
my left breast worth thirty Hong Kong dollars. He drank another beer, looking at my bare breast. He would do the same the next night, and the night after that. He was only an unimportant salaryman. He wore a wrinkled suit and a cheap tie. I wanted to give him my left breast. I wanted him to fondle it all night and suck it and fall asleep doing that. But I couldn't. If I got caught sleeping with a customer, my breast would be cut off. For a month, he came in, looked at my left breast, and went home. I thought I was going to go crazy."
She grabbed my beer and took a sip.
"Then one day another guy showed up. He was wearing an Armani suit and looked like a small-time gangster. As soon as he sat down in front of me, he took off the three-hundred-dollar piece, the most expensive one. He left all the other pieces. I actually felt less humiliated. He then took off all the other pieces, all the way down to the cheapest scrap. Then he beckoned, someone ran over, threw some clothes on me, and put me in a car. He was the first man who took all the pieces off. I thought I should love him."
She gulped Coke straight from the bottle.
"I started living with him. I wore a paper dress at home. Only for one person, for him. Each time, he paid and took off the scraps. Then I would work for him. But I never slept with him. Instead, during the three months I lived with him, I drank his sperm, probably more than a liter. He didn't ever try to screw me. After he took off all the paper clothes, he made me kneel and eat his cum, then fell asleep. Afterward, every time, I drank the water he had in his houseâEvian. My mouth always smelled like his juice and
Craig Strete
Keta Diablo
Hugh Howey
Norrey Ford
Kathi S. Barton
Jack Kerouac
Arthur Ransome
Rachel Searles
Erin McCarthy
Anne Bishop