Don’t apologize for what you want. What excites you. The woman at the bar, voice of gravel and tar, pronounced. The only people who get anything in this world are those who don’t apologize for who they are. It’s your nature.

Her neck was wrinkled prematurely as if she’d lost a lot of weight once. She wore a scarf. It made her look funny, the incongruity. Her ears were large, she hid them behind ironed hair. Mouth with the wrinkles of a smoker. We’re all strange in some way. Why do any of us have to justify it?

Nature. Borne out of experience. The two indivisible. Was it experience or nature, bent her perspective into these urges, created the creature she was? Nature. Borne out of experience. The first welt. The first shame. That feeling in your chest when you stop breathing and just observe the feeling of falling.

He stood at the foot of the bed with a Super8 camera. She wanted to taunt; think you’re fucking Hitchcock don’t you? He did think that. He decapitated her on a train, between Gare de Montparnasse and another ugly station. Wear sexy clothes, walk down the isle in such a way everyone notices, be irresistible, let the audience know why he cuts your head off and puts it in a sports bag, opaque eyes staring upward. Your lovely long hair. Even his nouns were filled with fetish.

Hating attention. Wanting only his eyes on her. She pretends they’re alone. Nobody else. No rushing green and dim suburbs, just his eyes. Walking in shoes that aren’t hers, borrowed, lent, pinching her feet. His eyes on her legs, running up them like warm water. She wants him inside her, she wants.

Other passengers; oh how cute, film students, he’s handsome, she’s too thin, they make a good couple. He dangles his fifth cigarette from obscene lips, his teeth already discolored, his nails dirty. She wants.

Beneath her blouse the bra he purchased, scratches, ill-fitting. She was always larger than she looked, she was always smaller than they thought. Don’t apologize for what you want It’s your nature. Bring the belt. Hold it taut above you, take a photo, let it swing, snapping back, the sound, it’s all in the sound.

She’s not an actress, she’s always acting, he can’t tell the difference, she doesn’t know either. The sound of him slicing through scenes, through cheese, through her skin, the infliction, the leather sounding on her skin. A welt that refuses to diminish ten years hence.

Now we do the last scene, the credits, I want you to be nude, I want to run the camera down your body like oil; hold the credits on little red hearts in front of you, don’t let your nipples show, don’t forget to shave carefully, it’s got to be perfect. She’s sucking in her stomach, pulling up her breasts, arching her back. It turns her on. He puts the camera down, and before it finishes rolling, he’s inside her and hurting her. She can hear the sound of it clicking, like it approves, taking in his thrusts like a hungering threesome.

Don’t apologize for being made that way, the woman therapist, she’s got green eyes, no cleavage, the smooth skin of a flat chested dancer. She would run her tongue down from her neck to her navel and then between her, until she screamed. Her skin holds color, a kaleidoscope. We all of us have our bents, she says, her voice is low, like she turned the dimmer switch to the last setting. She keeps her nails short.

He beat her because his penis was too small to do what he wanted. Standing at the foot of the bed, observing the leather cuffs, her exposure. If he could, he said, he would defile her with every pore of his being. He would bang her so hard her womb would turn purple. That urge couldn’t be sated. He transferred the rage and the lust to the whip, the belt, the restraints. She let him because when it hurt, she felt …

Years later she has a child at her breast and the child bites her. She rises her hand instinctively. She gasps and holds her breath. Years later she has a lover with one breast. the other is mangled and scarred, the scar looks like ice, she touches it with her tongue, the heat from her tongue evaporates. Her lover likes to strap on and ride her, delving deep into what makes her tick. Holding her throat, her wrists, placing too many fingers like pianist, until metaphorically they both bleed.

Her child has his eyes but none of his rage. His father is never Hitchcock. He makes pornography and spends his parents money. He fucks women and girls whose names he never knows. He keeps a photo of her in a box she gave him at 17. In the photo she’s looking down and smiling. He touches himself to that photo, more than makes sense.

Years have wrapped themselves in gauze, they are dabbing wounds, rubbing cream into bruises. He dies at 38 from an unnamed disease. She wonders if he carried it always, and it burned like absinthe, behind the leaning panther of his fury. She can feel his small hands at work on her. She can feel his intrusion, his blunt burial of niceties.

He slapped her once so hard she felt music in the air around her, chiming. It was at a birthday party, hers. She was standing to toast, her long neck, her thin wrists, peacock feathers in her hair. Someone gave her an oyster, she’d drunk a lot, she accepted it. The slimy feel of it going down her throat. Akin to gagging. The smother of fabric against her lips, binding. Somewhere a chair harshly pushes back, the sound again of bells, his flat hand slapping her high cheeks. The words; how could you? The way they sounded horrorstruck.

She felt she had struck the hardest blow. With her betrayal. Boyed by the oblivion of merriment. He never invited her to his apartment after that. He slept alone from that day on. She was not thrashed, struck, beaten, injured. His repulsion hurt more than all combined. She tried touching herself but it felt like dying. Or at least, what she supposed, dying felt like. Nobody understood. The therapist told her to get a pet. The lover married and had twins. She watched her urge diminish like a candle lit when someone has passed on. The very last flicker, and then it grows cold and crumbles to the touch.

Don’t apologize for being made that way. It’s your nature. He whispered it the first night. She came to understand. He recognized in her, that broken, magnificence. He knew what she sought and met it, side-by-side, two pieces of fractured wholes, touching imperfectly. The pain woke in her, an unbearable need to be alive. His mouth against her lips, his tongue entering, she didn’t need gentleness, she didn’t want it.

She wanted to inhabit the violence behind his eyes. Urging on a fast train. Make it look real, make it look like you are making love to the entire train, make every movement bewitching. Excite the audience with your every motion. Come on, you can do it. I’ve seen you do it. You must. She sits down in the train carriage, waiting for the murderer behind her to garrote her. He’s got a white scarf made of silk. He will do it fast and sudden, even as she expects it. She’s wet between her legs, her chest is rising fast and furious to the perversion of chiming bells .

His eyes reflected through the lens of the camera are so close they feel like they are climbing inside her. She may as well have her legs splayed, she may as well be one of his porn films in the future. But he’s not that yet and she’s not that yet. She’s in love with a ransacker of souls, he’s in love with a submissive who wants him to turn her nipples into flowering bruises. He has no penis but he has a camera and angry fingers. Now touch your lips like you are daydreaming, he says, erotically, slowly. Now strangle her, he commands, and the man behind her, pulls the white scarf taut.

16 Replies to “le language des jeunes”

  1. I don’t really think you’re a devil woman! I just typed what I felt in the moment, it was very sharp and observant / insightful, great writing Candice! (just clicked the like button, would have earlier, but must have nicked it)

  2. You outdo yourself with this, Candice! It’s wild and intense, as it should be. The emotion! I adore your writing. It truly moves me, no matter what, you manage to touch my soul.

  3. Truth be told I want nothing better than to write like this and publish with you some journey of words – this is my goal for this year.

  4. I really appreciate you for reading and saying this – it encourages me immensely

  5. Intertwined lives, lifetimes, journeys told in flashing, time shifting – Tara’s right that you’ve outdone yourself. Just amazing.

  6. Thanks? 😉 It’s just a story. I do really appreciate you reading Ogden.

  7. Ah I like you no matter what my friend because you are so very much alive

  8. I’m shaking my head over here with one of those amazed/exhilarated laughs. You can keep writing stories like that for as long as you like, my friend!

  9. I am so very, very appreciative to you for reading and your lovely words – made my day xo thank you xo

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