How About Some Fag OC? Pt. 1
Her hair not only matches the color of fallen leaves— the reds, the yellows— but also, uninspired, follows their eddying pattern. She exhales a long ribbon of smoke with fingers so cold and stiff they feel like a stranger’s. He shows up with an array of ugly flowers and the corner of her lips, a thin purple line, wilts emphatically. They met at her father’s funeral, an extravagant thing, where he strained through small-talk, running an impossible table on everything mundane. He’d ask what she did for a living, what she studied. Eugenics, she told him, I want to progress the human species through its series of hurdles. As he walked, one hand fishing inside his peacoat for a lighter and with the arrangement in the other, he wore that same quizzical expression of wistful abandon.
“They’re ugly.”
Under typical circumstances she would be given to feminist railing; reversing gender roles, conceiving him in her shoes, subjugating him with flowers— as she so believed. She often expounded on Battais’ mystique of a flower and man’s exertion of its sexual exploitation, developing into pre-coital repartee with time. A joke that hadn’t started as a joke at all but one that nonetheless had run its course.
“You’re drunk.” He lights a Dunhill cigarette and sits beside her. Her head sags and lulls to one side when she lets out a noncommittal chuckle. The forget-me-nots slide from her grip. “What?”
“My father is all. Keep your head on a swivel, he says.” She laughs and her breath smells like Campari. “Can you believe that? God, what a deplorable human being.”
