Read The Apocalypse Reader for Free Online Page A

get this over to you, to the department office, in less than an hour. Sorry there's no bibliography. That's the least of my concerns. In this afterlife.
     

SWEETHEARTS

Stacey Levine

    You SPLIT THE topside of my leg one night in the summer. Without thought I allowed you my bone. You lifted it away and placed it before you on the floor. You scraped it with your fingers and nails; my bone was not white, but grayish and brown-stained all over; it lay before you as you knelt; indeed, because of this extraction, my wet leg, extending from my body, lay paralyzed, dear, for the nerves had been destroyed. You took my bone and its shreds of wet red muscle; you wanted it, so I had given it to you, adorable one, at great risk to myself and to my detriment, defacement, exhaustion and enslavement, my terrible prostration, my deference, my horror and pleasure, every bit of it my choice, my leisure.
    And you asked that I would pierce you in kind, gouge you somehow, find the green stink in your gut and bring it into the air, the light, astound you with this, rip your layers of muscle, make you feel the curious interstices and gradations of pain that arise when wounds are made wider, or deeper, or are hollowed out from beneath.
    Angel, monster, I would not do these things to you; I only wanted that you would dig me bloody; I itched; I would not rip you, much to your dismay and frustration, because I loved to see how you begged, and when you did so, in screams, my pleasure increased a hundredfold.
    I am certain we met in the past; I am not always certain. This year, huge news has been flooding the world: fevered failures and pinprick successes in economic and foreign policy; I just wanted to be flayed by you, awful darling; I was astounded at having found you; I wanted this always, that you would continue this nightmare as you tore at me daily; I was mustard yellow, green, purple, bluish, all colors, all over; I wanted always to save these colors, to swallow each of your heartstopping blows and see every day how they bloomed beneath my skin.
    I am your starveling, your trash; in the morning you wake to the ferrous scent of my blood tricking across your face, and suddenly you are up, beginning to dig at my navel, tearing upward; you howl that I am bad, terrible, that I am always in error, that I should be different; I should destroy you further, spill your blood more, blackest spider; you burn away my sense that I am myself with your abuse; my veins fill with ammonia, naphtha; I am chilled and familiarly paralyzed. You bellow at the brown and red juice foaming in my stomach as you separate with the strength of your hands the two halves of my belly; you dig my gut, ruining my wet gelatine organs; if only this ecstasy were happiness, my demon, sadist, ass.
    Long ago, when I was just as lonely, my mother made me in her gut out of warm blood and sugar; I became myself there; I could not change. I fed and grew with the blind diligence of everything alive and became myself; I formed; you cannot change me now, my horror, though I can die; though you have flayed me many times, detested me, pierced my throat until I fainted in astonished pleasure.
    And you say you want me any other way, warmonger, simpleton; you say you're going to remake me. That's not possible, but no one can tell you otherwise; I accept your terms, I know only you, your acute, circular unhappiness and nothing else; I revel in our nightmare; I give my organs for you to smash; I refuse to flay you, this being my finest pleasure, second only to receiving your fantastically sustained torture; I will not hurt you; I cannot; you shout in terrible frustration, livid creature, at which point I dissolve in joy.
    Before, when I knew only her, I ran crying, running in circles after my lost mother who had thrown me out of her house, who had sent me away, alone. I know you, she said. You're weak. You'll try to stay here forever but you can't. You can't hide here anymore, she said. Go outside,