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I Would Hurt a Fly
By
Lily Amirpour
I’m walking to the Boom Boom Room, John Lee Hooker’s bar on Fillmore Street. I’m going to meet a boy I’d met a few nights ago and I can’t remember what he looks like.
I’m mentally preparing for him to be ugly.
Inside it’s dark and people look like shadows. Walking slowly past the bar scanning the room for him my eyes adjust. A guy with long hair in a Hawaiian shirt smiles and waves. Shit.
I walk over and decide I can forgive one thing, in this case the ugly shirt, to have a drink and give him a chance.
At the Motorcycle Club a few nights before, I was drinking myself drunk and feeling like a hungry monster. Through frothy sight he seemed cool and my pussy was belligerent.
I circled like a piranha.
I want a kiss and your number, I said and pushed my lips over his and swirled my tongue round his mouth. He gave me his number.
Now I approach him sober and smile.
“Hey…”
“Yea… Hey, you look different than I thought.”
“Yea, so do you.” I say this a bit too flat and he bristles.
“Are you disappointed?”
I look into his soft round eyes and realize I can forgive the shirt, but not the hair. Two things when long on a man are repulsive: hair and nails.
“Naaww, you’re adorable.” I push my hand into his mop and he heaves a sigh of relief.
He tucks a shaggy strand behind his ear.
He is a hippie.
“Makers, rocks.”
The bartender comes over with the drink and looks expectantly at hippie.
“That’s hers.”
Cheap.
Pulling out my money I begin to feel violent because he didn’t buy my drink. Was I overreacting? Was I portraying an archaic stereotype of gender or was he confirming my stereotype of hippies?
He tucks his hair behind his ear and raises his glass,
“A toast.”
“To the infinite possibilities of our paths, and to the pleasure of ours’ crossing.”
Through locked teeth, I smile and knock my glass into his too hard, a batting ram on a steep rocky cliff. Hooves grind against rocks making sparks and smoke. Nostrils flare.
I throw the whiskey down my throat and the tension releases a little.
“Wanna hear a joke?”
He’s eager like a child.
“What’s better than winning the gold medal at the Special Olympics?”
He hesitates, smile falters,
“What?”
“Not being retarded!”
I flash a toothy smile and the bartender guffaws.
Hippie looks offended.
“It’s a joke, lighten up!”
His smile is meek.
His looks pained.
His expression pays for my drink. Every drink he forgoes paying, I tell another joke.
“What’s orange and looks good on a hippie?”
He stares and says nothing.
“FIRE.” I’ve finished my second Makers by the end of the joke and I’m laughing.
He looks deliberately uncomfortable,
“What do you have against hippies?”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I’m not.” The look of a disappointed parent sits on his face and his arms cross.
“You’re a hippie aren’t you? You are! You’re a fuckin’ hippie!”
He squirms.
“So, you gonna buy us some shots or you saving up for some nag champa?”
I can see he’s having difficulty formulating words. I hail the bartender.
“Two shots of Jamesons.”
We drink the shots. He pays. Things are looking up.
“You know, Jamesons is flavored with smoked pork.”
Still no reaction from him and I decide he needs some mercy,
“Look, it’s a joke, alright? You’ve got no sense of humor, I have no manners, how’re we going to make it through the night?”
There’s one way. He orders us another round.
I ask him when his last relationship was. The change of topic has the effect of CPR on his suffocating sense of humor.
He begins melodically talking about his ex. They’d spent nearly a decade together. He was still in love with her. She took fresh herbs and made things with hemp and dried flowers. She liked to hike. She didn’t shave. She joined the Peace Corps and went to central Mexico where she fell in love with a local Peace Corps worker who taught her Spanish and fellatio. She learned to love these so much it
impregnated her. They moved to the jungle in Costa Rica to raise their baby in the trees with the monkeys and snakes.
Later, drunk and drunker, he’s defeated.
He concedes. His hair sucks. He looks at me,
“Want to cut it?”
“You’d let me cut your hair?”
I gauge his face for sincerity.
My bedroom.
I wonder how far he will actually go and he goes all the way into a chair with a towel wrapped around his shoulders as his long hair falls in chunks to the floor around him. I’m giddy with the irony that someone so nice would entrust his cranium to my scissor-clad hands. I could stuff them in his fucking throat as I walk around him. I revel in sadistic thoughts he knows nothing of. I watch his face. He eyes are closed: Trust, imagining us naked on mushrooms fucking in fields of daisies. Imagining lots of smiling and laughter. Imagining I'd let him suck on my tits now that he'd let me lop off his locks.
I cut it shorter and shorter. I can’t stop. Then he kisses me. He gets my shirt off. Gets at my tits. I'm asking pussy for a response, pussy is asking for a drink.
I have an idea,
“Want to see a miracle?”
His dick is hard, but he can’t resist; he wants to be mystified.
I scan the walls of the room. Across the room, in the large white expanse of wall my eyes dilate. A small black speck stirs.
“What’re you doing-”?
“I need to catch a fly. Alive.”
His brows furrow.
“Go to the kitchen and get me iodized salt and a glass of water.”
He looks confused,
“But I-“
“Do it.”
He leaves and my target has remained stationary, unaware. I grab the empty cup from the nightstand. Stealth is necessary. I breathe tight breaths. Slowly, slowly I draw near. It moves a little jerk, like a strobe light. I’m moving the cup in slow motion up and over the target. Almost a foot away and the fly knows nothing of what fate has in store. It rubs its legs together and-
WHAM
-is captured, already flying into the walls of this new prison.
Hippie returns with salt and the water. He stares blankly at the fly in the cup.
“I couldn’t hurt a fly.” He proclaims.
“I will kill this fly. Then bring it back to life.”
I cover the top of the cup with a book leaving a small crack and I slowly pour the water in. The fly stops flying and crawls around on the glass, creeping up the walls of the cup to higher ground. When the cup is almost full it sits motionless in the half centimeter of free space. I shake the cup and the fly gets swept up in the tsunami.
I uncover it and watch.
On its back in the water, it does the backstroke. It tenaciously swims in circles keeping a mean pace. I grab a bottle cap off the floor and drop it on top of the fly. Nothing left to do but wait. I look at hippie who is watching in disbelief.
“Exactly how are you going to bring this fly back to life?”
“With the salt.”
“What is the salt supposed to do?”
I smile at his skepticism and return to the task at hand. I lift the bottle cap and the fly is taking forever to die, it won’t stop kicking its feet. I put the cap over it again and keep holding it down.
I comfort the hippie who looks like he’s being tortured,
Wait and see, I tell him.
He’ll fly again.
After the fly stops moving I put it on the desk. It looks real wet and dead. I pour salt on top of it, burying it.
“Now we just wait, this’ll work.”
We lean in close and watch intently, looking for any twitch, any sign of life under the mountain of salt. Minutes go by, I unearth the fly and it looks dead and salty.
That fly never did anything else but be dead.
I look at the somber face of hippie. He blames himself for not stopping the morally bankrupt girl from a senseless act of violence. He is an accessory to murder.
Only sex can redeem him from his vegan guilt.
Cold knuckles push past my panties. The fingers force open, my angry pit bull, snarls. Hips sharp like razor blades and he’s inside. If my pussy had teeth it would chew off his penis.
He looks stupid naked.
My eyes are watching his face. He moans and gasps like a girl, with his head rolled back, Adams apple pointy. I’m laughing so hard I’m crying.
“Dummy.”
He stops,
“What?”
“I said DUMMY. Fuck me DUMB-DUMB!”
Paralyzed he looks at me like he just got really bad news.
My fingers seize a handful of short hair from the back of his head and yank hard. I feel his erection waver so I press my other finger into the flesh above his asshole. He stiffens and multiplies. A wave of agony washes over him and I see his Mr. Hyde. He pushes my hands above my head and finishes like a man on the electric chair.
Morning.
Strange, sober light in my room and I hate that he’s there.
My apathy runs deep and I wish he’d call me a heartless bitch or slap me hard on the face. I cannot digest his niceness and I’ve successfully crawled out of my skin into the dark corner of my room where I can safely snarl like a dog.
“Last night was amazing.” He touches me. I’m back in my skin.
“It sure was.” Big teeth.
“I feel like a different person.”
“Me too.”
Copyright © 2004 Lily Amirpour
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