well, she was cute in
the pictures
and in person
but she kinda broke the
spell when
she sat down at the table
and opened her
mouth

She just had to follow
every damn sentence
with a
cringe-worthy “meow” or “nya”
and she would
even rub her hand against
her face cat-like

“What’s up with that shit?” he
would’ve liked
to ask, but
kept to himself and stayed
a gentleman all throughout
the date

She only spoke about
animated shows
she watched and conventions she’d
participate to, always dressed
as some fantasy character

She showed him some
pictures on her phone and he
decided to make this
first date
the last
but then she said,
“Also, when I get fucked I
make those sounds, hehe.”

“What?” he said. “What sounds?”

“Oh, you know what I’m
talking about.” And then she proceeded
to reproduce the sounds
Right there
in the goddamn restaurant

Sounded like some child getting
beat up real good
and repeatedly stabbed all over and
in tremendous pain

The other customers and
the staff
looked over and he could see
hands reaching for
phones, ready to record the
shit

Well, to their credit, it
was some shit worth
recording
You don’t see and hear that
every day

Anyways, at the end of
the day he decided that it
just wasn’t the worst date
he’d been on

nor the worst sex
he had

Anything was better than
that time he
got stabbed by a
self-diagnosed psycho girl

he would start whistling
Very random
and very loud

even at night in bed

and stopping him was
very much a
gamble

The caterpillar-like
stitches on
his wife’s arm were a testimony
to that

He’s never been the same
since his head injury
Poor fellow just had the terrible,
terrible luck to
walk underneath an overpass while
some teenagers were throwing
big rocks for fun

Now he kept calling the emergency
number and crying that
his wife had
gone missing when she’d be just
in the other room or at work

The neighbors filed
noise complaints
because of
his nightly whistling
and apparently he no longer knew
how to use the
toilet paper. He always smelled
and it was worse when
he climbed in bed
besides his wife

It was hell
and hell broke people
and tonight again he started whistling
and woke her up
and as a response
she started whistling as well

They whistled together
in the dark
under the covers
and held hands and smiled
after so long

It was a strange day

He still remembered it years
after it happened

Usually when he got
drunk

It didn’t take much for him
to get drunk
Sometimes two beers
were more than enough

He was perhaps
five or six
and big sister was in her early
teens
She was a rebel

Wore thick makeup
and revealing clothes
and fake piercings
and argued with mom and dad
about tattoos
and boyfriends

But on that day mom and dad
weren’t home
and there wasn’t much to do
in those times. There was
nothing interesting on TV
and the internet wasn’t a thing

But big sister had an idea

That morning they found the cat
dead in the basement. It was
old enough to die. Big sister
went there and retrieved it
and brought it upstairs
and placed it on the window sill
and they watched as birds
came to eat the maggots from
its rotting flesh

Big sister seemed to really
enjoy the show
and he didn’t want to upset her
so he pretended he
enjoyed too

These days
the drunker he’d get, the more
vivid the memory
would play in his head

He had three beers
now