Ariel fingered the blade. She wanted blood. It had started with a kiss in a kitchen. Her thirty-first birthday, they had drunkenly talked of Prufrock’s mermaids and Whitman’s ferry in the dim lighting of Noah’s friend’s liver-colored apartment. It had ended three months later. A photograph of her sucking his dick in the Honda backseat snapped before he went home to his wife and three children had been found. Her question to him when she’d learned it was over had been, of all things, “Did she read my poems?” “No,” he responded coldly. “I deleted those. I don’t want you to think this was ever more than sex.” Ariel cut into her wrist. Cum bucket, she whispered aloud to herself in the bathtub, that’s all you ever were.
Melanie Meyer
meyerme88@gmail.com
The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides