Reptile

Fiction | First published in BREAKING BIZARRO on September 7th, 2019

You always hold the door open for them, and you wink when they flash a smile of feigned gratitude; no one gives a shit about chivalry anymore, but most of them are polite enough to pretend like they do.

“Up the stairs,” you tell them, putting a hand on the small of their back and guiding them forward. “First door on the left.”

They always comment on the neatness of your apartment, and on the crisp, fresh smell of the island-scented Febreze that masks the stale odor of cigarette smoke. You offer them a drink, but usually they decline, for which you are thankful. You despise pleasantries, and the coffee/dinner/movie date is laborious enough. Most of the time, you can get their clothes off in six-to-eleven minutes once you’ve gotten them inside. Nine-to-sixteen if they accept the drink offer. Eighteen-to-twenty-four if they request a refill. The latter is an infrequent occurrence.

The next part is typically just as tedious as the date. The fervent kisses, the tangle of limbs, the bed springs that squeal like suffering hogs. The sighs, the heavy breathing, the shuddering headboard...the clawing nails and the curling toes and the thighs that grip your waist in a vice grip. And then that last, explosively awful moment, rife with elevated moans or ecstatic shrieks, after which you collapse onto sweat-dampened sheets, light a cigarette, and sink into a murky pool of comfortable self-loathing.

Occasionally the sensitive ones will cry afterward, and that’s always a drag, but you’ve learned to deal with it. You’d cry, too, if you could, but not for the same reasons they do.

There’s always the pillow-talk of varying degrees of depth, and you accommodate them as much as you can, for the sake of politesse and nothing else. Once it’s gone on long enough, though, you gently insinuate that their departure is required, citing some morning obligation that necessitates your slumber. You never invite them to stay the night, and they never ask.

After they leave, you feel reasonably okay for a little while. Sometimes even for as long as two or three hours, you’re able to suppress the misery that accompanies each endeavor of this kind. That misery is, for a short time, washed away by post-coital warmth. Biochemical pleasure briefly beats out existential suffering.

It never lasts.

Most of them call the next day. The others wait until the second or third day, probably hoping in vain that you’ll be the one who initiates contact. Sometimes, if the sex is decent enough and their presence tolerable enough, you’ll agree to see them again. You ignore the rest until they give up.

The ones you do keep around exist only as mild distractions from the crushingly despondent state of your tragic existence. Once they stop being distractions and become added sources of unhappiness, you discard them like the trash that you are.

Whenever you break things off in person, they tend to cry and plead, bleating out promises and excuses. You always find this comical, because anyone who is upset by the notion of losing you is masochistically unhinged. Like a cancer patient who begs the doctor not to remove a malignant tumor.

These are the people you attract.

You collect them like trading cards, always telling them “Up the stairs, first door on the left,” always fucking them and then exchanging them for a new one and hating yourself more and more every time.

Until she comes along.

You tell her, as you tell all of the others, to come up the stairs, it’s the first door on the left. But she gets there, and you don’t fuck her. You want to, but not out of your usual self-destructive desire for compounded dissatisfaction. No, you want to fuck her because you can tell from the moment that you meet her that there’s something different. You can tell that it won’t be like it is with all of the others.

You think that maybe, even, she can save you.

So, the first night, you don’t fuck her. Nor the second, nor the third. You just talk deeply in the dim, smoky light of the living room, sitting on the floor with the absurd heart-shaped ashtray between the two of you. She looks at you through the gray haze and you don’t want to die. For once, you’re actually okay with being alive.

There’s something else, too. There’s laughter. Not the forced, coughing laughter you choke out when you’re with the others. Not the humorless, gagging chuckles with which you indulge the other girls’ drab senses of humor, pretending to think that their shallow jokes are as funny as they think they are. No, the laughter with her is real. The first time you hear it emitted from your vocal cords, you’re startled at the sound of it, because you can’t remember the last time you heard yourself utter such a genuine expression of...joy? That word makes you shudder, but it’s the only one you can think of that fits.

Then you’ll say something mildly-to-moderately funny in your flat, monotone voice that exhibits little sign of life, and she laughs. She tosses her head back, that perfectly angled pale face framed by long, rolling locks of bright pink hair, and it’s maybe the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.

There are many nights like this. You lose track. You pine for her in ways unbearable. You stop telling girls to go up the stairs to the first door on the left. Calls from recent trysts go unanswered. Dirty text implorations unreciprocated. Your bedroom stops smelling of latex and poor judgment.

Now, it’s only her.

But life is never that easy. There are no fairy tales. Happy endings are just something you get from underage sex slaves at sleazy massage parlors in Cambodia.

* * *

Early one morning, you awaken from an unremembered nightmare, drenched in feverish sweat. You stagger into the bathroom for a drink of water, and when you flick on the light, something in your reflection startles you. Your irises have narrowed into reptilian ellipses, and their hue has transformed from deep blue into a shade of burnt amber.

There’s something wrong with your tongue, too. It feels like a foreign obstruction in your mouth. Gripping the edges of the sink with perspiring palms, you open your mouth and are alarmed to discover that the tip of your tongue has bisected into a snake-like fork.

It’s because you are a snake, hisses a voice from inside of you. You’re worse than a snake. You are nothing.

You shut off the light and go back to bed.

* * *

If she notices the changes, she doesn’t say anything about them. You suspect she just doesn’t want to be rude.

“I don’t have a whole lot of emotions,” she tells you one night, sitting next to you on your couch, the steadily-filling ashtray lying between the two of you. She holds her cigarette elegantly in the air. Wisps of smoke coil up to form a cloud over hear head. “That’s why none of my relationships have worked out. That’s why I don’t have relationships anymore.”

“Yeah,” you say. “I’m the same way.” And you thought you were. Really, you did.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she goes on, “I do have some emotions. There are some things in the world that really make me feel very intensely. Not many things, but they’re there.”

“Like what?”

“Have you ever seen The Land Before Time?”

You were obsessed with it as a child, actually. You had the entire collection of VHS tapes, but you don’t tell her that. You just say, “Yeah.”

“I don’t know if you remember, but there’s this one part where Littlefoot sees his shadow cast against this big cliff, and he thinks it’s his dead mom. And he gets all excited and runs after it, but then he realizes it’s just his shadow, and that his mom really is dead. That part still fucks with me. Do you remember it?”

You do, now that she’s brought it up, but you haven’t thought about it in years. You can picture it now, though—this dejected little dinosaur, realizing that he’s all alone for the first time in his life—and it makes you want to cry. You can see yourself as a five-year-old child, sitting in front of the TV, uncorrupted by the world’s evils and tribulations. You can’t be sure, but you probably cried at that scene. Unlike Littlefoot, though, you weren’t alone; your mother was there to stroke your hair and tell you that Littlefoot would be okay, and that everything would turn out all right in the end.

And for Littlefoot, it did.

But not for you.

You’re not okay.

Everything is not all right.

And no one is there to stroke your hair anymore.

You think of that song by the Replacements, “Anywhere Is Better Than Here”.

“They play with your head, but they never stroke your hair.”

Maybe that’s why you’re always telling girls to go up the stairs to the first door on the left.

So you won’t feel alone, even for just a little while.

You look into the girl’s eyes, and you want to tell her all of this. You want to put your head in her lap and cry. You can’t do that, but you can do something. It’s one of those moments you’ve passed up in the past. One of those moments where you could have done something, should have done something, but you didn’t. You hate yourself for each and all of those moments.

“What is it?” she asks, and you look for something in her pale blue gaze that might give you a sign, that might tell you whether you should do something, or nothing at all. You search her face for some kind of invitation, but if there’s one there, you can’t see it, because you’ve never been good at identifying that type of thing. That’s why you always do nothing.

But doing nothing has just gotten you up the stairs to the first door on the left with an endless parade of loathsome girls in your wake.

You close your eyes.

You lean forward.

The half of a second before your lips touch hers is fraught with a million clenching feelings of self-doubt. You expect her to turn away or pull back. The hissing voice inside of you screams, You’ve ruined it, you’ve ruined it, YOU’VE RUINED IT! You worthless shitfuck, do you really think she would go for the likes of you? Stick with your brainless trollops and leave the real girls to the ones who can handle them.

But she doesn’t turn away. She doesn’t pull back.

Your lips lock, and your cold, fearful kiss is warmly returned.

You’re positive that she’ll recoil in disgust when your forked tongue works into her mouth, but she doesn’t.

What ensues is far different from the system to which you’ve grown accustomed. Your movements are not practiced and procedural, as they always have been in the past. The mechanical, inauthentic manner in which you treat intimacy is eschewed for something smooth, natural, and organic. You’re not just going through the motions. The motions are going through you.

Afterward, lying next to her and passing a cigarette back and forth, you don’t hate yourself.

For once, you don’t hate yourself.

You crush out the cigarette when you start to taste the sourness of the burning filter, and then you lay your head on her chest.

And with her long, lacquered fingernails, she strokes your hair.

But life isn’t that easy.

There are no fairy tales, and you’re not in Cambodia.

“People like you are so rare,” she says.

Your voice is hoarse when you croak, “What do you mean?”  You’re certain she’s finally going to call attention to your reptilian metamorphosis.

“Oh, you know. Most people attach all sorts of feelings to sex. But with people like us, people who don’t have as many emotions as other people, we can just fuck and be friends and not let things get complicated.”

“Right. Yeah, feelings are stupid.” You almost wish she’d said something about your tongue or your eyes, instead.

She keeps stroking your hair, and you can almost transport yourself back to a land before time fucked you all up. You could feel pure and utter comfort if she didn’t have to go and say, “So, let’s just make it clear, I don’t do relationships. I’ll turn tail and book it the second you start to catch feelings.”

Just like that, it all goes away, and everything else comes back. “You don’t have to worry about that,” you say, hoping to a nonexistent god that it sounds believable. It’s the first time you’ve lied to her.

“Good,” she says, patting your head. “Then everything will be fine.”

She says that, but everything is not fine. Nothing ever was, and now is no different.

After she leaves, you realize that the skin on your hands has become dry and flaky, like scales. You put moisturizer on them and try to sleep.

* * *

As the days turn to weeks, and she keeps coming over (up the stairs, first door on the left) to talk and laugh and fuck, you find yourself falling deeper into the very place she’s warned you not to go.

When you’re with her, it feels real. It would be different—not easier, but different—if it were purely carnal, but it’s not. It always culminates with you lying in each other’s arms, drowning in the sapphire pools of one another’s eyes. Skin on skin, shared breath, laced fingers. It’s intimate in a way it never has been for you. You won’t use the L-word because you might die when she turns and leaves forever without a backwards glance. Death would be welcome in many ways, but not like this.

She always does leave in such a manner; she’ll kiss you and then depart without looking back at you, and there’s never any over-the-shoulder smile or blown kiss for you to catch. But for now, though, at least she always returns. At least she still keeps climbing up those stairs to that first door on the left.

But what about when that stops? What about when she doesn’t come back? The transformations are continuing—the scales on your hands have now spread up your arms and are splayed across the backs of your shoulders, and your teeth have become sharp and fang-like—but she still hasn’t said anything. Sooner or later, it’s going to be too much for her to ignore. She’s going to finally see you for what you are, and then she’ll abandon your stairs and your door for those of another.

For all you know, she may already have started in that direction.

“You can sleep with other people,” she’s told you. “I really don’t care. It’s not like we’re together.” Most men would be thrilled at such a permissive proclamation, and at one point not so long ago, you would have been, too.

Not anymore.

You will find no pleasure between the legs of any other. No solace in the arms of someone else.

What about her, though? Does she? Her careless dismissal of any notions of exclusivity conjures horrible thoughts within your already damaged mind. You think of her sweating in the dark with some oafish loser, those long, pointed fingernails clawing his back, her pearlescent teeth piercing the flabby flesh of his neck.

These thoughts are pervasive, as is the sickness they tow along with them. You spend too much of your time hunched over the bowl of the toilet. You’re losing weight.

Specters of lovers past appear beside you in bed at night. You wake to find their smoky, shimmering figures lying next to you, grinning terribly. “This is what you get,” they tell you. “This is all you’re worth.”

They ask you, “How does it feel?”

“How badly does it hurt?”

“How long do you think you can take it?”

“Everything ends,” they whisper. “And in the end, everyone gets exactly what they deserve.”

Your pillows reek of the salt excreted from cold sweat, and from tears painfully unwept. You wish you could cry. It’s like being nauseated without the ability to throw up. Aroused without the ability to ejaculate.

Alive without the ability to die.

Lying on the couch one night with your head in her lap and her fingers in your hair, which is becoming brittle and frayed and is falling out in clumps, she says to you, “I think you’re more sensitive than you let on. I don’t think you’re as dead inside as you make yourself out to be. As you want to be.”

You seize up, self-consciously running your monstrous tongue over the tips of your pointed teeth. “No,” you protest. “You’re wrong. There’s nothing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You’re wrong,” you say again.

“I don’t think so. It’s not a bad thing. Just remember what I said. Once you start to have feelings for me, that’s when this is over.”

“I know that,” you snap, and for a moment the trail of her fingers through your hair stops. You’re grateful for the fact that you can’t see her face. When her fingers start up again, you say in a softer tone, “That’s not going to happen. It’s never going to happen.” It’s the second time you’ve lied to her.

The nights go on, and you try to remain as coolly distant as possible. For appearance’s sake. But the ghosts keep appearing every time she leaves, and they’re biting words cut deeper.

You could, you should, just enjoy the time you have with her while it lasts. That would be the healthy thing to do. But you can’t. You can’t live in the present because you’re stuck in a future that’s already happened, but hasn’t yet manifested in reality. Because the better something is, the more awful it’s going to be when it’s over, and that’s all you can focus on.

And this is really, really good. Better than anything you’ve ever had.

All that means is that it’s going to end up being really fucking awful.

You flee one night from the haunted emptiness of your apartment, out the door and down the stairs and into the parking lot. It’s raining. It always seems to be raining these days. You want to go to your car, to go somewhere, anywhere, but you know there’s nowhere to go.

You fall to your knees, wincing at the hard, stabbing chill of the wet pavement. Your soaked clothes stick to your scaly skin in an icy embrace that is not hers. You look down at your reptilian hands, slick and glistening. You’re unsurprised to see that your fingernails have become claws.

You shift your gaze to the sky.

It’s dark, and the rain is black, and there just isn’t anywhere to go.

Because there are no fairy tales, and you’re not in Cambodia.