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Two Stories
by Rhonda K

Nike's Shoe in Cinderella's Hand


The arched wing of blood over his right eyebrow said something about the cruel victory of Nike in terms that the major stockholder never thought of in his nervous play of markets. As I stood there in diaphanous silver La Perla, I noted his skin was rapidly beginning to match my panties. He had bought them to gain forgiveness or forgetfulness and it seemed now that neither had occurred.
     My pewter 8" pump rested by his right ear. In an amazing reliving of grammar school physics, both his body and the shoe hit the ground in precisely the same slow motion moment.
     'The Relief Parapet from the Nike Temple' at the Acropolis shows the time worn, faceless Goddess Nike bewinged and reaching down to her shoe. There is no evidence she meant to throw it. There is also no evidence she didn't mean to throw it. Her face has been obscured by time or violently savaged.
     Many women have found they get off in these domestic violence situations and just not on the notion that the bastard was dead but garnished with screen rights, clean criminal records and sympathetic stories. Problem was I had no history of bruises, broken bones or burns.
     I had, in fact, only known him for two weeks.
     I stood over him; full of the Titan's daddy hatred in one 8" heel feeling like a single breasted Amazon infused with a mythology that rendered his body metaphor. It wasn't possible the old bastard was dead. Yet, he was.
     I looked great there, too. Which was confusing. My blood lust was sexy in its full form. They said that poor men took to fleshy women for they sought the abundance that was missing in their lives. Here at my feet was the richest man in the city. I towered over him in the extremes of voluptuous that strained seams as much as it strained incredulity. This body was a commodity unknown in a world dedicated to beauty being defined by the evidence of cartilage and rib cages.
     At work, I cloaked myself in bulky anonymity. I was the dark-haired girl in cubicle 4. I was faceless. I overheard stories of ski trips and social climbing facing the derision of an office in full swing. It was perhaps determined I didn't know my way around a swing set. However, dare I wear clothes that fit, that would reveal the lift of breasts and delicious heft of buttocks? Even if I could, no one would dare make them. The glory of the fertility goddess has become the new obscenity. At work, I didn't exist to others but as a waste of a life and I was equally invisible on the walk home or the solo cruises through grocery aisles. If you had asked them what color my aura was, certainly they would have agreed on brown. One of them, feeling high on something she felt to be good intentions though it reeked of something like superiority, tried to talk to me about fixing myself up.
     Fixed up, I had the glint of the headwaters of the underworld river Styx. Fixed up, I was unavoidable as death warmed over. Fixed up, I had the power to hurt myself like no one else could imagine.
     He kept calling me "bitch." In between the gifts, the wine, the all night parties, his graven image was bitch. Once presenting me with an emerald necklace he said, "You she-bitch, you don't deserve this but you will after tonight." He smiled like a sound bite made three-dimensional. At a restaurant, he would order the most ridiculous wine that sent the steward puffing into the bowels of the wine cellar. "For my gorgeous bitch!" he would announce. Nearby people glanced over nervously with thin smiles.
     In a series of tight incredible dresses and insouciant drapes, I languidly lifted my glass.
     At night, he was like a steam engine fighting its way up a hill, "bitch, bitch, bitch" as he ascended my form, pushed under my skin, descended into my vortex, fought against my river and ached into me words like mother. Bitch. Mother. Hand on the back of my neck, he would tell me that I was the type of bitch that liked this as his cock hit the convulsive part of the back of my throat.
     The blood yellow roses sent to the office daily became heady offerings. However, I began to feel other women's screams around me like vapors. I began feeling big cat feline with curved teeth.
     Following me like I was a hooker, he'd pick me up from work in one of his crazy cars. I'd never know what street he would catch me walking across. As soon as I was in the car, he was pushing aside a hundred dollars worth of frilly underthings shoving fingers into a dry well of hatred while assuring me that I would be treated like the bitch I was. It was day six of our love affair.
     He loved me. Yes, he loved me and I had too much time on my hands. I loved the insomnia of dirty.
     He loved me in crazy, expensive lingerie shops making me sit on his cock as the saleswoman asked about sizes from the other side of the dressing room door. My pinched breasts mocked me in the mirror. As the sales total climbed she seemed less inclined to check on us. And if she did, she would have overheard I was a bitch. A dirty little bitch. And I deserved that and everything else that was going to happen to me.
     By day 9, I was beginning to slip at work. I'd wear a skirt that brushed tight against my thighs and fit into a dip under my buttocks. My hair swayed in just-been-fucked-locks over the water cooler. I was losing my anonymity. Men were beginning to notice me and women were beginning to hate me. My lips were bruised in several shades of Chanel reds.
     You see he bought them all. He would have me try them making me buy one at a time at the Chanel counter and return to him in his parked dark windowed black sedan. The Bloomingdale's girl had seen it all. She was likely sure it was a daddy game but couldn't figure out which one. She couldn't miss my mouth's bruised looks and the slight pinkish smears that stained edges of my lips. "Vamp." "Russet Moon." "Star Red."
      He wanted to know which red looked best on his cock.
     Somewhere when you haven't slept in days straight you think of the virgins. Yes, I began thinking of the virgin goddesses and how they dispensed with goatish men and lovely youths. Reading between the lines now, I realized it wasn't so much protection as to rid them of the degradation of temptation. Of wanting it so bad nothing mattered anymore. And wanting it in the worse ways. Athena had to kill them before she became less than a goddess. Nike fluttered by her side. A daughter of a Titan and the mistress of the river of death.
     It was here that I began feeling the spaces between my atoms. Electric synapses made long lazy jumps one to the other many of them missing their mark. At some points, particularly when he had me bent over I felt I had hard seeds all under the soft parts of my skin. I was a possibility held in check. Hatred groaned in me with gluttony. Nothing is purer and more delicious than hate. While your friends may help you, it is your enemies that spur you on to greater acts than even you thought possible.
     I could only have an orgasm when I imagined this one scenario. Two men attacked him while I pressed myself against the wall and watched anonymously. As he was entered in a dry thrust, I felt my fingers twisting into vines. My veins began fanning out into leaves of incredible greens. Sharp edged lilies opened from eyes and lips fell into tendrils of feathered new growth. As the other man forced his cock into my lover's screaming throat, I felt spring. Flowers opened, buds lifted heads and branches curled into cooler spaces. I was the most ravishing ivy ever to spread itself across a bedroom wall. As I writhed in the knowing shocks of orgasm, blue birds fell from between my legs, beating their wings and lifted themselves upwards across the room and out the open window.
     Nike isn't the only one who knows that victory is the daughter of revenge and death.
     On day 13, I woke up not knowing where I was. I was hoping it was a Saturday as it was already past noon. Somewhere the coke, the meth, the dope and the lines of abuse had brought on something like amnesia. I could only open one eye. My bra was wrapped double around my neck and my pants were torn at the crotch. He arm was around my waist and his smile was pressed against the substantial curve of my left breast. On his big screen television was a silent porno. Or something like porno. It was us. His mouth made thin lipped mouthings of "bitch" like a strange fish breathing in silt filled water. We were animals it seemed. Back down in the mud making things primal and further degrading them with speech which we some how had mistakenly believed made us above the animals. I read his lips. Foul words. Crude communication. Bitch came easier to him than "I love you." At the very least, it came easier to him than, "What are you doing tonight?"
     I had began thinking I had only wanted him to ask me if it was OK to pay my rent, however, it had ended in me only wanting him like this as he slept. Quiet. Softly quiet. His full lips pressed together.
     Unraveled, my carefully tended flammability leapt the firewall.
     He duct taped my mouth. Took my speech. I became his audience and his stage. As I shoved him away, I reached for the only thing left to me. My hair obscured my face as I took off my shoe and threw it with all my might imagining even for one moment it was the jaw bone of the ass that Samson had taken up against his enemies. I looked more like Delilah, standing there in long disheveled hair and angry green eyes.
     However, I had to be anonymous and fly out of there faceless and absent. I had to walk out of his house like I had walked into it. I took the bloodied shoe with me and took off its twin, dressed quickly and walked away on bare, silent feet. I took the shoes to the river and dropped them both into its swift dark current.
      
      
      

Hardball
      
This kills me.
     I want to tell him I'm the poem he'll never understand as he hustles down Houston pissed at me. Houston is all slate gray and full of rain providing a strange frame for his dumpy twaddle. His penguin walk away from me that says so much about the chafing of his upper inner thighs.
     Chuck's 400 pounds of gynecological drilling possibilities. I bite my hands. His endless hard poundings. I bite my lip. Groan.
     No matter how fast he walks, my trim, pert 10 mile a day trot will catch up to him. I'll hit his stride in minutes breathing far less heavily than he. I'll catch him in the amount of time it takes for him to pull the gelatinous membrane off his Bodega bought Sno-Ball.
     I could.
     I'm fueled up on the mathematics of coke and really dirty anal sex. He. Grinds. Me.
     Breathe.
     A khaki boy offers me the time of day. I look hopeless. Fucked up. My mascara looks like a widow's frail goodbye wave. Clinching my jaw, I realize he only sees my exceptional perfection. I sniff and swallow more of my fast forwards. The snake's after bite.
     He doesn't see the eaten out parts, my bruised knees and the hair missing at the back of my neck. He doesn't see my dirty panties, my pan-fried eyes, my hopeful dreams of degradation so deep only word for it is love. I'm ate up.
     The fuck.
     What he sees is my trophy pussy draped across his aching lap. So perfect. The way his friends will be so jealous. I'm not his blond "I got it." He doesn't understand I'd fuck his father under the Christmas Tree hoping he'd walk in during the good parts. Hoping he would see how it is all the same to me. Vanilla mixed with blood.
     Mine.
     The fuck.
     Chuck has two blocks on me and I can nearly hear his hard breathing from here. It is familiarly sensual like drawn blood spilled by a junkie nurse.
     The khaki fuck calls me a whore. Me. The lengths I go throw to just get laid. All four hundred pounds of it. My flesh seeking thrills don't come easy. My longing for hardball cock.
     The coke lodges over my left eye. My beauty shatters into need.
     I start to run. The rain. I. Run.
     "Chuck!" Blinded by prisms of black ice rain shattering into complex geometric rhythms of chemicals I pick up my pace.
     I'm the poem he never reads.
     I run faster.

RhondaK, a devoted disciple of Oscar Wilde's excesses, is often accused of being intimidating but blames it on others people's failure to honor Wilde's teachings, such as, "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." When not working as Co-editor of NakedPoetry.com, she labors as a librarian and often wakes up with impressions of books temporarily scarring her flesh. The last book she slept with was Radzinsky's "The Rasputin File." She is very, very promiscuous with literature. See http://nakedpoetry.com/rhondak for bibliography of other electronic work.

Links:

Editrix of: http://www.nakedpoetry.com

Daily thoughts and Writing Challenges: http://www.livejournal.com/users/rhondak

Email: xxrk@hotmail.com

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