Affirmations by Jacqueline Treiber
“What were these women saying outside of affirmations and dicks?”
Fiction by Jacqueline Treiber
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Now it seemed all the women were abandoning him. He let Cassie go, a sort of quick thing at first then a slow crawl to the door -- what with houses and rooms and money and such. Then one day she came home with a notebook, swole with letters to herself -- cheering affirmations and admonishments against their once friendly bond. She was now into self-help. She was posting sticky notes in the medicine cabinet. Phrases like “get that dick outta your head” against a backdrop of hot pink sky. A bouncy furry phallus gesticulating next to the scrawl. He suspected she was cruising forward into digital hearts, sending messages to mister or misses? Lonelyhearts. Waiting for a date, waiting for a future.
Then Janice, making-decisions-for-nothing-Janice. Saying she’d leave the job, saying she was fed up, she needed more power or money or status, he thought. Then she was staying, treating the job like a man -- giving only the basics, demanding the world in return. Saying there was no job like this one and hadn’t she been a little extreme before? Was it possible to share a workload from two coasts? He didn’t wonder like she did, he just saw red -- a fuchsia glow arising on the two purple fists resting at his sides.
What were these women saying outside of affirmations and dicks? What was the world revolving to but a gradual stop? Against action, tenderness was now a poison leeched through these women. He often felt over-loved. His thoughts and balls were golden, a cherishable treasure, unless they signaled opposition. He used to hate being the bearer of this bad news; it stung. Now he relished it, craved it. It was at once a hot blistering he could deliver, a kick to the head. He raced against the hot coals of their disapproval and did it again and again.
He said he loved her, both of them actually. They shared that. But did they? Did he? Did he tell them the truth -- what was love but someone standing up and dumping the dirt you just dug out of yourself?
Work was getting weird. He decided to leave, what with the mistakes he had made there and his troubles at home with Cassie. He was going to talk it out with her, tell her she had to give up this woo-woo shit. Drop the dick pics, move on and move out. He was getting tired of the descent into tears, that same softness he was initially drawn to, now a tangle he avoided. The key for talking was timing; he realized this after five years in a relationship. He was becoming a master of relationships.
Before slipping his key in the door, he suddenly remembered the exactness of a moment he had shared with Cassie the first day he moved in with her. His half-full laundry baskets of bike gears and pillowcases, butted up against and blocking them on the couch where they sat. Her legs were crossed toward him; he saw this as a good sign: she needed him. This good sign immediately dulled when he looked at her face -- all of a sudden she was drawn up tight, like a splinter had been shot into her spine. The lines of her face became more visible, the facial hair of her mid-thirties lay soft on her lip, her acne scars patched themselves together in a gray smoke.
“This makes it more real, you know.”
He knew.
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Header image courtesy of Charles Leval aka Levalet. Visit him online, here.
Jackie Treiber is a former Kansan, with 10-year roots in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, Elohi Gadugi Journal, and Queen Mob's Teahouse. She is the co-executive director of ICANNWiki, a nonprofit tasked with illuminating how the Internet works.