Man I feel like a woman (short story)
won me a $1000 prize in 2023 and then got given a B+ when i lazily reused it for university in 2024. classic
Many of my friends have already seen this story because it’s the one piece of half-publishable fiction I have completed in years. If you’re one of them, sorry. I need to lock in, and I overuse dog metaphors. I know.
Also, I realised I can put the thumbnail images in the actual piece lately. How cool!
Everything sickened me. I had been feeling this way for what I suspect may have been years, a dark brewing of something viscous and muddy in my guts, and Freya’s death was the baking soda to its vinegar.
I loved that dog, but had never been able to train her out of her primal hamartias. The last time was mercifully quick–flash of cat’s tail across the street, thump of paw pad on asphalt, screeching truck horn, brief sick crunch. I buried her with a headstone I made from a pebble and cried for a month.
Of course, there were other reasons I did what I did. My employment-averse brother Mark, who would ring me every week or so and grovel for money to spend on paying off his car or to-your-door burritos. My father, who would yell at me about the rest home food and how the nurses smelled and the other residents were out to get him. A boss that liked to stand behind me with his hands on the back of my swivel chair, breathe moistly on my hair, and call me sweetheart. I was no sweetheart. In fact, I was socially inept and chronically nervous, like a horse that had been chained in a dark stable and forgotten about.
My house was hardly a better place to be. The fly-spots on my bedroom ceiling were the closest thing I had to constellations, the bright white city light choking out the real thing into non-existence. I tried to keep things tidy, but dust was such a constant fact of the place that I eventually had to give up and let it quietly collect on my shelves and doorframes. The garage was full of things my parents didn't want, and every room smelled like damp and mothballs. When I traced my finger over the mould in my shower grout each morning, it felt like it was the only living thing there.
Finally, one night, I was followed home by a figure whose face I couldn’t see, its shadow stretching to my heels and looming just out of reach. I walked faster and faster until I was running and stumbling in my modest pumps, one of which flew off my right foot. Cinderella at twelve, handsome prince charming in an alley next to the skip? I made it home and bolted the door and didn’t sleep all night, fighting the tide even as I was floundering and gasping and sinking in faint familiar memory. In the morning I showered and put my divorcée pump and mangled dirty stockings in the bin. It was time, I felt, for me to snap my halter and return to whence I came.
So, with my evidence laid out on the table, I’m sure you’ll understand. And yes, I prepared. I went to the library and read everything on bushcraft I could find, explored tributary topic-streams of hunting manuals and topographic maps. Some of my savings were put towards a jacket and boots—I already had a pack somewhere. I went for practice hikes on my weekends, fasted to test my endurance, practised the knots I hadn't thought of since my days as a Girl Scout. There are many things you could accuse me of, but laziness and naïvete couldn't ever be what bring me to court.
“Hey there, sweetheart,” the last time I heard it, his back-of-hand hair teasing the nape of my neck. His breath was warm and wet. “How’re things?”
“I’m quitting today,” I said.
The hand lifted. “Is that so?”
“Yes.”
He argued less than I thought he would. All I had to do when I got home was leave a note for Mark and say goodbye to Freya. My utilities had been cancelled, furniture stored, lights turned off. I knelt and touched her varnished stone before I left.
The first few months as a gridless forest tramp were great, actually. Back then it was summer’s last stand, the world still hazy and pinkish and the nights piney and fragrant. As I lay down to sleep, I savoured the smell and the press and the darkness of the dirt in my hair and fingernails. Edible plants were easily foraged, and I set traps for small game of which I ate everything but the pelt and bones. It was life as survival, or, at least, more survival than it had been before. I was happily selfish and felt groggy at the notion. When I started to smell I dunked myself in the river, a one-woman baptism, and if it rained I built a lean-to with a tarp and huddled inside until it passed.
It was easy, before long, to occupy the role of an animal, something godless and quadrupedal that could live gladly off of entrails and scraps and an ignorance of death. I had always suspected I would make quite a good dog. Unfortunately, up until now, I had been stuck as a human with upper lip to shave and hair to twirl coquettishly and a job where I was required to be demure and sweet, roll over to show my belly in submission every day. Here, though, the water was calm, and I was floating on my back, barely sculling, half asleep in the glittering sun.
And then Stephen appeared, brunette either naturally or by circumstance, beard in all directions, turning leaves on his shoulders.
“Well, hello there.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Stephen. Pee aich. I’ve been watching you for a while.”
“Oh.”
“You’re like me. Gone bush.”
“Yeah, I guess.” My voice was husky from disuse and grated on my ears.
“You’re skilled. You know how to hunt.”
I shrugged.
“We should stick together. It’ll be winter in a couple months.”
I looked at him. Under the beard he seemed sort of normal enough.
“Great,” Stephen said.
So, we were two. I didn't exactly want him there, but he wasn’t a burden, mostly, and quite good at things himself. He kept a peaceful distance, although I could sometimes feel his hot heavy gaze spreading over my back. We shared food, of which there was plenty - autumn blazed through the forest, leaving it rich and reliable. There were chestnuts to crunch and roast on a fire, fresh watercress, ripe glossy berries Stephen told me he didn’t think would kill us as he grabbed armfuls. Sometimes I was glad for him. Well… no. But, yes. Sometimes. He was quite nice. He told me about his childhood on a farm, the lows of the cows as they were led in for milking and the chickens named after a string of beautiful women - Diana, Marilyn, Grace, Audrey, lovely Rita.
Then winter came, sterile and frigid. Hunger replaced the bitter vinegar in my gut, now a crystalline purity I could focus on and hone to a fine point. The names of my old coworkers and my boss evaded me. There were mornings when my fingers were frozen stiff and I fought to light the fire to boil water, and it was a rainy year, clammy and grey over the nakedness of the trees. Game was elusive and often unsatisfying, leaving me hungry, always hungry, and for the first time I began to doubt my plans.
Of course, Stephen was sick, feverish, sweating, vomit at the corners of his mouth and dribbling down his chin, mumbling, crying, and I fed him like a mother bird, dripping stew down his throat just for it to splurt back up again like faulty plumbing. I was exhausted. Sick myself. And very, very cold. But, then again, I was more girl than I had ever been, suburban paunch replaced with xylophone ribs and hairy ostrich legs. I had become a true freak of nature, breasts shrunken like balloons from a last-week birthday, my period on holiday somewhere, Ibiza maybe, sunning itself on a deckchair and snorting coke off a toilet seat.
Once we found a pile of dumped furniture: a burgundy couch with the stuffing leaking out, which we took for some insulation, or semblance of it, a splintery chair in a tortured pose, clocks with their gizzards on the ground, so very surrealist. There was a broken mirror in a gilt frame, the gold leaf flaking and scratched. I looked at myself for the first time in months and started to laugh. I couldn’t help myself. I loved it.
“What are you laughing like that for?”
“Oh, nothing.”
He sidled into the image next to me, us neat in a frame. “Oh, I look fucked. What the hell, I didn’t know it was that bad. Why didn’t you tell me about my beard?”
“What did you want me to say?”
“God, and I’m so scrawny. I used to work out, I used to take care of myself. Did you know I used to be a stockbroker?”
“Yes, you've mentioned it.”
I thought about it sincerely, now. Stephen in a suit, Stephen on the phone, Stephen the farm boy in the big city. He told me I looked a little bit like his receptionist once: “You both have dark hair.” And of course he didn’t stop there in the story, because Stephen never stopped, he was no quitter, not when it came to clients, not when it came to the Stairmaster, not when it came to our hunts. Above all and especially not when it came to the coquettish receptionist and the secrets she kept from him, a fantasy flash of red lace and a mound or two of flesh, soft, creamy. One time after a work party, when she was light and fizzy on champagne, he had driven her home, made sure she had made it safely to her apartment, suggested he come in and make her a coffee, or maybe one more drink between friends, or even two, accommodating, gentlemanly, never pushing, only nudging, until she was underneath him and even fizzier than before, a little confused but it was easy and fun.
It was certainly true he was hard to get rid of, and I did eventually try. Sometimes I would attempt to creep off while he slept, but then there'd be a grunt and a "hey, where are you off to?" and I would have to lie and pretend that I had just wanted to pee. Many a time I managed to get lost while we were hunting, but he always sniffed me out.
"What would you do without me?" he laughed every time he rounded the side of the tree I crouched behind or espied me from across the river. "Your sense of direction gets worse by the day!"
I dreamt of Freya one night. We were in the forest, Stephen was gone, it was just her and I, the pine needles, the puff of her breath in the air and a nautical whisper of wind in the leaves. We reeked of wet dog and pre-human, and we had food, and we slept in each others’ warmth, and there were no trucks to flatten us and no shadows to chase us, and we were kings of the world, even if nobody knew but us.
For a second I pivoted and teetered on the rim of wakefulness. Then I sunk back even further, to the musty attic of my memory, where the dust was an inch thick, and I was there again, with shag carpet on my back, and the socks I had been wearing, pink and yellow spots, that I looked at in the air the whole time and never once wore again.
Wakefulness slapped me with a weight, a heavy and sharp-edged one crawling onto me, and I made out the beard and felt it rubbing at me, on me, pubic, and the grotesque face blotting out the trees in a rictus of want.
“Hey,” Stephen grunted. He pressed me into the soil and covered my mouth with his, dirty hands stumbling down. A pause for breath–“It’s been so long for both of us, I know, I know. But I’m here now. I need you”–and a plunge back. I pursed my lips tight against him. What did he think we were? Adam and Eve in a sick inverted Eden?, I nede you, my forbidden fruit, my ripe sweet pink lady, your taste on my tongue. He kept on kissing the closed door of my mouth in a way that I knew from long ago, riptide dragging and tugging like a child on a skirt.
“C’mon, c’mon,” another pained gasp for breath. I closed my eyes tight and flung out an arm from under him, the most I could manage.
“What? What did you think we were going to do all this time? Where else could it go?"
He swooped down on me again, catching my bottom lip in his teeth. “I’m going to take you right here. God, I want you. I’ll look good in your mouth.” His right hand was roving over my uninspiring chest and grabbing at nothing. It was then that I scrabbled with the arm he couldn’t see, never saw, as his eyes only flew open when the rock smashed into the side of his skull.
He made an odd noise and I whacked him again. This time something gave way. A slick splash of hot wet blood doused my face. His grip had loosened and I rolled out from under him, ungainly, Eve turned to Cain. Stephen was gurgling facedown on the ground, pants undone, blood streaming out of the side of his head and across the dirt in runnels. I looked at my rock and my hand. At this point, it was going to be a mercy killing. I straddled his back and finished the job, detached, no sense of glee. When he went limp under me and there was nothing hard left to hit I stopped. My arm ached.
Somehow I managed to stand up and over him. His head was like a watermelon dropped from a height - well, to call it a head now would be inaccurate. It was soupy, shards of bone and meat, like the contents of a slow-cooker dropped accidentally on the floor. But from the neck down, he was whole, alive, recognisable. A lot of him. Most of it muscle and sinew, but nevertheless. Once I was stable enough on my feet I took a tentative circle around the body, a landbound vulture. His carrion was fresh.
Judge and jury, I have no defence. Could I have lain down next to him and let hunger and cold consume me? Would you have done that in my place? I didn’t want to do it. I swear. Revenge is not something that interests me, served cold or spit-roasted. But here we were. I would have died otherwise, was already dying, had died months prior. And I knew he would fill me just fine.