Filling a Much-Needed Void

The winner of the Names of Bands book giveaway is the delicious Diatryma!  Please get in touch with me at hanne at hanneblank.com and give me your mailing address, Diatryma, and I shall look forward to hearing you sing “Thair There” at karaoke someday.

For the rest of you, I’m posting a full-length preview of one of the selections from my limited-edition shade-grown fair-trade side project (copies still available!) Inappropriate Crush.  This is a bit of 98% worksafe fiction called “The Management,” and it’s posted in honor of the birthday of my friend Patrick.  Happy Birthday, Patrick!

The Management

by Hanne Blank

 

 

To Whom It May Concern:

Do not be alarmed.  This is not a love letter.  A love letter is a thing like a startled deer leaping a fence in its way.  This letter could never fly like that, not even to escape the wolves or the dogs and the men with the guns.  It is not that kind of letter.  The kind of letter this is should be slipped under a screen door, or hidden in plain sight as a bookmark in a book left lying carelessly on a table, not quite asking to be found.

I am appalled at myself, you see.  It is past being something for which a rationalization is possible.  I know you well enough to know that you are not at all what I want.  Other choices have in fact been made.  Large ones, deep ones, the sort of choices from which we we build our lives like dry rock walls, each one heavy and hard and chosen not for the ease of lifting it but for the way it fits, the way it lies, the way it leans into the others such that if any one were removed, the whole would totter.

You measure approximately an 8.7 on the Richter scale.  Do you know this?  Were you to lie along one of my fault lines I would not care to be responsible for what might follow. Seismically, you are a disaster waiting to happen.  I have seen bigger, more dazzling cities toppled by the likes of you before and I am having none of it.

Pursuant to this, there are several items to which I would like to direct your attention:

1.  You are not to appear before me in waking life with tales of having done something that I dreamt of you doing several weeks ago.

2.  You are to cease at once to have hands that make me wonder what they would feel like touching me in very particular places.

3.  Stop wearing those jeans.  You know the ones I’m talking about.  It isn’t fair.

4.  Do not under any circumstances kiss me.

Oh, and 5. It does not matter that you didn’t know, that I never told you before this.  It cannot come as that much of a surprise.  You know full well what I’m like.

I think you will understand perfectly when I sign this

Inadvertently yours,

The Management

 

 

To Whom It May Concern,

As you are well aware, you have summarily ignored several of the requests made in my previous letter. I realize that you are sufficiently perverse that a reprimand is useless.  Nevertheless I feel it would be remiss of me not to remind you that the requests stand, and that in the future, a respectful willingness to abide by their terms would be appreciated.

I feel I ought also to reaffirm my position in regard to the conversation that passed between the two of us four days ago, when we spoke at the party hosted by our mutual friend.  As you will no doubt recall, I explicitly told you that as you know, I have a partner of many years’ standing and I will not do anything that would betray that partnership.

In response you flagrantly violated my second and fourth requests from my previous letter, then, still pulling my head back with your fingers knotted in my hair, you asked, “But what about me?”

My answer has not changed.  I would betray you in a heartbeat.

Constant as the Northern Star,

The Management

 

 

 

To Whom It May Concern,

It may or may not relieve you to know that a cardiologist has pronounced me reasonably fit, and despite administering several unpleasant procedures was unsuccessful in reproducing either the sensation of heart palpitations I felt during our last encounter or the pang under the sternum I experienced just afterward.  It may well be that my susceptibility to such symptoms is dramatically reduced when in a fluorescent-lit examining room with a terse cold-fingered man whose complexion matches his labcoat, and not standing with my back pressed into cinderblock in a dim corner of a parking garage, in a miasma of car exhaust, old piss, and the smell of your skin under that leather jacket.

Until now, I had always felt I could trust my heart.  I believed that it would  always function properly, as nice and as dependable and under as many conditions as one of those Space Pens my mother would never buy for me.   Upside down, like in the commercials. Underwater.  With your knee pushing my skirt taut between my thighs and your hands on my shoulders and your words hot and moist in my hair, in my ear. In free fall.

In this broken world few things are as trustworthy as we might wish.  Sooner or later I suppose we must all include ourselves in that category.

And yet,

The Management

 

 

To Whom It May Concern,

I don’t know her name, but in the moment I saw her grab your arm she was as lovely and as hopeful as any woman could ever be, as wide-eyed and tender-souled.  She’s an architect, if gossip can be trusted.  Is that true?  I suspect it is. She dressed like one, in that red that was simple but not plain, the three artless bangles on her wrist, the trousers cut just high enough above her ankles to make her legs seem as long as your glance across the room.

You could do much worse.

I wonder if you’ve kissed her yet.  Probably you have.  You are a thief who steals kisses whether or not they are on offer, as well I know.

I wonder if you’ve kissed her like you’ve kissed me.  I can tell you that she wants you to.  I saw the tilt of her chin, the slight arch of her back, the angle of her shoulders.  She bared her throat to you and probably didn’t know it, but I did.  And so did you.

I know you haven’t fucked her yet.

I’ll tell you how I know.  I know because I know you well enough to know that when you’ve started fucking someone, in the early days, you orbit her — or him, sometimes, but usually her — like a moon that has found the only planet anywhere that knows its terrible and specific lunatic gravity.  And it lasts for a while.  Sometimes a long while, but usually not.

What happened instead was that your eyes stroked her throat and kept going, past that soft smooth breakable arch, not even seeing the razor-cut sculpture of her hair.  You nodded as if you agreed that the noises coming from her lips were words, but what you were really doing was waiting.  Waiting for me to look at you, waiting to make me take the weight of your gaze.  When I let you, my lips parted, a soft exhalation.  Not much.  But I know you noticed: you smiled.

Here’s something else I know: You are going to fuck her soon.  You will fuck her with pomp and outrage and absurd, inadvisable tenderness.  You will fuck her like it was a bad decision on prom night.  You will fuck her like you were the sole survivors in a lifeboat.  You will fuck her like she will never have to eat another breakfast alone.

Then you will break her heart.

I’d warn her but there’s no point.  You’d do it anyway.  It’s what you do.  You do things anyway.  And maybe that’s what she wants.

You could do much worse.  And would, if I let you.

Relentlessly,

The Management

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