Truth, Lies, Dreams
I won a prize beauty treatment.
As I sit down for my pedicure, in a small white living room, a man squares up in front of me and raises my naked left foot, puts it on his knee. He takes a large dressmaker’s scissors and, starting from the bottom of my pant leg, he cuts vertically up.
Next to me, another man assures me I will like it.
Siobhan comes to bed. Turn off the music, she says. I am half asleep but I reach over and hit the mute button.
“Do I have to do it?!” She sounds annoyed, as she comes round to my side of the bed.
“I did it already!” I reply.
Later on, I am fully asleep when she reaches over, gently touches my arm.
“What is the time?” she asks. But I am asleep. She reaches further over.
“Ngghh,” I mutter and I push out at her. “Why you waking me?” And I push her more.
“Don’t fight me,” she exclaims, “I am not a ghost!”
At the supermarket buying eggs.
I’m walking around with a girl I used to go out with. She has long black hair, greasy or unwashed I am not sure which, but I do not recognize her and besides, she’s in her twenties; she has a new boyfriend now.
Siobhan and I are at a hospital. We both have a disease. Cancerous? Siobhan has psoriasis, she has it spread across her bare chest and towards her arms and shoulders. You cannot see it on me.
The nurse leads us to a waiting room, more like a shower changing area with a curtain. She tells us to sit on the swimming noodles, one each.
When the woman I was making love to turned into a pig I knew that I had become too cynical. I watched her face fill out, her cheeks lose their definition and her nose turn up at me to form a perfectly cylindrical snout. Her skin became rough. It became pockmarked and covered in fine grey hairs and then her mouth widened and opened up to reveal a coarse and unclean set of teeth. Then her ears retreated, grew longer into sharp points that flopped over like a dog’s ears. And her eyes too lost their shine and their beauty. They contracted and sunk into the skin and they became red and as fired as a madman’s. I watched her and I laughed and cried for atop of this perverse metamorphosis was her hair, untouched by the transformation and spread loosely across the pillow: a wig on the head of a pig… It was the one hope for my salvation.
