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The Hunchback
Alan camouflages his hunchback with the ephemeral cover of
penumbra, burrows it in a hollow depression of the battered mattress, pivots
its spherical deformity towards the paint-flaking wall and shields it with an
awkward smile. But the smile reveals his yellowed teeth that only exacerbate
the reaction after the discovery is made, the reaction of incredulity, of
unbelief and of repulsion (in this order). The self-justifying fury splurges
out adjectively from the mouth of the beholder: you, sleazy fake (or is it
‘fuck’?), you penury impostor, you grisly monster; naturally followed by an
impulsive, swiftly administered punishment: deportation from the premises.
Alan’s
bag containing his freshly laundered set of clothes, his super-thin condoms,
his folded maps, is negligibly lifted from its timid spot in the dusty corner
and ruthlessly tossed, propelled like a piece of uninsured luggage, through the
open entrance door, an arch with a downward coil ending far in the hallway:
pluck!
“Your
bus,” Alan’s 19th Internet Romance announces with masterminded pragmatism in
her high-strung voice, “arrives in about ten minutes, I believe. Don’t ask me
to give you a ride.”
Alan is so fear-stricken by that point he would never, for the fickle life of
his, even think of sharing the untold dangers of the ride, or rather of its
driver. He mumbles something apologetic; with each mumble his command of
English deteriorates, until he can only manage to produce animalistic sounds
(whining? whimpering? whistling?). Alan ages, but not by years -- by millennia.
His bi-focal glasses augment his eyes to the size of
ping-pong balls, and now they glisten with dread (or with tears?). His knobby
knees quiver visibly. He desperately clutches his bladder muscles belatedly.
Urine stains his boxers and trickles down the inner side of his left trouser
and soaks into his sock. Whilst Alan’s body resides in this state of
psychosomatic disrepair, right hemisphere of his brains coolly appraises the
distance to the bag, to his date, his average velocity and calculates his
chances of making it to safety in one, even if ugly, piece.
“How could you do this to me?” Martha a. k. a 19th Internet
Romance issues a complaint in far less belligerent undertone. “Those black and
white pictures, which you e-mailed to me. Who made them?”
“Professional
photographer.” Alan says blankly and then adds rather grudgingly, “They cost me
a fortune. Fifteen hundred to be precise. All my savings if you want to know.”
Painfully
Alan looks up at the formidable female (who, dressed in scanty night gown is
sitting prone on the bed) and, for the first time, under the dim pallid light
of a 60Volt bulb notices with keen triumph, the color of her hair. The
obviously negative factor that her baby face is densely pitted with teenage
acne, that her body is hopelessly shapeless with three pounds of hanging dourly
flesh in the hipless mid-section that obscure the nether region Alan has
traveled two hundred miles on a Greyhound bus to perforate, does not, in any
harmful way, affect his self-esteem. Which is rejuvenated by vainglorious
trumpets: he, Alan Brodski, a dirt-poor immigrant (with pernicious prefix
“undocumented”) a . . . a . . . hunchback, has lured into his vile nets a blond
naturale.
Alan
speaks, and once he starts, his garrulousness takes the better of his usually
introverted self. “This New York photographer,” Alan relates to his shocked
audience of one (but a blond!) “has taken pictures of Madonna herself. You know
after she aged, I mean, so she would look young and marketable on those
posters.” His English springs back, heavily accented, but legible. “Our session
lasted an entire day, I mean, working day of course. He had taken, I believe,
thousands of snapshots. Awesome. Awesome is the word to describe how he had
tapered, I mean tempered with the imagery. Snip and snap and cut and paste. And
voalla! Meet Alan-the-movie-star after his digital-plastic operation.”
“Oh
my God. You look so straight on the pictures. What on Earth has bent you so
much?”
Alan
takes off his antiquarian glasses and wipes the lenses with the sleeve of his
denim shirt rather nervously. His vision loses about eighty per cent of its
capacity to detect the pouncing tiger (or rather a warbling elephant) but he
solemnly trusts his hunch: the young woman is too bewildered by it to launch an
attack. Capitulation is inevitable, Alan reasons sully, foreplay was as far as
they would ever get in terms of intimacy. But at the very least they can have a
decent conversation at a distance.
“Life did this too me. Life in America.” Alan says hoarsely, clears his thorax
and continues with feigned self-pity. “Ignominious sight, yes, they told me.
Many times. I will go now.”
“Wait,”
the blond interrupts him tersely. “I’m not finished with you yet.” She swings
her skittle-shaped legs from the bed and continues dreamily. “Tell me a story.
The story of your hunchback.”
Before
Alan indulges (and how he can not?) his already impatient listener, before he
scurries to the hallway to pick up and return his luggage, let us re-wind the
tape of the narrative and play the genesis of his 19th Internet Romance.
It is rather a virtual place where all Alan’s previous
(failed) romances originated, namely world’s largest Internet Café Easy
Everything, located tourist-smart on Times Square, City of New York. Its two
floors contain eight hundred plasma monitors wired into Pentium 3 processors. A
new caste of (primarily) young primates conflagrates here twenty four seven:
the caste of space monkeys.
Alan the monkey stoops at his personal space and clicks on
his rickety keyboard madly, obsessively, you can even say, compulsive
obsessively. His mind strings proper words into morally improper sentences;
eloquence, at this late hour of the evening solely conforms to the will of the
lengthening coiled organ in Alan’s baggy trousers. Upon his keyboard with a
missing “f’ key, Alan confluences his desire with that of incognito females.
The world of five continents and four oceans shrinks to a 12” inch liquid
crystal monitor. After three hours of chats irrevocably winding up in
cul-de-sacs for one reason or another, Alan hits a jackpot.
The jackpot is a multi-task lady in Amsterdam, New York (no
picture available) who is entertaining herself with the deft fingers of the
left hand, while typing horny messages with the fingers of her right on her
laptop. Alan, who would climb Everest solo without security belt, skin-dip into
shark-infested waters, all but to follow obediently the direction his engorged,
circumcised phallus points at, sublimates his own horniness into sexy words by
means of his sweaty shaking fingers. His scrawny body forms a foreboding
guillotine, guilty desire dragging his head down to the keyboard.
“I’m waiting for you in the dark to come and fuck me hard.”
Alan reads. He types. “I’m coming. Coming right now.” Alan the haunted hunter
and Martha the hunted haunter have resolved the issue of engagement. On another
window Alan checks the Greyhound schedule and counts the time while
gratefulness towards the people he has never met (but not that it matters)
overwhelms him. Thanks a lot to Bill Gates, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, IBM
professionals, every one and single brainiac involved in laying down high-tech
highways to the upstate beds. For Alan will be in the lusty embraces of
(scaling back the online ICQ dialogue to read her name) Martha before the
sunrise substitutes electric lights on this side of the Atlantic.
“Do you have a car?” Martha a.k.a Superbitch3496 inquires.
“No, but I can and will take a bus.”
12:30 A. M. departure from Port Authority (in 15 minutes).
Change in Albany at 3:15. Catch a bus to Buffalo, at 3:25. Amsterdam: 3:50.
Take a taxi: 10 minutes top.
“Hope you’re not going to sleep. Because I’ll be there with
you at 4.”
At
4:30 A. M. Martha lies on her back, which is roughly the size of an aircraft
carrier airstrip, and props her head upon her plump hand.
“Is it why you got your hunch, I mean back? I mean, you
know, spending so much time behind the computer and stuff?”
“Well, basically no, of course. Otherwise all space monkeys
would be hunchbacked. Hehe.”
You betcha Alan doesn’t want to cut his story so unfairly
short. If it were up to him, Alan would spin his yarn for a thousand and one
nights straight, this warped Shaherizada wannabe for the times of feminism. He
would dutifully entertain his date, until she, lulled by fantasies woven by his
silver, even if foreign, tongue, would amnesty her repulsion and invite the
artful storyteller to her bedstead.
With
permission from his hostess Alan shyly tiptoes to the hallway and reclaims his
shabby possessions; then he darts panicky towards the door, lest it would be
shut in his face. Once inside again, with more confidence in his crippled
posture, Alan tells his story with as much ardor as he can conjure after a
sleepless night.
“I
hail from Caucasus. But as you can see I don’t look quite Caucasian, perhaps
Mediterranean, unbecomingly Middle-Eastern, yes. But that’s the natural tan
look of the peoples who live up and along Caucasian Ridge. It’s where
Armenians, being kicked out of Turkey and Azers, driven from Iran, are
grid-locked in a bloody territorial conflict; where Chechens fight tooth and
nail and Al Quida’s purse for independence from infidel Russia, and Georgians
take the snobbish stand of civilized Christians but are not rich enough to join
European Union.”
So
Alan has begun reciting his saga (in truly Nordic context of this word; for
Alan likens to trace his ancestry, spiritual, if not physical, to the snow-covered
regions, that at various stages of Western history harbored valorous Vikings,
Anglo-Saxon globe trotters and conquerors and Germanic intrepid venture
capitalists). In morbid voice, with tears rolling down his scraggy cheeks Alan
tells Martha about the militants storming into the house and cold-bloodedly
murdering both of his elderly parents with AK-47 for some hush-hushed
atrocities his father-the-militiaman committed to a minor minority in his city
(but a major majority merely ten miles away). How he, Alan, jumped through the
window of the second floor, shattered his ankle but somehow managed to crawl
away. How a school buddy of his gunned down dad who happened to be a doctor
treated Alan’s ankle. How the doctor drove Alan all the way to Moscow, where he
bought a fake American visa from Russian mobsters and even gave Alan crumpled
one hundred dollar bill for the expenses in the new country.
And thus with mortal dangers behind his back (then straight
as a nail) Alan flies into exile to the shores of the free on a giant iron bird
poetically called Boeing 747. The subway train and his wooly legs take him from
JFK to dilapidated dorm on Brighton Beach (“ . . . for Russian is my mother’s
tongue, survival-wise it was the place for me to stay, at least initially until
the culture shock wears out”). There Alan observes through the groggy prism of
the jet-leg his roommate, a corpulent muzhik dressed in polka-dot pajamas,
vomiting copiously on the rug, then snatching a half-empty bottle of Stoli and
drinking from the neck. “Next day, well, morning, quite early, I venture into
stone jungles to look for a job for my wallet has only“
Martha
yawns. She opens her mouth so wide you’d easily park your SUV in the cavity.
Alan’s knees quiver in anti-climax visions: unheated bus heading south, New
York wind-swept, numerical streets and underground half-room in shadier (if not
shadiest) part of the city, alone. Those images plunge Alan into panicky
agitation. He searches the junkyard of his mind in order to locate that
renegade magic spark to ignite the fuse of his dark fantasies, but finds only
debris of memories and flotsam of dreams.
“Look,
it’s getting late, I mean early, you know what I mean. I gotta go to sleep.”
“But
tomorrow is Sunday.” Alan defends his cozy, storyteller’s spot in the armchair
by referring to the generic irresponsibility of weekends.
“So?”
Pragmatic, or rather simplistic, Martha retorts peevishly. “I’m sleepy. And
you’re boring by the way. Your story, or how you call it, saga, totally sucks.
And I mean it.” Alan gives up, or at least part of him does. He muses: my
attempt of prolonging the duration of the upstate visit resulted in quite
predictable failure.
“I’m
not giving you a ride, remember?” Martha says indifferently and changes her
body setting from vertical to horizontal. She rolls its mammoth bulk under the
blanket and announces. “You can continue with your lullaby, if you wish. When I
wake up tomorrow I don’t want to see you here. If I do I’ll call the police.”
She giggles, her eyes aglitter with mischief. “Or the Immigration Authorities.”
And
then Alan has his long-awaiting inspiration, his moment of eureka, when the
lights in his head literally go down for a split moment and then blow up with
accumulative power of all electricity in the entire state of New York. Suddenly
Alan knows how to transfuse his lukewarm saga, his lullaby for buffalo woman
into a sick, perverted fairy tale that would keep devil’s own wax-infested ears
perk up for nights.
Alan
says the following. “I was a virgin when I came to America and my back was
straight as this wall. For the past three years I had slept with eighteen
women. And look at me now.”
“I
don’t follow.” Martha says, yawning again, but this time you wouldn’t fit your
pinky into the crack between her lips."
“My
hunchback otherwise at standstill resumes growing after I have sex with a
woman.”
“What?”
Martha is vertical again. “Are you kidding me?”
“But
you see, I can’t help it. I mean not sleeping with women. I’m driven. Driven by
unflagging necessity, propelled by blind insanity, which is stronger than even
my lust. It’s as if a sexual intercourse is a matter of my personal survival,
not of my procreation (or recreation). Therefore I redouble, re-triple,
re-quadruple my courting efforts, with high-tech assistance, or if worse comes
to worst, simply with side trips to the Asian massager on the corner, who for
forty bucks let you ask her how much it costs to have sex with her.”
Alan catches his breath and continues in a tongue-in-cheek
voice of a stand-up comedian. “And as I retract my moist, shrunk penis from yet
another vagina, the dorsal part of my spine curves into a steeper convexity, as
if to bring forth the release of my wings. But wings are not embedded within my
hunchback. I did X-rays; the excrescence consists solely of bone marrow. The
doctors are clueless. One of those charlatans even offered me money from his
university grant to become his lab mouse.”
“What
the hell are you talking about?” Martha wouldn’t be more awake if she had drunk
twenty ounce of freshly brewed Columbian coffee.
“My
hunchback story, remember, that’s why I’m still here.”
“Please
continue.” Martha intones carefully.
“It’s
as if coitus is shriveling me into a fetus simple and weird as that. You see
I investigated my predicament, searched for ways to beat my bizarre curse. When
my back was still in a presentable form, I tried sleeping with women of other
nationalities, from different age groups etc. No luck there, as you well can
imagine seeing my immense disfigurement now. Every woman I bed only cripples me
more.”
“You
look like a very, very old homeless man doing very, very bad opiate drugs. Your
chin is almost reaching to the floor. Terrible. I mean it.”
Alan
thinks, as long as I feed my blond listener with twisted realities of my story
I have my chance. His chance of sliding under that blanket and nudge his
coffee-severely-diluted-with-milk skin against her half-and-half white. But for
the sake of cohesiveness of the narrative, Alan takes risk to fill in some
missing crucial details.
“As
you have noticed correctly I dread Immigration and Naturalization inspectors
for I have overstayed my fake tourist visa. Unfortunately I don’t have money to
buy a fake social security number or a fake green card. But to go home I
cannot, for I will be promptly eliminated by the berserk militants, murderers
of my parents, who have invaded my city about a year ago and slaughtered sixty
per cent of its population (I read the news on an obscure Internet site, for
the event somehow has failed to make into the mainstream media, perhaps because
the militants were supported by the CIA in the past).
“Thus
I was necessitated to lose my undocumented identity in the crowd, like a
foreign coin tossed into the pile of dimes, nickels and quarters. I consulted
my transplanted compatriots and they explained to me that the only way for me
to legalize my status in this country was through marrying an American citizen.
As I mentioned above, I was a virgin when I swooned down from the ephemeral
skies and landed on my butt smack in the middle of the stone jungles. But that
problem was quickly solved with a generous help from promiscuous American
women. Of course, with accumulated experience I realized that their promiscuity
was a perfect match to their ill commitment to any individual man. But I
wouldn’t mind incapacity of resolving my status predicament, no ma’am, I
wouldn’t. What in my country they wisely call “resisting temptation,” in this
land they refer to derogatively as “losing opportunity.” I had discovered the
joys of carnality and simply couldn’t get enough of it and yes, at times found
myself dismayed by prospects of sleeping with one single woman till death takes
her or me apart. I would be a happy fella in all respects, regardless of
status-less status quo if not for my growing (or stooping) hunchback, that is.”
“When
I return from the restroom, I want you to tell me, Alan, in every dirty detail
the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of your hunchback.” Martha says
unblushingly and un-anchors her barge body from the soft pier of the bed and
floats down the hallway estuary with half-knot velocity. She docks on a white
throne to unload the burdensome ballast and then proceeds to do some
superfluous ablutions before reentering the port.
Alan
left to his own devices (lonely, unattended, pulsating cork, to name just one,
but indeed a big one), desperately concocts the wildest, filthiest, grossest
fragments for his story that dangerously veers off into the cul-de-sac of
boredom. After Martha sheathes her corpus gigantus under the canopy of the
synthetic blanket, Alan says:
“A week after arrival in America, I primed myself for
getting over with my virginity. I’ve been collecting sperm in my testicles for
two weeks for my premier night. Reson d’etat: I wanted my first orgasm
conducted where it is meant to by nature, to be memorable in its sheer
hugeness. Now if you were a man (and I know that American women have been
emulating the opposite gender in seemingly every aspect, perhaps only excluding
combating colored people in their third-world countries), you’d appreciate the
fact that I actually achieved my coveted ambition. I abstained from my
compulsive masturbation and somehow managed to keep my night dreams dry.
“As a consequence my balls puffed up inundated with semen,
and I got stricken with an infamous, and literally unrecorded disease:
sperm-intoxication. Symptoms: vertigo, feelings of futility, mood swings,
severe deterioration of mental activities. I started having hallucinations.
People, ordinary folks transformed into puss-leaking monsters, their ghastly
snouts drooled brownish goo on the asphalt. Banshees shrieked at me from every
corner, goblins popped out of the boiler room and harassed me verbally in my
basement half-room. Thus I needed to neutralize my darkly visions by neutering
the towering spot where they originated. To approach women had become virtually
impossible due to the formidable dangers lurking outside. And I was utterly
reluctant to release the pressure down below that provoked those dangers to
appear -- I’d simply invested too much effort to build up this incredible
momentum.
“I decided to pursue my original plan of hooking up with a
woman via Internet. I subscribed to Udate.com using a credit card number from a
yellow purchase slip I found on the street. And three days later I straddled
greyhound and galloped with a hundred plus horsepower to East Berlin, which for
some unbeknownst reason was located in the state of New York. There I hooked up
with a girl named Heather, who lived in a dilapidated hut on the outskirts of
the town.
“Four hours after my arrival I was doing it. Having sex,
making love, humping, screwing, pumping her all stretched out from overuse and
two births pussy with all of my phallic might. It didn’t last all that long,
let me tell you. I didn’t exactly relish my first act of love, for I exploded
after about half a stroke. Well, at least I made it, got a permission to be let
in, and in I got. I yielded so much sticky liquid into glamorized orifice, I
thought Heather would give birth to quadruplets nine months henceforth. But the
only conception that occurred that night was the emergence of my hunch.
“I didn’t notice it right away. It took me about three
additional sexual intercourses with Heather to acknowledge the fact that
something hideous, something fucking fucked was going on with the obverse side
of my body. My back got bent and twisted. It was as if an anti-Cupid got inside
my body and used my spinal for his bow, pulling its hitherto straight line to
release an arrow of hatred into my heart. But the goddamn bow buckled and
snapped in his hefty fingers. I looked at my naked torso in the bathroom mirror
and saw a curve, a convex arch where there was a fine perpendicular column
before.”
“And
what happened after, what happened after?” Martha, mesmerized and indeed,
galvanized by the story, exclaims. But cruel Alan takes his time, for time, as
of present, is definitely on his side. He knows from his experience that
waiting for the climax is sweeter than having the climax.
“It
begs a philosophical question.” Alan takes a detour, confident that he’s safe
from extermination from the premises, at least until he reaches the conclusion
of his tale. “Whether there’s a love-unmaking side to our love-making. Well,
let me try to formulate my question more clearly. Does love, once consumed by
another, yields ugliness, decomposition, deformity? Do we give ourselves away,
piece-by-piece, through lovemaking? I mean, listen to love songs -- all songs
are love songs in one way or another -- they are all full of anguish, pain,
suffering. In my case, that suffering was materialized. Instead of emotional
impact I have had a physical. Do you know what I mean?”
Martha
shakes her head. No, she doesn’t. Alan sighs and returns to the freeway of his
hunch story. “When the weekend was over I went back to New York. To my
basement. To my sorrow. To my anguish. The back, indeed, was bent outwardly.
There was no doubt about it: I just had to look in the mirror and there it was,
bowed, curled, bent out of its streamline shape. But I refused to associate its
deformation with my sexual escapades.
“My
next stint took place in Freeport, Long Island with a rather strange girl,
Laura is her name, whom I met on Times Square where I was selling some
faux-artsy stuff, watercolor pictures, photographs and such and she, touring
the corporate stores (as if she couldn’t do it back home). Hm. How do I
describe her--”
Alan pauses staring at the floor. Throughout his monologue
his mega-myopic eyes are fixed on a carpet pattern, copied throughout the floor
area: two-inch tall pink elephants dancing on its hind paws and doing insane
acrobatics: juggling three black umbrellas on its proboscis. Alan would shoot
anxious looks at obese Martha and recall pictures of slim Russian teenage girls
he browsed on Internet just the other day, vehemently jerking his dick off.
“She was beautiful, Laura was, is, but in a rather peculiar
kind of way. It didn’t take me all that long to figure out the source of its
peculiarity, or rather, the reason behind it. Her beauty . . . ” Pink
elephants, rearing like untamed horses. “ . . . has imploded and disintegrated.
And I don’t mean because of her age (28), or because of her childlessness. A
quite different factor caused the implosion: she never shared her beauty with
other people, or so was my opinion after an evening spent in her company. Laura
insulated her physicality, her emotions, her spirit. She constructed this
impregnable wall around herself as a protection against the world, as an act of
egoism, an act of narcissism, thus rendering her beauty merely superficial,
leaving ghastly shallowness within. And as she pushed herself out of the
natural network, the flower of her beauty whose growth, whose blooming is
rendered possible due to the complex processes of nature, ranging from
biological to celestial, Laura had begun, at some point, to fade away inwardly,
to whittle prematurely. But Laura compensated this personal disaster with
imitating an action hero girl. She would conduct a complex mind-fucking game
with a number of her boyfriends (I overheard her cell phone conversations
during our date) and would have sex with the passion and speed of the machine,
gyrating her pelvis, screaming as if she was being tortured, with the ultimate
goal of provoking a stronger chemical reaction in her pretty little head, to
release the shards of her imploded beauty and relish them, perhaps for the last
time.”
“Enough, enough,” Martha exclaims, “what happened to your
back after you had sex with that Laura chick?”
“As my glans penis perforated Laura’s rather dry orifice of
her vagina, the upward curve of my thrust triggered the contortion of dura
mater membrane of my cerebra-spinal axis. Erectile fissures of my penis got
entangled with the nerve tracts leading to my vertebral column. Perhaps sex had
been so traumatic to me that the electrons and protons of my neuron system got
unbalanced by the surcharge of neurons from the excited vulva, that resulted in
a miniature atomic reaction. The condensed energy released from my nuclei,
instead of blowing my mind (or heart) sky-high focused the vector of its motion
on my vertebral column. Thus bending, disfiguring it.
“Believe it or not this is more or less the explanation I
got from a Brighton Beach doctor who wanted to treat me in Coney Island
hospital.”
“Say
what? Can you please speak English?”
“In plain English the convex of my hunch steeped
dramatically. And when I headed for my third date with an electronic music
addict, I already presented a rather uncomely sight. A sight, as you might say,
for a sour eye.
“I spotted my next hit on a subway train. She was sitting all by herself and
her Discman. I promptly engaged myself in conversation with her before my
consciousness kicked in and rendered my larynx immobile due to my inbred
timidity. As I said she was addicted to electronic sounds and loops and
samples. In particular she enjoyed hovering in five-minute musical utopias
mixed by such Brit mavericks of 80’s pop as Duran Duran, Pet Shop Boys and Simply
Red. She insisted on lubricating our lovemaking (she refrained from referring
to our fucking by any other name) that surely didn’t help me a bit with my back
problem. In fact, she with her electronic sentimentality invaded the AM
diapason of my nervous system and utterly destabilized it. As a consequence I
literally felt my hunch grow with every additional thrust.
“Here,
my story takes a dramatic turn for the routine. I would engage in versatile
sexual activity, propelled by the colossal strength of my newly dug out body
dynamics. I got kicks from self-destructing myself. But self-destruction
crippled me further and further, and ultimately you can see with your eyes in
the light of this fine morning the final product. Meet, Alan the Mutant, Alan the
Beast, Alan the Creature Despicable and Unspeakable.”
Alan
finishes his story still staring at the crazy elephants on the carpet. Glare
from the un-curtained window blinds him when he plucks up enough courage to
look up at Martha. He squints and sees through a watery prism of his cornea and
thick concavity of his lenses, Martha uncover her weighty body, slip her pink
feet into her slippers and shuffle towards him.
“My
poor baby. My poor poor baby, come to your mama.”
Alan
plays out his trump card with self-confidence worthy of Casanova. “But I don’t
want to bend it even more.” Silence and Martha’s warm hands on his hot cheeks
interrupt his killer line. He continues nonetheless. “No matter how much I want
to do it with you. Oh how much. I like you, you know. But I’m so afraid.”
“Shh.
Come with me. I’m different. You know that?” Martha’s voice yields almost
motherly softness, you might even say love, and yes, it is confident too. She
takes Alan by his shaking hand and leads to her bed. “I’m special, Alan.” She
chastens her Internet one-night stand. “I won’t damage your nervous system.
I’ll only mollify it. And your back will grow, but the other way around. Your
back will grow back in. Just come with me.”
Alan
smiles inwardly and does exactly what he is told.
Misha Firer was born in 1979 in Ulyanovsk, Russia. He lived in Israel, New York
and currently resides in Oakland, California. This year, 32 of his short stories
appeared in BIG News, In Posse Review, Nuvein, Paumanok Review, Scarlet Letters, Slow Trains,
Spoiled Ink, Vestal Review, Word Riot and elsewhere. His short story “Prayer Notes”
(Rose & Thorn, Fall 2004) was nominated for Pushcart Awards. "Modern Day Invisible Man"
appeared in Ascent Aspirations Magazine this year. "The Hunchback" can be considered as its sequel of sorts.
Misha Firer
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