Before You She Was a Pitbull
On the nights she is too tired to return to you she comes to me. She slinks across town after dark and stands on my porch waiting to be let in. She raps on my door with her bloodied knuckles and pushes the uncombed locks of hair from her face as I watch from my darkened hall, unready to let her in.
She never looks so beautiful
As this: as when she is made to wait.
Not that you would know this.
She tells me about you.
She tells me how you can’t go five seconds without hurling yourself at her, so eager are you to see your blood and spit and tears on her hands.
She tells me how you wait for her in your drive.
How you run into the headlights like a frightened fawn.
How before she has even stepped from the car you are between her knees, a palm on each hip, anchoring yourself to her.
She tells me what you’re doing to her.
How it’s killing her, this taking care of you.
She waits for me and I watch her mouth redden and soften, reminding me of the pomegranate arils I placed one at a time on her tongue that first night she was not with you. I unlock the door and open it to her, fighting the urge to bloody her lips with my teeth. Unlike you I am a master of restraint. Unlike you I can withhold my longings. I stand aside and let her take the stairs before me. I watch as she glides up them, her head cast downward, her waist more emaciated than I remembered it, her body casting canine shadows on my wall: a greyhound or a whippet, a timid creature with its tail between its legs. This is what you have made of her. Alongside you she has become weakened and I miss her strengths.
As she nears the top I think that I might have to carry her the last few steps but she drags herself to the landing and I meet her there. I guide her to the bath and sit next to her on the painted tiles, watching the steam rise from the tap and fill the room, easing our breaths and clouding our reflections. I help her disrobe and take her elbow as she steps carefully over the side and into the water. I leave my clothing on the floor beside hers and fold myself in behind her, reaching around with all four limbs, warming her body with my own.
I dampen a washcloth and gently remove the taste of you from her skin. Your fingerprints are everywhere and I am careful to wash away each one. I rake her matted hair with my fingers and feel it fall against my chest, blanketing my indecencies. I close my eyes and wish for once to be like you. I wish not to be a woman as I am but to be a man as you are. I wish for the simplicity of conveying to her my desires with the hardening of myself beneath her. How easy it could be, being you, voicing my wants and needs with only my flesh. What an injustice it is then that you waste what you have been given, that you deny her that which would satiate her; that you allow your fears of completion to come between you.
She tells me everything.
I light us a cigarette and place it between her lips where I want to be and listen to the laundry list of your requests.
She tells me how in the beginning they excited her.
How she looked forward to tightening the ropes and loosening your bowels.
How she sat in bed at night imagining new ways to unleash your tears.
She wanted to be creative. She wanted there to be an element of surprise when she marred your skin or stole your breaths.
She didn’t want to be just another of your devotees going through the motions, feigning an interest in your degradations.
But now it is just another shit job, she says.
Just another eight hours to get through.
She tells me there’s nothing in it for her anymore.
How your promises of reciprocation have all but been forgotten in your near constant quest for humiliation.
She tells me that above all she has grown bored with you.
There’s no imagination, no ingenuity or cleverness, in your requests anymore.
Your narcissism no longer feels romantic.
She leans back into me, elongating her neck, offering up to me her mouth.
I drop the cigarette into the water and watch it float beneath her fingers.
Her body is unfamiliar to me and my first instinct is one of penetration, which leaves me feeling crippled in my body, castrated by my creator.
In time, however, our movements slow down and become synchronized, our bodies mirrored images of themselves. And I let go my envy of you, of what I am not.
The nights she comes to me are beginning to outnumber those she goes to you.
Wait for her in your drive as I lay beside her counting her pretty breaths.
Continue your watch.
Pace up and down, back and forth, like a tiger in a cage, like it’s your freedom you want.
Elizabeth Ellen lives in ann arbor where, despite having a boston terrier of her own, she covets her neighbor's whippet.