Rimgia, whose hair was the color of the central length inside a split carrot…

Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder… and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair.

With a deep and quiet joy I recognized the beginnings of my own climax, and here again it was new, new. For usually it was rush upward toward the final explosion, with perhaps a split-second pause of almost unbearable sensitivity before the ejaculation—and that was a short series of electric thumps and a complete fall from whatever heights to the ever-present here-and-now. Thinking of the way it used to be, a phrase occurs to me: “I never left home.” But now…

Now I rode no rockets to a quick burst of color and a cinder-fall. They say that when a three-hundred-foot tidal wave struck somewhere in the Pacific, fishermen eleven miles were unaware of its passage, so gently and massively were they raised and let down. This is the way I was carried up to a height I had never before known; it was that all-but-unbearable point of sensitivity that I had flicked past so many times before; but this time I rested there forever, while time stopped. It was from this altitude that my joybursts were launched—not the abrupt sequence of little gouts of relief, but long sibilant syllables arcing up and out into a universe I had never known existed. Four, five of them, another, and then an interminable rest on that summit, and then one more, and then the last.

I had always been silent before; now, I shouted.

[…]

Then the great wave let me down, let me down peacefully and easily into the presence of my wife and my world and a sunshowered here and now.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

It was a face that told of an amplitude of nature and of quick and free motions and, though it had no regular beauty, was in the highest degree engaging and attaching. Madame Merle was a tall, fair, plump woman; everything in her person was round and replete, though without those accumulations which minister to indolence. Her features were thick but there was a graceful harmony among them, and her complexion had a healthy clearness. She had a small grey eye, with a great deal of light in it—an eye incapable of dullness, and, according to some people, incapable of tears; and a wide, firm mouth, which, when she smiled, drew itself upward to the left side, in a manner that most people thought very odd, some very affected, and a few very graceful. Isabel inclined to range herself in the last category. Madame Merle had thick, fair hair, which was arranged with picturesque simplicity, and a large white hand, of a perfect shape—a shape so perfect that its owner, preferring to leave it unadorned, wore no rings.

They had formed a circle around him, twenty, thirty people, and their circle grew smaller and smaller. Soon the circle could not contain them all, they began to push, to shove, and to elbow, each of them trying to be closest to the center.

And then all at once the last inhibition collapsed within them, and the circle collapsed with it. They lunged at the angel, pounced on him, threw him to the ground. Each of them wanted to touch him, wanted to have a piece of him, a feather, a bit of plumage, a spark from that wonderful fire. They tore away his clothes, his hair, his skin from his body, they plucked him, they drove their claws and teeth into his flesh, they attacked him like hyenas.

But the human body is tough and not easily dismembered, even horses have great difficulty accomplishing it. And so the flash of knives soon followed, thrusting and slicing, and then the swish of axes and cleavers aimed at the joints, hacking and crushing the bones. In very short order, the angel was divided into thirty pieces, and every animal in the pack snatched a piece for itself, and then, driven by voluptuous lust, dropped back to devour it.

fans upon
whose feathers
love has scattered
its blossoms…

los abanicos en
cuyos plumajes
desvaneció el amor
sus azahares…

Dean Allen is six foot three, myopic, of Scots-Dutch descent, and losing his hair. A recovering graphic designer, he lives in the South of France with Gail Armstrong, two swell kids, two cats he loathes and some dogs. He is squeamish around insects and crying children. His favourite word as of this revision is dipsomaniac. Formerly a fan of the phrase “to clean one’s own rifle” in reference to the act of onanism, he now prefers one coined by Corey Keegan of Toronto: “landing the Johnson account”. He likes the music hard and loud. Once, during a game of mock sloganeering, his friend Gerry shouted “French filmmakers out of Hollywood!”, to which Dean shot back, “French filmmakers out of Candace Bergen!” Money falls like water through his hands. Though well past the age where doing so would be feasible, were he to front a rock ’n roll band, it would be named Egregious Philbin. He needs to drink more water and curb his childish interests, though clearly these two needs have nothing in common. The funniest thing Dean has ever witnessed was some footage of narcoleptic dogs in a Nova documentary on sleep disorders. The second funniest was an interview with a farmer whose Tourette’s Syndrome manifested itself not in tics or verbal outbursts but in an overwhelming temptation to touch a running chainsaw to his pantleg. If Dean recalls correctly, that was in a Nova documentary on neurological disorders. A gifted mimic, he nonetheless eschews regional accents for comic effect. In a previous working life, he occasionally took respite from the stresses of the day by locking the door of the office bathroom, turning out the lights and just, like, standing there for a really long time. He admires several people. He is a lousy correspondent, and for that he is sorry. Except for the times when he is ridiculously overprepared, he is inevitably underprepared. In general, he finds patriots, professional actors, cult-stud academics, neoconservatives, chiropractors and usability experts to be silly. At the moment his favourite PHP function is extract(). Sometimes a nice piece of grilled beefsteak is all Dean requires to be truly happy. He has of late, with comic results, been using power tools. His pen of choice is the Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V5 Extra Fine. If Dean has pissed you off, he is sorry. If it were down to you and him, Dean would prefer to drive. He doesn’t understand golf at all. Right now he is several pages into a hundred books. Since moving to the country, he sometimes goes days without looking in a mirror, and when eventually he does it’s always a bit jarring. Dean enjoys card games. He can and — even when not called upon to do so — will recite Orson Welles’ cuckoo clock speech from The Third Man. After several tries, he has the waffles just about right, but still cannot prevent messy batter runoff. Though he has referred to it in the past, Dean is not entirely sure what the subjunctive clause is. He is likewise uncertain of the proper way to pronounce gerund.

You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, barely holding their tongues on their teeth, playing in corners where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.

Me miras, de cerca me miras, cada vez más de cerca y entonces jugamos al cíclope, nos miramos cada vez más de cerca y nuestros ojos se agrandan, se acercan entre sí, se superponen y los cíclopes se miran, respirando confundidos, las bocas se encuentran y luchan tibiamente, mordiéndose con los labios, apoyando apenas la lengua en los dientes, jugando en sus recintos donde un aire pesado va y viene con un perfume viejo y un silencio. Entonces mis manos buscan hundirse en tu pelo, acariciar lentamente la profundidad de tu pelo mientras nos besamos como si tuviéramos la boca llena de flores o de peces, de movimientos vivos, de fragancia oscura. Y si nos mordemos el dolor es dulce, y si nos ahogamos en un breve y terrible absorber simultáneo del aliento, esa instantánea muerte es bella. Y hay una sola saliva y un solo sabor a fruta madura, y yo te siento temblar contra mi como una luna en el agua.

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde—dyed by her own hand.

At last I looked at her; I took her elbows and looked down into her face, her dear face. Liza is one of those women who is the envy and despair of all the other women her age; she always, always would look younger than she was and younger than all of them. It wasn't only the small, slender, firm body and the smooth skin and clear eyes; it was the way she carried herself, the way, when she moved or spoke, she released energy rather than stoking it up and eking it out like the rest of us. She kept her masses of blue-fired black hair rolled and folded up into a gleaming dark helmet and her eyes were not green, as they seemed to be, but an illuminated blue full of so many flecks of gold that they seemed to be green.