Katharine

A sketch I wrote for Creative Writing:

Now she was craving a Diet Coke.

All day she had yearned for one thing: sex. Now that the whole mess of finding someone, getting them drunk enough, finding a cab back to her place, and finally tearing off that someone’s clothes had all been haphazardly planned, quickly executed, and completed flawlessly—the snoring corpse beside her had been the icing on her cake, what with his square jaw and three percent body fat—and brought her the utmost satisfaction she could devour from a throwaway man…now she was craving a Diet Coke.

The conclusion came to her then that no matter how large the craving—she hadn’t had sex for weeks—there would always be another to follow. One could destroy the earth with a handful of nuclear bombs and a hundred years of devastating climate change, but there would still be a mosquito or two that would eventually track you down and pinch you on the nape of your neck.

Some people smoke after sex, she thought, but I am not one of those people. Mysterious artificial sweeteners that sting the tongue and natural flavors in some carbonated water. That’s the only thing that can satisfy me after a toe curling orgasm.

She slipped out from under the however-many-thousand count thread sheets—she only knew they were comfortable as hell and cost about as much as there were threads to boast. And they were green. Green like the waxy fake plants she would fall asleep staring at in her father’s office when she was still young.

The man let a small breeze escape from some opening on his face. He was burrowed into one of her enormous feather pillows, so he was muted, already disappearing, becoming just another fuck. He sighed again and she imagined that that’s what it sounds like to be a mile from Old Faithful as it explodes, to hear it but not see it, to not be one of the people standing around it taking pictures, watching nature’s strange quirks with romantic wonder and awe.

Yet she maintained some politeness toward her gentleman. She tiptoed from her bedroom as she wrapped her silk bathrobe around her, tried not to push any of the creaky doors of her rusting apartment any more than they had to be driven, and held the can of Coke in the yellow light of the refrigerator as one might hold a baby in the middle of the night, lifting it slowly, holding it to her chest with relentless emotion. She brought it into the furthest corner of her kitchen, as far away from her bed as possible without leaving her home and walking to the roof, to open it with a that loud snap, crack, and hiss that cans of soda produce as reliably as the sun’s rising in the east or the top networks producing shitty sitcoms.

Like a geisha holding a steaming cup of tea she scuttled over to her sofa and curled her legs into a pretzel. And she looked like a geisha too: the blue moonlight seemed to be erasing her dark tan, inverting her into a thin powdery girl with a round face, a flat chest, and hair as black as the bottom of a well. She saw this girl stretching and sliding across the surface of the silver can, the specter of what she hid each morning as she applied foundation and crimped her hair. As she shadowed her eyes and extended her lashes. This was the girl that died each time she closed the tanning bed above her; she left this girl in there as she redressed, it was her coffin.

Yet Katharine kept finding her: when she would nervously put on an expensive pushup bra in the morning, when she would crave sex all day at the office like a teenager who’s just been handed car keys, when she would selfishly troll the bar, only cautiously use men and not let herself keep any lasting relations with them—when she would wake up and crave something as foolish as a Diet Coke.

Then the can was empty. She took one final swig, determined to get any last details from the selfish bottom, and set it on the coffee table. With that craving gone she slipped back into bed, made sure the alarm clock was off, felt herself toward the warmth of the nameless that slept beside her, and wondered what it was that she would want next.

She wondered if she might just crave him again in the morning, and eventually, in many years when the men no longer willed themselves into her overpriced sheets, if she would desire to have him back, his square jaw and two percent body fat, his snoring, his salty, cool smell.

Then exhaustion persuaded her to crave sleep, to which she conceded, and all wonder stopped. So she was briefly satisfied again.