Octavia

Homophrosyne (or, INFJ/ENTP 4EVA)

He takes me to Battersea Dogs Home for a treat and I feel his love warmlicking me in the rhythm of the rough little tongues through the cages and he says:

'If you were a dog and abandoned and brought here, I'd rehome you.'

I thump my tail and lay back my ears.

'But what if someone else got me first?'

Hackles raised:

'Never. Never. I'd bring my sleeping bag the night before and camp out, so I was first in the queue.'

As we kiss, a little russet lurcher whimpers mournfully; and for the first time, I feel sorry for Her.

Rage

His love always warms - except

When it scalds with the tepid drizzle of

A careful kiss or 

Polite declaration.

Then burned raw purple I claw 

At his face with my sharp little nails

As he holds me off,

Confused.

Supermarket sweep

Ambling aisles in Every Little Helps, I am brie-drooling and undressing Babybels with my eyes when a tiny woman, wizened as a peach stone and wafting doilies, quakingly accosts me.

'I'm sorry, my dear, but - you're so tall!'

I am momentarily zipped back to many-a bar opening gambit: I am not sure whether to snark back 'No, you're just freakishly short', or to go eyelash epileptic in pursuit of a free martini.

'Could you possibly fetch down the Jersey churn? I just can't reach.'

In a fluid sweep and swoop of my arm the cream is in her basket. She thanks me, and I wander off, thinking that there aren't many physical characteristics that make you inherently useful to others. 

Men say the funniest things! (#3)

He was my flatmate: Irish, with hobbit-hairy feet that he always tried to keep hidden. We had lived together for three years: I had seen him puking pure pernod, and he had slept with three of my friends.

(Feedback was: he preferred to giveth then receiveth. In fact, receiveth made him thoft.)

After a long Saturday night we were on the sofa watching repeats of rubbish and sharing chips when he knocked back his drink and over the sweet chili sauce and said:

'I love you, I can't keep it back any more, I love you, I love you so much.'

'Don't be a twat.'

'I do, I love you.' Red-eyed, he squint surveyed me. 'You're so hot. You've got beautiful legs.'

I eye rolled. If I knew how, I would have snorted derisively. 'Everyone says that.'

'No but everything's beautiful. You've got such beautiful, such beautiful...'

He airpainted in panicky gestures as his mind clearly struggles for a conclusive body part. Arms? - no! too much like legs, limb connection; eyes (tacky, and anyway who has ugly eyes?); tits..

'You have...such beautiful... ears.'

[The next morning, leaving him sleeping, I examine my ears in the bathroom mirror. They're not all that.]

Later, he let me break his heart. 

Men say the funniest things! (#2)

A friend (as in, a real person and a real friend, no sneer marks required)

Was not happy with her body, and only fuckked with a. the lights outside, and b. herself below.

One night, after much tonguing Mr Russian Standard, she agreed to reverse these situations.

Grinding away on top, her thoughts are of cowgirls and sweat-necks licked and shortened breath as calloused hands grabbed hips and then...

She heard him chuckle.

'What?' She asked, clenched half up his cock.

His eyes refocused.

'Oh nothing - sorry - I was thinking about something else.'

Later, she let him come in her mouth. 

If only I could change just this one thing about myself

I have
no sense of balance.

Whenever I'm asked at interviews, 'What's your greatest failing?'

I always say:

'I have the sense of balance of a dead dog.'

(You have to say this Dead Pan [but what does that mean any way?].)

I've never
Not got the job.

Men say the funniest things! (#1)

I was on a Romantic Weekend in Amsterdam, with the boyfriend before last.

(He was a Kiwi, and had made the first move.)

We had just been to a sex show where a man in a gorilla costume had shot fake come through a penis banana into my hair - it clumped. Red lights twinkled in canal reflection as he stroked my face and said, with melted Cadburys tone:

'You know, you look a lot like a hooker.'

My eyebrows scurry upwards, my lips lemon twist. He looks injured.

'What?' (says he, looking hurt). 'Hookers are really hot!'

Later, in the hostel, I let him suck on my tits. 

What I want to be when I grow up

Tuesday afternoon slithers through my fingers and I'm staring out the Windows Media Player thinking about occupations deaded as a dodo.

Station signalmen and 
lamp lighters,  
soothsayers, haruspices, 
wet nurses and 
wheelwrights.  

Cup-bearers,
glass eye makers, 
haystackers and hop pickers.
Soothsayers and archimimes and benshi and dog whippers and sbitenshchiks and knocker-uppers and Tea ladies.

And I wonder if I could have been a world-beater, an Olympic Gold telegram clerk, and if given a chance I would have sent messages of births and deaths and coronations at record speed, with poison accuracy, and changed the world. 

Instead, I do this. 

Fascinations of my flesh

'My girlfriend's legs are famous,' he always says, his tone sluttishly kissing both sneer and leer. 

'They're in that advert for tights. You know, brand sounds like a parrot. These things' - as his hand scorpion-scuttles up my thighs, angry - 'have been put up in lights, 34 feet high. Piccadilly Circus.'

The addressee, my boy'friend', me, the whole world looks silently at my thighs. 

It was ever thus: the rest of me may be slackbeige nothing, but my thighs, oh they're world beaters. In the school locker room all would stillstiffen like children playing musical statues, cans of Impulse perilously poised, netball skirts akimbo, as cherry chapsticks gaped. And now, frenetic changing rooms shudder to a slow pulse of fascination, and I have to push past mesmerised women, picking my way through their propped-up, half-dressed, devoured battlefield bodies.

No one ever notices my kind, terrified eyes. 

The girl who was beautiful on the inside

Ida had gut rot.

The doctor, seeing

Her ginger

Frizz

And squat 

Freckle - while 

Sight-supping the supple blonde holding close her kidneys in the waiting room -

Diagnosed

An app-en-dect-omy

At once.

Bare arse in 

Paper petticoat

Ida's fat dry lips cunted back

10, 9, 8 

As the anaesthetist wondered

Why she didn't 

Do something 

With her hair.

She awoke to the languid clithering kiss of hot love on her belly.

The doctor, eyes wide as summer, gasped in to find her gaze on his

And dropped to his knees, courtly awed.

'You', he breathed, 'You are the one' -

Her head swims in new waters -

'Your insides are so beuatiful:

Kidneys rose red, your duodenum sparkles

Like liquid diamond on blue velvet.

On slitting you apart the surgeons swooned

To find such intestinal perfectional.'

Ida 

Drew one stub-

-By thumb

Across her guts.

New worlds gaped.