There was no way we could ever get along.
First of all, she would use all the wrong words.
“You’re spurious,” she would tell me.
“You’re not making any sense,” I would say.
“Something is spurious if its source is indeterminate.”
“Ha!” she would counter sarcastically, as if
hitting upon an arcane truism. I don’t think
she realized she had just called me a bastard.
And then her forehead was all wrong. Bulging
at the top like a cold, sappy muskmelon. I would
look at her profile and swear I could see a toddler
playing with matchsticks. It was just as that Swiss
phrenologist Lavater once warned. Straight foreheads
could never be compatible with arching ones.
Then there was her skin: leathery and pitted
like a deceptive chameleon. Her chest, caved-in
as if a fishmonger’s hook had carved and gutted
out her heart. And those eyes, with their strange
luminescent glare like a feral pit bull’s. Finally,
one night when I dreamt I saw her face popping
out at me like a flimsy paper jack-in-the-box
vamp, I knew it was all wrong.
“I love you,” she would coo before hanging up.
She always did have a knack for misusing words.
The Shape of Things
