When he did that, when he did that, it made me so mad, let me tell you. He made it so that something inside of me crunched up, turned to crust, a crumble of something dried and burnt. I looked at him as he paced our living room, his face so perfectly boned when you look at it through eyes of love, as I had done before he did that. But now his nose was long, it was a salami, it was Pinocchio’s nose grown fat. He looked at me with his previously beautiful eyes, which had been green as the gentle breeze on a hot day, green as newborn plants pulsing out of the earth, but now were the green of slime, the green of pond murk. He looked at me and I was a crust of a crumb of a burnt pie. I could never turn back to woman, standing here, charred inside, a pie forgotten in the oven too long, and there was nothing to do now but throw me out. And that was what he had done, I supposed. He had thrown me out, but a part of me was left behind on the counter, this burnt crumb before him. And his nose was growing larger and larger and I supposed it was good that our future children wouldn’t inherit that schlong after all. Because there would be no children and there would be no interpretations of us as an us in them. There would be nothing, because their mother was a burnt up piece of trash in the dustpan, and their father was a caricature of a man from that Lifetime Movie I saw, a ghost image flickering across my TV screen as the woman sat in the courtroom, crying beautiful tears.
Joy Lanzendorfer is a writer living near San Francisco. She recently completed her M.A. in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where she served on the editorial board for Fourteen Hills Literary Journal. Her work has appeared in Word Riot, Great Kills Press, Salon, The Door, Writer’s Digest, The Writer, San Francisco Chronicle, Bust, PopMatters and many others. Her chapbook The End of the World As We Know It was runner-up for the 2006 Michael Rubin Chapbook Award. In 2007, 2008, and 2009, she was a judge for the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards.
In addition, she is co-founder of the writing group Word Pirates.