Tabloid Dreams by Robert Olen Butler

Author:Robert Olen Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2013-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

“Every Man

She Kisses Dies”

Bring on the sports heroes and the U.S. senators and the middle management bosses and the bad-seed uncles and the boyfriends your mama brought home from the cheap bars for the night, bring them to me and let them put their hands on me and their lips on mine and I’ll kill the sons of bitches, giving them what they want. I might as well. Because the men I love, the ones who come to me gentle and speak sweetly and take it slow and look me in the eyes and try their hardest to do it right, they all die, as it is. From the touch of my lips.

He’s gone for the moment, into the bathroom. He’s surely afraid. He’s so gentle and he must be afraid. I haven’t kissed him yet. The room is white. The sun is coming through the window and the glare from the walls blinds me. I have nowhere to look, it is so pure and so empty. I listen for him. He clears his throat. Even that sound from him, coming through the closed door, has a tiny trembling in it. He is afraid. So am I.

Did I catch this from somebody? In some unprotected moment of passion? It’s possible. How do you protect yourself from passion? And if you can protect yourself, how can it be passion? Must passion be gone from this world forever? Is that what we have to expect from each other if you suddenly find a man looking you in the eyes and you’re sure he’s seeing you and you can see him, real clear, and he says here is my body, take it, from my love for you, and I say here is my own body, I give you the same. If you are to really love each other, do you have to want this thing made of rubber between your sweetest flesh and his? If you find a moment on this earth when there is passion and there is love, shouldn’t this barrier between the two of you make you sadder than death?

It does me. And it made me that sad even before I knew my own curse was worse by far. I have nightmares—they seem like nightmares but maybe they’re just visions of the right thing to do in a world like this. I am about to kiss a man and we both really feel something between us and I say, Wait a minute. I go into the drawer in the nightstand and I pull out a foil pack and I tear it open and it’s wax lips, big red wax lips, and I put them on and I murmur okay out of the corner of my mouth and we kiss.

The thing is, I believe in God. I still do. My daddy was a preacher and he would talk about the lips of a strange woman dripping like a honeycomb and her mouth being smoother than oil but her end being bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword.

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