Three Ages of Man and Three Graces, by Hans Baldung
Master of Ceremonies:
Welcome to the all you can eat buffet of male privilege! It’s all you can eat bodies here, no souls attached! Need someone to fuck around with while you’re getting over your ex-wife, and before you’ve met the next adolescent to lure into co dependence, we have it! Need some emotional and physical intimacy while your ex-girlfriend is still living in your flat and only having sex with you occasionally, we’ve got it! Need someone to fuck while your partner is away in India! We can help you!
There are way too many bodies on the table here, and it’s easy for the customers to over indulge, which they often do, wreaking havoc on their frail digestive systems.
I have already been consumed. J.W., N, and the Red Headed Cupid have used a mixture of my blood and fascia to hold together the awkward, unmentionable parts of their lives, never thinking that I needed to have my own story. After all the M.C. said that there were no souls involved. Everyone listens to the M.C.. The Red Headed Cupid is still picking the flesh of my heel from his teeth as he greets his partner at Heathrow.
I am gathering my bones together where they’ve been discarded, underneath the table. I am trying to reincorporate, forming my own story, although I know it borders on the grotesque. Dry bones held together by alien saliva, and a head, I crawl out from under the table and stagger upwards.
N looks at my face and says: What’s eating you? Why do you look so down? Look at how the blue the sky is! There are so many people you could meet! Put a smile on your face!
I wonder if N notices that I am only a skeleton and barely standing up. I momentarily fantasize about somehow reasserting my boundaries to protect myself from the ‘wrong people,’ but then it’s still in recent memory that it’s only these ‘wrong’ people who approached me, and I don’t even have skin to hide the immodesty of my bones any more. All the sweetness of the flesh: generosity, empathy, and idealism, has been completely consumed.
I look at N and realize he is wearing strange, circular, opaque glasses. They turn prismatic in the sunlight. I wonder if he is actually blind, or his vision is distorted. I try to take off his glasses.
“Don’t Touch Me!” he snaps angrily. I look slightly wounded. “Maybe you should try dating someone uglier and less intelligent,” he says. “People like me only partner with people who look like Jennifer Aniston and own flats near Bakerloo.”
In an awkward pause I look at his sunken chest and flabby stomach and try to unravel what the MC said to make him equate personal fulfillment with commodity fetishes.
Then I totter back to the feast for women…I have some faint memory of being here before I was lured to that demented table by a chicken pie. The feast is a bit like the one in Peter Pan and also like the one in Beetle Juice. The food is very good, pies and cakes, turkey legs and quiche, but you have to work very hard to imagine it. Then when you put out your hand to grasp the imaginary food, an invisible hand swats at you.
You want emotional intimacy with your sex? Shut the fuck up you stupid ho!
You want to express your thoughts and feelings? Disgusting, no one wants to hear your imbecility!
You want to be in a relationship? You clingy bitch! How transactional!
You want to get married and have kids? Grotesque, That’s not for people like you!
I sleepily wonder what kind of people it is for, and where their table is, but I let it go pretty quickly. I have zero transformational powers in my skeleton, and no energy as my body is feeding on nothing right now. I couldn’t begin to look like them. Though I am absolutely starving at this point I don’t have enough energy to imagine any more food….and if I take any more hits from invisible hands I might collapse into a pile of bones. I am longing to….I am a few seconds away from….lying down on the grassy hillside and waiting for the lights to go dim.
Fifty Dates of Grey 