Two Stories By

  Mary Miller

Girls

He shows you his drawings, sketchbooks full of naked women. Women who were live at some point, who let him draw them before they became a story he would recount to you.  How one day you will be a story he will recount to someone else. You picture him high and biking through the streets of San Francisco. You think you might have loved him then. He points to one drawing, a bar scene, and says, so I’m sitting in this bar in South Korea, watching a group of people who thought they were coming upon the end of the world. They had given all their possessions to a charlatan, and so, when the end didn’t come, became very angry. He mimics tearing apart your apartment, holding a lamp over his head before setting it back down, knocking over a chair and then righting it. You like this story but you want to hear about the Japanese girl again. You want to hear about every girl who ever loved him, hoping that all of them, put together, might somehow convince you. 

Paper and Tassels

File his stories in your head: Homosexual Experience, Threesomes, Prostitution, Asian Girls. Mostly he fucked people over, which you like because he is in love with you. He will not fuck you over, you tell yourself. At some point he cries and says you are his dream girl. You have no stories to tell. You can count the number of men you’ve had on one hand, none of them any good. He sends you pictures. He is in the bathroom. He is outside. He is in the kitchen. There is a teakettle, a window, a cloud. There is a hanging lamp made of paper and tassels. 

[9/09]

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Mary Miller's short story collection, Big World, was published in February by Short Flight/Long Drive Books. Her stories can be found and forthcoming in Oxford American, McSweeney's Quarterly, Black Clock, Hobart, Mississippi Review, Indiana Review, Versal, New Stories from the South, 2008, and others  She is associate editor at Quick Fiction.