I hate people.
When I got home from work on Friday, all I wanted to do was hang myself.
My noose was already wound, welcoming me like a braided velvet headlock. My noose is always there—in my dreams, my diaries, my daydreams, my fantasies, my wet dreams, my sexual fantasies, my wet diaries, my bedroom.
Once, I joined a dating service and was told that my ideal partner was a noose. I love my strangle-bunny, and she loves me.
She seemed to expand and contract in the wavering candlelight like a sphincter—which was odd, since sphincters do nothing for me sexually. (Well, except for that one time.)
I lit incense and put on my special CD—two hours of Celine Dion singing nothing but 'My Heart Will Go On.' I climbed naked onto a chair, the noose spread wide before me.
The phone rang in the kitchen like a dentist's drill.
The machine picked up, a tinny voice braying some irrelevant message; but, since I have no friends, I knew it had to be a telemarketer.
The phone stopped.
Celine began her song again, a heartshriek that ripsawed my soul in two.
I stripped myself naked of anxieties, slid greased into the hot tub of my fantasy, and let the trembling bubbles of autoerotic asphyxiation begin to run their numbing fingers over me.
I thrust my head into the waiting noose. The velvet caressed my jugular, restricting the flow of blood to my brain, and I meeped silently, hungry as a guppy for the oxygenated pond water of Celine's voice.
I floated in the mile-high club of cerebral hypoxia, hovering over a bubbling vat of hot orgasms, helpless and pale as vanilla soup. But, no, even lighter, more airy, like white angel-food cake dough. But, no, still more malleable, like white vanilla angel-food cake dough-soup. My entire being hung—twisting, swinging—a great, airy, fluffy, doughy, soupy sack of fluffy nothingness awaiting the baking mold of sex.
The phone rang. Again I heard the telemarketer yammer and hang up.
I leaned forward a third time, the rope squeezing my carotid artery until my entire head felt ready to explode, until my body felt as rigid as a huge aerodynamic tube of pressurized aluminum building to explosive decompression into the airless upper regions of the great blue suffocating vagina of the sky.
I heard Celine, or a mind-ripping wail of sexual frustration, or a defibrillator in my brain. I heard the phone.
I flinched from the sound. My chair rocked back, the rope easing, blood rushing into my head, as consciousness jackbooted back into my mind. I had been fucking a dream, which shrank and shriveled and slipped through my hands like perfume.
The phone rang.
I stormed into the kitchen, demented, deranged, disoriented, and screamed 'What? What?' into the phone.
'Miss Williams!' a man shouted. 'Get out of the house. The killer's on the other phone. He's in the house with you. Get out now!'
'I'm sorry,' I said, 'but there's no one by the name of Williams living here. I think you have the wrong number.'
'Oh,' said the man, and he hung up.
He didn't even say he was sorry.
I hate people.