FICTION

On the same page of the city paper one day:

    

A confessed murderer awaiting trial for the torture and murder of a woman and her young daughter is a guest on a talk show via satellite. His appearance is facilitated by the mother's parents who, wanted him to tell them exactly what the

murder of their daughter and grandchild was like. "It was horrible to talk to him," said the talk show hostess. "He will go down in history as the lowest of the low." There was a photograph of the killer, smiling as if he'd won a prize.

    

A woman in San Francisco announced her intention to have intercourse with 1,000 men in a row, breaking the record of a woman in New Mexico who had performed the same feat with a mere 750. "I want to show what women can do," she said. "I am not doing this as a feminist, but as a human being."

    

Two giant turtles belonging to an endangered species were stolen from the Bronx Zoo. "This may've been an inside job," said the zoo president. "This person knew what he was doing, and he was very smart. We just hope he keeps them together — they're very attached." The turtles are valued at $300.00 each.

It was in the middle of the paper, a page that you were meant to scan before turning, loading your brain with subliminal messages as you did. How loathsome to turn a sadistic murder into entertainment — and yet how hard not to read about it. What dark comedy to realize that you are scanning for descriptions of torture even as you disapprove. Which, of course, only makes it more entertaining. "But naturally I was hoping they'd report something grisly," you say to your friends, who chuckle at your acknowledgment of hypocrisy.

    

And they did report something grisly: that the grandparents of the murdered girl wanted to know what only the murderer could tell them. You picture the grandmother's gentle wrinkled chest, a thick strip of flesh pulled away to reveal an unexpected passage to hell in her heart.

    

Then you have the marathon woman right underneath, smiling like an evangelist, her organs open for a thousand. An especially grotty sort of pie-eating contest, placed right beneath the killer, an open body juxtaposed against the pure force of destruction. Why would a woman do that? What do her inane words really mean? Will she select the thousand, is there at least a screening process? Or is it just anyone who shows up? If he had not been arrested, could the killer himself have mounted her along with everybody else? If she had discovered who he was, would that have been okay with her? Would she have just swallowed him without a burp?

    

You picture her at the start of her ordeal, parting a curtain to appear before the crowd, muscular, oiled, coifed, dressed in a lamé bathing suit with holes cut in the titties and crotch. She would turn and bend to show the suit had been cut there too. She would "ring-walk" before the bed, not like a stripper, more like a pro wrestler, striking stylized sex poses, flexing the muscles of her belly and thighs, gesticulating with mock anger, making terrible penis-busting faces.

©2000 Mary Gaitskill and Nerve.com, Inc.