I Puked and I Shat and I Pissed and I Came (Excerpts)
New fiction by Riquita Lea
Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of new or gently-used work from an artist who's earned our respect.
There is art that moves us, and there is art that moves alongside us. This is Fellow Travellers.
Today, enjoy three excerpts from Riquita Lea’s novel in progress, I Puked and I Shat and I Pissed and I Came.
I. “Got to say lads, them transsexuals, I take me ‘at off to ‘em I really do.”
Ron’s announcement chilled this segment of the call centre like an icy gust.
“Don’t mind saying it at all. Knew a chap up my road. Wife and two kids. Well she’s Linda now and well, now they’ve got a pair o’ mothers. And her wife’s a lezza.” Keith’s jaw donked to the floor.
“Couldn’t say a bad word about ‘er. Really came out of ‘er shell when she told us seven years ago. Well that’s seventeen years we’ve known ‘em both now.
“That Miriam off the telly you were slaggin’ off, beautiful young lady. Could say she was a ‘propa hinny’ Dave!”
(Ron and Dave were both from Newcastle.)
“Know what you’re gonna say lads, would I or wouldn’t I well never mind that. She’s living ‘er truth which is a damn sight more of what any of you lads do. That’s what life’s about, just got to be ‘appy at the end of the day. I’m sure she’ll find ‘er way.”
A manager shuffled Ron aside about an upcoming assignment on Monday, and crestfallen, Keith muttered something to Dave with glaring eyes as it quickly fell dead to Lindsey and Andrea’s admonishment. They spoke up in support of this lovely story and something rose wonderfully in Merie’s chest across the repeating fields of office sections, the dull geometric buildings of the industrial park, and across Lea Valley and all over the entire horizon to an infinity under a golden sky. There were ten minutes left to her working day. Covertly she wept and Andrea noticed.
Merie had had another one of the shittiest weeks of her life. I could have told you about it but it was boring to go into and therefore I could not be bothered to write about it at all. She had meant to check out a clubnight in the City this weekend, had made several abortive attempts in previous weeks with a semi-rupturing Head backpack full of colour-run women’s clothes. Had expected this weekend to be the same. A frayed slit in the nylon, a half-pinged plastic clip-on full tension, everything bursting to give way.
II. Look like shit but don’t give one
Merie was one of the girls who looked like shit, but by no means did she continue to give one. She was diabolically randy and had no trouble cultivating affection. Her personality was comely and entrancing, the energy her horrific appearance zapped from people was replenished by her spirit of gushing generosity. This is because she was permanently charged to the max with fuck, and would lean delicately on other people’s bodies like an anchor, never too much, but enough to fully saturate them with her magnetism.
This feeling of ugliness arrived very early on and with punishing acuity. Balls of flesh, hanging jowls, chin like a vintage typewriter, she had the hunk of beef appearance of a middle-aged man's head before the age of seventeen. This was around the time of the strike. Something unspoken, but deeply understood was pulled out of her and fully displayed. She launched into raunchiness. The strike was so dire, so bitter and dry, that something had to fill her with moistness; the sweetness of orgasm. She had to feel its thick warm chocolate oozing mellifluously through her veins and heart.
She knew she was ugly. It was indisputable. There’s this idea that beauty is a construct, which it is, but that construct’s effects still exist practically. This does much to govern the inhibitions of people, but her body would move irrespectively and with vaultingly forthright entitlement. The contortions her body was placed into through its unusual appearance, the responses this rendered, forced a playfulness out of it. It was a conduit for being that needed fun, attention, and to be fucked often.
Queers call everybody queer beautiful. When queers say this they do not refer to the hideous body of Merie. They try to but the pretense falls short. This body was horrendous in every context. Yet all the same, it was potently erotic.
If I was to place how it was erotic—which would be hard—it would be that all that straight women didn’t know about how attractive they found women and all that straight men didn’t know about how attractive they found men had come crashing together in an atomic starburst of completely confounding horn.
Her libido was nasty, her tastes in sex animalistic. She did not just not shave very often. Her face was septic. All with the domineering violence of bestial sexual congress. Merie took the kink fads in queer circles to levels that were appalling. She didn't have much returning custom. The odd reliant Robin. Mostly just an incredible reputation and a striking appearance that made many people very curious.
However, there are many good-looking people and there are many bad-looking people. Some good-looking people fuck, many do not. Many are so used to the pressure of advances that their entirely sexless lives become a comfort, therefore a pleasure, merely through their familiarity. Thus, they live lucratively mediocre lives of bareness and pedestrian routine. They laugh when they have trouble filling in a form. They campaign about polymer fibres in rigidified wool winter wear as if it were a salient and pressing issue. Many both good- and bad-looking people do not live like this at all. Merie was one of the bad looking people who did not.
What made Merie feel the worst was boredom. Boredom simply contained with it the lingering threat of gravity. So she pre-empted the disaster by frequently engineering a joyful distraction. She had to be around people. She had to give the energy she was incubating all the time. So she lived in a house share, worked little and spent everything she made. But when Merie was having a particularly stressful time or experiencing a particular sequence of heartbreaks, she was capable of a modicum of the brilliant violence that she had experienced in her youth. It was a fraction of that kind, but nonetheless very unpleasant. In those moments it was impossible to challenge her. It got her in a lot of trouble and made her many enemies, but her reputation as a mindblowingly apocalyptic fuck would not exist without it.
III. Merie Critical
One of Merie’s flings worked at the university as a tenured professor in the Literature and the Comparative Study of Literature and Literature Department. Or something similar but not precisely identical. Unusually female for Marie’s tastes, she still had the same air of shame about the whole thing that girls often find in discreet men, along with the attendant intense curiosity. The professor had found Merie's details and decided to contact her. Merie didn't know who she was, but lots of the younger girls who used goose farms a lot did, and that information definitely would have steered Merie away from what she was doing. It was not her usual but it was turnover.
Merie would often wear slutty black bras under fairly pedestrian tunic tops that pointed in freaky and normal aesthetic directions at the same time, with no aesthetic success. Lace bra inching out of the low neckline, baldly declaring itself over negligible estradiol breasts through thin white cotton. On the one hand, one could submit to the trappings of femininity's higher standards of presentation, and with it acquire status and respect. On the other hand, isn’t it sexist to go in for that and maintain these standards in the culture? That would influence the culture of all women and suggest that being sexily pretty is okay. But then on the other hand, as a man-born-baby-boy- man, wasn't it sexist to not submit oneself to what women went through? The professor raised something like this and other points like it with Merie, who was puzzled by the framing of an ethical choice over something as mundane and unavoidable as getting dressed.
The air of wonder constantly beaming out of the turgid face of the professor’s whirring head made the experience exciting but slightly uncomfortable for Merie. It was majestic, poised—but strained and unaffectionate.
"But what..."
“Rester calme sweet angel. Can I call you that? You're making something very clear. Let your body do the talking.”
Merie stroked her collarbone and the tedium of the professor's chatter softened to a sizzle and gradually elevated to a nebula of song. Deep within her she turned out to be very loving indeed. Her conscience was unfurling as if being introduced to her gentler nature for the first time, perhaps to her mother as a child, to something more extensive and yawning. Something that let her heart soften and connect her back to the earth. A hearth, a core, pulsing from Merie’s placenta core, lost in centuries, but dowsing the way to a future yet unknown in the swiftly uncontracting irises of her.
When it was over though, the professor went quiet. She tidied her short charcoal hair with her hands and re-draped her body with the asymmetrical woolens. Dutifully washed the wine glasses, tidied up and then left. She performed this housework out of gratitude that became a little overweening. Halfway through, Merie said something mildly politically incorrect. This gave the professor a politically aware revelation of perspective, and, unable to directly confront and risk being a bad guest, or to simply ignore what she had said and to move on, she decided to continue tidying up but to do the housework quite badly. Not rinsing the wine bottle before putting it in the recycling and stuff like that.
So what was the point of bringing that up? This extremely basic exercise in wish fulfilment? I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed laughing at the normie woman with an agenda and an awkward demeanour. Why did I write it? Oh you very well know why. To get you to ask why you enjoyed it. Perhaps like this tenured professor.
A portion of this story was previously published (in slightly altered form) in an issue of Bitezine.
RIQUITA LEA can't even spell 'the' let alone write and anyway, it's a bit middle class to be able to.
Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.
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