Case 2: Monica

[Part 2 of the "Fiction Rebel" series]

MONICA BELIEVES that there is intelligent design in everything. Take for example the napkin conspicuously wedged between her vagina and underwear just two days ago. Its design prevents blood from seeping out sideways, especially when she has to scuttle clearing one table to another so that more people could pretend to enjoy the steak severed from the rib of a malnourished cow that was rarely given the chance to munch grass when it still had a pulse. For a Hindu like Monica, the sacrilege is unforgivable. But dead livestock aside, the napkin is almost godsend for a waitress like her. It’s a divine creation meant to comfort every woman where she is most vulnerable and strongest at the same time, which, of course, is the vagina, except for one curiosity: unless she sends her napkin flying straight to the garbage bin like a shuttle that carries the weight of her menstruation, its wings, though, just won’t make it airborne. One might even say it’s a fatal flaw for an object that was never intended for sustained flight in the first place.

But Monica firmly believes in intelligent design, and at the exact moment she flung the bloody napkin across Dick’s living room, which eventually landed squarely on his face with an auspicious splat, she anticipated that it was also designed to end their quarrel and, ultimately, their relationship. She was right. She drew the first blood, and it was the last time Dick would ever claim proximity to her vaginal discharge. If anger had a scent, a color, a taste, that was it, a month’s worth of frustrated egg cell together with its fluids tucked in a disposable sheet, and Dick was in the right place and time to receive that final touchdown.

The day Monica first met Dick she instantly knew that the world is unfair, unkind, that God or Krishna is bent on playing divine jokes by giving a man a nose so flat you’ll hardly know it’s there on his face unless you press your thumb against it the way you earnestly stamp your thumb mark on paper. She looked at him and thought: that face is too ugly. It’s too damn awful whoever owns it probably doesn’t deserve a name. But she called him by his name anyway because of two things. One, she can’t bear the incorrigible humor of God, or Krishna, at the expense of a mortal who only wants to have steak for lunch. And two, he deserves his name.

Here’s your steak, Dick. Enjoy your meal. The name on his ID is a dead giveaway. That was the first time she called him by his name, and it felt like she just mouthed a word she’ll someday regret saying. The second to the tenth time she called him by his name was when they were in bed on a late Tuesday night somewhere in Quezon City, a place so clean and so good you don’t have to wear anything other than your skin and a slippery piece of rubber that you put on like a diving suit during bouts of either anxiety or infidelity. Oh God, Dick, harder! She would issue her moans like a virgin too tight for anything that occupies space and has weight. Of course, she was deflowered years before she met him. Her acrobatics and moans were simply for the show, for that dosage of mercy fuck she was willing to give him, the poor bastard with almost a nose, so that he can finally call himself a man who no longer uses his right hand for an improvised vagina. She was his dream made flesh, the redemption for his restless manhood, and he was her reality check.

For three months, they lived together in his apartment, a room too small for a man with a huge ego and a woman with an insatiable fetish for the backdoor. But theirs was the proof that domesticating a Hindu and a Grammar Nazi under the same roof can be done amicably. It was the closest to polite society they can get. Without sounding too pedantic Monica declared that these things easily qualify for intelligent design. There is a God out there whose name is Krishna or Jesus or whatever, and that this omnipotent deity can make India and Germany look like husband and wife blessed in matrimonial union by the church of scientology or whatever you call organized mafias that have money in banks and want more of it out of your pocket because they know heaven is on their side and hell is just below your feet.

On the fifth day of their fourth month, Monica realized that hell was no longer below her feet. When Dick came home drunk that evening with kiss marks on his neck and a missing condom in his wallet, Monica herself raised hell right inside their room, or what will soon no longer become their room, for she was determined to abandon this wretched foggy once and for all but not without a fight, or probably not without sending him first to his sarcophagus after slitting his belly open with a penknife so that his innards can finally inherit the warmth of the earth together with the maggots, for that was how much she wanted him dead just by screaming at him: Go to hell! Never mind the neighbors; they have their turn to go to hell one of these days, or nights.

Enough is enough, Monica thought. Thank God for bloody napkins with wings. She put her hands inside her shorts, fished out her napkin, and turned it into a projectile. Before Dick could dodge, it was already touchdown.





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