"Fall in Love if You're So Unhappy"
"His name was Victor. We met unromantically by swiping right instead of left on each other’s profile pictures."
Short story. You Care Too Much: Creative Women on the Question of Self Care. With/out Petend. November 2016.
This story I wrote in the summertime when every day something worst then what had happened the day before was being reported on the news. Prior to that summer, that winter & spring, mice moved into my apartment, making frequent and frightening appearances in the kitchen, and once running down the side of my curtain at 5 AM.
Once all of the holes in the backs of cabinets were caulked and filled, the mice were trapped. I guess they all died, because that summer, I could smell the stench of them in the drywall behind my bed - a smell that lasted the season.
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Excerpt of fall in love if you're so unhappy
His name was Victor. We met unromantically by swiping right instead of left on each other’s profile pictures. It was my last remaining friend, Golnar, who told me about the app, installed it for me, and swiped for an hour on my behalf because she said I was being too picky. Amélie Poulin watched us at my kitchen table while the sun set through the window above my pyramid of dirty dishes. Within that same evening Golnar also spilled red wine into her cleavage, caught her fingers inside the mouse traps several times as she set them, laughed hysterically for the duration of a burp then said that if I didn’t get rid of Rosy soon fat mouse-babies would start to repopulate my apartment until ours fates became intertwined and I disappeared into the thick of them.
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.
“You never heard of a Rat King?”
“No.”
“It’s when a bunch of rodents living together in a small space get their tails knotted together so then they become one giant rodent. Their feces is like, the glue. They develop herd mentality. It’s called a Rat King.”
“You’re actually disgusting.”
“It’s a real, scientific thing so you better watch out.”
Golnar pulled up a photo of a Rat King on her phone. I told her I didn’t want to see it, but she insisted. The image was of the brown dried up corpses of rats with their dark tails tangled, and their stiff bodies overtop of one another, fanned out to make the shape of a haphazard circle. She laughed looking at me look at the photo.
“Oh please,” she said. “Do not get over-analytical here.”
How many people had died from diseases carried by these creatures? And what sort of condition was this even for a rodent? For any living thing?
“Okay. That’s enough,” Golnar said. She always had a way of knowing where my thoughts were going. She took her phone back and picked mine up from the edge of the table. She told me she was going to get me laid for the sake of my sanity, but also our friendship. A few minutes later, a dating app had been installed on my phone, and Golnar was laughing again, sifting through old pictures of me to set up my profile. ∞
Read the full story by purchasing a copy of the book here.