The girl has been learning how to shit on the devil’s face. It is a slow process. First of all, one has to take into consideration the setting. In order for the devil to get a hard-on, he must be surrounded at eight points.
To the north, above the devil’s head, a soul writhing in eternal agony. On his right hand, a man with infinite bowels being disemboweled, infinitely. At his feet, a vain woman looks into a mirror where boils rise continuously to the surface of her face. To his left, a quiet old man masturbates. To the northeast and southeast, solemn demons. Northwest and southwest, fallen angels snivel. It is difficult, he explains, after millennia of existence, to get off.
The girl finds it hard to move her bowels properly under the circumstances. She is constipated, seized up, she anticipates the look of disgust on the face of the masturbating man; the angels in their chains rattle in a most distracting manner, and the castor oil has not yet kicked in. She bears down, she changes her position to a squat, she balances herself on the shoulders of one angel and one demon. The devil looks at her with the familiar look of a man about to come, who needs just one more, just one more thing.
The girl has been taking 25 mg of hydroxyzine, an anti-anxiety medication, to deal with her difficulties shitting on the Devil’s face. She feels it a personal failure; she has never failed to fulfill a man sexually. She doesn’t think to blame it on the fact that he has never been a man.
She blames herself but also the fetish and moreover the look on the devil’s face, possessive and mocking under his thin beard, as if daring her anus to discharge. The next time the situation is arranged, the dais well-lit, the tortured man mocking her with his ropes and ropes of loosened bowel, she mounts the devil, then turns to face his horny corny feet. He grunts, he is displeased. She turns to leer at the masturbating man; noticing for the first time how lopsided he is—how massive his right arm, how puny his left! He turns away, ashamed by her frank stare. And it is this, this mutual shame, this turning away, which finally moves her.
Katie Farris is the author of boysgirls (Marick Press, 2011), and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Verse, and elsewhere. She teaches at San Diego State University.
Homepage photograph via Flickr by Yellow Arrow