Atavistic Elf – Meg Tuite

She was gamey, ossified in my being, with a tattoo of a cockroach on her right arm and bagpipes on her left. I sat across the cafe from her every morning and tried not to gouge out my eye from lust for her musk. She permeated my wail that I tucked under my wretched self so I wouldn’t have to flog myself at home again.

I was an unkempt skull she twirled by and nodded at. Someone like a flowerpot seen everyday and barely noticed. I hoped there were blooms that dripped like a rosary in my wake.

One day, instead of leaving me in her backlash of bad memories like a parking ticket or some nasty liqueur she’d vomited up, she pulled out a chair, tumbled into it and stared at the bulge in my pants. Well, it wasn’t the bulge. My fly was open exposing a tweak of my Superman briefs. She pulled a switchblade in the shape of a derringer from her pocket and smacked it down on the table.

“I find you insipid, yet zesty, elfin,” she said. “Do you play D & D?”

“Yes, I’m a high elf,” I said. I’d played the game when I was like twelve, but really, I was over thirty now and she had to be at least a rocking forty-five. I picked up her gun-knife of nickel and knew I wouldn’t grow tired of her like I had the other girls I’d met in this cafe or the endless game of D & D.

I picked up the derringer and ran the knife up and down her bagpipes. “You know, as an elf, I am unaffected by sleep-induced spells and I will never age.” She smiled. I unzipped my shorts all the way down and slouched back in the chair as Superman blasted across my crotch.

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Meg Tuite’s writing has appeared in numerous journals including MadHatter’s Review, Epiphany, JMWW, One, the Journal, Monkeybicycle and Boston Literary Magazine. She has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. She is fiction editor of Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press, author of Domestic Apparition (2011) San Francisco Bay Press, Disparate Pathos (2012) Monkey Puzzle Press, Reverberations (2012) Deadly Chaps Press, Bound By Blue (2013) Sententia Books, Her Skin is a Costume (2013) Red Bird Chapbooks, won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from Artistically Declined Press for her poetry collection written with Heather Fowler and Michelle Reale, Bare Bulbs Swinging, (2014). She teaches at the Santa Fe Community College. Her blog: http://megtuite.wordpress.com