WORDS, WORDS, WORDS, he screamed at the top of his lungs; the first thing that came to his mind when he finally managed to cut through her breathless sentences - he didn't even try to understand what she was actually saying; her hot breath against his ear had woken him up with the irritating persistence of an alarm clock, and he wanted to crush it with his fist, so he roared words, words, words, like a man who couldn't bear the ringing any more, like a man who, to tell the truth, could no longer bear her nearness either, her mouth, the hot steam it oozed; he roared with the force of a scorched man, as if she'd burned him, and for a moment she thought the roar would bring the walls down, so she cowered, covered her head with her hands, dug her fingers in her hair and squeezed her eyes shut 'til it hurt, reacting like a typical female, typical by his standards, meaning excessive, hysterical and self-destructive, since she deliberately pulled her hair out, deliberately curled up in the pose of a crushed alarm clock and forced tears to her eyes as if to take revenge on him with this classic scene of domestic violence. She staged it in a second, lifting her weeping face towards him, towards the ceiling, towards the sky, and protecting herself with her fists full of tufts of pulled-out hair. It didn't impress him. It didn't suit her either. She's capable of coming up with something far more disgusting. Just opening her mouth would do it. But he won't let her. He stirs like a volcano, lava boiling in his cheeks; he raises his hand in a frenzy, he raises his hand, he raises his hand and... he stops himself, because the blow would hurt her more if it were shaped into a word, a thunderous and meaningless word that thrashes in all directions and won't be drowned out, and so again he hollers words, words, words, and indeed words are now thundering around the room, throughout the whole flat, or to be more precise, the cramped two-room apartment they're renting at too high a price, so that most of their eruptions could be explained away by the fact they're once again late with the rent. Demoralising, but true. She'd imagined them in more relaxed circumstances, and with much more floor space. He admitted that she'd drawn the shittiest straw. But better not to revisit that topic. Not now. Because the words are in the room. Words comparable to quicksand. Crumbling between their teeth, getting crushed into slimy sand, slipping from their lips like muddy bubbles with no meaningful content. Dripping down their chins. They should both look in the mirror and commit the image to memory. To make them sick of it. But they won't. They'd rather keep the mud gurgling until they run out of oxygen, until their last bubbles dribble down to the floorboards and they finally mop them up; they can't live in a pigsty, after all. Only then will they glance at themselves in the mirror, wipe the secretions off their chins and the smudged mascara from their eyes, comb their hair, fix their clothes, inhale, exhale, and expire. You might indeed say: they'll expire in yet another death, a tragic case of drowning in the bullshit they regularly step in, like true and passionate suicides. But she won't be the one to reach for the mop first, no she won't; she'll let the mud form a crust on the floor for him to see what his words, words, words really look like, up close. But surely he must be aware of how stupid it is to be repeating words, words, words, without actually saying anything; and just demonstrating that every word is meaningless, and too loud, besides? Isn't he, in fact, trying to convey that they no longer have anything to say to each other and that there was no justifiable reason to wake him from a dream, a well-deserved dream, mind you, with which he'd been trying to cure his unyielding exhaustion, his cursed frantic life with its impending rents that make him age ten years in a month; and just look at him; he's already a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, it's been too much for way too long now, and if she really wants to know, he too had imagined more relaxed circumstances, quiet afternoons of digesting his dinner on the couch, dozing off with his feet resting on the coffee table and waking up during the evening news; he'd imagined things would take care of themselves, or at least that he wouldn't feel guilty if they didn't, and he really didn't expect random acquaintances to be asking concerned questions about his health because he seems so exhausted, withered and fucked up, because he looks like he has a tumour and not just a woman, this woman who always fights back twice as hard, as if to say: man, you sure drew a shitty straw, too. The shittiest. And then she adds that no one would ever love him as much as she loves him. He'd better remember that. Nobody. Ever. As much as me. Excerpted from Love Novel by Ivana Sajko All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
