Her

Her A Character Study In Fifteen Lines

Lies saying she was born on the year of Orwell’s older sibling.
Describes the color of her hair as the kind of red only widows would use.
Fancies herself a Murakamian woman, which means that as we’re lying in bed after sex she’d hold my testicles in the palm of her hand and ask me existential questions.
As a kid, used to refer to fruit flies as flying gummy bears and to moths as hairy lepidopterans.
If possible she’d change her name to something exotic like Beirut, or Nineveh, or Carthage. “Wouldn’t that be funny?” she asks me as we’re in the shower. “You introducing me to your parents. ‘Mom, Dad. This is Laos.'” Yeah, funny as hell, I refrain from saying.
Listening to her when she’s back from the office is like sitting in a car with a hyperactive kid who keeps switching radio stations before you can even understand what genre of music they were broadcasting on the previous one.
Is convinced she’s a telekinetic and that her ability only works on moving pencils–she can order them to stop rolling, and they will. I’d like to say she’s crazy, but we’ve done some tests–forty-eight of them, to be precise–and only four times did the pencil not obey her. It bums me that I can’t understand how she does it.
Calls the stretch marks on her inner thigh her tiger stripes.
Her favorite memory is from summer camp back when she was thirteen. Music was starting to become a pivotal tool for socializing and she remembers making friends with a group of kids her age by discussing that rumor surrounding The Pussycat Dolls–was one of them actually a man? “Me, I thought it was the redhead. She never stripped as much as the others did, always kept her belly covered. She had a tranny attitude, you know?” One night, she and her two girl roommates invited over some boys to play spin the bottle. They must’ve made too much noise ’cause one of the counselors came checking on them, so the boys had to hide under the beds. The girls had only recently started their journey towards womanhood, so most of them still felt uncomfortable wearing bras. Before the spinning bottle game started the three of them had gotten into their pajamas, getting rid of the bras. She’d thrown hers under her bed. “It was gray,” she remembers. “The fabric wasn’t as soft as the ones they make today. It kept rubbing against my skin in a non-pleasurable way. Gave me more than one sore nipple.” As the counselor was making sure nothing funny was going on, she noticed one of the hidden boys find her bra and pock it with a finger, like it was some sort of alien creature? Then he grabbed it and sniffed it timidly. She never wore it again, but to this day she still has that bra stuffed in some cardboard box on top of our wardrobe. “I can’t persuade myself to throw it away. I don’t know why.”
Her circadian rhythm is all messed up. She goes to bed past two in the morning and wakes up less than four hours later, but she’s never sluggish or tired. She says she feels friendlier and more creative after dusk, as if she was allergic to sunlight. “I’m a night owl, babe. Hoo hoo, hoo hoo.” She always dances at witching hours and no matter how seductive the pillow might be, I can never take my eyes off of her goofy display of well-beingness.
I refer to her favorite author as A. M. Holmes to make her mad.
Is jovial, resolute, zesty, and all the other adjectives people use to describe someone whose flaws fit perfectly with their own.
When she gets up in the morning she drinks copious amounts of water then, looking into the mirror, whispers to herself, “If the guy selling pet rocks made it, so can I.”
Is afraid of needles and faints if she sees blood, but she’s got a tattoo on the inside of her left forearm. “I found it amusing that people would think of me as being inked,” is her reasoning behind it. The tattoo is that of an unaccredited quote. It reads, We’re attracted to those dying from our same poison because it shows we’re not the only fools on this earth.
After we first had sex she turned to me and said, “I don’t care what you do to me, just please, never let your memories turn me into a stranger.”

About Willem Myra

Myra's work has appeared in 101 Words, Microfiction Monday Magazine, Allegory, and elsewhere. He lives in a modest Italian city where he shares his love for literature with two cats and a stubborn case of rhinitis.