Status: 1st chapter completed, more to come
Selfish Love
The Amazon
A pink hour glass-shaped blob appeared on the horizon that lay across the street, a shelf with plastic table ware at the far end of a Max Stock store. As he found it coming right toward him, he decided to try and focus his tired eyes. No easy task, he found. Sleep was crusting the inner corners of the red, moist slits, and the salt from dried tears pulled at the skin of his swollen lower eyelids.
That morning, he had arrived at work to a fanfare of pity from his colleagues.
“Lior, sweetheart, what in the Lord's name happened?”
“Oh baby, you look like a wet mop!”
“Dude, let me give you a hug, you look like shit!”
“Baby, baby, oh no, come here, it's all gonna be okay!”
Ilana just slammed his face into her huge middle-aged bosom as she hugged him tight, choking him and rocking him sideways like a baby.
The night before, Lior had cried himself to sleep. In the morning, he had woken up angry. Keren kept haunting him. Taunting him. She was holding his heart hostage, his dog, and possibly a pack of cigarettes. Each one by itself provided a good enough excuse for Lior to burn with hatred. And maybe just a little bit of self-pity. Why did society expect him to be ashamed of the latter, anyway? Life wasn't fair, to nobody, and if no one else has the decency of showing some compassion, who else but yourself could you turn to? Wasn't it the same as masturbation?
“Nobody records their masturbation process on Facebook,” a friend had argued.
“I might,” Lior had countered. And for a moment, he'd considered doing it too, for good measure. But hadn't he facebooked his mother at some point? However, for both self-pity and masturbation records, his audience was slowly but steadily shrinking. With each emotional, melodramatic or downright suicidal status update about the cruelty and pointlessness of love, one friend on average would abandon ship. The reasonable Lior guessed it was because people, much less friends, liked to read such downers when they knew they couldn't help. But the hurt, abandoned, dog-less, heap of misery Lior, knew better: They were no friends of his.
The blob came into focus and turned out to be a light pink dress. Under it marched a pair of long, thick legs in black army boots. No socks. No tights. She would have blisters by the time she walked through this door. Farther up, a head sporting wavy black hair floated in the headwind. This big-boned woman had a lot of headwind. She strode fast and strong, as if she was lost in some epic daydream where Amazon warriors hung intruding males from their scrotes. It hardly surprised Lior anymore that the dog had changed hands so willingly. No matter how soft and prissy this woman may be somewhere deep down, and no matter how hard she seemed to try to show it – or else, why the pink dress? - she was the human embodiment of a Merkava Baz, that obsolete tank that, in between polish and oil sessions, could lock on to a target miles away and transform it into a crater only three missiles later. Did it really matter that somewhere in there, was a female, who probably dreamed of owning a pony and getting married in a puffy white dress?
Whoosh. His mind was jerked out of his pseudo-philosophical musings when the Amazon jerked her tall frame around the corner to walk through the door of the bank. Just in time, Lior managed to take that breath that would keep his face from changing colors.
“What's the hurry?”
She froze and swung around. “Hi Li...or!” How many Li-something did she know that she had to grope for the -or like that? “What's up?”
Lior's perfectly prepared speech of how his ex was a selfish cougar and how nice Tamar looked in that dress, went up in smoke. Pulverized by the Merkava Baz. Lior never liked the tank unit. Luckily, he had qualified for the special forces. “Nothing,” he sighed instead, hands in his pockets. “Still dead from the night shift two nights ago. You?”
Tamar leaned against the glass door. It creaked. “Oh, not much. Yesterday I went down to the West Bank to take some pictures of the riots there. Hilarious I tell you, Palestinian throwing grenades, children, rocks and onions and then complaining about being blasted with tear gas. You can see the pictures on Facebook.”
He was such an idiot. If he'd checked her updates, he would have had more to talk about. And of course Tamar had to cut a topic that added chest hair to his mental image of her. Couldn't she just be like all the other post-army women? Fucked up beyond repair but with rhinestone-adorned nails and no tales of thrill seeking even he would not engage in unless his commander had screamed at him to? Granted, he missed the action of army service. But while it used to make him feel five inches taller, this kind of pastime made the shadow under a woman's cheek bones look like stubble.
He inched away from her in spite of himself but when he saw a subtle smirk creep over her face, he decided to make it theatrical. “Are you that bored in life that you have to go into a war zone to feel something? Can't you just cut your wrists like every normal girl?”
“I've outgrown that one,” Tamar laughed. Was that a blush? “Look, I work a boring job, I want to make it as a photographer, so of course I go places. Of course I seek drama. For self-study. Think career.”
That was a new one. “A job? Weren't you unemp-”
“Last time you checked, yeah,” she replied, interestingly pointedly. “Now I'm in publishing. Analyzing Japanese newspaper articles from the 19th century.”
Lior's jaw raced his heart – which would drop to the cigarette-strewn ground first? She was female, fun and hot. And also taller than him, braver than him and had a probably overpaid academic's job which she talked about as if it were the most trivial thing in the world. If he was going to impress this woman, he would have to steal a tank and rob his work place with it. Too bad Gilad Shalit was free now, or else he could have rescued him. Actually, none of that sounded half as hard to pull off as not bashing his head through the reinforced window behind him right now. He pursed his lips as he dug deeper into his brain, but he was surprised at what organic Google yielded: A question. Why did all this bother him so much?
That morning, he had arrived at work to a fanfare of pity from his colleagues.
“Lior, sweetheart, what in the Lord's name happened?”
“Oh baby, you look like a wet mop!”
“Dude, let me give you a hug, you look like shit!”
“Baby, baby, oh no, come here, it's all gonna be okay!”
Ilana just slammed his face into her huge middle-aged bosom as she hugged him tight, choking him and rocking him sideways like a baby.
The night before, Lior had cried himself to sleep. In the morning, he had woken up angry. Keren kept haunting him. Taunting him. She was holding his heart hostage, his dog, and possibly a pack of cigarettes. Each one by itself provided a good enough excuse for Lior to burn with hatred. And maybe just a little bit of self-pity. Why did society expect him to be ashamed of the latter, anyway? Life wasn't fair, to nobody, and if no one else has the decency of showing some compassion, who else but yourself could you turn to? Wasn't it the same as masturbation?
“Nobody records their masturbation process on Facebook,” a friend had argued.
“I might,” Lior had countered. And for a moment, he'd considered doing it too, for good measure. But hadn't he facebooked his mother at some point? However, for both self-pity and masturbation records, his audience was slowly but steadily shrinking. With each emotional, melodramatic or downright suicidal status update about the cruelty and pointlessness of love, one friend on average would abandon ship. The reasonable Lior guessed it was because people, much less friends, liked to read such downers when they knew they couldn't help. But the hurt, abandoned, dog-less, heap of misery Lior, knew better: They were no friends of his.
The blob came into focus and turned out to be a light pink dress. Under it marched a pair of long, thick legs in black army boots. No socks. No tights. She would have blisters by the time she walked through this door. Farther up, a head sporting wavy black hair floated in the headwind. This big-boned woman had a lot of headwind. She strode fast and strong, as if she was lost in some epic daydream where Amazon warriors hung intruding males from their scrotes. It hardly surprised Lior anymore that the dog had changed hands so willingly. No matter how soft and prissy this woman may be somewhere deep down, and no matter how hard she seemed to try to show it – or else, why the pink dress? - she was the human embodiment of a Merkava Baz, that obsolete tank that, in between polish and oil sessions, could lock on to a target miles away and transform it into a crater only three missiles later. Did it really matter that somewhere in there, was a female, who probably dreamed of owning a pony and getting married in a puffy white dress?
Whoosh. His mind was jerked out of his pseudo-philosophical musings when the Amazon jerked her tall frame around the corner to walk through the door of the bank. Just in time, Lior managed to take that breath that would keep his face from changing colors.
“What's the hurry?”
She froze and swung around. “Hi Li...or!” How many Li-something did she know that she had to grope for the -or like that? “What's up?”
Lior's perfectly prepared speech of how his ex was a selfish cougar and how nice Tamar looked in that dress, went up in smoke. Pulverized by the Merkava Baz. Lior never liked the tank unit. Luckily, he had qualified for the special forces. “Nothing,” he sighed instead, hands in his pockets. “Still dead from the night shift two nights ago. You?”
Tamar leaned against the glass door. It creaked. “Oh, not much. Yesterday I went down to the West Bank to take some pictures of the riots there. Hilarious I tell you, Palestinian throwing grenades, children, rocks and onions and then complaining about being blasted with tear gas. You can see the pictures on Facebook.”
He was such an idiot. If he'd checked her updates, he would have had more to talk about. And of course Tamar had to cut a topic that added chest hair to his mental image of her. Couldn't she just be like all the other post-army women? Fucked up beyond repair but with rhinestone-adorned nails and no tales of thrill seeking even he would not engage in unless his commander had screamed at him to? Granted, he missed the action of army service. But while it used to make him feel five inches taller, this kind of pastime made the shadow under a woman's cheek bones look like stubble.
He inched away from her in spite of himself but when he saw a subtle smirk creep over her face, he decided to make it theatrical. “Are you that bored in life that you have to go into a war zone to feel something? Can't you just cut your wrists like every normal girl?”
“I've outgrown that one,” Tamar laughed. Was that a blush? “Look, I work a boring job, I want to make it as a photographer, so of course I go places. Of course I seek drama. For self-study. Think career.”
That was a new one. “A job? Weren't you unemp-”
“Last time you checked, yeah,” she replied, interestingly pointedly. “Now I'm in publishing. Analyzing Japanese newspaper articles from the 19th century.”
Lior's jaw raced his heart – which would drop to the cigarette-strewn ground first? She was female, fun and hot. And also taller than him, braver than him and had a probably overpaid academic's job which she talked about as if it were the most trivial thing in the world. If he was going to impress this woman, he would have to steal a tank and rob his work place with it. Too bad Gilad Shalit was free now, or else he could have rescued him. Actually, none of that sounded half as hard to pull off as not bashing his head through the reinforced window behind him right now. He pursed his lips as he dug deeper into his brain, but he was surprised at what organic Google yielded: A question. Why did all this bother him so much?