Kara > Books: anthologies‎ (66)

From a very young age I have always had the wish that I had been born female and this wish only go stronger with time. But I have not felt this wish arose out of the way I was born; I just felt intensely jealous of females for their freedom to wear beautiful clothes, make-up, etc., and I thought that being a painfully shy person, life would have been so much easier for me if I were female in a world that still largely expected men to take the lead in those early days.

… but without even poppin’ a single ’mone, without any surgery or laser, without eve presenting as female, my perception of myself totally changed because I finally accepted myself.

But I can see that our species’ entire relationship with words, and their mode of construction, is clearly undergoing a massive rewiring. I bridge an era straddling handwriting and heavy smartphone usage. Young people like my friend’s daughter with her emoticons and rampant acronyms are blessed in having no cursive script to unlearn – with the bonus of having no sense of something having been lost. That’s a kind of freedom, and I’m jealous. Part of accepting the future is acknowledging that some things must be forgotten, and it’s always an insult because it’s always the things you love. We lost handwriting and got Comic Sans in return. That’s a very bad deal.

How is money damaged? It is damaged because me having photons faster than yours by a few millionths of a second is enough to make me appallingly rich – again, for doing absolutely nothing except hacking into money itself. It’s hard to have respect for this kind of system. Often the latency issue is presented to the public as a “Wow, isn’t this cool!” moment when, in fact, it’s sickening, and is partially why the world began to feel one-percent-ish five years ago. Reasonably smart people inhabiting the Age of Latency are milking those still stuck in the pre-latent era.

Marcy enjoyed the pleasant soreness as she drove the five blocks home after each class. She liked how for an hour, there was a precise set of instructions she was meant to follow, a clear sense of direction.

A couple of months later, he comes over to my apartment in the middle of the night because we’ve long abandoned any pretense of a mutual interest in anything but dirty sex….

…he never knows how to make a move, still doesn’t understand he only needs to push me on my back and tell me to spread my legs.…

…I open my eyes and look up at him. A thin line of sweat beads along his hairline. I smile. I tell him to hate me more. He does, and a pleasant soreness begins spreading from between my thighs and my head is slamming against the headboard. Now I’m with him.

Later, I am still awake because I’m not very good at sleeping and I’m achy so I’m feeling tender toward him.

Bennett is not romantic and we don'>t delude ourselves about the state of our affair. He is, however, intense and always leaves me sore in uncomfortable places.

She gave in to the weight of him. He held her face between his hands like he might crush her skull. The pressure of his hands made her head throb, almost pleasantly. When Hiram kiss Mara that morning, her lips swelled and bruised, threatened to split open and spill. Her lips felt pulpy against his, beautifully misshapen. The whole of her body felt that way by the time he was done, as if every muscle, every part of her skin, had been worked through his hands and his mouth and his eyes until was broken all the way down.

When Mara climbed out of bed, sore, heavy, drained, Hiram said, “Don’t wash,” so she didn’t.

After her afternoons in the park, the stone thrower’s wife finds herself sweaty and pleasantly sore. She walks home slowly, breathing deeply. She revels. Then she takes a cold shower, emerges, wraps herself in a soft cotton robe.

I teach a section of Design of Concrete Structures and a section of Structural Dynamics. I have no female students in either class. The boys stare at me after class, they linger in the hallway just outside the classroom. They try to flirt. I remind them I will assess their final grades. They made inappropriate comments about extra credit.