Witches n' Bitches - David Luntz

The truth is he was a lousy fuck. Not that you’d know it from his demeanor. Like the way he would strut around stark-naked right in front of me and yank the fruit off my sacred trees without asking. Like he was taunting me, daring me. Like he just knew I wasn’t going to turn him into some swine as I had done to his filthy crew. Some guys are just so hot they know they’re untouchable even if they have literary immunity. 

I wish I could say he was as into me as I was into him. But I was just his sex toy to play with when he got bored. He was too in love with himself. I’d caught him jacking at his reflection in the mirror often enough. I’m not going to go into detail about his thing. Sorry, not sorry, I’ll just let you know it was like getting banged by an overboiled asparagus. If that revelation surprises or disappoints, sorry again, but after you’ve frolicked with the Cretan Bull, it’s all relative. 

Of course, I faked my orgasms. Male fragility really is a thing. You gotta know a man’s limits, what can break him. So yeah, I groaned and moaned, “Oh yes, yes, that’s it, give it to me Oddy, yes, Oddy, give it to me baby, don’t stop, don’t stop” but the whole time I was thinking about that bull’s cock.

I know a lot of things. I’m smart as fuck. I exist in a spatial and temporal mode you can’t conceive. What you call prescience is just normal vision to me. So, ya, ya, ya I hear your pathetic feminista groans ringing down through the millennia, “Oh sister, how could you do that, degrade yourself, pretend to like it, become the object of the Unmentionable Gaze? Way to fuck over our universal sorority. We SOOOOOO used to look up to you.” 

First off bitches, I’m not your fucking sister and I see you all, especially you big-talking Ivy-league diplomaed, chardonnay sipping, Lexus SUV leasing corporate hoes, pulling down your $300K plus salaries at those nonprofits your hoeing husbands and sugar daddies set you up in cause you couldn’t hack it IRL, and now you can’t even get the homeless off the fucking streets and you trying to bitchsplain me about sex? The fuck? You all listen up, it’s not about shits and giggles, it’s about power. You can’t imagine the erotic heights I achieved tracing with my index finger the lineaments of his post-coital smirk knowing all the while he was fucking me he had no idea who he was fucking with. That’s really what got me off, if you want to know. Besides, I’ve been around long enough to know secrets are the invisible glue binding all healthy relationships. 

I won’t lie and say it didn’t burn me up that I knew he was going to dump me. They always do. They always have a wife and a posse of snotty-nosed brats calling them back. You can’t compete with that. That’s my curse. But I also understood he had a story that had to be sung to the world that trumped my selfish desires. 

Harr, harr, harr, gotcha, gotcha. If you think I’m some charity case, some type of martyr who was willing to sacrifice herself on one of the literary alters of the canon, you’re fucking dumber than those ruminants lolling in my enchanted groves. I didn’t give two fucks about his “greater literary destiny.” I had to let him go. He had friends in high places who would have cindered my Brazilian silicon-injected ass into ash if I’d forced him to stay. 

So, yeah, he leaves me, which you all know, and his story becomes yours again and in that flick of the page I become the cautionary tale, the disposable concubine, sorceress, sassy shapeshifter, and skank ho. It’s reductive but mortal minds have trouble entertaining complexity and nuance. They devolve into caricature and cliché. It’s sort of like when you catch some stranger picking their nose and no matter how worthy of praise they may or may not be, they will always be that person in your memory picking their nose. Maybe that’s not the best example of the smallness of mortal thinking but I know you get what I’m saying. 

Once he asked me, “I’m curious, if you had turned me into something, what would it have been?” Almost fucking snuffed him right then and there. The presumption! The chutzpah! Like he thought I could just do my thing on a whim. That it took no effort, that he couldn’t see I was an artist who took my shit, my craft very fucking seriously. Like I have memorized tens of thousands of curses, chants, and incantations not to mention the virtue inside of every herb, plant, vegetable, and mineral and that’s just the pre-reqs. Mofos, it takes years and years of hard-won experience and tons of fucking up to get the kind of eye I have that can pierce the soul and pin down a creature’s native essence without which no successful metamorphosis can take place. 

But I’m grateful he asked me that question. It inspired the creation of a special farewell present. 

“Just a little token to remember me by,” I said, handing him a sparkling Trojan horse in the form of a jewel-crusted ostrich-sized egg that would hatch a mad parrot when he got back home. A parrot with a massive libido that would father a thousand generations of parrots, numbering more than the stars, who would fly into the homes of all the men who had left me and recount to their wives all the juicy details of our extracurriculars. 

That’s just my opening gambit.

I’m working on a dream parrot that’s going to go right to the source, burrow deep down into your nightmares and fears, learn all your secrets, sow division, ramp up the paranoia and night sweats. You’ll be waking up screaming, too terrified to think and amazed at how your unthinking flesh craves death. Why? Because you just don’t fuck off and leave me. Because I’m going to subvert the narrative and get out of this fucking long-winded odyssey. Because my story’s not ending as some sad self-pitying crone destined to live out her days on her lachrymose little rock. I’m writing my own story.

You losers all got therapists. I got vengeance. 

So, get ready because I’m coming for you. Who am I? You’ll know soon enough. 

I’m the original bitch.   

Originally appeared in Maudlin House and Bull, both in 2024

David Luntz: Work is forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, X-R-A-Y Lit, ergot. Twitter: @luntz_david