THE SUSCEPTIBLE FEMINIST

She was the sort of woman, who upon entering a room, immediately compelled every other double x chromosomally inclined life form to question their own femininity. There were few moments in the day when she didn't look as if she had just exercised her libido though she often claimed that she was not prone to brief romantic encounters. Thus was the way her hair was tussled and her cheekbones were flushed over naturally that she constantly appeared to have just been loved. Lingering was one of her specialties and she practiced this art in several places in which lingering was loudly discouraged including elevators, open houses and college campuses in which she did not attend. In fact she did not attend anything. She had no job and kept no friends. Her life seemed brilliantly confined to the moments in which she walked into a building she did not belong and the moments in which she floated out.

Her demeanor often led strangers (which were coincidentally the only type of people she interacted with) to believe that her veins were rich with royal blood. She relocated her life every seven months and only took apartments with the number sixty-nine, because she enjoyed the opportunity for the witty conversation that it provided. She was careful to consume less than four hundred and fifty calories a day though her body was well accustomed to this strict regimen and she seldom felt hungry. On all of her lingering adventures she was accompanied by a book and several critical eyes.

It was on one of the unique occasions that she did not have with her a ridiculously large tome that a certain man saw her and realized he needed to kill her. It was not a thought that spontaneously sprung into his mind as morbid thoughts are like to do but a compulsion that hardened his skin and made him ache with the force of the necessity of the act.

He was a soft man with feminine features and was constantly falling prey to the more masculine members of his gender. By way of twisted downward social comparison he found solace from his torture in the fact that he was at least more physically competent than those who bore the children. In him was a gruesome universe of hatred that leaked from his pores and infected those with unfortunate proximity. The origins of his contempt for society as a whole are not easily traced but what is known is that on a disturbingly humid night in Texas he sat in a restaurant and thought of ways that he would murder a pretty lady.

She was at the end of the bar in the restaurant. Having given specific orders to the bartender to not force small talk upon her (she had found and concluded that relations between customers and servers are always false as the latter's salary is dependent upon the persuasion of said relations and

so she could not enjoy them) she focused her eyes on studying the contents of the establishment. She studied faces and apparel and played stories in her head about what her life would be if she knew someone. When she discovered that she much preferred transient loneliness to the make believe underneath her curls she dropped her eyes in disappointment and noticed a man in the corner staring her way.

It was she that invited him elsewhere by paying her bill, walking to the exit/entrance and glancing at him. It was that significant glance that every man hopes to receive from an attractive stranger and even he with his antisocial tendencies and almost complete lack of comprehension of the social world could recognize what the look signified. It seemed ridiculously perfect to him that he should be provided with such a solid opportunity for his blood lust and he accepted it with the grace of a man lost in the desert, glancing around suspiciously every few feet.

When they had reached a location of sweet seclusion (specifically they were in the alley bordering the restaurant) she took hold of the lapels of his brown overcoat and began. These were the forms of human relations that she reveled in and as such knew how to proceed, foregoing the pleasantries. If life's meaning could be confined to a single vision it would be the fantastic display on a human face of finding afterlife. This can be accomplished in two ways.

As she was at his neck he began to find hers. His fingers discovered the veins beneath her skin and he applied pressure. At first this was not an unwelcome act and she encouraged the roughness, mirroring his less than gentle approach by biting his jaw and digging her finger nails into his forearm. A few minutes would find his style becoming more aggressive and she had just begun to realize the motivation of his actions. The word "no" was tossed around a few times before he found her mouth and abruptly put an end to her protests with his hand. He needed to draw the act out, savor every moment of terror before he destroyed her.

There was the sound of clothes ripping and of jewelry falling to the ground and all this aroused in him a powerful masculinity. In her was an archaic feminine sense of danger and a realization as to the specifics of her situation. She became acutely aware of her small stature in such a world full of strong men with ill intent and the glorious anger that it provided her with. Their fight proceeded in-between grimy alley walls and beneath leaking dumpsters, punctuated frequently by quick flashes of silver. At the end there was only a pool of crimson and a figure that walked slowly away from a body.