Nora Offen started out in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and attends Bard College as a fledgling creative writing major. Her work has appeared in Lux, To The Bone Literary Journal, The Ampersand Review, and Everyday Fiction. Her writing (generally a sort of abortive poetic prose?) has been described by The Ampersand as “pretty cute, with a fetching way of tossing its hair.” She enjoys constructive criticism, linguistic distinctions, crying outside at night, terrible puns, and conversations about the space between people.

One Way to Do It (October 20, 2009. Issue 10.)

(Bukowski Contest Honorable Mention!)

Ink and red wine was, aesthetically, the most satisfying. Beautiful color, a flavor vicious like the sound of a snapped violin string. Most importantly – and this crucial – the masochistic glory accomplished by that particular cliche. Ridiculous, a rush. In other words: we stayed in and made drinks for writers, knowing full well our crimes and ready to hate ourselves for them. Ink and fucking wine. The only cocktail more fitting would have been whiskey and blood, and not even we were willing to go that far.

“Cheers,” I said. The rain cried into the window, droplets set alight by passing headlights. My black boots made a puddle on the floor. I took another sip; the flavors separated and the ink (sweeter than expected, but with a slow furious burn) slid down my throat. I coughed some out onto my hand, a wet black hailstorm, and we looked at each other and laughed.

“Fuck you,” he said, “coughing up ink? Your life is not a poem. Don’t even try that shit.”

I laughed, appreciatively, and spat more out onto a napkin. Once I heard a girl’s voice and thought it was a violin. Honestly: not a metaphor. No one would believe me if I wrote it. No one believes me. I didn’t think her voice was beautiful, I thought the violin was discordant.

“Say it again,” I told him, wondering what he looked like naked. I felt my tongue smear ink around my mouth and I retched.

He combed his damp hair with one hand. “You’re not a story,” he said, slow and sexual and happy to help me. “Come on. Not a character, not a poem. Not even Bukowski.”

He cocked his head to see if that was enough. When I coughed against the table, the wine and ink shook together, only half mixed, in their glasses. The rain came down.

“You are not a sonnet,” he said, “and I’ll wait for you to throw up, but I bought dinner, and brought over the wine, and after that I was hoping for at least a blowjob.”