Assignment: Erotic Chores*
Digging A Grave For My Cat
There is nothing erotic about digging a grave. It’s sexier than that new 50 Shades of Grey movie, obviously. But everything’s erotic when compared to something like that.
When digging a grave there is nothing erotic for the one doing the digging. For the digger this grave business is an erotic-less chore. There’s nothing sexy about dying. And still there is death. Everywhere. At all times. Why is that? Judging by the catcalls of a perpetual oblivion, something has to be getting off. Right?
I don’t know.
Maybe the ground gets off on it. The shovel entering tip first and all that. Each thrust propelled by the grief of the digger. Each thrust thrusting deeper as the hole widens and the tears flow. Is that a cockroach or a clitoris?! Wind-blown-into-the-yard candy bar wrapper or cum rag (or both)?!
Fuck off! My cat is dead!
Maybe for the ground this is erotic. Maybe the ground gets off on this shit. Something has to be getting off on all this death, but I’m not! I may have been getting the ground off, but that’s not what I was there for. My best friend had just left me. I wasn’t out there to fuck the earth like a grieving porn star. I was out there to bury my cat. I’d woke up earlier that morning and Nickel was gone, laying dead beside my feet. Her eyes staring off into something that couldn’t save her. Staring straight through me.
Wrapped her in a blanket and put her in the basement Norman Bates style, plan being to bury her when I got home that evening, and I went to work, crying the whole way there, crying through my first appointment of the morning, and crying as I canceled everything else I’d had scheduled for the rest of the day until it was 9:30 in the morning/I headed home
like Death’s call girl or a damn sex object for the cold Earth but fuck that! The world is full of horrible things that ejaculate! Nothing I could do about that. I had a cat to bury! Anything I caught taking sexual pleasure while I did this would be properly eye-balled and logged. Bury the cat first. Seek and obtain revenge on those sick fuckers after.
I needed a shovel, I realized.
Earth dildo! The dirt screamed
Shut up!
I didn’t have one anymore so I dove inside the first shovel store that I came across. I did not leave the store immediately. I walked around for awhile with the shovel held back over my shoulder with n eviscerating glare I my eyes picking fights with anything that looked as if it was finding any part of this sexy: half a rack of spare tires the glue guns, a cardboard cutout of one of those Duck Dynasty duck call making fucks.
I hated that place. I had to leave.
I didn’t want to leave though because leaving the store would take me home to bury my cat and I didn’t want to bury her. A sick fucking chore. I wanted her to be alive and follow me around, watch me brush my teeth and chase stuff and sit on my shoulder as I stayed up all night typing about love and the world being such a goddamn mess. Who was going to watch me brush my teeth now?! Who was going to give a shit about anything I’ve done?! The peeping tom of a backyard I lived next to?”
Fuck that.
But there I was, Nickel retrieved from the basement, shoveling dirt out of the back yard as the body that used to hold her stared through me some more and the backyard screamed deeper, over just a bit, that’s it! Do it just like that!
Death has a hard on older than alarm clocks and grieving and funerals and grave digging is the existential equivalent of post big bang cold universe porn.
Love leads to death
A package deal
You start out almost optimistic,
then heart breaking,
shoveling for love until you realize
the love shoveling turns
always
to the shoveling of death
(this last bit to be read with an Italian accent)
as there can be no erection without the penis
there is never love
without the death
*writing assignment Erotic Chores assigned by Marcus If
Multiverse Johnson 