In the mirror I held my own gaze, with some cruelty, as I slid the cold-tipped tweezers up my left nostril, squeezed the forceps—tugging to ensure I’d successfully latched onto a fine hair—then pulled down hard to tug the hair from its anchor. I felt myself flinch but it seemed my reflection had hardly reacted at all. The tiny hair pinched between the forceps was short, brown, slightly wet with mucus. With my free hand, I held open the little plastic baggy and placed the hair inside, sealed it, rinsed the tweezers and that was that.
The instructions had said the hair needed to be fresh, not just a stray plucked from a brush, which didn’t sound right to me, but I’ve always been a stickler for following instructions. Call it a mild case of OCD, but the slightest variation from doing what is asked of me could fill my chest cavity with enough superstitious dread to break your mother’s back.
Just the one hair was all that had been requested. Simple enough, though I still felt a strange dread in parting with it. I could shed so much hair in a single day and think nothing of it, but this one little hair, looking back at me through the sheen of plastic, felt symbolically akin to an organ, an eye, a tongue, a finger. That was me in there.
I put the baggy in the return envelope provided, pre-stamped, sealed it shut and dropped it in the mailbox on my way to work. Goodbye me.
The test was Vic’s idea. In fact, I struggled to remember exactly how he’d convinced me but, knowing myself, I’d likely gone into a blind-quiet rage the moment he refuted my Dutch ancestry–a fact I’d double, triple-checked with my mother at several points across the span of my life because the idea of even accidentally lying to another person about something like the immutable history of my blood could make me dizzy–and not only did Vic deny agreement with this fact double and triple-checked by mother, he insisted upon his sudden belief that there was something in my face that he found to be very French which was all the faith he needed in order to paint me French so to speak.
Vic lived his whole life like this, on hunches and suspicions totally unfounded by evidence, and it had once been the thing that made me fall in love with him. Every early date we’d gone on veered in a direction totally unexpected, one moment walking through the park then somehow in a stranger’s apartment drinking their Grey Goose before being invited to a basement rave of a derelict warehouse. He was exciting. I let him break the rules and followed in his wake, a sort of loophole through which I evaded the dread.
But more and more over the course of our three years of dating–particularly the last year in which we first started living together–these hunches began to grate on me. Vic got hooked on an idea like a plastic bag skewered by a tree branch and he flailed around on the idea without reason or meaning and refused to let it go no matter how I pushed back on it. And I did push, which exacerbated the problem, but I couldn’t help myself. There were rules to things, whether he liked them or not, rules of the universe which were unchanging and forever solid.
Such as–a man can trace his direct lineage back through six generations of family records to a concrete origin in the hills of Groningen, Netherlands with no deviations until emigration and so this man was Dutch by nature, Dutch by blood, Dutch by all measures real. I was not French. But Vic saw something in the curve of my cheekbones that tickled a Parisian sensibility in his temporal lobe and he refused to let it go. Indignant, feigning an aloofness, he said that if it mattered to me so much, I should do a DNA test. As if some faceless company off somewhere could know more than my mother and her meticulous family records. To this line of argument, Vic merely shrugged.
“I’m not saying your mother is a liar,” he’d drolled through the open bathroom door with a mouth foaming toothpaste. “Only that it’s very possible your great great grandmother was a whore who had a French bastard baby and never told anyone. I think you’re descended from whores is what I’m saying.”
I turned over in bed and pretended to sleep.
Part of me doubted that even a DNA test would convince him, that he would be unable to stop seeing the French lilt in my cheeks now that he’d committed it to memory, but it would be a further proof at least. I could feel more sound in my argument. I could make it work.
But I’d decided resolutely against the multi-million conglomerates like Ancestry, 23AndMe and their ilk. Everyone knew they sold your genetic stuffs to the government. So I shopped around and chose the closest thing I could find to a small business, a discreet-looking org based out of Oregon called Discoverling. They had a handful of five star ratings that at least didn’t appear to be AI-generated and I trusted the state of Oregon on principle.
In addition to all the general information the website requested–birth name, mother’s maiden name, etc–it also asked a single question at the very end: Why would you like to know yourself closer? The phrasing of the question struck me as deeply strange. I’d chewed my thumbnail about it for a few minutes, feeling the high-school-math-test-bead-of-sweat tracing its way down my forehead, then hastily typed I require proof of myself and hit submit before I could think better of it, feeling my answer was at least as strange as the question itself. It couldn’t matter that much.
Either way, I’d done the deed and I’d have the results soon enough.
A month passed. I grew impatient then complacent then impatient all over again. Vic seemed to forget about the test almost instantly but I knew it was sitting easily on his backburner because he would, at least twice a week, say something to me in French just to see me wriggle. I felt antagonized. A little cinder of self-loathing set in the hearth of my ribcage.
I considered the possibility of forcing myself to give up, pretend it never happened, as if I hadn’t paid $131 the day I signed up (the idea of sending a follow-up email, or worse–making a phone call–was something I found abhorrent) and then the day before the envelope arrived, Vic and I were having lackluster sex (self-indulgent for him, performative for me) and he was doing something around my asshole that was not exactly pleasurable when he bit my ear like a rabbit scarfing down some lettuce and whispered, ma pute française.
I was walking in the door the next day dialing the number against my better judgment when I saw the envelope on the counter. It was a simple, crisp envelope. Off-white. Eggshell. I peeled it open with a kitchen knife.
There was one thing inside of it, which fit in the palm of my hand. I held it gently, almost cupped it like a baby bird. It was a polaroid photograph of me from the chest up looking blankly into the camera, affrontingly expressionless, set against a slate gray wall. I was shirtless and, I don’t know, wet? There was a sheen across my skin that was hard to make out in the dim light.
Something urged me to look over my shoulder but it was just me in the kitchen, alone, and the diminished reflection of my confusion in the glass on the door.
At dinner, I asked Vic if he was playing some kind of prank.
“How would this be a prank?” he asked with a mouth full of fettuccine.
I shrugged. “Seems like the kind of thing you’d be capable of.”
He swallowed and it was patronizing somehow. The bob of his throat patronized me. “I pranked you by…taking a polaroid of you naked and covered in slime in a room you’ve never seen before? Did I drug you for this? Then I created a fake envelope with the return address of the place you’ve been waiting to receive mail from and stuck this envelope in our mailbox?”
“Well, it was on the kitchen counter, actually.”
He blinked. “Because I took it out of our mailbox and put it there. God, I’m good at pranks, they should give me a show on Comedy Central.”
I demurred. “Well, what the hell is it, then? I’ve never seen this photo before, Vic.”
He shrugged, a creature of absolute indifference. “I think you got scammed, babe. You gave this place all your information so they could mail you an AI-generated photo of yourself.” He paused. “If they send another visibly showing your penis et. al, I would like to put it in my wallet.” He said et. al, out loud.
I spent quite a while poring over the photo before getting into bed. Was it AI generated? The wall behind me was flush, unbroken, but pock-marked like real concrete. My skin was dewy but supple. My cheekbones nursed their French abrasion. My eyes though–if anything was off, it was in the eyes. I was left with the unsettling yet exciting feeling that they looked realer, more true than my own eyes when I found them in the mirror. They peered not past the camera but through it. I met my gaze and something passed between like a shifting in the cosmos.
The next day I received a tracking email at work. You’re on your way! it exclaimed without emotion. Estimated delivery date: 3 days. No carrier information but a tracker seemed to offer me live data on the package's journey from them to me. Which seemed perhaps illegal but also maybe just a randomly generated placation because when I went to the link provided the package appeared to be in the middle of a densely wooded area in East Oregon. The blinking dot moved steadily on a neat trajectory toward my home. The truth of my blood. I’m on my way.
Inexplicably, I’d brought the polaroid to work with me and found myself taking it from my wallet to periodically observe it. In certain light, the eyes seemed to follow me. A tricky Mona Lisa quality to my lips made it seem as though I was about to open my mouth to speak as the photo was snapped. The longer I peered into its dimensionless plane the more I could imagine that I remembered it being taken, I could feel the damp chill in the air hugging my naked body, my ass against the rough concrete while some formless entity angled the camera toward my face.
It made sense, if I thought about it. I thought about it very hard.
Before bed the next three nights, I found myself consulting the photograph and then the tracker which never once ceased its steady blue blinking. The dot, which throbbed like a pulse, crossed highways, rivers, stomped through suburbs and cities alike. I knew it had to be fake as it scaled and descended the obstruction of the Rocky Mountains without once slowing but I felt heartened watching it. To know truth would be delivered.
There was a loveliness in being alone with myself for once. A feeling stirred in my chest the longer I spent with the photograph, then with the tracker. Something like liberation.
The night before the truth was to arrive, Vic came into the study without knocking while I was engaged in my ritual time with this anomaly.
“Huh,” Vic said, startling me from a trance. “This is different.”
I blinked at him. The laptop was opened to the tracker with the polaroid propped neatly beside it. In one hand I held a glass of wine. The other was down my pants.
“You scared me,” I said.
He made a wet noise with his mouth. “Should I be…concerned about whatever is going on here?”
I shrugged. “Am I not allowed to enjoy time to myself?”
He put up an I’m not fighting with you gesture. “Just worried that this whole thing has been stressing you out. I was just fucking with you, babe. French or not, you’re still my whore. I can look up how to say it in Dutch if you want.”
A horrible desire gripped the back of my throat. To scream I’m not your anything! The words surprised me, even if I choked them down, tremoring slightly at the space they took up in my body. I loved Vic. He was going to propose soon, I thought. This was the order of things. Did I want order or not?
“Well,” I said, with difficulty, “The results arrive tomorrow. So we’ll know the truth then.”
Vic sighed. “Does the truth matter to you that much? You are who you are regardless of what your mom told you.”
“It matters,” I said, turning from him. “The things we say about ourselves matter.”
He said something further but I’d already returned to the dot on its holy trek across my screen. I could picture it–him–on horseback with a pearlescent sword clutched between his teeth. The carrier of truth, order, justice. He’d set things straight.
I could hardly work the next day. The dot blinked closer to the house with every slinking, slipping second. My every nerve was lit up. I hardly recognized the feeling of my body.
When the package claimed to be ten minutes out, I texted Vic–who worked from home–to tell him it was arriving and he should bring it in right away so it wouldn’t get stolen. When he didn’t respond within the minute, I texted him again and then again for every minute which he did not reply until it was three minutes away and I texted him every thirty seconds and, finally, as the package arrived on screen, he replied Just heard it get dropped off. I’ll go grab it and I exhaled–I’d hardly been breathing at all.
How does he look? I replied. Then, misunderstanding my own question, I added, How big is it?
Vic did not reply. I zoomed in on the map and the dot blinked steady as a heartbeat within the digitally rendered walls of my home. Another hour went by with no reply and I found myself smirking smugly to myself. He opened it and was shown the truth. I was right and he was too furious to admit it yet. He’d have no choice when I got home.
I slipped out the door fifteen minutes early without telling anyone. My blood was boiling with desire. I held the image of Vic’s face in my mind, the shame with which he would have to accept, even in silence, that he was wrong. I was going to push that face down into the pillow with the back of my hand tonight. I would get to fuck him for once. He’d be my whore.
The front door was unlocked. The air, when I stepped inside, was sweet as honey, thick with sticky desire. Stale coffee on the kitchen counter, lights low and sexy.
I found him on the couch, naked, sitting politely, back straight, with his hands folded across his lap as though he'd been waiting for me to come home without moving for many hours. At his feet, Vic’s body was hacked to pious little pieces, arranged into a neat and orderly pile like a fresh brick wall still settling. Nothing more true than that. The body rendered to deli meat.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello you,” he replied.
He seemed pleased to see me. Rising, I watched his shoulders tilt just slightly forward like mine, his hair curling round the soft lobes of his ears like mine, his penis hanging modestly between undefined legs like mine. Misleading cheekbones like mine. I’d never seen something so beautiful.
Stepping over Vic’s body and the liquid smearing the hardwood, he approached me with a smile neither kind nor cold, a spot of blood on his chin like a beauty mark we did not share. But he was clean, fresh and lovely from head to toe despite the fact that he’d run all the way here to meet me.
There was nothing in me which stirred a fear. He stepped closer and I let him. When he raised his hand and placed it to my cheek, I let him. I’d expected it to feel cold or manufactured but it was warm. It felt like my own hand when I’d rest my head against it. There was tenderness in his palm.
I gathered my voice from the steady of my lungs and said, “Who are you?”
He tilted his head to the tune of mine. He said, “Je m’appelle toi.”
He brought his forehead to mine. Then the tips of our noses. One hand on my cheek, the other he wound round the nape of my neck. And when he tilted his lips up toward mine and kissed me, pairing the twin of our lips, I let him. The taste of iron on his tongue.
Could a thing be more perfect. Could a thing be more just. I could just tear myself apart and peer with satisfaction at the rotten, immutable core of my being.
it’s been a while since i’ve had company / it’s been a while since someone touched me
the joke post drafted in my notes app which inspired this story.
Holy smokes. Your stories are heartbreakingly, tragically sad, funny and beautiful all at once. Every word feels carefully thought out and crafted with your unparalleled sense for empathy, humor, and truthfulness. I love the manner in which your words build up the foreboding feelings of dread, fear, and suspense. Towards the ending I cried at least three times while reading, and to me crying while reading is one of the highest form of compliments in my book. Laughter or tears to me meant that your words got to the heart of some universal feelings. Your brilliant and inspiring collages are unmatched. I feel quite lucky to have found your beautiful, empathic, and brilliant stories here. It’s quite a gift you’ve got with the written word. Thank you for taking the time to share your powerful storytelling skills with us readers.
Alright, James. I'm pretty sure this is one of the best pieces of fiction I've read on this site. About a quarter way in I was like "Oh damn, James has really gotten good." Then about half way I was like "I need to step up my writing. This is great." But at the end--the end!--I threw my hat on the ground and shouted "The boy done it! He actually done it!"