THE STALKER`S CHEST

Put this one in. It`s a picture of you and `the monkey` with her head romantically tilted on your shoulder. All in black and white. This one too. An old love letter that you wrote but too obscene to send. Some more love letters, ones that you received. Bits of short messages on little bits of papers that turned up to be more memorable than you expected. Don`t forget these collections of spoons, chopsticks and matchboxes from some hotels with their logos. Some posters. How about some unfinished portraits of her. Some semi nude ones too. Oh and pieces of tissues with some lipstick remains stolen from her wastepaper basket. Remember the good old stalking days? Here put your nose on the tip of this perfume bottle. Remember the scent? Familiar? Never mind that, dirty your mind a little. Smell this piece of black scantily `souvenier` that you got after you did something nasty one night. Sketches and bits of sarcastic doodles and what else. Ah yes her voice in this tiny cassette tape that you recorded without her knowing it. Put them in. Put them all in the chest.

THE GIRL WHO BET INTO TROUBLE

I know another girl who came to me one night. Over a glass of root beer and a pack of cigarettes she told me about a bet she had made. Some friends of hers challenged her 1k each that she could never make this one nice, married, family, homely type forty`s man, fall in love with her. That this guy was 99 and a half percent unprovocable.That was the ultimate assurance from her friends. They wouldn`t throw away 1k each if they were skeptical.

Being naive and short minded thinking plus the triple k`s that she would get from three friends, she accepted the challenge. She said she just couldn`t resist being challenged that way. Moreover it was her self pride and integrity that she had to preserve.

Days passed by and the nice homely man started to melt day by day. Until that night she told me that this guy was already half way in love with her. She was beginning to get the creeps with assumptions and what if`s. That the guy was all over her everyday life. Consistant phone calls days and nights that were genuinly resulted from an innocent heart that really cared.A man who was almost deeply in love and ironically so pure that he had never even touched her so far. She just couldn`t tell the truth because she didn`t know how and most of all, the imagined heartbreak to follow. If she kept playing the game, nobody could guarantee no home broken or a divorce filed. She was getting real scared of the circumstances. That if there was a bit of love in her heart for that man, it was just a speck, all for the sake of his innocence and that she could just rid of it like swatting a fly from her cheek.

She told the three friends and they had already noticed the changes earlier on. The three friends had by then cancelled their bets because things were getting serious and that they couldn`t handle the situation anymore. Moreover that nice homely man was not only a friend but a higher superior and they dared not when it came to telling the truth about the bet. That would make them looked like bozos and the victim a double bozo.

As she related her woes it was already almost 4am. All the while I was trying to indentify her weaknesses and that night I knew one thing about her. She succumbs to the ultimate truth in life. Sincererity.