Ordinary Bruises For years, someone lived in my bedroom with me, someone with oily black hair that curled up at the nape of his neck and tattoos on his forearms, who chewed ice cubes and snapped chewing gum. He slept beneath my bed or behind my curtains or in my closet, and he never responded when I called out. Then one night he was gone. The room smelled different. I stayed up late, as usual, reading another novel about my life to come. As I read, I pulled a single coarse black hair that curled just below my belly-button. I pulled and it just kept coming, just kept growing longer. And the feeling was brand new, better than anything I'd felt before-- When I'd finished the novel a nest of black hair lay beside me on the mattress. I cut it with a cuticle scissors and hung the heavy coil of hair on a nail in my closet. I was hungry that morning, not at all tired, filled with a new story, a version of my life to come. --And when I got married the first time, I gave my bride that coil of hair, from which she wove a negligee which revealed everything it covered. I never told her where that thread had come from, as she never told me where she learned to dance. She loved to paint my body with lipstick, to paint her nipples and belly-button, to sing in a language I never learned, an "automatic" tongue, while she danced around me, poking me, taunting me with that blood-colored lipstick as she danced. My second wife loved fishing nets, motorcycles, fishnet stockings. She thought she'd shaped our children from clay she dove for, down to the bottom of the lake we dreamed, behind the house we built with our bare hands. We grew old together, she and I, pinned back each other's faces and slack bodies, made each other new again that way. Then we made love and unmade love until I was perfectly bald and covered with heart-shaped tattoos that are fading, even as we speak, into ordinary bruises.