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June 3, 2020
Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles - "Just Tonight I’ll Be Kurt and You Can Be Courtney" by Angela Readman
The Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles series is curated by Meg Pokrass. Authors pair an original work of flash fiction with a song.
Just Tonight I’ll Be Kurt and You Can Be Courtney by Angela Readman
Inspired by "Violet" by Courtney Love
You come in with prom gowns you lay on my bed. Always mine, I don’t ask why. I order fresh lilac sheets. We spend a while looking at the lace like women dissolving after a dance. You hand me the scissors and I cut.
Shorter, you say, Straight. I do as I’m told. You want to be Courtney Love. I’m more Kurt. I wear striped pyjamas because I saw a once show where two guys shared a room, and that’s what they wore.
They made breakfast look fun. Juicing oranges, popping the toast to stripper music.
You prefer baby-doll nighties I sometimes borrow when my fiancé comes at weekends, but all week I’m Kurt. Kneeling outside in Converse, fishing stuff out of blocked drains. Condoms, tampons, condoms. Our bubble bath hisses at the lives of our neighbours. The nappies and wet wipes of the kids with bunnies uphill. You love identifying our stuff in the pipe, the nights I hold in my rubber gloves. Cotton buds, bits of your fishnets. I wear those too, less Courtney than you, but I’ll do.
You look like sisters, the ladies in Oxfam say. You hold my hand and tell them we are, but sometimes at night you slip into my bed. My fiancé doesn’t like it, but I never say no. It’s freezing, I say, it’s not like living at home.
It’s true, but I've had to get used to bathing with the door open. You always knock, asking if you can come in and talk about that guy who uses patchouli oil for everything. The woman who’s teaching you to lipread, or the man who can’t stroke your stomach without you imagining a baby bump.
I’m lucky, you say. I’ve found the one.
I soap my armpits and whisper. I could stay like this. Maybe get a cat you’ll let me name.
I want alpacas, you say. With the shower curtain between us, we are old women spinning wool on a farm, laughing at spit in our face and flinging dung on the fire.
What if we were naked? my fiancé says, what if we were on all fours?
But we aren’t, I say.
When you kneel by my bed and touch my shoulder, I don’t think about him waking up. I follow you in pyjamas. The people you brought in are skinny pandas, eyelinered and huddled over a Cure record in the kitchen. A blond guy dabs snowy powder off the cover and hands it to a girl with jittery knees.
This is my Amy, you say.
Cool, you want? the girl asks.
The album sleeve is clouded with fingerprints. I usually keep it in plastic, but I take it and dip my fingers in the dust because I’m Kurt. I have never been my anyone, other than with you.
Angela Readman's work has won The Anton Chekov Prize for Short Fiction, The Costa Short Story Award and The Mslexia Competition. Her collection Don't Try This at Home won The Rubery Book Award. And Other Stories published her first novel Something Like Breathing in 2019. She also writes poetry.
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previous Flash Dancers stories
Book Notes (2018 - ) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2015 - 2017) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2012 - 2014) (authors create music playlists for their book)
Book Notes (2005 - 2011) (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlist essays
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week (recommended new books, magazines, and comics)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Short Cuts (writers pair a song with their short story or essay)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
