Short Prose The Girlfriend Biography A.C. Koch 1. She tied a scarf around her neck regardless of the weather. Her nails were real but looked fake. I never got anything I wanted from her because the weather was against us. It rained, I showed up late, and she was gone. It was sunny, we met in a café, but she split to take her abuelo for a wheel through the park. It was cold and starry, we met in the park, she was stuffed up and sick and afraid to kiss. Nothing else ever happened. 2. She was a sculptor with a dimple in her chin, and she waited tables at Dot's Diner. She had a thing for me, but I no longer remember how I knew that. Years of backburner crush culminated in two weeks of nakedness and rubbing. She tasted of freckles and smelled of cilantro and onions. Her apartment was wildly messy. She had a parrot that learned my name and screeched at me, Nice ass! Nice ass! That's all I remember. 3. She thought that Queen lyrics were poetry, because English wasn't her first language. I thought that Jacques Brel lyrics made good quotes for love letters, because French wasn't mine. When she dumped me, she explained it like this: Nothing really matters. I wrote back, Ne me quitte pas. She never answered that letter. 4. She had a caramel-colored birthmark in the middle of her chest that made it impossible not to fixate on her breasts. She knew this. What are you looking at? she said with a half-smile. It wasn't necessary to answer. Nothing much ever happened between us, although my imagination continues to work through the possibilities. 5. She had this tattooed around her left ankle: Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les cœurs, où tous les vins coulaient. She didn't even know what that meant, only that it was from a French poet and that a lot of people thought it was cool. Her boyfriend was a drug dealer named Lance and he got shot between the eyes as he was parking his convertible BMW downtown. She told me this while we were in bed; it had happened that morning. He was dead now. I'm going to shave my pussy, she said, and start over, you know? I didn't know. Later, that line from Rimbaud became my favorite thing to repeat to myself when I was walking around the city alone, and it wasn't long before I forgot all about her. 6. She was perfect and beautiful in every way except that she was foul-tempered in the morning. Fuck, she said, my bitch dyke roommate used up all the fucking coffee. I dumped her. 7. She was a dance major. She was always sweaty and ripe, and she thought her farts were hilarious. I told my friends that she might be the sexiest person I had ever laid eyes on, but also the stinkiest. We screwed in my dorm room behind the sheet that curtained my bed while my roommate masturbated to the sound of it. Unique among all lovers before or since, she violently orgasmed during intercourse, every time. It almost killed us both. 8. She painted abstract watercolors on the front pages of newspapers. Then she broke into an art museum and hung one of her pieces in the modern gallery between a Stella and a Rauschenberg. When the police showed up and arrested her, she asked for an art critic instead of a lawyer. 9. She worked at a television station and devoted all her energies to producing public service announcements that aired at four in the morning. We stayed up in bed to watch them, and the difference between us became clear: she thought her public service announcements were avante-garde, and I thought they were sad. I can't watch tv now, on any channel, because I don't want to be reminded. 10. She was a lot older than me, and had the face of a silent movie star. She was a jazz singer but would never sing me my favorite standard, "Corcovado." This was because her husband had been decapitated in a car wreck while they were listening to that very song. She walked away without a scratch, as they say. 11. She was a teenager and still lived with her mother. Her boyfriend was an abusive thirty-five year old Iranian immigrant who managed an International House of Pancakes and did cocaine and drove a Jeep and fucked her in an unfurnished apartment he kept on Capitol Hill just for her, and the others like her. She mistook all of it for love. She dropped him when we hooked up and I spent months looking over my shoulder, but he must not have taken it too hard. 12. She was a lot like all the others. There was no single thing that made her unique. There was a snowstorm, then a freezing wind. We stayed in bed for three days while the world turned white. It may be that all these women and girls were the same one. The same single person. And that I was continually being given the chance to work through some problem I couldn't quite solve. Over and over and over and over, while the snowflakes fell. (A.C. Koch's work has recently appeared in The Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, In Posse Review, River City, in Spanish translation in Tower of Babel, and is forthcoming in Oyster Boy Review. He lives in Zacatecas, Mexico where he teaches English at a university and edits fiction for The Zacatecas Review. zacatecas.org This is his first contribution to the magazine.)