My Dinner with Adriana

The life of a serial killer is tough. It’s not as easy as some people think. The work requires months of meticulous study, crafting each act with precision, only to find that no one gets to appreciate your artistry.

To maintain appearances, you must suppress primal impulses and undertake mind-numbing jobs. I became a night porter, which affords me plenty of free time to attend to the duties of my trade.

Today, I rose early to make a critical, anonymous phone call before disposing of pieces of Uberto. Afterwards, I swung by the hardware shop for supplies. So little time, and so much to do.

I’ve lived in cities all my life, always watching from the shadows. When I was ten, I realised how people lie, how they wear masks, how their eyes never line up with their words. That’s when I discovered the streets are empty, even when they’re overflowing with bodies. People are hollow, consumed by their self-importance, and indifferent to the suffering of others. There’s something revolting about how they scurry through life, trampling over one another, locked in their delusions. Even amid crowds, they remain alone.

Now, at thirty-six, all I dream about is killing.

It was two in the afternoon, and all I wanted to do was go home and watch a homemade movie with a cup of hot chocolate. But instead, I had a date. I met Adriana online last week. She’s younger than me, which works in my favour. Less experience. Less… suspicion. We’d arranged to meet for lunch at Perro Rojo. It’s quiet.

It’s perfect.

I took an extra-long look at myself in the mirror this morning. I dress like a typical tourist: khaki shorts, a loose shirt, sandals, and a rucksack slung over one shoulder. Nothing out of the ordinary. Average height, average weight. Clean-shaven. I could be anyone. That’s the trick, though.

I arrive first. The restaurant is empty. Dark tables bathed in low light. A waiter, lean and pale, greets me with a stiff smile and gestures to a booth at the back.

I sit facing the door, positioning my rucksack beside me on the bench. The weight of it is comforting.

Adriana arrives. Late. She’s not as pretty as her pictures. Her photos promised sharp cheekbones like a model’s, but in person, her face is rounder. I can’t decide whether I’m disappointed or relieved. There’s an air of dishonesty, as if she’s crafted an image to be like everyone else. She’s wearing a bohemian-style white dress, and a large crystal pendant dangles between her breasts. She walks with effortless confidence. Too many dates to count.

I stand as she approaches, smiling with the right mix of warmth and detachment.

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Energy work ran over. Client had a major blockage.’

She slides into the seat opposite me.

‘I understand,’ I say. ‘I know how it is when the universe refuses to align.’

She smiles.

The waiter appears and pours water.

Adriana raises a hand. ‘What are the vegan options?’

The waiter smiles. ‘Uh, the roasted vegetables and the quinoa salad are vegan.’

‘That’s it?’ Adriana stares at him, as if he confessed to a crime.

The waiter nods.

‘Quinoa salad,’ she says, as though it’s some moral victory.

‘I’ll have the steak,’ I say.

Adriana narrows her eyes. ‘You eat meat?’

‘Yeah,’ I reply. ‘I know it’s not great, but—’

‘It’s unethical, don’t you think? Animals are sentient beings, and we’re all connected. It’s inhumane.’

‘You’re right. I’m not proud of it. But—’

‘That’s… human of you. The universe doesn’t want us to live in such a violent way.’

I smile, but I don’t believe her. I don’t need to. She thinks peace comes from a crystal. Mine comes from watching the life drain from someone’s eyes.

‘That’s why I connect with veganism. It transcends the material world.’

I nod, knowing the real reason I eat meat. There’s dominion in consuming another living being. And I’m not blind to the fact that I, too, am a living being. One day, I’ll be a box of flesh and bone, devoured in turn. There’s a beauty in that symmetry. A balance.

But I don’t say that out loud.

Adriana prattles on about her holistic lifestyle and how she’s healing the world one plant-based meal at a time. Her words are smooth and confident, but something flutters behind her calm façade. It’s an effort to convince herself as much as me.

I nod along. She talks about crystals and their power to channel energy. Her fingers grip the pendant. I can’t help but notice the tension in her shoulders, as though her words are a performance she’s been perfecting for years.

The waiter arrives with our food.

Adriana digs into her quinoa salad with a self-satisfied smile, while I cut into my steak.

I savour the first bite.

‘So,’ she says, ‘what made you try online dating?’

‘The usual,’ I say. ‘Busy schedule.’

A moment of silence passes.

‘Oh, no one’s aligned anymore.’

I sip my wine. ‘Frustrating,’ I say.

She nods. ‘God, yes. My ex? He was so toxic. He didn’t understand my work at all. I tried to cleanse his aura, but he suffered from emotional constipation. Complete narcissist.’

I fight the urge to smile.

The irony’s suffocating.

Adriana twirls the stem of her wine glass between her fingers, studying me.

‘You have an interesting energy.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah.’ She squints. ‘There’s something dark and mysterious about you. Have you ever done shadow work?’

‘Every day,’ I say.

‘That’s so important. Many men struggle with emotional maturity. They don’t even try to evolve.’ She sighs, shaking her head. ‘I’ve been on so many bad dates, I should get a medal. Like, this guy Uberto? Ugh.’

I almost choke on my drink.

Adriana doesn’t notice. She rolls her eyes. ‘He was so low-vibration. Obsessed with cryptocurrency. Plus, the pig never called me back.’

I grip the rucksack’s strap. Uberto. A breath escapes me, and I fight the urge to look inside. He’s still in there, waiting.

Then it hits me. How absurd it all is. How random. The universe, in its cruel humour, ties us together in ways we can’t anticipate.

I turn my focus to her hands as she speaks. Soft. Unscarred.

She’s never cleaned up anything messy.

She grimaces at the memory of Uberto. I swallow my laugh.

If only she knew.

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘some men are terrible.’

‘Right?’ She smiles, leaning in. ‘It’s exhausting. You want to meet someone evolved, you know?’

I sip my wine and think about the animal I’m eating. The guilt slips away. It isn’t about the animal, is it? It’s about control, about power. And power is so delicious.

Adriana excuses herself to the bathroom. I watch her go, then exhale.

She speaks to me with a warmth I cannot comprehend. Part of me wants to understand her. Part of me wants to break her. To force her to see the emptiness I do.

I unzip my rucksack a few inches. The scent slithers out, coppery, sweet, decay.

Inside, Uberto stares back at me, mouth agape, as if insulted.

I scratch the line of dried semen from his eyelid and zip the bag shut.

When Adriana returns, she stops short of the table. ‘Do you smell that?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘The waiter brought cheese. I sent it away.’

She studies me for a moment, then sits back down.

We continue talking.

She laughs. We finish our meals.

‘You know,’ Adriana says, ‘this is nice. A normal date for once.’

I match her smile. ‘Yes. Normal.’

The word sticks in my throat. Normal. Is it this banal dance of words and fake smiles or the darker currents beneath the surface? The things we don’t speak of, the things that pull at us even as we pretend they don’t?

The city hums outside, indifferent to the dramas unfolding within it.

I picture her head in the bag. How her skin will tear when my mask of patience slips.

The thought excites me, but only for a moment.

A part of me doesn’t want to see her again. A part of me wants to see that flicker of recognition. The moment she realises what I am.

She looks at me, fingers clutching her crystal pendant.

‘You have an unusual energy,’ she says.

My grip tightens on the rucksack. ‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. Like you’re standing on the edge of something. Like you’re about to make a decision.’

The candle flickers.

Does she see me? What’s beneath the mask?

I could end this now. Let her walk away, never knowing how close she came.

She leans in. ‘You should go for it,’ she says. ‘Don’t hold back. The universe rewards those who chase their dreams.’

She reaches for her empty glass. Our eyes meet.

I blow out the candle.

The world holds its breath.

And in the near darkness, I decide.

Digital Dreams in Euphoria: A Fucked-Up Fairy Tale 

In the techno-mystic realm of Euphoria, Queen Cherrypop lounged on her crystalline throne, her neural interface crackling with static as data streams flowed through the kingdom’s quantum networks. The palace walls shimmered with holographic representations of her past battles with the notorious Baroness Cuntingham each pixel encoding the power struggles that had shaped their realm.

Co-Queen Silver materialized beside her, their shared consciousness intertwining through Euphoria’s bioelectric grid. The kingdom had evolved since the days of simple fairy tale magic, now existing in a space where ancient spells merged with cutting-edge technology. Together, they monitored the realm’s vital signs through their enhanced neural networks, watching as the streets below pulsed with neon dreams and digital desires.

“The old powers are stirring again,” Cherrypop whispered, her voice carrying the weight of both organic and synthetic wisdom. She remembered her earlier days as a naive princess before the great technological awakening had transformed their realm into a hybrid of magic and machine. The goddess Twatzapooner’s essence had been uploaded to the kingdom’s mainframe, becoming an AI guardian that watched over their digital domain with algorithmic precision.

A warning flashed across their shared consciousness – unauthorized access in the Dark Forest’s data core. The forest had become a maze of fiber optic cables and quantum entangled trees, where digital predators lurked in the shadows of corrupted code.

“Something’s different this time,” Silver observed, her chrome-enhanced fingers dancing through streams of data. “It feels like… Cuntingham, but evolved.”

In the end, it wasn’t just about power anymore, it was about evolution. As Queens of a kingdom where fairy tale magic had merged with high technology, Cherrypop and Silver understood that their real strength lay not in dominance, but in adaptation. The juxtaposition of technology and humanity had become their greatest weapon against the darkness that threatened their digital domain.

They rose together, their forms flickering between flesh and light, ready to face whatever new horror had emerged from the synthesis of old magic and new tech. In Euphoria, even fairy tales had to upgrade their operating systems.

Life Happens

Six hours after I delivered the valedictorian speech at my high school graduation ceremony in the Trinity School gymnasium, I fucked a transvestite prostitute in an alley off the corner of 44th & 10th. I didn’t know “Stevie” was a dude. For one, he had the same name as the unquestionably female lead singer of Fleetwood Mac (who had an ubermasculine boyfriend named Lindsey). I was also kinda buzzed after knocking back a bottle of Old Grand-Dad washed down by a sixer of PBR tallboys. But the warning signs were there. Stevie had an unusually deep voice … a disproportionately large adam’s apple … knew the name and alma mater of each of the Jets draft picks … and my best friend Simon’s mom told me that my dick tasted like ass after she blew me the next day at his graduation brunch in East Hampton. 

But gender and sexuality issues aside, I knew that Stevie wasn’t my type, and it would be a short-lived romance, when he wouldn’t shut the fuck up about urban renewal and gentrification driving up rents and pushing the working class out of Hell’s Kitchen while I was shredding him behind the dumpster. People shouldn’t have to listen to that annoying first-world petit bourgeois bullshit on a first date, especially on the night of their high school graduation. New Yorkers are so selfish, especially the poor ones.

I learned the truth about Stevie a few years later during my junior year at Georgetown when he showed up at my feminist theology class – disguised in a priest’s cassock and using the pseudonym “Father O’Finnegan” – claiming to be the professor. At least now I know where he mastered his M. Butterfly dick-tuck/butt-lube technique … and why he wouldn’t blow me.

During my gap year between undergrad and NYU Stern, I had a serious live-in girlfriend named Margaret who preferred to be called by her nickname, Peggy – which coincidentally was the same name as my eighth grade art teacher, who looked much better in thigh-high pleather boots and red lace panties (and sucked a better dick) than my Peggy.

Peggy ate with her mouth open and had atrocious table manners. It wasn’t until I took her to the free clinic for a pregnancy test that I found out she was a Peruvian Llama. I guess that’s why the test came back negative. 

But it wasn’t meant to be with us. Maybe because I could never figure out why “Peggy” was a nickname for “Margaret” – I guess it’s just one of those things in life that you’re supposed to accept and pretend to understand, like cryptocurrency or the electoral college or abstract art or the weekly New Yorker  fiction piece. It ended for good when Peggy got bounced from first class on our flight home to New York. Buh-bye, Peggy.

With my first Goldman Sachs paycheck, I bought a silicone sex doll customized into a combination of Posh Spice and Joan of Arc. Some nights I spoke French to her, some nights I spoke Cockney-accented English. Some nights I called her Joan Spice and we ate roasted lamb shanks and drank red wine and snuck into the basement laundry room and made love on the floor, watching ourselves reverently in the washing machine window reflection. Some nights I called her Posh D’Arc and beat the living bejesus fuck out of her. She didn’t complain as much as Stevie and Peggy, even when I snored and pissed the bed. She left me when I got passed over for a promotion.

My first night in prison after my securities fraud conviction, I shit myself to discourage the other cons from raping me. I had heard or read somewhere that’s what Ivan Boesky did, and he was a much better securities fraudster than I was. One of the guards laughed and told me that prisoners don’t rape each other in minimum security federal prison. When I asked him for a pair of clean pants and underwear, he winked and brought me a used, threadbare Smurfette costume. I had to give it back when I got paroled.

A few weeks ago, I met a nice girl named Carol at the coffee urn in the church basement at my Tuesday night meeting (I can’t remember for which group). She’s old as fuck like me – at least 43.  On our first date, she asked why someone with my education and experience was working as a dock hand. I said it was always my dream but life got in the way.

“Life happens,” she agreed.

I think Carol’s a keeper so long as she stops asking stupid questions.