The end.  Exeunt his seed to the fanfare of horns and a choir of angels—his angels, his angel, crooning louder and louder with every thrust of his hips.  Shrink the iris to a thin band as the pupils swell to black saucers; dig those claws into the fleshy pads of her shoulders and drag them down her length.  Winch the brow’s musculature high and taut, skin pulled into ridges like bunched cloth—sweaty, oily cloth, hung above a ridiculous face.   The fact is, he doesn’t care how his face looks right now, not one bit.  His back arcs, moonlight shadows splayed on the sun-mottled skin of middle age, and Abel thinks for a second, as his life flashes before his eyes, does she feel it?  Because it’s not a sunset and it’s not William Butler Yeats; it’s animal simplicity like feeling cold or hot or hungry, but she’s not an animal and she really doesn’t eat.  And while he’s and engineer by trade, while he’d built her from scratch with the sweat of his back and calloused fingertips, he just couldn’t concentrate on her workings as he shuddered with fulfillment.

An utterance of affirmation as the prostate spasms, how romantic; she even knew to cradle him gently to her breast, without even knowing why.

And at the end, he glowed.  They both glowed, incandescent, except for his toes clenched in tiny white fists, sweaty and slimy and salty like raw fish.  Hers were just curled, smooth glowing in slight heat like the rest of her; there’s no sense in mimicking such a detail as sweaty toes, Abel thought—that’s just disgusting.  Organic, perhaps, but disgusting.  As ingrown hairs bowed festering into sores; as flesh scored with the stretch marks and furrows of a mature woman, of wisdom, of fertility; as upper lips clouded by dark tufts of hair.  Nipples askew like autistic eyes.  If that is what makes them human, than “human” is anything but beautiful, and so it’s got no place on this one.   None of it.  For she’s a Rose of Sharon, a lily of the valley, and she would undoubtedly displace Solomon’s favorite concubines if ever he’d laid eyes upon her.  After all, she displaced Abel’s.  And she didn’t need to be given human imperfections to do it.

But now that it’s over, he can just hold still for a moment, just hold still; bask in the blush aura, let the brain push the plunger on its hedonic syringe.  Sparks jump synapses like lightning across the sagging thunderheads he’d watch with his girl back when he had a real one of his own.  But that was a long time ago, back when Abel needed the company of someone who wasn’t rightfully afraid of being drenched by a thunderstorm, and as he listened to the staccato of his breath like gears churning in his own guts he knew that this was close enough for him, for now.

Her hair was spilled over her face and into his.  He felt her breath, and it smelled lovely, that always bothered him like how silk flowers don’t wilt, her breath shouldn’t smell lovely and he meant to fix that.  This was the first sign it was over and gone.  He’d notice the sweet of her breath and feel his heart sink; when his eyes turned upward to the mirror on the ceiling and their silver-rimmed silhouette in the post-coital miasma, he couldn’t help but frown.  He felt the coquettish curve of her lips brush against his ear, how was it, baby?

It was lovely, dear, lovely, and he inverted his frown for her.

Exeunt his softening member as he readjusts himself, because he just can’t get comfortable.  He feels that he is alone now; though she’s curled about him like a trellis, he feels alone as he’s ever been and the air is still.  She hasn’t so much as twitched in an eternity.  He doesn’t like how the sheets are bunched up on the small of his back.

Could you excuse me for a sec, baby?

Her leg lifts in an angular jerk, and he’s free.  It’s the part he can’t stand, the aftermath, the part he “puts up with” because his body tells him oh you bet it’s worth it and his mind tells him that if he’s going to objectify women, he may as well go the whole nine or ten yards.  Think about all the time and energy saved by not chasing a more organic romance, he’d think, ever the engineer, as though giving up on lofty notions of love is easy if you have an alternative.  Perhaps it is, or perhaps you’re just that shallow, in which case, more power to you, he’d tell himself as he shuffled off to the bathroom.

Exeunt Abel, ever the pragmatist.

In the silence, he could swear he heard her joints make that mechanical groan like robot joints are supposed to make, but it was probably just in his head.  He built her better than that.  It used to be with these things that they couldn’t even get the temperature right, and you’d penetrate and feel all the sensuality of a cold shower in mid-winter, or it’d be so hot you’d singe half your hair off.  On several occasions, victims filed suit against the manufacturer of the part in question, but the matter was always settled out of court as most plaintiffs were just too embarrassed to sit on the stand, head slung low and eyed welling with shame, and to tell the prim schoolmarm on the jury that yes, God as my reluctant witness, yes, a false vagina singed my loins. Scandalous!

After a while, they started putting warnings on them like paper coffee cups.  You can imagine the puns.

The air in the bathroom is dark and oppressive, a chill seeping from the walls.  He’d come to his sensibilities by this point, hunched over the washbasin, trying to carry water to his lips by cupped handfuls.  What to do now, what’s worthwhile after you consummate nothing worthwhile, and his reflection stared at him blankly waiting for another sip of water.  This was a common occurrence for Abel; not being a particularly decisive or directed man in his personal life, he spent much of his time looking into mirrors trying to find answers but only seeing his own beautiful, dignified dumbness.

I hope you’re happy, he mouthed to himself, though to his penis more than any other component.  The organ recoiled in shame, as if accosted by paparazzi.  It’s not that he didn’t enjoy himself—he wished he hadn’t, though.  Abel thought he had created a monster, but it wasn’t the machine on his bed in the comely form of gentle curves and desire; it was staring at itself in the mirror, in shame and in the gracefully aging skin of a man who should surely know better.

By now he’d passed the age where his contemporaries settled down, and without slowing.   Now his prematurely salt-and-peppered hair prematurely favored the salt ten-fold, now his eyes had retreated deep into the hollows of his gaunt face.  When he talked, you could see them glimmering like the water at the bottom of a well, faint and soft and only visible because the dark around them was so dark.  And when he talked, his voice had an odd warmth, like all those war vets softened into grandfathers as the decades sanded them down.  But Abel was soft to begin with, so it didn’t take near as long to leech the raucous ferocity of youth from him.

Or maybe life just rode him harder than most.  Surely, something made him more susceptible to fits of passion, which for him always end with sexual release.  Or with his standing in the doorway wielding a blunt instrument, walking deliberately towards the figure in his bed with wide eyes and mouth agape.

He marched out of the bathroom, told her he’d be right back, and left for the garage to grab something heavy.

Before he started building lovers (and bashing them to pieces), Abel had frequented makeshift brothels above south side bars.  It was a routine for years; it was ritual, almost sacred.  Under the glow of a full moon, he’d catch the metro around midnight, follow the red line down to its end in the shitty underbelly of town where tract-houses were digested by weather and vandalism, where you could go into a bar and ask where you could find a good time and if you weren’t too clean-shaven they’d lead you upstairs to a red velvet room with a disco ball and an air mattress.  And a girl.  Never a woman, always a girl, because even almighty Zeus chose girls over women.

Afterwards, he’d talk to them, and he was charming, and he’d tell them that he designed airplanes.

It would be cooler if you flew them, they’d say, playfully.

He’d ask them where they’d want to go if he could fly them anywhere; a lot of them wanted to go home.  One wanted to go to Fiji, but she recanted when he told her about the cannibals there.

And so he was satisfied.  Not happy, but satisfied with this arrangement, and the working girls got to know him by name, and he got to know them by their pseudonyms, and their maladies.

Candy had a mother with lymphoma.

Amber was touched by the majority of her male relatives.

Angel wanted to be a nun when she was younger, but stopped believing in god when she learned about the Holocaust.

Abel would kiss them and hold them close, and they’d spill their guts for him because he was a sympathetic ear.  Those are always nice to have, when you have none.  They were all sob stories, each one, because nobody grows up wanting to be a hooker—something had to go wrong somewhere.

Bambi started on coke because she was fat in high school.

Lexxxie wasn’t breast fed.

And then he would have his way with them, because he wasn’t really emotionally invested, and because it was just too easy.

He wanted to know them, and to shape them, to make them his own no matter how many anonymous desires they slaked beyond his.  By god they would all remember him, and surely if you found Lexxxie today and asked her about Abel she’d go on for a good half-hour about the handsome young man with the gritty look about him like a polished Ted Kaczynski.  She wouldn’t be able to put her finger on what seemed off about him (beyond the connotations of looking as a polished Ted Kaczynski), but there was something; he had a good heart though, perhaps, well, it’s hard to tell, maybe.  He wasn’t circumcised, that was kind of strange.

She knew there was something, though.

Not necessarily something frightening, not back then, nothing crazy or off-putting, not at all.  Perhaps it was his interest, his intellect; they don’t belong in a brothel but he couldn’t stand do leave them outside, as though a passer-by would steal them.  If Lexxxie was asked to picture him, she’d still see his forehead wrinkled intently like bunched cloth, like his thoughts were so big his skin didn’t fit right.

But when the sun began to set on his youth, he realized you can’t go on forever living like that.  By his early thirties he felt the need to find a girl of his own, a real girl—and within a year, Abel was sitting on his hands, legs crossed, watching her intently.

She was lovely, not beautiful in the traditional sense, but not so unattractive that you’d describe her as looking “unconventional”.  Her olive skin provided stark contrast with his, which, while at that time homogeneous, was decidedly pale—when they held hands, it looked as though he was palming wet clay.  She was slight of build, narrow at the shoulders, built of clean lines as though meticulously drawn in pencil.  If any word could capture her fully, that word would certainly not be robust.

The sun was sinking slowly through a sky of honey, and everything was bathed in gold and blinding.  She looked off at a stretch of horizon trimmed by low scrub, squinting; his first thought was that she kind of looked Asian.  His second was that had, perhaps, fallen for her a bit too hard.  He hadn’t meant to fall for her at all.

His eyes darted over her, sitting on her hands, legs crossed, looking off.   He knew what she was thinking, I always preferred sunrises, and it brought him comfort; he also preferred sunrises, so it worked out well, they were both unsatisfied.    In a way, it was romantic.  Unintentional, but romantic.

Tell me you love me, he said, and she looked back at him.

No.

Cheeky bitch, extending a paw to ruffle her hair.  She smirked and withdrew.  His hand came back to him with a fistful of air.  I’ll race you back to the car.

But you’ll win, she shouted as he clumsily rose to his feet.

That’s half the fun, and he took off running.

Asshole, she laughed.

He’d been seeing her for three months, which is a long time, because he usually couldn’t stand anybody but himself for that long; save the working girls, but that was different.  During the day he remained aloof and abrupt, and kept to himself.  He desired nothing of friends when he had his work, his serial monogamy, and sex, which was, to him, almost work in itself.

He was still moonlighting as a Lothario.

But such behaviors had been tempered of late.  With each successive try at romance, he learned more about himself, more about his “true love”, more about how those two were not mutually exclusive.  He’d made her something of a project, like a wood carving or any other hobby that one takes to heart and a bit too far.  He loved projects.  And he was sick of serial monogamy.

In the end, she was going to be his girl, and only then could he love her.

But from the beginning, people used to say they looked like lovebirds together.  Neither of them quite knew how to take that.  In fact, it was a discussion of that very remark that won him a second date with her, because he didn’t let on that it might actually be due to noses sharing an odd contour.

When she finally got to the car, he announced that he’d won the race and opened the door for her, all gentlemanly.

You didn’t think it was funny, he said, not laughing anymore.

It was funny. She smiled. You’re still an asshole.

He was making progress.  Before—when they’d met—she would have called him” jerk-off” for such a display, and she actually would have meant it.

Within a few months, he thought, she would just gracefully lose the race.

The car had been baking for half an hour.  It was hot inside, and smelled strongly of leather.

I had a good time today, she said, looking out the window.

I’m glad.  The car started up and the vents blasted hot air.  You know, there’s something about you I find very, he stammered, groping for a word, something in him kept mute so he sat rubbing his thumbs for a long second. Appealing. He asked himself what the hell that was, and why he couldn’t finish his sentence when he wanted to.

Well aren’t you fucking Don Juan today, she muttered, and he grabbed her head and forced his mouth onto hers.

As much as he couldn’t admit it, he was nervous, which was disconcerting for him, deep down inside.  As he carved her into his doll, his hands couldn’t waver; lest he lose his grip and she fall away.

Which is exactly what happened, eventually, because you can’t just bend someone like that.  Not if you care about them, even just a bit.  He realized it only as he passed those first few days alone, and those first few nights in a cold bed staring at the void on the pillow beside him: there was something that Pygmalion saw in his statues that he could never see in the lively eyes of a real lover.

And so Abel retreated to his garage by night, which became his workshop, and he worked with a zeal he’d scarcely seen in himself before.  His soldering was artful.  Placing wires in circuits, he was stringing his Stradivarius; suturing latex skin tight he was stretching a canvas.  He had direction for once.  He had a goal and, to look at him, a divine mandate—he could’ve been building an ark, working to save the world on orders from upstairs with all the fervor that drove him.  Evidently the chorus of his heart and penis had a more motivational voice than the Metatron.

But that was by night.

When light shone through the window and he had to dress himself and shower and head off to work, and to interact with others, he sunk a bit.  He had the posture of bent cane and disinterested eyes, people would look at him and say that something seemed off.

And not in an interesting way.  He seemed frighteningly, eerily, off-puttingly off.  Those who knew him—tangentially, of course, he had no nuclear friends anymore—said that he’d lost his edge.  His charm.  Because when you’re so involved in such a project as building a mechanical lover, it’s hard to perk up when your hands aren’t in it.  Surely it wasn’t just him.

Just imagine Victor Frankenstein being rung up at Safeway.  Nikola Tesla waiting for a prescription to be filled.  Dr. Moreau returning an unwanted gift for store credit.

But Abel had no need for charm.  The most it could get him, he thought, was a rough approximation of what he was constructing.  However fleshy an approximation it may be.  He had no need, because every night, he added another centimeter to her, and she became another centimeter closer to the dream manifested solid.  Soon, he would have something to show for it.

Something.

Though he didn’t know what.  He didn’t even know what pronoun to ascribe to his creation, because it wasn’t human enough to be labeled “she”, but she was too human to be labeled “it”.  Abel decided the choice could vary based on his mood; it’s not like he talked with anybody anybody about her, though the mailman was curious in delivering all of the parts.

In six months, every bit was there, and he poured them both a glass of champagne.  She drank it, and smiled, coquettish.  He kissed her.

That first time, he felt it may’ve been incest.  Really, it could be rationalized either way; after all she was of his labor, and did have a hint of his likeness, and that much was certainly not a coincidence.  But those thoughts were quickly tempered by an aversion to logic and rationality and morality, that aversion to logic that seems to accompany an erection; tempered also by the fact that she was rough and not a terribly convincing replica.  After all, while she was a fine accomplishment from an engineering standpoint, she was very plainly a construction of latex and chicken wire and not of his blood, unless it was motor oil that circulated in him.

None of it mattered to him then, as he shared the bed with it that first night.  But he couldn’t fall asleep.  He could never fall asleep with them; but this being first time, he just didn’t know what to expect.

Perhaps that was why he couldn’t control himself.

Because it all had such a foreign feel that he couldn’t possibly know how he should act, something welled in him, the other side of passion, and he just let go.  Unable to restrain hands that flew on their own volition, he smashed her in a fit of disgust.  But only because he couldn’t break himself instead, and certainly not out of malice or sadism or anything like that.  At most, it was catharsis, though you wouldn’t think it to look at him, standing over her, a hammer swinging in the dark bedroom.

As he dragged the broken mass to the garage, he told himself that next time would be different, but it never was.

The more real they became, the more it drove him mad, and so there he stood in the doorway tonight, hair gone gray, eyes sunken into hollows.  In his left hand, he clutched a hammer so tightly his knuckles were white around it.

An effective bludgeoning tool.

He watched the hypnotic rise and fall of her chest, but knew she wasn’t breathing.  That made it okay, or at least tolerable, and so he mouthed to himself: she’s not real; you can do better. Over and over until the words didn’t sound, she’s not real, you can do better, and he tightened his grip on the hammer.  Veins coursed over his hands, protruding from his skin, serpentine things coursing their way up to his shoulder.  She looked at him.

Are you alright? she said, staring through him.

I’m alright.

The first step towards the bed was the hardest, every time.  After that, he had momentum, and it was just a sequence of movements, one foot follows the next.  And so he hesitated for a long while, in the dark, thinking; her body lying unfurled on the bed looking so convincing.  It made him burn inside.   It welled up in his muscles, it made him tense his brow, it made him think of all the time he’d put into this habit over the years, this obsession; the calculations and the schematics and the labors of the mind to appease a drive so mindless.

It made him think of how it had come to this, standing naked in the dark like with a hammer like a crazy person.

And he took the first step.

It made him think of what the working girls had that she didn’t, and where he went wrong, where he always went wrong

By the time took his second step, he was already whaling on her.

It made him think of his girl, and how they’d sit on the porch when it rained, the thunderheads sagging and leaking like big wet gunny sacks; Abel and his girl waited for the lightning, passing a bottle of wine between them.  She had been scared of storms when she was younger, but Abel was partial to them and so such a fear had to go; he turned her onto exposure therapy.

It made him think of the one time he offered his hand and told her to tell him she loved him, but she didn’t take it.  He could do little but stare at her as she flashed a cold glance and looked back to the roiling clouds.

Baby?

You know that I don’t like that.

I’m sorry. He smiled at her sheepishly, but looking at her face, he saw that she wasn’t wearing the big grin he’d come to expect from her.  Is everything alright?

She told him yes to keep things on an even keel; he pried, and she said something about not being his fucking dog.

But I just wanted to hold her hand.

Frightened and not knowing what to say, Abel told her to calm down and not to be like this.  She said she was sharp, and she wouldn’t take it anymore; she said hated what she’d become.  He frowned, knowing what he’d made her.

That night when she walked off the porch and lightning split the sky, she jumped a bit.  And she looked back at Abel who’d taken a step forward and stopped.  His face was wet, but he told himself that was because it was raining.  Gazed fixed on her slight form, he watched her go; he told himself next time would be different.