by Kate Maruyama

They were twenty and wrote their love for each other in Sanskrit tattoos. His wound around his neck, encasing his throat in barbed wire characters. Hers, across the base of her spine just above the butt, circled her lavish hips.  They broke up two months later.

She married a professor of Tamil who would only make love in the dark. She thought it was because he found her naked form unappealing. He was too polite to tell her that reading, “I love Randy” spelled phonetically across the top of her ass, undid him completely. Eight years later, when they divorced, they could only cite “irreconcilable differences.”

Kate Maruyama is a part-time teacher and co-founder of Annotationnation.com. Her work has appeared on Salon.com, Gemini Magazine and Halfway Down the Stairs. She is completing her Master’s in Fiction at Antioch University, Los Angeles and is revising her second novel.