Rikki Ducornet, "The Dickmare"

Love or sex among clams or clamlike people.

(from Tin House, vol. 9, number 1)

It all boils down to this: does she present to the Dickmare or not? She fears the lot of them, those perpetually inflated Dickmares, their uncanny magnetism matched only by their startling lack of symmetry. Yet she has been summoned. A thing as unprecedented as it is provoking.
And she has awakened with a curious rash. It circles her body like a cummerbund. A rash as florid as those coral gardens so appreciated by lovers of bijouterie. A rash having surged directly—or so she supposes—from her husband’s anomalous—or so she hopes—behavior.
Once she had thought her husband admirable. Admirable his thorny cone, his sweet horny operculum, his prowess as a swimmer, the beauty of his sudden ejections, the ease with which he righted himself when overturned. Not one to retreat into his shell, in those days his high spirits percolated throughout the yellow mud they optimistically called home.

They’re clams. I guess. Or some kind of bivalves. Ones with a mostly human language (and a vivid one at that). As to what it all means, beyond exploring some biological drive, I’m not sure. But reading it is a pleasure. Read it here.
I haven’t posted in a while, mostly cause I was working on this and read Dave Egger’s What is the What.

One thought on “Rikki Ducornet, "The Dickmare"

  1. Chrissy

    Hey i read a book not too long ago about clams. I think it was called the Angry Clam.
    I have the other book by the author Erik Quisling called Fables From The Mud. It’s a self-improvement type read. It’s one of my favorite Fiction/Philosophy reads.
    His bedtime stories for Adults is the most unusual and like nothing I’ve read before, but is pretty much ‘dark humor fables’ with lots of drawings.
    He tweaks pop culture and our society’s endless obsession with self and self-improvement.
    These philosophical tales are the perfect mix of dark humor and simple yet shrewd observations of the human condition.

    Reply

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