Manon Uphoff - Desire

She is young, too young perhaps, but desire has swelled up inside of her and it must, she knows, be released. Her family can’t help. Her friends can’t help. She doesn’t know any boys who could, would, or should, help. But a man – a stranger – he could help.

The girl likes the fairy tales where the endings aren’t happy, where something is lost and nothing tangible is gained. Where desire supersedes sensibility, and where it is okay to end up damaged and broken as long as the reward matches the payment. It’s worth noting on the outset that so many of the pre-Disney fairy tales are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) sexual, struggling via metaphor with the vagaries of virginity, teenage desire, and innocence lost.

Manon Uphoff’s Desire is the story of a young girl – fifteen – who knows in her heart that submission to an older man, a stranger, is what her body craves. She meets a man, makes clear her intentions, and together they walk to his rundown apartment.

The excitement grew in her. She felt she was swelling and drawing the darkness of night up into her, like a flower does sweet water. On the town square she imagined she was no longer in any normal city – she was in a world of glass and stone, where she and the man were the only two warm animals. The thrum of distant cars sounded like bumblebees. Drops of rain began rolling slowly over her cheeks, down her neck, and the walk went on and on and on.

The man is “a man” and the girl is “the girl” – they have no identity beyond her capacity for desire and submission, and his willingness to take her as she is offered. Uphoff uses words like “stiff” and “hard” and “swelling” and “moistly” for physical descriptions, saturating the text with sexuality, draining it of intellect, reason and even emotion. “The girl” is a stand-in for any young female, and offers an uncompromising examination of teenager desire and sexuality. The girl is never criticized by the narration for her behavior, but nor is her night with the man glamourized. Instead it simply is, which is to suggest that, yes, young women have desires in much the same vein as young men and yes, sometimes they act upon it, no matter their age and no matter who with. Uphoff knows, of course, that reading the text will incite uncomfortable feelings concerning the extreme youth of the girl and the obvious age and experience of the man. He knows she is too young, and he knows he is her first, but – and here Uphoff is at her best, exactly identifying the see-saw mixture of desire, wariness, and even self-loathing – she’s so young and so unspoiled. How could he not?

Her pelvis pushed up and she ran her hands through his stiff dark hair, forcing his head down harder, as if she were a nut with a hard shell, and not that the shell was cracked, power and rage came pouring out, and a wanting, a wanting that frightened her.

But that’s his problem, not hers. The story ends with the girl at home, avoiding her mother’s questions and back to her room, where she discovers, to her satisfaction, that there is blood from the night before in her underwear, that she has taken some of the treasure home with her. She has achieved exactly what she wished, has paid the blood price for the enjoyment and now she is a woman.

Uphoff’s text is raw and direct, and utterly compelling. The plot holds no surprises, which leaves the story to focus on the character of the girl, the man, and the inherently sexualized descriptions of the evening they share together. This is a dangerous text, sexy and erotic and charged with anticipation and longing.

Desire by Manon Uphoff is a short story from the Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2011

See Also

Other stories from the Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2011, include:
---United Kingdom: Welsh: Roberts, Wiliam Owen - The Professionals
---United Kingdom: British: Mantel, Hilary - The Heart Fails Without Warning
---Turkish: Üldes, Ersan - Professional Behaviour
---Swiss: Stefan, Verena - Doe a Deer
---Spanish: Catalan: Ibarz, Mercé - Nela and the Virgins
---Spanish: Castilian: Vila-Matas, Enrique - Far From Here
---Slovenian: Jančar, Drago - The Prophecy
---Serbian: Arsenijević, Vladimir - One Minute: Dumbo's Death
---Russian: Gelasimov, Andre - The Evil Eye
---Romanian: Teodorovici, Lucian Dan - Goose Chase
---Portuguese: Tavares, Gonçalo M. - Six Tales
---Polish: Tokarczuk, Olga - The Ugliest Woman in the World
---Norwegian: Grytten, Frode - Hotel by a Railroad
---Montenegrin: Spahić, Ognjen - Raymond is No Longer with Us – Carver is Dead
---Moldovan: Ciocan, Iulian - Auntie Frosea

Index of titles by The Dalkey Archive Press under review

Index of short stories under review