You Look Like a Skoo and You Smell Like One, Too

Subscribe Strange, short, and diverting writing delivered to your inbox every Monday.. You Look Like a Skoo and You Smell Like One, Too Skoo Once upon a time, I had a terrible marriage. We couldn’t stop fighting. We fought all night. We fought so loudly the neighbors complained. We threw things and called each other “prick” and “cunt.” Of course it was a very lonely time. The shame was unbearable and black and continuous. We agonized constantly about how to stop it, and the life we could have if we could just get along. But anything we tried would start a fight. Then we’d be screaming like children, throwing things, terrified, in the filthy kitchen that never got cleaned—when you fight like that, there isn’t time for cleaning. Everything’s dirty like your life. At the tail end of one of these fights, in the little hours, both of us exhausted and sick on adrenalin, fuck you, it’s you who, cunt, prick, idiot— I suddenly saw how absurd it was and said: “Well, you’re a skoo ! And whatever you say, you’ll never be anything but a dirty skoo !”— skoo being a word I’d made up on the spot. My husband got the joke and rolled with it, saying, “Well, you’re a ca ! You’re a low-down ca, and that’s all you’ll ever be! A ca !” We went on for a little while— you skoos are all, you’re like every other ca— both laughing, grateful, all rancor gone. We even believed we’d turned a corner. We’d had an insight that could stop the fights, and we just had to cling to that knowledge. In the months that followed, we elaborated skoo and ca into a game. The skoo, we decided, was a weasel-like creature. We imagined a whole folk culture of skoos, where skoos told tales of a trickster figure called the Mandrake Skoo. The ca, meanwhile, was a monotheistic bird that worshipped the Great Ca on the mountain. I called my husband “Skoo.” He called me “Ca.” They were the nicknames we used when we were alone, […]

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