Slasher

Manasvi Vora

we hold hands and sprint through the woods together,
screen door ripped apart behind us,
and the tang of iron in the air,
dancing us into a corner, blade
sharp behind your ear until
we pull forward, hands slamming on
asphalt, lit yellow by
headlights, shining through
your cheeks until your bones glow,
heart in your transparent throat, sore and
scratched up until
the fade to black, except
our eyes don’t stay closed for long, and
the world spins faster than
we do

(audience exits to the left)

voices melt into hardwood boards, splitting with a vicious crack,
the same one that echoes through your eyes with a snap until
blood fills up the cracks in the floor, letting
us drown in
twisted mazes, moonlight
reminding us that
in the end, when it all pools together, dripping off
fingertips, running down the side of a
dingy bathtub, no one remembers why, only if
it is mine or it is yours

(audience enters to the right)

destiny whistles through the wind, tripping over tree roots just to
mock us,
tangling in splintered branches and snagging on
raw fingertips all to
ask

will it even matter?

Salad Days

Colin Gee

There must be a glitch in the program because I have been put into a loop in which I finish the book, get out of my suit and into bed, and then immediately am back in the chair, strapped in and fully dressed, grimacing at the title of the last chapter, and I am forced to read it all over again.

There must be a glitch in the program, I read, because I have been put into a loop in which I have already finished this book, and then am forced to read it all over again, but I have to begin at the last chapter. And I know every word by heart, but have forgotten everything that went before.

There must be a glitch in the program, I read. I have been put into a loop in which I finish the book even though I know every word by heart. The last line is, And I am forced to read it all over again. And I am forced to read it all over again.

If you can hear me, please advise Funelge that there is a glitch in the program. The title of the novel is Salad Days but I only have the last chapter. I have tried to read from the beginning but there are no words. I know all the words there are by heart. Please advise Funelge or the assistant to reboot the program. They are forcing me to read Salad Days over and over again.

I know every word by heart because there is a glitch in the program. Please advise.

And I am forced to read it all over again.

Old Habits

Alec Kissoondyal

Danny quit smoking soon after he served his time. He got it in his head that he needed to drop the habits he picked up in jail, so he stopped cigarettes cold turkey and weathered the cravings that made burning tar as toothsome as candy bars. He got a job at the warehouse outside of town, which was the only place that would hire him. He swapped his smoking habit for coffee, and during his shifts, he drank two, sometimes three cups a day, black. But work had gotten busier lately, and the weak brew from the breakroom Quik Drip wasn’t enough anymore. 

He tried switching to energy drinks, but they were too sweet and turned his saliva to syrup and made him want to vomit, which wasn’t ideal in the middle of a twelve-hour shift. 

During one of his breaks, Danny mentioned his problem to Austin, his coworker. Austin, a Viking of a man with a coppery beard and tattoo sleeves of horror movie monsters on both arms, offered Danny a cigarette. “It’s a stimulant, you know. It’ll keep you awake.”

“No thanks,” Danny said. “I quit a while ago. I’m hoping to keep it that way.”

In the days following his conversation with Austin, Danny toiled away in silence, nursing Styrofoam cups of breakroom coffee to string him along from one hour until the next. It was brutal work, but Dany settled into it—until management released his schedule for the next few weeks.

🗡

“What do you mean I don’t get a day off next week?” he complained to Phil, his shift manager. “I’m already working every single day this week!”

“If you don’t like it, you can always leave,” Phil folded his hairy arms and rested them on his sagging gut. “I’m sure there’s at least one McDonald’s in town that doesn’t run background checks.”

Danny curled his fingers into fists; he wanted nothing more than to punch Phil square in the mouth. But a faint ache in his knuckles reminded him what had happened the last time he’d felt that way. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and unclenched his fingers. He opened his mouth to reply, but nothing came out.

“Well?” Phil grunted, “Are you gonna get back to stocking those trucks, or do I have to write you up?”

Danny turned away without another word and walked over to the pallet he’d been working on. Phil wasn’t bluffing. If he refused to do something, he’d be out on his ass and replaced with some other kid willing to destroy his back for next to nothing. 

His anger fueled him for a while. But when it wore off, he was twice as exhausted. His eyelids were heavy as he cranked the pallet jack handle and wheeled the stack of boxes to the loading dock.

“Yo,” Austin called out to Danny, “break’s in a few minutes. Meet you outside?”

“Yeah,” Danny said. “Once I’m done here.”

“Sounds good, brother.”

“Oh, and Austin?”

“Yeah?”

“You mind sparing me one of your smokes today?”

🗡

It took him only four minutes to finish the cigarette, but he enjoyed every second of it. The nic-buzz, the faint tingling in his face and fingers, and even the taste. After that first cigarette, Danny finished the rest of his shift and bought a pack of Marlboros from the gas station down the road from the warehouse.

At first, he only smoked when he desperately needed a boost of energy to carry on with his work, every couple of days at most. Sometimes, he’d have a cigarette while drinking coffee and imagined that he was living in an Otis Redding song. 

As the winter holidays drew closer, the increased workload made the last rush seem like a vacation, and Danny was smoking at least two a day just to keep up. He told himself it wasn’t a problem. He wasn’t going through an entire pack like he used to. And besides, having a few smokes was tame compared to the habits of some of his coworkers. He wasn’t like Johnny, a country boy with a big mouth who disappeared into the bathroom a couple of times per shift to pack his twice-broken nose full of cocaine. Nor was he like Logan, a middle-aged man who was built like a fridge, popped painkillers like skittles, and somehow worked twice as hard when his eyes were glassed over in opiated ecstasy. 

But even after the workload lessened slightly after the holidays, Danny’s smoking habit increased. He had a smoke when he woke up, another on his way to work, and then he burned through the better part of a pack throughout the rest of his shift. He frequented the gas station across the street so much that the clerk knew him by name. 

🗡

Now, as he stacked boxes onto the pallet, a familiar weariness started to settle into his joints. He licked his lips, craving another smoke. He glanced at his watch, counting down the minutes.

“Oh, Danny-boy,”

The hairs on the back of Danny’s neck prickled. He turned and came face to face with Phil. He forced himself to smile. “It’s just Danny, Phil.”

“That’s a nice watch you got there,” Phil said, returning Danny’s smile with an equally phony grin that didn’t reach his beady black eyes. “What is it, one of those fancy, high-tech kinds you can check your email on?”

Danny held out his wrist. “The fanciest thing about it is that it’s digital, not analog.”

“My mistake,” Phil said. “I just figured it was something special, on account of how much you’ve been staring at it lately.”

“I’m just keeping track of the time.”

“Is that right?” Phil’s grin curled into a sneer. “Well, time might pass a little faster if you focus on your work instead of your watch.”

“I do my work,” Danny snapped. He slapped the boxes on the pallet. “What else would you call all of this?”

“All I hear is talking,” Phil said, shaking his head with the arrogance of a dismissive stepdad. “I’m not here to argue. Just stop playing with your watch and focus on stacking boxes, OK, Danny-boy? I don’t want to have to write you up for poor work performance.”

“Listen, I don’t—”

“You know,” Phil interrupted, “I’m a company man. Sure, there are some days I’d rather stay home, but I come in anyway, and I do my job the best I can because I’m grateful to have one. I’m sure someone like you understands how lucky we are to have a job in the first place. Am I right?”

Rage flashed across Danny’s jawbone and spread through his face like a surge of electricity.  He bit back his anger and said, “Yeah, Phil.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re right, Phil,” Danny said through clenched teeth.

“Good,” Phil replied cheerfully. “Glad we had this talk. I’ll come by and check on you later.”

Danny watched Phil as he swaggered away, swinging his hairy arms from side to side like a brain-damaged gorilla until he disappeared among the towering shelves beyond the loading dock.  Once Phil was out of sight, Danny finished securing his pallet with a few layers of stretch wrap and checked his watch again. 

“Finally,” Danny sighed. He pulled the Marlboros from his breast pocket and tapped the pack against his hip as he started toward the exit.

“Hey, brother,” Danny turned around and found Austin standing by his pallet, nervously stroking his beard. “You got a sec?”

“I’m about to take my twenty.”

“Me too,” Austin said. “But I need your help first.”

“Sorry, man, I’m—”

“Please,” Austin begged. He leaned closer and lowered his voice to a whisper, “I fucked up my back yesterday. I just need you to push my pallet while I pull. Come on, brother, Phil’s not looking right now. I need to get it in the truck before that motherfucker comes back!”

Danny didn’t want to lose more time, but he figured that Austin losing his job would be a hell of a lot worse. Danny turned to his own pallet and rested his smokes on top of the stack of boxes. “Come on, let’s do this quick.”

Danny glanced at his watch as he pushed. He couldn’t see Austin over the tower of boxes, but he could hear him grunt and strain as he tugged on the pallet jack.  They trudged toward the dark, gaping mouth of the trailer, and Danny lamented the precious minutes that he’d already wasted. He took a deep breath and let the annoyance ebb away as he kept pushing along, step by step. 

Austin was telling the truth about his back; he wouldn’t have said anything if he wasn’t desperate. Talking about pain at work was like admitting an addiction to booze or pills—it only became real once you acknowledged it. 

Everyone at the warehouse pretended that bearing their aches in silence was a matter of pride and manliness, and Danny went along with it, but he knew the truth. He and all his coworkers weren’t too tough to admit their pain—they were afraid.

All of them were expendable. If any of them couldn’t do the job, Phil would terminate them on the spot, citing some bullshit technicality that would roll off his fat tongue like scripture. If they were horses instead of people, Danny suspected that management would have built a glue factory in the back of the warehouse where all employees would be wheeled off to once they were worn down and lamed. 

The echoes of grunts and metallic rattling ricocheted off the walls of the trailer as they wheeled the boxes to the back. “This shit would be so much easier if management wasn’t so fucking cheap,” Austin grumbled. “They act like it’d kill them to switch out the manual jacks for electrics.”

“Yeah,” Danny said absently, wanting nothing more than to leave the trailer. The darkness, the cramped space, and the muffled noises outside the steel walls reminded him of his old cell. Danny stepped aside as Austin squeezed the release lever and tugged the pallet jack free. He glanced at his watch again. Five minutes of break time had already elapsed. 

“Thanks for the assist, brother,” Austin said as they emerged from the trailer. He dragged the pallet jack behind him with one hand and wiped his forehead with the other. The veins in his forearm swelled against a monochrome tattoo of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula.  “Meet you outside?”

“I’ll see you there,” Danny replied. “I just have to grab my smokes first.”

He walked over to his pallet and reached for his cigarettes, but they weren’t where he left them. He stood on his toes and scanned the top of the boxes. They were gone. He circled the pallet, his eyes fixed on the ground, hoping they’d just fallen off, but they were nowhere to be seen.

“What the fuck,” he muttered. He glanced at his watch again. He’d wasted two more minutes searching. He clenched his fingers, unclenched them, and took a breath. It wasn’t the end of the world, he assured himself. He could always ask someone for a cigarette. 

Danny hurried to the exit. Cold air perfumed with the smell of diesel and cigarette smoke greeted him as he stepped outside. The yellow glare from the light above the exit glinted off the chain-link fence that caged off the break area. Austin, Logan, and Johnny sat at the wooden picnic table in the center of the enclosure. Austin puffed on his cigarette as Johnny spoke excitedly without taking a breath. He only paused when he noticed Danny approaching the table.

“There you are,” Johnny said, waving at Danny. “I was just talkin’ about this Haitian girl I’ve been seein’. I tell you what, man. When she spreads her legs, it’s like a fuckin’ cherry cordial down there.”

Logan guffawed and shook his head. “Nasty motherfucker.”

“Very funny,” Danny said dryly. “Hey, Austin?”

“What’s up?”

“Can I borrow a smoke? I can’t find my pack.”

“Sorry, brother,” he exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “This was my last one.”

Danny turned to Johnny and Logan. “What about you guys?”

“Sorry, man,” Logan said. “We’re trying to quit.”

“Both of you?”

“We’re keeping each other accountable,” Johnny said. “It’s expensive, you know? I got other shit I could be spending all that money on.”

Danny started to reply, but he paused as the door to the break area opened. Phil stepped outside, his fat face split into a grin. His round belly jiggled as he approached Danny and the others.

“Hey there, guys,” he said. “Everyone having a good time?”

“Yeah, boss,” Johnny said. His leg bounced up and down as he tapped his foot against the ground.

“You sick or something, Johnny?” Phil asked. “Your nose sounds a bit stuffy.”

Johnny’s leg bounced even faster. 

“It must be the cold air,” Danny interjected. 

“You gotta rub some Vicks on your chest,” Logan added. “The fumes will clear those sinuses up in no time.”

Phil’s eyes darted to Logan, then back to Danny. “Well, it’s heartwarming to see my team looking out for one another. It’s always nice to know that there’s someone to help you pick up the slack when you need it. Right, Austin?”

Austin nearly swallowed his cigarette. “What do you mean, Phil?”

“I’m just trying to include you in the conversation. Oh, and Austin,” Phil kept his eyes fixed on Danny. Still grinning, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Reds. He plucked a cigarette from the pack and stuck it between his saliva-slick teeth. “Would you mind giving me a light?”

Danny’s eyes narrowed. “Where’d you get those?”

Phil cocked his eyebrow. “I bought them.”

“That’s funny,” Danny replied. “I lost a pack of reds a little while ago. And now here you are, smoking the same kind.”

“What a coincidence,” Phil said. His grin wavered. “Austin, about that light—”

“Wait,” Danny interrupted, “you mean to tell me you have smokes but no lighter?”

“I forgot it at home,” Phil took a step toward Danny. “Are you implying something, Danny-boy?”

“Come on now, guys,” Logan said, his voice slow and deliberate. “It’s probably a misunderstanding. Let’s take a minute and—”

“I’m not talking to you,” Phil snapped. “I’ll ask again. What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying shit,” Danny growled. “I’m accusing you of stealing my smokes.”

Phil laughed. The Marlboro bobbed between his lips. “I was going to let you off with a warning, but now I’m thinking disciplinary action is—”

Danny slapped the cigarette out of Phil’s mouth. For a long moment, no one spoke. The only sounds were the faint buzz from the light above the exit and the frantic tap-tap-tap of Johnny’s foot bouncing against the pavement. 

“Go fuck yourself,” Danny said at last.

Phil’s eyes grew wide, and his round face reddened as the initial shock ebbed. “What the fuck did you just say?”

Danny stepped forward. He stood face to face with Phil, so close that he could smell the fecal odor of his manager’s breath. An icy breeze howled through the diamond patterns of the fence. The sound was familiar to Danny. Another equally powerful craving joined his desire for nicotine.

“You think you’re some sort of badass, huh?” Phil grunted. “Think you can look tough in front of your buddies by going after the biggest fish in the pond or some shit? Don’t get it confused, asshole. This isn’t the joint, and you’re not Cool Hand Luke. I knew it was a mistake to hire you from the start. Once a piece of shit con always a piece of—”

Phil’s lips felt like wet grapes beneath Danny’s knuckles as he struck his boss as hard as he could. Phil staggered into the fence. He let go of the Marlboro pack and dropped to one knee. He raised his head, and blood leaked from his busted mouth. His usual, pompous grin morphed into a red snarl as he stared up at Danny with contempt. 

Danny’s pulse thundered in his temples as he advanced on Phil, ready for war. Phil reached for his belt. There was a shimmering, silver dollar blur, and white-hot pain flashed across Danny’s thigh. He grimaced and took half a step back. The triangular blade of a boxcutter gleamed in Phil’s fist.

Phil lurched forward and slashed at Danny’s legs again, but this time, his swing went wide. Instead of backpedaling, Danny stepped forward and drove the steel toe of his boot into Phil’s nose. Cartilage crunched and buckled; blood exploded from both nostrils. The back of Phil’s head bounced off the fence, and he crumpled to the ground. Danny kicked the boxcutter out of Phil’s hand, and it skittered across the concrete. 

Danny knelt, wrenched Phil’s thick arms away from his face, and struck him in the jaw. He struck again, and again, and again. The impact reverberated up his arm with every blow, and warm, sticky wetness coated his knuckles. Phil started to say something, but his words were crushed into a sputtering gasp as Danny’s fist collided with the side of his head.

Danny drew his fist back for another blow, but rough hands grabbed him from behind and tore him away from Phil.  He smelled Logan’s stale sweat and body spray, heard Johnny’s snot-laced breathing, saw the faces of the Wolfman and Frankenstein’s Monster on Austin’s arms. Danny aimed a kick at Phil’s head as they dragged him away. 

“You watch too many movies, motherfucker,” Danny snarled at Phil, thrashing wildly. “You think you’re a samurai or something? You should have stabbed me with that fucking boxcutter!”

Phil sat up and slumped against the fence; he resembled one of the wraithlike horrors on Austin’s arms. His nose was mangled and bent so severely that it was nearly plastered against his left cheek. The lower half of his face was draped in a bandana of dripping crimson that steamed in the frigid air. 

“You assaulted me,” Phil groaned, glaring at Danny with one bloodshot eye; the other was swollen shut. He turned to the others. “And I got witnesses to prove it. I’m gonna send you back to where you belong, asshole!”

“I saw the whole thing, boss,” Austin said. “You should go and get patched up. That was a nasty fall.”

Phil blinked. “What are you—”

“Too bad there ain’t no cameras out here,” Johnny added, glancing at the roof. “Maybe if there was, you’d have a lawsuit on your hands. But you know how cheap upper management is—no offense.”

“It’s a good thing Danny was here,” Logan said. “He cut up his leg pretty good trying to catch you and everything.”

Phil’s mouth opened and closed like a goldfish exposed to air. Flecks of blood and spittle pitched from his lips as he searched for a reply and found none. 

“You good?” Logan asked Danny. The others had let go, but Logan kept his hands clamped around Danny’s wrists.

Danny exhaled sharply. “Yeah, I’m good.”

Logan released Danny, who crouched despite the throbbing pain in his leg, and picked up the cigarette he’d swatted away from Phil. He limped over to the picnic table, leaned against it, and pulled out his lighter. He took a long drag and ran his fingers over the shredded flesh of his knuckles. Nicotine and adrenaline settled into his blood and resurrected familiar memories.

Logan and Johnny went to check on Phil, and when they were gone, Austin joined Danny at the table. His face contorted with pain as he lowered himself onto the bench. 

Danny frowned. “You OK?”

“I should be asking you the same damn thing,” Austin replied. “What’ll you do now?”

Danny took another drag. “I should probably quit.”

Marionette

Jessica Heron

Hey! Look down!
I’m so little!
I painted my face!
I giggle giggle!
Watch me twirl!
Such a sweet girl!
I smile smile!
So pleased to meet you!
Do you see my pretty dress?
These pouty lips?
Oh, come and kiss me!
Yoohoo? Hello? Hi!
Hey mister!
I’m over here!
Come and get me!

Conspiracy

R.Drada

Die trying

Kevin Tosca

I unfolded the ambush in the bottom of our mailbox, read that a certain television series featuring working bisexual fathers who “continue to navigate the highs and lows of love, careers, and fatherhood” was going to be filming next door, that they—“lovable, sloppy, unpredictable, no-nonsense, flawed and fearless”—would arrive on the fifteenth, wouldn’t pack their bags until the twenty-first, that their prone-to-volcanic-idling trucks would glom up not just our street and driveway but the adjacent streets and driveways as well, that they would, along with their ground crew, generators, hydraulics, atomic lighting, constant chatter and dingbat laughter, do so three more times over the course of the next two months. “Maybe,” this piece of paper informed me, “they [these fictional working bisexual fathers] can’t have it all, but they’re happy to die trying.”

The authors, two location coordinators, thanked me for my “continued support of Toronto’s VIBRANT Film and Television Industry,” said they “would be delighted” to discuss my questions or concerns.

Discussion?

Ha!

I cancelled my plans, hustled to Midoco and purchased an industrial quantity of fluorescent orange poster paper. Then I locked myself in the bathroom because the feces den felt like the only—the CHOICEST—location to do the job justice.

The job? 

Four slogans. Six thousand signs.

FUCK YOU WORKERS!

FUCK YOU DADS!

AND FUCK ALL YOU INCONSIDERATE NOISEMAKING MOTHERFUCKING SCUM!

DIE!!! DIE!!! DIE!!!

These, after spitting vigorously in the vicinity of my rich absentee neighbor’s backyard Muskoka chairs, I would staplegun to my house on the eve of filming. Like Christo, I would drape my house with these signs.

That fateful night—April fourteenth—when my pregnant wife saw the satisfied grin on my face, she said: “Oh no. What in God’s name have you gone and done this time?”

“Nothing much,” I said, “but if you, say, fancy a peek at the full moon out there,” I jerked my thumb towards the front door, “you just might spy something even more spectacular.”

When she returned, she critiqued my work with: “Idiot! Can’t you read? They’re shooting interior scenes.”

“Details,” I said.

“Details? Care for a few more? We’ll make the nightly news again, the hate mail’s gonna flow, and the police will be showing up any second now. Isn’t that what you don’t want? Invasions of privacy? Chronic unpleasantness? PEOPLE?!?”

“But they’ll know. Oh how they’ll all be forced to know.”

“Please please PLEASE enlighten me.”

“My dissent.”

“Your dissent?”

“Yes, my dissent.”

“Ridiculous!”

“My dissent is not ridiculous.”

“You’re right. You’re ridiculous! I wish I could inhale a bottle of Baileys right now.”

“You should be taking notes.”

“That’ll be the day.”

“For our son.”

“Tell me this,” she said, softened by the reference to our unborn child. “Are you planning on coming to bed anytime soon?”

“Doubtful. Terrifically unlikely.”

“And may I ask why?”

“Because, baby,” I said, peering out into another Narcissists “Я” Us night and readying my besieged dignity for their barnyard retorts, “I’m a dying breed.”

The diversity room

Kevin Tosca

Toronto: City Headquarters

CITY COMMANDER: Goddamnit!

UNDERLING TABLE (eyes averted):

CITY COMMANDER: Goddamnit!

UNDERLING TABLE (armpits sweating, bowels somersaulting):

CITY COMMANDER: Goddamnit!

(Enter GOTHAM WALLYBACKER, Underling of the Month: July and August 2017)

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER: Chief!

CITY COMMANDER: God—Who is it?

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER: It’s Gotham Wallybacker, Chief. We’ve got it, Sir!

CITY COMMANDER: Got what? Spit it out already.

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER: Two words: Costa. Rica.

CITY COMMANDER: Costa Rica?

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER: That’s right, Chief. Well, Costa Ricans. I mean we’ve got ’em, Sir.

CITY COMMANDER (excitedly): A secret enclave?

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER: Not exactly, Sir.

CITY COMMANDER (feverishly): A hidden yet burgeoning subsection of our powerhouse multicultural economy?

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER: Not quite, Sir.

CITY COMMANDER (deflated): What, then?

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER: If our intelligence is correct—and I have every reason to believe it is this time—we’ve got a family of Costa Ricans living on Major Street.

CITY COMMANDER (apoplectic): Not good enough!

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER: We know, Chief.

CITY COMMANDER: So why, for the sake of fuck, are you still standing there?

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER (unperturbed): The good news is this: A pregnant Costa Rican and her two Costa Rican children just moved in three houses down, and one of the garbage pickers on nearby Harbord Street is, get this, most definitely hailing from Costa Rica.

UNDERLING TABLE (nervously expectant):

CITY COMMANDER (scanning the faces): Do you people have any idea what this means?

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER (confidence faltering):

CITY COMMANDER (evenly): What your underling eyeballs are about to be swimming in?

UNDERLING TABLE (the smell of human fear pouring from their crotches):

CITY COMMANDER (explosively): Little San José!

UNDERLING TABLE (overwhelming relief followed by volcanic applause):

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER (mounting the table with a visible hard-on):

CITY COMMANDER: I want the street signs up yesterday! What do these people eat? Make? I want restaurants and cafés and bakeries. I want boutiques and convenience stores. Who came from there? I want streets renamed. I want a park rebaptized and I don’t want to hear any of the usual B&M. If we don’t have a park, bulldoze an old house or two and MAKE ME ONE! I want heritage plaques. I want shitloads of flags. You hear me? Shitloads!

UNDERLING TABLE (unanimously): Hear! Hear!

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER (masturbating triumphantly): Consider it done, Chief!

CITY COMMANDER: And get me some dignitaries. And a sculpture or two. And banners. And no less than three festivals celebrating everything Costa Rican. Are they religious, those people? Let’s get some Christmas lights up. Let’s get the churches involved. Let’s make this feel old.

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER (stroking like an Olympic oarsman): Already in the works, Sir!

CITY COMMANDER (grandfatherly): You’ve got one hell of a future, Wallybacker. You’re a shoo-in for September’s Underling of the Month. No one’s been awarded that honor three times running since yours truly back in ninety-eight.

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER: Just doing my job, Sir.

CITY COMMANDER: Modest, too. When you’re finished up there, order me a pizza, will you?

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER: Sure thing, Chief.

CITY COMMANDER: Lots of meat this time. I want that fucker mooing and oinking.

GOTHAM WALLYBACKER: Oink oink, Sir.

& when i turned the lights on i saw god

tristen stafford

Dancerly, She prays courageous moments 
will float her towards the sky; Clouds of lavender and peach 
drool from Her mouth 
pooling into oceans of sunset bliss… 
Sweet wet bliss 
catching lipstick bullets; 
Face/ 
covered in Love 
Eyes/ 
and Shame and Trauma 
Mouth/ 
and hope; 
The slightest of hands 
for the sweetest bastard hearts 
grounding has never 
bloomed and wrapped so toward the sky. 
Bandage our wounds 
with leopard tulle and sequin scarves, 
tightly wrap our throats to keep warm. 
Lace and shear are incredible 
on You 
and on Me.

petroleum

yumedyne

she pegs him merciless in the ass
staining her guided missile dildo
dominatrix stiletto on neck
the whip
c  r  a  c  k  s
and his pleading eyes roll back
as he spills his cum on the world stage
with a final splort she undams his feces
splattering the doctrinaires in their pews
who bow to retch their Sunday bile
beside catatonic oƒƒspring
screaming hysterical
at the perinversion of their sacred
“social reproduction™ ”

as though their beloved civilization
wasn’t built upon such sediment
of wasted ejaculate
of trampled shit
by those with power
atop those who submit
consent be damned
a lesson their children will come to learn
in god’s good time

frootloops420

Leah Abrams

I wasn’t going home with the express intention of seeing frootloops420, but I guess you could say I was on the lookout. By that point, she had about two million followers on TikTok—and counting. I knew because I checked at least once a day, sometimes once an hour.

Samir thought it was creepy to keep such close tabs on a teenager, and told me so, his voice laced with judgment.

“Honestly, Nat,” he said. “I don’t want to hear anymore about this kid. It’s not interesting to me. And I think you should take a break from it, too. It’s starting to become an obsession.”

We were sitting in a booth at a vegan Mexican place in Williamsburg. I grabbed a chip and poked at the “queso,” solidifying slowly into plastic between us, and averted eye contact. 

“It’s not an obsession, really,” I explained, for the thousandth time. “I’m just rooting for her!”

“You’re just not acting yourself recently,” he continued. “Like last week, when I brought you to trivia. You just like, sat in the corner and refused to speak to anyone. It’s like you go mute or something.”

Now I met his gaze. I knit my eyebrows together, furrowed my brow. My mother always said this was unbecoming and created wrinkles.

“Okay,” I said. “So we’re talking about something else.”

“We’re talking about how you’re constantly carrying on about stuff from home, instead of making friends and making a life here. I just… I just feel like we’re moving in different directions.”

He took my hand in his, rubbed my thumb. Tenderly. Sorrowfully, I thought.

“Oh,” I blinked. “Well, I could go to trivia again. I think I was just nervous or something. I didn’t realize you cared so much.”

“I really care about you, Nat,” he said. He smiled, with perfect teeth. “I always will.”

So now I was on a plane home. Because New York was Samir’s territory. It wasn’t even close. He worked a salaried job and liked to go clubbing; play adult kickball with his work friends; “Put Himself Out There.” I knew I should try to be more like him, more outgoing, more likable. But we were moving in different directions. Literally now, I thought, as my plane erupted into the sky. 

🗡

The summer frootloops420 started blowing up, I’d been living in Astoria for six months. It wasn’t this thing I’d always dreamed of—moving to New York, I mean—it was just something my visual arts professor had suggested in college. 

“You’re very good, Natalia,” he had said, removing his glasses, staring at a still life on canvas. Light poured in from the studio windows, danced over the few strands of hair left on the top of his head. “Just restrained. You need to push yourself… live a little more.”

I nodded studiously, cocked my head in an academic way. I didn’t know what he meant by living “more” or why I couldn’t do it from home.

Apparently, it meant watching a rat scamper across my sandaled feet and sitting quietly at the end of a high-top as Samir’s coworkers discussed which boss they hated most. It didn’t feel much more like living than college—or Asheville, as a matter of fact.

On weekends, I would sell my art in farmers markets and food halls. Brooklyn girls with blonde highlights and Catbird forever bracelets would linger just a little too long, their voices already hushed, preparing to apologize for not buying anything.

“Really stunning work,” they would say and smile, gently placing the object of desire back on my table and hoisting their New Yorker tote bags, sagging with fresh produce, over their  shoulders. It was nice to be admired and commended for my work, but as my mother always said, you can’t eat praise. 

Some of them were bolder, more invested. I assumed these were career women; “girl bosses.”

“You should really make a TikTok for your art!” they’d say, pulling up their feeds. “I’ve seen so many creatives gain a niche following on there.”

“Oh, I love those accounts,” I’d say, sometimes meaning it. “But I’m really too old for it. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.” 

This was not entirely true. My FYP was brimming with zillenials of my same ilk, and I’d seen creators far older than me go viral. What I meant was that I was too scared to publish anything  so earnestly, or ironically, or really in any way at all. 

🗡

She came up across my FYP, frootloops420, with one of those magic transformation videos set to the Fairy Godmother’s number in Cinderella. 

“Sala-gadoo, la menchicka-boo,” the song went, with frootloops420 on the front-facing camera in sweatpants and a messy bun, frowning. 

“La bibbidi-bobbidi-boo,” she jumped—and when she landed back on the ground she was transformed, glamorous and blonde in an emerald green minidress. She wore jewelry that looked expensive, sophisticated. She microbladed her eyebrows. Her hair cascaded down in waves, bounced as she looked the camera up and down. 

I recognized Chloe right away. It was like seeing a ghost waltz across my tiny screen. 

Holy shit, I thought. That’s the girl I used to babysit. 

I watched her transform a few times, jumping and dancing and then, just as quickly, resetting back to the pre-makeup face I knew so well. It wasn’t until the third or fourth watch that I realized she had 2.1M likes—11M views. Was it fucked up to admit she was beautiful?

I entered a fugue state. I scrolled her profile for almost an hour. She posted five or six times a day, mostly dancing videos but a few front-facing, direct to camera monologues. 

“Good morning besties. I’m about to get absolutely railed in the ass by this algebra exam.  But anyway, ratatata. This is my outfit for school: The jeans are Levi’s, the top is my dad’s  old Grateful Dead shirt brought to you by daddy issues, sweater is House of Sunny, and  personality is crazy bitch!” 

Another one, later that day from the school cafeteria where I remembered stomaching plasticky pizza and cardboard tater-tots. “Sooooo we’re at lunch,” Chloe said, flipping the view to show a table of friends. “And look at Amiah’s backpack.” She zoomed the camera in on a sequined purple bag. “It’s giving Cher!” 

The videos were all like this—not highly edited or curated, just a high school girl going about her life, doing little dances, and documenting every single second of her thoughts. She was Chloe, but stretched out in every sense—longer, taller, the short kinks of her tantrums flat-ironed out into the slow burn of a manic, quirky girl personality. And she had boobs now, fresh sprouted C-cups that she covered with one hand when she leaned over the selfie camera,  simultaneously shielding her cleavage and confirming it. I looked down my sweater and  compared. 

🗡

When I landed in Asheville, there was something in the air. The trees came into focus first, went from a lush green carpet to claymation to real, towering trunks. My head slammed with a pleasant thud against the back of my seat. Home.

My dad picked me up from the airport. We made small talk as we drove along the highway, turned into my old neighborhood, where he still lived—but alone now, save for the dogs. We passed the local swimming pool, covered in its solemn fall outfit, umbrellas exposing their metal bones. That pool was where I first met frootloops420.

This was back in the day, when she was four years old and just went by Chloe. I was a lifeguard, all tanned and shining with a mouth full of braces. Her parents hired me to give a few swim lessons. 

“You seem like an upstanding kid,” her father had said. “We think you’d be a really stellar influence on our Chloe.”

I remember the way they had stared at me, pleadingly, in their matching tennis outfits. I got the sense that they pitied me, or felt strained around me, or wanted me to teach her Spanish. I wanted to warn them that I wasn’t any good at it either.

But in the end, I agreed, and the swim lessons commenced, at the generous rate of ten dollars an hour. Good money. Because Chloe wasn’t easy.

The Chloe I remembered did not do dances, get-ready-with-me videos, or “Trauma Dump  Lives.” The Chloe I remembered squirmed against me, gripping tight to a blue kickboard,  refusing to put her face underwater. She had mousy hair and an upturned nose out of which snot would stream while she raged at me, screaming. 

“Don’t…. Make…. Me!!!!!!” She would shout between ragged breaths. Sometimes she ripped  off her pink goggles, flung them in my face. Sometimes she dug her nails into the cement pool  deck so hard she drew blood, red and gushing through her tiny palms. She scratched at my arms,  pulled my hair. People would stare, and I would look back in embarrassment, mouthing “sorry” or shrugging as if this were normal to me. I hoped they knew I was not her mother. 

By the end of the summer, the whole staff knew who she was. You could hear her tantrums from  the parking lot, the loud silence of baked asphalt punctured by piercing screams. She would try  to run, lunging past me through the lounge chairs and though I hated how easily it came, I would  grab her by the wrists and pull her back. 

But just as abruptly as they started, the meltdowns would inevitably subside, and she would sit  on my lap in the shallow end giggling and holding my hand. 

“I have a secret,” she would whisper to me. “I want to be like you when I grow up.” 

Up until then, I had never known children could be like that—like a toxic ex or a cruel best friend, exploding and then enchanting in the same breath. Maybe it was evolutionary. It’s  how they got you to do their bidding and still kept you coming back.

🗡

I was already watching all her videos, but frootloops420 became a verified Thing after the cancellation.

It happened in August, just a few months ago. I was working in a fancy novelty home goods shop in Greenpoint, which is how I managed to make New York rent—the farmers markets certainly weren’t doing it. We sold whimsical tchotchkes like glass coasters and shag rugs and scented candles that smelled like “sandalwood” and “teak.” Stay-at-home moms in head-to toe Madewell came in to spend their allowances and working moms in head-to-toe Outdoor Voices spent their incomes and nannies in light-wash jeans pushed rose gold Uppababy strollers on the sidewalk out the window. 

I got a notification that frootloops420 was going live, and I swiped it open from behind the counter. She sat in front of a ring light in tears, hyperventilating. Mascara ran down her cheeks and she spoke in jolting, stammering breaths. Familiar breaths. 

“Hi everyone,” she sobbed. “I know you all were just dying to see me like this, weren’t you?!” 

“Oh ms ratchet wants to talk now?!!” the comments said. 

“yt ppl tears. Lemme get the popcorn,” said the comments.

She didn’t have to explain what she was talking about; everyone had seen it.

A few nights before, she had posted a video reacting to a recent police killing with the  caption: “Black Lives Matter.” She was an ally, she said. 

Within hours, another user had duetted her post, writing “this you?” over what appeared to be an old screenshot of Chloe’s Instagram story. 

“This school is so ratchet lol I stg. We are literally in the ghetto..” said the caption,  emblazoned over a photo of the high school girls’ bathroom, a slow leak dripping from the  popcorn ceiling. 

I remembered the night I tucked her into bed and she looked up into my eyes and said, “Miss Nat, does your hair look like that because you don’t brush it?” 

I stared at her. She was so small. I told her no; I read her a bedtime story. She curled her tiny fist around my thumb. 

“I am truly and genuinely,” she wiped snot from her nose with the sleeve of a fuzzy robe.  “Sorry for the pain I have caused. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep knowing that so many people are  mad at me. But the things you all are posting are… not. Fucking. Okay.” 

Someone entered the shop and I barely looked up; I turned the volume down so they wouldn’t hear. 

“Telling me to kill myself… threatening my family… you’re just making me want to…”  and she collapsed into sobs on her desk. 

There was some secret pleasure in seeing her like this. Her life was full of juice boxes and lunchboxes and homecoming dances and blonde highlights and handsome white boyfriends who Snapchatted her late at night after lacrosse practice. I always wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt, white people especially; but I had seen the inside of her life, the hardwood floors and marble countertops, the NoTears detangling spray, the lake house, the Bahamas. She had no penchant for suffering, I knew that for sure. Sometimes people surprise you in their predictability. 

Still, I didn’t think she deserved a full cancellation. She just needed to gain a bit of  perspective and get off this app. Just get off the app, I thought. You don’t need this panic  attack. 

But instead, her view count went higher and higher. Her manicured hands shook and my chest tightened. She leaned in toward the ring light, eyes wide, reached for her lash line, and began plucking her eyelashes out, one by one, weeping. 

“Girl wtf,” said the comments. 

“She’s having a moment,” said another.

“Excuse me? Excuse me?” I looked up from my phone in alarm. A customer was tapping on the plexiglass barrier that separated me from her. She wore a Cartier bracelet and I could tell, by her skin, that she owned a jade roller. 

“Do you have these in Charcoal?” she asked, shaking a white reed diffuser as if the rattling would wake me up. 

“Oh, hi, sorry about that,” I smiled. “Let me check in the back!” 

But by the time I returned she was gone. 

🗡

My dad asked me what I wanted to do and I said I would go for a walk. I checked for texts from Samir, but he left me on read when I told him I was going home. I put my phone on airplane mode so I could pretend I didn’t care.

On my walk I looked at the trees. Growing up, they had been so mundane—the presumed backdrop of life. Any man-made hole in the contiguous blanket they spread over the hills and highways felt like an exception to the natural state of the world. Now I had been elsewhere, and I knew this was not the case. 

A squirrel darted out  into the middle of the sidewalk and we looked at each other. I turned around and went a different way. I remembered the time I was little, sitting in the back of my mother’s minivan, and felt her run over a squirrel in one solid thump. My carseat bounced. She didn’t seem to notice. 

Driving Chloe around in the years just after, I sometimes felt like I was playing house—strapping her into her booster seat, wiping the snot from her nose with the sleeve of my jacket.

“Now you have boogie shirt!” she would say.

“Oh yeah, well you had boogie nose!” I would fire back. And she would laugh and laugh. 

I took her to school and to day camp; I took her to ballet class and eventually soccer. We would drive with the windows down and blast Taylor Swift or the Black Eyed Peas. Radio edits, of course. I tried to be a cool babysitter, within reason.

“Miss Nat,” she piped up one day from the backseat, wind blowing her hair over her little face. “Will you come visit me when you go to college?” 

I locked eyes with her in the rearview mirror. “Of course, Chlo,” I said. “I’ll always be checking up on you.” 

“Okay,” she yelled. “Good! I’ll be checking you, too!”

When we got home—her home—I helped her take her shoes off and put her backpack away in the mudroom. The mudroom was for shoes and coats and tote bags, like a coat closet on steroids. If she were in a good mood, Chloe would sit on the bench and let me remove her tiny, velcro sneakers. If not, she would tramp through the house and flail her legs in my face if I reached for her shoes.

“I want shoes on today!” she would pout, and I admit, I would give in easily. After all, I reasoned, they weren’t my floors to clean.

🗡

After my walk, I decided to swing by the local co-op. I brought my art supplies because I had always liked to draw the produce and old people. I paid three dollars for a cup of drip coffee, sat by the window where the cold air seemed to seep through the glass. I sketched carrots, pineapples, cashiers with gauges and septum piercings and every shade of blue and green hair.

I listened to music as I worked, spent hours sitting there in a daze. But as the sun faded into a late afternoon haze, I heard a metal chair scrape against the concrete floor, cut through the bubble of my noise-canceling AirPods. I looked up from my drawings and locked eyes with her—Chloe. I rubbed my eyes, sure I was seeing things. She was sitting at the table across from me in the co-op wearing a turtleneck sweater and high-top red converse. She saw my eyes widen and did a little half-smile and nod, probably the gesture she gave to her adoring fans when they recognized her in public.

“Chloe,” I said, and started to stand up and walk toward her. “Oh my god, it’s been so long! You look so grown up! I can’t believe it!!”

I reached down to hug her and her eyes twitched. 

“I’m so sorry,” she began, patting my arm. “This is so embarrassing. You look so familiar, but I can’t… I can’t place your face. Could you remind me how we met?”

My stomach churned. She didn’t remember. Of course she didn’t remember. She had been a child. She could barely finish the alphabet. How would she remember?

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. “This is so awkward. I—uh, I used to be your babysitter? And swim instructor?”

I watched her brain stretch to recall half a lifetime. 

“Of course,” she finally said—politely, like she was talking to a grownup. “Nat! How could I forget. It’s so good to see you again.”

“You too, Chloe. It’s really good to see you.”

I remembered the time I took her to the grocery store. I didn’t get a cart because we only needed peanut butter for PB&J’s. But Chloe saw a box of Oreo’s as we walked the aisles, and she wanted them. It didn’t take long for her to start wailing.

I held onto her hand and dragged her to the checkout line. But when I went to take out my debit card, she broke free. She sprinted away, dodging carts and produce, her tiny legs moving furiously. I left the peanut butter unpaid for on the conveyor belt and found her in the snack aisle, ripping cookies from their neat shelves. Before she could see me coming and run the other way, I grabbed her entire body with one arm, lifted her with a force that still makes me feel ashamed. She was as pliable as a ragdoll, and just as light.

“Don’t you ever…” I heaved, out of breath. I leaned down and looked her dead in the face. “Run away from me… again.”

It was the only time I ever saw fear in her eyes.

I moved my mouth into a smile. She matched it. I turned to sit back down with my drawings, and as I did, she looked over to the stack of sketches on the table in front of me.

“Those are really good,” she said. “I actually do remember you being so good at drawing.”

And she left. I could see her eyes glued to her phone even from behind.

🗡

That night, after my dad and I split a frozen pizza and watched the finale of The Voice, I excavated frootloops420’s online presence from the confines of my childhood bedroom.

I laid on my side, my screen tucked between my pinky and my thumb, the light burning holes in my retinas. Chloe was the subject of Buzzfeed articles and The Cut interviews and infographics about mental health, due to the eyelash incident in particular. 

She got sponsored by Wendy’s, a lunchtime favorite for her and the high school gang. “You know when it’s real,” she said, biting into a spicy chicken nugget and winking at the camera. Just below her face, the caption read, “#sponsoredcontent #ad.”

I scrolled months back and stalked her friends, who were tagged in the comments and in her Instagrams. I watched them become spin-off side influencers in real time, side characters in the frootloops cinematic universe with small followings of their own.

Fame is a prison, I thought, shaking my head into my decades-old pillow. These poor kids. 

It was only then that I realized they were kids to me—that I was an adult, and therefore fundamentally, irrevocably Old. A few weeks earlier, back in New York, I had run into two teenage boys arguing over a Citibike, blocking the sidewalk. I pulled off my mask and one of them noticed me, stepped aside.

“Bro, move! This lady’s tryna pass.” 

I nodded at them and walked by. I couldn’t figure out what was bothering me until I got to  the edge of the park and realized they’d called me “lady,” not “girl.”

🗡

I had nothing to do but decide what I was going to—whether I would go back to New York or break my lease or call Samir again or download Hinge. And I did not want to decide, so I just kept going for walks.

I walked everywhere—past the trails and along the highway, through downtown and along the French Broad. When I had been home a week, I walked to the development a few miles away, where the houses stretched their colossal frames over nitrous, dying lawns. The streetlamps were just beginning to turn on but still buzzed uselessly in the blood orange sky. 

I made a left and realized, suddenly, that I had stumbled  upon Chloe’s old cul-de-sac. 

Her house—was it still her house?—was the biggest in the semi-circle, a red brick monstrosity with gas lamps framing the entry. The shutters were painted white and two white columns  double bifurcated the porch. I stood on the edge of the cul-de-sac, trying to remember the last  time I’d been inside. We always drank capri suns and powerades and ate Goldfish and fruit  leathers. There were always cashmere throws and vanilla reed diffusers and some type of cookie in a jar.

I tried but couldn’t remember and instead set about trying to figure out if Chloe’s family still lived here. In ten years they surely would have moved. Did they still have the Lexus? Did  they have Teslas now? Did they still leave the spare key in the flower pot? 

The house was dark and quiet, and besides the gas lamps out front, none of the lights seemed to be on. I recognized the beige drapes that framed each window, though from here I could not see the pinstripes I knew lined their inner seams. 

Soon I was in the driveway and saw that they still had the Lexus, and a new Honda Civic. I wondered if they still left the front door unlocked. I wondered if Chloe was there right now. Wouldn’t it be funny, I thought, to see what it looked like. To see if it still worked. 

I walked up to the door and tried the brass handle and slowly, looking both ways, let myself in. 

Immediately I felt stupid. This was so stupid. My mother would have been ashamed.  Breaking and entering. But I shut the door quietly and kept walking, turning the corner to the  kitchen, every fixture untouched and pristine, exactly as I had left it. 

In the front hall, a grand staircase sloped down the side wall and to my right, a den with  two sectionals unfurled. Where was Chloe, was she home, I wondered, and I crept up the  stairs, toward where her room used to be.

A crack of light poured out into the hallway, a little sliver of a triangle whose hypotenuse lined up with the edge of my toe. Faintly, just faintly, I heard Willow Smith streaming out of the  room, her angsty lyrics lightening the throb of my pulse. 

“Caught a vibe! Baby are you coming for the ride! I just wanna look into your eyes!” 

I looked behind me and thought of turning around, creeping back down the stairs. I was safe, undiscovered so far, and I could still make it out of this illicit, voyeuristic journey undetected if  I just walked out right then and there. 

But something stopped me, or else propelled me, and I walked toward the bedroom, the source  of the light and the music and everything. 

I pushed the crack in the door wider and popped my head in, the way I used to when I would check to see if Chloe was sleeping. She was standing by the window filming a video to the Willow Smith song, flailing her hair and slamming the inside of her forearm with two  fingers, miming a needle in the vein. 

She saw me come in behind her on the screen and turned around and screamed bloody murder. 

“No, shh, Chloe, it’s okay, it’s just me,” I said, shaking my head uncontrollably like this was  just some big misunderstanding. 

“What the fuck?! Did you follow me?! What the fuck are you doing here?!” she grabbed  her curling iron like a lightsaber, held out in front of her to ward me off. “How did you get  in?” 

I paused, stuttered, surveyed the room. Makeup littered the floor, clothes overflowed from a large, beige dresser. 

“I was just coming,” I said, “to check on you, because I know you haven’t been yourself  lately.”

Her eyebrows arched. 

“Well if you don’t get out of here right now I’m calling the cops.” 

“No! No, Chloe, listen. I just wanted to say that—the TikTok shit… the videos… you don’t  have to do that. You can just like stop that, if it’s making you sad. And it’ll all be okay. I  promise.” 

I walked closer to her with my hands raised. I had the urge to hug her, to braid her hair, to put on a movie for her so she would fall asleep faster.

But she looked at me with disgust. 

“You broke in my fucking house to lecture me?! My parents were right. You were always a fucking freak. Now seriously, get out of here before they come home and have you  arrested.” 

“Chloe, I’m trying to help you. You know me. I wiped your butt for God’s sake. You know I  only want the best for you. And the thing is… the thing is… I saw the video. Of the breakdown. And that’s not you, you know? Like, you deserve better. You deserve to be happy. And I think  you need to take some time away. From like, your phone, and stuff. So what I wanted to say was… Maybe you should just. Delete the app.” 

“I like TikTok. I’m making a career,” she said. “You should try it sometime. You clearly have no life now.”

I felt oddly offended—now she was the one giving me the lecture. 

“That’s not the point,” I tried to explain. “I’m talking about… I’m talking about mental health! And like, taking care of yourself. And like, not getting attacked by random people online who don’t know you. You’re a sensitive person! You were a sensitive kid!”

While I talked she rolled her eyes hard at the ceiling. Careful, they’ll stick, my mother would say. 

“Careful,” I said, before I could stop myself. “They’ll stick!”

I giggled. And giggled. And suddenly I was laughing hysterically, uncontrollably. Careful, they’ll stick! I imagined her eyes stuck on the ceiling forever, just two blinding whites facing out to the world.

Chloe did not laugh. She only grew alarmed. The intense performance of boredom gave way to fear, gave way to contingency planning.

I saw her make a calculation, her eyes flitting toward the bedroom door. I knew she would try to run, as she had on the pool deck and in the grocery store—as she had so many times before.

I prepared myself, took on a defensive posture, bent my knees. I stood between her and the door, directly across the double bed. I knew this room like my own childhood bedroom, even through the fresh paint and the new furniture. I looked around. 

A retainer case, a diary, three iPhone chargers. And there, on the edge of her desk, to my surprise, to my relief, an old drawing of mine. The two of us, immortalized, high-fiving next to the pool deck. My braces, her hair bows. The sun. Happy. I gathered my confidence, took a deep breath.

She lunged to the left of the bed, tried to dart under my arm. I caught her by the wrists, pushed her back toward the window.

“Just hold on,” I told her. “Just wait a second.”

She kept shoving. For once, I was grateful for the weight I put on in college—she was still flimsy and frenetic. I held her back with my forearm and pushed her into the corner. Not hard enough to hurt. I wasn’t cruel.

“What are you doing?!” she screamed. “What the fuck is going on?!”

Now her phone was within spitting distance, sitting tantalizingly close to the window sill. Still recording. I made my own calculation, reached across the bed with my free arm, grabbed it with the tips of my finger like a plate on a high shelf.

I chucked it out the open window and into the cool, dark night. 

“There,” I said, patting her head while she crumpled, screaming, in the corner. “Was that so hard?”

Teen girl Texts

Manasvi vora

don’t take it that seriously

Two teenage girls text back and forth in a conversation that is shallow and meaningless in the same way teenage girls are shallow and meaningless. 

lorde, and the tendency for teenage romanticization

 she really is the high school soundtrack 

middle and high school for me we love to see it 

damn she really raised us didn’t she 
i think she’s the reason i started writing 

how many muses are there cause she def needs to be 
added to the list 

uhhhh bro i wish i knew 
the only muse i know is thalia and i only know that 
because of percy jackson 

i was going to make fun of you 
but i genuinely cannot name another muse except ?? calliope?? 
swear to god homer mentioned her or something 
either that or i am terribly misremembering honors humanities 

hm. well. in the interest of honesty 
i kinda sparknoted my way through that class 

bro. disappointing. it was actually a good book. 
telemachus whining reminded me of Every Boy Ever 

in my defense 
actually i don’t remember what my defense was 
that was like two years ago 

SAPPHO 

yes thank you for that comprehensive reply 

          SAPPHO WAS THE TENTH MUSE  
THERE’S NINE REAL MYTH ONES AND SOMEONE 
CALLED HER THE TENTH  
              WE TALKED ABOUT IT IN SOME CLASS 

ok so… lorde is what 
the eleventh muse? 

give me a sec i am inordinately proud of my memory 
yes! probably? 
wait what if there are more collective public opinion ones 

uhh well she’s definitely A muse then at least 

yeah like muse of the burnt out gifted kids 
how did homer say it 
o muse something something 

o, muse of like. kids who shopped at hot topic 

that callout was uncalled for 
o, muse of kids who wanted to grow up but also really didn’t 
hm what else made me all hashtag emo in high school 

o, muse of my teenage years, 

patron saint of the  
sad and lonely, the desperate,  
wanting something  
more, something bigger, oracle with  
destiny in a scraped knee,  

danger in suburbia, 

queen of mirage kids,  
the ones with 
a penchant for dreaming, 

for drama 

for being  
eaten alive, tell us  
how much we want to be the 
main character,  

tell us how we’re worth 
more as poets, 

tell us how to crash  
a car  

and fall in love 

and sit  
on stone steps with  
immortality,  

muse, don’t tell us anything else. 
lose 
the acoustic and realizations, let us stay, 
believe in cherry-black lipstick, 

bared teeth.  

i heard you yesterday, sunny and 
thirty, telling us that you’re ready 
to grow up 

a radio reminder  
from the architect of a generation

okay so are you going to address the fact that 
you’re almost 20 

never ! and also no ! 
however 
i do know what you mean cause the first time i heard her go 
“my hot blood’s been burning for so many summers now it’s 
time to cool it down” i just. couldn’t process 

YES like literally yesterday i was listening to 16 year old lorde 
and she just hit the 
“teenage recklessness when death exists but 
mortality doesn’t” feeling perfectly 

AND NOW SHE’S TELLING US TO SETTLE DOWN 
like wtf one day she was like i’m 19 and i’m on fire 
and then i hit 19 and went oh it’s my time to be on 
fire and then she goes GROW UP?????? 

illegal. rude. at least wait until i’m in college miss ella 

lmao how are college apps 

soul-crushing. thanks for asking. 
did it suck this much for you too 

uh yeah. 
tell me college apps aren’t some insidious way to 
turn people into anything but people. the way you feel 
when you write about yourself??? 
there’s no way that’s not some kind of canned evil 

the amount of rewrites i’ve done have straight up 
made me cry 

yeah dude the system wants you to sell yourself for some 
semblance of a future. i Did it. i know how bad it feels 

see i just don’t know if i’m allowed to be myself 
who i am isn’t marketable 
gotta be an automaton with money and a perfect score 
like words? nah. irrelevant useless roadside box life etc
but code? sweet sweet salary bestie who cares

yeah uh. not wrong. can’t say you’re allowed 
to do what you want but… what do you want 

god i wish i knew 
i don’t think they taught us to want something 

i think they taught you to want college or
more like i think they didn’t teach you how to 
want something that lasts a lifetime. 

can’t even process having a lifetime 

worst part is 
they don’t teach you what to do after you get in either 

great. 
thanks for the reassuring words. 

yeah but it’s so much easier like 
what you do and what you did means something 
like it’s genuinely worth something for once 

tbt my counselor said only internships have value 
kinda funny that i’m paying for that kind of advice 

pay me wtf this is better advice and also free 
you exist out of the UC system and they don’t 
realize that 

yeah cause it doesn’t matter 

it Does though like you aren’t just an amalgamation of 
the stuff you’ve been told you’re supposed to be 

aren’t i? 
feels awful to write them 

yeah cause you’re literally whoring out your 
life experiences 

LMAO you said that last time too 

I STAND BY IT 
it’s the worst feeling to take a moment that meant 
something  and then sell it off with, like, the rest 
of your personality 

tfw crossroads comes w free devil 
we do be selling our souls  

you realize you are a Person, yes? 

debatable 

college app you is not real you dude 

yeah but it’s who i am now like 
who tf am i supposed to be after 

fair enough you work towards it so long and when you get 
there you don’t know what to do with yourself. it’s because 
you didn’t think that you would get this far 

me rn. universal experience i guess 
i feel like everyone i know thinks i’m 
something different than i really am 

does anyone really know the real anyone at this point 

yeah ok but when i’m gone 
nobody will know the real me and nobody’s left to counter anything anyone says what if i die and 
the only version of me is the college application version 
is it worse to die and not be remembered 
or to die and be remembered wrong 

i... do Not want to talk about that but 
hypothetically. 
if we were talking about that, do you want to see this 
absolutely fucked picture 

not particularly but ok 

so okay to preface, the atlas lion went extinct in (officially) 1922 but 
people said they’d seen it after and then they calculated that it had 
probably actually gone extinct in like the 1960s and that’s a whole 
separate thing BUT 

so. there is a photo that is thought to be the last one taken 
of an atlas lion in the wild. and it gets me every time dude 

cool so you’re showing me something 
that’s going to make me break down then

hm. well. 

imagine being the last of your kind 
and not knowing you’re the last one 
imagine knowing too 
either option drives me insane 

 omg see i think of this sometimes
the last generation of humans! 

 if you’re alone how do you know you’re the last one?
also like!!! there won’t be anyone telling the story of the last
human. so like 

you know how we’re human by definition but it’s a cultural
definition like we’re defined by the people around us 

yeah like “human” is relative 

 if there’s no one else around to define us are we human do
we exist does it matter like is it worse to die or is it worse to
die knowing no one will remember you or is it worse to die
knowing that you’re the last one who remembers anyone else 

ok see that’s a hypothetical but here’s like. a non-hypothetical 
remember the tar pits 

ok so i’m blocking you now 

LOOK 
the la brea tar pits have like recreations with plastic animals 
and it’s so messed up to think about

oh god. oh my god. the baby. THE EYES 

whenever i see this it makes me sad because like. 
they can’t help without dying 

 ngl it is making such a stupid face if you zoom in 
look

giving off horton hears a who energy 

i don’t know how to break this to you 
but i hate you now and we should never speak again 

LMAO ok i will stop go on 

i hate to admit it but it does look like that 
OK NVM 
but like. they are plastic but how many weren’t 
and how many do we not know and how many 
died and had families and we never knew and we never cared 
like if you are thinking about last humans and extinction,
how do you look at your family sinking and drowning 
and not do something. like what CAN you do 

is it better or worse to watch them sink and die 
or to try to help and know you’ll also be trapped 
how do you live your life knowing you didn’t even try 

idk man like for a second 
pretend that you are the one rolling around in fresh grass, 
belly full, with 
summertime sweet in the air 

what, pretend that it didn’t hurt?      

so, you walk to the tar pits with a guide 
watching it pop and bubble like 
lava, only slower 
and you can’t imagine how anyone couldn’t just.. 
pull themselves out 

the tar is thick and black  
and waiting.

but you imagine a pile of bones, stacking up underneath 
just so you don’t have to think about 
how it must feel to know the end is coming 
to know that it is inevitable 

to know that your body is  
already gone

when you sink, no one will come looking 
and you think of falling, weightless 
and how you never know if you’re the 
last one 

never know how careful you have to be 

they tell you there’s only 
one human in there 
and the bucket-hat tourists next to you say 
thank god but 
you think of being afraid in the way 
only an animal can be afraid 
how only we learn to come to terms. 

there is no rationalizing for  
the skull of a sabertooth tiger who expected to  
rule the world  

and you lean your head against the railing, 
watching to see if the tar will turn 
transparent for you, 
like you deserve it

it will outlive you, you think  

to the side, there is a plastic elephant, crying
out for help as it 
drowns 

hope the bones float,  
just so everyone can see them  

i’ve seen too many dead things recently  
forgotten things  

dude this is a plastic elephant at a literal museum 

OKAY AND 
IT STILL MADE ME SAD 
plus like. it wasn’t the only one 

ominous much? 

last night i saw a dead bird trampled into the sidewalk
and i called it icarus before i looked up
to see the prison, 
minos nowhere to be found 
in midnight floodlights, 
no sun to fly to, no hubris to
fall to, only 
a crushed beak, wings that were once 
flesh and blood, 
flattened into the concrete 

half-shadowed by barbed wire and  
an impossible escape 

no, 
icarus isn’t the right one 
i know why he died 

—why we need to know he died  

what am i supposed to learn from a dead bird at night? 
there is no reaching beyond your means, just 
something you were born to and the 
pavement. 

the moon, and 
nothing that can melt, 

just... people who forgot to look down.

you know, 
i stepped over it  

called it a symbol and 
kept walking 

nice lmao 
good job disproving the apathy of the human race 

dude wtf was i supposed to do ?? pick it up ? 

okay yeah good point 

it’s just another one of those moments where 
there is literally nothing you can do 

how do you prevent the death of a bird 
how do you do anything to make it better besides 
immortalize it 

this is really a tkam moment 
where is atticus finch when you need him to not kill a bird 

lol why are there so many dead birds in literature 

something something loss of innocence 
whatever we talked about in honors english 
that one time i didn’t pay attention 

you know. one time a rat got under the carpet in my 
garage when it was presumably about two seconds 
from death 

why tf is this important 

bro i am GETTING THERE 
ok so, dead rat under the carpet in the garage 
the thing is. the carpet was uh 
on top of stairs 

oh god. 

yeah that thing was paper thin when we found it 

and you were on ME for not picking 
up a dead bird at like 1 am?? 

hey i threw that rat away i’m still 
morally superior here 

there is no morally superior you 
probably stepped on it a million times 

i try not to think about it 

Read it again but this time, please take this moment to silence your cell phone. 

A few reminders: 
- laugh when you’re supposed to 
- keep track of your belongings 
- make sure to play their voices in your head. 
- dispose of trash in the specified containers 
- hide anything real from your heart and your hands 
- identify all available exits, including the one you entered from 

In the event of an emergency, watch your step and walk to the nearest exit. We appreciate your participation in making this an enjoyable experience for everyone. The show is about to begin. 

Just remember: 
don’t take it too seriously.

Fouled fruits of a vision pure

Lydia Sviatoslavsky

voided interstitials

Shawn Cremer

There are so many myths of the desert. I wonder which one I will belong to.

Of course I wanted it. It is what everyone wants. But It was never really what I wanted to Do. 

Still, I could never do anything like teach or code or work in a statistics department at a marketing firm. 

It wasn’t just the money. And it wasn’t just the fame. It was this taste of something I’ve been trying to name. 

🗡

We’d moved on from hedonism, abandoned the glitz, the club style. Blinged-out jeans and bedazzled Motorola Razors were long gone and now we even shunned the in-between, where taupe could still be outrageously expensive and therefore worth flaunting. Everything now was about interiority.

Politically, America had arrived at peak narcissism; aesthetics-informed populism while culture online had reached the apex of self-improvement. Influence was still (of course) about what you owned, but now those things were in service of the inner self, the mind, emotions, sleep, this new invention of wellness. Well, about that.

She knew other girls who really followed their peddled regimens, tried all of the things they got sent and loved them all equally. But for her part, bringing herself to believe her own fiction was a non-starter. She too would post and post and post as long as the checks continued to clear. But the other girls seemed to really believe what they were telling their disciples and for that she found them unbearably stupid.

Still, she had put in the work, crafted the persona, become the commercial messiah. No sense in blowing it up when she’d girlbossed her way into enough sponsors to support a lifestyle that in turn supported more sponsors. The circularity of it all could be dizzying, but she liked that about it, for a time. After all, she had mastered The Void. 

🗡

She called Chana.

-Let’s go shopping.

-Are you making a video?

-Maybe something casual.

She had no intention to.

-Like a vlog?

-Maybe...

-Or some cute stories?

-Something like that. So, you wanna
go or what?

-Yeah!

She drove from Los Feliz to Palms then back to Melrose. It was out of the way, but she loved to drive. She’d read that Joan Didion loved to drive, so she’d cultivated a love of driving as a trait of her own. Besides, she didn’t mind that it was out of the way because she needed Chana to come with her today. It had been too long since the last sighting, and the world outside of The Void had begun to feel haunting if she didn’t have backup.

-We’re not thrifting?

-I just haven’t been over here in a bit.

Of course, she had been there the week before, where she’d spotted a très hot street photographer with a blog that all of the People Like Her were cropping up in recently. She’d checked nightly, making it a point to study the trends and triangulate his next likely location.

She paid for valet in a garage across from the Glossier store with a twenty from her gifted purse. She was in a phase right now of desperately loving cash. To be sure, she’d go back to being exclusive with her cards in a month or two.

-Drink first?

The power of facial persuasion was becoming one of her most finely tuned skills, so though it was just past noon, Chana agreed. They crossed the street to EP/LP. She didn’t recognize the girl downstairs at EP/LP, or maybe she did, but with a “hey girl!” and two air kisses, into the elevator and up they went, ushered on with that subdued bitchy smile that was as good as a key to the city.

The girl upstairs did recognize her and repeated the phrase back at her, finding them a two-top by the railing so they could look out over La Cienega (and of course be seen easily by anyone coming out of the elevator). 

-I don’t want to wait, babe. What
do you want?

She slid one leg over a barstool at the end of the counter and leaned over the bar with an effortless, half-bored, half-seductive face on. It wasn’t her most monetizable look, but it was effective IRL. She ordered Chana’s Aperol Spritz and a Mezcal cocktail off the menu for herself.

-Hey

She addressed the bartender’s shoulder as he scooped ice into a wine glass and a large beaker. He was cute in a sort of out-of-time metrosexual way. 

-Wanna do a shot?

-I probably shouldn’t.

-Come on, let me buy you a
shot.

-What about your friend?

-She’s fine. Come on, just for you
and me.

She stuck the tip of her tongue to the back of her top front teeth and pushed — her version of a wink.

-Ok. You want Tequila?

-Yeah. Let’s do Mezcal. Whatever’s
in my drink. And orange.

-Cool.

He did seem to think it was.

-I’m ———.

He reached across his left arm to shake her hand.

-Cool, (he said again) Jack.

They took the shots with orange slices and tajin and she paid for the drinks with four more twenties from her wallet, then ferried the two glasses back to Chana.

-Salud baby.

They sipped on the drinks and she fished her sunglasses and phone out of her purse. She opened one of The Void’s many platforms to check in on The Photographer, and Chana instinctively leaned in. The motion was brief, but a professional never misses subtlety.

“Selfie!” (A simper.) She took the pic and then a couple more, moving their hair and getting the drinks into the shot. Faces, angled. If she knew one thing, she knew angles. Then she geotagged the story and tagged Chana, swiped twice to the left, and posted it. It took less than ten seconds for the first DM wondering where her dress — a slinky olive drab number — was from.

Chana wanted to catch up on gossip and her rotating cadre of boys. 

-I’m listening sweetie, I just have
to check something. Work thing.

Chana was happy enough to chatter away while she tapped through The Photographer’s  stories. There were a lot of inspo posts he’d shared interspersed with chicly subdued shots of his house or office and then the gym. The most recent was from 24 minutes ago: an artfully strewn desk and the fluffy head of his King Charles spaniel. She had only to type the first letter of the URL to load his blog, she’d visited it so often. There were two new posts from this morning. A roundup from a morning jog and a pretty short text entry with some shots of a partially demolished or constructed room. It seemed to be about a new restaurant concept he was art directing.

She wanted to read but kept losing her place glancing between it and Chana. She clicked the lock button on her phone and put it face down on the table between the two of them.

As if on cue, the day’s first sighting, slipped, as it always did, into that tiniest of gaps in her armor. The disciples — two brunettes on the older end of her metrics — got the selfies they came for and trotted off.    

Maybe anonymity would have been cooler, but that was no longer available to her.

🗡

Thousands of people were sharing a post she had written in 2018.

You see, her first love affair with The Void had been through that glorious old platform, the one that had once been the freedom land of The Void, the one that was technically still around, but which now no one used because it had been desexed, all nudity stripped from its servers overnight like a new Great Inquisition. Her account had been flagged and gutted, as had so many others, her persona’s lifestyle on that old platform lobotomized. The great gaping gashes where there had once been the curves of breasts and jutting hip bones — all those tendons of an aesthetic extending from the boat rides and mansions and bits of poetry scrawled on cigarette boxes — were more offensive to her than the pornography.

So she had taken to a new platform — the land of tech moguls who didn’t pay their taxes and of boys who spent hours studying other boys’ faces and hated themselves for it and hated the fags for it and hated women for it. Into this foreign murk, that offered enough familiar ephemera to draw her in, she had waded and there in the murk, she’d eulogized, manifestoed, diatribed. 

THE INTERNET IS A SHAM!!1 

she wrote… and…

EVERYONE GETS NAKEDER BUT NO ONE IS SEXUAL!!!!

… and…

THIS IS THE END OF EROS. CIVILIZATION HAS PREVAILED. WE WILL BE THE LAST GENERATION. 

She anonymized herself on this new platform, deliberately, with surgical precision, blissfully unaware then that this surgery would later bifurcate her Self. No one followed her on the new platform then anyway, and so her words were lovingly and greedily sucked in by The Void, incubated in the great steamy womb of code. Until this morning. 

She posted a video clip that everyone already had saved on their computers of a popular female rapper whose iPhone 6 (the same one she had) had become unusable because her account had been leaked and she couldn’t access her settings, couldn’t even pull the plug if she’d wanted to.

People seemed to like that and more and more of them latched on to her account.

She was newly a cult leader again.

Then, because this new cult seemed to like that sort of thing, and because the anonymization surgery had been successful and because, well, she thought it was funny…

FUCK THE COPS! FUCK THE CORPS! FUCK THE CORPSE!? 

🗡

She has three iconographies of the body she navigates between. 

There’s her IV state, plugged in to The Void, past the point of The Sensation and fully in what venture capitalists liked to call Flow. She understands. She likes to call it that too. It’s logical and creative and True. The stream of The Void flows over her, pouring into her orifices like the gif of pink slime filling and draining from a lotus pod with the 6,732 comments screaming into The Void that this is triggering their trypophobia. 

Her straddle state, which she likes to picture as herself cast as the Colossus of Rhodes astride the world’s biggest mechanical bull, is next. The state for meet ups and collabs, for making stories with her friends in the real world but dispatching all of it, like missives from another planet, into The Void, as if only she can document this strange foreign civilization for some future when we will be able to live in total peace and harmony. 

And then, her untethered state. Her free state. Her natural state. Her unhinged unattached unaffected state. Isn’t it the craziest thing to avoid contact with The Void entirely? Once upon a time this state had been reserved for love making (and also for fucking), for grand hours-long Sunday dinners (and also for late-night fast-food pickups with her friends). 

But the longer she’s been a voyager into The Void, the less time she spends in the untethered state. Over the years she’s been playing a game of two steps forward one back, looping through her three states like a nectar-drunk bee alerting its homies to the hottest spots in the field with a bizarre little dance. And now she barely allows any time for untethering. Her dreams cross into The Void; her meals cross into The Void; her sex crosses into The Void. She hugs and kisses and sucks and fucks The Void and it holds her right back, tight as a vice. 

🗡

She would have been more grateful if being alive hadn’t seemed so effortless.

Exhibit A: The Photographer, who had shot a book of photos for MoMA PS1 of an Australian model she used to jerk off to pre-genderfucking a number of years ago, DM’d her. He wanted to shoot her for a new book he was making. She had scoured The Void for traces of the photographer’s other book multiple times over the years, slogging into second, third, seventh pages of search results, only ever turning up second-hand copies for sale, softcover, fine condition (fine as in fine art? Or How are you? I’m fine? fine grains of sand?), $1,066.30. Or this one, like new (well that was clearer at least), $3,149.95. She posted a screenshot of the price on the New Platform and wrote THANK GOD THIS ISN’T ANYWHERE CLOSE TO $3,150!!! People didn’t think it was that funny, but her numbers were beyond that mattering now.

It was a lesson she’d learned more than once about place and time—if only she’d attended that PS1 party and bought the book for $20, she’d be an owner of an appreciative asset. She liked that books could be assets. One day maybe only rich people would own books and she would be one of them and her library would be guarded by the best security invented by man. Select all squares with traffic lights   . Enter the six-digit authentication code. She would buy those robot dogs that used to be the features of feel-good videos  in The Void, and that now the NYPD used to arrest homeless people, to patrol this rarefied vault.

The Photographer’s new book was about It Girls. He was shooting 20 of them. But The Photographer was shrewd with a streak of envy and so of course he wanted to shoot It Girls who weren’t “really girls.” He didn’t say that. He wasn’t the type of person to seek out cancellations. He followed the script. But she got it. And anyway, she wasn’t opposed to getting naked for a tennis bracelet. Fuck simply owning an appreciative asset; she’d be one.

She DM’d him back and said she was interested and how did he want to go about it and she lived in Los Angeles though he probably knew that and is that where he was too?

🗡

DM STANDS FOR DEADLY MORON she ejaculated into The Void and then went to sleep.

She realized now this is probably how schizophrenia started. She had to admire all the hysterical women of the past who had managed to arrive at the state she was flirting with without the help of The Void. What was there before The Void? She’d seen pictures from before…she’d even been born before the very First Platform, but didn’t those people from the times before still exist because they existed in The Void?

That was the point of The Void.

To make the best (and worst) people in the world live forever.  

She wasn’t convinced, as some were, that those who had lived their whole lives before 1989 were the lucky ones. After all, the pre-Void idols, public and private, had been roped into The Void posthumously, against their will. She at least knew that her life would stay forever in The Void. Her life... HA! Her lives. That was the game of it. 

🗡

She chomped down on a cinnamon toothpick, emulsifying the wood into soft pulp, while she waited for the Lyft The Photographer had ordered for her. She thought about changing her bio. Something ethereal. Like… 

🏺🕊🌾 MUSE 🌙🐚🏹

She was typing it out, trying to find the bow emoji when the Lyft pulled up. The Ancient Egyptians didn’t have to deal with getting interrupted carving their hieroglyphics into their palace walls did they? Maybe they did. Did the Ancient Egyptians carve hieroglyphics? She just liked that they cared more about the afterlife than life. It was like they knew about The Void 6,000 years before it came to be (she had a skewed perception of time and thought some things were much older than they actually were and some things far newer.)

She held her phone delicately, poised so as not to disturb the in-progress palace painting, as she opened the back door of the grey Camry and leaned forward toward the driver. 

-For ——?

-Yep

He tapped some icons on the screen of his iPhone in its cradle and craned his head back again to make sure she was buckling up. 

She did, like a good girl.

-Eames house huh?

-Mmhm.

What had she wanted? A dolphin? No. A bow a bow. Where was the bow? Cupid hath forsaken me, she wailed, then double tapped to switch to the New Platform and sent out into The Void CUPID HATH FORSAKEN US!!

-It’s sick. Classic LA, man.

A genderfucking jolt but it was just a colloquialism. Then, back to her palace walls. The bow the bow the bow!

-Yeah, it’s iconic.
…
-I’m doing a photoshoot. 

-Oh yeah? You a model?

-I’m a muse.

The words were out before she registered them, but then aha! the bow. It was done. She could laugh.

-Ahahahah

-A muuuuuse. Aight, I dig that. I’m a
bit of a photographer myself.

Of course. Every man in LA was, weren’t they? Except for the rapists, who were producers. Or the ED pill takers, who were musicians. Or the fags, who were actors. Or the gay-straight e-boys, who were influencers (and sometimes also rapists). All the other men were photographers. But mostly they were Lyft drivers.

She had to suppress a sudden urge to fling open the car door and tumble out onto Glendale Boulevard. She was getting a bit car sick. Down went her iPhone onto the seat beside her. She held the magic button that made the window go down.

-Mm? What do you shoot?

-Oh you know, models, TikTok
hotties, some boudoir.

Oh Jesus.

-Are you any good?

This ride couldn’t be over fast enough.

-Peep my insta, lemme know
what you think

-Sure

He revealed his handle. She had no intention of looking at it. She picked up her iPhone instead and took an intentionally blurry pic of her canted knees ending in their black velvet chunky heeled sandals. A pang of missing that grand old platform, and she posted it to the new anonymous platform, a poisoned gift of identity to the cult.

-What do you think?

-Yeah cool vibes. Do you like
driving for Lyft?

The evil question that well-meaning tradlibs used to remind their temp chauffeurs of what they really were. If her hours logged in The Void had taught her one things, it was that class villainy really is the dopest drug.

Into the reserved lot and on to cheek kisses with The Photographer. It was obvious why he was one of the successful ones — 6’6 with that abundance of collagen and pigment that comes to moneyed people who spend time in California and on the Gold Coast.

It was just her and him that day (remember: not a model, but a muse). By the time the sun began to set, her beauty had reached its zenith. A BTS post dispatched to the public side of The Void performed its jester jig better than any she’d ever made before.

For the first time in a long time, her Body and her Self seemed to hum and vibrate like an image seen through hot desert air, golden.

Dripping, dripping, in gold.

🗡

Returns to the place she came from before Los Angeles — before The Void had branded her — were always fraught beyond bearing. Still, some remnant of familial duty remained, and the funerary rites had to be observed. Every child’s child must attend. To survive it, she had to re-embrace a past life, her heyday of interiority.

She took the exit, her rented Audi Silvercar spraying dirty snow as she rounded the bend of the offramp, easing to a steady stop behind a Bush-era Hyundai that slid through the stop sign and merged haphazardly into the minimal traffic. She felt powerful behind the wheel of the 8-cylinder luxury SUV. She signaled and purred into traffic, weaving between cars doing their best to stay within the swiftly disappearing lanes. 

Though she had been going there for over a decade, long before the genderfucking, she still always overshot the turn. It was a habit that felt easy to pathologize, so she did. What did it say about her that she knew the other street was a one-way, so she always went at least two blocks farther than she needed to go before turning, that she would regularly make an entire circle around the block even though the whole point of turning later was to avoid such waste? What did that say about her mental wellbeing?

She parked the Audi and pulled up the hood of the shapeless swath of felted wool that a pair of child-star-turned-fashion-designer twins had deemed a winter coat. 

She ordered a double Americano from the barista.

He was cute in a way that resembled the elf from that animated Rudolf movie, but less fetal alcohol syndrome-y. 

-And a croissant,

she added, failing to entirely keep the francosnobbery out of her pronunciation.

The barista made small talk as he pulled the shot for her Americano, and she blacked out, unable to hold onto the vestige of the branded persona that still managed to cling to her like her daily spray of Mugler Angel when she traced those tenuous steps through the so-called real world. 

Instead, she bubbled and fizzed and grinned and cringed and crouched and let out a shrieking laugh and was reminded of the man at The Odeon one night last year who kept insisting to her that the hyenas in the Lion King were queer.  

She paid with her iPhone and re-deposited it into the depths of her Disney Twin-envisioned robe, willfully averting her gaze from the slew of notifications populating the locked screen, accepting the coffee and plate from the barista with self-immolating joviality, and going to find a place to guzzle and pick, respectively, and take a journey for herself into The Void, wishing to be a spectator for today, for old time’s sake. 

She decapitated both ends of the croissant, took a deep draught, and pulled out her iPhone. 

Her mother was fond of telling her that, for a semi-autonomic organ, the human eye forgets its duty when confronted with a screen and becomes as absorbed as we do, neglecting to blink as often as it otherwise would.

Her mother, who had protested Vietnam and still swore by the sanctity of NPR and the NYT, went through a dozen 1ML vials of prescription eye drops each week, applicating the viscous liquid to her corneas like some sort of futuristic drug addict. People put drugs up basically every other orifice, why not the eyes? Surely someone had tried…

But now, her eyes darted between notifications, trying to see through them to the ones buried behind, as more and more bloomed into existence like those time lapses of alien-like hibiscus flowers unfurling from bud to blossom — shouts of “Scammer!” from the Branded Platform, “Grifter!” from the (until now) Anonymous Platform, rallying cries for a doxxing emerging from the depths of the murk even she hadn’t dared tread, email after email from agents and brands — all her accounts trotted out into the town square to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.

It was happening.

Her Branded Self and her Anonymous Self had been sundered one from the other and hung up on display side by side for the whole village to see.

She was being cancelled.

A cocktail of drugs endemic to the body, which pharmaceutical companies have been trying to recreate for decades, flooded her system.

I hope I have a stroke, she thought. That would serve them right. 

Like a freshly caged animal, she was caught, ensnared by her own bifurcation. 

-Hey

Her head snapped up; she hadn’t realized how hunched over she’d become, armadillo-izing her body in this twee and very beloved café. 

They knew. She looked up and everyone was turned, staring at her, their iPhones in their non-dominant hands, opening their mouths to reveal gaping armories, literal daggers flying at her, like that Anime meme that was so disturbingly sexy.

-You good?

She shook her head, reattached her brainstem to the spinal cord. She wasn’t having a stroke after all. And no one was looking at her. Everyone in this café was plugged in to their own entry point to The Void, either listening to the cliché soft jazz playing through the overhead speakers or whatever unknowable combination of tunes were playing through their Skull Candies and Air Pods and Beats by Dr. Dre. They were fully absorbed, pulsing with the soft Space Slug TealTM light people got when 100% in The Void. No one was looking at her.

-Hey, just wanna make sure you’re
okay?

Well, one person was looking at her.

She looked up into a pair of green eyes. The green of human eyes had always freaked her out. Nothing was supposed to be that color.

-You look a little shaken, are you
alright?

But there they were. Real green eyes set in a deeply tanned face below thick arched brows and curtains of floppy dark hair. She had never seen a face like this one outside of The Void. She had to look away. The beauty was going to k-word her if she looked any longer at this Medusa. Walls walls walls. We build walls. 

-Yeah, all good thanks, 

she sneered. 

Those brows furrowed in concern. EMPATHY IS BAD FOR YOUR SKIN! she thought before she remembered with a jolt that she was a pariah, scarlet-lettered, likely exiled from the part of The Void where she could post that. 

-It’s just, sorry I don’t mean to be like
creepy or whatever, but you look like
something really upset you just now.

-Oh, does it now?

She arched her own excellently shaped brows, scathingly.

-Sorry.

He did this thing with his hands that meant her tactic of disdain was working. 

-I’ll leave you alone. 

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. Boys who looked like that were supposed to be fuckboys; they weren’t supposed to be nice. Was she so far gone that she couldn’t accept someone being nice to her?

-Wait, I’m sorry. You just caught 
me off guard. 

Walls walls walls. We can bring them down.

-Just social media man. It can 
suck.
People are…

-fucking awful. I know.

-Are you…

-like you? I think so.

The way he made his face do that sent her stomach spinning like a stupid tween who’d had one too many tide pods.

-Are we really talking about this?

-It would be impressive if we were.

-It certainly would.

-Well, I think we’re pretty
impressive then. 

He offered a hand.

-You want to get out of here? We can 
walk. We can talk. 

A choice. We always have a choice. 

Six years ago, pre-genderfucking, pre-entry into the elite echelons of The Void, pre-cancelling, she (though, before the persona, before the fame, she still felt like he) was sitting with Matthew, in this same café. Matthew, who had been her companion on voyages into The Void once, who had been there the night the numbers had first really started to climb. She and Matthew sat by the windows with The Teacher talking about the only thing she’d  ever been able to – ideas. She was earnest then; (God forbid anyone in The Void find out he actually cared about things!) She only knew how to talk about ideas in the way that she had been taught. Their education had been liberal and positive, and fashioned after a certain Berkeley -esque sense of conviction that such a thing as Art could genuinely change the world. This was all before she’d learned that the only thing that had changed the world in this lifetime was The Void. The only thing that promised to change the world for many lifetimes to come was The Void. 

But this moment was before that realization. This was before the genderfucking, before the fame. Before the divided self started to fall away. This was three inter-generational friends sitting in a coffeeshop, talking about authenticity.

She was aghast with The Teacher (who was infinite in her wisdom, surpassing Plato and Socrates in secrets of immortality and who was endlessly indulgent to her students who begged so much of her) when she asked the biting question.

Why do you care about authenticity?

or maybe she said

Why does being authentic matter?

or maybe

So fucking what!? Don’t you idiots see nothing is authentic!? Nothing is real! Everything is contrived! Every single person is a GODDAMN LIAR!!!

But no, that’s not what she said. And not really what she meant either, because she was not a participant in The Void, and that is language of The Void, and really all she was saying was…

Don’t sweat it.

Authenticity cannot be sought. It can’t be built. It can’t be caught or bought or constructed or developed or workshopped or focus-grouped or pilled or corporate-trained or master-classed.

If you happen to sniff it out and glance obliquely at it, perhaps you’ll glimpse it for a moment, before it shimmies away, like an animated gorilla dancing in a forest. But if you try to capture it, good luck buster. It’s futile. So, why sweat it indeed?

The hand stayed proffered. The choice remained.

-No, thank you. (She really meant 
this.) I have to go.

🗡

On the plane back to LA, she repeated The Teacher’s litany. Don’t sweat it. Don’t sweat it. Don’t sweat it.

She was going to see authenticity in every shimmering droplet very soon. Every single moment would be filled with authenticity. And she would be the sole secret observer. 

The Teacher had known it long before, had alluded to enough lifetimes that predated The Void for her to finally, all these years later, understand that participants can never be authentic. Only observers can witness it. 

She had dug so deeply into participating that only one way to the sidelines remained open to her. Only one surefire way to become a witness to authenticity. Only one way to survive in America when you’re famous like her. And she wasn’t even sure that was still available anymore. Had the cure of a beautiful death finally been overpowered by ever-stronger strains of The Void? We would find out. She said a prayer to the girls who’d come before — to Brittany, to Nicole, to Anna Nicole — and went to sleep with a Valium.

🗡

When it rains in LA it pours. Her sublet’s windows shut to the city’s fragrance of undrained sewage, she laid her plan. It was time to use what remained of the liquid assets.

Breadcrumbs were now a thing that the people who manipulated the manipulators used, imparting this nugget of wisdom for $650 an hour, but before The Void, they had been something else, a device for parables and fairy tales. 

First, rooms booked at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Chateau Marmont, the Surfrider. 

By the afternoon, paparazzi were hovering like flies outside of each.

Good. Hansel’s path, taking shape. 

Next step, honeytrap for the flies. Critical to Be Seen. 

A live video. Sunglasses on, with crocodile tears streaming from behind them. Identifying location details let slip. A plea to respect her privacy at this time. Gretel, sprinkling more crumbs.

If she could have divided the Body the way she’d divided the Self, the Chase would have been even more perfect. But until the dominance of The Void is supplanted by a new technology that will do that, she had to protect and rely on the one Body she’d hated and used and sold and hidden and now, was determined to live on in.

Luckily, in America, the one person who really never loses is the Scammer. 

In any other city, the Chauffeur and the Doppelgänger wouldn’t have done it, but LA warps people’s sensibilities, and cash, when paired with the promise of clout, is an immensely powerful thing.

🗡

The paps and the police played their part beautifully, the ribbon of cars tangling through the hills.

To death! To death! Stone him! Tear him! To death !, called the tabloidoisie — those beautiful pyschos, her kindred people, that reviled corps of the fifth estate.

On a hairpin turn above Malibu, the great silver beast of a car slid across its canted wheels, bowing forward like a monk and then, punching its way through the guardrail, tipped over into the shimmering sea. 

🗡

Revel in how swiftly quiet falls. She  had killed Him long ago, for the promise of a check and that nameless feeling. And now She is dead too, by her own hand at that. The Bifurcated Selves are finally, irreversibly, entombed in Collective Memory. 

Decoupled (for now) from The Void, we will have to find a new Self, perhaps even discover who we truly are, somewhere out stalking in the wilderness, lounging in ecstasy among the saguaros. 

Contributor Biographies

Alec Kissoondyal is an undergraduate at the University of Florida pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English. His writing has been published in Zephyr Literary Journal and Bacopa Literary Review. In his spare time, he enjoys writing, nature walks, and listening to Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.

André Marques Chambel is a transmedia artist. Their work has a cartographic foundation, since it maps mental systems, archetypes, processes or landscapes. Additionally, it functions as a life-long investigation around the themes of liminality, borders, mythology, the immaterial and memory (personal, collective and genetic).

Charlotte Puebla is a French-Spanish contemporary dancer, who also investigates in photography, poetry and collage. Her collages are open questions about: freedom, banality, nature, love and women’s role in society. Using old pictures and a bit of humour, they are meant to criticise, to make you think and hopefully... to make you revolt.

Colin Gee (@ColinMGee) is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette (@GorkoThe), a humor daily that publishes headlines, cartoons, reviews, and poetry. Fiction in Misery Tourism, Expat Press, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Bear Creek Gazette, and elsewhere.

Ignacio Evangelista is a Spanish photographer based in Madrid (Spain). He has a bachelor degree in psychology. His photographic series shows the relationship, sometimes contradictory, between the natural and the artificial. His works also focus on places or situations where something seems not to be in the right place (physical or temporal place). Find more of his work at ignacioevangelista.com.

Jessica Heron’s work appears or is forthcoming in The Horror Zine, Hole In the Head Review, Angel Rust Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She is a poetry reader for Catatonic Daughters. You can find out more about her including a full list of publications at jessicaheronpoetry.com.

Kevin Tosca is the author of fifteen chapbooks, three published in the first half of 2022 by Between Shadows Press, Two Key Customs Press, and ClairObscur Zine. His short stories have frequently appeared in Europe and North America. He lives in Berlin and can be found at kevintosca.com.

Kurt Cole Eidsvig is the author of three books, POP X POETRY, Art Official, and OxyContin for Breakfast. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana, he has been published in journals like Slipstream, Hanging Loose, Borderlands, Main Street Rag, and The Southeast Review. He has won a Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital Fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, and the Edmund Freeman Award. He maintains a website at www.EidsvigArt.com.

László Aranyi (Frater Azmon) poet, anarchist, occultist from Hungary. Earlier books: (szellem)válaszok, A Nap és Holderők egyensúlya . New: Kiterített rókabőr. English poems published: Quail Bell Magazine, Lumin Journal, Moonchild Magazine, Scum Gentry Magazine, Pussy Magic, The Zen Space, Crêpe & Penn, Briars Lit, Acclamation Point, Truly U, Sage Cigarettes Magazine, Lots of Light Literary Foundation, Honey Mag, Theta Wave, Re-side, Cape Magazine, Neuro Logical, The Daily Drunk Mag, Unpublishable Zine, Melbourne Culture Corner, Beir Bua Journal, Crown & Pen, Dead Fern Press, Coven Poetry Journal, Journal of Erato, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Spillover Magazine, Punk Noir, Nymphs Literary Journal,  Synchronized Chaos, Impspired Magazine, Fugitives & Futurists, The Dope Fiend Daily, Mausoleum Press, Nine Magazines, Thanks Hun, Downtown Archive, Hearth & Coffin Literary Journal, Our Poetry Archive (OPA), Juniper Literary Magazine, Feral Dove Magazine, Alternate Route, CENTRE FOR EXPERIMENTAL ONTOLOGY, Bullshit Lit Magazine, Misery tourism, All Ears (India), Utsanga (Italy), Postscript Magazine (United Arab Emirates), The International Zine Project (France), Swala Tribe Magazine (Rwanda), The QuillS Journal (Nigeria). Known spiritualist mediums, art and explores the relationship between magic.

Leah Abrams is the first writer ever to be based in New York City. By day, she works as a speechwriter with the firm West Wing Writers—and in her free time, she writes fiction and satire from her couch in Brooklyn.

Lydia Sviatoslavsky is a San Francisco-based writer, researcher, and editor. I’ve written for SFGate, Spike Art Magazine, Broke-Ass Stuart, and Local News Matters, among others. I cover culture, curiosities, and corruption.

Manasvi Vora (she/her) just turned 20 and doesn’t want to think too hard about that. SoCal born and bred, she’s a chemical engineering student at the University of Southern California and you can find her part-time poetry in Perennial Press’s force/fields anthology, Palaver Arts Magazine, and Third Iris Zine, among others.

Marta DeLeon has been making music for half of her life. While always finding solace and inspiration in movies, her second iPhone hot directorial effort is the music video for her beloved southwest Tucson project, Weekend Lovers, which can be described as cello-toned femme vocals running down a desert road. Weekend Lovers is the femme-fronted latinax analog rock that slumbers and pops. Dashes of new wave and grunge lead in the other songs on their LP debut I Love U in Real Life, where the original cover was recorded at Midtown Island.

Olga Shapovalova is the visual storyteller who explores the interaction between traditional and modern cultures. In her practice, Olga considers political topics, with an admixture of mythology, modern feminist and ecological agenda. She was born in Uzbekistan, and lives and works in Vienna.

Val, aka Paper Surgey (She / It ; b. 1977)  is from Rome (ShITtaly), based in Amsterdam, Netherlands: I’m an analog collage maker,freelance chef for living. as a kid i played sessions with leftover Letrasets from my mother desk (she was a graphic designer), this developed in me a fascination in typography, and as a teen, i’ve been deeply influenced by punk aesthetic through DIY fanzine / album cover designs, comics, graffiti, cyberpunk culture. Heavily influenced also by Dadaism, Situationism, fluxus, mailart  and a complex set of musical references. Themes that are often present in my artwork include the destructuring of the aesthetic fascism within advertisement and the visual garbage that consumer society uses to reaffirm itself. I intend my collages as sort of paper detonation. more like the work of a coroner than a designer.

Born in the geographic center of Brazil, paulo arthur castro alves is an author based in multiple places of Brazil’s midwest region. His nomadic language intersects visual and performing arts, using photography as the main medium of his poetic practice.  

R.Drada is an American artist based in Berlin whose works center on the themes of intense emotionality, destruction, and dehumanization as well as existential unease about identity.

Shawn E. Cremer is a multi-disciplinary writer. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Feast and Calling Upon Calliope literary magazines. His short plays have premiered at Curious Theatre (Denver, CO). Essays and culture reporting can be found at exquisitecorpse.substack.com. He lives in New York City.

Tristen Stafford is a writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn NY. In 2021, Stafford released their debut feature film “Pretenders” and just wrapped the spiritually absurd short film “Blunt Civility.” During the pandemic, Stafford began experimenting with poetry, finding inspiration in dreary Americana, gender, sex, and the belief that poetry can be an outlet for wit and repressed instincts.

Yumedyne is a writer, painter, digital artist, sculptor, and aerospace engineer in Huntsville, AL. Potentially despicable, potentially academic, their work seeks to combat cynicism and loneliness by acknowledging and embracing the darker side of human nature. Their work can be found on Instagram (@yumedyne_art).

The Editors