These actors are cracked. Out from under techno-creep overseers rise the rejects, the dropouts, and the freaks. A counterculture funhouse, home to strung out hedonists, underground musicians, magic practitioners, and those just looking for the next party. With Venice Peach (Maudlin House, 2025), Jessamyn Violet creates an alternate reality that seems too wild a proposition and yet right around an interdimensional corner. Politics and show business intermingle in new and strange ways, as LA’s free spirits are put to the test. I spoke to Jessamyn about this unruly book.Rebecca Gransden:Step right up here, Pop Stars and Punkers...Welcome to the Strangest Show on Earth.The world of Venice Peach is one of spectacle. It speaks the language of the sideshow, of show business and the circus. What draws you to the carnival?Jessamyn Violet: The two most primal draws to the carnival are A) knowing that you are also a freak and wanting to be with your people, or B) the fascination with freaks because you secretly wish that you were freakier. For me, I was a freak AND a geek from an early age, and that’s why I enjoy living in and writing about the carnival atmosphere. It’s always a little off-kilter; you can feel the dysfunction lurking close beneath the surface. There’s an intoxicating mix of fun, pride, and production magic in the air. When I first moved to Venice, there was the original Freak Show on the boardwalk, which was more of a weird, dusty cabinet of curiosities. They had the two-headed turtles and snakes out front to draw a crowd. Over time, some reality TV money came in and it grew into a full-fledged performance featuring an electric lady, a guy who would put a fish hook through his nose, a bearded lady, and more. Some crazy stuff went down, and it basically disappeared overnight. The boardwalk really hasn’t felt the same since. I ran into the bearded lady at a dive bar in New Orleans this past fall and she still didn’t want to talk about it. RG: When did you first have the idea for the book? How long did it take to write?JV: This book came to me in the early fall of 2016 in a way no other book has. We were facing that election and I could sense what was about to go down. I wanted to go to a place in my head where all the worst had already happened and the characters were on some sort of wayward, weary “uptick” again. It was my version of pressing an ambiguously optimistic fast-forward button, I suppose. I wanted the characters to feel hope, and to feel sexy, and to also be inevitably doomed. The first draft came to me faster than any before, in just over two months. Of course there have been years of revisions since, but the “first take” came out from somewhere pure and almost prewritten. I had the “lightning fingers.” Just like it’s supposed to feel, but hardly ever does. RG:A strange and wonky energy tugged and pushed at all those wandering the Venice Beach boardwalk at dusk. Drifters and vagrants scattered in search of shelter. Robotic security scanned the souvenir shops as the owners shuttered their doors and windows, preparing for a tumultuous night of hot gusts blowing in from Santa Ana. Airborne grit and grime coated the heaping piles of abandoned technology and covered benches and turbo-tennis courts like dirty snow. Outside gyms and the silicone skate bowl grew littered with fallen palm fronds and feathers.Venice Beach is your location. How did you settle upon this place as the main focus of the novel? In what ways does the version of Venice Beach shown in the book differ from the reality?JV: Venice Beach has always had a profound effect on me. I moved clear across the country in 2006 just to take a chance that I’d be able to live here, and I’ve held on tight ever since. It’s a place that helps me make more sense to myself, gives me a deep inner peace…. Basically, a soulmate manifested as a place. And since I couldn’t marry it, I wrote a fictional tribute to it. My only hope was to be able to capture it in a way that conveyed the full range of the colors, art, creativity, characters and electricity in the air, here; that demonstrates the freak haven that it is and will hopefully always be. You can go out wearing absolutely anything and people don’t bat an eye. As someone from a small town, this feels endlessly refreshing. All types of people can be found in Venice Beach, making it arguably the best people watching in the world. The juxtaposition of the boardwalk and Abbot Kinney Blvd, as gritty as it can be glamorous. Venice Peach’s version of Venice is kind of like the real one on hallucinogenics. I wanted the book to be a trippy reflection of it – a place where bizarre people collide and accept each other for their differences, but distorted enough that you could believe you were in an altered version of it. RG: Until recently the idea of a robot president would’ve horrified most voters of whatever political persuasion, now it doesn’t seem an unreasonable option. How do you view the president’s role in the book?JV: The weirdest part about the robot president role, President TBD 3000, is that I wrote it before AI took off… Back in 2016, I’m not even sure I’d heard the initials yet. It was just a funny (in its awfulness) idea to me. I could never have guessed that it would become so much more relevant – and maybe even possible. Hard to comment much more without spoilers, but… I think that President TBD’s role in the book holds up eight years later, miraculously. RG: A juicy peach with dark glasses adorns the front of the book. What’s the story behind the cover?JV: The cover art is the work of Venice muralist/street artist Muckrock. Her artwork is everywhere in Los Angeles, especially Westside since she lives here in Venice. I’ve been a fan of hers as long as I’ve lived here, and Muckrock is someone who shows up for her community in pure punk rock fashion. My band Movie Club collaborated with her in 2019 for a music video, and she was so cool about it that it became my dream to have her design cover art for my Venice-based book. I gave her no real direction, as it should be when you hire a master of their craft. I just said, “Do your version of a Venice peach,” and Muckrock spray-painted this icon onto a wall in an alley here in Venice Beach in about 20 minutes. You have to work fast when you’re a street artist. And as expected, she nailed it. It has since been covered up, sadly, but that’s how it goes in the world of street art. But it will live on forever on the cover. RG: Magic practice and the act of divination is part of the Venice Peach world. What led you to incorporate the ideas of witchcraft and Tarot into the book?JV: Venice Beach has as much dark magic as light, and is a potent place for witchcraft. Tarot readers are all over the boardwalk. Psychics are posted up on corners with neon signs. Tourists love to get their futures told and palms read here. Sacrificial animals have been found on the beach. A raw food cult used to have a members-only “garage” here, and I got to peep it a few times because I was trying out the raw food diet and hanging out with members with names like Pineapple Head and Vanilla Bean. There are all sorts of interesting stories about the now-abandoned cult/church structure on Rose Avenue that a famous actor from the 90s used to own. Sexy cult stories… No one has bought it since. I’m practically dying to see inside, and have often imagined posing as a buyer just to get the tour. RG:All together, there was an effortlessness to their sound that made Tiny Tin Heart an analog band that the locals had come to know and love like they were the next big thing – though it would be near impossible to reach that kind of status because the live music scene had almost completely died out. Most venues had transformed into sports bars or DJ-fueled nightclubs. And it was known that fame, in general, took longer than ever these days, thanks to the oversaturation of Everything On Earth. Music, and the music industry, plays an important part in the novel. How has your individual experience in that world fed into the book?JV: I’ve been playing and listening to music as often as I write and read books my whole life, and I often feel compelled to write musician characters that include perspectives on the music industry. I try to include a lot of angles – from the characters who do it as a hobby, to those relentlessly driven by burning passion, to the ones primarily in it for fame and fortune. Being on the frontlines of the indie music scene, I often marvel at its advances and setbacks. Too often, things get lost in translation. It’s wild to see how many talented performers struggle and sabotage on platforms because they don’t get the results/response they feel they deserve. Artists can do backflips for attention and only sometimes get it, and even then, the translation to lasting fans, ticket sales, record deals and profit margins is far from guaranteed. Big agencies keep reviving the old days of music – reunion tours, giant nostalgic festival lineups – because back when music was only sold in tangible form, people would listen over and over to the same bands and the songs came to really mean something to them. Nowadays, it is truly difficult to make a lasting and sustainable impact. We see more and more small venues folding, and that is a hard thing to watch. But we must continue on in the face of adversity, and hopefully inspire others to do their part to never let the indie music scene die because community support keeps people putting themselves out there. There’s a rare form of connective energy that is passed through the early stages of growth that is absolutely essential to both the performers and the listeners. And that is the point that Tiny Tin Heart is at in the book, they’re creating that energy through their music, fueled by community support in an illegal underground speakeasy.RG: Did you listen to music while writing the book? Are there bands or artists you would recommend to Venice Peach readers?JV: I almost always listen to music while writing… During this first draft I was obsessed with Frank Ocean’s Blonde, which had just dropped at the time. I had Warpaint’s entire repertoire on heavy rotation. These quirky Canadian bands I’d discovered called The Unicorns and Mother Mother. Tame Impala’s first two albums. “Lo-Fi Hip Hop Beats” Youtube playlist as well. RG: The titular Venice Peach is revealed to be a juice and smoothie place. What is your best ever smoothie?JV: OK, I am lazy when it comes to making smoothies and I reeeeeally don’t enjoy paying $20 for one, so I don’t really drink them often… but if there was a Venice Peach Specialty Smoothie, these would be the ingredients:-Frozen white peaches-Almond milk-Dash of fresh mango-Dash of cinnamon -Coconut cream vegan yogurt-2 scoops protein powder-Bee Pollen-Maca Powder-CBD oilAnd it would inexplicably cost $8 so everyone could afford to GET SOME!RG: Your characters face encounters with robotic police, and many aspects of society function under surveillance. They confront the dilemma of whether to reluctantly kowtow to a technocracy, or consider resistance. What is your own relationship to the technological aspects of contemporary life? What, if anything, do you resist?JV: I’ll try to harness my tendency to rant on this subject… but I resist nearly everything. Even dumb things. I’m contrary by nature, and decidedly a luddite. It’s in my blood and my star chart, I think. I’m a triple Taurus. I’ve never used any form of AI that wasn’t forced on me (Google, Meta, looking at YOU). Updates drive me insane and I delay until forced, and then see red about being forced. I’ll never own a Siri or Alexa and only speak to them if absolutely necessary, and they seem to sense my hatred because they never do what I tell them anyway. I fight to do things the hard way because I am a stubborn bull, and I don’t want to get soft, spoiled and lazy, or forget how to do things myself. RG:Bobobo was deeply devoted to a female duck, but she was unfortunately not faithful to him, as she couldn’t resist having offspring each year. It drove him wild but he stayed by her side (or usually in the murky water underneath her).How do you describe your creation, Bobobo? JV: Hehehe… Bobobo is a paranormal creature who willed himself into existence. For years, I’d been playing around with this idea for a children’s book, “Cassandra and the Canal Creature” – but every time I tried to write it, the canal creature just came across as creepy… Venice Peach was finally (and shockingly) the right home for the concept. It turned out to be the complete opposite of a children’s story, the storyline mounting to perhaps the dirtiest scene I have ever written. There is a certain vibe to the canals that I’ve always felt could produce a uniquely magical being, and the canals are both pretty as well as pretty scummy and dirty, and I guess that had to come through in the being’s personality as well. I could not tell you where the name came from. Absolutely no idea. And for some reason, in my head his voice has always been that of the great narrator of Winnie the Pooh, Jim Cummings. RG:It was probably nothing. But the part had come to mean too much at this point. Gerard’s entire future depended on landing this role. The director, Ty Beck, was one of the last few directors worth working with. The industry had completely gone to shit and most productions out there were written by algorithms starring holograms. Gerard was only interested in doing the real thing, and therefore hadn’t sold his image, voice and likeness profile off yet.Which movie would each of your characters choose as their favorite?JV: Really fun question. They’d have to all be classics… Odessa’s favorite movie would be Natural Born Killers. Stevia’s would be Return to Oz. Auggie’s would be Dude, Where’s My Car? Dr. Phil’s would be the original Blade Runner. Bobobo’s would be E.T. Cassandra would dig Tank Girl. Gerard would love industry meta flicks like Tropic Thunder and Bowfinger. And Matt Bogart would claim a tie between Pulp Fiction and Swingers. RG: Classic band tensions and twisted dynamics plague the novel’s group Tiny Tin Heart. Clashes of personality, ego, and music direction arise, as is a common story. How did you approach this aspect? Any real-life bands or artists an influence?JV: Hah! Too many to count … Yes, a life spent collaborating with and observing all sorts of musicians has influenced the way I portray the band members. All writing is a collage, I think, of life experience, your hopes/fears, and what the plotline benefits from. But as far as the matter of whether there are any direct references here, there are not. Each of the members of Tiny Tin Heart is entirely unique, and also a mass conglomeration of musicians who came before them. RG:Venice Peach introduces the concept of superdoom. How does superdoom differ from ordinary doom?JV: I had a lot of fun with the concept of “superdoom on the supermoon…” Feels very SoCal. It’s intended to be silly, but also feels very real as far as the hyperspeed humanity has been entering of late. As a millennial, it has truly been wild to watch the acceleration within the span of my own lifetime. Ordinary doom was for people to speculate about humanity in the 1900s. The 2000s increasingly feel like a superdoomed time, a period in which having optimism for the future gets more and more hard. I look back on my college years and think about how differently I got to envision the future than the kids in college right now, and that feels both sad and special, you know? The world was still holding itself together a little more tightly back in the early 2000s. Then I graduated and went into the previously thriving magazine industry, and things took a downward turn. So I parlayed into film and TV production, which is also somehow in an insanely tumultuous state right now. And that’s just my own experience. So many people in so many industries have been doing the same shitshow shuffle at lightspeed lately. And I feel for the newer generations who may not get to have rosy optimism at any point in their youth. To me, that is the real definition of what superdoom is. RG:Auggie was pissed off. During the Venice Pier portion of their afternoon walk, Cackles the cursed seagull had latched onto Auggie and Rusty. It was understood through local folklore that whomever the gull latched on to would fall victim to hard times. The ugly bird trumpeted his terrible caws of doom while hovering over him and his poor dog, thoroughly creeping them both out. Fishermen pointed and clucked at them sympathetically while the gull’s grim shrieking painted everything with a dark and ominous foreboding.Rusty the Dog, Fonsie the Snake, Cackles the cursed seagull, Pansy the cat: Venice Peach is a damned menagerie. Your animal creations are gifted with some of the most memorable scenes in the book. How do you view the animal presence in Venice Peach?JV: It is an odd and funny animal cast in Venice Peach! I’ve always been obsessed with animals. When I was little, I used to want to be a zookeeper. Animals hold so much charm in their personalities and presence, and I just wanted to honor their contribution to the overall Venice vibe. I have always been a firm believer that animals make everything better and think that certainly extends to fiction as well. Another thing about animals is that they’re hypersensitive, but also immune to our politics and social bullshit, so they are the most clear and unbiased readers of the room, and it’s always so fun to play with that. RG:Venice Peach presents a warped, funhouse mirrored version of contemporary politics and social trends. What roles do satire and absurdity take in your work?JV: A big one, I’d say. I grew up enamored with Mark Vonnegut and Tom Robbins, and their styles imprinted deeply into me. In my opinion, there’s no better way to make sociopolitical commentary than through satirical fiction. It’s a language all of its own, a timeless way to present the times. It’s kind of like drawing a caricature of society, enlarging certain aspects and adding weird flourishes. And as for the absurd – everything is already so absurd these days, it only seemed natural to piggyback off of that. For me, there is terrific tension when you realize you are suddenly immersed in a world where anything can – and probably will – happen. RG:Two months later, his wife had announced that she was having an affair with his best friend and leaving him. That was when Philip officially gave up on partaking in emotions altogether. He surrendered to the betraying nature of human beings, the crushingly individualistic, overwhelmingly capitalist society he lived in, and the numbness that the societal structure demanded in order to survive. He wanted nothing more to do with anything even slightly related to caring. Underlying the wildness of the book is a sense of aching dissatisfaction, and your characters express mixed feelings on the world they inhabit. They are reared on devices, in therapy, struggling to relate to others on even a basic level, and hungering for intellectual stimulation. What do you view as the dark heart of the book?JV: Ah, poor Philip… The psychotherapist who is tragically unable to fix himself. He does, however, make some attempt to break through his own walls eventually… I suppose the dark heart of the book is that humanity is pretty screwed, and things will surely get even more grim, but the truth is that we’ve never really figured it out, have we? No one can point to a time in which things were “sympatico” here on Earth. Even the dinosaurs seem to have done something fatally wrong, hah. So why not break through our innate discomfort and inherited despair to make our best, most honest and brave grab at joy that we can? We shouldn’t let anyone or anything repress our ability to do what we love and be who we truly are. It’s just like the Beastie Boys said, you have to fight for your right to party, you have to fight for your right to get a good vibe going and protect that flame. RG:Ever since the Hollywood zombies had almost captured and converted Gerard into their gruesome and feral kind, he’d been on a junk food sex spree to end all junk food sex sprees. He’d gotten off with only a fractured ankle, and the titanium air-cast he wore to heal triple-time turned out to only help his game. Sympathy was apparently a major turn-on for some women. And he had major survival horniness. It all combined into one perfect sex storm and suddenly there weren’t enough women in the world to satisfy him.Freaky characters mean freaky sex, and your characters approach this with gusto. How did you approach this aspect? Are there any scenes that didn’t make it into the book?JV: Hey, now… Sounds like you want a Venice Peach “Deleted XXX Scenes” black-market chapbook, here. I guess I should get on that in case what’s already in the book isn’t spicy enough for *ahem* some people… No seriously, the coolest thing about publishing with an indie press is that 9 times out of 10, they are down to keep all the good parts. I’ve gotten lucky twice in that department. I’m someone who is always disappointed by authors who skip forward to the next morning right as a scene is getting good, so I like to “put out” in the literary sense. It’s all in there, baby. As for how I approached writing the dirty scenes, it’s hard to say. The sex lives of these characters feels like just another facet of their personalities that’s already there and I’m just pulling up the curtain. RG: Do you have an ideal reader in mind when writing?JV: I think most indie fiction writers are writing for their own amusement, then crossing their fingers and praying that what they enjoy is somewhat marketable and relatable to others. When shopping this book around, one small press told me it was “more on the commercial side” than what they publish. It weirdly gave me hope, even though it was still a rejection. Originally, I wrote this to compete with Netflix and HBO shows on an entertainment and pacing level, because let’s face it, they are the most popular storytelling platforms out there. It’s a good thing writers can easily compete with their budgets, as our imaginations can do anything for free. RG: When you reflect on the writing of the book, what comes to mind? Are there associations of place, people or time?JV: Absolutely. As mentioned, the first draft was born in the fall of 2016. I had shattered my leg skateboarding that previous spring and was finally somewhat healed, so there was a strong feeling of gratitude to be in motion, to have made it through that hard time. I was in love with the show Bojack Horseman, and had never before wished I had been in a writing room to that extent. I was working in production, and some of the people and experiences were inspirational to the book to some degree, so I will always remember what I was working on at the time. RG:Venice Peach is released by Maudlin House. What attracted you to work with them and how have you found the process?JV: I first came upon Maudlin House and publisher Mallory Smart through her very cool calling card; her podcast called Textual Healing. It’s all about the music we listen to while writing, and I was delighted when she agreed to have me on the show. It was spring of 2023 at the time, and I was gearing up for the release of my first novel, Secret Rules to Being a Rockstar, which is about dysfunctional Hollywood musicians in the 90s. It was a great chat, and Mallory was truly supportive of my mission. It left me with a feeling we should work together more. I was excited to blurb her music-centric book I Keep My Visions to Myself last year. Then we got together with two other authors who write about musicians, Claire Hopple and Kirsti MacKenzie, and recorded a group episode of the podcast Rock is Lit thanks to the amazing host Christy Alexander Hallberg. It only seemed like a natural fit, by this point, that my weird book with three musical main characters would find its rightful home at Maudlin House, a music-loving indie press with the motto “Keep Maudlin Weird.” Mallory and her partner (and husband) Bulent have been very open to my ideas on the cover design as well as interior edits. Publishing is such a grueling industry, so it feels like such a gift when you find people who are chill to work with, responsive, and down to go the distance to see your dream through. RG:Fuck the future. Join the freak circus.What’s next for you? JV: I’m actually going to be living in the freak circus all summer… I’m also a drummer and my band Movie Club is going on a “Psychedelic Circus” tour to celebrate the book release. We have dates in Venice (Townhouse, 6/10), San Francisco (Make-Out Room, 6/11), Eugene (Sam Bond’s Garage, 6/12), Portland (No Fun Bar, 6/13), Seattle (Baba Yaga, 6/14), Olympia (The Crypt, 6/15), Bend (Silver Moon, 6/17), Santa Cruz (Sub Rosa, 6/18), and Culver City (Village Well, 7/12). We're also producing a Maudlin House x Movie Club Musical Reading for the 40th anniversary of Printers Row in Chicago at Gallery Cabaret on Saturday, Sept. 6th, 2025. The event will feature over a dozen rockstar readers performing spoken word over Movie Club's live instrumental rock n' roll. The goal behind these “Psychedelic Circus” events we’ve been putting on in Los Angeles (six pretty epic ones so far) is to incorporate a sense of broader community in live events, joining talents that usually get separated in one rocking variety show of sorts. Why shouldn’t writers get to read to live rock music? Or theremin players get to sit in for full band anthems alongside burlesque dancers? Each date will feature local special guest performances, plus I will be doing short readings from Venice Peach over ambient guitar. I hope to meet many fellow freaks fighting the future out on the road. Godspeed.
We happened upon the enormous hole by chance. It was a tremendous hole. The largest I have ever found. Perhaps twenty feet in diameter and located in some woods along the Southern State Parkway. The walls of the hole were perfectly flat and thus of unnatural design, although I cannot say who would have dug such a thing. I could not see to the bottom. I threw a rock in and listened to it bounce against the walls, and listened to the sound grow fainter and fainter and eventually vanish altogether. Of course I urinated in the hole. My need to urinate is why I happened upon the hole in the first place. I found the lack of report unsatisfying.Bladder cleared, I trudged back through the tall grass. Stewart waited in my car’s passenger seat. I give Stewart too much credit: it was not We who found the hole. The hole finding was done by Me and Me alone. If Stewart says otherwise, know that he is a liar and that his generation is brain damaged from lead poisoning. I told Stewart through the window to hold on a bit longer, I needed to make a call. He did not look up from his phone, but gave an okay sign with his thumb and index finger. P. answered. She said, Yes? I said, The hole you are looking for is eastbound off of exit 42. Beyond the grass. Watch for the swaying pine. Then I hung up. Being cryptic was a running joke between P. and I.I returned to the car and told Stewart of the enormous hole. Obviously he wanted to see for himself. I assumed this would be a quick thing, so I trudged again with Stewart in tow. The swaying pine which would possibly not be swaying by the time P. arrived swayed over us. Presently, this pine swayed quite a bit. More so than the other pines, at least. Its plumage was robust. Stewart and I stood at the edge of the enormous hole and gandered.“It makes me wonder,” Stewart said. “This life is full of beauty and mystery and there are so many things that we’ll never find.”Waxing poetic again. There was little in the way of mystery in regards to this hole and even less in the way of beauty. I said, “Howsabout we go back to the car and get out of here. I would like to eat. I am withering away.”“But who would dig this thing?” he asked. “I do not know, Stewart.”“I can’t see the bottom at all.” He went down to his stomach and peered over the edge of the hole with his phone flashlight. “Me either, Stewart.”“I’d like to climb down there and have a look.”“I’d like to leave, Stewart.”“Somebody dug this hole for a reason and I, for one, am itching to discover that reason.”I would never have told Stewart this, but I wished to be long gone before P’s arrival. P. and I have a speckled past and I still to this day find it best to avoid her in person at all cost. Stewart in the mix compounds things. Based on where P. lived and her style of driving, I estimated her arrival to land within the next twenty minutes.“I have three hundred and fifty two meters of climbing rope in my backpack,” Stewart continued. “This pine tree is more than thick enough to support me. Although I don’t like how it’s rocking.”Before I could respond, Stewart began tying the rope to the pine. The pine swayed in a way that could possibly have been interpreted as annoyance, if pines got annoyed. “What is your plan for getting back up?” I asked. The sides of the hole were near perfect in terms of smoothness: this hole-digging was the work of a professional. “I reach the bottom, you untie the tree, you retie me to the car hitch, you pull me out. I thought you were the college boy.”I often grow tired of Stewart, but an unfortunate fact is that we will be together until the bitter end. And I will admit a fantasy of this bitter end glided across my mind as Stewart donned his climbing harness, as he slid the rope through the appropriate hooks and carabiners, as he pulled the rope taught and leaned back against the edge of the hole, and as he hopped back and descended into the cave. Yes, the wicked fantasy glided in a most elegant way as I listened to his feet slap the wall. But despite the occasional fantasy of Stewart’s death, I still love the guy. Those things are not mutually exclusive. I would never, say, loosen the rope from the swaying pine and listen to Stewart plummet to his doom. No, I stood on the edge of the cave and watched him hop his way down. I yelled, “How’s it looking down there, buddy?” My voice echoed and his voice echoed back, “Like a cold, dark hole.”“It is enormous, is it not?”He said, “This hole is of a depth unencountered in my years of hole-diving.” Which is something I knew to be true. “I want a photo next to it when we’re finished,” he said. There was silence, and then he asked, his voice growing feint, “Do you ever wonder if there are irreconcilable differences between the generations?”I lied. I said, “I am unsure, Stewart. I would prefer not. I would prefer that you and I are basically the same. But who knows, the world changes and with it so do we.”I could not make out Stewart’s reply. It grew dark. A red Corvette pulled up behind my car. This red Corvette belonged to P. She got out of the car but kept it running. She stepped into the headlights and I felt small eruptions in my gut. P’s hair is the color of Autumn. She always smells like a fresh batch of snickerdoodles. I still to this day find the scar on her face pleasing in an unconventional way. She paused in the headlights and sashayed. She knew what she was doing. Then she pushed her way through the tall grass and said, “We’re going to have to check ourselves for ticks.” She noticed the climbing rope. “Why in the name of the lord Jesus is Stewart doing that now?” Just then, the rope went slack. For a moment, we thought there had been an accident, but several tugs on the rope indicated that Stewart had in fact reached the bottom. “I admire Stewart’s bravery,” P. continued. “He’s a man who doesn’t shy from risk. A man who knows just what excites a woman. A man with arms muscular from a life of hard work. I’d like to wrap myself around a man his age and climb him like a primate.”I walked to the edge of the hole. I spread my arms out wide. I closed my eyes and fantasized about leaning forward, the rush of wind parachuting my clothes and watering my eyes.“Don’t be ridiculous again,” P. said. “I’m only talking ish.” “I’m just hungry,” I lied. “We can hit that diner you like so much. The one with the pork flambe.”Stewart’s rope continued slacking and tightening. The pine continued to sway.“Don’t you have work to do?” I asked.“A hole this enormous is going nowhere,” P. said.“What do you think is down there?”“Probably a hole lot of nothing. Get it?”Stewart’s rope slacked and tightened in an impatient manner. I find the older generation pushy. They want what they want and they want it now. I untied Stewart’s rope from the swaying pine and retied it to my car hitch and P. showed me how to tie a figure eight. I wanted to yank Stewart out of this hole and be done with the night. I was hungry for pork flambe. I wanted to feast. P. remained at the hole to supervise.Stewart left my car radio on a vintage jazz station. Velvety trombone filled the cab. I switched to four wheel drive and crawled along the shoulder of the parkway. Every couple of feet I braked. If the rope went slack after braking I would know Stewart was out of the hole. I figured that part out by myself because Stewart was right about me being a smart college boy. I turned the jazz off and rolled the windows down so that I would be able to hear of any developments from P. The commuters had already gone home. Cicadas buzzed, a bat skittered overhead, a light breeze carried from the south. It was overall a peaceful scene. In the rearview, I watched Stewart’s rope lit up by my tail lights. The rope pulled against the non-swaying trees and created a sort of pulley system. Stewart only bought quality rope and so there was no worry of fraying, but if I floored the accelerator, something tragic would have happened, or even if perhaps I simply untied the rope. I hit the brake. The rope was still tight. I shifted the car to park. Yes, both options were tempting. But Stewart and I will be together until the bitter end. I shifted to drive and continued on at a steady ten miles per hour. I braked once more and the rope went slack. I got out of the car and heard P. and Stewart calling my name.
My buddy Pilot comes to visit. Says it’ll do him good to get out of town for a couple days—new scenery, change of pace, leave the normal life problems and complications and stresses behind. But also we’ve been wanting and meaning to hang out for a while. The new scenery and change of pace and leaving behind of life’s problems and complications and stresses are all bonus. Icing on the cake, cherry on top. All that. It’s sunny out, blue skies, warm. It is beautiful, in that way that can feel unique and special to the Pacific Northwest. We make pizzas. I got Lili a pizza oven a couple Christmases ago, which means I got us a pizza oven a couple Christmases ago; we’ve made pizza once, sometimes twice a week, every week since. Mostly for ourselves, but also when entertaining. When friends come to town and we replace life’s problems and complications and stresses with food and ease and friendship.Pilot raves about the pizza, and we say we know, because we’ve gotten good at making pizza and we know it. Still. When he raves about it, it makes us proud. We eat and drink and share stories and volley compliments back and forth and round and round.Making food for your friends. Sharing time with loved ones. Beautiful, warm, sunny, Pacific Northwest blue sky days. Getting good at something. Sharing that thing with others. Friends giving you honest, proud compliments. Friends, in general. Gifts, all. Life can be gifts, all the way down, when you let it be.Lili asks Pilot how his summer has been so far, and he says he’s been writing a lot. Lili knows that, because Pilot’s been sending me new stories as he’s been writing them, and I keep telling her about them, but she nods and tells him that’s great.I can’t publish any of them cause they’re all about my divorce, Pilot says. But it's all that's coming out right now, he says.I remember that, I say. Meaning, getting divorced. Meaning, it being all I could think or talk about. They’re really great, I say. Each is more fun and stupid and inventive than the last, I say. As a compliment to Pilot and also to Lili, though she knows. I’ve said that to her before, too. We have a few more beers, and tell some more stories, about writing and divorce, about friendship and food, about life and art.
***
The next day, we have a lazy morning. In the afternoon, we walk down to the waterfront for happy hour. Oysters and tuna tartar and beef skewers and pineapple shrimp and cocktails. It’s happy hour, so everything is discounted, but we’re on the waterfront and so everything is expensive. We complain about the prices, while ordering more than we can eat and second and third rounds of drinks. We each agree when someone else says how beautiful the day is; we each, when it is our turn, say how wonderful life can be. Full and a little tipsy, we walk along the waterfront and Pilot says he really wants to see an orca. Do you think we’ll see an orca? he says. How magical would it be if we see an orca? he says. I guess it isn’t really orca season, is it? he says. I kinda feel like it would solve all my problems and complications and stresses and be magical if we get to see an orca, he says. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen an orca here along this waterfront. It feels both like I have and haven’t. It feels both impossible and likely. I tell Pilot we’ve seen a few seals swimming around in the water and that always feels special. He asks if there’s sea lions here too, and I say I think there are but I can’t remember for sure. We don’t see an orca.We don’t see any seals or sea lions either. It’s ok. We go out for tiki drinks, and we share more stories and we re-share the same stories we’ve already shared and we recap everything from earlier in the day, and the night before. Lili is giggling her drunk giggle and Pilot is glowing like he doesn’t have a care in the world and my face is warm like I probably got a little too much sun.At our table inside the tiki bar, we’re on an island, or in a boat, or under water. Maybe all three. We’re pirates and sailors and explorers and mermaids and mermen and sea captains. We order another round. We cheers orcas.The walk and the day and our lives and the the view of the water and the sun on our faces and the tiki bar and sharing stories and sharing meals and getting drinks together and escaping our lives for a couple of days and friendship—ours, specifically, but also just friendship, in general— and getting to tourguide a friend around somewhere you love? Gifts. Magic! There can be magic anywhere—everywhere—if you know where to look. That isn’t really what this story is about though.
***
Revisiting this story months after first writing it, I’m unsure what it really is about. I’m unsure if I knew at the time, when I first wrote it, and have since forgotten; or maybe I was always unsure and I wrote that sentence as something of a reminder to figure it out at some point during revisions; or maybe I was unsure, but I was ok with that, and I wrote the sentence just because I liked the sound and feel and idea of it.I’m leaving it now.I like the sound and feel and idea of it.And what it’s really about isn’t really up to me, anyway. That’s for you. To decide, or to decide that it isn’t up to you either and that it doesn’t really matter.That’s ok, too.
***
The next day Pilot returns home, and Lili and I take the ferry to one of the nearby islands. She’s never been on a ferry before, and I’m reminded how special it can be to experience something with someone for their first time. The ferry ride is fun and cool, and the views are beautiful, and it all feels a little like make-believe. And then watching all of that through Lili’s eyes, reflected on her face and in her smile and radiating out from her whole body, makes everything even many-fold times true. On the island, we drive along the coast and comment on the tide being so low. We walk through a farmers market; we eat lunch and have a drink; we walk through the downtown like tourists to whom everything is new and discoverable and anything is possible. We drive across the island to a park and we go on a hike through the woods and then we walk along the beach. We see a sign about local sea animals. The sign tells us about the seals and sea lions and porpoises and orcas in these waters. The sign places them on a scale of how frequent they can be seen, from common to occasional to seldom. We drive back across the island and get another drink and another meal. We drive along the coast going the other way and comment on the tide now being so high. Magic! we say. Magic! we both believe, in this moment, even if not in others.
***
In that previous draft of this story, Pilot was Kevin. Because the stuff in this story that actually happened, happened with my buddy Kevin, when he came to visit.I’m unsure why the change.When I first wrote this story, I was in the middle of a burst of writing. Every few days, and sometimes every day, I’d write a new short story, inspired by something Kevin, or our other friend D.T., texted to our groupchat. I’d copy and paste it into a Google doc and use it as a springboard into another 600-1800 word piece of autofiction about us, and writing, and friendship, and telling stories and life and seeing art and magic and beauty everywhere you look. D.T. texted that he needed a break from life, and so I wrote a story about a guy quitting his job and driving around the country, visiting friends and meeting strangers, buying a boat and learning how to sail, becoming a follower of different religions and denouncing others, all looking for meaning and for purpose. Kevin texted that divorce was like God sawing off parts of your body, and so I wrote a story about God telling a woman to saw off her partner’s limbs, adding in narrative references to the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. God didn’t tell the woman in my story to sacrifice her partner, only to saw off his limbs, and also He didn’t stop her at the last minute like He did with Abraham. When I told my girlfriend about that one, I expected her to make fun of me for writing story after story after story after story where Kevin and D.T. keep popping up, but instead she glommed onto the surreal body horror part. Which surprised me, because normally she looked at me like what the fuck are you talking about? when I described one of my more surreal or speculative stories, but also because I’d forgotten that was even what the story was about. I’d gotten so distracted by how Kevin and D.T. keep popping up in them. She told me she used to have this idea for a story about someone cutting off their skin so it would grow back healthier and blemish free.I could write that story! I said, and went and got my laptop and opened up a blank Google doc and started typing. In the story, the narrator cuts off his skin so it will grow back healthier and blemish free. He works from home and orders delivery and never leaves the house, waiting to reenter the world as a whole new version of himself. But his skin never grows back. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to make of this miscalculation. Doesn't have any idea how to make sense of this world at all, now that he thinks about it. He has an idea. He sits down and writes a story and when he gets stuck, these two characters, his friends, Kevin and D.T., appear out of nowhere in the story and tell him what to do next, or they do something funny, or they say some non sequitur that doesn’t literally tell him what to do next and isn’t technically funny, but it makes him laugh and gives him an idea for how to proceed. He finishes the story and sends it to the Kevin and D.T. in his story.I sent the story to the Kevin and D.T. in my actual life.Is this your whole thing now? D.T. texted.I like it, Kevin texted. I didn’t say I didn’t like it, D.T. texted.I like it, too, I texted. They’re fun. I keep trying to write something fun and stupid and inventive, I texted. But every story just keeps ending up being earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted.But that’s fun and stupid and inventive, too, Kevin texted. That’s just your version. I wrote the bonkers version and yours is just a little happier and like you had a good day, he texted.Are they just dumb and repetitive though? I texted.They feel like iterations, but not really repetitive, Kevin texted.And so what if they are repetitive, D.T. texted.The so what and also the word iterations gave me another idea and I wrote a story about a guy writing a story about a guy writing a story about a guy writing a story. I lost track of how many levels or layers of story-within-a-story it was. I told my girlfriend about the story, describing the story itself and also my writing it, and how I sent it to Kevin and D.T. and they said it was earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted, and how that surprised me. I told her about how writing is weird, how you’ll have one idea and start writing it, but then it will become something else without you meaning it to, sometimes without you even realizing it, and she looked at me like I was stupid.She knew all that.I’d told her some version of that a million times.I kept writing stories like this. I didn’t know what to do with them; they felt too meta for anyone else to care, but they were so fun and Kevin and D.T. said they were fun and when I told my girlfriend I finished another and described it to her she’d roll her eyes and look at me like you’re so dumb or like what the fuck are you talking about? but also she’d say it sounded fun, and she’d laugh, and it would light up her face and the room and our lives and the world and God would smile down on us and say, Aaron, that one was even more fun and stupid and inventive than your last, and also even more earnest and open-hearted.And then, time passed, and I revisited these stories. This story. I again feared it was dumb and repetitive, but I also liked the idea of it being in conversation with some others I’d written. So I changed Kevin to Pilot.Pilot is the name I sometimes use for a best friend character in my stories. The Pilot character is usually a fictionalized version of one of my friends, though not any one of them specifically. It rotates. Sometimes it's an amalgamation. It’s never my friend who is a pilot, though. That would feel too on the nose. In the last story I wrote about a character inspired by my friend who is a pilot, his name was Matt. That isn’t his name, though it is the name of another of my friends. My friend Matt has appeared in a couple essays I’ve written, but I don’t think ever a fiction, so I’ve never changed his name to anything. He made an appearance in a piece of fiction by my ex that was kind of about me, and she changed his name to Luke. He jokes about that sometimes. But then, I couldn’t help myself, so now there’s all these sections that are still and again about Kevin and D.T.It is kind of dumb, and repetitive. Or iterative. And I don’t know what it’s “about.” But it feels fun. And just might be the bonkers story I’d been chasing. Though maybe even just thinking that means it’s actually the most earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted. It’s the most everything. Which is maybe what the story is about. Fun and stupid and inventive, or earnest and nostalgic and open-hearted, every story seemed to be about how, every now and then, if you’re paying attention, if you’re open to it, the whole world can be about anything and everything.
***
On the ferry ride home from the island, Lili and I go to the top deck and watch the island recede behind us. The sun is starting to set and it’s bouncing off the water and everything is lit up in gold. There’s a whale off the right of the ferry, a voice alerts us over a loudspeaker. Everyone on the ferry runs to the right side of the boat, hoping to see the orca. My girlfriend gets there first. I saw it! she says. I saw the whale!We’re all staring at the water, staring into the sun bouncing off the water, looking around, looking for a quick glimpse of something to prove that magic is real.I see something in the water. It submerges, surfaces a little further away, then submerges again. A seal or sea lion, probably; a fin of a porpoise, possibly; an orca, maybe even. I keep watching and watching and watching and watching and watching but don’t see anything else. I wonder if Lili saw the same thing I did, or something else. I wonder if she saw the orca and I missed it, or if she saw a seal or sea lion but wanted it to be a whale and so believed it was, or if I saw a whale but am too doubtful and so believed it wasn’t. The same voice over the loudspeaker now tells us that we are almost to shore and to return to our vehicles. Our trip and our journey and our day is almost over.But first I close my eyes. I feel the sun on my face and the crisp air on my skin. I’m silent and still and unthinking.I open my eyes and see an orca, and then another, and another, and another, and another. They’re everywhere. Cresting, submerging, spraying water up through their blowholes, swimming all around us. I watch and I smile and I laugh.I close my eyes again, and when I open them, the whales are gone. Just like that. We return below deck and get in our car and wait to be told when it is our turn to exit the ferry, back to the mainland, back to our normal lives.
With the short fiction collection My Child is a Stranger (AOS, 2025) Brandon Teigland offers a close reading of possible futures. Teigland’s exploratory voracity lays the groundwork for an examination of impulse, whether towards the limits of art or the human. The realm of theory has to live in our very real, fleshy heads, at least for now, but what happens when assumptions break down? I spoke to Brandon about this questing and interrogative collection.Rebecca Gransden: How long has the compilation of My Child is a Stranger taken you? What was the process of choosing the stories for inclusion like?Brandon Teigland: Over the past decade, while writing and publishing three other books, I was also assembling this collection—eighteen stories written between 2015 and 2025. In that time, the culture of contemporary fiction has changed. All the stories I've included in My Child is a Stranger are in some way about the time of their writing, whether they explicitly address the issues of the day or not. Everyone knows what these are: globalization, economic collapse, inequality, technological upheaval, environmental degradation, mass displacement, terror, war, and, with these, shifting ideas of what it means to be human.Is there a common thread among these? Probably not. As Jean-François Lyotard would say, there is no overarching metanarrative to explain and justify everything. There are only outcomes—ideas lived out in all their messy complexity. The 'child' in the title comes from Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, where he cites Isaiah 49: My child is a stranger, but a stranger who is not only mine, for he is me. He is me, a stranger to myself… However we relate to children in our own lives, the figure of the child—whether as an evasion or an embodiment of hope and despair—tells us something of the fears we as a species have for the future and what hope we invest in it.RG: What does the posthuman mean to you, and how does it manifest in your writing?BT: Posthumanism is a strange institution—one that allows us to be everything, anything. David Roden’s Disconnection Thesis suggests that posthumans would be radically different from humans because they would be 'disconnected' from existing human forms of life, practices, and conceptual frameworks. This disconnection isn’t just physical but involves a deeper ontological rupture—meaning posthuman beings may not be understandable in human terms, as they would operate outside the assemblage of human social systems.I see two kinds of posthumanism: ‘open’ posthumanism, which is unrestricted and capable of embodying anything, and ‘closed’ posthumanism, which imposes its own self-chosen limitations, restricting what posthumanism can be. I find both compelling and a little suspect, which is why I consider my writing a type of speculative posthumanism.Roden’s speculative posthumanism contrasts with critical posthumanism, which focuses on deconstructing the human concept within cultural and philosophical contexts. Instead, he considers the possible emergence of new kinds of beings beyond our ability to conceptualize—an unpredictable evolution where technology, biology, and autonomy break free from human structures. This aligns with my interest in posthumanism as a post-existential, almost unknowable state, where identity, transformation, and alienation lead to forms of existence outside human comprehension.To ask, ‘What is posthumanist literature?’ is to examine how writers might explore these feral forms of fabulist fiction. Literature is bound up with what it’s like to be us, to be human. How we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves. Posthuman literature matters not because it helps us understand who we are today, but because it asks who we might become, or not become, tomorrow.RG: “The Last Shape” explores themes of aging and decay, of the ravages of time. You highlight how the pursuit of ‘beating’ time, the thirst for life extension, can lead to a state that pollutes the living environment. How do you view the concept of deep time? What is the contemporary relationship to the idea of primitive memory and evolution?BT: In “The Last Shape”, Professor Ali Abbasi, a biogerontologist, ventures into California’s Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in search of Methuselah, haunted by dreams of being trapped among its twisted pines. He realizes these trees endure not through vitality but by existing in a half-dead state, mirroring his fear that extreme life extension leads to stagnation and detachment.As he ascends, he encounters a breath-like entity dormant within the roots, suggesting that longevity is not just biological but an unnatural disruption of time. When he descends, his own breathing has changed—his body altered, his humanity uncertain. The story critiques the philosophy of senescence as a postmortal impasse, where longer lifespans sever us from evolution, erasing primitive memory and disrupting the natural balance. Deep time, embodied in these trees, reveals that life and death are inseparable, and immortality is not a triumph but a corruption of identity. The pursuit of preservation doesn’t just pollute the environment—it pollutes the self, rendering us unrecognizable. True continuity lies not in defying death but in accepting the decay and renewal that sustain all life—offering no solace beyond nature’s endless cycle.RG: We each have to face our own apocalypse. The collection confronts apocalypticism on both a personal and societal scale. How do you view the modern era’s version of apocalypse? Is there an apocalyptic zeitgeist in the literary scene?BT: The apocalyptic realism of contemporary literature is an as-yet-unstated movement, forming new waves around writers who are realizing that there is no limit to what literature can do: it can do anything it wants. It can be raw, risky, and random—deliberately unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. Most significantly, it can embrace a wilder edge, a kind of optimistic nihilism—something like a Crowleyian call to 'Do what thou wilt.'RG:I chose the wrong means of escape. I took an awkward shortcut that led me right back to where I was, left to compound the horror of living there, in that place of no escape, with the exhaustion of the journey. Empty-handed and up to my ears in student debt. If I wasn’t a destroyed human being then, I am now. Stagnant and useless. Full of false sensation. False scorn and feeble hatred. Not knowing which it really is, scorn or hatred, I laugh.“The Naysayer” pays particular attention to the concept of ‘giving up.’ What does ‘giving up’ mean in this story? To what degree did you consider structure in your approach to “The Naysayer”?BT: “The Naysayer” is a novelette written with the experimentalism and exploration of postmodernism and pessimistic fiction, chronicling a protagonist who internalizes failure as a metaphysical and existential certainty. The narrator, a disillusioned student burdened by debt and an eroding sense of self, isolates himself in a rented room where he discovers a lost manuscript, A Theory of Giving Up, written by the enigmatic Detlef Stefan. This "taxonomy of failure" becomes the narrator’s gospel, shaping his understanding of human effort as futile and resigning him to a state of inertia.Giving up, in this story, is not simply surrender; it is a conscious philosophical act, an assertion of negative will, a final form of resistance against a world that demands constant forward motion. Structurally, “The Naysayer” parallels this philosophy by rejecting conventional narrative resolution, unfolding in recursive loops of failed attempts, lost texts, and abandoned thoughts. Each passage feels like a false start, a directionless intellectual meandering that reflects the narrator’s inability to progress in life. The disquiet of “The Naysayer” is not in catastrophe, but in its quiet insistence that all roads lead nowhere.RG: How do you feel about the idea of anonymity?BT: I prefer to be a known unknown—recognizable yet obscured, present but absent. Absolute anonymity doesn’t interest me, but neither does full visibility. Slavoj Žižek describes the “Bartlebian act” as a quiet refusal, an opting out rather than direct resistance, like Melville’s scrivener who “would prefer not to.” Writers like László Krasznahorkai cultivate a similar aura of mystery, remaining at the periphery of mainstream literary consciousness while exerting undeniable influence. Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms take this even further, fragmenting the self into multiple voices, each existing independently while the author remains elusive. In an era of constant self-performance, there’s value in resisting that pull, letting the work speak for itself, and leaving just enough space for the writing to haunt the reader.RG:I’m afraid to begin this story, a story with no definite end. There’s no single structure I can name here, no crystallized normality around which I can base the experience of my life, nothing that I can’t doubt any more than I can doubt the very room where I’m writing this now, a room in a city in a postanthropic culture on a planet in space. On an old bed, I lie down passively, supine, in a kind of resignation, and wait for the end.Are there stories that you are still afraid to begin?BT: “Cathedral of Spiders” collapses the boundary between fiction and nonfiction by making myself a character, testing how far self-mythologization can go before dissolving into alienation. The work teeters between self-aggrandizement—casting myself as the last human, the final perceiver—and the ironic deflation of that role through solipsism and cosmic insignificance. Writing becomes both an act of creation and self-destruction, a manuscript that longs to be burned yet refuses to end. I feared this erasure—not just of identity, but of the distinction between fiction and reality, between writing and self-annihilation, between the author and authored. The text spirals endlessly, a voice narrating its own extinction, unable to stop.RG: What does the future mean to you? Where would you like to take your writing?BT: The future is a place where writing literature is impossible—extro-literature. Extro-science fiction, as described by Quentin Meillassoux, explores worlds where science cannot be used to explain existence. It rejects science’s ability to establish objects or theories, confronting the idea that the laws of nature are not logically necessary. In a similar way, extro-literature suggests that writing itself becomes impossible in a future where meaning dissolves, where narratives are no longer anchored to human logic or perception.All my writing questions the limits of human-centered storytelling. I’m trying to understand how a posthuman novel both embodies and reshapes its own form—how a posthuman novel functions. If writing itself becomes impossible, what remains? Perhaps only fragments—stories that can no longer be told, slipping away. If posthumanism severs us from our origins, then posthuman literature must do the same—breaking away, leaving no meaning behind.
Everyone was lined up to watch. We’d waited months. Cassie sat beside me on the curb as her dad revved the engine of his bike. Ready. All eight cars from the night’s derby were bumper-to-tail in front of him like a canyon. He had cleared seven in Wichita once, but never eight. Cassie’s step-mother Luann had refused to show. Cassie and I both wore shirts with a graphic of him soaring through the air. He signed them earlier that day, laughed and apologized that he was out of the smaller sizes. “Christ sake, those look like dresses on you two...” Walking away we’d sniffed the signatures as they dried. We sat beneath a streetlight waiting for the jump. Our white shirts glowed. Her knees were tucked into hers like huge tits, she looked down at them and smiled at me. “Hope mine never get this big.” She made jokes when she was nervous. Her dad turned the throttle again, ZRRAANG....ZRRAANG. Carnival lights turned woozy in storefront windows as they shook. He took a last look at the ramp and then retreated to the end of the block for his approach. He was the coolest guy I had ever seen. My dad was on stage with the rest of the band and they all started banging away on their instruments. He was on drums. It was their first original tune all night, a rabid, crescendoed free-for-all. The engine screamed through its gears down the street toward us. The band stopped on my dad’s cue as the front tire reached the foot of the ramp. Our hearts beat into our ears. Eight cars. Cassie knew before anyone else. She realized Luann was right. That eight was too many. She pulled her knees from her shirt and sprinted toward where he would crash land, feet from where his helmet split against the street.
***
After that he was different of course. The bones eventually healed but his head never did. No more state fairs, no more jumps. And Cassie was different too. She threw away all those shirts because no one wanted them anymore, especially her. They sold his motorcycles to pay the hospital bills. He would shuffle through neighborhoods, never lifting his feet. Sometimes barely dressed. People whispered in their yards about him until it wasn’t interesting anymore. Finally he took a shotgun into the basement and finished what the crash had begun. The police took most of the mess away, but the blood was still there. Shards of bone were left behind too, some stuck in the ceiling tiles even. I heard my dad screaming into the phone the next day, furious. “Because I would’ve done it myself, Frank, for fuck’s sake!!!” He came out of the kitchen, eyes wet, shaking his head. “That poor girl...’’ They’d let Cassie clean it all up herself because she and Luann couldn’t afford someone else.
***
I followed Cassie down to the creek behind the funeral home. She lifted her dress over the tall grass along the bank. The first time I’d seen her in a dress, or a necklace. She took off her shoes and put them on a large rock, then stepped in. She bent down and caught a few tadpoles in her cupped hands. That time of year there were thousands of them. We’d collected them together as little kids. “Lonesome in numbers...” I didn’t know if she was talking to me or the things squiggling around in her hands. She looked up. “It’s something my dad used to say. That there are so many people it can make you lonely sometimes. Like these things...just too many of them to mean anything. C’mere...” She let the tadpoles go and took off her necklace. It was a delicate gold chain with a dull, white pendant shaped like an arrowhead. “Gimme your hand.” She pressed the sharp edge of it against her palm and drew blood. I asked her what it was. “A shark’s tooth. My dad gave it to me.” It didn’t look like any shark’s tooth I’d seen. I gave her my hand. She squeezed hers hard against it and I felt our blood mix. We watched it drip from our hands and disappear into the water. She asked me if it hurt and I shook my head no. I looked at her and saw she was crying. That’s when I knew it wasn’t a shark tooth between our palms; it was bone.
We’re brushing our teeth side by side at the sink, like we do every night, when I see it. A spot of bright red on my husband’s face, peeking through the bangs that have been out of fashion for years, but which he refuses to grow out because I adore them. It’s no bigger than the tip of my pinky. But it’s definitely not a pimple. It’s flat and even and there are ripples in the skin around it, like the imprint left by a tiny elephant’s foot.I get less than a second’s glimpse before my husband bends over the sink, spits out toothpaste, rinses with water. Then he turns and heads for bed. I’m still brushing, brushing, brushing. Still thinking about the spot. Hazily I wonder if, given enough time, the repeated motion of the toothbrush would eventually grind my teeth clean away. The news has been calling it SL-29. The SL stands for Spot Lesions: they resemble flesh peeled off in a perfect circle to reveal the raw redness of the meat underneath. Except they never heal. They never go away. Instead, they spread all over the body. The spots are often itchy, and weep a strange fluid—sometimes clear, sometimes yellow, sometimes black—that doctors have still not been able to identify. Sometimes they crust, like herpes sores, and then the pain is said to be immense.A better name for the disease would probably be something to do with pox, but that word would alarm the population, and the most important thing with any disease outbreak now is to avoid any alarm. After all, we saw what happened with the “Covid Crazies” and their masks, their stockpiling, the way they wanted to stay inside all day and sacrifice the economy for their delusions. The Vice President referred to them as “Gollums” the other day, and his fanbase (which regrettably overlaps significantly with the Lord of the Rings fanbase) praised him on social media with an avalanche of memes. The administration loves SL-29. It’s sexually transmitted, so what better punishment for the whores and sluts and single mothers than to have our loose morals branded on our faces forever? There are even rumors that the official SL title doesn’t stand for Spot Lesion at all, but for Scarlet Letter. Most people call them the Scarlet Spots. I finally rinse my mouth and head to bed. My tongue feels cold from toothpaste, a heavy slug resting against the slick backs of my teeth. My husband, facing away from me, seems to already be asleep, but that’s impossible. He never drifts off this quickly. Does he know I’ve seen his spot? Has he even seen it? Of course he has. For all the grief he gives me about admiring myself in the mirror so much, he could never miss something so striking. It really is scarlet. As I get into bed, he continues to breathe slowly and deeply. The steady rhythm remains uninterrupted even as I fluff my pillow and lay down, as though he truly is asleep. But he could be faking it. He could be praying I fall asleep without asking anything. But they don’t fucking disappear, my love, I think, clenching my jaw as I glare at his shape in the darkness. Are you going to shellac your bangs to your forehead? Use foundation so I never, ever see?And what about when the spots start spreading? What then? Yes, the only trouble with the spots is that men get them too. That’s why SL-29 is at the top of every STD screening test. Before chlamydia, HIV, gonorrhea, and everything else that can, in some way, be managed or treated or cured.
***
In the middle of the night, when I’m sure he really is asleep, I creep to the bathroom. I close the door quietly, flick on the lights, and examine every inch of my body. I have to use a hand mirror for the more hidden spots, but after a while, I conclude that my skin is SL-29 free. For now, at least. My mouth tastes rank, like I’ve been licking the floor and my own armpits. I go back to bed and try to sleep but my dreams are hallucinogenic, liquid, slipping through my brain like slick poisoned water.
***
Monday morning. Subway car rattling uptown, my sleep-blurred eyes, that odd gnawing hunger that always comes with not getting enough sleep. I brushed my teeth before leaving—alone, this time; my husband goes to work an hour later than I do—but my breath is stale inside my mask. I’m one of the few who still wear them, and my husband would be ashamed of me if he saw, ashamed and angry enough to shout, but he’s not here right now. Just a few other early-morning commuters, still mostly mired in the fog of recollected dreams, who couldn’t clearly give two fucks about my mask. Across from my seat, there’s an ad: “One night with Venus, a lifetime of SL-29.” Next to the bubbly words is a cartoon of an embarrassed man, face covered in red spots. I wonder how many people will catch the centuries-old reference to syphilis. When the subway gets to my stop, I stand up and walk past the sign, glancing at it one last time. Now that I’m closer, I can see the vandalism I would’ve caught earlier if the vandal had the presence of mind to use a Sharpie instead of a pencil. The word Venus has been crossed out in thin, barely-visible graphite. And above it, scratched deep into the shiny plastic, as if he could already tell that the pencil wasn’t going to be sufficiently discernible: A WHORE.
***
As soon as I sit down at my desk, the fogginess leaves me. It’s a sudden, destabilizing rush, like coming down out of the clouds on an airplane at night. Suddenly you’re seeing civilization spread out below you in all of its greedy, multiplied glory: city lights glittering like insect shells, spangling clear across the globe like earthbound stars. At least my resting bitch face comes in handy today. I’m left in peace as I boot up my monitor, open my email, scroll through my new tasks for the day. I don’t actually read any of it. Instead, I’m thinking of my husband. His way of saying “Only with you” when I ask him to do something he doesn’t really want to do—clean the bathroom, sign petitions, scrub the crusted stovetop. It’s true that there’s some romance in the teamwork, in both of us bettering our living space side by side. Once, we made eye contact over our flooded bathroom floor, flashed each other twin grossed-out grins: We’re in this together.The way he promised, using almost the same language, that he’d always be mine. It was just after he proposed, and he was holding my hands carefully. Like they were birds, hollow-boned and nervous, that might at any moment fly away. Most men make a big deal out of a woman being theirs and only theirs, but my husband seemed to find the idea of him being mine equally scintillating. At the time, I found it touching. Now I wonder if it was something he read online. One of those tricks guaranteed to lower the female guard. I think of my husband’s wide, toothy, childish smile. His complexion is so pale that even his teeth, which are actually fairly white, look yellow. Soon the spots will cover his entire face, astonishingly bright on his skin—not melting into one another like confluent smallpox, but just barely managing not to touch. So that each spot preserves its own perfect roundness. Almost as though it’s intentional. I once saw an interview where a doctor squinted at a patient’s face and pronounced them “the most perfect circles I have ever seen in nature.” He even took photographs, and other people measured the circles, confirmed that they were indeed mathematically perfect. “The good news is it’s not fatal,” the doctor said as he concluded the interview. “The bad news is it’s not fatal,” I muttered to myself, watching, because the suicides were rising by then and have continued to increase ever since. What the fuck do I do now?I check my wrists and forearms again. I fight the urge to march to the bathroom and strip down in a stall, twist until my body is covered in sweat and I’ve pulled a muscle in my back from trying to see every inch of my skin. I can’t panic. Panic won’t make any of this any better. According to the guidelines, the disease is 80% transmissible before any spots appear—that’s why we need expensive SL-29 STD tests, rather than a simple strip search. But once a spot has appeared, that person’s transmission rate climbs to 100%. Anyone they have intercourse with will get the disease too. And once a spot has appeared on someone you’ve been having sex with, you have forty-eight hours to see whether they’ve infected you during their asymptomatic phase. Forty-eight hours from last night. I just need to make it till Tuesday night, and I’ll know. For better or worse. And then I can…then I can…At this point my brain stops. Like a webpage that won’t load. I simply can’t think of what I’m going to do after the forty-eight hours is up. Almost with relief, I recognize another problem: I can’t know how long that spot has been there. Was it there the day before yesterday? I can’t be sure—I barely glanced at my husband all day on Saturday, preferring instead to read and separate myself from him and his video games, the way he cursed at the screen whenever he made a mistake. A flat red spot hiding behind his bangs would have been easy to miss. And of course there’s the question of how he got it. Where he got it. Who gave it to him. Only with you. I feel like I’m breathing through a rolled-up piece of paper. A hollow plastic cylinder. A straw. The ad from the subway flashes back into my mind. The slogan, the humiliated cartoon man, the crossed-out Venus. And then that other word, etched into the plastic, with such determination and fury, like a scar. Earlier, I thought of the vandal as a man. Now I no longer do.
***
My husband gets home an hour after me. His bangs are perfectly in place, and he’s smiling: his teeth the color of weak chamomile tea, his lips stretched and rubbery. “I got your favorite,” he says, holding aloft some bags from the nearby Korean restaurant. “Excited?”I blink at him. Does he think that he can use bibimbap and glass noodles to, what, bribe me to stay with him? That, supposing I’m clean, I’ll willingly let him infect me so that we can be scarlet-lettered together? Ha. Only with you, babe, right? Red circles clustering on our faces and then trailing down across our bodies, so bright we can’t cover them even with the thickest foundation. Maybe he’s even dreaming that I’ll come with him to live in one of the communities where the SL-29 social outcasts live as shut-ins: spending their worst days soaking in cool water, spending all the other days hiding behind thick curtains. Only venturing outside in the darkness, like suicidal, hideous vampires. I almost laugh at the idea. He takes my sardonic grin as a sign of pleasure. “I knew you’d be! It’s always better when it’s a surprise, right?”“Oh yeah, definitely,” I say, trying not to let the sarcasm seep too deeply into my voice. “Surprises are always better.” Only twenty-four more hours to go, I think. And it’s now that I decide. If I don’t have any spots on my body by tomorrow night, I’ll get out. I’ll tell everyone the truth and leave him to pick up the pieces by himself. It doesn’t matter that I can’t divorce him—I’ll run. And if I do have a spot on my body by tomorrow night….But the thought of that turns my guts into snakes. It makes my head so heavy that that I have to bow over, gripping it in my hands, and the next thing I hear from my husband, coming close and speaking in a voice that I could swear is more fearful than it ought to be: “Is everything okay?”In bed, he reaches for me. “Sorry, babe, not tonight,” I say, trying to sound as regretful as possible. “My stomach’s cramping…I think it’s from eating too much spicy food.”“But you love spicy food.” His hand is on my waist, stroking gently but insistently. I fight the urge to jerk away from him. “Yeah, but I’m not used to it anymore. We haven’t gotten from that place in a while. Or any of my favorite restaurants, for that matter,” I add, unable to keep the resentment out of my voice. “We’ve mostly just been eating the bland American food you seem to constantly crave.” In the silence that follows this, I hold my breath, letting it live high and shallow in my nostrils and the tops of my lungs. But, finally: “Huh, okay.” I can hear the shrug in his voice. I never rebuff his sexual advances unless I’m on my period or have a migraine, but he just moves to the other side of the bed. My body relaxes in relief. At the same time my mind spirals, trying to determine whether he’s given up so easily because he knows he already infected me last week, or because he thinks he’ll have another chance tomorrow.I want to ask Who was she? Was she hot? Did she refuse a test, or did you just not care enough to even ask for one?I want to ask Was it worth a lifetime of spots marring your whole body? Flesh pepperoni peeking out all over your cheese-curd-colored skin, skin the color of milk gone sour, skin like that of a corpse just before it stiffens and turns blue?But I don’t want to make him angry. Ever since the Domestic Violence shelters have all been closed down. Ever since the Domestic Assault hotline has been disconnected. Ever since calling the cops on your husband is the quickest way to get yourself dragged down to the station for “inciting the violence” yourself. Ever since new, privately funded studies came out showing that women are indeed the more emotional sex and that their manipulation can easily be used to paint good men as “abusive.” Ever since no-fault divorce was eliminated. Ever since. Ever since. Ever since. Ever since the dawn of fucking time because men have always been physically stronger than women and always will be.
***
In the end, I don’t even have to wait forty-eight hours. The spot is there on the back of my knee when I go to the bathroom the next morning, peeking out at me like a knowing eye. I stare at it like I’m waiting for it to wink. Heat unfurls across my body—a panicked rush of blood, a silent roar. My vision goes black at the corners, as though smoke is closing in, and I curl forward over my knees, muffling my wail in my hands. A crazy idea flashes through my mind: cut my leg off. But that wouldn’t work, not even if I took it off at the hip. The disease has already spread throughout my body. It’s like mold: glimpsing a little bit on the surface only means that the roots have long since claimed what’s underneath. There’s no stopping it now. The panic gives me tunnel vision, and I’m standing up now, staring into the bathroom mirror, staring at my face which is now unblemished but which will soon—who can say how soon—show a spot. Maybe with me, the disease will creep upwards. My husband’s will progress downwards, and mine will follow the reverse course. We’ll fit together perfectly.I turn the shower on full blast and scream into a towel. Swallowed up by the terrycloth, it’s more vibration than sound, and it shudders through me, shakes my arms and legs until I’m a trembling strand in the corner of the bathroom, looking towards the door with wild eyes, praying he didn’t hear anything. Because…because…Why? Why the fuck not?To get my answer, as I always have, I need the clarity that comes with pain. So I step into the shower. I gasp; the cold is a physical force, ripping the air from my lungs. Needles of icy water rain down on me, shocking, splintering me into a million particles like television static. A numb buzzing in my brain. Pain, pain, pain—And then, clarity. I slam the shower closed, panting and trembling. The facts are simple, clear as ice as they march out before me: He fucked someone recently. He got SL-29 from her. He returned home. By now he’s sure, by now he must be sure, that he is infected. He hasn’t told me. I’m infected too. Probably from when we fucked on Thursday or Friday. I’m in the same boat as him. We’re in this together. But it’s not a boat I’ve joined willingly. It’s a boat he’s dragged me into, without my knowledge or consent, a boat that could bind us together for a lifetime. If he were more possessive, I’d even suspect he’s done this deliberately, binding me to him so I can never escape. But he’s not like that. He’s never been possessive. And he loves himself far too much to ever destroy his appearance just to have me by his side for the rest of our lives. I clench my fists on the shower wall and get myself back to the row of facts. Okay: yes, I am infected too. I skip to the next one before my legs can start shaking again, quickly, onto the next fact: he needs to be punished. My husband can do so much to me. He can cheat on me. He can put his hands on me as many times as he wants—smack me across the face for speaking in the wrong tone of voice, pinch my lip between his sharp nails as a punishment for accidentally stepping on his foot—as long as there are fewer than two witnesses. He can stop me from voting. He can even impregnate me and force me to keep the baby (although what other option would I even have? a coat hanger? a handful of toxic weeds?). Although, in his defense, he has never done that last. He doesn’t want children either. It was one of the things we agreed on at the very beginning, one of the things that bound us together in a world where other couples were constantly fighting and breaking up over the issue. We simply looked at each other and said, “Nope.” Smirking, like we were in on some grand inside joke. A secret held like a jewel between the two of us. Funny how it’s always the wives who are paraded like a spectacle for bringing the Scarlet Spots into their homes. Sluts infecting their unsuspecting husbands. Funny how it’s never, ever the other way around. I think again of the ad on the subway. The original saying was One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury: a phrase intended to sway young men away from prostitutes, because syphilis was treated with mercury in those days. But what about the phrases to sway young women away from the Johns who would later pass that disfiguring disease onto them? Those phrases did not exist. They never do.I step out of the shower stall, run the shower hot for a few minutes, and then emerge from the bathroom. Using my weakest voice, I tell my husband I’m coming down with a cold. “I just took a steaming hot shower,” I say mournfully. “I think I’ll take it easy in bed today.”He gives me a sympathetic nod and tells me to feel better. Before he leaves, I notice another spot, just below his chin. He turns away from me quickly, not wanting me to see. I want to tell him that I already know. But that would ruin the surprise. And surprises are always best, aren’t they, love?
***
As soon as I hear the elevator doors close in the hallway, I fly into action. I have to get everything set up perfectly by the time he comes home. As I walk to first one hardware shop and then the next, and then a chemist’s shop, and then a kitchen-wares shop, I try to let my thoughts wander. But they don’t want to wander. They keep coming around to tonight’s plan, like a fierce, certain arrow. And I smile. I keep smiling even as I’m aware of that spot on the back of my knee, that barely perceptible itch. What’ll happen tonight, what I’ll turn my husband into…it’s almost enough to make the infection worth it. Almost. I spend the rest of the day setting things up. He’s only got two red spots, but I can add a few more: early ones, surprise ones. Maybe I’ll take some things away, too. I think again of why I didn’t want to make him angry when we lay in bed that night. Yes, on the whole, men have always been physically stronger than women and always will be. But that’s assuming no other factors have been introduced to alter the equation. And a sedated man bound to a bed, tied in five-point restraints like they use at the hospitals for hysterical women—well, all his strength will be useless. As useless as the nipples on his chest. Maybe I’ll start with those. No one’s coming to help him. After all, the Domestic Assault hotline has been disconnected. Tonight it’s his body on the bed. And—finally—my choice.
The woman who wrote Beowulf considered it juvenilia. She composed it during the years she roamed close to the old hall, hearing the revelry, watching the fighting and fucking from the slippery dark outside. Over the long seasons she recognised, in her observations of the hall, a will that sprung from its inhabitants; a mode of life that ran in tight, obsolete cycles. Drink spilled, offence taken, necks opened, blood added to mud, children made, killed. These dances played out, accumulated nothing. Over time, she moved away from the hall and disavowed the tales she wrote about it. In their place, she composed stories that were not about human things. Wine and swords melted into the grey candlelight of the old world. She took what the land told her and made its rough clay into her letters. The humans and their fires were things she had stepped upon to light the way; this new language was in the stones, in the correspondence between root and soil, between a bird’s foot and the branch on which it balanced. The years turned. She roamed further into the land’s interior. Caves contained dialogues of water and stone. Animals in mating bred glyphs and signs. Trees bent horselike to meet her, brushing flowers into her neck as she went. There was no longer a distinction between herself and where she placed her body. Blood from a wound was shared with whatever thorn had cut it. As water ran over her hand it carried some unseen fraction downstream. These were inscriptions the world would not preserve; a language inscrutable by the evening of the day on which it was composed. She would scratch on bark or carve into rock, then find it gone. The idea of lines on a scroll became laughable to her, pulp, dirt. The description of a blade, a creature, a warrior, a mother––this was child’s work. She found within this new expression a tapering line, a promise that vanished like ice. Foot became tree became fur became blood became water. Eventually, she was no longer visible. The hall raged on out of sight, a red pinprick, prevailing.
***
It's a mistake for one to assume that writing is the end of anything. Anyone can knock stones together, that’s writing. Anyone can stick a sword through an eye, that’s writing. As words get older, they become solid. Eventually they’re just something to trip over, look back on, and curse at. The world does not have need of anything so final. A place is found in its accumulation and then its dispersal. What else is there to say, other than I am something that briefly came true. Aeons pass. A body sits at a table. It is hard to make out what it’s doing through the haze––perhaps the old perpetual scratching of lines. Some monster shambles to the door, knocks, enters.
In 1983, when I was 32, I invited my Sorbonne classmate Renée Hartevelt to dinner at my apartment at 10 Rue Erlanger, under the pretext of translating poetry for a school assignment. I planned to kill and eat her, having selected her for her health and beauty, characteristics I felt I lacked.I have had a lifelong suspicion that people find me mentally and physically repulsive. However, many of those who meet me find me to possess obvious intelligence and a sense of humor. They also find me handsome, although of austere appearance. I am often regarded as “very self-analytic."I considered myself weak, ugly, and small (I’m 4 ft 9) and wanted to absorb Hartevelt’s energy. She was 25 years old and 5 ft 10. After Hartevelt arrived, she began reading poetry at a desk with her back to me when I shot her in the neck with a rifle. My colleague Brod has compared me to Heinrich von Kleist, noting that both of us have the ability to describe a situation realistically with precise details. He thinks I am one of the most entertaining people he has met. I enjoy sharing my humor with my friends, but also help them in difficult situations with good advice. According to Brod, I am a passionate reciter, able to phrase my speech as though it were music. I fainted after the shock of shooting Renée but awoke with the realization that I had to carry out my plan. I could not bite into her skin because my teeth were not sharp enough, so I left the apartment and purchased a butcher knife. Brod feels that two of my most distinguishing traits are "absolute truthfulness" and "precise conscientiousness." I explore inconspicuous details in depth and with such precision and love that unforeseen things surface that seem strange but absolutely true.I consumed various parts of Hartevelt's body, eating most of her breasts, face, buttocks, feet, thighs, and neck, either raw or cooked. I swallowed her clitoris whole, due to her being on her period at the time, and me not liking the smell of menstrual blood, while saving other parts in my refrigerator. I understand the pathos of things. I possess an empathy towards things, a sensitivity to ephemera, an awareness of impermanence, of the transience of things, both a transient gentle sadness at their passing, as well as a longer, deeper, gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.I also took photographs of Hartevelt's body at each eating stage. Once the remains of her body that I did not consume started decomposing, I attempted to dump the remains of Hartevelt's corpse in a lake in the Bois de Boulogne park, carrying her dismembered body parts in two suitcases, but I was caught in the act and arrested by French police. In my debut novel, I coined the term Saudade, an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for something that one loves despite it not necessarily being real. My wealthy father provided a lawyer for my defense. After being held for two years awaiting trial, I was found legally insane and unfit to stand trial by the French judge, who ordered me held indefinitely in a mental institution. After a visit by the author Inuhiko Yomota, my account of the murder and its aftermath was published in Japan under the title In the Fog. In my second novel, I coined the term Weltschmerz (literally "world-pain"), a literary concept describing the feeling experienced by an individual who believes that reality can never satisfy the expectations of the mind.My subsequent publicity and macabre celebrity likely contributed to the French authorities' decision to deport me to Japan, where I was immediately committed to Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo. In my third novel, I coined the end-of-history illusion, a psychological illusion in which individuals of all ages believe that they have experienced significant personal growth and changes in tastes up to the present moment, but will not substantially grow or mature in the future.My examining psychologists all declared me sane and found sexual perversion was my sole motivation for murder. As the charges against me in France had been dropped, the French court documents were sealed and were not released to Japanese authorities; consequently, I could not legally be detained in Japan. I checked myself out of the hospital on the 12th of August, 1986, and subsequently remained free. On July 2nd, 1982, I attached 43 balloons to my lawn chair, filled them with helium, put on a parachute, and strapped myself into the chair in the backyard of my home at 1633 West 7th Street in San Pedro, California. I took my pellet gun, a CB radio, sandwiches, beer, and a camera.While being lifted in the air by the balloons, I considered inventing the wind phone, an unconnected telephone booth where visitors can hold one-way conversations with deceased loved ones, but decided against it.
She thumbs the tumor where it rubbed on the boning of her bra. Her work shirt is half undone, her chest exposed to the mirror. The hooks unclasp, and it’s there in full view: pill-sized, pill-hard and intradermal. She squeezes, this is no pimple - the skin that hides it turns a deeper pink and that’s the end of it. An intruder to the bathroom fails to enter, the door ruts the lock. She buttons her blouse and smooths out her hair to return to her work. The tumor snugged in its place over her breastbone, against the bra, beneath the blouse.At home, the blouse is torn open for inspection. The woman lives alone, where no-one will stop her picking and probing. Her thumb angles it left, right. The node is anchored and completely numb. How long has it been growing there? It’s been a long winter. When dressing and undressing in the dark, certain sacrifices are made. It’s entirely possible for a woman to miss the point, no matter what she thinks she’s agreed to lose when signing the contract. Every job has its roadblocks. This was little more than the latest in a string of unanticipated set-backs.The tumor is clothed in soft skin, reddened from inspection. It slides downward when her thumb slips sideways, aghast and curious, she slides the pill further down and finds no resistance, no pain in the slightest. The effort translates it a few centimeters lower. The woman’s skin is split open. She opens a thin, oval window through yellow fat to the wet, pink muscle underneath. A clean wound, she braces for burning that she expects but doesn’t feel. For minutes, she is thrown back on her ass in shock before the mirror. Her features are catlike. She crawls forward again to inspect her opening. The tumor lies waiting, the skin above shows no sign of releasing it and when she tries to push it back up where it came from, it refuses. A dilemma presents itself. Reason dictates an open wound should endeavour to remain small - though reason has not encountered a wound as willing as this. Why didn’t it hurt? She thinks she might have gotten lucky. Logic dictates that harm creates pain. She will have to keep pushing to feel some. Then - and only then - will her condition make sense.As she tests, the pill slides further until it rests at the beginning of her stomach, a trail skating behind it like the fly of a dress. There is still no pain, but there’s something like it. Slowly now, the body peels tenderly, the split inches as the cells divide. Electricity from their parting comes in small dispersals, easy warmth. The sensation deepens with the cut, she realizes when the tumor passes over the naval that she is out of splittable skin. How unfair. Feline face flushed, mouth agape, torso yawning with muscle sparkling under the drooping cuts. Pill-like tumor pressed and ready over the mound of her cunt.She forces it down, measuring her limits. Her skin gives way. Pleasure courses thicker and hotter than blood though unready veins. The passage is savoured. Movement of the tumor over the slick flesh of her vagina arches and blossoms to unimaginable heights at every millimetre. It shoots through her legs and cools the palms of her feet. She feels holes torn where none have appeared. But alas! Her openings meet at last and somehow the tumor becomes lost inside her. It is gone. What remains is the woman, legs spread to reveal the opening wide enough to dissect her body to the breasts. Underneath the wrapping, the muscle is healthy and vibrant. It trembles involuntarily when inspected. Breath clouds her face in the glass, but she is not currently interested in breath.. Gently, she pulls the sides of the wound wider, it gives way easily. Pain refuses to find her, friction between skin and muscle is like slipping an old burn through velvet. Fingers find their way under. She is confronted with the image of herself, a woman she knows well, naked, panting and dipping her hands beneath her skin as though she were hungrily caressing a lover under their clothes. Whole hand under, whole hand up. The rift splits more where her arm has gone, it passes the breastbone to her neck. Wrapped in ecstasy, she has torn the skin all the way to her face in want of further release. Her fingertips run over her teeth and she recoils, at last, in face of what she has done. Is continuing to do. Terror grips wide eyes for a moment and the shock has sent her limbs moving spasmodically. She catches her loosened skin on the carpet. It pulls to the side, replacing fear with ecstatic friction once again and her thoughts of repercussion are replaced by greed. Her hand runs under the opposing arm and removes it like a glove. Just as simply, the other is removed, then she works on loosening her leg. She slips out of herself like stockings. Leveraging her hands over her top row of teeth, she reaches up, pulling her face off like a hood. She drops the whole thing on the floor, a deflated heap of blood and flesh.Free from her binding, the body feels lighter, less agitated. The pleasure has died down to an insignificant hum. But has not yet made a full exit, as the open air against her muscle brings a slight tingling sensation. Blood billows out around her feet like a shadow where she walks on her plush cream carpet, the fibres putting welcome shocks through her naked soles. Facing her in the mirror is a glistening wide-eyed creature of meat. Hairless, lipless, quivering red ape of tendons and sinew. Although it moves at her command, strangely, there is no compulsion to covet or mourn for it. Nor are there thoughts of returning to the chrysalis. She kneels in a widening pool of blood, raw palms smearing the mirror where her teeth grind the glass.
I can’t remember his name so I will give him one. Devin. He was 32, blonde, sun kissed, and standing on a dock in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t tell what color his eyes were but if I had to guess, they were blue. I hit “heart” and a few hours later, I felt his “heart” back vibrate against my jeans. It was December 2014 and I was 21. Back then, the OKCupid app was clunky and I always gave out my cell because texting was easier. I gave Devin my number and his texts came in green on my iPhone 5. He tried calling me immediately after and I rejected the call. “Can’t talk now, what’s up?” “Oh, sorry. Just wanted to say hi.”I ignored this and went about my day, already forgetting him.The next time he calls, he calls three times in a row at 9:45pm while I’m cramming for a Bio Anth final in the Philosophy building with two other girls. I pick up on the third, frustrated and already bored. I tell him I’m studying for a final in a flat tone and don’t run with any of the small talk he’s making. Eventually he says, “You know, I was excited to get to know you but I didn’t think you’d be such a bitch.” His words are like a dental drill buzzing too close to my pink gums.I immediately stop breathing, faced with a challenge. I liked challenges, holding my hand over fire to see how long I could last until the burned flesh was too much. I liked stretching my endurance. I was young then, what an excuse.I forgot what I said next, but my voice changed. I remember thinking of a kitten before its first time getting its claws trimmed, unwieldy and meaningless. I petted him with my voice, pressed my hand to its nose for familiarity. Devin told me he worked in entertainment, lived in Jersey but went often to New York for events and premieres. I told him I was an actor and director finishing up college. I told him where I went to school and thought about joining him for premieres. He asked me what I was into sexually, a conversation I was privy to having. Nothing scared me about sex anymore after I lost my virginity in London the year before. Out of all the questions he asked me, the only one I remember is did I like having things stuck up my ass. I forget what I answered but it probably wasn’t the truth. “I wish I could meet you tonight”, his voice like gravel. “I’d love to pick you up and see you in person.” I told him I had to study for my final and he proposed to see me after I was done the next day for coffee before I went home for break. But we kept talking, and at one point, he called me from a different number. A work phone. Devin demanded nudes a couple hours later. I sent him a couple I took weeks ago in the daylight, light pouring into my room as I faced my Macbook, my bottom half covered with my Marimekko duvet but my top exposed, an indie sleeze Rokeby Venus. My nipple piercing on my right breast twinkled as my pupils focused on the spot to the bottom right of my laptop’s digital eye. I remember feeling beautiful, classy, powerful when I took those, thinking they were a gift. Devin responded immediately that these were old photos and that he was insulted that I didn't send him something new. “I want you to go back to your dorm and send me 30 photos of yourself in 15 minutes.”So I did. I sucked myself in, contorted my body and began clicking my iPhone camera. I sent him 30 and he asked to Facetime me. I said yes. I never thought I could say no or ask for photos in return. I don’t know whether I say this to prove I wasn’t asking for this or because I can’t objectively look back at this anymore.He Facetimed me and I answered on my computer. His screen was black, I could not see his face. He told me he turned off all the lights and was too lazy to turn them on. I vaguely remember he said he had a cat or two. Did I see them? I can’t remember. I can’t remember how it happened but I was laid back on my twin sized dorm mattress, pressing my cheap red marbled bullet vibrator from Spencer’s Gifts to my clit, fake moaning but trying to make it real. My eyes were fixed on the high cracked ceiling, avoiding the square of darkness on my laptop but more importantly ignoring my body reflected back to me, a form that felt so foreign and weak to me. I had a pit in my stomach that could’ve been sexual shame but felt coarser than that. I tried to ignore it. Devin’s voice was in my ear as I faked the build of an orgasm. Right before the false peak, he said, “now shove it up your ass.” I didn’t do it. By that point it was 3am and my exam was in five hours. He agreed he’d see me after for coffee and I went to bed with a sour stomach.I woke up and took my exam, running on acidic coffee and adrenaline. I remember passing my friend Carina in the dorms, pink and giddy because I found someone cool. We both always talked about our boy troubles at our small liberal arts school. I remember I imagined I was glowing telling her the news, like a drop of dew on a leaf. Once I realized I had nothing packed, I called Devin and asked if we could reschedule coffee for when I returned in the spring semester. He hung up immediately and five minutes later, I received five texts from an unknown number—his other number I forgot to save. All five texts were photos of a man I didn’t know—a brunette with a dark goatee who looked about 250 pounds. Photos of him standing with friends outside, his arm wrapped around a woman’s waist in a bar, him wearing those wrap around glasses dads wore. Another text came in. “I knew you wouldn’t like me because of how I looked.”I can’t remember how my body felt when I got all of these texts. I called one of his numbers back, I can’t remember which. I could tell I was on speaker phone and asked him what this all meant.“I have a medical condition where I look the way I do but I’m going to have surgery in a couple months. I wanted to find a person who could see beyond what I look like now so that when I look different, I know they will be with me because of who I am.” I pictured a fucked up version of Beauty and the Beast, my childhood VHS tape warped in the sun, all the cartoons twisted. I couldn’t understand why I felt conflicted. He kept talking.“Well, I’m already on my way to your college.” “What?”I only then recognized the fact that his voice sounded slightly farther away, in a tunnel. He was on speaker phone. I imagined his chubby hands on his steering wheel, every minute a couple feet closer to me.“I’m getting off at your exit now, it’s too late for me to turn around.”That’s when I remember how my body felt. It felt like glass.I thought it would be easier to handle all of this on my own. I didn’t think to get campus police involved or anyone else. Devin had my nudes. It felt like I had already signed over my rights and my body and there was nothing I could do. I told him where to go after he passed through the entrance, campus police probably waved him in without looking up from their phones. His black minivan circling the campus like a vulture over a bunny with a broken leg, too stunned to move. He pulled into the small parking lot of my dorm building. It was one of the older buildings on campus and the 4th floor was supposedly haunted by a girl who jumped out the window because some boy broke her heart. He got out of his van as I stood on the gravel. He had the same wrap around sunglasses, red adidas shorts that hit right at his knee, and adidas slides. I didn’t look at his toes for too long. My plan was to say hello and send him on his way. But once his soft, sweaty flesh enveloped me, he said, “I thought I’d get to see your dorm.”I remember walking him up to the second floor of the dorm, my shoes pressing into the grey carpeting, thinking “I have a loud scream, I have a loud scream.” Because even though I knew this wouldn’t end well, I thought I could handle it. Devin sat on my bed, his flesh resting on the same Marimekko bedding in the photo I sent that he hated.I buzzed around the room packing. He wouldn’t stop talking. About New York, about events, about how he worked on Lord of the Rings—a fact I checked on IMDB later and his name wasn’t listed on any of the projects. As he kept going on, I kept checking the clock, seeing time constrict as my Dad drove closer and closer to me. At one point, I remember telling him he needed to leave, that I didn’t want my father to meet him like this. He asked me to sit on the bed with him, my worn stuffed elephant as the only witness as he said, “I’m not leaving until you kiss me.”I wish I had taken the time to think, to slow down, to pause time. To rewind, to enter this dorm room as I am now, to grab my hand and run screaming down my hall. Knocking on doors until someone came out. I picture this now and my screams are silent. She lets go of my hand because no one comes out, no one hears me, and she returns to her dorm room, sits down, and kisses him.I have never felt my body shake as violently as it did then. Every muscle in me was alive, knocking against my skin like bees in a hive of flesh. I pulled away and remember seeing this booger, this gleaming moist pea green lump of rejected bacteria hanging from his right nostril and being disgusted. “I could tell you wanted more.” He said with a grin.He left shortly after because I said my dad was nearby. I forget if I kissed him again, and my dad arrived 30 minutes later with my sister in tow. We packed the car and drove back to Rhode Island. Right before my dad came, Devin called me again on speaker phone. “I know your dad wasn’t almost there. Don’t you ever lie to me again.”That night, I went to the 99 with my high school friends. After three five dollar margaritas, I told them numbly that I was catfished. I told the story like it was a joke, looking for laughs along the way. Three of my guy friends looked stunned, one of them saying, “Christ, are you alright?”The only thing that comes back clearly is what my only girlfriend said, “Are you sure you didn’t do anything enticing?”I called my therapist the next day and told her what happened. “I need you to block both of his numbers. This man has done this before, he has a story and a system to manipulate women.” she said. “Once you return to school, you need to report this to campus police.”But I didn’t heed this advice. I thought I could fix this. I texted him a couple days later and explained to him that I really couldn’t get into anything serious with my senior thesis coming up in the spring. It really wasn’t him or his looks (or his lie), it was all me.What came next was a large paragraph, jumbled and clearly voice to text, but the one thing that stands like a monument in my mind was that “he didn’t want to be my friend he would find a way to fuck me he would.” I blocked both of his numbers. I deleted my OKCupid account and never redownload it.I told some of my good friends what happened to me when I returned in the spring semester, always when I was drunk or stoned. I figured it was a good party trick, like my nipple piercing—something initially painful that turns into a cheap novelty. There was something about seeing people react to the story. How they laughed at the term “catfish” and then their faces shifted and landed in a place of concern. I watched this happen time and time again, hoping that concern would rub off on me. It never did. I graduated in May 2015, age 22. I packed up my parents' car and stayed in a hotel with my best friend for our last night in Jersey. “The Graduate” was on TV, Katherine Ross in her wedding gown and Dustin Hoffman staring straight ahead into a world we never see. It is now February 2017. I have forgotten about Devin. I live in Brooklyn and work as an executive receptionist for a luxury real estate company. I get a text from an unknown number around 3pm, nothing atypical as a girl who goes on a lot of first and only dates. “Hey beautiful.”“Who is this?”“Devin.”“Sorry I don’t know of a Devin.” “From December 2014.”Just as my brain made the connection, I received a photo of myself. Nude from the tip of my breasts up, a small smile painted on my face. My eyes locked with the digital eye of my phone.Another text. “I just wanted to see if this girl was still single.”I can’t remember how I thought of it but I texted back, “So sorry! I think you have the wrong number! Best of luck finding her.” And blocked the number. All I can remember was sitting in a packed L train during rush hour, feeling like I was being hunted, that he saw me hiding in Brooklyn. He knew where I was at every moment. I called both my Providence based therapist and my new New York based therapist as I walked home in the park. One said she was impressed by my text to him and the other said this had nothing to do with me, that this was some indication that he was flailing and reaching out to older situations. I pictured him in some basement in his same red adidas shorts and adidas slides, a single booger hanging from his nostril, the only light coming from a laptop as he shot off messages like bullets from a sniper rifle into the void. “You could be in Africa for all he knows.” I tried to believe that as I struggled to find sleep that night.Devin never tried to contact me again. I grew up thinking that love could be served up on a spoon or a knife, but it was love just the same. I had no concept of what negging was, what manipulation could look like, the idea of revenge porn was just whispers and nothing legitimate. For years I looked back and thought what an incredible idiot I was. How I got out by the skin of my teeth. How it really wasn’t that bad, all he did was kiss me in a small dorm I invited him into. How I should’ve known better. I retold this story countless times and I guess I was waiting for someone to ask why I did what I did so I could finally say that I did it for love.
