I made sure never to start the day. Abstained from True Conscious Hours. And yet, somehow, it went on without me. The sweat underneath my upper thighs became my five o'clock work whistle, an inarguable sign that the day was already over, before it had ever begun. Weeks went by like this. So smooth and easy that I hardly took notice. For I was a junkie, refreshing my feed with abandon, in willful avoidance of the aforementioned True Conscious Hours. YouTube was where I found the good stuff. I let the algorithm swaddle me tight, held in close by its data-driven embrace. Fifteen-to-twenty minute videos filled up my daylight hours without friction. The app analyzed my viewing habits, my click-through rates, average time spent on a page, engagement (likes, dislikes, comments) and explicit feedback submissions, among hundreds of other figures, and then offered up a viral load of For You content. Up Next was left on perpetual autoplay. My Suggested Videos offered up new, pulsating veins to tap into.The algorithm led me to the strange community of glitch hunters. Those who scoured the three-dimensional plane, in search of an errant polygon or invisible wall. They looked for exposed flaws in the game design, ones that opened up new possibilities of play. And exploits, for speedruns. A number of these videos concerned Super Mario 64, a game they treated as a sacred hyperobject, the ur-three-dimensional movement game. The creators’ focus on Mario 64 went beyond mere glitches. They imposed masochistic constraints on themselves, in limiting their button presses to the least amount of jumps theoretically possible; all this within level environments specifically designed around the act of jumping. It was a mindset akin to religious asceticism, achieved through the careful study of mathematical formulas. Equations that led to new modes of movement. And the discovery of parallel worlds. The YouTubers tore apart the fabric of the game and grafted a new reality atop of it, one more pliable to the player’s will. I watched a series of videos in one uninterrupted sitting, a film festival curated by my most destructive viewing habits.
Super Mario 64 - Watch for Rolling Rocks - 0.5x A Presses (Commentated)
Here is a play by play of what I do. First, I use scuttlebug transportation to move a scuttlebug to the corner of the Watch for Rolling Rocks platform. Then, I use scuttlebug raising to raise him to about the height of the platform. Next, I use hyper speed walking to generate massive speed. Finally, I use Parallel Universe movement to navigate to the top of the course, launch to the scuttlebug to bounce on him, and ground pound in the misalignment of the platform to get onto it. And from there, I collect the star.
The TRUE Number of Parallel Universes in SM64, Solved!
Parallel universes in SM64 are a glitch where the memory for a level loops back around, caused by wandering too far from the stage. The glitch manifests as an invisible copy of the level, with varying degrees of bugged collision or objects. This has a strong resemblance to the nature of the 'Minus World' in Super Mario Bros, which is caused by another mathematical memory error.
My usual microphone is broken, so the sound quality might be a bit bad (I'll consider re-dubbing the video at some point). Not 100% sure if anyone has figured this out before, but based on what people have told me I don't believe it's been done.
Super Mario 64 - Go to The Secret Aquarium - 0x A Presses (VC Only) [OUTDATED]
I go to The Secret Aquarium using zero A presses. Unfortunately, this method is only possible on emulator and virtual console, and NOT console. This is because if Mario goes to a Parallel Universe on console without fixing the camera in the main map, the game will freeze.
So what are Parallel Universes? Well, Mario's position is a float, but is treated as a short for testing collisions. Since shorts can only hold up to 2^16 values, some information is lost in this conversion. Following this logic, there isn't just one map, but a grid of near infinite maps spread out by 2^16 intervals. These other maps are invisible, and are called Parallel Universes (PUs). With enough speed, Mario can travel to these PUs.
The Mystery of the 1995 Build of Super Mario 64 (Every Copy of Super Mario 64 is Personalized)
On July 29th, 1995, a Super Mario 64 build was constructed that forever shook the internet. From a ghostly Wario apparition to strange cases of personalized copies of the game, this precursor Super Mario 64 version was full of many different mysteries. Many theories arose surrounding this haunted occurrence and today we'll be doing a deep dive into the bottom of the Mario 64 mystery iceberg.
(Rare) Unseen Footage Of E3 1996 Demo Of SM64 (Wario Apparition)
yep it fake ok ...
Every copy of Mario 64 is personalized?
why the f**k everyone keep saying THIS?
The Wario Apparition is a rare software glitch where an unused game sequence occurs with Wario’s head in a bowser room, in Mario 64. It is commonly mistaken to be a creepypasta. Waluigi apparition is also rumored to be in the game hidden somewhere, fake or not it’s very unsettling.
I looked up from the blue light of my laptop screen. Soon I would be called down for dinner. And have to do the dishes afterwards. Then I would eat a low-calorie yogurt cup while I watched an episode of Shark Tank upstairs. Finally, I would lay in bed for five hours. Stare at the ceiling as I listened to a podcast. Fall asleep with my fluorescent light still on. My teeth unbrushed, my face unwashed. Another day completed with little-to-no resistance. I wondered how long my desecration of Time could continue. Obscene enjoyment was derived from my days spent staring at the loading screen. The internal mantra of you were bad today, you were bad, you were very very bad—a vesper delivered with an implied smirk. From the outside looking in, I could see I was locked into a game of chicken, secretly yearning for someone to come nail me down and call me on my bluff. To finally force my hand. I wanted to be taken down so fucking bad. To be shown for the heretic that I was. But no one wanted to go there with me. Those in my general vicinity danced on eggshells.There isn't just one map, but a grid of near infinite maps, spread out in multitudes of intervals. The videos got stuck in my head. I let the Parallel Universes form in my mind, then disintegrate and rebuild, unsure of their resonance. There was a certain poetry in the Youtuber’s voice over. My position is a float. But treated as a short. I nodded along in agreement. The coordinates of my spirit. Manifested as an invisible copy, with varying degrees of bugged collision or objects. The hidden realm was left largely untapped. How did I make use of the unseen copies, the glitches in my own memory loop? There was an effort, on my part, to create meaning. With minimal button presses. The apparition’s head in the room. A ghost, trapped within the RAM of a Nintendo 64 cartridge, our names already written in the code, before we’ve had the thought of purchasing the game. An old TV screen flickered, with washed out, red-green colors. It played back the graphical abstractions. But they were cruder than I’d remembered, with flattened water textures, and a pixelated tree that stuttered in and out of existence. Yeah, it’s fake. Ok?A voice called out for me. And yet I couldn't move. I was paralyzed, caught in the thick ooze of Wasted Time. My eyes scanned the room in a panic, searching for a stray platform, a scuttlebug, anything to launch me into the next map, towards an alternate grid. I longed for an invisible place, where zero presses would be enough.
Superstition slipped in with the last of the September flies. My hands were full and I couldn't get the door shut fast enough behind me. There was a clog in the bathroom sink where drain flies had nested. Something about my slowness made me wonder if we didn’t deserve it. Jake said to get hot vinegar if I was too damn scared of store bought bug killer. The sour smell drove him out all afternoon and when he came back he saw I had let the vinegar boil out. He headed upstairs with a bottle of bleach but found the bathroom door locked. He shook the handle, his mad rattling brass on brass. I kept the bathroom key hidden in a bag of bread flour and started buying loaves from Ms. Debbie. On Tuesday she said I had autumn all over me and could I please take off my sleeves because the sun wasn’t done yet. I told her I didn’t feel him. On Wednesday, Jake worked late so I cooked nothing and peered under the bathroom door. I heard more than I could see, a buzz louder than his engine in the drive. He came up behind me, a shock I can’t blame him for. I was captivated. A fly crawled under the door and then beside me on the floor, until it was under Jake's boot. On Thursday, I realized there was nothing in the drain but bar soap and toilet water. I wondered what they were eating. Jake left early the next morning, not mumbling like I thought, but shouting. Neighbor Mitchell came over with jam, said he’d seen all the bread I’d been carrying in and heard the yelling. I couldn’t think of what to reply because I hadn’t heard anything. On Saturday, I combed the crumbs from Jake's beard, wiped the jelly from his lips and stored the scraps in a paper napkin. He was late for the river yet drank his Busch slow while we waited for what, I wasn’t sure. When he left, he said the forest service would be burning the woods down and not to be afraid of any ash the wind might carry. I didn’t catch his meaning. I was busy shutting the front door behind him, then fishing the key out of the flour. At the flies’ door, I sprinkled the collected crumbs on the ground and blew them into the bathroom. There was no obvious reason for me to have grabbed the key. I knew from the first larvae floating under the faucet that I would never let the flies free, but I knew it in the way one knows a lie they like better than the truth. Playing pretend, I put the key in the lock and let it rest a while, imagining what it’d mean to open the doorand see what I’d let grow. The outside air was cooler now, no flies swarming picnics or slipping through windows. The neighbors had already begun to eat a little slower; begun to keep the lids off butter dishes. What would it mean to unleash the end of their ease? I pulled the key out knowing I could not open it and felt sick. A million flies thrashed inside that locked room. I pushed my forehead to the floor and the house vibrated in a familiar pattern, till I knew his boots were beside me. His hands didn’t notice the key still in the door; they carried a drill and went for the hinges. He didn’t notice how easy it could have been to open. I hollered, Jake, Jake we don’t want to know but the drill was in his ear and the screws fell to the carpet. At once the door laid him out flat, or rather the flies pushed the door down with him under it. I pulled the neck of my dress over my mouth and nose, sealed my eyes and through the pulsing air, felt my way to him. Flies were in my ears and over my body, the force of them so thick the air resisted as I pushed the door away. The flies did not disperse but were a continuous flood, layering over each other and on top of us, so that it took my roaming hands minutes before I found the key sticking out of the top of Jake’s leg. His hands found mine and pushed them away. He did not hear me as I said no, don’t make room for them in you. He pulled the metal out. Instinctively, I dug my fingers into the wound trying to fill the space but he didn’t understand. He pushed me out and I came back and he pushed me out again. In seconds the flies found their way into the flesh, eggs were buried close to bone. Seconds more and the larva was spilling out of his thigh, growing wings, laying more eggs. Maggots hatched the infection in his blood, then sped the decay. The flies forced the rot and ate it up and then they went for the blood on my fingers and the crumbs on my dress. They ate the wishes out of my belly and the lies out of my mouth and by the end of it all I understood superstition had just been a false name for knowing.
Shifting states. The novel-in-flash Glass/Fire (Querencia Press, 2024) exhibits the unfolding travails of girlhood, a reality adorned in rich contradiction and symbolism. Mandira Pattnaik’s sumptuous language carries forth a deep and sensuous meditation on life’s volatility. The wildness of nature’s forces at their most capricious lend an elemental intensity to fate. A dynamic and revealing exploration of growth, I talked to the author about the book.Rebecca Gransden: In the mood we were in, fire could be liquid, could be sand, or molten like lava, or flames, licking the last of us.You open the book with the above line. How important are opening lines to you and what does this particular line suggest about the book in its entirety?Mandira Pattnaik: Thank you, Rebecca. I do not particularly stress over opening lines, though I greatly acknowledge their importance, especially in flash fiction. It’s helpful to think of the opening as the answer to the question: What does it all boil down to? So, it is essentially the essence of what I want to convey. I want readers to feel surprised, or jolted, or pleased, or offended—I want them to respond in whatever way. With fiction, I shepherd some of the things that I know as truths ignoring from which field of study they originate and insert them into my make-believe world. I’ve now grown to enjoy this kind of braiding. This line, while it braids certain facts about the nature of fire, also tells something about ‘us’. Do ‘we’, as much as we are ‘in the mood’, as yielding as glass yields to fire? I asked myself this question that hadn’t been answered or addressed in my mind and wished to take the narrative forward from there. That’s the way I approach writing—a kind of collaboration between knowing and unknowing. It becomes interesting how a fractured pattern forms that I must uncover in the process while exploring what remains unsaid. Since I had the scope of a novella, and it was the first time I was attempting something of this length, I had the liberty to take or not take the chance to provide answers, and hoping the reader will decide for themselves.RG: How did you decide upon the title—Glass/Fire—for the book?MP: Glass and fire are unrelated in ordinary usage, and it is easy to forget that something as common as glass is formed by subjecting moldable liquid to fire. But then, glass is fragile. Again, some of the toughest glass-made objects are very useful. Fire is energy, enormously potent, but it is shapeless. It has many forms just like glass. Firepower, however, again like glass, has been tamed to suit human needs. So, all these facts seemed very related, though not in a general comprehensible sense. When I set upon the idea of the novella, the opening story was already out in the world, titled as “Glass/Fire”. After that first piece was published, I was sure it was a title that was full of possibilities and that could be open to interpretation (which I kind of love about titles!), and I had to name the novella that I was writing with the same title.RG: A recurring theme is that of impermanence, the fluid nature of states, whether that be of the physical, tangible and chemical type, or the psychological or spiritual. What is your approach to transience?MP: In Indian Hindu religion and mythology, from a very young age, we’re rather familiar with thought-schools such as the cyclical nature of births and rebirths, the virtue of detachment (to possessions as well as relationships) as opposed to being attached, and how change and impermanence is in-built in the universe (as opposed to absoluteness). I understand the doctrine of impermanence is very important to us as a people. Neither are rulers forever, nor is the mortal body to last eternally. Similarly for wealth or happiness, as is bad times and sadness. In Buddhism too, which originated in India, ‘anicca’ is the same doctrine of impermanence, evanescence, transience. Just as life changes in empirically observable states of childhood, youth and death, so do mental events as they come into being and get dissolved. Friends and foes appear and fuse into the mind’s horizon when their job is done. I find this deeply profound. I realize that the recognition of impermanence alleviates the stress of modern living. I seem to course around the theme of transience quite often in my prose and poetry and somehow that has touched a chord with my readers. Simultaneously, I am a great believer of fluidity and interchangeability. These preferences, I understand, gain ground in my writing in a natural manner.RG: Your language is rich, sensual, often concentrated in its descriptions. You make extensive and poetic use of simile and layered meaning. How much of the style you’ve chosen for Glass/Fire is a conscious decision?MP: Thank you so much for saying so. I’m grateful for all the praise that my use of language gathers, given that I am not a native English speaker. Also, I am not a trained writer in any sense—no degrees or writing workshops, and nothing to do with writing in my family, so it amuses me when Granta, denying me a bursary that I had applied for, compares my sample piece’s style to that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It also propels me to search for what is my true calling, but then I realize that, having had no training is a blessing as I have all the liberty in the world to use my natural style the way I wish to. I have often been appreciated as a lyrical and sensual writer, which of course, is gratefully received. As often happens, one is not prepared to hear anything about one’s writing—I feel so inadequate as an outsider, untrained, writer from the global south. And then one does get more comfortable. It kind of grows on you, and one starts believing in one’s writing—which I guess happened to me. It was never conscious. I am happy I am allowed my lyrical style, without the imposed regulations that academia might have suggested, or which formal training might have eroded.RG: Let’s imagine pure mechanics. Not fire. Instead of glass, let’s talk attraction and repulsion. What is to be stirred with two scoops of isinglass so courses of molecules change, or solidify like glue, or say, become viscous?It’s tempting to see a tension between the scientific and materialist language used in the book and the lyrical and artful, but the impulse to adhere to distinct categorizations on those terms is made moot early on. While you talk of the chemistry that makes us, the stuff of life, the novella interweaves aspects more broadly to present a holistic view. How do you view the scientific when it comes to Glass/Fire? Do you have a personal interest in the sciences?MP: It's really difficult to place science and art in two watertight compartments, isn’t it? There’s a constant osmosis taking place, and even one feeding on the other to enrich and enhance each other. I like this interplay. I tend to incorporate this tension between science and art amply in my writing. When it comes to Glass/Fire, the very basis of the work, starting at its title, is heavily drawn from various branches of science. I like to think of myself as a scientific and rational individual who also recognizes the limitations of science, both theoretically and practically. I have a background in science, yes, but I also graduated in economics and worked in accounts and audit—so these are all related and interwoven into my writing now. I’m also a big advocate of science explained and used in everyday life, as should the arts be. Instead of classrooms and seminars, science and arts should be part of life for the masses, not just the elite few.RG:But being suspicious in a relationship cemented with trust, is really cruel, it eats away the insides like termites.The novella addresses heavy themes such as adultery, marital breakdown and family strife. Your characters face the undermining of their foundations. How did you go about incorporating these aspects within Glass/Fire?MP: In opting for exploring certain issues, or the choices of themes we make as writers, I am not much interested in topics that essentially affect an individual or family, such as the themes above. I’d rather explore issues that affect society more broadly, such as hunger, civil unrest or apartheid. Having said that, themes of a domestic nature are no lesser in my mind, just a matter of what I am keener on examining as a writer. To me, issues of adultery or marital breakdown are simply manifestations of other problems in families and societies, and as you very importantly point out, in surviving these, the characters in Glass/Fire face the undermining of the very foundations on which their existence depends. These are ways in which the characters are forced to reevaluate the very basis of their being—and they undoubtedly fight back. I wanted to address how fragile existence sometimes becomes, when the truths and relationships you hold dear to yourself are shaken. I believe this kind of tangential approach to characterization requires more involvement and engagement. Instead of examining the said intensely domestic themes directly, or thinking about these issues as specific to one group or category, I asked myself if I could get to the core of their sadness or unfulfillment, and if there were several minor issues that were responsible for the situations the characters found themselves in.RG:There was a man dwelt by a churchyard. His wife was the enormous yew tree that shielded him from all. His children came by as autumn leaves, or as some say, they were the cattle that died grazing upon the yew. Sometimes the man coughed so hard, he’d want to be taken out to sea. But they’d trick him—his wife and his cattle-children—saying, the season’s changed and Christmas is here, when nothing ever changed at all.When it comes to narrative, the novella constantly highlights the meaning to be found in the everyday, that symbolic significance not only exists in a wider cultural manner but is amplified and changed by the personal stories we tell ourselves and are reinforced by family rituals. What was your approach to narrative for Glass/Fire?MP: I find the symbolism in ordinariness haunting me everywhere. It is like there are things on display, in nature and in people, waiting to be observed and newness discovered, until one realizes that it is only the form that has changed, and nothing ever changes permanently. I think I am going back to the theme of impermanence I discussed earlier. There is a lot of anguish, sense of betrayal, and a sense of forced mental captivity in Glass/Fire, and the only way out of it, at least momentarily, was to search for symbolic outlets for that feeling. I think the undercurrent of anguish is somewhat redeemed through the pursuit of, what I term as, ‘extraordinary ordinariness’. I’m attracted to natural, accessible objects' magnetic qualities, things and sights easily missed by the unobservant, which are significant in the way they enhance the beauty of the everyday and what is considered the regular or mundane. In that reference, my approach in Glass/Fire was to find that ray of hope in ordinariness as a signifier of extraordinariness.RG: How does the concept of freedom impact the book?MP: Ah, now that’s somewhat muddy territory for me—I mean, this concept of freedom. What is even freedom—how free are we? What is the freedom of mind? Is being free in the body enough? There are so many questions, and I can hardly begin to comprehend even if I knew the answers. But yes, I am very much an independent thinking individual and the concept of being free, or at least, feeling free is very important to me as a writer. I routinely turn down offers to write according to a certain theme or plan I’m not enthusiastic about. I respect others’ freedom, and in that context, I think it is very essential that we can be tolerant towards the ‘other’, whatever that may encompass. In this book, the narrator, Lily, their mother, Jo, and Heena—they are all seeking some degree of freedom. Some manage to achieve that ‘limited’ freedom they had been dreaming of, others don’t. So that again becomes slippery territory and I’ll leave readers to decide for themselves.RG:Gaze at the archipelago around, like it were the pores of a humungous indigo skin. Pass the tiny island where the market still spills with cheap wares people buy. Not you fancying something anymore, though—glass bangles and silk scarves and colored beads mean nothing today. Ceased to have any merit long ago.At a point in the novella you address the psychological consequences and emotionally disruptive impact of a devastating event. What struck me as particularly perceptive was the observation that in the aftermath of such an event meaning is drained from the world, rearranged or lost. Do you have a philosophical approach to meaning that is expressed in Glass/Fire?MP: I am not sure I am consciously incorporating the ‘meaninglessness’ of certain things in the aftermath of a particularly traumatic or psychologically draining event, but I think it follows as a universal truth of the human condition. When a relationship is thriving, there are several associated memories, and the lovers hold on to those as proxies of the ‘feeling of being in love’. But when there’s a disruption, the equations change, and the same things have no significance.The stories I’m interested in and truly invested in, and want to produce, are about finding the truer meaning underneath our superficial lives and delving into the raw, untouched material underneath. That is where the root is—the origin and consequence. After Where We Set Our Easel, my debut novella, I found myself thinking, What is the consequence? In my debut, I was particularly favorable to seeking a hopeful resolution. But in this one, because of its length which allowed me more space, I wanted to approach the questions of origin and consequence with more elaboration, and not necessarily a peaceful resolution.RG: Looking back, but with an eye on the future, how do you feel about Glass/Fire now? What is next for you?MP: I feel content with how Glass/Fire has been received by readers. I can perceive that it has generated critical interest and is being seen as a book that stands out from the crowd. This is extremely encouraging because I write about characters and settings that are not very common—especially because they belong to South Asia and the novella almost entirely happens in a coastal region of India. I am also happy that this means I can continue to be as original and faithful to my style as I want to. Following this, I have a collection of short stories that I hope will find publication soon. I am also excited about my debut novel that I am currently working on.
My girlfriend has started a new regiment this week. She told me after coming home yesterday from work. Supposedly, this is supposed to help her achieve her “ideal form.” Every night now she is supposed to take these fluorescent green pills with her dinner. I don’t mind it too much. She becomes so sleepy afterwards, so I tuck her in our bed before sitting out on the couch for a couple of hours. Our flat is now quieter than usual.It seems the side effects are starting to take place in her body. This morning, she woke up before me squealing in front of the bedroom mirror. Her reflection seemed sickly in color that contrasted her cheerful visage. Grabbing my hands, she drew up my fingers to her cheeks. The skin there felt taut, reflecting the light from the ceiling fan. After we got ready for work, she texted me to go get some food and blankets for the upcoming weeks. Coconut, muskmelon, and vinegar for fruit flies. Her skin has begun to constrict, pulling back to reveal new valleys and canals. I asked her if she should be more concerned about her health, but she says this is natural. It’s harder to watch her stumble around more often around the apartment. I wrap cute bandages around her fingers from all the glasses she drops in the sink. Bruises color her thighs and hips. Her eyes have begun to cloud, a soft chocolate becoming milky blue. I have started to memorize where to run my thumb in circles at the front of her scalp, feeling small bumps under her skin. She asked me to help her this weekend hemming her jeans. When I run my hand along her vertebrae, she shivers while I test the new skin of hers.She quit her job. She told me that she won’t need it anymore. When my arms rest around her waist, foreheads touching, her new antennae curl in an arc and brush my ears. I asked her how much more fruit do we need to go through, and she giggled. She pressed her sharpened fingertips to my chest. Murmuring, she tells me how refreshing it feels now to breathe, to feel in her own skin. Next Tuesday, we’re supposed to get a humidifier in the mail to help her skin break smoother. The pills are starting to run out, so I have to go pick up her refill tomorrow and grab more trash bags.The night her new limbs emerged was the worst. I had just refilled the humidifier the second time while she begged to be held, covered in a cold sweat. Gently, I would roll her over on her side while I switched out the wet towels to toss into a bedside hamper. I would lay down on my side, rubbing her naked back in circles while the skin sloughed off to reveal a set of newly emerged elytra. I lean over to see her tear-streaked face, pressing my lips to her eyelids and her mouth, gently kissing where labrums fought to break out under her top lip. We both smiled. Once she fell asleep, I gathered her shed skin into a pile and shoved it down into trash bags. I got her the lavender scented ones this time.I like to watch her eat now, watching the juice run down her neck as she practices using her new, miniature mandibles. They click while she talks and when she annunciates her S’s. She told me that soon it might be harder for her to speak without proper vocal cords, so I signed up for a subscription to an American sign language course. She sits beside me while I review the alphabet, stroking my back with one of her new, dark legs that jut out from her waist. When we lay together in bed, I like to lay by her back and rub her newly fitted wings between my forefinger and thumb. She becomes more iridescent by the day. The flat has become lively again, with happy chitters reverberating throughout the place. I had to get her a pair of crutches today. Her legs were the next to go, as I watched the marrow into chitin. The thighs I would grip were now small enough to be held in my palm. As her bones start to hollow, it has become easier for me to carry her around the apartment. She covers her face whenever I decide to carry her like a princess from the bed to the kitchen for her meals. Slowly, she asks me what I will do once her transformation is done. I tell her that I will still love and take care of her regardless of her body. Her antennae wiggle in response. That night, I carried her to bed and held her tight to my chest. It felt like I was holding a bird.When I woke up this morning, the other side of the bed had a beetle sitting on her pillow. I put my hand out, watching her crawl up my arm to my nose. I walked her out to the kitchen and sat her by the sink. She spun while I cracked open a jelly from the fridge for her to squish into her mouth. Later, we went to the pet store to pick out a new enclosure. I brought her in her old water glass. She would point out which substrate she liked, what hide aways she wanted. Everyone else there was also carrying their girlfriend in cups. I set up her new enclosure in our bedroom after. She sat on my hands chewing my cuticles. She seems to really like her new spot on our nightstand by the window.My girlfriend died today. One morning when I woke up, the bed felt devoid of her presence. I shot up, running my hands and flipping up blankets and pillows, trying to find her. When I ran over to check her fish tank, I could see her on her back, arms curled up into her chest, bright green peeking out underneath. I scooped her up with my hands, flipping her over while I sat on her side of the bed. She was beautiful. I didn’t even know how to mourn. While I sobbed, cupping my girlfriend to my chest, the humidifier screamed waiting for its tank to be filled again. I decided to put her by the edge of my nightstand afterwards. When I turn in my sleep, I can twist and look into her honeycomb eyes before hiding under another blanket. I like to imagine that she is still there beside me with her cold exoskeleton pressed against my stomach.
We stood on top of our worlds as we knew them. The fall could kill us. Or worse. All part of the thrill. Henny, Walsh, and I were on the last level of scaffolding wrapped around the Bronson Windmill in Fairfield. We were heading into our senior year at Greenfield College Preparatory School. If you think we had on boat shoes judging from the last sentence, you’re wrong. Only Henny and I had on boat shoes. Walsh wore oversized flipflops with bottle openers on the soles. We sat down, dangling our feet over the edge of the scaffolding, swinging them back and forth above the hundred foot drop. Our cargo shorts were still damp from earlier when we jumped off the cliffs at Devil’s Glen into the river below, oblivious the devil was ever there or ever anywhere.Henny and Walsh were two of my best friends. I looked over at them. Walsh with his pellet gun slung over his shoulder and his Marine haircut to be like his older brother over in Afghanistan. Henny had our communal bong, Sir Bubbles Puffington II, in the padded bong case, slung over his shoulder like it was a bazooka. His babyface was angelic and devilish at the same time. Henny was short for Hennessy. He always told everyone he was from the Hennessy Cognac family. He wasn’t. His dad worked on Wall Street.I sat beside Henny and Walsh with a plastic bag full of three Coors Light forties from the bodega in Bridgeport that never ID’d us. I handed them their forties and we twisted the caps off.“Boat shoes are the cowboy boots of Connecticut.” Henny clicked the toes of his shoes together.“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Walsh laughed.I looked out at the view. The windmill was on the tallest hill in town. We had a panoramic view. The kinda view suckers in our town paid millions of dollars to wake up to every morning. Ours was better though because it was free. Free for a limited time only though. The windmill used to power a dairy farm in the 1800s for some dude named Bronson. Then it was a nonfunctioning windmill for awhile, preserved to remind everyone of what came before us. Then a cell phone company bought it and decided to repurpose it into a cell tower which was why the scaffolding was up that summer. It was still gonna be a windmill on the outside, but it was gonna be a windmill wired to the gills with cell phone stuff too. Change can be crazy like that, turning a historic windmill into a cell tower, restoring it so it didn’t fall in on itself, didn’t just crumble to pieces. As for us three, we were falling in on ourselves a little up there at the top of our worlds as we knew them.I looked up at the sky. A high-flying jet from JFK or Laguardia was a fly buzzing over the clear blue edge of God’s dead face. God was dead to me then. Every plane, even high-flying ones, still looked like another news cycle. Walsh took his pellet gun off his shoulder and aimed it at the far off plane. I looked out instead of up, at Long Island Sound, what we call The Sound in Connecticut. To the east was The Sound, then Long Island itself, then the Atlantic. To the south, The City. The horizon aligned with the last level of scaffolding so perfectly at some angles it looked like a gangplank leading directly to the Manhattan skyline where things happened. We didn’t climb up for the view though. The view was a byproduct like resin caked in our bong. We climbed up to shout fuck you down at our town below, the words echoing back at us, too young to know what being on top of our worlds meant.It was the summer of 2004. The summer we climbed that damn windmill every chance we got. But that night was our last. After we smoked the bong and threw our empty forty bottles up in the air, after Walsh shot at them and missed, after the bottles shattered on a stonewall below, and after we shouted our fuck yous and climbed back down, we got in a bit of a pickle. We were smoking the bong again in Henny’s Jeep on the road beneath the windmill. Henny and Walsh were in the front seats. I was always paranoid, so I turned around and looked out the back window. A cop car had materialized outta nowhere a few hundred feet behind us. A cop got out, drew his handgun, aimed it down at the asphalt and tiptoed towards our car. I turned around and hunched into the front seats.“Cop, for real.” I placed the smoking bong between my legs in the backseat, covering the mouthpiece with my palm.Henny sprayed the Ozium and put all the windows down. We trained for this regularly. We were prepared. I looked out the back window again. The cop continued his slow march, one step at a time. When he got to the back bumper, I faced forward and stared straight ahead. I shoved my bag of weed under the driver seat. In my peripheral, the cop was almost at the driver-side window. That was when Walsh got out of the passenger seat. Walsh had his hands up. I didn’t know if it was because the cop told him to put his hands up, or he did it to show the cop he wasn’t holding anything. It was a blur. “Just meeting up to go out for the night.” Walsh walked towards his brother’s Wrangler he was allowed to drive while his brother was off at war. “I’m getting in my car. We’re leaving now. Sorry for any trouble, Officer.”The cop seemed confused. The cop holstered his gun and continued walking up to the driver-side window. He bent down to look at Henny. He looked like a rookie, only a few years older than us maybe. I cupped my palm over the bong even harder.“What’s on your lap?” the cop asked Henny.Henny was a smart dude. He was no idiot. He’d tell the cop it was oregano, spices for our youth group’s pizza night. He’d say anything except a bag of weed, Officer.“A bag of weed, Officer,” Henny said.A bag of weed, Officer. The honesty angle. The cop will understand. He was a teenager not too long ago.“Outta the car!” Rookie Cop screamed. “Put your hands above your heads where I can see them.”I took my hand off the bong. There wasn’t any smoke left anyway. Things got hazy for a few minutes. More cops arrived. Next thing I remember was us sitting on a curb with our hands cuffed behind our backs, unable to swat away mosquitoes eating us alive. So many cop cars it looked like a murder scene. Our wallets, cell phones, bags of weed, the bong, and the pellet gun were on the hood of Henny’s car.Rookie Cop told another cop “Three Stooges here were shooting that pellet gun on private property and smoking that big bong.” Rookie Cop had his hand on his holstered gun. “I responded to a shots fired call, guns blazing. Lady reported three men on top of the windmill shooting a gun. You believe it?”The other cop swatted a mosquito on his forearm, smushing it into blood and said “Don’t look like these three’ll be curing cancer anytime soon.”So the three of us sat on the curb with our hands cuffed behind our backs like a real meeting of the minds. I stared at our warped reflections on a cop car door. Walsh was crying. He struggled to wipe his tears with his shoulder because of his glasses. He kept muttering our lives were over, that colleges wouldn’t take us with criminal records. I looked over at Henny who had this smirk on his face like getting arrested was something to cross off his bucket list. I looked at myself. My hair was cut high and tight because Mom never let me grow it out and it was so blonde I got called Village of the Damned kid at school sometimes. I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t think getting arrested was badass. I’d also be lying if I told you part of me wasn’t scared shitless.“I need the three bags in the back of the Jeep,” I told the cops. “My parents are divorced. I’m going to my dad’s tonight.”I was always explaining my parent’s divorce to people and not because I wanted to. And I was always having to lug around my duffel bag, backpack, and PS2 in its travel case whenever I went from one house to the other.“Relax, sweetheart.” One of the cops said. “You’ll get your bags.”The cops finished searching Henny and Walsh’s cars. Read us our rights. Crammed us into the back of one cop car. Our hands still cuffed and smushed behind our backs. We weren’t buckled in with seatbelts. Rookie Cop got in the car, turned it on, and hit the gas. But the cop car was still in park. The engine revved so loud all the other cops stopped what they were doing to laugh and bust Rookie Cop’s balls. I was surprised cops made mistakes too. I thought about asking him if they taught him that in the academy. Make the other cops laugh, bust his balls back after he busted ours, you know, live a little. Cops and robbers shit. But I remained silent.Once Rookie Cop figured out how to put the car in drive, we drove off. “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen was playing on the radio. Reality hit me when we passed Mom and Pat’s house. Pat was my stepdad. It was the house I’d gotten picked up from less than an hour before, after I finished an SAT practice test and Mom searched my bags and my cargo short pockets for drugs, but she didn’t check the waistband of my boxers where I stashed the half ounce. I saw our white house with green shutters. Our golden retriever, Max, ran along the Invisible Fence line at the edge of his existence. I saw the giant sun-faded American flag that Pat had fastened to a clothesline he nailed between two trees almost three years ago, the week after The Towers fell and everyone put those little plastic flags in their car windows. The flag was three thousand ghosts flailing in the August breeze. The flag was a lot of things I didn’t understand.Rookie Cop drummed the steering wheel with his thumbs, softly singing the chorus to “Born in the U.S.A.” and mumble singing the verses. Every turn felt like the game Jell-O, our weight shifting into each other with the curving hills of backcountry Fairfield as we passed big houses with nuclear green lawns. Downtown, the houses got smaller, but the lawns were still nuclear green. Bush and Kerry yard signs everywhere. Sidewalks appeared. Everyone was staring at our meeting of the minds going on in the back of that cramped cop car. Joggers. Dog-walkers. Labs and golden retrievers. Lance-Armstrong-looking wannabes on expensive bikes. Young commuter couples walking into restaurants. Moms or nannies pushing babies in strollers with ridiculously oversized wheels. Old men with War Veteran snapbacks watering their driveways with gardenhoses. A gang of kids with glow stick necklaces around their necks about to bike through the haunted graveyard. OxyContin-addicted Phishheads from our youth group who robbed us for a half pound of pot smoking cigs outside the pizza shop they work at. Even a laminated memorial picture stapled to a tree, the picture of this kid who killed himself driving drunk a year ago. All of them had eyes that followed us. I was facing the kinds of consequences Mom and Pat had tried to prevent for years. They were always saying they didn’t want to see me end up like my stepbrother Ralphie. He’d faced all kinds of consequences from drugs.We passed Fairfield train station. Commuters walked up the stairs from a northbound local. If we hadn’t gotten arrested, we’d have driven in circles smoking the bong until we ended up at McDonald’s and ordered McDoubles with Big Mac sauce off the Dollar Menu. Henny would’ve dropped me off at the train station for the last train out of Fairfield, the 11:48 local to Stamford. I’d’ve taken the forty minute train ride, transferring once in Stamford onto the local to Grand Central which stopped in Cos Cob, a neighborhood of Greenwich without mansions, where Dad lived. Every Monday night and every other weekend, I went to Dad’s where I had no curfew, unlike Mom’s where I had to be home at 10PM sharp.Rookie Cop pulled into the back of the police station as Bruce screamed at the end of the song. We were unloaded from the car in an area resembling a grocery store loading dock. Henny and I smirked when we looked at each other. Walsh didn’t smirk whatsoever. We were led single-file into the station like a sad little parade. Henny and I were being charged with possession of marijuana (our separate bags were combined, a little cop trick, but still weighed a gram and a half short of a felony) and possession of drug paraphernalia. Walsh was being charged with the same, plus something about the pellet gun. Rookie Cop led me over to the fingerprint station. As he pressed and rolled each fingertip into the ink pad, then onto their little squares on the sheet of paper, I stared at a McGruff the Crime Dog poster. I’d met McGruff once when he came to my school in third grade for a D.A.R.E. rally while a uniformed cop helped him waddle around the gym. On the walk back to our classroom, we’d all seen it. A bald man with an upper and lower body much-like Scruff’s, but human hands smoking a cigarette and eating a sandwich. Scruff’s hollow head and front paw gloves were lying on the grass beneath the man’s paws. It was like learning Santa Claus wasn’t real. Scruff couldn’t take a bite out of a sandwich, let alone crime.When the fingerprinting was over, the ink stained my fingertips, smudges I’d carry into the future. Another cop took my mugshot. It was nice not having someone telling me to smile a real smile for once which was what Mom always said. I called Dad instead of Mom for my phone call. I’d’ve rather stayed in jail than gone back to Mom’s that night and faced Pat who sometimes cared so much about me I wondered if he cared about me at all or if maybe it was some long gone version of himself he was trying to save.“Dad, I got arrested. I’m at the Fairfield Police Station,” I said.“Jesus Christ, Sean. You were arrested a month ago.”That was true. I’d been arrested the month before in the parking lot of this Connecticut fast food chain called Duchess for yelling the chorus to “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba at the top of my lungs and also for underage drinking. It was only a summons. No handcuffs. No cell. Just twenty hours community service and some fines.“What happened?” Dad asked.“We were smoking pot.”“I’m leaving now.” Dad sighed. I heard my stepmom, Paula, in the background, saying “What is it? What happened?” Then dial tone.I was led to a cell by a desk job cop. The cement block walls in the small row of cells made everything echo. A drunk guy in a wrinkled suit with no tie was in one of the other cells. He had his hands on the bars. He reminded me of the pirate trying to coax the keys to the cell from the dog while the jail burned in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World. “When am I getting outta here?” the drunk guy asked. Desk Job remained silent and pointed at the empty cell for me. I walked in. The bars slammed shut behind me. I was alone. I thought about how being arrested would effect the future Mom had planned for me. College, all that stuff. The future I had planned for myself didn’t exist.Walsh was led to my cell shortly after. I wanted to say something to him like it was gonna be alright, but I wasn’t sure if things would be alright. Henny was dumped in shortly after Walsh. We were quiet for a while. The air-conditioning was blasting. It was freezing.“Our lives are over,” Walsh said. “I’m eighteen. I’m gonna be charged as an adult.”“It was some pot and a pellet gun,” Henny said. “We’ll be fine. Fuck the cops.”Henny gave the finger to the camera mounted to the ceiling. I shook my head and slouched up against the cement wall. My teeth clattered from the cold. Walsh cried again. In the moment, I felt strong not crying. I felt like a man, like an adult, like I was ready for the real world, though it would still be three months until I could legally buy cigarettes and blunt wraps or fight a war for oil or vote for one moron or another. My mind back then told me when you get arrested for smoking pot and shooting a pellet gun and you don’t cry, you become a man. Walsh was the manliest of us three. That was the weird thing. I pulled my arms and my head into my t-shirt so it was a little tent. There was a buzzing sound. I peered out through one of my sleeves. Desk Job came into the hallway, opened the cell door with a set of keys, and told Walsh his parents were there. Walsh got up and told the cop his life was over. Desk Job remained silent as he led Walsh away.I thought about Ralphie again. About how he’d been arrested a couple times. About how he ended up. About how Mom and Pat were gonna say I was on the same road as him, a predestined path to destruction because they’d been saying that since they caught me with a pack of EZ-Widers and a few weed stems and seeds freshman year and acted like I was shooting dope into my jugular. I already knew drugs were bad. I also knew they were good. And cool. I already knew drugs were bad though because of how Ralphie ended up, but I wasn’t doing the kind of drug he ended up doing. I swore to God on my mother on my father on my life I never ever would.“I got the munchies.” Henny laughed as he laid back on the bunk with his hands behind his head. “Do you think we’ll get any Burger King? My cousin got Burger King when he got arrested. Or bologna sandwiches like the TV shows?”I told him I didn’t think so. I told him I didn’t think we’d get any Burger King like his cousin or bologna sandwiches like the TV shows. I needed to tell myself something too. I needed to be like, self, listen up, when you’re in a holding cell, there’s always something you need to tell yourself. You need to tell yourself don’t be the god of poor decisions. You need to tell yourself don’t be the god of anything as a matter of fact. You need to tell yourself you're powerless over most of the things you wanna control and everything you think you know about life when you’re seventeen is bologna. You need to tell yourself you’re an idiot kid dousing his life in gasoline. But you don’t tell yourself anything like that because you haven’t lived enough to know the difference between what you can and cannot change. You need to ruin your life before you can tell yourself not to ruin your life. So instead, you sit and you wait for your parents to bail you out. You sit and you wait next to a drunk man in a suit with his hands on the bars like the cell is on fire and the keys are gone. You sit and you wait for the cell to burn down around you or for the cell to burn you up with it. You sit and you wait and from the top of your world you scream fuck you down at anyone trying to save you. You sit and you wait and you scream and all you hear are your own echoes.
The factory closed the week before Christmas. The owner had moved his operations to Bangladesh. Emanuel had spent eleven years on the assembly line. It was the only job he knew. Marta, his wife, could no longer cut hair. Her condition made her hands tremble to the point that her clients had begun to complain about nicks on their necks and ears. They were three months behind on rent, the electricity was shut off. Their kids were eating crackers and trekking through the snow with holes in their shoes.Emanuel had once had luck betting on football matches. That ended, as all good things do. He owed Ahmad, his bookie, three thousand francs. The man had already taken his scooter. Now the threats began.“Your wife is very lovely,” he said. “It would be a shame to put her to work, if you know what I mean.” “You know my situation,” Emmanuel said.“Meet me tonight,” Ahmad said, “and your problem will be solved.”Emmanuel tucked the children into bed, kissed his wife, and put on his threadbare coat.A wet snow was falling. Sloshy puddles had appeared on the street. The air was cold enough to make Emmanuel’s teeth chatter. He slipped into a dive bar he had often passed but never entered. Some men were yelling at the barmaid. Emmanuel ordered a glass of whiskey and downed it in a gulp. He ordered two more and found himself quickly drunk. Ahmed was waiting on the street in the posh neighborhood he’d directed Emmanuel to. “What do you want?” Emmanuel said.Ahmad lit a cigarette. “Not far from here lives a banker. You’re going to rob him.”They walked a few blocks and stopped in the shadows of the hedgerows surrounding a grand house.“See that window?” Ahmad said. “Climb in. Go up the stairs. The bedroom is on the right. In the banker’s closet, you’ll find a large, gilded box filled with his dead wife’s jewelry. All you have to do is get the box and bring it here.”“How do you know this?”“In another life, I was a woodworker. I built his cabinets.”Emmanuel clambered through the window. The house was dark but for a sliver of moonlight through the window. In the living room, a portrait of the banker and his wife hung above the mantle. Emmanuel crept up the stairs and snuck into the bedroom. The banker was snoring loudly. There was something ridiculous about the old man’s head on its enormous pillow. Emmanuel knew that if he didn’t take the box this very moment, he never would. Do this for your family, he thought. The box sat glimmering on a shelf. He snatched it quickly, too quickly, and slammed his knee into the closet door.“Who’s there?” the banker said. Emmanuel’s foot snagged on the rug. No sooner had he fallen than the banker punched his back. Somehow in the dark, Emmanuel found the box and smashed the banker’s face. The old man staggered back and crumpled to the floor.“I’m so sorry!” Emmanuel cried. “I’m so sorry!”The banker’s eyes fluttered, his lips bubbling with spittle and blood. “Help me, please!”Emmanuel wanted nothing more than to get away, but the banker gripped his coat. The old man was surprisingly strong. Emmanuel had to wrench himself loose, finger by finger. He ran down the stairs and out the door. Ahmad stood across the street, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Emmanuel thrust the box into his hands. Ahmad opened it and smiled.“Your debt is settled,” he said. Emmanuel stumbled home and collapsed to the bathroom floor. He lay there for a long time, praying that God would not punish a man in this position. After a time, he felt better. He undressed and crawled into bed beside his wife.“Are you okay?” she said.“Go back to sleep,” he said.
A nun was cloistered in a convent near me. I knew her. She was the Mother Superior. She was the main bitch. Top energy. She left that cloistered convent and moved to the Midwest. I was visiting the Midwest for poetry and to fuck a writer I’d been sexting with for months. I waxed my pussy right before I went on that trip and that was a mistake. My boyfriend dropped me off at the airport. I took a pill to fall asleep on the plane. When the plane landed, my head was resting on the stranger next to me. My head was on his shoulder but he never tried to wake me up. I was embarrassed but he was polite about it. I am no longer embarrassed and it's kind of a brag. I had my head on a random man’s shoulder on a plane and I was so comfortable and he probably wasn't but he was cool with it. I wonder if he enjoyed it.When the plane landed, the writer I was going to fuck was waiting for me. He rolled my luggage to a restaurant. We had sushi. We had beers and sex. I texted the nun. She texted me her address. I didn't know nuns could live alone. The writer took the L with me to the nun’s neighborhood. The writer made a racist comment about the neighborhood and walked me near her apartment. I asked him to leave. I called the nun. She came out. She asked me to come up to her place. We went up and down a very tight staircase. Her apartment looked exactly like all the memes about the coziest lesbian homes with green walls and mismatched furniture. This was the first time I saw the nun’s hair. I had imagined it when she wore her habit. Her current congregation allowed her to wear regular but modest clothing. She could show me her hair and I liked it. Her outfit was highly nun-coded. As expected. As it should be. And I loved it. I put on a black, velvet bodysuit and jeans to my date with the nun. I had my hair down. She drove me to an area the writer hadn't taken me to yet. It was a tourist spot by the water and it was beautiful. We walked on the boardwalk but didn't hold hands. We ate Italian food. She talked about how much she loved to go camping. We got ice cream cones. We licked the ice cream cones. I had never seen her licking anything before. Her licks were meticulous. When we got done licking, we got on the wrong elevator and got lost in the parking structure. Neither of us had paid attention to where she’d parked. We were too excited. We were on a date. We kept getting back on the elevator and coming out on different levels. I was getting sweaty. She said it was the priests’ fault. I thought about giving up and getting on our knees. Asking god for help so we could find her car.I imagined her having a sexy amount of authority as Mother Superior. Making sure a sexy amount of suffering happened at all times. An hour later, we found her car. I told her I would take the L back to where I was staying but she insisted on driving. When she dropped me off, she waited for me to go inside. As you should. When you go on a date with someone you care about, you wait to make sure they're safe. I went back into the writer’s apartment. He woke me up with his dick the next morning. It was similar to the ending of Kids (1995). A drunk Casper rapes Jennie as she sleeps. He was sober and we were in bed.I forgot to reply to my boyfriend for most of my trip, so when I got back home, we broke up in his parents’ living room.
Peggy got down on her knees and asked God to send her a good man. She thought she had one in Jack but her friends told her that he wasn’t a good man, or if he was, he was good in the way that men are good which is different from the way that women are good. Something about the difference between a deal and a contract. Peggy thought all goodness was the same and maybe the goodness in Jack was hiding. For six months Peggy and Jack had dinner once a week until one day he stopped answering her calls. “He’s just not that into you,” her friends said. But wouldn’t he have said that around the time they promised that they would always be honest with each other? And couldn’t he have said that before or after he told her, I feel like I can tell you anything?She called his house at doubling intervals — one day, every two days, every four days, every eight days, every sixteen. “Stop calling,” her friends said. “He’s going to think you’re crazy.” But just in the way Peggy knew Jack was good, she knew she wasn’t crazy, so why should it matter. “What if he’s dead?” she asked. “What if he’s hurt?” Then one or another friend would say they just ran into him in the supermarket. So Peggy got back down on her knees. “Kind and capable,” she thought, that’s all I want God. Then she spoke it out loud in case God wasn’t listening with his brain-ears. “Kind and capable, please.”She had three recurring dreams about Jack. In the first one he was smothering her with a pillow. In the second he was holding her under the waves while she drowned. In the third, which was the most violent, he was stabbing her in the bony place between her breasts while she held her hands up and tried to take the knives in the smooth basket of her palms instead. The dreams were eerily silent, like the moment before Jack’s automated voicemail kicked in. The only voice in the dream was Peggy’s, always asking the same question: “Why are you doing this?” Years passed and God sent Peggy several ok men. Jack died, not from suffocation or drowning or stabbing, but prostate cancer. For months after his funeral Peggy told anyone who would listen that she was disappointed in the catering. “Jack hated horseradish,” she told her friends. “Jack hated cold cuts. Anyone who knew him would know that.”
She had only applied to work in the Halloween store because she thought it would be temporary. But this store was open year-round—the building owned, not leased, by a man named Ed, who was thin and wiry, nostalgic and ambiguous as a figure in a Grant Wood painting. The devotion he extended to the rows of ludicrous masks and cackling witch animatronics seemed more suited to the motions of a farmer, tending to something whose harvest would keep people alive, rather than fleetingly amused. Ed preferred silent, solitary work: keeping inventory, tracking shipments in the back room he seemed to live in. He wanted someone to take over the register, be more “front-facing.” “Are you a people person?” he asked her when she first came in. She lied and said yes. In the Halloween store, time was always running out, yet somehow not passing at all. Ed’s business philosophy consisted of keeping a permanent GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign out in the front window to create what he called “a false sense of urgency” in the customer. The music that played during her shift was always the same recording Ed had made of a Top 200 countdown on Labor Day 1993, commercials and all, every day climbing the same apex towards “Heart-Shaped Box.” Then it would start its loop all over again, trapping her inside. She would think of all the other times she had heard these songs over the course of her life—these same songs again and again and now, a million times more. They were engineered for liminal spaces: checkout lines and waiting rooms and traffic jams, to give people the illusion of movement and rhythm when their lives were going nowhere. Usually this time of year, Christmas music took over, the ultimate opiate of the masses, to distract everyone from the cold fact that another year was slamming shut forever. But not in the Halloween store. The music didn’t change. It never would. That would mean something was coming; that would mean something was ending. To stay afloat, the store also sold other holiday items, stocked as if they were perennial: pastel Easter baskets of unraveling wicker, Thanksgiving wreaths of fake papery leaves, snowmen whose bodies were made of Styrofoam and crumbling glitter. It was the snowmen’s season now: winter, at least by some definitions. But this was Florida, and the seasons never really changed, not in any meaningful or significant way. That was her favorite thing about coming here: the pure indulgence in wasting perfect days, because they were in seemingly infinite supply. It didn’t matter what she did or didn’t do with each one, because another would reappear the next morning, new and clean and glaringly bright. She couldn’t possibly be held accountable to change if nothing else around her did. The store was listed on various obscure websites and in off-brand guidebooks as an “oddities destination,” although the people that stopped in were always on their way to somewhere else. Usually, they would stalk the aisles for a minute or two before walking back out empty-handed, muttering there wasn’t much to see, just the same old shit you could get anywhere in October. “Speak for yourself,” she would think as she watched them leave, staring out the display windows into the vanishing point of the horizon. The store possessed the most beautiful natural light she had ever seen in an interior space—that was its most extraordinary quality, what should have been advertised in the guidebooks. Every afternoon, the golden glow that seeped in and wrapped around her nearly brought her to tears. Its beauty had something to do with the time passing, a phenomenon that persisted outside the safe confines of the store. The light was a reminder that life was short, something which was easy to forget whenever she was inside. Even Ed’s sign out front was only a false alarm—time running out rendered merely a marketing tactic and as such, a lie. She came home at night smelling like the plastic that everything in the store was made from, the way she used to come home smelling like coffee when she worked at Starbucks, her first job, her first failed attempt to make a life for herself. But unlike the way coffee’s nutty sweetness had begun to smell foul, the pungent scent of the plastic began to smell not quite sweet, but the next best thing: unnoticeable. Like how when she was a child she realized that all of her friend’s houses had their own special scent, but she could never smell her own. The place she came from always smelled like nothing, like it wasn’t a place at all. From her view at the counter, she could see the rack of personalized tombstone decals, some of the store’s best sellers. People thought it was hilarious to pretend to be dead. HERE LIES ADAM. HERE LIES ANNIE, they went, and so on. She could see her own name hanging there, a straight shot at eye level. When she interviewed for the job, Ed had asked her what scared her the most. She considered the question, really thought about it. But then too much time had passed so she just blurted out, “Nothing.” The word lingered in the stale air of the store. She could sense it hanging over her, like a spirit. She felt it, she believed in it, but that didn’t make it real.
For several days I have been followed by a man I cannot see— a man who presses his nose to the back of my head, who laughs quietly whenever I whirl around only to confront empty space. He casts no reflection. He never speaks. Who the fuck are you, I yell. Why are you doing this to me. Always at a steady pace, never sprinting, keeping my strength, I keep space between myself and my pursuer. I make sure to pass the lodge several times, the one that used to have the sign COMMUNITY SOUP KITCHEN draped over the doorway. I got a packet of sanitary pads there once; typical goods for the homeless. The woman who handed it over would not look at my face. I remember the foundation caked in her wrinkles. Now it is locked up. Frantic, I call for help a few times with no answer. I do not believe that no one is there. The solitary yellow window on the second floor winks out as soon as I rattle the door. I give up, trying to ignore the prickle at the back of my neck. But in the dark I feel the man gaining on me. I frequently slap myself across the face to stay awake. I wander the streets circuitously, in the cold and rain, until the sole of my left shoe is unglued and flapping, and my jean cuffs fray. When my bladder becomes a boulder I squat, timing myself. He always catches up.I fall asleep on my feet, head knocked back by a lamppost. The man touches my shoulders and my stomach swings like a hammock. Fuck off, I slur. I shrug out of my coat and jog into a crowd. Pedestrian eyes travel up the tracks on my arms. I haven’t slept in days! I scream at passers-by. I can hear the soft pad of footsteps behind me, not even struggling to keep up. His laugh. Somebody fucking help me!Limbs jostle me from all sides. The concrete sidewalk leaps up to smash my elbow. In the lodge there was a plaque praising community service above the kitchen entrance. I remember a penlight shining in my eyes, blurring the figures standing around me. My shirt was wet, sticking to the skin of my chest. The rank smell of vomit hung about me like a cloud. The voice of the woman wearing cakey foundation said, “these people are such animals.”Now, I’m in an empty hospital room. The only light is fluorescent. A poster to my left takes over the wall: Understanding the signs of addiction: we are here to help.The door slides open and a young PA with a tablet asks me how my elbow feels. I do not speak, because it is too late. I know I will not have his sympathy. I focus on my breath until he leaves. I finally feel that I am able to get up and stumble to the bathroom. To the mirror. And now you will leave me here, with the man blocking my way, as I cannot look around the back of his head. He stands here with elbows bent, shoulders rising and falling in the motion of tying a tie. I, doomed to occupy the space of a shadow, cast out and grasping for the physicality I’ve lost— I am disgusting to you. As days lengthen to weeks you’ll forget my pathetic begging. Smile, and, smugly, tell yourself that everything is how it should be, of course. Nothing is the matter.You’ll make way for him.You’ll call him sir.