There was a billboard along the highway that read, FG3: ONE LAST RUN, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright profile to profile, stars and stripes behind them. The bottom text dictated: WATCH NOW ON AMERICAPLUS, so I opened my week’s ration of AmericaPlus and swallowed the last tab of blotter paper. It wasn’t enough to hallucinate, but my microdose made rush hour on the highway seem warm and tingly with sunset and my fellow commuters as carefree and wealthy as I briefly was.
When the birds burst up and out from the sidewalk grass in front of my car as I’m driving home from the store on Mother’s Day, and I think: how beautiful! as the unexpected blue of their wings flash before me, and then: oh no! did I hit them?—it’s a near thing, a miracle: I miss them, just. Because the birds live, when I arrive home and honk to let my family know I’m back, let’s go, and my husband emerges, he does not stare perplexedly at the bumper of our newly-purchased SUV. And, because the birds are both still winging through the clear May sky, I do not slide out of the driver’s seat and find a dead bluebird resting like a macabre figurehead just above my Texas license plate. I do not marvel at its tiny twisted legs. One splayed skyward. Reaching. My son doesn’t nudge it with a stick so it falls glittering to the concrete of our driveway, a jewel torn from the crown of heaven. Let’s keep it, I don’t say, so my husband doesn’t have to shoot me that look both disgusted and affectionate like: you’re such a weirdo and I love you, but absolutely not, no way, dead songbird in the freezer is where I draw the line. The bird is still alive so I can't take a picture and post it, like an omen, on Instagram. So, because I don’t kill this bird on Mother’s Day, the universe does not decide, a month later, that four and a half weeks of pregnancy is all I get. No, the bird flies free and this baby—the one I don’t know I want until I see the pink parallel lines and feel a yes so deep it rings like a bell? This baby lives.
During my dissertation on the history of traveling theatrical acts, I came across a grainy old black-and-white piece of footage from a fair. In the silent reel, too few people hold the ropes of a hot air balloon, intending to keep it grounded. As the balloon takes off, four people continue holding their ropes, lifted off the ground. One by one they release, dropping to the safety of Earth below. Except for one person who holds tight. I was born with a condition of isolation. Drinking didn’t give me a sense of belonging, but it made the affliction tolerable. It gave me a lens of delusion I needed: This is temporary. It muffled what was insufferable.I cling to the rope as the balloon gains height. Departing this planet, legs swinging wildly. The people below gather and scatter. Every moment, I am shocked at how high I am, then I’m perilously higher. On a Tuesday, surrounded by barely-tolerant family, I listen to them read pleas off index cards, voices trembling. It’s supposed to touch me—change me—through the shaming. Instead, I feel more othered than ever. I keep a blank face and endure, quietly stoking my rage. When I finally let go, the fall is very far. Windmilling my arms and pedaling my legs noiselessly. There is grace in these movements; an artificial tranquility imposed by the silence. I hit the ground soundlessly, grainy figures run toward me, the balloon long gone.The readers are done so I take a breath to unleash the violence brewing. Instead, a choking sigh escapes. Bodily relief. Two impossibilities: compound the isolation or give up what made isolation tolerable. Fear of the inevitable forces of gravity that, for some of us, encourage us to hold tighter and escalate the very horrors we fear. I understood this instinct.
We’re nearly there now - lids grow heavy as the sun sets on our species. It’s bittersweet, sleep’s surrender, a warm blanket wrapping around our aching bodies. It’s better this way, a relief to embrace our conclusion without a coda, to no longer carry on. In the end it wasn’t cancer or rising oceans or mass extinctions or other self-inflicted harms but a deep fatigue that hollowed us until there was nothing left to do but rest, finally, now and forever. One last shared sigh, releasing the weight of our communal sins, and then the comfort of an unending slumber.
No NameI looked at her picture to see if she was more attractive than me. I looked up her family’s ancestry to see if they had ever owned slaves. They hadn’t; they were quakers. I looked at the picture of my boyfriend and her when they were in Italy together. I had never even been to Italy and he knew this. Yet there he was four years ago eating gelato with her with his eyes closed and a big grin. He probably wouldn’t take me to Italy because I was dull and uncultured. She worked in academia at a fancy university and had degrees that I would never have. I worked as a preschool teacher and everyone thinks I just finger paint all day. I don’t, and we mostly use colored markers anyways. She was born in a city, a really important one. I was born in a town with no name. It did have a name, but it hardly deserved one. She was not prettier than me, but somehow that made it worse. She must be really special while I am just attractive. Being attractive isn’t special. Anyone would date someone attractive because they assume they're good at sex. I am not good at sex; I just lay there. She probably did really kinky stuff. Like finger stuff. I heard ugly girls do that to compensate. She was not actually ugly, but I needed to say that she was. It was all I had. Cool Party I had finally been invited to a cool party. I was wearing a long skirt. I couldn’t drink because I was on antibiotics so I ordered an apple juice at the bar because I thought it would at least look like a beer but the bartender handed me a bottle shaped like an apple. I was wearing a long skirt and drinking apple juice and everyone thought I was Mormon and they hated me. Nobody had said they hated me, but I could assume they did because nobody was coming up and talking to me. The most popular person at the party had invited me. He was talking to everyone else and everyone wanted to talk to him. I was alone in a corner watching a Youtube video on mute, which probably wasn't helping. Then someone came up and began talking to me. He asked about the Youtube video. I told him it was two really funny guys that play video games and he asked if I played video games and I said no because I didn’t play video games, I just liked watching other people do it. He excused himself and walked away. I was jealous of him because he could walk away. I finished my apple juice and went home.
So there is one rooster in the neighborhood that sounds normal, emmits the typical cock-a-doodle-doo cry in the wee hours of the morning. Then there is the other rooster, the one that submits a scream like someone is holding a hand around its throat. It's like an "Ehhhhhhh," sound. And it's much louder than the other rooster's call.So every morning, I hear the rooster that screams and wish I knew where it lived so I could find out exactly why it screams.
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The rooster belts out its usual "Ehhhhhhh," sound, then scratches at the scar on its throat.
You reach your forties and your life’s nothing but bus rides to work, and long hours in the lab, and a sandwich for lunch because with a mortgage and a spouse and two nearly-grown sons your pay doesn’t go far, and every day it’s rinse-and-repeat, your life fading away in this windowless room with its unsparing fluorescent lights, its stink of solvents and reagents, and then one day you mix compound A with solution B and what you’ve made is a substance so viscous and black you can scarcely believe it, you tip it out and it’s like you’ve poured emptiness into a puddle on your workbench, a hole where there can be no hole, an utter absence of light that you lower your head to peer at, and touch its tacky surface with a fingertip, then press your fingers into, and that’s when its chill soars through you, rapid and numbing and dragging darkness with it, and before you know it that darkness is everywhere, that darkness is everything, and you should panic but you don’t, your heart should race but there is no heart, there is no you because you are this void and it is you, and it is stillness, and it is peace, it is where time has never existed, so it’s a shock when it breaks apart and you’re yanked back by a burning in your chest and your eyes open to a glare of ugly lights and your colleagues kneeling over you, weeping with relief that they’ve revived you, and you’re weeping too because you are you again, back in this sordid little world.
Behind the dune of plastics, hidden among the clumps of charred O-Rings and heaps of shapeless garbage, there is a large tank. In the tank are cockroaches. Every day, I climb onto the metal cover and contemplate the gray dawn that creeps through the hills of waste. Then I defecate inside the tank through the top hatch. Every day, my feces nourish thousands of hungry cockroaches. In the morning, I take my net and fish. The smell of the tank does not bother me. On the contrary. Sometimes I climb inside and catch the biggest cockroaches that hide at the bottom. Then I climb back up to the pot of water on the fire and cook breakfast, lunch, dinner. I eat fifty, seventy, ninety cockroaches a day. I also make a good, dark, bitter, thirst-quenching, nutritious broth from them. The cockroaches feed on my waste, I feed on them. Every day, I go for long walks through the sludge in search of more food for my farm: human excrement, remains of dead animals, or shapeless things. And then I collect fuel to keep the fire burning. This is my life. No one ever comes near. They are afraid, disgusted, pitying, horrified. They are shortsighted and confused, all moving towards their end, even if they run away in different directions. They run away and do not see the beauty. I do not run away. I see. And then, at sunset—gray, blurry, misty—I sit on a heap of garbage and smile, because life, every life, is wonderful.
In the bar, she stares at him constantly, which is embarrassing in and of itself, but also because she cannot seem to physically control it, and she knows his friends will notice (she somehow does not count herself in this body of people, although that is where she belongs; within this crowd, her desire isolates her, carves out a space of hot, silent shame), and she knows that they, his friends, will murmur to each other, that they will note her desperate, pathetic, puppy-dog presence, but she seems to have a physical impediment that means she can’t stop staring, and even when she forces herself to look at other people, she doesn’t see their faces but instead the overlay of his face, their mouths and faces moving and talking in a sick parody of his mouth and face, and when she glances across and sees him talking to another woman, it is as if she has been punched in the chest, it takes the wind out of her, she wants to cry, to scream, to cradle the other woman’s head in her hands and press down on her eyeballs until they turn to wet, soft mush. She spends so much time repressing this jealousy, certain that it is neither good for her nor appropriate for her feminist commitments, that it is a relief to simply thirst for blood.
TODAYToday a bully from my high school is coming by to beat me up one last time (he has cancer). AMERIKKKAOf course Amerikkka leads the league in serial killers. There are a great many serial killers in town right now—because of NYC’s favorable tax laws and enterprise zones and the big serial killer parade we have every year, and because in a lot of our restaurants serial killers eat free. A JOINERHere’s something you might not have known about me: I was a joiner in high school. Carbona Club, Whip-Its Society, Nutmeg Club, Friends of Cough Syrup, Society of Huffers & Baggers, Air Dusters Club, United Helium Party, Poppers & Snappers Study Group—I did just about everything. THE DARK WEBAnother strange aspect of the dark web is that some entrepreneurs have set up shops there. So you can stop and enjoy a hot dog. Or you can take a break at a little booth and get your photo taken with a monster (it’s really just a cardboard cutout, but it looks very real. And the teeth work). PROVERBCan’t have people looking up your cornhole. I think Benjamin Franklin was the first one to say that. BEATLEI’m told 60% of “A New Film About the New Beatles” had to be reshot because of me. Unfortunately, that was the end of my movie career. I checked around but nobody needed a Beatle right then, not even one with as much experience as I had. (I said I had a hundred years experience.) JAILHow did I end up in jail? When I got to Yuma I hadn’t slept in two weeks and hadn’t shaved or showered. My clothes smelled like farts and clams and were stiff from sweat and dirt. The police got dozens of calls claiming a caveman had just robbed the bank! I got a chuckle out of that one. RSVPSadly, due to a bean diet and other environmental factors, I will be unable to attend. THINGMy hand starred in the TV show The Addams Family. Yes, it’s true, Warren Beatty was definitely up for the part of Thing but I eventually snagged the role. I did an excellent job in the macabre/black comedy sitcom and to this day it’s still considered the best TV show of all time.
