Newest Painting Venture: Color Me Moody

December 31

"Rescue me. There's no one fun here. It's, like, forced festive."
The New Year's Eve SOS text from Dante, Alice's best friend.

Every message is a movie quote.

Alice is alone, sitting in her too-small efficiency, what she calls "cozy".
Sitting in her armchair, she battily dons her mother's old fur coat and hat.
She refuses the muff, on principle.
Auld Layne Sayne rolls on repeat, the lights are off, her champagne bottle is corked and in-hand, and every surface--every single surface--is covered in rainbow twinkle lights.

Alice is naked under the coat, tears rolling down her chest, and this newest message, lighting up her iPhone, has forced an unconscious recoil from glow.
Vampiress.

"Also, I wanna make sure you're not hanging from your shower rod," he adds, when Alice fails to respond.
She always has her phone, Dante knows it, and Alice hates him for it.
She smirks at him from her chair and pops an eyebrow.

"You're fit for a straight-jacket, Al."
"...fucked three ways towards the weekend."

Alice throws her phone at the ground.
A loud clunk because of the wooden floor.
She worries about the wrath of the blind lady downstairs and stands up.

Carefully, determinedly, Alice lifts the coat to her waist with both arms, hands situated on her hips, and, slowly, she pees on her iPhone, aiming carefully for the curvy square, all-purpose button.
Girls can aim, too.

There's ankle spray, and Alice wipes herself with her right hand.
None on the coat, she flicks it off in one go of it.
.....
"Good morning, Al."
Alice stretches her legs in her chair.

"I haven't had a good morning in a good, hot minute, D. Shut up, please."

"I don't even know what we're talking about anymore, Al."

"See, that's your problem, D. Right there....
...I always know exactly what we're talking about."

Retinal Bleed

Did you know that cockroaches can’t go in reverse?

Seriously. Front and turns. That’s it.

Julie’s aunt works in Emergency in New York, and nurses really have the best stories.

But cockroaches.

They like dark, moist places, did you know that?

Well, they do, and think about that when you’re lying in bed tonight, because her aunt says that they like to burrow in people’s ears while they’re sleeping.

But they get stuck when they can’t back out.

Antennae on your eardrums.

Wicked.

Julie doesn’t have roaches at hers, but Chicago does have rats the size of small kindergarteners. Sans their plastic, foamy cartoon backpacks, just for clarification.

She sees the rats on the El tracks when she has to take rides in the middle of the nights.

It’s most nights, really.

Like last night, she sat across from a homeless man who had a parrot on his shoulder.

The man was homeless, but the bird had a sweater.

She’s had a couple of good giggle fits about it, thinking about it, today.

Julie doesn’t do rats—worse than cockroaches for her—but it’s weird because from above, on the platform, she fixates on them—no fear—almost trance-like, hypnotized—by the rats.

If the rats were even with her, on her plane, if we could take the height of the platform from the tracks and flip it into a width, and add it to the width of the rats’ distance away from Julie now, she’d be terrified of the rats. Even though, technically, they’d be farther away from her then than they are now.

Pythagorean Theorem.

But it’s because the rats could get to her then.

Can rats climb walls?

Julie looks down.

Her gynecologist told her that she has a dissociative disorder.

Depersonalization, to be precise.

Julie didn’t think that her ass doctor was super qualified to make that particular diagnosis, per se, but mostly, she got pissed at the “disorder” part.

The use of that word.

“Carefully crafted, I’d say.”

“I only do it so it can’t get to me.”

Doc said, “Julie, you should really go for EMDR.”

Julie doesn’t know how to explain what happens to her in the late nights and early mornings like this. She has night terrors and wakes up her neighbors and pisses herself and one time shat herself.

Julie won’t ever forget the morning that she woke up with shit in her pants.

She had a salty, teary trail that had dried across her nose, and her hair was so wired and out that she looked like she’d buried her tongue in an electrical socket.

Mostly, she wakes up in such pain that she can’t stop shaking until she goes for one of her rides.

Pressed for time, sometimes she doesn’t even wear shoes.

Julie can’t handle everyone being dead.

She feels terrible loss.

The Suicides—her mother, Aunt Karen, Zack, eight friends.

The Cancers—her father, grandmothers, and pretty much everyone, everywhere.

The Fires—Miracle and D’Andre.

The Murders—Uncle Mike, Kamesha, and Robo.

She can’t handle it, so she doesn’t.

The pain is white gory insipid, and it spawns out from somewhere under her third left rib.

Julie gazes down as a rat gnaws on the rotting carcass of a one-legged pigeon.

Nubbed, oozy mucus.

She doesn’t know that she’ll be blind in ten years.

Look up. Maybe you can see Julie. She’s that gray thing floating there, with the bleeding empty eye sockets and the pulsing veins.

Graveyards (written in May)

My dad used to call that sofa THE CAREER STARTER. 
But it was only a joke because he'd had it custom made and designed in Texas and he'd ask people to take off their pants to sit on it, especially if they had butt buttons.
Scared they'd scratch the leather, I guess.
It's habit to us, to take off our pants.

Brass brads make curly Qs on the arms, and the color is a distressed, dark caramel that he always called "mauve", even though I think that's purple.
It's three cushions wide, squares not rectangles, and it has cherry wooden legs that look like upside down pears.
The pillows against the back are free, not attached, and there are four of them. They're beautiful, thick with dry, white wrinkles, and I used to suck on their leather corners when I was little, while my dad wasn't looking.

He called it THE CAREER STARTER  because he thought that the prospect of having to sleep on it in his home would force us into wild financial success, the notion too unbearable to consider at any great length.
But I'm sitting here, curled in an armchair, moscato mug well tended, watching Goodwill hobos knick it down the hallway.
Cancer, you know.
It's harrowing, because I don't have a career.

WWF(a)C Fastwrite

"Some people dream of being chased by Bigfoot" [What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, Laura van den Berg].
I dream of Lady Gaga surprising me at the Gap.
Walking into my store in her meat dress, desperate to buy our new orange Always Skinnies.
Tragically, she's in Asia.
Other times, I imagine all of my customers as pieces of furniture.
It comes to me, instantly, what they are.
Gifted, clearly.
Like that lady--she's an ottoman. Obviously.
Forget all this noise.
I just wish I had huge feet.