Atlas and Alice, Issue 18
Derek Fisher
Rash Purple sky in morning. Endless promise of warming. Purple sky at night. We all turn out the light. I decided to do a thing. Every hour on the hour I’d tell a stranger they’re beautiful. The decision came to me while writing poems in the Greenhouse Cafe. It hasn’t gone well so far. The first person was a woman, old and white. Mid-seventies, ish. She screamed at me and hit me with her purse until I ran away. Even chased after me for a hot second. No accusation of wrongdoing, no How dare you!, just screaming. Her blotches weren’t even that bad. Purple gashing along the eyes and much of the left side of her face, but it wasn’t terribly saturated. From a distance, you could hardly tell. The second person, a man in his thirties, well dressed and professional, race unclear, headphones in, said Fuck you. Then he took out his headphones and said Wait? What did you say? I said I said you’re beautiful. He nodded and repeated Fuck you, and kept walking. He was clearly wearing an older version of NeoSkin. His skin was super flaky and you could see the purple through it. The third person was a young Black woman. She said thanks but she shook her head after she passed by. She was badly affected. I wanted to say to her I mean it! I’m not messing around! You are beautiful! but she was gone before I got the chance. Maybe it would defeat the purpose to scream at people in the streets when I was trying to make them happy. I walked by a fresh site of a recent immolation demonstration and I was struck by the way the black scorching tattooed the concrete. It was a fairly small chunk of city street, maybe a quarter of a block’s worth. This had been The Fashion School’s second immolation protest. Thirty models set themselves on fire. Cynthia Lloyd was one of them! Crazy to think about. I remember jerking off to her in Chatelaine way back. On
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