11.33”
Little story about little girl. Frank wants to be called Francis now. He let his hair grow an inch and a half longer, out of the lazy buzz cut he used to keep to a side swept crew. He stopped sleeping over in her bed, so, she guessed he had grown up. One night with a mechanical pencil she wrote him a letter and slipped it under his door. She never got a response, aside from a little too long look which communicated something exterior to the conversation at hand. He started spending all his time behind a closed door. She flung hers wide open and a few boys came shuffling through. She knew she’d never get as old as him. He told her that love stifles creativity and makes production obsolete. She put her head in between her hands and manually nodded along to his sentences. She starts a new letter but decides to light it on fire with a birthday candle when she finds herself trying to write why dying is okay. She called her mom to see if she still loved anything. Her mom said she’s been living inside video games so that she can pretend she doesn’t really exist.
Dandy took a train. Her hand rolled up and down, shoved through the small rectangular slot which the glass pane of the window could be pushed aside to create. She watched the ends of her fingers over the long flat expanse of her upper arm dance delicately as though brushing through the tips of grass they couldn’t really touch. She couldn’t remember what a neutral face looked like as she sat on the train. Unsure if she was displaying a tense nervous thin lip, a concealing near smile, or an angry grimace, she sat directly facing her parlor partner. The girl across from her had a dumb look on her face, lips spread apart and eyes downcast as she swatted her pointer finger up and down over her phone. The thought of replicating her parted lips kept floating into Dandy’s mind. She worried it might appear mocking or dismissive. So instead she twisted her fingers together and sort of puckered up her lips. She took to looking at the
long diagonal lines created by staring at rows of grape vines at the correct angle. Embalmed long French finger nails, which seemed funny when applied, tap the table in front of her. Each time the train made a stop she contemplated grabbing her backpack and running off to catch the next one back to San Francisco. She was going somewhere she’s never been before. She was trying to run away because she couldn’t find another way to stop fantasizing about just staring at New Mexico’s sky, switching between bright hot blue and milky clotted black. Watching the sun turn into the night and back into the day again. Climbing a mountain of disjointed rocks to sit on a particularly flat topped one, and just watch. Writing a manuscript and burning the pages. Bringing her baby back and just talking purposelessly, trying to trick the other into smiling. A coalesced reduction. Not reduced in the negative, but like really fine vanilla
extract or expensive duck organ. Refined in simplicity and attention. Like a walking meditation. Slowing down and watching instead of just moving forward and through. She was trying to run away from the confidence that things will eventually feel the same as they did a few years before. On a walk along the thin median line to the window framed in the final car of the train, she met a Shaman. When she asked him how one becomes a shaman, is there a university of phoenix degree for that or do you have to live in a hippie commune somewhere in Arizona for a month, he told her it entails consuming copious amounts of hallucinogen and then trying to leave your body. He told her he ingested mushrooms or LSD 93 times in the past year. Past the point of any enjoyment, it was a practice not a recreation. Through this he learned how to separate himself from his identity and enter the body of other people, search for their demons, and pull them out.
Dandy asked him if it was a bit like dying and he told her that he believes in another land, a heaven, where everyone meets again after death. That this life is always only one thing with different perspectives. He said it was more like listening to someone completely, without agenda, and with your entire body. When you let someone be considered with no barrier or defiance, it is easy to know them. She asked if he thought most people ever listen like that, away from themselves, and he said no. Suddenly finding it easy to hold her face, Dandy told him that she was listening, and he nodded. Quietly he said he enjoyed her company and then offered to give her a tattoo on the train. Dandy asked him why, if it is possible to know anybody, she loves and understands specific people instead of everyone. He shrugged and said that that was the question. She leaned her head on her shoulder and remembered the time she lay on the lawn, curled in her love’s
arms, and looked straight into his eyes for minutes. Side by side, they treated each others’ eyes like mirrors, smiling, pretending, and gesturing, following rhythmic easy understanding. “I want to know more people,” she told the shaman. He wrote a website down for her. A week later, back in her familiar untamed garden in San Francisco, she tried to paint the face she’d seen in the train window, musty and faintly transposed over California’s soft yellow brush. The eyes she painted were trying to name everything. They screamed I love the sweating twinkling lights that have fallen down the soft slopes of trees into puddles in the valley. They screamed I love the places the clouds chose to stay, highlighted and crooked across the sky. They screamed I love the crane swinging towards my railroad tracks, pivoting perfunctorily until its crossed lines seem straight. The eyes saw too much, they were staring, empty in reception, trying to
look at everything. She imagined someone standing in their backyard, touched by the train tracks, watering their lawn with the same vacant face she wanted inside her landscape. But for him too, the clouds will move and become blurred or less oblique before again finding their place no matter how carefully his eyes name them. Her trip is a circle. Her painting is a circle. Running away is running around. She is going along the track. Spiraling upwards. Running spherically until she gets dissolved into the sky. Folding in and out of shapes for unoccupied faces to name. In turns it is easy to be afraid until you realize you’ve seen that tree, that smile, that cloud before. After that, it is easy to forget why you are turning.
a hysterical
First layer is like a cruise ship filled with happy bumbly small door and head down the stairs, I quickly run down there is a hospital ward with old people being led around symptom fused and each nurse glares at me with a particular hatred. stairs, down another floor. Here there are doctors and a tients. They capture me quickly and I am returned to the originates the situation and become desperate to discover more. This the zombie like top deck. I run down flights and flights exit that can be found in any school or library. The scene into twisting grassy hills which I run down and then fionly to the side of the giant oval. I am standing over the Ocean this certainty that everything is not right, that I have to be just under the surface of the falsity of the top floor. I see erty, starvation, hunger. A cause, the truth behind the top. where and that the only way to topple the internal control was to and right, certain that it was my duty to destroy anything a couple, a 45 year old dyed blonde woman and a 12 year two of dirt surrounded by terrified people watching the oputhe mannerisms and gestures I had picked up as a pasthem. The boy didn’t trust me but the woman was fasciover to the side of the cliff, gazing into the water as I recontrasting Right as I reached the crescendo of my story they gripped had constructed. Seizing the opportunity I grabbed the They tumbled and crumpled on rocks and I watched long my heel and sprinted back to the rocky mounds, up anwish-fulfillments, people everywhere eating dirt and grass. They had a true one who ruled the land and after most ran away frighthouse on the side of a cliff surrounded by fruit trees and people who all warned me away from the house and ran having humans manning the electrical and service sections of the to think about who and what symbol they were protectme, set their monkey friends free, return balance. They altheir very center of the home, surrounded by children’s books. the knowledge that my quest was driven by an indiscern-
source
people being fed constant television and food. I discover a three floors because I want to escape. On the third floor by nurses in green scrubs. I wander around here a bit con- in Slowly they start closing in on me and I run back to the small angry grey haired man circling the floor but no patop floor. Now I know that there is something wrong with different time I sprint down the stairs after breaking away from of stairs that turn quickly, the grey industrial emergency changes as I speed down farther and farther. Stairs turn nally splutter down (deck 4) and throw my exhausted legs staring down a rocky cliff. On the rocks I am struck psychic by the one to change this world. That reality was brimming rocks and water and waves and as I looked around, povSomehow I recognize that there are leaders on each floor systems, destroy the king of each floor. I felt compelled past wrong between the regime and myself. In a field a bit far off sits old boy. They dine at a fancy central table on a mound lent meal. With instinctive strides I approach them. Using are senger on the arbitrary sustained life before, I befriended nated by my muscles and defined jaw. I walked with them counted a falsified tale of how I ended up in their land. each other in empathetic fear for the many challenges Iable leg of the woman and boy and threw them off the cliff. enough to make sure they were dead, pitiless. I spun on other floor, into another layer. Here I saw small monkey sadness in their eyes, a perfect determined pain. I asked to ened, one frowned and pointed upwards to a beautiful fresh streams. I pushed through the arms of the monkey quickly up the hill side. I found dirty poor working class combine house. At first they resisted my entrance but I asked them ing by blocking my entrance. I encouraged them to join lowed me to enter and I found the evil king quickly in the Once again emotionless, my actions are mechanized by in ible morality. I ripped the books from his grubby fat fists
different
and threw them over the cliff. He dived after them, withbut his hands caught the books lodged in the rocks and pull him up and I frowned without mercy. A chinese elecpsychic to convince him that he shouldn’t and we both stood on were covered in the grease of a full rich meal he had been desperate thumb and fingers. Slowly the oiled hands slid systems, down the hill until he made a splintering connection with any advice, I ran onwards up the hill again, prepared to the nurses and old sad patients. Only the patients are gone thy. I run backwards to a small alcove, the fact that I’ve are I can’t kill all these nurses. On this floor it makes no sense I stumble, action-less. In my stupor a pretty blonde nurse optimistic until she jabs a pair of scissors into my chest. I scissors out and throw her roughly on the ground. She able Mexican woman and a giant Samoan man. I leave them was easy to make things start but I’ve got no plan from on the top deck, and meet King Henry. We already know to brand new pair of golden brass knuckles. I laugh at his plaining that gold is no substitute for brass. He laughs too, one finger stroking the metal. A race begins and we all worlds flatten so that each one is visible at a distance from combine Hitler’s floor. To make up for my disruption in his factory up the pathway to a fourth dimension, an alternate paralsome small silence, he summons the force of a giant wave. into Hitler’s floor and pulling it all out over the cliffs gone in the mushroom floor above it. The flood destroys the docof which floors he is flooding and keeping. I run through When it all settles I am on the bottom floor, by myself. The the soaked floors. I walk up the now united world and disone expression. I tell them how this is all their land now, I feed a small girl spits it out, disgusted. I am surprised but not overly. They shake the feeling they might build up what the king had Sexualwissenschaft
out a second hesitation. This one had been simple, easy, he lay there sustained by his literature. He begged me to trician jumped forwards, wanting to save the man. I had the edge of the cliff watching the king struggle. His hands eating, bacon juice slipped down his cheek and coated his down the book and like the blonde two before he rolled a sharp rock. Without offering the newly liberated staff kill whatever. I run up a few floors now up to the one with now and the nurses run quickly with anger and evil apabeen murdering is finally catching up to me and I’m sure who oppresses and who is oppressed, categories blur and runs near. I try to indoctrinate her to my side and feel quite scream out in angry pain as she begins to cry. I yank the lands in a pile of bodies I had not noticed before, an old for dead and dying, terrified of my responsibility now. It here on out. I somehow walk slowly into a private room, each other, he was expecting me. He proudly peacocks his purchasing mistake and fold them into an envelope, exwe all are merry. I place the folded gold into my pocket, move to the center track. Only it sinks downwards and the the track. We run, circular and outwards. Floor 6 is just like station he cloned all his subjects and is trying to open lel ultraverse. I ask the king why he allows it, and after It sweeps through my running feet and past me, crashing and dead in the sea. He wipes out the monkey floor but not tor and nurse floors. Easily solving everything. I lose track the chaotic sheets of water struggling to stay coherent. earth is fertile now and grain and rice crops spring from cover a few monkey people on the edge on their old land. a tangerine and she loves it. I offer her another and she see the new land and I am momentarily optimistic. I can’t made in their own manner. I frown at the disenchanted girl.
my first sad girl voicemail. “I’m sad again” she said, “I don’t really know why I’m calling. I’m sorry. I think it is good to start by apologizing. So, I’m sorry. Or maybe not at all, maybe that is some sort of obligatory infliction. Maybe that means you should just stop talking. I don’t know, I don’t know anything. I’m sorry. The thing is, I’m sad again. I was good for two weeks I think, I made a new friend and I took on extra responsibilities and I joined a, I joined a, pottery class. I stopped listening to my sentences so much, I stopped watching how my hands moved so much. We’d been talking consistently since I left him and it felt nice, only positive. Then he called out to me in the morning, and I could see him in bed, perfectly, I could see it, like in a crystal ball or something, it was oblong and hazy but clear, crushed in the back of my mind. And I felt so lonely. I felt lonely for myself and for him, and lonely for the relationship, and sad that our love made us feel separate from the other people around us. He told me he was on a boat and wished I was next to him. I wrote a place I loved him with sharpie on my 75 cent t-shirt before going out with unwashed hair. It feels bad. I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m saying this. I feel stupid. I feel stupid for everything.”
she had bad taste in boys but worse taste in girls
SAD GIRLS DO IT WELL
unsent love letter, may 2013 - september 2013
volume one
11.33”