Stop Drinking the Tequila Kathryn Nowinski
I.
Scene 1, Operation Warped Speed OMG.
Setting: November 3, 2020. She stands suspended upon the stage laid by the bed of a pickup truck, backed across the ditch that leads to the soccer fields that were a pumpkin patch until the farmer who owned the fields donated the land to the local chapter of the AYSO during the late ’90s. KATHY: What do you know about corporate oligarchy? WHAT do you know about descent into totalitarianism? | Homo sacer, Agamben’s idea of bare life written backwards in the mirror in Sharpie across her tits. It’s the day of the 2020 election, it is her 29th birthday. | | Harrison Township did not have a library when I was growing up. My father spent his Saturday mornings drinking coffee at the Starbucks of the Barnes & Noble on Hall Road while he waited for me to finish drama classes. “if one kills the one who is sacred … it will not be considered homicide?” What is contained within an ellipsis? SHILOH: This is not a dreamscape, this is not a nightmare. This is the mundane, the ways white girls from the suburbs from good families lose their virginities and go on to lead wholesome lives. Before we could fix a toilet or clear out hair from the drain with a coat hanger. White girls from nice families, who didn’t buy silver rings that turned their fingers green because they didn’t want to spend their allowance, but still attended abstinence events. You could reclaim your virginity they said, but that wasn’t in our minds then. Girls from nice families, on their backs, in a twin-sized bed. What is there to reclaim? Chantilly street in Laurel ‘For god guns love and country’ & a ‘don’t tread on me’ bumper sticker on your Jeep Patriot. One of those is overkill, we get it. II. Eyes to See Setting: a porch, a toilet seat, or a dinner table. Candles lit surrounding her. SHILOH: Can you imagine something so recklessly beautiful as peeing into a toilet bowl filled with soft boiled eggs? The pleasure of it? Dreams where you wake yourself up just as you’re sitting down on a toilet, muscles unwinding, body expelling. You wet the bed once while sharing a hotel room with your family travelling for a wedding. You were 13 and drank too many Shirley Temples. Now imagine something so recklessly beautiful as a woman resting on a sofa, laying with the pages of a thick book draped over her eyes. She likes the weight, but it is also a little suffocating.
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