After a minute, June just let the the gas thing (nozzle? I don’t drive) fall to the ground, and she threw a crumpled $20 bill at his face, and she went back to the driver’s seat and got in. The gas man was still screaming, threatening both physical violence and a call to the police. June just drove away.

And I was like, What the fuck, June. They will legit murder me for shit like this. I’m black. I have drugs on me. I don’t exactly read as straight right now. There is nothing respectable about me.

June said that that they had the same law in Portland, where she grew up, and that she had never given a fuck about it then and she didn’t give a fuck about it now and also we’re just in New Jersey and it’s not like we’re in Wyoming or whatever and also poppers aren’t really drugs.

I didn’t have a good response. I took the blanket off Mimmi-mimmi and rubbed her underside a bit. She mewled and spit up a gooey little rainbow on my hand, and then she said some shit about chemtrails. June repeated that she wasn’t scared a couple more times, apropos of nothing, but we didn’t stop again until we got to Pennsylvania.

#

Mimmi-mimmi was a spherical cat head from space. She arrived on the trail of a falling star. She was a princess of a cat planet, which in her language is called “Cat Planet.” She came to save the universe from evil. She was powered by imagination and love, and she spoke the wisdom of the stars, and she wielded the Pure Cosmo Force, which was immaterial and never adequately explained to me. She landed in an alley behind June’s apartment in a burst of color and light, and we befriended her for obvious reasons.

#

In Mississippi, June went down into the Feather Maze to search for a piece of the Trigger Egg while me and Mimmi-mimmi went to a blues club. June wanted to be in and out as quickly as possible, but I said we had to stop and get some culture to nourish our souls. We were in Clarksdale, birthplace of the delta blues. How could we not pay homage? Were we philistines, animals? The compromise was splitting into two teams, Team June and Team David, the latter of which I nicknamed Team Tiger.

I found a club on Yelp that looked cool. I sat in the back, with Mimmi-mimmi discreetly hidden in a baby stroller. The music was okay. It was the kind of club that allowed baby strollers and presumably babies in it, so I wasn’t expecting it to be too hot. I don’t know if I even really like the blues. I really like the idea of the blues. It’s super black, and I am into black stuff because I am black also, and also also, it sounds like the music ghosts would make and I often feel like a ghost. But the problem with blues is that every song is the same. Same structure, same chords, same melancholy. Over and over and over and over.

Mimmi-mimmi spoke to me in my mind and said with a voice touched by Eternity, Beyonce did 9/11.

Her telepathic intrusion into my brainzone reminded me that Mimmi-mimmi can get up inside me like whenever, so I tried not to think of anything. Which is impossible. So instead I thought about me, in theory to get lost in the funhouse of unchecked solipsism, but mostly because thinking about me is kind of my main thing as a human.

Some people at a table were laughing and looking generally in my direction. Naturally, I assumed the former was a result of the latter. I slid my hands into my pockets, slowly, like a chill motherfucker holstering his guns at the end of a spaghetti western. The polish was chipped and faded, but there was still some color on my nails, a toxic green that evoked the flash and sizzle of a way-cool space laser. That $20 June had thrown at the guy had been intended for things other than gas, specifically special secret New Jersey pizza that they call “tomato pie.” In accordance with broke hipster logic, I was allowed to waste 10 of our dollars on something for myself. I chose a few bottles of drugstore nail polish, because whatever, fuck you, I do what I want.

In addition to doing what I want, I also do extreme self-consciousness and fear of everything, so I had to put them shits away. It was Mississippi, after all.

The band on stage, five old white guys, did an okay version of Mannish Boy, which is a pretty mediocre song. Muddy Waters is such a boring choice. “I’m a maaan!”, we get it, Muddy, thanks. I always preferred Howlin’ Wolf. Smokestack Lightning is an American classic, and the man himself sounded like he was halfway into turning into a werewolf. Or maybe turning back into a human from being a werewolf? I think all musicians should sound like they are halfway turning into or from a monster. That is true art. But this song was boring, “I’m a maaan,” and then the Shadowless swirled up from Beneath, their edges flickering in the dim, their cold, slippery hands tracing faces frozen in inert ecstasy. It was very uncool, but part of me was kinda happy I didn’t have to hear about being a man anymore.

A bunch of them started swirling up in my personal area. I was immune to the Shadowless’ languor due to a space ritual we all did at the beginning of the adventure (cool story, bro). I grabbed Mimmi-mimmi and shook her. I shook the shit out of her. Her eyes got to glowing, and she floated up to the ceiling, and she shot beams out of her eyes, and they died a bunch.

And Mimmi-mimmi said, Fluoride cannot melt steel beams, and I thought that was pretty funny.

Released from the Shadowless’ lifeless languor, the club patrons had a real serious freakout, so me and Mimmi-mimmi peaced without paying. We met June back at the hotel. Blood was running down the side of her head, and her hair was tangled in transpicuous, almost ethereal feathers, and a crystalline shadow was beginning to bloom on her left shoulder. The Egg piece was wrapped in a dirty strip of t-shirt on the bed. I coaxed Mimmi-mimmi into fixing June’s shoulder before with some tum-tum rubs and a gentle whisper. I wanted it to be like cool banter, where June would ask how the show was and I would say it was cool and the band did a pretty okay cover of Mannish Boy, which is kind of a boring choice, and she would say something funny about having had fun doing her thing, but instead she just said, this sucks, and I just said fuck.

#

There are 999 pieces of the Trigger Egg, hidden in ancient mazes scattered across the world (mostly continental United States and Southern Canada). When we collect all the pieces of this supertemporal space relic, Mimmi-mimmi will unlock its power and defeat the evil Prince D, who himself seeks to plunge Reality into the undarkness of leminiscate null-space.

So far we’ve got about four hundred of them. It’s been three years.

#

The Mushroom Maze was in Tennessee. We all went went together, deep into the Earth, through a door at the base of a mountain and down into the dim and damp. Mushrooms clung to the walls and the ceiling and each other, glowing in every shade, gently but steadily, in intricate patterns and delicate tessellations. The smallest was as big as my hand, the biggest bigger than me and June put together. Every now and again, spots on the mushrooms would flicker, and we realized as we drew closer that they were eyes, humanoid but not quite human, blinking. The number of eyes varied from mushroom to mushroom. Some had only three or four, others were ringed with them, others made me wish I could ask the mushrooms if they would like some mushroom with their eyes, which is a very funny joke I thought of and told June and she didn’t like it.

We rode a giant mushroom cap down a river of neon slime. We had to solve a puzzle of matching different colors of mushrooms to different jars and then putting the jars on a scale so they were balanced, and the the instructions were written in a language only Mimmi-mimmi could read. She was having a relatively good day, making conversation and floating by her own power from time to time, but still it was still bullshit. Took all afternoon.

There was a humanoid mass on the ground next to the Egg piece. Its bottom half was a sprawling mass of mushrooms, with stems all grown together and entangled like the tails of a rat king. The top half was a human skeleton. There was a pistol in its lap, amidst the mushrooms, and there was a pair of headphones on the skull connected to a walkman at the waist and there was a large patch of mouldering t-shirt covering the chestbones. The shirt remains had a picture of a wolf on them. The skeleton was only barely holding it together. There were holes in the recognizable bits, and there were many unrecognizable bits scattered around it.

And I told the skeleton, you used to be cool, and June stole his walkman. I asked Mimmi-mimmi how he could’ve gotten here, how he could’ve broken the barrier the divides the conceptual and the real. And Mimmi-mimmi began to explicate a papal conspiracy and was really annoying in not letting me interrupt her.

I asked June if she remembered this being fun. Like, in the beginning.

And she said that everything is fun in the beginning, even bad things.

And I said that that did not make any fucking sense, and if she was trying to allude poetically to our relationship, she should just put it on front street.

And she said I shouldn’t be such a girl about everything.

And then we had a fight.

#

The mazes are revealed to us by a map Mimmi- mimmi brought with her from space. The space map reveals the Mazes in a completely arbitrary order, so we end up having to travel all over the fucking place, back and forth, back and forth. New York to Arizona to Florida to Texas to Massachusetts to Seattle to Ohio to wherever. One time, one Maze was in New Orleans and the next was in Baton Rouge, which was pretty cool, but most of the time it sucks.

Here is the list of the Mazes:

Slime Maze

Feather Maze

Light Bulb Maze

Horse Maze

Piss Maze

Fruit Maze

Sadness Maze

Hair Maze

Slush Maze

Spit Maze

Spider Leg Maze

Alphabet Maze

Ghost Costume Maze (AKA “These are ghost costumes, right? Not the other thing?”)

String Maze

Knife Maze (AKA “The Borges”)

Hair Maze II

Rock and Roll McDonald’s Maze (The actual Rock and Roll McDonald’s)

982 others

#

June wanted to have sex in the hotel room between Las Vegas and LA. I wasn’t sure if it would be cool since Mimmi-mimmi was in the room, but June put a newspaper over Mimmi-mimmi and said it would be cool. I asked June if she wanted some poppers, and she said it hurt her feelings that I needed drugs to fuck her. I knew she was going to say no, so whatever. I had a special blend where I mixed the poppers with Mimmi-mimmi’s tears, the ones that dried up and got matted in her fur after she had her episodes. I cut them out and put them in them in the bottle whenever I had a bottle that was starting to go headachey. There was of course lots of cat hair in there, too, but it was not like I was drinking it.

So I got a good sniff going, and we started making out. As we were rounding second base, my eyes began to tremble and glitter, and the psychic boundaries dividing my sense of self from my perception of the universe disintegrated, and my mind was able to construct a new conceptual paradigm for itself, allowing my consciousness to project beyond the limits of real space, and I floated out the door.

I kind of wanted to do something cool, like fly to the moon or go down to the bottom of the ocean, but I didn’t really want to do that. I just chilled at the hotel, flying around, poking my head into rooms in a totally non-creepy way, just ghosting it up. I tried to people watch for a while, but even that was exhausting. Human lives are incredibly sad, especially lives on the road between LA and Las Vegas, which already sounds like the first line of a sad 70s country song.

There was just this girl watching Frasier in her room (clothed), and I love Frasier. We watched three episodes together, though she was unaware of my presence (not creepy). She was pretty cool. There were some dope shoes on the floor, and she had an asymmetrical haircut. I started doing this thing I do sometimes where I start to fall in love with girls really quick because they seem like they have a really good life going and I want to have a good life going, but I didn’t because I wasn’t being that asshole anymore. I was being a whole new kind of asshole, an asshole free of envy and desire, and asshole with a life of their own.

When I got back to my room/body, me and June were done making love.

#

Mimmi-mimmi used to be really cool, like, smart and funny and whatever, but then her brain she started getting overwhelmed. Too many stimuli, too much information. Cat Planet had been simple, comfortable. Earth was chaos, madness, death. Too many systems, too much noise. Us humans, we get by forgetting everything that isn’t right in front of us, but Mimmi-mimmi’s hyperintelligence didn’t allow her to do that. That’s why traveling sucks; everything’s fresh and new again when you go somewhere new, so you can get your heart broken over and over and over and over.

#

Me and June had a fight in Portland. She kept calling me David, David, David in a way that I felt was pointed, so I called her a dirty word, and she made me get out of the car. and she said she would pick me up after she and Mimmi-mimmi did the thing and got the the thing and whatever. I told her that Mimmi-mimmi liked me more than her, but she didn’t care. Mimmi-mimmi told me that life on Earth was a hoax perpetuated by Stanley Kubrick and FEMA.

So I walked around Portland for a while, blah blah blah, and then some Shadowless appeared. I ran, they pursued. I tripped in an alley. One of them stuck its hand in my brain, and it really fucking sucked, like all my thoughts turned into static and my perceptions got all muddled together into this mush of too-bright, too-hot, too-everything pain, which is not too far from my normal condition, but like, I don’t like hands in my brain. That’s not where hands go.

Prince D popped up, and he was like, we finally got you. Hand over the Princess.

And I said, she’s obviously not here, man. Obviously.

And he was like, well, where is she?

And I was like, at the Maze or whatever. I don’t know where it is. Somewhere around, I guess.

He tried to play the heavy for a while, but I was pretty clearly ignorant of anything that mattered, so he chilled out. His Shadowless peaced, and he he said I was still captured, but that we could hang out or something.

At the coffee shop, he told me that he missed the empty corridors of his uncastle, the spray of void essence on his face at the edge of timelessness, the nobody waiting for him, whose scope was infinite and whose love endless. He asked me what the point of all this was, why we were fighting, what it all meant. He said he didn’t even know what he would do if he won. He was handsome, as if carved out of a beautiful absence. He captured me often, and we had a certain rapport. I liked being around him, though I didn’t know why.

I told him that I had been sad since forever, and that I was making June sad, too. I told him I didn’t know who I was, but every step I took to find myself just pushed her away, that she never signed up to be with someone like me. I told him how much I had loved her, but that I didn’t know how the dream was supposed to end. I told him the truth about me, what I am, who I am, the truth that I have only been able to articulate a few times alone in the dark with June.

Ha, not really. I sipped coffee and made a rude gesture at his expense. Like, pretending to jack it. It was really funny. June and Mimmi-mimmi came and saved me later, and Mimmi-mimmi shot eye beams at him, and he got mad and left.

#

Mimmi-mimmi used to tell me about space. Not the space I knew, the space we have here, the dead infinity stretching out to the end of nothing. No, her space, a space filled with color and magic. She had traveled the stars and fought evil and made out with cute boys and girls and seen all types of awesome shit. That was how we became friends, really. June and Mimmi-mimmi became friends due to a shared affinity for action adventures, a desire to get things and and do things and live life. But between me and Mimmi-mimmi, it was always space.

She told me once that there’s this hole in space on the other side of everything, and there’s this entity trying to come out of it, a goddess or something, and she’s like as big as the sun and made out of ice and starlight, and there’s this whole section of this galaxy where all the peeps are dedicated to keeping her from coming out of the hole. Like they have spaceships and stuff and they shoot at her and she swats at them, and they die, but their children build new spaceships and come back and do it again, and they’ve been doing that since forever, and she’s pretty much stuck in the hole, like a cosmic Winnie the Pooh. Mimmi-mimmi showed it to me with her mind powers, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life, and I was moved to tears, and I had some epiphanies about myself. I asked Mimmi-mimmi why the people are so concerned about her exiting the hole. and Mimmi Mimmi said that people are more in love with the status quo than they are with anything else, and, in the moment, I thought that was some dope space wisdom.

#

Mimmi-mimmi got into June’s purse when we weren’t looking, and she choked on an old tube of lipstick and died. We were in a hotel in the desert. I tried removing the tube, and I tried shaking her around, and I cried a pure tear on her face, which is how magical creatures are usually revived according to films. Didn’t work. June told me to stop messing with the body, and I did..

We buried her in the sand that night. There were no stars. I said a few words about how much I would miss her, and June said something in an alien language Mimmi-mimmi had taught her. We didn’t talk about finishing the Trigger Egg without her. We just buried the pieces and the map with her. It wasn’t even halfway done.

I guess this is the end, I said.

And June was like, Yeah.

Then we drove back home. It was quiet without Mimmi-mimmi. We talked about whatever, but it wasn’t the same. June said I could stay with her and her mom while we figured stuff out. She talked about how nice it would be to have a regular job and regular friends and regular, non-cosmic responsibilities. I told her I agreed.

Mimmi-mimmi always said I should be braver, that I had shit going on that I didn’t even know about. I was trying to be braver, but not as brave as I should be. So I asked June, Are we still going to be friends, at least?

And June acted confused for a second, but then I guess she realized that she didn’t need to act soft for me. And she said maybe.

And I asked her if she wanted to be friends, and she was quiet.

I told her that I wanted to be friends. that I had always wanted to be friends with her, from the beginning when we met, that night at the party, and it was like a classic romance, and I was the debonair man-about-town, and she was the femme fatale, and it was boy meets girl and everything fit right.

She told me that she felt like she missed me or that she was mourning me and that she didn’t really know and would get back to me after thinking about it hard.

The sun turned grey between Columbus and New York, and time itself began to slow down to a sort of slimy, nauseous trickle. The moments seemed to get lost in the quiet, and I had a headache worse than any headache I had ever had, but then it was normal again. I guess Prince D did the thing he was doing or didn’t do it or whatever.

I remember us stopping for gas somewhere, and I offered to go inside and pay and buy gummy candies and energy drinks.

And as I was getting out, June said, “I love you.”

And then she looked surprised, and I couldn’t remember her saying it like that in a long time. And I figured it would probably the last time I would hear it, and I said I love you too, and I knew I probably wouldn’t say it again, and I walked away.

It was sort of cool, like in a movie.

The 
                   universe is a fractalfractalfractal
                                                                                 [[hyper-narrative]]
[which is to say it is an infinitely self-similar∞ story object]
 a fantasy 
                 written 
                                 in matter 
                                           and motion 
                                                            and T1/\/\3 
                                                            and s  p  a  c  e
All things exist as both phenomena within the story and iterations of the story, 
recursivelyrecursively symbolizing itself on every level. 
This is why we ought not despair at our 
smallness
for we as humans contain the universe,
both as map and as territory. 
To understand the universe
to solve the mystery at                                                                                                               the end of the book, 
we need only understand ourselves. 
But this is impossible, 
like looking at the back of one’s head in the mirror. 
This is why we should despair. 
Not for our smallness, but for our grotesque immensity and the invisible multitudes within us.
There can be no escape, 
for all acts of rebellion are absorbed into the narrative
for the narrative is hungry and all-consuming.
What can we do then? How can we live?
Simple. 
1. Mineral oil.
2. Neutrogena foaming cleanser.
3. Thayer's witch hazel toner.
4. Stridex Maximum Strength Pads (morning) 
4b. Nip+Fab Glycolic Night Pads Extreme (night)
4c. Alpha Skin Care Intensive Renewal Serum (twice a week)
5.  Innisfree Super Volcanic clay mask (once a week)
6. Mizon Snail Recovery Gel Cream
7. Palmer's Cocoa Butter Sunscreen (morning)
8. Neutrogena Rapid Wrinkle Repair Night Cream (night, duh)
9. Vaseline (night)

He texted me again, and he came over, and after we fucked, he said, “⛔💋🚬, 👨.”

I did get lipstick on his vape, purposefully and maliciously. A streak of glittering black and purple, a little galaxy shaped like a kiss. But there were more important things to discuss.

“⛔👨. 👩🏿=♀️” I said.

He put his hand on my thigh.

“❓😉” he asked.

I didn’t have an answer, so I took a long hit and let a cloud come out my nose like a dragon, a trick I picked up in college to amuse people. He never seemed amused, but I still did it every time, because maybe he liked it and just didn’t show it, and I didn’t want to risk it. I handed it back to him, and he took his own hit, quick and sharp.

“👩🏿=👨,🧒=👨,👪󠀽󠀽=👨, ♾️=👨.” he said.

It’s very nice that he calls everyone 👨, sure. All men are brothers, of course. But there is a context here. There are implications. Our actions don’t exist as objective projections of our will. One has to navigate the semiotics of the situation. But how to phrase it?

“🤔💭📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚—”

He gave me a kiss. It was soft and wet and pleasantly garlicky.

“🤫,” he said, when the kiss had broken, and he laughed like it was a joke.

He always kisses me when he wants me to stop talking. I know that’s bad. I know. I’ve read enough books to know exactly why it is bad and how it is bad, the shape and color and angle and velocity of misogyny. But I like that he likes to kiss me. Even if it’s because he thinks I talk too much, I like that he likes to kiss me.

“🚗🍔,” I said.

“⛔,” he said. “🚚.”

“🏃🏿‍♀️🏃🏻🏠,” I said. “🌇.”

I’ve slept with him on and off for a few years now. You know how it is. He’s never been my boyfriend. He is, at heart, a dumb piece of garbage, and as a result, there’s nothing he could ever do to really hurt me. I can talk to him in a way that I can’t talk to most other men, because I don’t really care if he likes me.

But even though he is not my boyfriend, I had decided it was time for him to take on more boyfriendly duties, time to upgrade the relationship from fuckpals to casual date-friends (but not boyfriend/girlfriend, obviously. I’m not a little girl tying knots) So I decided to lay the trap, entice him into an entanglement. But how does one get someone to buy the milk when they’ve been fucking the cow for free? This is a difficult thing for gals like me. It’s like the old saying goes, always the animated merkin, never the glorified pot-au-feu.

“🍕,” he said.

“⛔🍕. 🍛🫓❓.👍🏿👍🏿❤️🍛.🤏🏾🍻🌉.”

“⛔,” he said. “⛔💭💭💭💭💭💭.”

“⛔❓” I asked.

“🤔🤔🤔,” he said.

“🗣️.”

“👩🏿≠🐩. 🍻+🍕=👩🏿‍🤝‍👨🏻. 👩🏿=😌.”

I decided to say what I mean. I never say what I mean. I am physically disgusted by it. But maybe this is how one obtains one’s deserts, a well placed speech act and a beautiful smile.

“👨🍆🍑→🏃🏿‍♀️🏃🏻🏠”

A long quiet, like the blank space between stars.

“🤷‍♂️,” he said. “👩🏿‍🤝‍👨🏻=🙂. 👩🏿‍🤝‍👨🏻≠💖. 🏃‍♂️📅👱‍♀️⏰.”

And I saw myself reflected in his eyes, and I imagined a crunchy, yellowed sock stuffed into a dank drawer. Or maybe that’s too sentimental. A crumpled tissue on a bedside dresser beside a container of lotion. You get it.

“🤷🏿‍♀️,” I said.

He got up and got dressed. I watched, still naked. He stood in front of my bedroom mirror and tied his tie in a Grantchester knot. A poor choice. The four-in-hand is a much easier knot with a similar shape. It was, in fact, my preferred day-to-day tie back when I wore ties, quick and easy to tie, stylishly asymmetric, familiar but not a cliche. The only advantage of the Grantchester over the four-in-hand is that it is bigger, as big as a full Windsor. This I assume is what draws him to it. It is big, and he is big.

His knot was sloppy and irregular. He undid it and did it again. He undid it and did it again. It’s ugly every time. I slipped behind him wordlessly, still naked, and I began to do it for him. He raised his arms up, and I could see a little smile reflected in the mirror.

“⬅️⬇️, ➡️⬆️, ➡️⬆️, ➡️⬆️⬆️, ➡️⬇️, ⬅️⬆️,🔄,⬆️,⬇️,↕️,” I say.

I never liked the Grantchester, but I learned it perfect. I know them all perfect. Once, plumbing the depths of esoteric masculinities was a nice distraction from the agony of being.

He didn’t say 🙏. He put on his shoes, a pair of expensive brown leather Oxfords that I’m sure he paid too much for. People pay too much for things because they confuse cost for value, because they do not use their eyes and their fingers and their tongues to know the world. They just use their ears, filled with other people’s words.

“👩🏿+👨+🍕?” he asked. “📆?”

And of all the things I could say, I said, “😍,” like the dumbest bitch in the world.

He left without kissing me, because I was silent, and he didn’t need to shut me up.

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Storybook, Almost

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SHINE COCKATOO is fair; she is fair. Soft and sweet and endless, a sonnet given shape. She blesses me with her last cigarette, and I light it with a tiny plastic Cool Frog, myself in miniature, whose tongue is made of fire. I take a long, sumptuous puff and revel in the sensation, the alchemical reaction of smoke and Shine Cockatoo and being. I experience myself differently when I am around her, as if suddenly I am perfectly smooth, perfectly round, a pebble in a turbid sea. Or maybe I am like a pad of butter melting in the sun, deliciously. Or maybe feathers caught in a summer whirlwind, a fluttering swirl of sweet air and lilac tingles, lost in confusion, unable to separate self from other from image from self.

And she says:

Mein Vöglein mit dem Ringlein rot singt
Leide, Leide, Leide

like blood dripping from a wound.

She is from Jupiter, but I imagine her emerging from the salt and foam fully formed, like a Venus from the brush of an Old Master, and I imagine her strutting onto a sunny beach, glittering seawater clinging to her iron wings, sinuating around the pitched beaks of her chest, down her stomach, falling, falling, falling, and I imagine brilliant roses growing where the droplets kiss the sand, and I imagine the roses rapidly growing into long, delicate vines, a miracle, tangling around themselves and creating a dense thicket of roses, and I imagine myself and Shine Cockatoo in pitch darkness beneath the roses, the warmth of her body next to mine juxtaposed against the cool breeze shaking the roses, dropping honey-sweet petals on our heads, and I imagine the petals like falling stars in the night sky, and on each one I make a wish, until I am all out of wishes, and I want for nothing, and I cannot imagine anything else.

But she says:

Es singt dem Täubelein seinen Tod,
singt Leide, Leide, leide

like the last time you ever asked your mother to pick you up.

We lie together on a dingy bed in a dingy bedroom of a dingy apartment, Shine Cockatoo’s apartment. A contingent of insects (beetles?) crawl out from a hole in the wall next to the bed, disgustingly, and catch the sunset’s refraction in their shells. I put my hand on the faded paisley wallpaper, imagine the beetles approaching it, climbing onto my skin, biting, burrowing, consuming, such that the aggregation of me called me would be dispersed evenly among them. Imagine a mirror shattering on the ground. Do you now have one broken mirror or many jagged mirrors? How do you separate the elements of a thing from the thing itself? How small can the fragments of a mirror get before they stop being mirrors?

“Please don’t do this,” I say. “Please.”

I relax my arm, give it up to gravity and inertia and let it dangle heavy over the edge of the bed. With my other arm, I reach out to her, and she pulls away.

And she says:

Leide, Leide, Leide

like all the stars in heaven whispering about you behind your back.

I stare out the window into the absolute twilight and pretend that I am lying on the edge of the world, and I imagine rolling over, off into the void, and I hold the image of the night in my mind as I fall through layers of imagination as if breaking through a spiderweb labyrinth, and I do not blink, even when my eyes became so full of sunset that my head begins to ache, and that pain commingles with imagined nothingness into an almost narcotic moment of self-abnegation, a velvet labyrinth of sensation and spectacle and and memory and agony.

But it isn’t enough. I need more.

The best way to overcome pain is to overload the system.

I think about everything that makes me feel bad, particularly those things that relate to her, and I make the thoughts as brutal and cruel and true as I can, and I begin to cry, and, mixing jagged memories with overwhelming anxiety, I begin to retch, and I quickly cover my mouth with my hand, and I pull my hand away from my mouth and look at it, and I see little tadpoles in my hand sticky with snot, and I crush them quickly, before she can see, and I stare at the mess of juice and crushed flesh and stomach snot for a while, as if staring at a mirror, and, knowing no other way to elegantly discard it, I lick it clean.

“I’m disgusting,” I say. “I’m not going to be okay.”

How pathetic. Utterly pathetic. Even more disgusting than the snotty mess preceding it. We all have phlegm and spittle inside us; we don’t all have such mucky words, such mucid sentiment. What the fuck is wrong with me? Can’t I save myself a little dignity, at least.

And Shine Cockatoo says:

Zicküth, zicküth, zicküth

like a chick snotfully chirping, too weak to break its shell, caught unsteadily between birth and death.

“One last time. Just one more, I promise.”

And so she touches me. Her wings are cold, her feathers sharp. She smells like cigarettes and perfume. I look at her face as my hands move across her body, reading her as if a piece of erotic fiction. I watch a glittering bead of sweat develop on her brow, a star in the night, and I watch its descent down her face, delicately tracing her features. I lap at it as it rests on her beak , trying to know it, trying to know her.

This is what I like about sex, the full engagement of all the senses. Very few other entertainments offer the same opportunity for sensory overload,

for ego erasure,
for a few minutes lost in the paradise,
scrambling in the labyrinth of the other,
the phenomenon of Shine Cockatoo,
the ocean of Shine Cockatoo,
the salt and sink of Shine Cockatoo,
the taste of oysters and ozone on her beak,
the smell of flowery shampoo,
the warm touch of skin on skin,
the quaver in her voice,
the sight of her,
the moment of her.
I can feel myself leave my body
And my mind wanders to a beautiful place
where I am
and am not
here and everywhere
not doing this thing
But I am unable to maintain myself,
and I might think about ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛, but I don’t
and coitus is ceased.

The whole business of being a human is absolutely disgusting. Every second, every moment, every aspect from birth to death. I hate this and I hate her and I hate you.

I love her.
And she says:

zicküth
zicküth
zicküth

like an ortalan in brandy, drunk on angel lust.

And after, Shine Cockatoo walks to the television on her dresser and turns it on, and I, laying still on the bed, press my stomach with my hand, testing it. It is soft. It is soft. It is probably the softest thing I have ever felt, and I wish I could share that softness with someone, anyone who could appreciate it. I imagine I am guiding someone else’s hand to my soft stomachskin, imagine them cackling with wonder. So soft! Like a bunny! they would shout, as though it were unusual for a frog to have a soft stomach, because they would be so amazed that I existed at all, so grateful that I had shared myself with them.

They probably wouldn’t even need to love me. It would just be nice if someone really knew me, or wanted to know me, even if they didn’t particularly like me.

But Shine Cockatoo is insensate and numinous. She sits on the edge, and we look at the television screen and watch a pterodactyl monster burn holes in the sky:

And she says:

And she says:

And she says:

She doesn’t say anything.

Why doesn’t she say anything?

Am I really that bad?

What do you think?

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Anita stopped telling people about the time she had been Freaky Fridayed a little after she turned thirty, feeling it undignified to keep clinging to an ancient anecdote. She had been embarrassed about the incident at first, when the principal players were still participants in her daily life, but in college, five years past the Friday and eight hundred miles away from her mother, recalling it was like looking at stars through a telescope. The story became a charming icebreaker at parties, some outrageous bullshit to argue about at the lunch table, an all-purpose conversational theme on which one could improvise any number of variations when there was nothing else interesting to say. Interesting, yes. That was the word. It made her interesting. Even if her interlocutors did not truly believe that she and her mother had Freaky Fridayed, that she at age 14 had spent a day working as an executive at a major fashion magazine while her mother had to fill in for her at the quiz bowl tournament, it was very interesting of her to make such a claim. Even if they thought she was a liar or insane, she was interesting, special, magical, different, freaky.

At 30, though, it was embarrassing again. All her friends had heard the story a million times, and, after nearly a decade of regular employment, the prospect of a day spent working a real grown-up office job in a real grown-up office building was no longer an exotic misadventure nor grist for dorm-room anticapitalist rants: it was just life. Anita found it was more interesting to hold on to the story as a secret, something to tell her friends not to tell anyone else about, something to pointedly avoid talking about if brought up at dinner parties, something to only ever allude to as “a freakish day in my past” or “a Friday I would never forget” without giving further detail, even if pressed.

(The incident had actually taken place on a Tuesday, but the reference point was familiar and explanatory in itself.)

So when she turned 40 and realized that she was now older than her mother had been when they had Freaky Fridayed, she had no one to tell. She lived alone. No husband or children of her own with whom she could Freaky Friday.

So she called her mother.

“You never call me,” Anita’s mother said, instead of saying hello. “I’m dying and you never call me.”

“I called you three days ago,” Anita lied. “Don’t you remember?”

Since her mother’s diagnosis, Anita had taken to lying to her. It made everything easier.

A pause, and then, “I know! I remember. My friend Jen’s son calls her every day. Sometimes twice a day.”

“I’m not your son,” Anita said.

“You’re still my baby,” she said. “You don’t understand because you’ve never had kids.”

Anita had once brought up getting Freaky Fridayed at a group therapy session for newly-out girls. They had been jealous and had begged her to tell them what it was like. She had tried to explain that it wasn’t a very “gender” experience for her, because she didn’t become “a woman”; she became Mama. She had been primarily invested in making sure her mother did not embarrass her at the quiz bowl tournament, and even after she was back to normal, her thoughts lingered on whether or not the existence of Freaky Fridaying also implied the existence of God, not the appreciation of her mother’s feminine mysteries. She had, frankly, found the whole thing unsanitary. She always felt disgust when the other girls described having worn their mothers’ and sisters’ clothes as curious teens, offended not by transgression but by contamination. The idea of wearing anyone else’s underwear, permeated with the essence of shit and piss and pussy-sweat, no matter how many times they had been washed, no matter how edifying it might be to see a girl in the mirror, was absolutely vile. The Freaky Friday had been like that but moreso, trapped in the body of another filthy animal for a whole day, covered in her sweat and stink and shit and flesh. To the extent that the incident had influenced her gender, it was a revelation of the profane. After Freaky Fridaying, she was more aware that her own body was that of a beast, and so she decided she might as well make it a little more to her liking, because it was a vulgar thing to begin with, not something to be precious about.

“Are you still with that man?” Anita’s mother asked. She said the word man too sweetly, as if to smother her disdain in treacle. She did not like him, her on-again, off-again Otto. They had both always hated each others’ partners, most especially Anita’s father. Her mother and he had already divorced when they Freaky Fridayed, and after, having spent the hours between the end of class and the beginning of the quiz bowl tournament alone with him, Anita’s mother had taken him to court for sole custody and the termination of any visitation rights, the kindest thing she ever did. But once, she had said that Otto was just like him, and Anita subsequently went three months without speaking to her. It was true that Otto and Anita’s father had a similar charm to them, but Anita didn’t like to think about that.

“No,” said Anita, as they were off-again at the time.

“I want you to bring a man to my funeral. Don’t come alone. I don’t want it to seem like I raised some lonely spinster.”

“You’re not dying,” Anita said.

“I am dying. The doctor said my case is terminal.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Then what did he say, Miss Smartie?”

“You have a condition. It is going to progress over time. But you’re not dying.”

“My brain is rotting. Turning to mashed potatoes. My brain will rot and then my body will rot and I’ll die.”

Anita’s mother had always been dramatic. She was not lying, but she was dramatic.

“You still have a long time left.”

“I’m going to die young.”

“You’re already too old to die young,” said Anita. She winced, realizing it was meaner out loud than she intended. But Anita’s mother laughed, like always.

“You’re still young. You don’t understand,” she said.

“I’m not young anymore. I turned forty yesterday.”

“And you didn’t call?”

“You didn’t call me. I was waiting for you to call all day. You never call me.”

“How was I supposed to know it was your birthday?”

“It’s been the same day the last forty years.”

“Okay, Miss Smartie,” said Anita’s mother, and she began to sing “Happy Birthday” off-key, almost sarcastically.

Anita’s mother had never understood her. The Freaky Friday had left both with a strong desire to be better but had provided no material solutions to the problems they faced as mother and child. In the months that followed, both grew to resent the mutual failures of compassion, the paucity of understanding, the grotesque stinginess that each demonstrated to the other every single day. It was worse than before, as if each expected the other to split their life in half and share it without reciprocating with half of their own life. She has witnessed my suffering, they thought, more or less. She has heard how people talk to me and seen how I must struggle, and she treats me like this? Anita, at least, still tried to be better, but did her mother ever notice? Of course not.

“You should wear a dress to my funeral,” Anita’s mother said.

“Don’t be morbid.”

“I have a dress you should wear. It has black feathers on the collar. It’s very dramatic. I want someone to dress up at my funeral. Someone should look interesting. Your cousins are going to dress like slobs in sad little suits.”

Anita laughed. “I’ll inform them that the dress is cocktail, not business casual,” and then she added, “You’re not going to die.”

“I will.”

This was true.

“Not soon.”

This was not a lie.

“Jen’s son is gay,” Anita’s mother said. “He visits her every weekend. You should come by. You and he would get along.”

“Are you trying to set us up?”

“I think you would get along. If something came of it, that would be nice. A single forty year old can’t be picky anymore.”

Anita did not believe that her mother truly accepted her or appreciated her own feminine mysteries. She would often comment negatively on her clothes, saying she needed to dress “like a woman” more. She did think that most women Anita’s age needed to dress “like a woman” more, and that Anita’s problem was not an absence of femininity but of confidence, that she was just following the herd instead of letting herself be interesting, and she was not entirely incorrect, but Anita felt it was a terribly insensitive thing to say to her, given her circumstances. She was sure that, more than anything, her mother just wanted her friends to think she was a good person who was kind to her transsexual daughter.

“I don’t fuck gay men.”

“Don’t be vulgar.”

“Sorry. I don’t kiss faggots.”

Anita winced; her mother laughed. They shared a sense of humor. This was the only trait that Anita acknowledged they shared, and she thought it was unfortunate. Her mother had always been so good at bringing out her worst self.

“You should come visit me anyway. I haven’t seen you in months.”

“Soon,” Anita lied. “I’m busy with work. You don’t understand how busy it gets.”

“We can get sushi. Remember when you were little? I don’t want it, Mama. It’s raw! Daddy makes hot dogs! I want Daddy! And now Miss Smartie is so fancy, so cosmopolitan. You should thank me for introducing you to interesting food.”

Like her mother, Anita had loved her father more than anyone or anything in the world before she hated him. But she didn’t like to think about that.

“Please. You still won’t eat Indian because of a stupid thing you saw on the news in the 80s.”

“All that spice is bad for digestion. They did a study.”

“No, they didn’t.”

“They did. I saw it on the news, Miss Smartie.”

On other occasions, when she was feeling poetic, Anita’s mother would admit that she did not eat spicy foods because she did not like the way the burning sensation seemed to trace a path through her insides, making her aware of all that disgusting viscera. She likened it to pregnancy. Once, Anita had said that comparing a little vindaloo with the gestation of a child was ridiculous, but Anita’s mother had told her that she didn’t understand because she didn’t know what it was like to have a uterus. Anita had said that she did, though, on account of the Friday. Anita’s mother had said that she didn’t really know, though, since Anita would never have children, which was true.

“I started a diet where you only eat crunchy foods,” said Anita’s mother. “The crunchiness tricks your brain and you get less hungry.”

“Diets are fucked,” said Anita, who still resented the yogurt and rice cakes of her childhood and was currently on keto and intermittent fasting. “If you’re really that sick, you shouldn’t be on a diet.”

“Miss Smartie,” said Anita’s mother. “Why didn’t you become a doctor?”

They only talked a little longer, until the conversation was no longer interesting.

“I’ll call you again soon,” said Anita. Although Anita had called to remind her mother of their Freaky Friday, but it felt childish to bring it up now. As if she were still upset about her mother losing the quiz bowl tournament. As if being a middle-aged woman was still something unfathomable. As if that day was still their only moment of meaningful connection. But without that Freaky Friday, well, was there anything interesting for them to converse about at all?

“We just started talking,” said Anita’s mother.

“It’s been almost 30 minutes,” Anita lied.

“You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” said Anita’s mother. “You’re going to wish that you spent hours and hours on the phone with me before I was a vegetable.”

“Don’t be dramatic. I’ll call you this weekend.”

Back when Anita was in the habit of telling people about it, she often had to explain to people that her primary reference for being Freaky Fridayed was not the original 1976 movie or the popular 2003 remake, but the mostly forgotten 1995 television movie with Shelly Long, which came out at the perfect time for her to appreciate as a child. Unlike other versions of the story, the Friday in this film is motivated not by the desire of mother and daughter to be understood by the other, but by a melancholic envy, the desire on one hand for the carefree life of a child and on the other for the power and freedom of adulthood. A subtle but meaningful difference. The desire not for empathy but for escape. But of course one finds oneself caught in a cliche like a mouse in a trap: wherever you go, there you are, and there you are. The doctor had told Anita there was a test she could take to see if she was going to get sick when she was old, too. She had declined. Wherever you go, there you are. But you wouldn’t understand because you’ve never Freaky Fridayed with your mother.

And one of them said, “Don’t forget.” And the other lied, “I won’t.” And that was that. With nothing else interesting to do, Anita opened the group chat and told everyone that Mama wasn’t doing well, so that her friends would think she was a good person who was kind to her dying, dementia-ridden mother.

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Pleasure is the law.
L'art pour l'art.
Not a dream, not an imaginary story.
No crying until the end.