TV SKY

By

Acosta and Gao

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deadra Acosta

April 0 20XX

Expletive Deleted

SAG SLAG

The size of this pain is more than I know. And it has been that way for longer than I have held. This weight is the consequence. I think, I feel like the death itself, I don’t die ever. What discovery I made was the solidity of myself, my inability to crack, my foundation stands. I feel tired, but not for fatigue.

It was naive but that doesn’t mean it was wrong. It was fitting for my age, everything was—is. I don’t miss you, I really don’t. In my life, maybe it’s that I never really felt like holding on to much, at least past a certain point. That point is far away, and I think the struggles of then are crawling, and making my life ahead.

The ugly talks are the ones I will have a great skill for. I will be ornate, a flower of death that carries within, kills instantly. Maybe because I have mold in my complexion, the gray cask of my eyes, their rock hardness, and there might be pain, though, also. I hoard every moment and feeling I can get now, just to embalm and frame what I think I am and keep it.

Experience for the sake of it, I hold time till it’s over. I sharpen my flesh after I finish grinding it down, taking the shavings of my bloated remains to the bathroom. The mirror is like a liar I once beat half to shit in the eighth grade, got expelled after I kicked her kidneys to Crayola colors. I shape my face around the plates of makeup I serve like gavage down my throat, like the things we used to eat together and taste in each other’s mouths.

One time, I could taste your spit all the time.

That was not a long time ago. I can’t say.

I also have the right to say anything, so that could be a flat lie.

But I will say, sayonara, motherfucker.

Deadra Acosta

April 28 20XX

Househole

DEAD ON ARRIVAL

And later on, they said it’d be born, that insolent fuck, some shit like that, yeah, go eat a bag of dicks. Motherfucker never left the room, never said a word at dinner, slept all day, didn’t work, face in the phone, that bitch.

“Blood” is bullshit—and thin—like my nerves. We aren’t love, having lived here. Dad and Darlene from LinkedIn dropped the fuck out. And being the bottom-feeders they are, the SNAP benefits and medicare card is the only reason I haven’t starved to death. Dark shit, hard times, uh huh, yeah, but I’ll fuckin’ eat them all anymore dead. It’s all I have left.

Apparently there was $10,000 put away, all going towards “picking themselves up, getting a new place and a job.” That was nothing. That was years down the drain. Yeah, there’s, no sign of anything yet—left.

To think I graduate in a month is crazy. But doesn’t that sound stereotypical: me, the pseudo-ditzy, pseudo-intellectual teenage girl (barely legal for all you fucks) finding it so “crazy!” that I will receive a high school diploma. Big deal. I’ll walk for anyone who’ll lick the floor I walk on.

I was never supposed to go to college—er, technical school—either. That was never talked about till tenth grade. And we’re supposed to be broke as shit, but that’s always misleading. It’s always misleading.

And we? What we? There is no we in this house. At least none I’m in. I claim no ownership of the lifestyle going on here, the whole mass of fat on the meat and the fat in their faces from drinking all day. Go fuck yourself, you fucking creep. I swear, I’ll fucking kill you.

“No, cut it out, fuck you,” I say.

“Hey, Deadra, could I trouble you for a beer?” Dad said, and next time I’ll cut his dick off.

Bronson Gao

May 27 20XX

どこ

心配しないで

I think I died one time. I can’t remember anymore, though, specificities about any of it. There wasn’t any clear perspective I could save except for an image of mass quantity, super-size consumerism, the late-night media, etc. That’s no way to live, but if this doesn’t seem like living, I don’t know what it seems like.

On my night stand are CDs from my first car. I’d stolen them from my brother’s stereo. I sit here listening to one, and I say nothing. I could spit. I could kill myself I feel so good. 私は嬉しすぎて、死にたいくらい。And nothing really hurts. 何もあまり痛くない。Here’s my disintegrating face in this bed of cemetery candy, drifting awake thinking about AMV Hell and My Favorite Martian. And nothing really hurts, you said.

Silent in a dark room—and inside this screen—My appendages numbed out and I began disintegrating into the sofa, my forehead blunted by a plate of steel. I’d bitten the sensation out until my teeth tore apart, almost at least. Until it was done it would be my life and all I had. Now listening, this shit is massive and a snapshot of something like deja vu. I can’t think like this. I’ve inherited some expired cyanide here. I’ve xeroxed this けち auto-death penalty. I can’t think I like this.

The most I have to offer you is me bailing out. Like a performance, the perspiration is profuse as my skinned knees reach out on Saturday night, and I bleed like its American medicine, man. I must’ve cracked my head out of no better decision so many times, no other decision to make, unless I kill myself with pharmaceuticals quickly in a high quantity, or alternatively, slowly until I’m null, afraid and old.

And I remember having crushes in high school, which weren’t even really crushes, but I just wanted to feel something while jacking off in the shower. 体だけが欲しかったんですけど。I just wanted the body.

And I can’t not exist, man, because there’s fuckin’ nothing else out there, not even death. But it’s a violent, dangerous thing feeling something for yourself. Having a biographical history feels like being crucified. I try to feel like there’s nothing going on inside, absorbing external vibrations like a sponge. I’ll sell you nothing but a burning in my limbs, and that’s it.

It’s only bruises. 大丈夫ですから。I think through the actions of my consequences, all the bruises like tree rings and calluses like twisted knots. Every thought I can access is initiated by the deviation at my lips’ curve, their form into an inverted frown. Sometimes, I crouch to look at small dead things in the grass, extinguishing an unremarkable mystery; there was a dead bird against an overpass wall; I ran over a squirrel once.

The sleeve of my jacket has a bloodstain on the joint. The front of my forearm has a patty of brown roses beaten into the distressed nylon, draining to my wrist and shyly grasping my hand. My hand has warmth on top of warmth in the form of blood, my fingers working against each other, drawing the scum from the pores like buffalo sauce. I don’t think it really matters if it’s mine or not.

I took a panorama photo with a dead dog in the center of the frame on the side of the road. It smelled like the compounded sweat of big people that can’t bathe easily, dressed in moldered mange and warmed by the sun. Its nondescript eyes did not shine and the fur was caked and stiff. Nothing moved about it but the flies.

It reminded me that the life I wanted doesn’t exist: 私には住みたい所がどこにもないんです。It’s okay I’m not dead, and I’m not other people either. I’m not anything special, and I generally just don’t worry about it. しんぱいしないで。私は特別じゃないんです。私たちは別にどこへも行きません。We’re not really goin’ anywhere. 行けないんです。

私は死ねないから、どこにもいないんです。

Deadra Acosta

May 28 20XX

Wet Paper Bag

GETTING OFF

Today was my last day inside of a wet paper bag. There were five silent minutes in fourth period after the econ final was over; at least, I was finished. I’d probably keep my B. It wasn’t that hard.

But anyways, nobody called, and there was nothing else on my phone. Even if there was, the games didn’t matter. I didn’t wanna do anything. I couldn’t bother.

I put my phone away and looked forward. The girl sitting next to me had her head against her arms on her desk. She had some kind of product in her hair. It made it stiff. I could smell it.

The kid sitting in front of her was playing a video game. He was wearing a Sepultura shirt and thick-rimmed glasses. His face was a bit spotty, he was really pale and skinny, but he had a good jawline. He asked Kacey out to prom and she told him no.

Alexis was looking into a pocket mirror, putting on lipstick. All her makeup was really colorful, just short of neon. She was the only one I knew that could pull it off. She looked kinda like a goddess, like a Greek sculpture. There was one time at a party when she drank so much she took her top off and just walked around with nothing but a bra. All the guys looked at her like a pork chop, like a piece of meat. I sat next to her in the kitchen when she started vomiting.

I held my notebook at the rim of my desk and looked up every now and then. The pen stuttered to make their features, coming up short on ink. I began slicing apart Zach’s face—the kid with the video game—but that was also fine. Sarah, the one sleeping, turned out pretty good, her crumbled ball of cardigan and leggings. And Alexis looked good enough on my notepad. It was only five minutes like this.

“Three of my classmates died in the month of May,” I overheard Aunt Betty say last weekend. She gave me a bat mitzvah card for my birthday last year. Dementia would kill her too, soon.

When I got home, I started thinking of My Uncle. He was a boulder of a human thing. He wasn’t a man, but just like a shape anymore, a blob, a mass. The gut melts below his ironic muscle shirt, dipping into the snags on his stained basketball shorts. The fat drips from his wire frame like ranch dressing, freckled black and white as bird shit.

He moves like a novelty-sized condom fucked and crusted like magma, pushing the lawnmower up the incline and into the weeds like Sisyphus about to die of heat stroke. My Uncle should die of heat stroke. My body creases against my bedding, my skin submitting to the tightness in my jeans and the awkward pull against my shirt. I’m too tired to readjust, or do anything but think about My Fat Fucking Uncle.

I guess I get hot or angry or both and pull out a piece of paper. Through the window’s blanket, a cigarette burn breaks the sun into fragments, seeping into my eyes as I rise to the desk. Tony Hawk is doing a kick flip and suffocating the sky. The room is stuffy, there is no fan, and my pencil drags out My Uncle’s plight.

In the picture, his cake batter face is flushed, the swan wig hisses, the butcher-red lipstick and bar-hooker eyeshadow makes him into a sexual minstrel. It’s a black, refined circus act, flowing from the lips like a mom that should’ve swallowed. It looks just like him in my head, maybe nothing in real life, but that makes it more powerful. This is my hate-sex.

Today was my last day of high school. Today was my last day in a wet paper bag. I’ve finally clawed my way out after being tied at the feet and spit-roasted, sucking on the sting of bleach, testosterone and chlorine in the locker room. I am my own person.

Dilapidated, I tape the picture to the princess mirror in my childhood bedroom. I take some scissors I sharpened with sand paper and spread their legs. I have them mount my arm and slowly pull inwards. Meanwhile, my other hand is between my thighs. It reminds me when I went to church without underwear. I still slept in this room then. My blood mixes on the moth-rotten comforter, sinking into my ammonia. I should get a picture of this. I am my own prison now.

Bronson Gao

May 28 20XX

家

日本人じゃない

I am not Japanese. I have a Chinese mom and a White dad, and am in no way Japanese. So obviously, I took four years of the language, probably to piss my parents and extended family off, though I don’t regret it. No surprise everyone says I don’t know “my language”: “my language” this, “my language” that; some poetic musing or conventional wisdom on “heritage” and “identity”; a way of living I’ve never had.

I remember Mom made me learn some kanji in elementary school and a fistful of phrases (“hello,” “goodbye,” “yes,” “no,” etc.). So it wasn’t for a lack of trying, though I can’t remember any of it, unless it was loaned to Japanese.

I thought I was supposed to feel like an American after all. やっぱり、アメリカ人にならなければいけませんでしたが、まだなっていません。Even when I’m not and I know it, it’s all there is even still. I’ll eat meatloaf and McDonalds and smoke American cigarettes sometimes. And as a consequence, I am a disappointment to them, their biggest one.

My older brother died last weekend. He worked for a Chinese company, doing something vague and important-sounding, something-something with computers, one of those made-up office jobs they give business majors. But at least it was a career, and one that paid well. And then me, I wasn’t valedictorian, prolly ‘cause I was more interested in having a real life.

Related to what I mentioned earlier, I tried looking for a girlfriend a couple times, and I did get into it at a couple parties, but I never got a number after it was done. Usually, she was kind of drunk, and so was I. And it’s a miracle: their dads never called or came to break my nose.

I heard what they’d say. I don’t need to repeat it all. Whatever you come up with is probably more interesting than most of what I’ve received. In high school, they don’t say it as loudly, or with as much spit on your face as in middle school, but I won’t mistake it for a change of heart.

Now, they just do it with their friends when you’re out of earshot, or in their head when they look at you with a stupid face like they think you don’t know. I mostly tried not to talk about it whenever the subject came up, ancestry. “Where were you born?” the question was. They had a way of using that word, “you.” It’s like I was a little cousin, some spit-faced nephew, a case study, lab rat, etc.

It got easier as I got older, at least. I started lifting weights around the eighth grade. I figured it’d make me more intimidating. I did get bigger, in fact, not bigger than any football kids, but, they stopped stepping on the back of my shoes when I was walking, stopped going through my shit when I got outta my chair, stopped feeling me up like a specimen whenever they felt it’d be safe and easy—at least usually.

I recall a couple situations at parties. It hardly ever happened—and was probably mainly just the drinking—but for certain, I remember those nights, wincing for the choked air, for the metallic soreness in my knuckles, for the breathless perforation in my chest. It didn’t feel that bad, usually, and I don’t even think we hated each other. Some asshole just said the wrong thing.

There was a joke that I knew martial arts, but then some people started to believe it, so then it became a rumor. I don’t at all, but that implication gave me a mystique, especially when I could finally act the part. 実は、空手ができないんですが、まだ喧嘩するのが上手なんです。And that doesn’t sound very Japanese of me either, giving myself a compliment like that.

My brother was a lot older than me. He was born in China, in some place nobody has ever heard of. That was just after my dad’s first tour, and that was where he met my mom. All three learned, and can—or could—speak “my language.”

And my brother died of alcohol poisoning in his apartment. It was his thirty-second birthday, and I was skating, listening to Candiria when they called.

Bronson Gao

高校一年生の時

地下室

うるさい音楽

Getting into local metal was one of the best things to happen to me in high school. I remember getting kicked in the teeth at the first pit I got into. I still had braces then, and my parents were displeased, obviously. The weirdest part was when my dad insisted on coming with. Whenever I got a new interest, he especially felt the need to insert himself into it, analyze it, and declare it valid or not. And my mom wasn’t much better: not about the skateboard, the music, the t-shirts, whatever.

He was wearing a camouflage baseball cap. A sneaker shotguns into my lower lip, and from my peripheral, I dimly make out the sweat stain on his polo and his “That’s what ya get” look. He’d folded his arms and stood leaning against the wall, wiping grass flakes from his pant leg and checking his watch like he was waiting for someone.

これは映画みたいなんです。The kid with the lip ring helped me up and apologized, and I said “No problem” and sat down. Then, I was distinguishing the steel taste of my blood from the rattled wire making it. I look at my dad still standing by the door and say “Fuck him” to myself in my head. Then I look at my hands; they’re empty, trembling a little.

Now I wanna get back in there, and I’m leaving. Nobody really said anything, but it was mutually understood that it was happening. The last thing I saw was half the crowd piled onto the stage, one mass of people grabbing for the mic, trying gargles and death screams. I wondered, but knew, I didn’t get any sympathetic looks as I turned my back and went outside.

After that day, my dad needed a good reason for me to use the car. There needed to be proof that I wasn’t just going out to do whatever the hell I wanted, that I was on the right path in life, that I wouldn’t be “such a fuck-up.” In hindsight, I think either it happened that I got good at lying, or they just gave up trying to make me their “perfect son,” the sequel to what now isn’t, and now can never be.

Deadra Acosta

June 3 20XX

Househole

THE FORK

The first image is me seated at the counter, alone, furthest seat to the left. The fluorescent bulb is in front of me, throned on top of the window. The sky is a fresh coffee stain. The moon is a refrigerated egg. The baby chicken is dead now, all brains and bones snuffed, the stain of this light the form and consistency of menstrual sludge.

The electricity is in front of me and dimming everyday now. The dirt-dark envelopes the area against my back. I wouldn’t see a hand on my neck until it’s too late. I couldn’t scream until I ate the fingers on my face, swallowing them bruised, brutal like the carpet crushing me standing.

My palms wince against the breath palpitations of the counter, living like flesh as a parasite inside of me like worms, this house my infection, my body, my whole. There is a bowl of dirty rice and my fork ejecting its parts from the cold center. I microwaved it for two cycles and gave up. I knew it wasn’t hot, but this is good enough.

There is the same fly on the refrigerator as last week, and the next. I’ve eaten with it since, and will continue to. All other motherfuckers disappear into and out of bed and then in their cars all day and night. So really, it is only me and the insects living here.

I look away as saliva and bone disintegrates this bite into nothing. I’ve finished another fraction, only. Reflex urges repetition, and the vessel’s floral print drugs me into it. I put my eyes on the face of my fork and see the gizzard gore flexing into the sky. The grubs are sore and penetrated by my steel member. They chafe together like lovers attacking each other naked.

I stutter to fly-feast on this bowl of excrement. It cleans my taste buds and wipes the smell of rotting feces on my cleansed memory. I am soiled by the sausage that I cannot differentiate from dog dick and the rice staring blind at me like larvae.

Bronson Gao

六月十四日

コンビニ

父

I decided—against my better judgment—to buy a Father’s Day card today. Not that he deserves it. In truth, I don’t know why I came here. Maybe I’d feel good about myself for doing it, or maybe I just don’t wanna fight my mom this time; but these are the explanations I deceive myself with. Really, it doesn’t make me feel good that I’m doing this at all.

I drove to the drug store, and it was raining pretty hard. The lot was empty, and I could hear nothing but the sound of the storm. There was no music, I remember. The whole atmosphere felt agitated, but it might’ve just been me. I don’t like this shit, and don’t like being compelled to do it. Man, but this is still the best option, I tell myself, knowing full well it isn’t.

In the Hallmark Aisle is a girl. “Hey, you were in my English class, weren’t you?”

“Oh, yeah!” she says.

“Deadra, right?”

“Yeah.” Her face was pretty much erased, eyes glazed over until I said something. Entering her path, she watched the cards with a reptilian distance. She looked like she was the only thing that registered to herself; the rest of the world could’ve been less than nothing. She was a certain way of being for a moment, and who knows how long that was.

“Gettin’ a Father’s Day Card?”

“Oh, yeah…”

“Me too, actually,” I said. “Not that I really want to, though.”

She laughs. “Me neither, actually.”

She wrote this one piece that she read aloud for the class. It was this really brutal, eccentric stream of consciousness. It dealt pretty heavily with human degradation. I remember words like “auto-cannibalism,” something-something about the end of a human being in a pit of vulgar, gruesome sexual acts, really gory stuff. And she wasn’t shy about any of it, either.

I really admired it, actually. I still think about it sometimes, so I brought it up: “Hey, I really liked that thing you wrote for English, last year. ‘Skull Sugar,’ right?”

“Oh! Yeah… Thanks,” she says. She rocks back from my eye contact at first, shocked, maybe even charmed. Everything about her face is strained. Even her hair looks stressed, cropped short into this angular, machete bob. I can’t tell how much of the bruised gray under her eyes is genetic and how much is sleeplessness.

“Y’know, in peer reviews, I always thought it was interesting how you put, like, Japanese phrases in your writing. Do you still do that?”

“Unfortunately I haven’t had much time lately. Been busy. Oh, how was commencement for you, anyways?”

“Uh, fine.” She looks away for a moment. “What’s next for you, after summer? We haven’t spoken in awhile, so—“

“I’m goin’ to Ivy Tech, then I’ll prolly be transferred after I get, my associates.”

“Oh! I’m going to Ivy Tech too. South Bend?”

“South Bend,” I say. And as I speak, I watch her face shift a hue. It’s like seeing somebody just come back from the dead. I wonder if that was excitement. And now I gotta wonder what it was for. And then, my next question must be where I really axe everything, a dead kinda dead.

“I know this is short notice, but, I’m havin’ a graduation party this weekend if you’re free,” I tell her.

 

 

 

 

Deadra Acosta

June 14 20XX

Household

AUNT BETTY

I’m staying at Aunt Betty’s with My Fat Fucking Uncle. That drawing I made of him, I ended up pouring water on it, wadding it up into a ball, and feeding it to their dog. I can’t stand that fucking thing, its yap, its ugly haircut, its shit on the living room rug. And then there’s my Aunt’s constant chatter, towards the thing, (“Oh, you stop it!”), her girlfriends on the home phone, the siren of “What?” back and forth from the kitchen and the living room, Aunt and Uncle less than ten feet away from each other.

I think I’ll kill myself before I get this foul.

“So, what’d you do today?” She asked me at dinner, face burned the color of a coffee tin under the overhead, the light’s cover bronzed with exotic insect forms, some still crawling.

“Nothing.” I didn’t wanna talk about the card and I didn’t wanna talk about the boy at CVS. I wanted to keep those facts in my head to myself and, I didn’t wanna hear her spiel about what I should or shouldn’t do. Fuck you, Betty.

“I saw you went driving,” she says. And she makes eye contact with me in a way that tells me she wants more information.

“Yeah, just had to run some errands.” I shiver at the thought of mentioning Bronson. It threw me off, the whole thing, all of it. I ultimately didn’t buy the card, like I thought I wouldn’t. I had the feeling I have right now in that moment, like a deer in headlights for minding my own damn business. And what wrong have I done, anyway? Fuck you again, Betty. Stop looking at me without your eyes, you bitch.

I put my dish in the sink and disappeared into the room I sleep in. I look at the scissors in the cup and it’s really nothing special. I cleaned the blade with rubbing alcohol when I did it the other night. That was the other reason I was there, actually. I needed more gauze.

I put my headphones on, carry the line across my calf, draw another, score them until I break skin, wrap it up for the night, go to sleep.

I just woke up at 2:23 AM dripping in sweat. I feel alive. I turn on my lamp and just lay here, thinking about nothing. It’s any day now.

“Happy Father’s Day, asshole,” I say in my throat, not to no one. I can’t fucking stand that pig and myself also, for what I thought to do for him tomorrow. That prick wouldn’t be getting shit from me, not even if I could watch him eat it.

Not even if I could watch him bend down and inhale my crap would it make me wanna see the pathetic everything that he is. Go do it for somebody else, Daddy, please. I’m not even tired anymore. I feel bloated, and I look down at the cut on my belly that I made the other day. It wasn’t really deep, but I wrapped my head in a blindfold, while I showered, and drug it into me with a boxcutter from the garage.

I felt like a fat piece of shit. I imagined all the blooming wasps and moths in my intestinal nest, fluttering and fighting for the scraps of another frozen pizza, another box of rice, another McDonalds cheeseburger. Because the food can go, but the feeling will not. I remain the colossus, hoping to give birth to pestilence on the floor of the shower, feeling and tasting my sour liquid licorice as it comes out.

I’m proud of myself for this being my future. I’m proud of my molted snake skin wrapped in my emergency blanket, here on this block of soap melting into the sinking heat. I’ll close my eyes and hopefully it’ll be done now, and I say that every night it’s like that.

I know in the morning I’ll wear my long socks again to cover the seams, and Betty’ll say “You look cute!”

And I’ll blush for at least two reasons.

Bronson Gao

六月二十日

家

パーティー

And hell, Deadra did show up after all. I was betting on it not happening honestly. I think there was fear for this in the back of my mind. I don’t think it was stupid, what I said, but I think it was impulsive. But that might not’ve been wrong either.

I think this is what I wanted, honestly. The hot-pink flush of my dad’s face presses against the glass of Deadra’s whole atmosphere, like a mental patient with a biting problem. He’s like a living planet, typified by its sweaty, veinous surface, Deadra standing on top and kicking dirt around. In a rare moment—kind of like when he challenges my mother—he could not act, could not help to be acted on.

And when that interaction was through, backed into the corner of the patio, I could not tell if my dad liked her or not. Maybe it’s more accurate to say he was puzzled by her: a no one from nowhere without any significant experiences, but capable of inflicting paralysis on him without even really trying.

I approach her after my parents have had their fill. My mom took her hostage in the kitchen, force-feeding sweet-talk, probably marveled by the fact that her son finally brought home a girl, at first. But disappointment was gradual as she realized who this was: not Han Chinese, not an academic. And when she walked away from Deadra, I swore I watched my mom forget her in real time.

But still, I approach. “Havin’ a good time?” I ask.

“Sure!” she says.

“I’m glad,” I say, not certain that was a yes. I’m not thinking about any of this too seriously, even if this might be the last time I ever see her, most especially in my house. If I were at a supermarket, I could probably pick her out by the back of her head and overall figure pretty easily. I can’t say I’d say anything, though. やっぱり、見すぎてはだめだね。

My extended family files out into the garden, おじさんやおばさん、おじいさんやおばあさんなどが庭で待ったり、立ったり、ちょっと食べたりしています。It’s my party, when I had no role in the plan, made no decisions for it, and feel no more than vainly celebrated. I guess I can’t complain. The food is good, the conversations are alright, 天気が良くて、デードラさんがいます。

Once the guests have stopped breathing on us, Deadra and my friends and I gather in the kitchen. About my friends, there’s Dylan Hacken, Danny Esquera, and Bryan Picus. Hacken and I used to exchange CDs, but he ended up losing my copy of Short Bus, so I kept his Korn self-titled, and that was it. Esquera helped me out of a pit after I got my head split open by a skinhead, and that’s how I first met him. And Picus was the funniest kid in my Japanese class. But none of these people are especially important in this story.

Introductions were fast enough. They’d all roughly known her, except for Esquera, who went to a different school.

“So, what do you guys do for fun?” Deadra asks.

“Skate, go to shows, hang out at Bryan’s parent’s property, y’know,” Danny says.

“What kind of music do you like?” It was like a teacher probing the class. I almost couldn’t believe they were biting for it, too. They were being profiled.

“I’m really into Prong right now.” This was the wrong answer.

“Slayer.” This wasn’t any better.

“NIN,” This was the worst yet, as though Deadra would have any idea what a “NIN” is. “Nine Inch Nails,” Bryan says.

じゃあ、これはまた映画みたいなんです。いつ終わりますか。この話は本当に長くて、ここで何もしないといいんですが。

We hung out a few more times, me and all these people. The actual adventures were mostly trivial, buying petty drugs behind IHOP, cruising down McKinley at night, heading to the skatepark, smoking cigarettes, etc. We had fun.

Deadra Acosta

July 3 20XX

N/A

NOT NOWHERE

I wrote my number down, in that card I gave him. To be entirely honest, I don’t have any friends. That isn’t the reality, but it’s still the truth, it feels like. I still have all the names of the girls I used to talk with in my head, but I won’t bring them up, because you wouldn’t know any of them, anyways. I look at my commencement booklet, tracing the logic between all the italicized numbers next to the names, and then their meanings on the bottom of the page.

I look at Bronson Gao: ah cl. Academic Honors. Cum Laude.

There’s nothing next to mine, on the other hand. It’s like being invisible, unknown. Yeah, I prefer it that way, though. I look at my raped diploma packed tight and human on top of the desk in this room, what I sleep in when I get the chance. The skin is organized and unknowable, strong like a victim. In the flesh, the interior image collides textures, rice paper against my nails, so it’s like.

That isn’t true literally, none of this is. In my hands, it feels like a piece of cardboard with a nice coating. The inside image feels like paper. I’d do myself a favor incinerating it on the stovetop, hopefully sending the sparks onto the curtains, towards the cabinets, all over the walls and all over us. I hope you’re there too, that day. You, who’s hearing this, is who I want to see the most.

I wrote my number down, though, in the card I gave him. I said “I’d love to talk to you more if you’d be at all interested,” a shitty choice of words. No, yeah, I would not “love” to talk to him more. In reality, I wouldn’t even really like to. I could’ve gotten by just fine saying nothing.

But I waited everyday for something to happen. I checked my messages, my email, voicemail, everything. I must’ve been waiting for nothing, I finally realized, though. It took me five days to figure that out, after his party, that it doesn’t fucking matter. Fuck Bronson Gao. I hardly knew him to begin with.

Two more days came and went after that, and it had been a week, maybe longer. It felt like the feelings disintegrated with each hour of silence. And three days ago I was forgetting about him, until he sent me a text.

“Hey, Deadra, this is Bronson. Sorry for taking so long to get in touch, been really busy,” he said.

“Oh, it’s cool, thanks for reaching out!” I’m begrudgingly willed into typing. Being pissed off washed off easy like blood on a piece of metal, his sentiment like innocuous dish soap, doesn’t know the real thing when it sees it.

“Of course. I bet you’ve been busy, but I was curious if you were interested in finding any time to hang out this summer. I don’t have much going on other than prepping for school and working a little, so I should be pretty available,” he said.

I remembered his kinda boring friends, and remembered being kinda turned off by them, generally. It was a situation where I couldn’t tell how much they were fishing for me in a certain kind of way, and I wanted nothing to do with that, especially because of who I was actually there for. And well, that’s mainly because… there’s a couple different reasons that go into it.

I don’t know how I feel about Bronson Gao, really. I know I don’t like him in that way, don’t wanna date him, but I wouldn’t dislike his company. I also don’t have any friends anymore, like, at all. I get bored sitting on this bed drawing on myself with a pair of scissors anymore. It’s just habit, and it only gets more interesting the harder and deeper you go. I never had a great swimsuit body, anyways, but now it’s pretty much impossible. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

“Do you have anything going on on the fourth?” I ask, wishing I could’ve proposed a sooner date, also horrified: I was going to hang out one-on-one with Bronson-fucking-Gao. What the hell.

“No, I don’t actually. What time would be good to meet up, and where?”

“How about 6:00, and we could meet at the mall?” I said. I said it. Yep, I said it. That’s right, that’s what I said, motherfucker.

Bronson Gao

七月四日

マール

アメリカ

It’s busier than I expected, but not by much. I wonder how long the line is at Chik Fil-A. Good thing I’d never eat there. That makes me wonder what Deadra likes to eat. お寿司か、色々な肉か、それとも野菜だけ食べるのが好きですか。

A man offers to shine my shoes so he can sell me something, but I don’t look at him. I get mixed into the shuffle of a variety of different people, lots of families in patriotic casual-wear, some arm-locked couples—mostly younger—a woman with her seeing-eye dog, some scene kids. I never disliked the feeling of getting lost at large. Being around enough people, you feel invisible.

However, some crowds have been just the right size to give me shit, like a class full of kids—mostly alike—in a small elementary school absolutely anywhere. Blonde or brown hair, brown eyes, ghostly skin in the winter—myself always darker—kids’ll be cruel either way I guess; and besides, not all of them were bad.

You see all human expressions in elementary school, boiled down to bare essentials. And with that in mind, maybe within this silence all around me is a spitball on the back of my head, an Indian burn, a shove on the blacktop. Nah, I’m not invisible, probably not. でも、見られない人もいます。

I enter the food court and sit down across from her. The chairs suck here, I remember now. Maybe some good conversation will make me forget. I hear her nails clacking against her phone’s keyboard. Maybe she’s texting her friends.

She puts it down. “Oh, sorry, you’re here,” she says.

“Sure am,” I say. “How’s your day been?”

“Boring, quiet.” She folds her arms and begins scratching one of them. Her composure is withdrawn, not as cool as it was the day of the party. She’s wearing a black zip-up hoodie with a 3 Floyds logo on it, a decent-sized hole in the right forearm. It’s not at all cold outside, either.

“I’m really glad you came to my party,” I tell her. “Your card meant a lot. I feel like an asshole for not reaching out sooner, but, I’ve been writing a shit-ton of ‘thank you’ cards to people I barely know. Been kept up with that.”

“How’s that been?” She makes eye contact, a stellar flash of curiosity reflecting.

“Mostly boring. Some people I put some effort into, a lot I haven’t,” I say. “Oh, and while I’m at it, here’s yours.” I recoil a little, realizing how this last bit of information sounds in this context: how much effort did you put into it, Gao? “I swear I put some effort into it.”

She laughs in a social and polite way. She doesn’t say anything, opens the envelope and reads my candid-enough, almost-honest depiction of sentiments. I don’t not feel what I said is probably all the truth there is.

“Deadra, I am glad to have gotten to know you as little as I have. Thank you for your support, and I wish you the best in all future endeavors.” I wrote as though I’d never see her again, as if she was going to Chicago or Little Rock or Miami and never back again. And for all I know maybe this whole Ivy Tech thing wouldn’t be it in the end, and maybe the big, wide world would be the place to go for us both, though probably not in the same direction no matter what.

“I was also wanting to treat you for dinner,” I tell her, silence having fallen in the past thirty seconds. That want was without premeditation. It had not existed until that moment, but so it came.

“Thanks so much for all of this!” she says, a flicker of feeling wavering through outward expression like a candle, not dead but less alive than who knows how long ago. I admire it. It’s a whole different thing.

We head to an Asian-sounding place, a murky fusion of Chinese, Thai, Japanese, etcetera. And when we ate, what image matters from this moment is unknown when I still look for it.

Deadra Acosta

July 4 20XX

Pit of Mine

LAZER SNAKE

You’d probably be pretty bored to hear me talk about cutting myself again, or how eating feels like eating shit, or my ugly extended family. You’re probably pretty bored watching me read Sylvia Plath quotes in the mirror, me.

I went back to the house and fetched his old Lazer Snake hoodie. It was hardened into the floor in the animal room. That’s where we kept the fish tank long after the family died, and it came to scum until the water molded solid and cancer-black in my best dreams. And the hamster cage quivered in disabled silence. I see the lizard’s terrarium quake like the disintegrated pile of scales, it left behind.

I took the memories from my head, lit them like incense, huffed the fumes like duster, so now only the burnt offerings I keep in mind. So now death is the key to fungal immortality, the image of expiration cemented squarely in the center as a lifelike, undying picture. Like the truth inside standing torture, as extended pain and monotony, the dead-alive things the brain will hoard out of lack of any discipline will not be avoided, just like the brutality in all four corners of the body—incapable of sleeping, sitting, fucking, regretting.

Whoring out my emotions, I’m thinning out in your oversized sweatshirt, Daddy, just like if I’d worn it when I was a little girl. Just like if you’d given it to me on a day where there was nothing but your self-sacrifice and my ineptitude, my animal weakness pissing on the floor. And now I’m lying on my back, walking my eyes from the wood paneling of my basement, upwards to the shredded ceiling tiles flaking away like old white women’s skin. And I hope I never have to live that long just so I can become that.

My sight inside, my peripheral cave gives me a context. It is the feeling of rocking shut as a seashell on this filthy sponge, rising the skin at my joints into roadkill, feral rash—fungal immortality before floral carpet. When and if I die, it’s a matter of if. If not, I’ll stay in this dirty, broken sweatshirt, worn by essential avoidance for all history, forever the product of unwashed stains and ineptitude. I used to live here, I tell the world, not sorry at all I’m lying, knowing that truth is whatever the fuck you tell.

Bronson matters even though he doesn’t, really. It felt nice to see him today, in all honesty, and he offered to take me somewhere after dinner, but I didn’t do anything. There is no reason, which is the truth I tell. Maybe it’s just easier that way. Then, when I stuck the house key in the door, when I even just got on the road and knew I was coming here by the feeling on my face, I knew it was gonna happen this way, even when I had no cause, not even a real desire.

I don’t wanna fuck you, somebody said once. I didn’t. Those were the last words in the sequence, and it never came up again. There, sometime, it was probably cleaner than this, and I didn’t mention all the lights were off. And I didn’t mention they cut the electricity last month, and my princess mirror no longer turns on when I stand up and go in that room, look at the brown stains left from the blood in my legs from over a month ago now.

I lived here then, but it isn’t even me. It isn’t mine, this thing, this tiara of dog teeth and fragments from the handrail on the stairs. It still wasn’t fixed six-fucking-years later! And the nail still sticks out on the same spot on the steps, the loudest fucking steps you’ll ever take, knowing up and down you can disappear into obsolescence in both directions. I am torn apart in both directions—past and present—into the shape of a daughter in a darkness not even hers!

I inherited nothing when he sagged into slug. All into the slime and wax of his dirty bed, I didn’t get the power and purity of watching paramedics rape him tight and subhuman into the ambulance, done gone and fucked off into no place. The body is too malleable: I looked into the open-casket, I told Aunt Betty it saddened when really I wanted to claw the fucking eyes out. I wanted to drag him home with me and drown him into the bog of cancer-black in the fish tank, serve his pig skin to the ash of this terrarium, make him quiver in disabled silence.

Bronson Gao

高校三年生の時

教室

スカルシュガー

“Sick to the stomach again, there, sacrificed a wish to auto-cannibalism. I could make the flavor Your taste in the mouth of what mauls You alive. And You eat. And begins to smell like Your mouth, the meat is in Your hands.

“The blood is on Your hands. And that little feeling scrapes away. On the edge of my nails, I press into Your bitten touch. As the sum total of the effort, You are worked, whipped clean. Thus is the fervor and foam at the mouth for the taste of skin.

“Stripped by the belt from the four limbs, this is Your birthday suit, cutie honey. Yeah, coulda been laughing, ‘cept there’s nothing funny. I crawl on Your spine like a scepter, like a slave’s suckling hunger for Your defecated death ritual. Your face is dressed in pilgrim flaccidity, the purest feeling. My teeth concede.

“You can’t help what chooses You. You can’t help what You become. In the air is a consciousness, some sense of normalcy. It flickers as the seasons change. I don’t know what to do the day it gets on all fours and fucks itself into an abattoir's stain.

“Internal bleeding recedes into a phase of doubt. Wrath stalls for its apprehension—fading rapidly—asking if You finally ended in the end, as if one could. It was the mistake. Deep inside, never mind the stain.

“Don’t worry.

“From Your skull I eat Your sugar. I cut You vulgar. I twist You apart like a rabbit’s neck in my bloodied fist. That little feeling scrapes away until its final day alive.”

Deadra sat back down.

 

Bronson Gao

七月十九日

道

何も要らない

We’re driving, and I should’ve brought my watch with me. The clock, then, is how the weight of sun is distributed. But the sky, I can even ignore it at this point.

There were moments where I struggled to hear her voice over the music. I offered to turn it down, but she said it didn’t matter. It also didn’t matter enough for me to push further, it seemed like. This is more than good enough.

“Where do you find this stuff?” she says.

“I saw ‘em live. They’re local,” I say. It’s a grindcore demo, some violent elegy for the suburban reject—lament’s putrefaction—cocked like a hammer, a dad’s gun to a head. I’m not the only one sick of this place, evidently.

I start grinning when she says “How can you listen to this?”

“It’s awesome,” I say. “I think it’s a great time, what do you think?”

“What am I supposed to think?”

“It kills stress, man.” And I think whether I should’ve called her that or not, letting it sink in. How deep can a hole go, I wonder.

“How?”

“Bang your head.”

“What?”

“Like this.” I make the motion, and I figure she’s seen it before—probably many times—but didn’t have the vocabulary until now.

From my periphery, I see her start doing it. Her rhythm isn’t very good, but she’s trying, which counts. I had my doubts about whether or not she was really enjoying this, but I think that’s disintegrating. And past my initial demonstration, I’m doing it with her.

“What are you doing?” She asked underneath laughter. Somewhere I got bold enough to start growling to the song.

“Singing!” I shout out, veering my eyes from the road to hers. Then I roll down the windows. “You do it too!”

It took a minute, but I watched the confusion evaporate.

“AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!” she screams at the slicing wind. I turn the music up.

“LOUDER!”

“GRAAAAAAAGHHHHHHH!” She sounds like a siren. It feels like the most intense experience I’ve had that’s really mattered. From looking at skinned cats, beating my nose into the pavement, getting crowd-killed, I know this is better. 何よりも楽しいです。

子供の時、夏は長くならなくても良かった。やっぱり、次のはいつも来ていたんだが、私は本当に正しくなかったね。実は自分の時間を全部消してしまったから、人生はもう意味がないみたい。

それに、いい家族は大切だと思う。そして、今を消してから、何も要らないと思うんだ。世の中は社会でしょうか。じゃあ、社会は会社みたいすぎて、高すぎるんだよ。だから、生活はもう大事じゃないかも。でも、私はまだここにいる。

When I was a kid, summer didn’t have to be long. After all, the next was always coming; but I was actually incorrect. Actually, because I disintegrated all my time, life no longer appears to have meaning.

Moreover, I think a good family is significant. And after I’m done erasing right now, I think I won’t need anything. The world is society, isn’t it? Well, society resembles companies too much, and is also too expensive, you know. So, day-to-day life may no longer be important. But I’m still here.

Deadra Acosta

July 17 20XX

Bronson’s Saturn

EAT EVERYTHING YOU NEED

I’m thinking when I wasn’t at all a moment ago. It’s back again, in my head.

“What’s this?” I ask. He changed the tape earlier. We just kept going, but not really saying anything now.

“Failure,” he said.

The speaker scuttles a fluorescent tone, in musical ambiguity. “Didn’t you rewind the tape?” Evidently not, but still, it’s different now. Somnambulant guitars slosh, half awake, caught somewhere hopeless, holding a hand out. In this space, the music is the distinction between dream and sleep, with wakefulness cracking on that line in between. And in other words, it makes me feel so too.

Maybe this is how men get after they touch themselves: empty, sticky; looking blankly at the face like it’s not even there; not actually looking but just thinking about looking, regretting later.

It’s like being cut open when he looks at me, and it is unafraid, I can tell. But it doesn’t feel like cheap erotica, or even naive boy fantasy. He doesn’t suggest a subterranean, fevered quality, at least not yet. And he doesn’t even know it when I look at him, what way I am left, like lightning’s remains shot through a cross.

I became a broken branch of the family tree. Being here marks me God’s unworthy specimen, streaking for something that doesn’t want me. I feel like a street peddler, Jezebel the leper cutting herself for cash. And I am sitting in Bronson’s Saturn, hardly not crying.

But really, I’m not anywhere anymore but in the sound, in my head. There is no Bronson Gao, Daddy, none at all. You’re all I got, I’m reminded again.

I remember crying into the shoulder of his t-shirt. I’d hated him until bodily failure, screamed myself into emptiness until, “I love you.” He spat it all over me, as his skin gripped mine, arms of something pulling me in, pulling me down. I can still taste the things we ate. I can still taste your mouth. “Please help me stroke this world to sleep,” Dad.

I have no stake in my own skin. And when he did, I had not waited. Just, it was endless anticipation, never in wanting. All that I miss, rocking shut on my mattress at night, is the bedroom’s body, and the prognosis I watched. The wallpaper’s liver spots, moths in the wool, shame tastes to tell me I’d die, and it’d be worth what.

I don’t remember myself, other than the pelts of dulled fear I call my power. The taxidermy lines my peripheral chasm, what I admire at dark, hovering my hand over a lighter, holding martyrdom. It was me. “Softly licking her to sleep,” the bones of my fourteen-year-old carcass are given a context in the corner. Fungal, I watch.

“I’m goin’ down / To the wonderful life, I’m goin’ down.” I’m here, and that’s the only truth there is. I’ve given my sensations to silence, and now I lay bleeding on your bedsheets, waiting for you to finish your cigarette, holding on to the moment before it starts again. Aunt, Uncle, Bronson, you see the end result is all you see. You don’t see the in-between. You don’t see the moment: of knowing just what you’ve done.

Every one, every stroke is another scar on my limb. To think this is what I always wanted, seated at the dinner table with a smiling woman and a tired, but happy man.

I look in your eyes and see the simulation: “Your face is easy to hate / Looking helpless and sincere.”

Finally, I’ve descended, not knowing how good I had it. I’m going down. I’m goin’ down, I’m going the-fuck-down.

I feel the moisture on my face. I don’t care what happens next anymore. Like fingers, he can put his eyes all over me, like he wants a night in the bedroom, his bare spine reflected in my childhood mirror, hovering.

I’ll probably kill myself tonight.

Bronson Gao

七月十九日

道

町の外

町の外にいる。ここには建物が全然ない。三時間ぐらい運転して音楽を聞いていると思う。また、これは映画みたい。後で、あなたは何を考えている？

もう一度夕方が始まります。それから、今夜には何もない。そして、今泣いていることについて、話してくれない？

“What’s wrong?” I ask her. We’ve been silent for awhile now. I saw her from my periphery, holding her head away from my eyes. I didn’t say anything, and can now hear consequences of my inaction.

She cried, softly, just like the sizzle of an amplifier left to drone. “Hey, we can head back now if you’re—“

“No!” she yells, and it must be more than myself. Then, she just kept crying, and I kept driving, hoping it would stop sooner than later—it, whatever that was.

It, whatever that was, it could’ve been the whole situation, her crying, or the fact that I could do nothing but keep going. These are just the situations you find yourself in, where a moral compass is useless, and I’ll say it again that this looks like a stupid fucking movie: the dramatic breakdown in the car; the hesitance on my part; the illusion of control, also on my part.

I think I’m more nervous now that it’s over. It’s dead in here, no more laughter, no more chatter, just the noise to fill the cracks. I’m working out the right words in my head, forming and reforming. Ultimately, though, I don’t think I have the nerve.

But fuck it. “Wanna talk about it?”

With an ugly voice, I feel a wash of hot shame. I also feel the whole scenario stripping apart at the seams. Nothing really matters in any tense.

Deadra Acosta

July 17 20XX

Bronson’s Saturn

SELF-PERFECTION IS SELF-INFLICTED

“Bronson, I lied to you.”

“About what?”

“I fucking put my old man in the ground, in April.” He says nothing. I collect the remnants of my gurgling throat. I fight the sight of his open casket futility behind my eyelids, and try to keep speaking. “My dad is dead. My old-fucking-man is dead, fucking dead.”

“I’m so sorry—“

“Stop.” Useless fucking words, the last thing I want to hear ever. I’m fucking pissed at you now, Bronson. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. “Don’t you fucking say that.” I sniffle.

More silence on his end, how long until I feel sorry? “No, wait… I’m sorry,” there, I said it. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so—

“Can I… what can I do?”

I think. I breathe, “Just keep driving.”

“I’m gonna need to stop for gas eventually,” he says, with tender, but inflexible words.

“Okay.”

More silence is of no note. We descend further into the webs of corn and soy, a frail frequency newly seeping from the stereo all over the floors and grates. They play nothing but Hispanic music, now grated by this shitty stereo. He doesn’t say anything for a long time.

Out of the black, “My brother died last month,” he says. Then he says nothing. And I say nothing. So he says, “We were never very close, but it’s hit my family pretty hard. My dad stays out late on the weekends. He comes back smelling like shit… and I can hear them fight in the other room. It’s like, you know, every problem they had in that relationship, has just fuckin’ finally fallen apart.”

Bronson Gao

七月十九日

道

両親

“But yeah, he was their golden-child, their valedictorian, fuckin’ salaryman-asshole. Real Chinese-American hero, yeah. So of course I never lived up to that, in their eyes,” I say, as a long, probably pointless tangent. Some fuckin’ guy I am for that, man. “Sorry if that comes across…” How’s it supposed to come across, Gao? “I dunno, I just figured—”

“I get it,” she says. She looks at the floor, her hair shielding her eyes from me. I look over and bet they’re closed, anyways. “Me and my dad… we weren’t close, either, anyways.”

I think I can relate to having shitty parents, in some degree. It probably isn’t the same. I mean, judging by some passing observations, I’d guess it’s the opposite, between us two. Yeah, my mom is a good person, and my dad means well, but I won’t forget how it feels to spend your whole life training to be a replacement.

“It fuckin’ sucks. At least, in my case, it’s always a matter of comparison. ‘Well, your brother did this!’

“‘Your brother did that!’

“‘Why can’t you be more like your brother?’ Motherfucker, why can’t you? Goddammit…

“If I’m being completely transparent, I don’t… hah, miss him that much.” I feel my head bleed as this truth leaks out. God-fuckin’-dammit, man.

Now what’s she gonna think? What kinda asshole says that about their fucking brother, that who they hardly even knew? Yeah, some judge of character I am. You must’ve been right, Mom and Dad. Fuck me.

“Can I tell you… there’s something I wanna talk about. About my dad,” she says.

“Sure,” I say, glad to move on.

Deadra Acosta

July 17 20XX

Bronson’s Saturn

MY PLACE TO FLOAT

“It’s not even that I just didn’t like my dad,” I say. “To be honest, I couldn’t fucking stand that motherfucker.

“I’ve never felt more disgusted with, about anything in my life. And, and I, I’ll disgust myself just being his daughter. I mean, yeah, you gotta understand how it feels to know that that made me. That will always be my origin point. Like, there’s no fucking turning it back.

“I’ve,” and before I know it, I’m saying it, I can’t stop myself, “I’ve hurt myself, a lot, about it. And I’ve done other things, too, just, fucking…” The words fall apart and I’m crying again, and he’s just listening for me, saying nothing. And it feels soft, the atmosphere. My face is a slop, tears, sweat, all red. And I can disintegrate, and really let myself die for the first time. Because right now it’s not about blood or pain, but just letting myself go. I can die now.

“I think one of the things, that made me the most sick, Bronson, is when I went to by that fucking card. It was just by impulse, just by the fucking notion. And you saw me there?

“I mean, I fucking hated myself so much, I don’t wanna talk about what I did.” But I did. I wanted more than anything to talk about what I did, the way the shower boiled my skin flimsy, the blindfold sagged into slag on my face, my hidden abortion in wonderland, floating into the atmosphere, a pink, Mexican candy baby. On my knees, the slice was deeper than I said, than the truth I told.

“Tell me anything,” Bronson says.

And then he said nothing, again. So I said, “When I was a kid, he always called me…” and I breathe through the words, to make them safe, to make them not his, “a fat bitch, a slut, a fucking cunt, a whore.” I breathe: “And we spent nights sleeping in the same room, almost every night—even when I never wanted to.”

Bronson Gao

七月十八日

道

忘れてはいけない

The story went on. I fed my attention, and said almost nothing. We were floating in the darkness, our purgatory of county roads, and a lack of meaning for anything. I still don’t know why this started. Maybe it was something I did, or said. Now, though, I think that could be the least important thing. Never mind what any of it means, “I need to get gas.”

“What time is it?” I ask the attendant. I go in to buy some Slim Jims and Red Bull. I forgot we never stopped for food, or at all, in the last four or five hours—I would guess.

“12:34 AM,” he says. It’s not as bad as I would’ve thought, but still, I only have a rough idea of where the hell we are, and what the situation will be once we get back in town—who goes where—is a further mystery. Selfishly, I could imagine her staying at my place, a thought just to serve my own ego. But still, that’s what lingers.

I get gas and get back in the car. “I got some snacks if you’re interested,” I say, realizing I should’ve asked what she liked beforehand.

“Thank you,” she murmurs. She takes a drink and a beef stick and we’re gone again. Time passes, and “Thank you for everything,” she says, seemingly having stabilized just enough.

“It’s no problem.” I’d kinda forgotten why we started driving to begin with, into this abyss at the end of America: where time is forgotten, the radio stations are different, and things can look unfamiliar, but just as plastic and ordinary as what’s always been.

For the car, I bet I told a lie that didn’t need to be any stronger than it was, mainly because my parents only care about retaining the veil of authority, even if what’s inside has been hollowed out by loss, bad faith, etc. Some American dream it’s been. To the wonderful life, I’m goin’ down. And 1:27 AM, I drop her off at her house, and I’m back home by 2:15.

Bronson Gao

六月十五日

家

くそ

I hold out the card. “Here,” I say. “Where’ve you been all day?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “Why? Was your mom asking?”

“What do you think?”

“Yeah, probably she was.” He sits down on the sofa, and I’m glad he stopped breathing on me. The image is rough, but it’s been a minute since I felt glad he came home at all after a day like this. No, I felt pretty sure that he would keep going on too, which I resent.

But there are multiple pieces of resentment, overall: that he turned out to be the hypocrite I always wanted him; that the scenarios of hate I dreamed up as a kid, to get back at my parents, would come true in some way or form; that this is all caused by the collision between dogmatism and unwilling occurrence, my birth known as a quality control issue, a bad simulacrum. You should’ve known there’s too many fucking variables.

And I used to think this was the way things ought have been, y’know. It’s hard to see out of what you’ve always been inside of—the cult of the hard working American—hard to see the propaganda on your dinner plate, your clothes, what you can and cannot read and watch. It’s hard not to become that faithful inheritor of superstitions and prejudices, the securer of parental authority’s legitimacy in all corners of your life.

Maybe I’m blinded by disgust not to want any of it. Maybe there is more to what my “noble” father was as a human. But that kind of perspective has been blanketed by what I see right here, damping out all the heavy shit, or any conversation really, except for fishing, girls, football and guns.

He leans into himself, opens the envelope, looks long at the card and then puts it down. He doesn’t say anything, just stares at the ground between his legs.

It says, “You’re not who you fucking think you are, asshole.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bronson Gao

中学二年生の時

家

とても可笑しいね

中学二年生の時、私は転んで、三週間歩けなかったんです。When I was in the eighth grade, I fell and couldn’t walk for three weeks. でも、まだ宿題をしたり、勉強したり、洗濯したりしなきゃいけなかった。But I still had to do homework, study, clean, and so on.

私の部屋まで歩けなかったから、毎晩ソファで寝ていた。Because I couldn’t walk to my room, I was sleeping on the sofa every night. My room was—is— upstairs, which I don’t know how to say in Japanese;でも、あの時にテレビを見ることを忘れていません。But I haven’t forgotten watching TV in that time.

私の部屋にテレビがなかったし、それは面白かった。Because I didn’t have a TV in my room, for one thing, that was interesting. あの時に遅くまで起きて古いアニメを見た。In that time, I slept late and watched old anime. I’d never had any interaction with it until those nights. Out of terror, I turned it down until barely audible.

The clear perspective I could save was the room as a foxhole, the television a nightly flair to smoke out my position, a self-administered cyanide—only that it was expired. The twitchy rustle of the TV and its Apocalypse Now pyrotechnics was a place of war catatonia. My disaffection to institution triggered an attempt towards subversive submission: mass quantity, super-size consumerism, me and the late night media.

There were lurid, exotic worlds I’ve now forgotten; of course I had no context for any of it, the last two episodes of FLCL like tracer rounds through a shoulder blade. If the PGA tour, Fox News, and the fucking gardening channel were each squares of intellectual nutrition, what I was doing must’ve been worth my personality’s assassination.

 

Deadra Acosta

July 21 20XX

McWorld

MY FIRST KNIFE

It must’ve been the whole scenario, the music, the atmosphere, the mind out of mint condition, spinning. I asked to borrow that record when he dropped me off that night. Magnified by Failure, the title itself speaks for me, my base vulnerabilities made banal for all spectators. At least in my head it’s so, staring at Father’s Day cards, but also through them, like how we looked at each other in the darkness, knowing it was nothing but the collision of our hollow shapes that proved us, thus my petrified form is an illusion for all fucking spectators.

I went to Walmart today looking for a pocket knife. In my experience, I’d only ever used kitchen knives, boxcutters and X-ACTOs—and scissors, of course . I figured it would make my clothes more comfortable carrying around something like this, something to fiddle with, to flick on out of any emotion ever. I look at the cased shelving, feeling something pry at my head.

I am 19-years-old. I can buy my own knife, a real knife, with consequence, legitimacy, weight. This isn’t a game anymore though, don’t you know? This is what you get for growing up, a canvas to grow gangrene all over, an erect, masculine decline. Stiff as a brick, my thorax throbs in your forearms, picking my bones for something to pawn. Next time check the fish tank and the terrarium first, before my bra.

The end result is boredom. I remind myself of what a suicidal teenage girl is supposed to be, wearing suicide as an armband when really I never wanted to die. If I bought my first knife, the first I’ll ever own, I could get into bleeding out in the bathroom, the backseat of my car, and/or right in your face, as in anywhere you go, you.

I could do it anywhere, I’ve shoplifted more than once, mainly for makeup, shampoo, and so on. If not for this case, I’d do it here too.

I called a clerk up. I can remember the conversation being obscene, blurry. That’s not at all important, other than that it was instantaneous, and pushed me right into the parking lot. I stood out there for a moment not really knowing where I was, what I came here for. Or maybe the better answer is that I couldn’t believe it was body, skin, and my premeditation.

My will bought an ugly Kershaw, three inches long, flaccid when folded. I think up this lyric to try meanings for this grotesque experience. I look in the plastic bag in my lap, dwelling in the horror of my own authority. Just sitting in a hot car in the parking lot at midday, I think my whole life has been a miracle too good.

Scenario spawned the thought of every new apartment complex. They’re conceived, bred like dying in heat; so the gun becomes an organism of hard flesh. The mettle of the malleable body is its orgasm; together they transact. They are soldered, cooling into mutual execution. And from the hatcheries—Elkhart, downtown—no one would see me until the ground saw my first, all to do with the fact that no one lives: there, wires connected and fused to the right surfaces, the two-bodied extinction.

Everyone I’ve seen has carried their corpse up and down the stairs, breathing through their mouths, tugging on their shirts, and being in a way of perpetuation. It is only perpetuation. You could spend all everyday eating ice cream and jacking off in front of your monitor. You would still be a slave. You would still be in the apartment where nobody really lives, not telling anyone you will return anywhere, not letting them know how much you pay to sleep every night in your own bed of shit, licking your towels and the vomit on the carpet in your house-fucking-hole.

Could I too, on top of the Mishawaka water tower, I think to myself, knowing I could. There are places tall enough to die out here. There are places out her, I drive myself with this in mind. I drive myself to approximate delusion, knowing I’m still sane. I could drive into a semi.

I’ve thought of these scenarios all before, and besides, there’s no point having bought the knife, hadn’t I any intent to use it. And I already said I didn’t wanna go anyways. But now I’m reaching, dodging the world itself.

Deadra Acosta

July 24 20XX

Elkhart

YOUR LIFE IS OVER

We can do it today. I’ve never felt an air in my head like this. I feel like every word is meant to undermine the consequence, to undermine how I really feel. I don’t have to say anything, which makes it even more horrifying not knowing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bronson Gao

July 26 20XX

Mishawaka

TV SKY

Her yearbook photo was on the screen, pasted over shots of the police tape for thirty seconds. The TV is always on. They found a body blown into the ground. The decision was made. The 4-H fair was more exciting. The world turned on its side and forgot.

I just sat there. My parents looked at me, said something observantly sympathetic.

I say general, expected words. I think I sounded fine enough, which I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be fine. They exit though, and I just sit.

I remembered those times when we over-shared with each other, and that first dinner at the mall, and when she went to my party, or seeing her at CVS. I never even got to know her that well.

I remembered “Skull Sugar.” I remembered, hardly. I remembered we were going to the same Ivy Tech. I looked forward to it too, man. I fuckin’ looked forward to it too.

This is how I want it to seem. I can’t assemble real despair because it isn’t mine on this couch. WSBT 22 dissolves into a series of insurance and pharmaceutical commercials. This utility is a false salvation, graciously coercing codependency. It needs you like a friend needs a friend: not for the friendship, but for the ego. And if it works, it might make you feel like a dead brother with cocaine on his lip, a hickey on his neck.

I got in the car. My mom smoked a cigarette in the garage and just watched. I felt like she understood, and I think there was love for twenty seconds, the same as before middle school. This bond was contorted in what ways as always. Now was holographic, even if it wasn’t itself and couldn’t be.

It was familiar and could not be held. If I sit there and stare at it, it will look like thirty apathetic seconds on the TV screen, and the pathetic portrayal of guilt in what isn’t a mirror, but not a wall. I wanted to feel sorry, I bet.

The sky is glowing white, brushing against the edges of the leaves. The summer is about over. Whatever parts that have stood still will become absolute looking forward. And it will be in ending, disintegrating into the memory of long walks at fourteen, my first iPod, and Khinsider contextualized by skies the color of pale fire. Adolescent boredom lives long enough to know what things you won’t really become, and what’s inside of the adults in the room. And that makes me wonder how it dies.

No more lucidity, no more fluency, I tune to a static signal and immerse myself in a familiar, flavorless sky. This is the part. This is my metal machine music at the end of a world, where the whimsy peels off like dead skin from a steam burn. I’m over it.

I go to the skatepark, the same one I was at when my parents called. I precipitated the quiver in my mother’s voice.

“What’s up?”

There was a breath and a moment of hesitation, a sigh. Her voice trailed off into a croak, and she gave up quickly, sobbing dead at the receiver.

“What happened?”

It got worse from there, and I stayed on the line the way back home. For that half an hour I loved her too, but not the same way I did since before middle school. So sitting here now, I realize the sensation I felt in my mom’s cigarette wasn’t what I left behind in eighth grade. It was that flash of necessity to a body the night I learned Chan died.

I sit here without a skateboard, posing like a trailer-park burnout. Watching cars pass, I take in the enormity of a place like this. It is the only one I need to maintain, and that’s the only job I can’t quit. I’d put in my two weeks, and as relief fades, the last thing I can do is my laundry, the dishes, and clean the house with a broken leg.

I die slowly through a lifetime, I must be. I’m just waiting for something better than busting my face on concrete or punching a skinhead. I sit here reckoning with the fact that this is all I have, Deadra.

Bronson Gao

July 30 20XX

Deadra’s Aunt’s House

AUNT BETTY II

Desensitization is nutrition, I guess. I got a call from Deadra’s aunt on Monday. I never knew they lived together. Whenever I dropped her off, what few times those were, she never specified who she was with. And I never went in the house, I guess it makes sense from what she told me.

“You knew Deadra, didn’t you?” Betty asked me.

“Yeah, we were friends,” I said, not sure if that word is accurate.

“Oh, I thought so!” She sounded very cheerful, warm and deep on the other line, a pleasant variety of those feelings.

“Um, I’m calling because Deadra left a note for you,” Betty says.

“She did?”

“Yes, she did, and I’d like you to read it in-person if you can.” It’s a soft command, one I find the nerve to follow.

“What would be a good time for me to come over?” I asked her. And that would be today, at this time. So I’m here, sitting with Betty in a set of chairs from the ‘80s, in a house from the ‘60s, in a world where things get older, and everything new is never progress, just a cheaper replacement.

“I first got to know her in my English class,” I tell Betty, about Deadra, figuring out the right tone of voice for my delivery. “She was a really good writer, I remember.”

“Oh yes, she certainly was,” Betty says. Her body language is subtly dramatized, made of circular, buoyant motions. She was a very beautiful woman, I could tell, voice like a tasteful wedding band three decades out of style. She gave off an enriching, syrupy energy, but only great in small doses.

Anyways, I can’t tell if her comment was flattery or not, but then she goes, “Oh! And here it is,” handing me an envelope with my name on it. “Would you like some privacy, while you read it?”

“Sure, if you don’t mind,” I say, flipping it over. If she isn’t going to be present as I do this, I have to wonder what the whole purpose of my visit was. But either way, she rises and leaves into her bedroom. I open the card.

“This place is the smell of slow death. Never before have I been this: ‘I disgust; I need to think deeply; I’m going for a long walk,’” the first paragraph goes.

The second starts: “But that’s what you’d expect me to say, isn’t it, Bronson? Looking through the reason I’m doing this I am using my hourglass. I flip it upside down and I see your face through the grains, you.” And it goes.

“Yeah, feeling okay today, despite the minimal details of my situation; I haven’t eaten yesterday. If nothing else it made me feel understood, I think to myself.

“I am the abyss and you are my edge, hun. Water erodes the coast and drips the remains into me. Dive into me, you, who stands motionless all the time. Can I not tear you down, I think to myself. Graze my cold hair.

“I could praise and discuss you for the rest of my life, Gao, which is probably only a couple hours. Your life has had the most inspiring soundtrack of any game I’ve ever played. It is one of the truest revelations I have ever seen, that has ever touched my face. Give me your level of interactivity, baby.

“You know, I never wanted to be like my older sister, but now I’m starting to remind myself of her,” she writes. I never realized she had a sister. “And oh, here’s her phone number and address in case you’re curious.” And there they were.

“I’m not really afraid of anything anymore. It’s gonna happen to me eventually anyways, boy. But this is for you.

“Love, Deadra Acosta.” The thing in the envelope my eyes tried to avoid the whole time was a polaroid. She took all her clothes off and stood.

She painted herself with the abjection from all the openings, soft red skin poised in a death game. Few incisions flaked at the edges, frayed like old clothes. Most molten like dog shit in the sun, sanguine stuck like semen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bronson Gao

July 30 20XX

Deadra’s Aunt’s House

AUNT BETTY III

I vomited with the envelope on the sink next to me. I cried softly in the bathroom for a few minutes. I bet Betty was listening the whole time, voyeur-sympathizing. I exited, hiding the letter in my pocket, secretly praying not to crease it, not to mention anything.

“How was the letter?” Betty asked me, now tending to some task in the kitchen.

I struggled to think of any proper response. “It was…” I stop for a long five seconds. “I’m not sure what to say.”

“Oh, I understand completely, dear,” she says to me, suddenly offering her arms in a fluid motion. I take it, and we hold each other for the right time, pulled off the heat with just the right moisture left. “Now, would you like anything to drink? We got water, pop, coffee, tea—”

“A water’s fine, thank you,” I say, letting it set in that this would be an extended visitation.

The TV’s turned to the home improvement channel. Neither of us are watching it, serving mainly as audiovisual ventilation. I didn’t even know this woman.

"I never got to meet you before, when we used to hang out, me and Deadra,” I say. “I always wondered about that, what her parents were like…” I trail off.

She takes a breath, and I watch her body language, seeing her brain troubleshoot an answer to my half-a-question. “Her parents… you see, her parents were very flawed people. It was a very hard thing on her, growing up with just her father,” a subtle comment implying an absent mother, “especially because he was a hard man to deal with, we all knew. But we never knew how bad it was until he passed.”

“When’d he pass?” I ask, knowing when, but still selfishly curious, poking and prodding my friend’s body as it sags in the sun. I’ll call her that for now.

“This April,” she says, nodding solemnly. “Yes, this April. He had suffered heart failure. He smoked and drank his whole life, and he could never eat a vegetable.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” wincing as I remember Deadra’s voice in my head: stop .

Another sigh, “No, don’t be, really,” and a reflexive chuckle follow, a replacement for soft tears. “He was a crass, cheap, low man. He is not the kind of man you’d want to be sorry for.”

The conversation went, and I held on to the things I knew I couldn’t ask her, about food, about angst, sex, human degradation, “auto-cannibalism.” I knew we both knew, and I saw some of the parts of the conversation where she withheld her knowing, or maybe I’m just deluding myself. It’s like if you look into the abyss long enough, you see it wherever you go.

This was a good human being: warm, kind, forthcoming, talkative, potentially overbearing, but dependable. I don’t know why the hell I stayed there for almost three hours. I did though. Her husband was Carl’s—Deadra’s dad’s—brother. I guess in that way, we’re both outsiders looking in: having little more than professional affiliation with the power structure, no authority within the clan.

And then the center of the situation falls apart. Deadra’s parents become nonexistent, she comes here, and doesn’t live more than a couple months. And I’ve tried sorrow, but keep resolving just half-awake and with questions in this house, not as sad as uninformed. So as Betty talks to me about her dog and other extraneous things I can’t bother to remember, I keep sneaking looks at the circumstances with all terrifying clarity, all the fractured appendages and a twisted neck.

“Y’know, I like you,” Betty says to me, subtly pointing from her chair. “I mean, you oughta know by now, since you’ve been here so long!”

“The sentiment’s mutual,” I say, easy. I have to wonder if the whole reason I came over was just because she was lonely.

“There is one thing I’ve been meanin’ to tell you, Bronson,” she says. “It hurts me to do this, but I think you’ve convinced me you’re the best person to have them. I’ve put together a box of Deadra’s belongings, that I think would be of interest to you. I know how close you too were.”

Bronson Gao

July 30 20XX

McKinley Highway

NOT NOWHERE II

I didn’t realize “how close” we were. Yeah, again, I guess you can’t appreciate where you’re at until it’s gone, and I mean places, people, things, anything you’ve ever thought.

I’m driving back home now. This is the same route I took that one night: 1:00 in the morning, smothered by the naked darkness, recalling Deadra’s collapsed form in the passenger seat, folded inward in spontaneous sleep.

七月十七日から十八日まで四時間ぐらい運転をしたり、日本語で考えたり、遊んだりした。From July seventeenth to eighteenth, I drove for roughly four hours, thought with Japanese, had fun, etc. A key drawback to community college is an absence of any Japanese language courses. I think I could do something in Chinese, and that would be the irony of my high school experience. At least I know some kanji.

At least I know some kanji. I was supposed to go to a state university, that’s a part I’ve been leaving out. For the convenience of my narrative, I’ll also mention that my dad didn’t serve long enough to pay for my college.

I’ll intensify that logic with the tidbit that my parents were poor, and are now less poor, but still lesser middle class assholes, hence why I’m myself. My dad is a slob. My mom spent her whole life in a village and had nothing. I sometimes wonder if she just married him to get the fuck out.

And that’s the tragedy of a son that looks just like the man you chose for freedom, and are paying the price for everyday. Chan looked just like you, spoke just like you, shared your sense of humor, your aspirations, Mom, all that generic shit.

China’s poverty was different then than it is now, in the nondescript, mythological past. Modern prosperity made it make sense for Chan to go back when he did, to assimilate into something he’d spent his whole life preparing for. And I can cite bullying—racially-suggested suppression—as the trauma of a second-generation immigrant; but as a kid, I still remember liking my nationhood as it was, being an American from nowhere in America. And now, all the money’s gone. We’re not goin’ nowhere. まだどこにも行けません。

But anyways, I’m back home. I didn’t speak to my parents; they were watching television. Their faces glow like radium painters for a watch company, poisonous work sitting there. It’s familiar disgust.

I carry my tote of mysterious personal items, my pandora’s box. I sheepishly took it from Betty’s hands, appreciating the weight. It was heavier than I expected. My imagination devolves into a tasteless wonder for what all would be “of interest” to me, Deadra’s underwear my image of moral terror, and primal impulse.

The grotesque becomes, but not as the image itself, but myself in its relation. I disgust myself the same way as had been you, Deadra: for seeing what I think, but do not choose to think.

There’s no underwear in the box, and I sigh in relief for what I don’t have to prevent myself from doing, not knowing if I could actually commit myself to it, not knowing how much of this is just fantasy. I reel back, disarming and breathing.

The horror returns when I look back in the box, making meaning for the six or seven composition notebooks stacked on top of each other. I feel a visual tremble, and put my eyes to everything else. There’s an old digital camera, a house key—a piece of paper with an address taped to it—a couple cds and books, and a few clothing items, for my shame.

And for my shame, I take out her Lazer Snake hoodie and just look at it. It feels grimy, matted in my fingers, and I now realize I never touched her, which was probably for the best. There’s something in the pocket.

I pull out the knife. It’s the same one in her right hand in my photo. Now in mine, I look longingly at the handle, blade folded inwards like she was in my car that day. I still see her thin fingers packed tight against it into a fist, a flair on the edge, eroding, draining into the water.

Bronson Gao

August 1 20XX

Deadra’s Sister’s House

DISREGARD IT ALL

In what way she reminded herself of her sister was to be seen. As I entered the driveway, my tires ground into a week-old newspaper, softened by the rain and solidified as something horrible. This place was a shit-hole. The grass went up to my knees in spots; cardboard boxes and beer cans decorated the patio; cigarette butts sit like seeds in the broken vegetation.

I tried to call earlier today, once in the morning, again around noon, and about half an hour ago. There was no response each time, just, “leave a message at the tone” in a passionless, hazy voice. I did each time, in fact. Obviously, I didn’t give a shit anymore after the third time. I was gonna see it no matter what way.

I start an adrenalin response as I knock on the front door, knowing that entering this place could be—will be—a multitude of hazards. I wait for a few minutes, listening to large-sounding dogs taunt me from the inside, probably two or three of them.

Eventually, a man answers, his groggy, robust, yet alienating form shown through the storm door. “How can I help ya, stranger?”

“Hi, I’m here about an Angelica Acosta. I was a friend of her sister, Deadra, and wanted to ask about her,” I say. That last part was still rough. I didn’t know what I wanted to learn from her; I didn’t have any questions. Maybe I just expected her to pour calk into all my contextual fractures. Now I’m thinkin’ this place needs it more than I do.

He puts his thumb and forefinger over his brow, looks away. “Yeah, sure. Come in,” he says. He opens the screen. “Dogs don’t bite. Don’t mind ‘em.”

It isn’t really a problem. The downstairs has an open floor plan, and to the right are a couple dilapidated couches, pieces of foam poking up and out like hernias. A husky wrestles some kind of shepherd to the ground, twisting into an end table and smashing a lamp to shards.

“Motherfucker!” the man says. “Shit, man I gotta tend to this. She’s upstairs, room at the end of the hall on the right, can’t miss it.”

“Got it, thanks,” I say. This place is a carcinogen. It’s also very exciting, and for all its disaster, it seems important to look at, even when I know it isn’t. No, this is the end of America: Cops blaring on the TV; pesticide pets demolishing; the smell of a dirty sink blurring into dog shelter must; particles of air coagulated into haze.

These must be the loudest steps I’ve ever taken. If my foot smashed through one of these wooden boards, I don’t know how much of the scenario would be hilarious, and how much would be desperate. That reminds me how I’ve found myself less moved by her thirty seconds of minimal significance, her Cannibal Holocaust playmate pic, my general implication in what feels like a thing I should’ve never stopped to look at. And that must mean I’m not there yet.

I feel like I’m walking to the execution chamber now. I resolve myself with this comparison, thinking it’d be easier not to come back from this at all. And I know, that what I can’t let myself know I fear is how affected I’ll be after this hour, leaving this place lobotomized or harrowed by domestic apocalypse. Maybe then I’ll have a reason to kill myself.

I knock on the door. “Is Angelica in here? I’m a friend of Deadra’s, and I’m wanting to speak to ya. I called you earlier,” I said.

“Come in…” I hear, faintly. Or maybe that’s just an illusion. I convince myself it doesn’t matter, and twist the handle.

The curtains are drawn, a faint sliver of a TV sky washing chrome into the room. Incense is lit, but the smell of bodies, dogs, beer and food has cemented itself into the foundation. Many things have died here. From the clothes wasted on the floor and bed, I can’t see a living thing.

The first part I pick up on is the hair on the pillow: black, jagged and staticky like hers. “I’m sorry, did I interrupt anything? I can—“

“No, you’re fine,” she says, with the same matte intonation as her voicemail. “Close the door, if you could. You can sit anywhere”

“Sure,” I say. I sit in a distressed recliner, wiping it off, checking for wordless stains. “Thanks for having me over. I’m sure you’ve heard about her passing, and I was mainly curious just to see if you didn’t have any more insight into… what inspired what happened.”

“What do you wanna know about?” She rises from her back, twisting in my direction and resting on her elbow. Her upper half is bare, comforter held over her chest. She is a thin woman of darker complexion, gorgeous in this darkness when I can’t make out her eyes, or the smell of her body from anything else.

I think about the question for a stutter. “Well, one of the things she talked about a lot was her father. I never got to meet him, and know pretty much nothing about him, but was curious to know if you wouldn’t be willing to let me know, about him at all.”

Her body edges backwards in an exhale. “Her dad, our dad…” Another pause. “I mean, there’s not really, simpler terms than he… bedded with her.” How candid.

I knew that already. “She told me about that, not much, but enough. I guess what I was curious was, what was life like when you were growing up?”

“When I was growing up? I wasn’t living at home anymore when Deadra was born.” I then look at her, and realize how much older this woman is than me, or her. “Deadra’s my stepsister. Dad married her mom after he left mine.”

I wanna ask a question I know I shouldn’t, now that the subject’s come up. But I’ll hold on to that one for now. “Did you ever get to know Deadra’s mom?”

“Yeah, pretty well, in fact. I remember she was always sweet, good with kids, soft, good at cooking.”

“Whatever happened to her?”

“People say she left. I know the truth, though,” she hisses. “She had a drug problem, mainly painkillers, I think. Either way, she probably overdosed, went down the wrong alley, got laced, whatever.”

“How’d you find out about that?”

“There are some things you don’t usually find in a medicine cabinet. She wasn’t sick, either.”

As my eyes adjusted, her face became more and more defined. Statuesque symmetry faded into the wear of time, eyelids torn into chasms. She is skinny, but not the right kind of skinny. The body is made rigid as a fishbone. The anomaly is made when it is cut from a context, and that goes for anything.

“How was it when you were growing up?” I ask. And now my life could be over, I know.

“He used to beat the shit out of me.” The words are just there. They float around like a confession to the bathroom mirror, something you rehearsed in your head habitually to make yourself believe in. But the thoughts aren’t enough to justify your existence. Nah, somebody oughta know how it is for real, how you are. “He never touched me there, if that’s what you wanna know.”

I didn’t wanna know. “Were you and her ever close?”

“No, not really.”

“I see.” The stalling begins. The dogs were barking downstairs the entire time, but now I can actually hear them. I can hear the humidifier breathe the fungus and the bed crumbs. I hear the years of torment that is Angelica Acosta’s locality. I am a tourist to torment.

“Is that all you came here for?” She patronizes me like some impetuous child, pulling her out of probably the only thing of importance, fucking getting away. And that must’ve been your reminder, Deadra. There was nothing left but to get out like everyone else.

“I don’t know.”

“You can stay as long as you like,” she says. And I just sit here, dripping into the abyss.

Bronson Gao

August 4 20XX

Home

SKULL SUGAR II

“Sick to the stomach again, there, sacrificed a wish to auto-cannibalism,” the first line reads. I opened the book at the top of the stack after twenty minutes of unconscious hesitance, convincing myself I just didn’t have the time right now, but knowing there was nothing else I could commit myself to. I face the twist of intention, and open Deadra Acosta’s diary, if that’s what this is.

The first paragraph ends with “And begins to smell like your mouth, the meat is in your hands,” inducing a flashback of when she called me up, telling me about her purging. It was a bowl of mint chip ice cream. Why she specified this information precludes me. But the fact that it was unavoidably what it was must’ve manifested itself somehow as dire, all the way to the graphic imagery of it as an abject. She told me about that part, sobbing.

When I met her in English class, her chicken-scratch penmanship, oaken inflection, wardrobe like a suburban refugee all marked her untouchable. The mystery was alluring: this literate, morbid evergreen of a woman. She was a year older than me, I recall.

The fascination increases seeing her CD collection. I popped in her copy of Jagged Little Pill. Like her literature, the music is intimate—親しい— and simultaneously taunting, accusatory, sexily vengeful. “On the edge of my nails, I press into Your bitten touch,” Deadra writes, sinking her fingers into the attacked mass of physical sensations of another.

In all truth, I don’t know what the writing is actually about, other than the imagery it force-feeds. It’s describing something, that’s its minimum obligation. The narration is directed repeatedly at “You,” “You” who is referred to as “cutie honey”—a cheeky allusion, and also a pet name—who Deadra manifests as simultaneously worshipped and abhorred. And it could be her father.

“I crawl on Your spine like a scepter,” she writes. The scepter attaches an object of vulnerability or decay with the concept of royalty. That the spine may be alienated from separation with a body, no longer serving its original purpose and being rendered a grotesque, static object, leads to the perspective that Deadra attempts to reach regality by embracing this symbol: committing the four limbs to immersion into the sensory input of uncanny, banal decomposition.

A point of irony is found by understanding that the spine in its present form is obsolete to its original usage, yet retains absurd significance that she ascribes. Becoming an atomized symbol of death, Deadra says that her act is “like a slave’s suckling hunger for Your defecated death ritual,” drawing a bold contrast between diction of infantile helplessness and a morbid, excrement-caked tribalism that newborn fixation is aimed at.

Thus, the sentiment is conveyed that Deadra, knowing the humorless irony of her behavior, manifested in her mind primal, barbaric varieties of debauchery relative to mortality and vulgar physical processes—defecation, abjection of matter—as forms of status that she compulsively turns to for emotional nutrition in an infantile state.

As a consequence, “You” could also be herself, knowing the violation she regularly commits herself to, and lacking the agency to prevent it.

I sit here with my notepad, attempting to make sense of a person whose life I had no right to know this intimately. It’s to the point where I’m getting a fluency for her handwriting, having spent too many hours absorbing the trivial events of high school all the way to the latest incision.

I think I can learn that no one who wants connection wants it to be like this. No one wants their existence known on other terms than the fiction of the interior self. Deadra had a variety of Deadra that she sold to me, and I now dissect the parts of that product from whatever the hell this is.

“Did you think about your bills, your ex, your deadlines / Or when you think you’re gonna die? / Or did you long for the next distraction?” Alanis sang.

It was all a distraction, wasn’t it, I ask myself.

Bronson Gao

August 9 20XX

Where

I DON’T NEED ANYTHING

It’s all extraneous. I think you’ve made me realize that: you, who I can go without naming, whose name has been worn thin on my mind. I can’t imagine you ever liked it anyways, the insurmountable baggage of inseparability, infantile.

It’s over, pretty much. It’s been done, and I’m preparing for how little I’ll feel when I get there, back home. This isn’t away-school we’re going to. And I can’t live where this key takes me, this place Angelica told me not to “fuck with for your own goddamn sake,” lights axed, darkness turned into a dead kinda dead.

This place smells like everything you wrote about. This place breathes with effort, skin of the counter swollen and bruised, whipped tight and rubbery like you—in the pictures on your sim card. The bone and saliva of this place has dehydrated to ossification, the wood panel dry, dark and cold in the animal room in the basement.

The fish tank smells of molded TV dinner. This world in this house-hole is the same, a microwaved superficiality masquerading as edible, livable, made of integrity and economic. Nobody’s ever gonna sell this place. It reminds me of the time me and Danny went to an estate sale together. The wallpaper was flaking off in patches; it had the emptiest basement I’d ever seen; I thumbed my hands through the clothes in the closet, every piece devoid of a context I could access.

I had more context here though. I made a crucial mistake I had to pay for, stopping at the drug store. Now I had to see what those eyes behind the blindfold saw. I had to know how “death is the key to fungal immortality, the image of expiration cemented squarely in the center as a lifelike, undying picture.”

There are two bedrooms in the house. What I’d imagine was Deadra’s room is—was—the pink one, with a Tony Hawk blanket grossly nailed over the window, minimal light accessible. It smells like death in here, what I’d smelled before on the side of the road, and in Angelica’s last resting place. Someone lived here, though, sleeping in the bodily waste nightly, sharing a bed and a body with the body that made her, all to the point of decimation.

I don’t sound like a friend, and that must be because I’m not, no matter if I say it. I’m just a fan, an asshole who owns all the merchandise. Maybe I’ll find some copper wiring to sell, or a pair of her panties to vainly look at until the pain sets in.

It doesn’t help me to think of myself in this way, and I left the house with nothing. I’d already checked the whole damn place, and anything relative to her—that would give me closure, a sensation, anything—was gone. I called Betty a few days ago, and asked, cheaply, if she’d come up with anything else I’d want. She told me I had everything.

Her journals were filled with drawings. The last one was dated May 28th: the last day of senior year. It’s an interior shot of a classroom from our high school, exhibiting a familiar cast of bored-looking young people: Zach Nedderman, who I saw Glazed Baby with; Sarah Fay, who I made out with at a party once; and Alexis Kilgore, who rejected Brian at prom last year.

You get to know everyone in a place like this. I’ve spent my entire life in Michiana, but that much you already know. The world outside of this place has been an empty endeavor, communicated mainly through descending spirals of highway to listen to music to, and the mention of a rare “Darlene from LinkedIn,” the scam artist in a dead friend’s notebook.

Maybe the outskirts of town is mortality itself. Maybe that’s the real end-of-life hallucination: driving far away enough to find the same things you’re afraid to think you’ll die in, but contorted to a fresh form of disgust. Maybe that’s where you become a Deadra Acosta, the rain pelting down as you stare at a blank image, the words failing to make any contact with You, or me, or you.

And I can’t say さよなら、even if this is just a fucking movie.