THE MARKS OF AEGIS
The first nice thing I ever did to my body was tear it open.
Before then, my standard cruelty to myself was taking things in that hurt and holding them there. I said yes when I meant no: at work, at dinner, in parked cars. I tried to annihilate myself through abundance, absorbing and sloshing and wallowing along. I wanted to be swollen with misery.
When I couldn’t make enough of my own troubles I took on other people’s. I swallowed or inserted or injected some friend’s wretched situation and the accessories of their wretchedness, and in there they stayed, building up in the junkyard of abuse under my smooth young skin. God, I had great skin.
It got to be that one day I was tired. I could not tell want from habit. There weren’t friends left to take on troubles from, and the work was done, the plate empty, the cars driven home and tucked away in roomy garages beneath sleeping families.
Well, I’m practical when I’m nothing else. I got out my box cutter and I started making ways out. I sliced along the planes of my skin and squeezed until everything on the inside that ought not to have been there was on the outside again. I expected to recognize each individual trouble, but everything had melded together into a civilization of its own.
I cleaned it up with my best detergents, slowly and methodically. A whole city emerged. All the people I had used had formed alliances with one another, built striking homes from the rough materials I’d left them with. Their culture may have started in filth but it had changed and grown. Their buildings floated and spun in slow orbit of one another. Every wall was a doorway and every stair a hall and every window a skylight or escape hatch depending on the rotation of the structure at given moment.
I called it Aegis and admired it, and thought about maybe putting it back inside me to keep forever. It was a really beautiful place with so many inhabitants who deserved that beauty. I thought I deserved a little beauty, too. But when it started to float higher and away I saw that it didn’t need me anymore, and I decided to end our association on more gentle terms that it had begun. I opened the window and sent it on its away, crying as it swept into the breeze. Aegis is still out there, thriving I think.
Then it was done, so I closed myself back up. When I ran through the first aid kit I used the sewing kit and when I ran through that I used the soldering iron. Then I took a very long, very hot shower.
Some people see my stitched and bandaged gashes and my cauterized holes and say, there goes a bitch who has really fucked herself up for good. There goes a real mess. They think they’ve seen a tragedy. But these people don’t know the first thing about scars. They’ll never understand how I could be so proud.
HERE YOU ARE, NEAR ME
Parvaneh walked to the coffee shop in her cleanest shirt and dress slacks at rush hour, just to hold onto ritual and routine, now that she no longer had a job to structure her weekday. All it took was one ultra-popular friend retweeting her grouchy hot take on the manager with the simmering bigotries—not even naming names—to launch her from being a person with a job and a Twitter account to being a martyr in the fight against office microaggressions. A clickbait mill retweeted the retweet, quoted and linked it at the top of their big feature about harassment, which had the effect of funneling all new harassment into her mentions and, soon enough, her personal email, her work email, and the work email of her human resources director, whose fifteen minute review of the situation left her circling the cream and sugar island in the The Bee’s Buzz instead of having anywhere else to be on a Monday morning.
She took the entire shaker of chocolate powder with her to a round table in the back of the cafe and tapped on the three-hundred unread messages alert on her phone.
Strangers were indignant about her original gripe. They called her a liar, a slut, a terrorist, variations thereof, and threatened to perform all manner of violences on her. One by one, she screenshot, blocked, and reported the messages, as if this might do some minor good like tossing back a single dried-out starfish into a polluted sea. Doing this without letting herself read them was a lesser of two anxiety attacks. But this morning, as abruptly as she’d become unemployed, the vitriol dwindled, and the pictures started.
The first picture came with a note: “I saw your story and your avatar and the documents about you and I recognized you from this photo that hangs in our first floor hallway. See attached.”
The attachment was a photo of that aforementioned photo, in its frame, in the wallpapered hallway. A white family—mom, dad, goth-looking daughter, startled-looking son—smooshed together in front of the Byrd Weatherbee statue in the University neighborhood where The Bee’s Buzz operated as well. All of their hands touched Byrd’s brass foot, a tourist-folk tradition for good luck which persisted in spite of the Weatherbee University hazing standard to piss on that same foot late at night, after their proud parents have stumbled drunk into rideshares and been whisked away like reverse-Cinderellas to luxury hotels.
In the background of this photo, Parvaneh saw herself sitting by the statue, shoving a bagel in her face, with wet hair, adding an unintended layer of sloppy reality to an otherwise idyllic family portrait. She looked up from her phone and her drink and out the front window of the coffee shop, where she could glimpse the left elbow of Weatherbee’s brass akimbo stance behind a swarm of pedestrians.
Parvaneh squirmed. How many photographs existed of her in the albums of strangers? This partial answer was tantalizing. More of them arrived throughout her first week of unemployment, from different kinds of people, in all corners of the city. There were more families, couples, packs of friends, selfies, the creative commons licensed photo from the Wikipedia page about the Byrd Weatherbee statue. In every single one, she was present, walking, sitting, eating her lunch, picking her nose, rifling through her purse, finishing a beer, reading a book. Sometimes, just waiting for something, a train or last call or the laundromat dryer. In several, she looked right into the camera with the beginning of motion in her stance, her gaze already drifting unaware to the next blip of interaction with the lives of others. The torrent of threats evaporated, but neither were these new messages friendly in any conventional sense. Each one said some variation of the same simple description: “here you are, near me.”
SELF CARE
Fuckos in this stupid town think nobody notices how when the tide just keeps coming in without going out again that “some” neighborhoods get sunk forever as an “unfortunate side effect of coastal flooding” while others become the sexy hip cool new “seafloor village.” I’d cackle every time some bullshit golden-brick seawall crumbles and takes another mansion with it, but now there’s straight-up UNDERWATER house tours for a zillion dollars a ticket, the same way they used to show off their giant Christmas trees and shit but even more pretentious cause now I guess they host in designer scuba gear. “Oh, this old thing? Blub blub, there’s sand in my butt, no wait it’s diamonds, ha ha!” (That’s how they talk probably.) MEANWHILE where MY shitty old apartment used to be is now an undersea God-damned HOTEL AND CASINO. In a cute little dome bubble park and everything!!! Like imagine if when the Titanic sunk they were just like “fuck it, we’ll make it work if we can disappear the poor people corpses, we’ve GOT to make back our investment SOMEHOW” and everyone was like “oh my God of course that’s SO important!” So I got to know some of my favorite sidewalks for a bit, and wouldn’t you know it, “extreme weather” means something else entirely when you LIVE OUTSIDE!