*She*                            
*who knew boats*
*and ropes*   
*no longer played* *

&nbsp;

Algae sat on Lake Chetek year round, a layer of clotted cream sponge-like and lime green. As a kid I remember sitting on its frothy lip, feeling like a fly on the edge of a cauldron. Looking out, I thought how perfect it was for our family reunions to be held on this rank body of water. Even plants on the shoreline slouched and slumped towards the lagoon, futureless, sediment leaching through their weak roots. I watched trees fall in one-by-one like born again baptists in a failed ceremony, bodies left floating while their clothes rotted off. It was the saddest lake I ever saw.

A few intrepid pontoons tried their luck on Chetek most July Fourths. Dads with red skin from the sun (or the beer) helmed their metal inchworms, lugging along athletic, drunk children on innertubes. Jampacked under the awning like Hawaiian buns, moms and aunts in tankinis bristled with chubby uncles, sausage arms dangling off the boat’s padded edges. I was jealous of these kids. They had the type of parents who could swallow their pride and dress up on Halloween, or countenance the gauche life of a blow-up Grinch in their front yard. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of pride, maybe they even liked it, the perennial childhood of it all. My parents were adults through and through; my mother thought holiday decorations were vulgar. Our lone Christmas display each year was a towering tree, sparse as Charlie Brown’s and at one with our home’s endless angularity. The branches wore elaborate origami ornaments that she spent hours making in the months leading up to Christmas, spread out in our breakfast nook with her Earl Grey and sliced pears looking half-Japanese, serene and papery and thin. To this day I recoil at anything minimal. With his skimpy tree, Charlie Brown may’ve rejected  Jesus’ birthday as commodity, but my mother was in my mind embracing darker forces: the puritanical, the controlled. I always thought she was a bit of a tyrant. In her poem *Daddy*, Sylvia Plath writes that *Every woman adores a Fascist*...well not if they’re your mother, I’d like to say back.

Our reunion was held on the grounds of Salvation Park Bible Retreat, the northern Wisconsin camp my mother had attended as a kid, skinny as a rail and soft spoken. During the summer that most girls her age got their periods, she got chased around by rowdy boys chanting *Flatsy, flatsy two-by-four!*, an easy dig at her underdeveloped chest. Even my mother’s body was unadorned. She finally menstruated at age 18, technically an adult and ready to ship off for college. The night I first spotted blood in my underwear at 11, a relatively common age, I looked down at the rusty patch and began to cry: I was dirty like everyone else.

Unlike mother, my dad was a real stranger to Northwoods white trash, not a Wisconsin guy at all. The rural poor could never tug at his sympathy, an emotion reserved for those he saw as acutely at risk: Black city kids, urban immigrant communities. He was himself a postwar refugee who grew up in a rundown part of Chicago’s South Side, and the space afforded to poor people in places like Chetek was its own kind of luxury in dad’s view. He got in trouble making jokes to his students at the university about the lives to be lived in conservative, white working class enclaves: "If you fail this exam you can say hello to flipping burgers in Rhinelander! I hear Arby’s is hiring!" He thought this was hilarious and didn’t much examine the fact that most of the kids in his classes were from little farm towns like Chetek and Rhinelander. I was taught to be pretentious in the strangest style, to rebuff rural kids and nurture soft spots for communities I was not even a part of. This contradiction rubbed me the wrong way, especially when I stared at boats. The same way Republicans launch attacks at the welfare state when its beneficiaries purchase cell phones or sneakers, liberals shake their heads at house poor motorheads. I wanted to be a motorhead. I wanted to pop onto one of those tubes with a gropey baseball player and get whiplashed. I wanted a fat mom who knew how to party.

As a 2-for-1, our reunions were always held around July Fourth, a fact that nicely inlaid resentment for me approaching the event as I would be missing celebrations with my own friends back home. We certainly didn’t go every year, but the ones we made it for were preceded by weeks of arguments, tantrums, and ultimatums spearheaded by yours truly. Sitting around eating flavorless snacks with Protestant moderates was my worst nightmare. Mother’s extended family was a grim net of risk-averse Holy Joes and Maries, pale and sickly aesthetes who said doilies were "too fancy." If you were going to be religious and conservative minded, I thought you should be the *fun *kind, the messy and drunk kind. Chetek’s impure waters swirled like the collective id of mom’s family, the flipside of moralism and lean meat. The lake sustained poor folks who had the audacity to revel in their bad luck. Watching them honor life’s various dishonors while I hung around clinically reserved men without boating licenses made me sick. As my great uncles nodded off in adirondack chairs, I longed to tip them over like sleeping cows. I pictured myself shoving them into the green muck of Chetek, where the slime would swallow them up like some fifties horror flick.

The summer before eighth grade juts out in my memory—a long straw that itches my cortex when I think about those Hansen Family gatherings now and again. The slower I pull on that straw the stickier it gets with old information. Names and smells emerge in oily puddles, ready to be stepped in and resented and washed off.

At the time, I was one of those preteens who fancied herself precocious without having any actual information. It is in a young girl’s nature to refute realities with intuitions, and I suppose you could say I didn’t excel at anything concrete. My dad still played records back then, and I became entirely attached to Joni Mitchell’s *Court and Spark*, the song "Twisted" in particular. The lyrics unleash the genesis of Mitchell’s art, centering herself as a little girl. The child gets drunk and knows she is a genius at three. She refuses to ride in a double decker bus because there isn’t a driver on top. Vodka helps her sleep. I thought this was both very cool and completely relevant to my own stature as misunderstood prodigy. In our living room I’d listen to Mitchell brag and boast over and over, giving myself rug burns as I writhed on the floor like an epileptic. That year in school I had learned about Pentecostals, a kid in my class was one of them, and I was so jealous I could feel my heart boil everytime he described their church services. Speaking in a language whose meaning and accuracy you and only you could confirm seemed to me the most sublime expression of self, practically tailor made for my instinct-laden, jittery tongue. Mitchell got this, I thought, and had the confidence to relinquish herself as a vessel for something—or someone—else. *Instead of one head I got two, *she sang. *Exactly! *I thought.

I piled into my parents’ Honda Odyssey the morning of July 4, 2004 lost in my own jokes, knowing that I would be utterly incapable of acting present with my mother’s eerie family. Our van’s interior was coated in dog hair and had the middle seat removed so that I could lay on the carpet during longer trips. If I didn’t look out the windows I could pretend that I was in a moving room. My dad never questioned this desire and had happily dumped the row years prior. He and I were not "seatbelt people" anyways. New cars and their lousy beeps have stripped this preference from our kind.

Driving due north only to land in the armpit of Chetek bummed me out. If we kept on rolling towards Canada we could go to Lake Superior, my favorite summer spot, where you can see clear 60-feet down and swallow the water if you so choose. Our arrival in Chetek, rather, was cued by the abrupt proliferation of unnecessarily long driveways and "wood for sale" signs. Every house in the area had a flagpole fit for some kind of state department and a thousand wiry messages about our troops. I myself didn’t know any active military men. "The troops" was a tidy abstraction that kept people from asking too many questions. You either supported them or you didn’t, I guessed. Throughout the hour ride up my mother badgered me about my lukewarm attitude towards the Hansen’s; she didn’t see why I couldn’t be nice for one day.

"Why can’t you be nice for one day?"

I told her I was nice to people who earned it.

"I’m nice to people who earn it!"

I figured that the Hansen’s deserved a taste of their own reticent medicine, and I was happy to give it to them in the form of adolescent hostility. They weren’t even immediate family, not by any stretch. These reunions were a tenuous hodge-podge of locals, people who basically lived within a 100-mile radius of the lake. Our most recent common ancestor may as well be Ghengis Khan, I thought, once again envisioning my great aunts and their moth ball auras. I knew my mother had herself hated these people as a child, and her newfound amnesia paired with a last minute sense of duty that my dad and I saw straight through. In fact, my dad was the only one who authentically got along with the Hansen clan, even if it was in a sociological capacity. He got a kick out of their fucked up foods and emotional shortcomings. (In an exemplary Christmas celebration, he was the sole dinner attendee who finished his plate of the Nordic fish jello known as *lutefisk*.) The Serb in him felt like he was at a zoo, and the father in him felt proud of his acerbic daughter idling there, so clearly the product of *his* genetic contributions.

As we turned onto the long dirt road that led to the Salvation Park cabins, the smell of sulfur and cheap fertilizer seeped into the car. *This is basically Chernobyl,* I considered, dramatically, though the plot of land did objectively look bereaved. The grounds hit my soul every year like a poorly maintained memorial, to what I didn’t know, but the marks of disaster, death, and disuse were omnipresent. Felled trees dotted the forest with moss-covered axes resting on their stumps. Juiced up on chemicals, the overactive earth swallowed acts of human intervention in every direction. I was unsettled by such futile landscaping efforts and quietly spoke to myself about this while my dad looked for a spot to park in the lot. By the time we pulled up it was close to full with practical, unflashy vehicles: Hyundai Sonatas, Kia Sorentos, and Ford Foci in particular huddled together like nervous, milquetoast children. The most conspicuous vehicle in the lot was a Honda Element, a model that possessed my dad with visions of a revolutionized family dynamic.

"Now that’s a goddamn car," he said, walking up to the comically geometric SUV. "What have I been saying about this car? I’m going to win the lottery next week and get one of these. Hook a pop-up tent camper to the back of that and you can go anywhere, we’d never have to stay in a motel again."

"When do we ever stay in motels?" I asked. Our family, like most midwestern stock, rarely flew and on multi-day road trips dad drove through the night.

"Well we don’t but with the Element we wouldn’t even have to think about it."

While he and I litigated a hypothetical future, my mother, eternally tardy, fiddled with her purse in the front seat, re-folding her hankie and making sure she had enough soy-free soy sauce and sunscreen for the day’s activities. Finally getting up to go, she murmured an esoteric comment about the weather and signaled for me to help carry her pot of gazpacho. There was about a 2% chance that any of her relatives would eat this. In bringing a dish she knew they wouldn’t enjoy, she was participating in some kind of experiment in confirmation bias. This was of course passive aggressive, her bread and butter, however, that style of conflict was something she had plainly inherited from the same people she was about to punk. I loved to unwind this mire of quiet revenge and subterfuge, it was so alien to my own mode of confrontation, yet so essential to Hansen family politics.

I eventually took the lead and started walking to the park’s mess hall to drop off the food and begin the merry-go-round of stop-and-chats. The first person I caught sight of was my mom’s cousin Gary, a terrible omen. Gary had a Boss Tweed belly that he chose to emphasize with atrociously tight, grey t-shirts and belts pulled so snug I thought he’d explode. He wore shoes and cargo shorts from wholesale grocery stores and saw it fit to pull my ponytail every time I saw him. On the one occasion I encountered him with my hair down he gathered it himself, thinking it best to stick to the routine he conceived as ours. I didn’t want to have any kind of routine with cousin Gary. To top it off his face was blighted by psoriasis, a condition needlessly spotlit in contrast by a jet black mustache—that thing could clean a grill.

"So-feeeeeee-a," he said torturously, reaching for my hair. I let him have a yank or two.

"Hello Gary," I said, looking around hoping my parents would catch up. "Where are the girls?"

"They’re by the pool already. Did you bring your swimsuit?"

*Wouldn’t you like to know, *I thought but just nodded. The girls in question were Gary’s three "daughters." A handful of years ago, he and his wife adopted them in Atlanta as full-blown teenagers. They brought the girls back to the Wisconsin Dells, a chlorinated shithole if there ever was one, and enrolled them in private schools that taught intelligent design. I thought the whole arrangement reeked to high heavens of Gary’s own "intelligent design." Whether it had to do with taxes or something more deviant I didn’t know, but even as a middle schooler I could tell there was something fishy about the adoption. The girls all jokingly referred to it as the "abduction" which made me laugh though it strikes me at the moment as deeply unfunny. When I saw the film *Dogtooth *years later in high school, images of Gary’s family unexpectedly visited my mind. As the adult daughters fooled around in their father’s pool on-screen, I thought of Gary’s poor girls swimming laps whenever I saw them, desperately simulating something like freedom. To this day domestic bodies of water connote little for me beyond familial perversion—sexual and financial.

"Honey that thing is heavy, keep moving," my mother interjected, timidly approaching her older cousin. Neither of my parents were big fans of Gary and for this I was grateful. They made brief business of saying "hello," courtesy of my dad’s fine-tuned ability to never completely stop walking. This trait drove me nuts as a kid, I thought it was rude. I know now that it’s totally brilliant and have adopted the technique for my own purposes.

The mess hall sat near the lake, unassuming in its dark brown paint and ranch-style layout. A pair of screen doors marked the entrance where comings and goings were made known by a springy wood slap. Bare-legged children with see-through skin circled the building playing sheltered-kid games. Jacks, cards, Yahtzee. My brain shutdown like a computer when these distant cousins tried to explain their contests. I was plenty social, but my interests were prematurely horny and unfit for such a lawful scene. I primarily liked to loiter with my friends until something bad happened. Before one of these homeschooled cranks could corner me, I thankfully spotted my third cousin Anna and her brother Al. They were from Chicago and half-Italian, meaning funny. Our dads and the three of us were the only people in sight without a cock and bull "sun poisoning" story.

"Hey sweetie!" Anna hollered, approaching me with her new boobs and vacation braids. She’d been wearing halter tops sans tits for ages and I was truly happy to see her filling one out finally. Anna was about to be a freshman, she had earned it.

"Someone normal!" I joked, gesturing with my head for her to follow me. "I have to drop off this retarded soup somewhere."

We broke off from my parents and went inside. Hobbling down three carpeted steps to the main room facing Chetek, I paused briefly to observe the cliques of stiff-limbed retirees, supposedly my elders, pace the buffet area, perusing the fare silently as though at an art gallery. Somnambulant nods betrayed their most vivid concerns in life: hunger and patience. I created a small space for my body to squeeze through and took a moment to scan the offering myself. By and large I already knew what I would be up against for the next eight hours, digestively speaking. Most grotesque was always the tray of hors d'oeuvres known to many as "Wisconsin sushi": a snickerdoodle-like roll-up of pickles, ham, and cream cheese. Fully deranged. I set down the gazpacho (shockingly the plastic table didn’t buckle), snagged a piece of *lefse* (simple and sublime), and went out the back door behind Anna (staring covetously at her emerald booty shorts the whole way).

Anna’s grandpa Ben, my grandmother’s sister’s husband, intercepted us en route to the pool, eager, I was sure, to show off his latest duck sculptures. This was his great passion. He photographed birds in the pond behind his cabin and carved out their likeness from walnut. The old guy even painted them, they were pretty good! To this day I have some respect for him.

"Don’t you two make the prettiest pair in Chetek," Bill beamed, ensnaring us both in an airless hug.

"Not much competition," I accurately observed, causing Ben to smirk as he stepped back.

"That’s not very nice Sofia!" he "scolded," visibly entertained by my little attitude.

"I guess not."

Hours later, a certain incoherence had picked up around Salvation Park. It was subtle at the start.

I first took note as I pulled myself out of the pool, my skin all pruned and light pink. I grabbed a towel off the ladder’s railing and became aware that nearly everyone on the deck had passed out. It had been a long day in the sun, but this was mighty uncharacteristic for a group of adults whose work ethic Max Weber would have gladly studied. With the exception of one or two light beers they were practically teetotalers.

I fetched my bag from the cement and went to sit down on the edge of the shallow-end with my book, I think it was some YA emo dreck about self-harm. I read for a little, maybe 30, 40 minutes, until I realized how starving I was. As though they could hear my need, the sleeping relatives began to stir. In the midst of them I saw Ben. Reclined on his pool chair with ham in his lap like some drunken Silenus, he was slowly and methodically eating the butts of cigars from an ashtray. He smiled at me, teeth covered in charcoal.

It was suddenly cold.

I badly wanted my dad, but he’d left the reunion early to catch my brother’s soccer game. In his absence disquiet set in, blunting my perception and making my ears ring. There seemed to be an hourglass inside me, depositing sand in the far reaches of my limbs, making them heavy. My brain pushed on my skull like a baby, trying either to get out or tell me something. I threw on a hoodie with some basketball shorts. I needed to find my mother.

I left the pool area and made my way towards the overnight cabins nestled at the western edge of the park. Jogging the wooded perimeter, I scanned the grounds as best I could. Noisy birds and frogs kept my agitation at a fixed buzz. Hearing a twig snap,  I stopped and zeroed in on my great aunt Dierdre: crouched like an animal and swaying. She was a rigid woman, a closeted dyke I’d been told. In her sixties, she had married some truck-driving oaf and the pair made a late life together in financial ruin, senselessly upgrading trailer homes every five years. Dierdre was always mean to me. To her I was as profligate as a movie star blonde just for wanting to take ballet. My mother said that she didn’t like little girls and had acted the same way towards her as a kid, and here before me was that same callous lady, reason dethroned, chucking herself about like Goody Proctor dancing with the devil. She usually wore western shirts shoved into stiff Wranglers and faded leather belts, really macho ones about four fingers wide with buckles bigger than my fists. Now she was ass naked with cream cheese on her face and a towel around her neck. She refused to register my voice. I knew I should give her a hand but my spirit that day was petty. Diedre was normally so impervious to pleasures of the mind, perhaps I was doing her a favor. I backed away from the forest, until I hit the open field.

It was green all over.

At least it felt that way. I swear I saw the color shed from the trees, filling the air like hookah smoke. The mossy rocks that flanked each cabin seemed to pulse rhythmically, ridding themselves of some prehistoric toxicity. The environment and the people in it were betraying each other, like some moralizing Edward Abbey story, I thought. Maybe it was just the weather, or maybe I was just hungry.

I continued to dart around and yell my mother’s name. Peeking inside an old stave church near the mess hall, I found my eldest great uncle instead. Walter had thrown himself off of his expensive wheelchair and was army crawling, dragging his distended legs along the chapel aisle by slow degrees. His proportions were horrifying. Bits of pickle stuck to the floor behind him in a ribbon of opalescent entrails.

"Walter?" I stammered. He looked insane. "Should I get some help?"

The fat man stared through me with vague, regardless eyes, blushing strangely like a schoolboy. His veins bulged and I pitied him. A Norwegian slug on Norwegian wood. With his pants sagging like the markets he watched so closely, I left him there, gesturing the Orthodox sign of the cross on my way out.

When I got to the mess hall’s main room I made my way over to the buffet table, thinking that I might grab more *lefse *to sustain my search. Not a drop of mother’s gazpacho had been consumed. Next to it, the tray of Wisconsin sushi was empty. Someone was approaching. I spun around with caution, terrified of which delirious relative I might face.

It was mother. Her linen shift was the only clean fabric in sight. A light above us flickered and she glared at me, taciturn as a tenured principal. Pointing to the vacant tray, her unnaturally skinny arm tensed with emphasis.

"Tell me right now did you eat any of that crap?"

"No ma’am," I assured her. Gun to my head I wouldn’t have touched that shit, she had trained me well. I was her orthorexic soldier.

"No one would be sick if they had eaten my gazpacho," she ruled, dropping her arm. Tension quelled for a beat and I grabbed her hand.

All around us, sweat-soaked Hansen’s shifted languidly between couches, melting down from their gassy illnesses. Tracks of peat streaked the linoleum and clustered near cracks and corners. We ran out the back door. It had begun to rain and Chetek’s foul-smelling waters were steadily closing in on the mess hall. On the makeshift shore I waved wildly for one of the rednecks out there to pick us up. My feet were doused in algae and mud and I was chilled to the bone but determined. I didn’t care that we looked like a couple *X-Files *victims, I had made up my mind: it was the health nuts’ turn to surrender.

A speedboat in the middle distance clocked us (more likely my mother, a very elegant woman) and beelined our way. I squinted to make out the boat’s name. Airbrushed on the side was the phrase "Any Given Sunday" in black-and-blue cursive lettering. It was in fact a Sunday. A sexy teenage boy wearing six or seven titanium bracelets and white-rimmed shades sat cockily at the helm. The shirtless captain, unmistakably the boy’s dad, let the engine tick over. Drifting with the waves, I could hear them yell over the motor’s rattle.

"You ladies want a lift?"

My mother drank three Coronas that day. They’re randomly gluten-free. I even got my baseball player and sat on that pitcher’s lap until my butt hurt. Between drinks he lit Roman candles into the dull, diseased sky. I felt framed in my young aloofness, fastened in place by the affection of strangers. Rendering their services to women, they too were pleased with themselves. The dad looked so sincere standing there in his puddle of seaweed and sand, I decided to call him Rick the Skipper. We were the only beings that day undiffused by hammy pinwheels and Chetek’s miasma of stink.

As these things go, Rick the Skipper got blasted. To the nth degree. Tequila, vodka, at least six Bud heavies. When the rain cleared up, he convinced mother and I to go tubing with an unadorned "are you chicken?" threat. Putting the boat in neutral, he stumbled over to the stern and reeled in the rope hand-over-hand until his tube was close enough for us to climb on. I stupidly asked for a couple life jackets and he looked at me like I was a census collector.

"Don’t have none of those around here," he promised.

I inched onto the bright red disc and my mother followed. We awkwardly arranged ourselves and gave Rick a nod. He threw the boat in drive. Chetek’s surface was as green as roulette table felt—our tube glided like a chip between hands. We looked at each other and burst out laughing. Her family was still rotting on the shore. We had almost forgotten. I watched her breathe freely for the first time since she was young, or so I imagined. She looked proud of me for some hardwired, maternal reason. We were happy.

Without warning, Rick the Skip throttled his boat to the right, swinging us with abandon towards the thick wake of another rig. I screamed. We hit the tangled crest and went flying.

In the air all went quiet. I cocked my head and watched my mother tumble like a little girl, suspended upside down in the mist, prisms tattooing her skin. I could see she was still laughing.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

***Title and epigraph from Lorine Niedecker’s "Paean to Place," written between 1968-1970 on Black Hawk Island in southern Wisconsin.**

And the place was water

I couldn't work for the Lonely Planet, I knew that much. For starters, the name made no sense to me and I didn't care to find a way in which it would. I supposed it was a reference, Jacques Cousteau or Ponce de Leon could have said *It's a lonely planet!* in a journal while writing at sea or something like that and then the phrase took off, but references are only useful if you get them right away. Looking up a reference is pathetic, like doing 23andMe—it's better to feel the answers in your bones. One of the clowns running for Branch Manager (BM) of the country recently got in trouble for her own DNA results, I mean, she never should have done the test, identity lives in the shadows of myth, why prick a finger unless you have diabetes or need to do blood brothers with a cousin? Don't get me wrong, I don't like this potential BM, she reminds me of my preschool teacher who accidentally murdered all of the baby chicks our class was raising by turning up the incubator too high (foolish, utterly), but I don't think our BMs should be running around proving weird shit and doing tests like that. I really don't.

&nbsp;

If I could find a job maybe my headache from yesterday would go away. The interview with Lonely Planet was pure shit, I kept bringing up this picture

&nbsp;

![image1](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/1.png)

&nbsp;

and repeating the male founder's name, over and over again, to his face: *Tony Wheeler, Tony Wheeler...Tony....Wheeler*. I couldn't stop, it was one of those tics, I mean when someone's got a really good name, I mean really good, like Tony Wheeler or

                Hella Jongerius
                               I. M. Pei
                                                Rem Koolhaas
                                                                Walter Gropius
                                                                                Eero Saarinen

&nbsp;

I just can't get enough. Wheeler was dressed like ass and visiting New York for the weekend from Melbourne. We were in the West Village having a latté on top of a gay bar that had become a monument, then a coffee shop, then a coffee shop monument. He had the waddle of someone who doesn't understand the concept of home and said "Melbourne" in the worst way possible, you wouldn't believe it, *MEHL-LA-BOW-NUH*, a place he described as *a livable wine city* before bullishly switching gears to blab about the process behind the Lonely Planet's first guide book, *Across Asia on the Cheap*, co-written in 1973 with his *stunning Irish wife*, Maureen. When he finally exited memory lane I looked him dead in the eye and said *No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity*. He thanked me for my time and declared the interview over. That quote's Cousteau. That one's definitely Cousteau.

&nbsp;

*It's for the best* I told my mom on the phone afterwards. She said I should treat interviews like sampler platters, *sometimes you need to order one to figure out what you don't want*, and I told her I understood. Tony Wheeler was the pig anus calamari—not for me, not this meal.

&nbsp;

It was February and brutal outside. I had to scooter home to Chinatown so I was pissed off. The sky was acting like the cement and I hated using labor-saving devices to travel, but I was still enslaved to a free trial with SCOOTLE; if they found out I was walking during the gratis period I could get arrested. There were some real cretinous fucks at SCOOTLE.

&nbsp;

Mounting my SCOOTLE, I also told myself the failure of the meeting was for the best, but I knew it wasn't. These days I was dead from the neck up everytime I entered an interview and it wasn't a joke anymore—I needed to land something soon.

---

The next morning I was woken up by a shrieking neighbor, wishing life was like this

&nbsp;

![image3](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/2.png)

&nbsp;

or this

&nbsp;

![image3](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/3.png)

&nbsp;

but it was definitely more like this

&nbsp;

![image4](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/4.png)

&nbsp;

How do people do it? Five of my six friends had girlfriends and each of them a job. I was jealous of them all but refused to admit it and instead texted stuff like *how's jail?* and *enjoy your pottery class lol* when they had date nights planned. The last time we all went out, I was asked to go home before midnight because I told Garrett's infernal girlfriend that natural wine was an illusion. She started going to great pains to explain "skin contact" and I had downed just enough poison to say *when's the last time you gave Garrett skin contact* and she understandably lost her shit. Garrett told me to go to bed; I SCOOTLE'd home. Garrett hasn't called me since.

&nbsp;

I sneezed three times, molted my sweaty sheets, and surfaced from my bedroom groggy and wan. My bathroom-kitchen smelled like wedding soup again and I remembered that I ran out of coffee a day earlier. Before I could get my coat on to go buy beans from BEAN, the new spot across the street, my phone rang and it was my mom whom I always answer on the first try. *You won't believe who I saw last night* she said. I asked who and she said *your old hockey buddy Kyle McCracken*, a dude the girls called "Stallion" in high school. The last time I saw him was about a year ago when he dumped himself right next to me at this dive bar where I grew up in Altoona. Kyle was a specimen back in the day, 6'6" and perennially tan from his family's timeshare in the Caymans. His build was busted now from boozing too much, but his face still held the vague charisma and good-cop authority of a vice-principal. Altoona's a small place, the kind of town with jerks that think the state of a lawn reflects the homeowner's spiritual integrity. And if your brothers play hockey you really ought to as well unless you want your dad to kill himself or something. Real predestination crap if you ask me. Anyways, you can't go anywhere in Altoona without running into everybody, so I think I ordered a Leinie's and some beer cheese soup from Tanner, the owner's son, and I remember getting out my book—this depressing memoir by Mary McLane. She spends about 200 pages just disemboweling Butte, Montana, which isn't so bad a place if you know what to look for. There was this one line that really stuck with me, still does, where McLane announces *I have in me the germ of every crime*. I loved that. It's a bit childish but I even wrote it underneath the bill of my Packers hat, and I wear that thing a lot. It smells like ass. For all the callous stuff I say about the goings on back home, our football team can play, I mean really play, and those boys are class acts especially when you consider the athletes we're dealing with across the border, not only west of us but to the south too. Anyways, Kyle had initiated with *Well isn't this a blast from the past* and I wasn't in the mood so I just went ahead and asked if he was still putting tobacco between his toes. You see the whole hockey team used to cut up their feet and put chew in their skates to keep a buzz going on the ice. *I'm actually working at Royal Credit Union, you dickhead* and he meant this to impress me on some level, I recall that really bummed me out, so I had to adjust my tempo. *That's cool, Kyle. Was just giving you shit* I cleared up and took a spoonful of my soup, which is basically just hot, salty Velveeta if you've never tried beer cheese soup before. He said *You would be reading at a bar* and I told him he would be drinking at a bar. *Well I'm off Tuesdays and it's dollar pitchers*. I remember launching into some kind of diatribe about the dignity of affordable living in Wisconsin compared to New York and Kyle started ignoring me, coolly, moving his attention to the front of the bar where a former gymnast had walked in. Her name was Allie Kristen and her knees were as hyperextended as the day we graduated. Fortunately, her pecs had finally turned to tits. I did not like the way gymnasts' joints bent the wrong way, especially in public, it made me sick. They all had these bone diseases with German names by the time they were fourteen or fifteen so you almost felt bad for them. It made my beer cheese soup lose it charm, it's one of four foods that get cold on you quick from my experience. Chai tea lattes, sautéed mushrooms, and scrambled eggs are the other three. I asked for the check, paid, peed, fist bumped Kyle, then Tanner, and left. Allie didn't fist bump me but blew a kiss without puckering, moving only her hand toward her mouth and away again like a *thank you* in sign language. I wasn't too mad because she never was one for major emotions, even her gymnastics coach, whom she loved and had sex with I think, had to slather Vaseline on her teeth to keep her smiling during meets. So that was the last time I saw old Kyle. *Lucky you mom* I replied, and told her I couldn't talk at the moment. *Okay sweetie pie, keep on keeping on...*

&nbsp;

It was past noon. My apartment hovered above a store called The Golden Shower that sold bathroom appliances and I had to walk through the place every time I left the house. The proprietor, Ken, wore a chubby face with an excellent sense of humor and always said stuff like *The king emerge!* when I walked past him in the mornings. I liked Ken, he knew a lot about porcelain and shower heads and that kind of toilet and sink thing. My dad never taught me any of that.

&nbsp;

Outside the wind was coming off the East River making it about another twenty degrees colder than the existing zero. I hustled over to BEAN and was pleased to see the news on, a rare pleasure as domestic usage of cable had been banned last August. Manhattanites were strong-armed into patronizing businesses to watch cable news; streaming services now only hosted one network with godawful pundits, "Lizz n' Justin," these totally zestless losers whom I privately referred to as "Jizz n Lustin" or, more abstractly, "Jizz Eruption." On the television, the current BM was discussing his most recent plan for New York, Make the West Village Sexy Again, which would force NYU to accept only the children of actors and models. The screen flashed

&nbsp;

"The West Village used to be sexy and now it's no fun. Not a single g-string in sight. No frills, no seduction, just BORING. Changing things after a perfect conversation with the reasonable NYU dean."

&nbsp;

and then

&nbsp;

**STUDENT INTERVIEW: SON OF BOBBY CANNAVALE MAKES STATEMENT**

"The area around NYU was expensive in a cool way when I was growing up, but now things have gotten expensive in a bad way, not hot at all. I can't explain it, but I want to see more of my parents' friends' kids and fewer randos when I go to the library to drink. Thank you to our BM for understanding this."

&nbsp;

Cannavale's son was incredibly handsome which made what he was saying kind of digestible. It probably would be nice to blackout and read *Heart of Darkness* with good-looking classmates. NYU was kind of shit anyways so I decided I didn't care. Let the celebrity children be. I picked up my beans and made a pact with myself as I crossed the street: only one game of Fortnite before applying to more jobs.

&nbsp;

Upstairs, I got situated with my PC and fresh-brewed joe. The apartment now smelled like wedding soup and coffee, which was discretely more disgusting than it smelled before. It didn't matter; no one came up here anymore except for myself and sometimes Ken to recommend movies. I hadn't slept with anyone in about a year, not since my ex left me for someone in Critical Chain Project Management at SCOOTLE. *Those are just words strung together* I had told her as she picked up the last of her things. *You're a monster* she responded, *enjoy your games*.

&nbsp;

I was settling into some building warm-ups when an email notification lit up the corner of my monitor: *New Message, Benji Hartman*. It took me a second to place the name. I repeated it out loud and ere long recalled it was the guy I had interviewed with weeks ago for the Editor-in-Chief position at the *Fearless Flyer*, Trader Joe's circular. I hadn't completely bombed that meeting, Benji was also from the Midwest so we were able to connect over the Minneapolis hardcore scene, but I never heard anything back. I paused my game and opened the message.

&nbsp;

*Dear \[redacted\],*

&nbsp;

*I'm so sorry for the delay. There was an outbreak of salmonella caused by our Organic Coleslaw Kit that did not leave us in a good position the last couple weeks. I don't want to lie to you, our first choice candidate, a real enterprising writer and strict thinker named Teddy, bailed. So you are our second choice. Don't focus on that. I think you could be great.*

&nbsp;

*Can you come by our LES location this afternoon around 3 pm to get the ball rolling? The Fearless Flyer needs a new image, can you be that person?*

&nbsp;

*As warm as can be,*

&nbsp;

*Benji*

&nbsp;

*Vision Consultant*

*The Fearless Flyer*

*Benjihartmanvibes.com*

&nbsp;

I was shocked, offended, confused, curious, and replied that I could be there at 3:00.

---

I rolled up to Trader's a few hours later, maddened by my journey's psychological toll. Every fifth ride with SCOOTLE, you were required to listen to a trip-long promotion for their pioneering ergonomic stance, throughout which the app strobed this soul-stirring image

&nbsp;

![image5](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/5.png)

&nbsp;

across your helmet's plastic shield. It was impossible to determine how many accidents this had generated, SCOOTLE is excellent at burying bodies. I alone had killed two pigeons because of that Quasimodo and her optical insurgencies. I dismounted and looked down at my shitty henley, its dizzying pattern of vaguely Navajo signifiers, and wondered how I chose such a thing, how I chose anything. I began to question my motives for taking this job at all. The *Fearless Flyer* was an elevated coupon book with recipe suggestions done in the tradition of home-ec instruction, the core principles being ease, efficiency, and grace. A year ago I was writing shit I actually knew about for SHAWKER and talking about marriage with my ex. SHAWKER got absorbed by the BM's son's friend's uncle and his media conglomerate last April and my ex could be dead for all I knew. I had to keep my cynicism at bay, I didn't want to pull another Wheeler. No Cousteau quotes, no bullshit. I zipped up my fly and entered the store.

&nbsp;

When I got off the elevator, I quickly realized I didn't know exactly where I was going. Benji and I had met our first time at BEAN. I crept up to the customer service zone, manned by three Hawaiian shirted helpers, and asked where the *Fearless Flyer* office was. *We SO get your confusion* the tallest of the three said, *It's in the basement*. I joked that they looked ready for a Jimmy Buffet concert, but the jab was somehow too adjacent. *How do you figure!* the youngest employee practically screamed, her septum piercing doing a complete 360°. These people were nuts. How could you wear a Hawaiian shirt every day yet not know about Parrotheads? The tall helper insisted on accompanying me downstairs and I was too out of my element to argue.

&nbsp;

The *Fearless Flyer* headquarters turned out to be one windowless room reminiscent of the offices assigned to nascent, but obviously sinister investigations on TV shows about the FBI. Three desks were arranged in the center of the room, a hackneyed rendition of the coworking pod, and one dumpster loomed in the far corner. Benji got up from his desk and strode toward me, while the other staff member, presumably one of my writers-to-be, remained pecking at her computer. *How do you do good sir!* Benji asked, approaching me hand outstretched, raising his eyebrows up-and-down in a remarkably imprecise impersonation of some sort of old-timey actor. His hair was piled on top of his head, gauges poking out on either side, and I thought to myself that he was a pretty handsome guy despite the insane vibe. He apologized for the offices and we flipped through the basic geography of the space, the expectations of the position, and the Trader Joe's way of life. Having done editorial work in the past, there was little need to dig too deep into logistics, and so we spent most of the afternoon talking about my new ideas for the publication. He seemed open to shaking up the branded content and recipes with more essayistic food writing, and I was relieved to find that he was someone who could be persuaded easily by a thoughtful proposal. Less settling was the third employee who hadn't yet been introduced. She hardly moved and used her long, black hair to create a parasol around herself and her screen, furtive and cooky, Allison Reynolds style.

&nbsp;

Apart from her, the most urgent snag was Benji's impending absence the following day. *You have literally one day to get the February issue done* he admitted anxiously. He was leaving early that very evening for a silent day retreat in Montreal. *I need this, I trust you* he lobbed rather prematurely. It was true, I could handle the administrative side, each issue of the flyer used the same template, and all of the promotional pieces had already been written and uploaded. I had two slots to fill, but Benji wouldn't be available for final approval. The issue had to be sent to print by the end of the next day, and the words would be on flyers, ready for distribution, the morning after that. *Kind of thrilling, no?* I obligatorily agreed that a tight turnaround could be a rush, and Benji beamed with performative faith. *I'm off!* On his way out, he turned momentarily, walking backwards, flushed with the shame of someone with something better to do. *I never introduced you to Megan! Megan, come! You'll have to do it yourselves, I'm sorry* he feigned and got on the elevator. *And don't forget your Hawaiian shirt!*

&nbsp;

Megan rose from her desk slowly, exaggeratedly, and I saw that I'd misjudged her look entirely. Under the skirt that hid her bottom half when seated, were comely, excessively pale legs atop a pair of metallic Pleasers. She wore a rose-patterned button down, a daring interrogation of the Hawaiin shirt genre, with a tightly pulled, black bustier peeking out beneath. Her every feature was caricatured; I felt my gaze darting between them, unable to choose the centerpiece. Drawing closer she rolled her eyes, offering a French manicure to...shake? Kiss? I was hurtling toward a weird remark when she saved the day. *Benji is such a tool sometimes. I'm Megan*. I gathered my boyish thoughts, my braindead impulses, and strung together a pleasant version of myself to submit.

&nbsp;

It was nearly time to go. Before we parted ways, Megan told me she was recently struck by a sign on a telephone pole in her neighborhood, showing me this photograph of it

&nbsp;

![image6](/assets/images/issues/issue1/posts/SofiaMajstorovic-Fearless/6.png)

&nbsp;

to which I responded *That's an interesting theory*. I asked her what she made of it. *It's not a theory* she replied, *You should trust me*.

&nbsp;

I told her I did and that I'd see her tomorrow.

---

The next morning, I flew around the house trying to piece together something reasonable to wear. It was useless. I concluded that I owned nothing, a sentiment I remember my ex repeating every weekend before we attended dinners and parties. Luckily, I could focus on the bottom-half, as my Hawaiian shirt had arrived that morning courtesy of SCOOTLE's overnight delivery service. The teen that fulfilled my order was yawning when I opened my door. I handed him a five-dollar bill and he told me it was against SCOOTLE contract to collect tips. *So wack* I offered in its place.

&nbsp;

Descending into the *Fearless Flyer* basement, I mulled over Benji's truancy, wondered why he saw me fit to hold the reality of this world in my hands. The day had invented a plan for me but I was not yet willing to accept it. I felt acutely then that a study had been designed for me to blindly enter as variable: as capuchin, prisoner. It was better to be aware of the test than not, I concluded, accumulating some semblance of oversight by way of paranoia. Elevators had this effect on me. I got off and walked to my desk.

&nbsp;

Megan had beat me to the office. Sitting in a flattering ankle cross, she seemed to be enjoying herself too much on the computer to be working on anything *Flyer*-related. She let out a big snort, took a swig of coffee, and I asked what was so funny—a stupid in. *Okay narc* she joked, thumbing a tray of Trader Joe's milk rolls with newly painted nails, now Ferrari red and filed into points. The rolls looked like yellow-fever victims spoiling under the prods of a sadistic new nurse. I swatted her hand to stop. *Don't play with your food*. The familiarity I intuited in her name-calling was making me bold. She pulled back her hand. *Bossy* she said with a wink, throwing her hair into a loose bun. I had read in some pick-up artist book, a joke, sort of, that women fiddling with their hair signaled emotional vulnerability. Following Tucker Max, it was time to neg Megan, to criticize her strategically, but something about her cracked this model. Her forceful expressions, amplified by cartoonish dermal fillers, suggested a will too pliant to insult into affection. I wasn't good at it anyways.

&nbsp;

By early afternoon I had finished writing the first of the two submissions for the February *Flyer*. I landed on an op-ed about Valentine's Day and its austere cuisine, the nearly punitive nature of its non-indulgent indulgence. I argued that candy hearts were at best tortured Altoids, and chocolate boxes a dangerous guessing game of gooey entrails. I wondered on the page who could possibly be enjoying these unpalatable candies, and proposed that the holiday's culinary tradition undergo a radical transformation. I asked Megan to proofread it.

&nbsp;

*I like it* she said after a round of line edits. I could tell she was holding something back. *No seriously, it's nice* she doubled down. I pressed for an honest reaction. *It's just* she hesitated, *don't you think people are sick of reading about food?* I agreed, but didn't think Trader Joe's *Fearless Flyer* was necessarily the right content platform to disrupt. *Think about it,* she continued, *the* Flyer *is one of the last physical publications in New York, sure it's lame as shit, but I, I don't know. I have so many ideas for this stupid place*. I wanted to hear about them; I suggested lunch. *Sure* she agreed, *there's an Italian spot down the block*. I followed her lead out the basement's emergency exit and into the bright, bitter day.

&nbsp;

We took a three hour lunch. It was completely inappropriate. Megan spoke fluent Italian, a language she taught herself in order to read *The Name of the Rose* in its native tongue, and ordered three main courses for us to share: gnocchi with clams, spinach and ricotta ravioli, and a caper capellini. She believed deeply in the intertextuality of all words and references and stories, and said so crazily between spoonfuls of sauce and sips of soda. I told her I understood, had also read Eco and Borges, that I loved those guys, but she said *reading them in English is pointless*, so I hung back, yielding to her vocalized reverie. She told me about her poetry, a practice she had gotten into after experiencing a certain psychic death, I guess, from concurrently seeing so many wealthy men—guys who happily bankrolled her in return for what sounded like very little effort. She had worked part-time at the *Flyer* throughout to maintain a writing credit on her resumé. Her big idea for Trader Joe's was a kink section called Trader Hoes. *It could be massive* she insisted, *look at all the freaks in line at that place on any given afternoon, look at the fucking staff*. I couldn't argue. There was definitely a squirrelly aura to the Trader Joe's consumer. Maybe she was onto something. I asked if she'd show me some poems and she got out her bedazzled iPhone, pulled up the Notes app, nails clicking appealingly, and handed it over. I scrolled through a few pieces, lurid but undeniably eye-catching, and told her she should email me the one called *THIGHBROW*. I didn't want to fawn. *It has a strong motor* I cleared up, immediately embarrassed by my long gone knack for workshop language. *Oh no shit! I recently performed that one at a stripclub in Midtown.* She took her phone back and sent the poem to my work email.

&nbsp;

It was dark out when we left the restaurant. Stopped at a light and looking at traffic, I felt the night sky to be awake in its own way, lines of cars seeming to dodge its advance rather than the other, usual way around. I told Megan that I never felt the Butterfly Effect anywhere so acutely as in New York, where the mistake of a person miles away could haunt the trajectory of your entire day. *Oh sick, you smoke weed?* she joked in response.

&nbsp;

Arriving back at our pods, I told her I appreciated her edits and that she could take off an hour early if she'd like, I could handle the final slot on my own. She thanked me. *I'm off on Fridays, let me know how things go with Benji tomorrow*. She handed me her number and asked what neighborhood I lived in. I told her my apartment was across from BEAN in Chinatown. *Cool* she virtually breathed, *Hope to see you around this weekend*. I contained my delirium.

&nbsp;

Beating with adrenaline, a pressure I noticed in that moment had become alien to my soft, shitty body, I pulled up the *Fearless Flyer* template, uploaded Megan's poem and pressed send. I repeated to myself: *You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star*. Nietzche said that I think.

---

Friday morning I walked into the store, not quite triumphant but not altogether humiliated: a small feat for me on any given day. Through the windows outside, I had seen a crowd gathering by the registers. It felt good to know that the commotion might have something to do with me.

&nbsp;

*May I read what our good man, he who has just graced us ten minutes late with his presence, thought might be appropriate to put in the *Fearless Flyer*? No no, not *Playboy*, not *Maxim*, but our *Fearless Flyer*: a family publication, a wholesome publication* Benji roared from the helm of his ship, if you will, surrounded by the unswerving crew and dependable mates that constituted the store's colorful staff, gesticulating wildly, summoning the strength he'd need to share Megan's poem aloud. He opened up the paper with unthinkable gravitas, as though leading chautauqua, and drew a deep breath: *Thighbrow*...

&nbsp;

**THIGHBROW**
Megan Michelle Mitchell

&nbsp;

Burrow in them, curl not, your brow and mine
Tangle me up again
  	                              "get me a comb caddy"

&nbsp;

I don't want to grow up
                                 I just want your $$$ daddy

&nbsp;

Keep it real with me, Chief, are you Sad
Can we, I mean me, be here
	        This apartment makes me
	        Want to die
	        Who did this?
  	                                     Where's your Miss?

&nbsp;

I don't want money I want ________
		                 I lied

&nbsp;

Emulsify the fillers, don't mind just bill ‘em
Intermix and coalesce, dot dot, kiss kiss

&nbsp;

Squirt
	        Water	Pee?                   Or jizz
:(

&nbsp;

Hello, I'm dancing up here
Ballet flats weren't in the cards
		               SCORPIO ARIES SAG
	            Where's your fuckin BADGE

&nbsp;

Always kiss me goodnight

&nbsp;

You get Sunday Scaries
	       I get Friday Fright

&nbsp;

I thought it was pretty good. A couple people clapped. I looked up at Benji, shrugged my shoulders, and started to laugh. His glare said *I trusted you*, but his audience-driven charade necessitated a bloated final scene, a "To be, or not to be." Taking center stage once again, Benji activated every inch of his figure to mime zipping his lips and throwing away the key, followed by two rounds of an umpire's "HE'S SAFE" gesture, landing finally, brilliantly, with a stiff arm and trembling pointer finger directed at the store's sliding glass doors.

&nbsp;

I was too ambivalent to retaliate and waited until I got outside to toss my Hawaiian shirt in a garbage can.

---

It was fittingly my final day of the free trial with SCOOTLE. As I parked across from my house, my phone prompted me to leave a mandatory review. *SCOOTLE is freedom* I wrote, *Four Stars and Feeling Nubile*.

&nbsp;

Feeling somewhat dissociated rather, I walked towards home replaying Benji's expansive soliloquy. As I got closer, I saw a tall girl vaping outside. Dressed in a leather skirt and blood red corset, I couldn't believe it: it was Megan. Eyes twinkling knowingly, she had seen the issue. It was all for Megan. She apologized for her pussing lip injection and I said she was perfect. I grabbed her hand, led her through The Golden Shower, and up to my apartment. For the first time in years I felt like myself, like someone with a living sex drive, with untaught predilections and needs. A rare midwinter sun shot through cracks in my walls making Megan look like a deity and I didn't even apologize for my mattress on the ground. As I eased her onto my bed she looked up at me with total candor, an unabashed and earnest abandon like that of an orthodontist praising you for completing simple instructions. *You were fearless for publishing me* she whispered, *my fearless flyer*.

&nbsp;

*We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking* I quoted with a smirk as I entered her. She smiled: *I love Cousteau*.

Fearless

Today I poke around your throat
and laugh at jokes you steal.
At night I search for the remote,

amid the couch, our home’s trench coat,
I pat and scrounge, reveal.
Today I choke around your throat

a scarf I found inside my tote.
(Bones, they squeak, then heal.)
At night I search and feel remote,

the more I know, the less I vote
and turn my steering wheel.
Today you spoke around my throat,

hid words I had, hid my gloat.
(Our pillows kiss and squeal.)
That fight and search for our remote

may have sucked my last grace note.
Cross-leggéd, lost checks, loose meals,
some okay coke inside my throat,
*It’s white!* (I lurch for our remote.)

House Poor

Author_SmallLeftAlignedTitle

###### Prime Rib

&nbsp;

There is room in your stomach

again so you've come to me,

head blooming with greasy ideas

of meat and how it should look.

Of course I know your preferences 

before you do, just as I know your

name before you register mine

(why must I continue to have one?).

This gridlock of tables is my 

little rat maze and you fancy

yourself a scientist of the first degree.

A charred letter of loin could save

this Thursday, you're convinced,

and I'm not unconvinced this is the case

for you, Large Man with Family. A dire

thing, these matters of big foods

and Thursdays. Still, I take myself with 

a grain of salt, the same sort rimming 

your margarita like gutters after

a snowstorm. It rarely snows here.

When it does, your Thursday has 

something in common with mine and

finally there is something to talk about.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### Table 4

&nbsp;

“Yucca fries side of chipotle aioli, table 4.”

&nbsp;

Vinny hands off the plastic bowl to Curtis, who moves it down the line to me. I look at the potato knock-off, inured to its charms. The food here has taken on object status, its smells no longer commune with my autonomic reactions. The bitchy white light of the kitchen furthers such feelings of sterility, the cooks pace in it like nurses. Apron-clad, well-trained. I leave their operating room and re-enter the clubby atmosphere of our bar. A real shock to the system. Every restaurant has to be a party, no one dines in peace anymore. Even breakfast hours have been infiltrated by hungover disc-jockeys and their milk crates of archival treasures. Quiet mornings destroyed. Plates of savory crepes shifting and swelling to the bass, as if to acknowledge the pudgy dancing boys of night to come. Fleetwood Mac has become mimosa music.

&nbsp;

Table 4 is occupied by a wholeheartedly ambivalent duo, expensively done up but hunched over. Undoing the work. I often want to tell pretty young girls to sit up straight. Quasimodo TikTok necks, incapable of responding to me on the first or even second try. Their eventual attention makes me feel even worse, as though I'm distracting them from the real work of research elapsing on their phones. I do not wax poetic on the dignity of small-batch anything, but I can tell you how many plates you and your friend need, and I believe that making eye contact with strangers makes your day more specific. A new type of invisibility emerges, watching them have their food questions answered from reviews when I am standing inches away, full of insight, no matter how insipid. 

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

###### Girl Smooth

&nbsp;

It's me against the music. I know I suffer but I don't know why. Taking on the zone, I'm almost there. Lean in for a kiss with a girl-smooth face. It makes a difference. You say you want to lose control. Step outside, here comes the showdown. Take a little piece of my mouth and spit it out. For instance, we could dance all night. Comparing feet, crunk with Britney. Check this out. How have I loved this room every morning? Daylight. Boom-boom. Lick a pencil behind my back. Get on the floor and shake that ass. Heads bob and lean, busted goggles. Syncopated, no need to even touch me. That's also a sin. Yeah. Doubled over with clownish glory. Mennonite purse. Slit the plastic and stir. Don't know where I've lived for a long time. Blow. Breathe. Take over. 

&nbsp;

He's enough, the Israeli DJ. Thank him. No service, short bartender. Call some friends, it's pretty good. Turn where cars are. Bingo. New black lace, internet hair. It's all around, I can feel it now. Move forward. Machinated, let's go. You sort of walk in heels. Expensive pole lessons paying off. Propped cell, little traffic cone. The collected stories of your weekend. Look at her. Practiced sex drive, outrageous. Lost the beat. Didn't have it in the first place. Nobody's going to get the chance to look down on me. Bring the heat, dumb industry. Problems in the corner of course. Underage wishes. It's all forgiven, even fast fashion. I could go places but I won't. Self-care composites, hands clapping in emoji. I can't argue with small offenses. Grab my waist for real, moldy and irrelevant smile. Fade-in. The club is full of butt, you could still come. Political bouncers, reasonable giants. Scene hasn't collapsed yet. Bathroom line, tactful. Go ahead, cut. Compliments from a stall. I sort of do everything. Brave girl. Toilet girl. Sip a sip in that baby tee. Emerge. Last song of the night. No requests, capsule collection. Back-off Grindr grimace. It's all good. Lost your lip gloss but found a bag. Circle of life. Close out the devil's cup, patience for a weak pen. Fucked the signature, no cash ever. Stole your free time, tidal fortune. I can drive the whole group nowhere. Wasted tension, more dreadful laughter. Sometimes I just like to have it all. 

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