Read Time: 02:54
(Excerpt From: “The Privilege of Cowardice,” Essays by White Girls)
I grabbed my Balenciaga slipper and smashed that fucker, just as it was eating a still-very-much-alive caterpillar, I smashed it straight. It was one of those “killer bees” everyone had been posting about in the neighborhood. Does one dead killer bee matter? A queen can lay about 1,500 eggs per day. Still, one dead, left out lifeless on the pavement like that, staves off the others.
I have never been quick to act in defense of myself or other humans when they are being eaten alive (also right in front of me) by other pre-programmed killers like culture-sellers, bosses, or abusive spouses. I know this about myself, have been living with this disappointment about myself for a long time, that I still wear my Balenciaga slippers out into the yard.
***
(Excerpt from: “Eulogy for Another -Ism,” Coping with Suffixes)
There was a man who was a friend of everyone in everytown, across the anywhere nation. The man was friends with everyone in everytown because he was the boozy loveliest of joy who travelled far and wide, spreading his smiles and joy and booze. If he had been a cartoon, he’d have travelled with a little bird that was his best friend and minder.
One day the man who was a friend of everyone up and died, he was quite young with a family, and everyone across the anywhere nation was sad. They posted drunken pictures of the friend of everyone, and they recalled half-remembered events and those who wanted most to forget them then had to remember them.
And now his friends pay homage to his life by chugging the beers and downing the shots and showing the pics, but it’s never just a pour out, never that, because man, I mean what a waste.
***
(Excerpt From: Pablo)
Pablo worked along the coast one summer selling ice cream outside the place with the red and white awning where the rich people and the ex-pats went. Many of them he knew, and the first month they saw Pablo selling ice cream, they thought it was la plaisanterie. The second month they thought it was la nostalgie, and the third month brought hushed discussion about his state of depression.
Pablo would sell his ice cream only to children. And he’d take a pencil or crayon (whatever was in his apron, really) and after three or four passes of the pen on a napkin, he’d hand the child an ice cream cone, wrapped in a delightful and artful napkin-doodle.
Pablo was depressed. But the patterns in the sloped cobblestone street, the sun’s and shadows summertime shifts, and all the beautiful, self-important people seeing themselves as important–these things were fine.
One night, Pablo left drunk from the place with the red and white awning, and when he punched the door open into the summer night, the heat punched back. His face clammed sticky with heat as soon as he reached the curb, and he pulled a cigarette from his pants pocket.
Looking down, he saw one of his soiled napkins in the gutter, on it a crumpled, dirty doodle, lifeless and useless, worse, just litter. He thought of his friend that committed suicide. He thought of his art. He thought of squares. He thought of a prostitute. He thought of prisms. He thought of all these things as one thing. He squinted at the doodle in the gutter and said, “Well that’s where that belongs.”
And then he lit his cigarette, and pitched his sweaty face upward toward the blue night sky.
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