It was that she couldn’t scrub it off. The flecks. The rest of her skin called off, collecting in pumice stone holes, but the flecks on her skin: they just.
Looked like lighter skin, or ash, or deviations from her eye sight, the occurrence that happens when you look at a clear blue sky and ethereal hexagons hitch lines across your POV. A snowy moth in your shoeshine. A visual itch, if you can imagine it. Three out of four friends find that metaphor confusing but weirdly resonant. The fourth now uses the phrase on a regular basis. A baseline level disorder that buzzards loosely gnaw, the maggots not yet, the finely fungal hair cropping not yet, the precursors to panic not even yet coagulant. Buzzards eat maggots in the carrion and the maggots, in turn, desire to be eaten, though they don’t desire as much as exist in the environments where they are eaten and return, generation by generation, to the same carcass. Panic (or the precursors to panic, such as longing looks at health supplements, repetitious Googling of knowledge one already knows) as one unformed aspect of the omni-soup singularity before the Big Bang. But one should take bites at a problem, when you have the consciousness for it.
Chemical exfoliants: yes.
Chemical exfoliants with the microplastic beads: yes.
Chemical exfoliant with the microplastic beads that are advertised as degradable: eventually.
Sunscreen: yes.
Korean sunscreen: how do you undo the years? How do we un-degrade the skin that’s been degraded?
Now: pumice stones. The physical treatment after the chemical ones, which, in hindsight, was a misstep. An old woman on the box of 12, gleaming, laughing at a joke that is not all that funny but is glad to hear from whoever it was that said it. Her feet are already fine–as fine as old people feet can be, which are often atrocious. The nanas hunched over by double-digit angles, feet squishing like soft potatoes. Not boiled or baked but just raw. And soft. Lebron James’s feet before you eat a fruitcake. Bloated, mottled, puffy, quasi-diabetic. Besides: not about feet. This isn’t about the feet. The specks are on the right ankle and, concerningly, the left thigh. Two different places means it’s all over. Not all over, as in. All over as in, covering. Specks at the density of flour coated on a mixing bowl four feet away from a kneading station. You could barely even call it dusted on. Mottled. It took Lori Vanderjagt two months to find the word “mottled”, Lori short for Lorikeet, by the way. Not vitiligo, by the way. Skin cancer makes it darker, not lighter, by the way.
Something like Birt-Hogg-Dube, but the dots aren’t raised. Papules appearing in your 20s and 30s, the literature says. On the face and neck, moguls or boggish hills on the Scottish moorlands. Lori, 26, high-breasted, plum cheeks. She hasn’t even done LSD yet, she’s so naive. She has so much yet to stunt on. There’s no texture to the specks at all. Papules, the literature calls them. Favre-Racouchot not even in consideration, but Lori can’t stop looking at the pictures of old sunbaked faces and their blacked eye holes. Darker than bruises.
Things are more often what they aren’t than what they are, he said.
What?
Things we hold dear and meaningful: it’s not that they are but that they now aren’t. Or they aren’t what they are supposed to be. Or that they once were but now have no value assigned to them. Hauntology, he said, but mispronounced it.
This was the first date of the first man she had ever dated. He was broke and asked for a place that could land him two or three solid beers for under $15. In one of his pictures, he held up an iced coffee to his face and pursed his lips, charging his eyes to launch some kind of projectile. In reality, under improvised city candles (doorbells that surveil with annular LED glow, the battery levels of delivery bikes, the retroreflectors of vehicles that redistribute all the above) he glared, half-awake, addled out of his bottom-broken couch with minutes to spare. His pants' crease withholding orange crumbs, collar flared on one side and not the other, too much lip balm making a pasty smile. Two months since they first expressed interest in one another, which was postponed until the mottling situation could be cleared up. Which it hasn’t, but you can’t dangle a worm over water forever, as they say. A hooked worm lives only for the catch, they also say, the catch which kills the worm which kills the fish which fills you up fried boiled grilled delish but somehow can’t be said to desire its place in the belly of the fish like the maggots in the flesh of the birds of the deserts dry where the thermals rise but the worms like the maggots are like women and faggots all the same in place and time over and over and over again in lines and hooks across piers and docks, in the same places and the same times fated by choice but never, can it be said, to have desired.
I once knew a guy named Luke Worm. W-o-r-m, Lori said, like a talking children’s book. He tried to go by Lucas after grade 8. Didn’t work.
Dissonant notes from the bar’s guitar player. It would sound good if he meant it. The guitarist’s eyes were closed, his words slurred; he can only play half the chords. Spit, on the microphone. In ten minutes time, he will complain that two drink tickets aren't enough. The song is a cover of a song about a man who never gets lonesome, who lists all the situations in which he isn’t lonesome except for one that does, but the singer doesn’t remember the bob to the wheel, and after plucking anoutofbeat interlude, he warbles new lyrics in invented English.
His cock was the same size as hers if her cock was a little bit longer. The potentiality of cock, she said, sizing each other from tip to base, base to tip. The woman giggled.
And the man said: the kineticism.
pause
of cock.
Oh, Lori moaned, but in a controlled way. Ohh. Ohhhhhh. She moaned in a way that sounded like she was understanding a problem she’d been wrapping her head around for years.
–———————————————————————————————————-
It’s the next day, or something like it. Lori forgets about the mottles for two days. The remnants of yesterday's humidity linger beneath the bathroom sink.
Day 1: Cloudy, 50% chance of rain. H: 75, L: 60
Day 2: Miserable, 98% chance of rain. SPC marginal risk of severe thunderstorms. High shear, low instability, Main hazards: damaging wind, 5% within any 25 mile radius. H: 72, L:69
–———————————————————————————————————-
The stones in a pile, the box used up and the grandma with the scrubbed feet, with the tenuous smile, still in the nook between the recycle bin and the hot zone of the refrigerator's heat exchanger. Wilting. The stones in a pile of 4-3- 2, a stable pyramid with no zenithal caprock which makes the pile more like a ziggurat or a low-polygon Mississippian burial mound or Chichen Itza than a Khufu or Alexandrian lighthouse. The stones are something that need to be dealt, as in disposed, with but Lori feels bad for them. They have a friendly shape: a “bouba” not a “kiki”, though the sound Lori would make to call the loosely tri-lobal figure is: “Chooboo”. The stones also contain her, her dead skin, considered waste but there’s something alive about Lori’s detritus that means she cannot dispose of the pumice mound. A chickling Lori owned a blue duck with a slot in its skull, plastic, holding pennies and nickels and two Euros cast off by her parents, off color from UV bleaching, partially melted from the lensing effect of the cups of water she kept along her windowsill, such that the duck existed as a memory longer than it existed as a duck, ruling over the windowsill amongst other animals that couldn’t be called animals anymore. Shaped substance, raw formed polyethylene, never thrown out until Lori moved away.
Chicken Itza with locations in Temecula, Santa Clarita, Indio, and Arcadia. Plans for more throughout the greater Southern California region, a region that no one calls “the greater Southern California''. Owner a white gay named gringo Sam, who no one called gringo Sam but himself, self-effacingly, paranoidly, with a chuckle that didn’t fill up space. Who, somehow, via the manipulation of his gait into a step that didn’t step but squelched his rubber sole onto the terracotta floor as he walked, could avoid echoing his steps in an empty room. Lori describing the restaurant, gringo Sam (with scare quotes) to a skeptical date named Prov, short for Providence. No. Wait. Not Prov. Too much like improv, the date said. A sound alike, but not a homophone. Provo, Lori said, is another misinterpretation. Thank you, Providence said, for another thing I don’t like. No follow up comment, meaning she’s actually mad. Providence’s eyebrows, like gringo Sam, the hue of glacial silt. Black, but not ivory. Mottled more often used to describe darker spots on a lighter background, as there’s little in ancient modern England that would make a darker background more light. Dirt flecks on a white suit. Snowflakes, but non-removable. Bleach stains, as one example. “Providence or Provo '' in the crooned half-English of Elizabeth Fraser. Providence, Lori almost said aloud: you look like a quill in an ink pot, left to soak to continue the letter of a wigged aristocrat. You have, almost, this latent cantilever keeping your whole figure poised. But Lori holds. Whatever happened to just looking at women and expecting the light to pour out of them?
Wait, so how did you know gringo Sam? Providence asked. Oh, Lori said, he’s my dad. Sorry, mi padre. He’s gay so he’s now mi papi. But I think that’s sexual, yeah? Papi, Providence said, curling her tongue. Yes? Lori responded.
The guitarist is back at the bar and, again, drunk. A deal was struck: three drink tickets. ONLY VALID WITH TIP. This will come back to bite him, as in two hours, he will fish in his pocket and pull out two crumpled Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Not rare enough to be a tip, the manager says. His eyes are sadder tonight, not angry, not pitiful. Drunks often have eyes they can barely keep open, guts they can barely control. No one calls them sots anymore or wine-os. Lori hears a name, MJ, as she and Providence get up.
Squelch-clack (on the sidewalk).
Squlech-thud (Lori’s apartment on the 3rd floor).
Squelch-hophophop (in the apartment hallway, Providence on one foot, getting the boot off).
A business card taped on Lori’s door, printed in all black. You wouldn’t believe how small fonts can be.
On the front:
We leave corners of our innards to our friends and occasionally, to lovers. To hold the abdomen in place; it’s not as intimate as we once feared it would be. Sometimes, we entrust the holding of the abdominal organs to a stranger, and they get their hands inside. Alchemic hands, creating life within. We worship the hands blessed.
On the back:
We can’t foresee the dirt underneath their fingernails. It’s obvious, in memory, in the buildup. At the end of a movie, you remember the details that foretold the end. The way she never asked questions, or if she asked questions, the way she asked them to the air. You will tell me that you wanted it like that. Beheading a chicken with a dull ax is the most intimate slaughter, you will tell me. You were tired of it clean and tired of your adultish ties. Tired of verbal communication. Tired of cul-de-sacs. Tired of being friends afterwards. And you, who understood the contract but never lived by its words, you who believed there are more than just feelings, you, who let your nerves become honest. And they leave, walking down the stairs like bloodhounds on the true path. Call me; touch the linen; be reminded that the natural state of a body is to be unclothed.
XXX-XXX-XXXX
Providence is sweet, and more interesting than the guy who doesn’t know how to pronounce hauntology. Her spit tastes like water, like pure spring water, except it’s warm and not a self-sustaining hydrological feature. More like a Gatorade cooler without the ice. Without the button that expunges the contents. Without the beat-up impacted plastic that cuts the thin back-of-the-palm skin by surprise. Goes without saying. It’s a medical condition, unfortunately, a serious one at that. Lori learns there’s a significant amount of digestion that happens within the mouth, mostly with carbohydrates–place a saltine cracker on your mouth and find out–so her food pyramid is more of a food octahedron.
Lorikeet and Providence do have sex, once the spit thing is explained. It’s neither as fun nor as thrilling as either woman expected it would be. Hips like honey-wine; lips like lidocaine. Two long candles burn on Lori’s dresser–one gives off puffs of smoke while the other struggles to stay lit.
–———————————————————————————————————-
The dream is of draining a cat of its blood, which is worse than just killing one because not only is she killing the cat but she is actively doing something called “watching the life leave his body”, which if you must kill a cat (not listing reasons here), you would want to have that happen both quickly and with the least amount of personal culpability (“least blood on hands” if we, regretfully, wish to remind ourselves of the situation), yes, one (meaning you) would want the least amount of blame and the least amount of pain and you would not pretend like this cat is your friend as Lori pets him, a grey and white cat with a pink nose and a face that eats kibble with crumbs left hanging on his chin, and Lori let his nose brush against her fingers which is an act of trust or of possession on the cat’s part, the cat’s name is Pip, short for pipsqueak, his cheek along her fingernails, his eyes closed into slits as she tied his legs into increasingly tight knots which Lori knows because she trained for this but the cat didn’t, the cat didn’t know a thing and this segment would be slow, the segment where Lori takes the trapped feline and, from the rope that dangles around pip’s hind paws, secures him upside down, taking the space of two or three blinks, as much as you can feel time in sleep, because evil takes a long time to grow; that’s what you don’t know from the inside; it’s a liquid that never seems to pour out of the bottle; it’s licking a stuck piece of gum below a school room desk waiting for it to soften enough to land with a thud at the destructive center of your appetite, but it’s short for the rest of us. Us walking into the bathroom the next day and seeing a cat strung up like a duck roast, a cat whose eyes are red and everything limp. The cat’s eyes are getting redder as Lori keeps slow and she can almost recognize that at this point, at this late point in the cycle, that this is not her normal bathroom, not her own personal bathroom because, yes, there’s the tweenage number of pumice stones in 5-4-3 but there’s also another pile, one of white flakes, and Lori can recognize in imperfect consciousness that they represent her skin or maybe snow that couldn’t melt, and when Pip’s upside down, strung up like a duck roast or a dead fascist, she puts a knife to his throat, the piercing of skin, elastic; the skin excited to fly open, the saran wrap of the treat you wanted to eat so badly. One blink later, a voice from the pile of skin flakes or unmelted snow asks, “why have you let myself get this far?”. It’s a good question. It’s a very good question to ask.
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