flash fiction – mariaology

Stoned Julia

Puts on her shoes. She’s late for work but work doesn’t occur to her. Dad called and said I’ll not be home, not the now. Dad called and said, I’m reading all of it. Dad said I’m done. I’m done with this.

Stoned Julia stops by the salon and asks for a casual shag.

We’re out of razors, the girl says.

Do whatever you want, says Julia. The world is moving very slowly and she will have the hair for it, pronto.

The salon has a fine selection of scissors and combs. Julia is texting very slowly the underwater pleas of a failing employee. She’s supposed to be at work but she can work from her phone. She has words for every pore in a body.

What do you do, when you’re not looking this cute? The hairdresser says, snipping Julia’s fringe into triangles.

I make content.

Content.

It’s kind of boring.

What kind of content?

I pretend I’m famous and sometimes reply to pitiable men who want me. As in me, the celebrity. I am good at being not who I am.

Is the pay good? She spritzes with expert nips the front half of Julia’s hair.

It pays.

Huh.

Put it this way, I don’t ever wanna serve tables again. But then, you put up with some shit in the content farm, let me tell you.

The hairdresser squints with a dash of suspicion.

Want dye?

Is there a colour? I mean, it’ll cost more.

What?

What do you think of me, naturally?

You’re a mousy blonde.

I guess.

I mean, do you like it?

I blend in. Nobody knows that I’m the voice of a famous —

Can I make you strawberry blonde? It won’t take long if I super bleach.

Can I just have a moment to vape outside? I wanna finish this monologue. Then I’ll make a decision.

You can just vape in the toilet. But you’ll have to take the cloak off.

Okay.

Outside is overrated. They say the pollution —

Girl, I haven’t got all day, Stoned Julia slurs.

Okay, well, lift up your arms.

I have strawberry ice vape, lychee vape, goes Julia, parma violets. I smell like chemistry.

What do you mean?

Just chemistry. Something I remember.

The salon girl hums.

How long is this going to take?

She’s putting a ton of foils in Julia’s hair, heavy thick silver foils that fold endless origami smelling of chemicals.

The foils need twenty minutes then I’ll do an orange wash, with a splash of pink maybe.

Another hour in total.

Julia, nodding off, relishes the incoming wrath of her boss.

More foils. A machine that goes over her head is so sci-fi.

Do your parents know what you do?

Julia mumbles like… her parents are dead, or she doesn’t know.

What are they doing? What are they doing right now?

She tries to picture them watching television but only sees static.

Things are a bit fuzzy. Her hair is so, so wet. Dripping.

Honey you’re gonna look gold when I’m done.

Strawberry gold.

Pretty much edible.

What you writing now?

Wouldn’t you like to know what the famous love.

I feel like it must be amazing to be anyone in the world.

Sometimes. Sometimes it stings.

Do they say anything weird?

Like you couldn’t imagine. I once sent them a packet of my toenails for a hundred dollars, claiming they belonged to ___________.

Could you not get sued for that?

People don’t copyright their toenails honey. The whole industry runs on body parts and scams.

How did they know they were buying the real deal?

I painted them violet.

The hairdresser takes ten minutes to blow dry Julia’s hair, using a diffuser the size of the moon. Everything afterwards is huge and bouffant.

Wow, I love it. What would my dad say? Girl you’re a CAKE!

I guess ___________ would have violet toenails, I mean I can see it. She pauses, holds a mirror up so Julia can see the back of her head.

Do you like it? She brushes some flyaways into place with a small comb.

Yeah I look delicious. You’re really good. I can see this working.

A woman in the opposite seat is talking about the scandal involving a local politician.

Yo that guy went to high school with me, the wash girl chimes, rinsing silver from the octogenarians — two of them at once. He used to go out with my sister. He seemed kind of rich.

A phone rings.

You need to delete more with the razor. Hone in on it. I’m looking for an edge.

I wonder if anyone still has his number, Julia thinks. Julia sees his baby face in a newspaper and knows the big policy. What he’ll do to the city. What he’d do to her.

Hmmmmmmm…..hmmmmmmmm…..hmmmmmm…. goes the razor.

Brush little sweat from someone’s brow.

So are you happy girl? You look great, go get ’em.

Cutely, Julia is tousling her blonde curls, newly bright, a shade too tangerine. The credit card taps sweet and completes a big transfer. It’s a big day. Fragrant.

“It’s true, I am a tiredness that lives outside its labour.”

She was in the employment of pulling loose threads from the garments of bourgeois timewasters. This was indeed total dream territory of the utmost, beyond even mastery challenging the idea that you would have time at all.

One day, the feeling in her stomach was ready for business. What would she regurgitate of her labour. The comatose hour belonged to sleeping bosses who returned their bodies to the pond. She had the whole shopfloor to herself. What did she vomit? A threadball as big as the Ritz diamond in Fitzgerald. Everything said in the service of clout vacuity was held in that clump of acid filament.

I knew that Hunger Day was created when I became an adult

I knew that Hunger Day was created when I became an adult

It awoke blessed with need and unkind feeling. The trembles of the unmentionable, now and as ever. It needed time to replenish the hormone stock of its happiness. Like the rest of us. It needed so much more than stock and horror. It needed video — swithering — it needed Latinate prose, free indirect fries and vinegar. O so much fucking vinegar. It was tabs, log-in distress, the altitude of edible starlight.

It knew goodness so much as a child knows the day is structured around hunger. When I was growing up, it was easy. It was so easy. I would plunder the stress realm so much to get what it wanted. You are in want of the possession of character, said a soap-lathered mouth. It cried. It died. It died again. It died in the succulent wormhole of nothing in particular.

It did what

makes a good leader: motive, openness and the emotional intel having bloomed droll talent on the vintage catalyst. It did unto them what dread blossomed corpseflower altruism ugh no. It deepened. I did so much for it. One of daddy’s ego tantrums was colloquial botany. Sold out the id. It did.

Spider Necklace

That spiderwebs look like necklaces is hardly surprising. You made really good use of the cookies. They lived in your brain and measured time like a smart meter to cost more, horrible sharp smell of time, golden darling. The temperature got cold enough so that spiderwebs were necklaces encrusted with sharp frost, to unhook from trees and arabesques of gate to wear at night. The people took pictures of glaciated cities and posted them on the outer gates, with affections measured by the gram. They wore black tourmaline wolf spiderlings and blizzard stone zebras to cover their décolletage. Inside the small room, scared my hot water bottle would burst on me, I was too cold to have glamour. I looked at my golden darling coming close to coming, I could hardly wait for winter to end its solo guitar on the buttress of autumn. It wasn’t as though time snatched the web from her neck and said no more posting, no more selling yourself short as a small glass animal. Often I was a gelid cadaver, after a fuck. The man on the podcast who was a famous director said he hated to be in pain and encouraged women to stop poking their own wounds. He said to do things that made you feel better, instantly, and he put those words in the mouth of a blonde and glamorous actress. I used to buy lighthearted eyeliner and dot my face with artificial freckles to look ‘healthy’. Squinting at the sun is a personality. The moon is our universal friend. Those cookies will be hatching soon and we’ll live in the fat of their secrets. I couldn’t be alone again, especially with the gimmick machine of octovision. I had studied the web and was now found styling myself a spider matriarch, highly resistant to magic, indulged in the cannibalism of love’s imaginary, myself at the end of Verity Spott’s Hopelessness. Frost crystals glitter in the gathering wind saying people make mistakes. You can tear this from me, all of my necklacing sentence, I don’t care anymore.

Ornament & Missouri

Once, the temperament of the bellflower was of concern to me. I wrote down words like ‘ornament’ and ‘Missouri’. I had a Lamy pen to write sideways, slantwise, of my other life. There was one club in particular where I excelled in the art of other people’s music. What some call karaoke but I call languishing in melody, obsessively, falling apart in front of an audience. I was like the VHS girl-child in Aftersun butchering ‘Losing My Religion’ with such sweetness the whole resort goes silent. What talent had I for pitch or flourish? There was a column of white light above my head at all times which I imagined writing into, solemnly, a long list of my songs. The more they snared in my throat, the more they became me. The newspapers declared this behaviour ‘cheery perennial’ at the local, noted my penchant for particular martinis, the olive glow of the evening. Any evening, you could find me there in a sequin distress, picking my excess off the floor. I had this thing called a hem. It was the way my voice dropped. The way I gathered it up. Outside the club was a cottage garden, can you believe it, where I tended these purple flowers. I spritzed the last of my drinks across their wilted leaves and I murmured the inside scoop of each song, so only the flowers knew. Their growth was writing itself all over the skirts of the club, I was feeding it; soon we would nourish ourselves from the fruits of trial and error. It seemed appalling that my whole generation had fallen back into the habit of other people’s songs. As a child, I was dragged along to open mics, and all the songs were original, weren’t they? You had to put a few coins in the kitty to get on the list. According to the principle of locality, a particle is influenced by its closest surroundings, with interactions limited to the speed of light. But according to Bell, there are variables. The risk of being heckled or worse, adored. I knew my theory of the song to be incomplete and quantum. It went very far. I stroked the rare blue hue of my partial shade. I queued Outside. Sung the non-lexical vocables of glossy stars. Ate lyrics for kicks. I paid the price.

12/09/1998

I began life calloused on the thumb of the family. All my life I ate chalk. My first memory was volunteering the date in class. “It’s the 12th September miss”. What’s the year? They made me stand up to write it. That morning a bee had stung me behind the knee, in that very soft spot, and I hadn’t told anyone. I winced and limped to the board and wrote 12/09/1998. It was the summer the ash tree was felled and then the oak, and we all made nests from the heaps of cut grass and I tried not to cry when scolded for grass stains, my skirt too short, my sting. Did I not understand the task at hand? You need to help the boys beside you, they said, when you’re finished your work there’s always more to be done. I wanted to be done with it all at once, and to never do it again and bask in the slow, drawn-out time of my earned oblivion. Then I discovered coffee and had all these memories rushing to the loch where I learned the name of a baby swan, a cygnet, which sounded like a form of jewellery or grammar. “That bread has stones in it”, I would say when presented with brown slices of something seeded. Throw it all to the swans. The mothers did not know what to do with me. I would not eat the slabs of pink trembling on dinner plates, so I ate the sleepover candy, all of it, and slept through the films, the first to want to sleep in their company. The mothers were vicious with hairbrushes. Do you know what happened that day in 1998? I licked white powder off my forefinger, then my green thumb. I felt funny. Under the table, the boys showed me their easy-peelers, their cigarettes, their rusty little knives. Somebody telling me to focus. To stop. At any moment, I’d feel the ash, the wax, the writing all over me. I was in the birdshit deep in the loch, my sediment; I was a lot of work.

Who do you envy?

Those who climb trees with such dexterity as to know how the vertical itself is a kind of knowing. The up-and-down world of clamping fingers and knowing what manner of pressure to apply to manage to hold. I want access to that but I come up against some limit in who I am. A sportsperson would hum in mine ears to try harder. Try to be better is a motto I’ll go with, thanks to a certain poet, but it doesn’t work with sports so much as an ethics for life. Wait. I had this leg on the walls of the world and all it really took was your sweet voice telling me there was a hold. A purple one, a yellow one. Just go for it. A spokesperson would yell in mine ears on behalf of surfaces: it’s going to be alright. I saw videos on the internet of climbers surpassing that moment of freeze to do something amazing like haul their bodies sideways, jump horizontally across the limit, and the thaw on their faces as they landed splat triumphant on the mat. One time another man landed on top of me, I let out a little squeal. It was deliriously exciting. I still have the scar. A rock song. All of the holds became rocks in themselves. You had to find a way to speak to them. If I do this with my fingers, if I really push, if my core could hold out longer for hovering. Suddenly it wasn’t about getting to any top or topping the wall or making that tap of completion. I wanted to find good places to literally hang out, my body a sort of hesitant dying leaf, relishing this thanatos in departing the life-giving branch. My nerve damage screamed in the rigid day. In the cafe with too-hot soup my sap bleeding out meant everything. I have envy for the strength of limbs in those who have earned it, their elastic ecstasies. In my dreams I hung upside down from trees, the frames of swings, the scaffolds of my dilapidated neighbourhood. My hovering grew powerful with longing for motion and soon I would strike a leg up, feel lusty for the whiteout snow beyond summit. Currently, the hardest climb in the world is called ‘Silence’. As I write this, condensation drips from the inside of my window panes, waters the baby aloes, drips like a cat lapping water. I watch a perfect lunar kitten suckle your fingers. The first nourishment. We can’t insulate the thought of my life. I put up my right hand higher than god and clutch.

notes on fake heiresses

‘I work for my success, I earn my accomplishments. […] Maybe you can learn to be smart like me. I doubt it, but you can dream’.

I would really like to exorcise Anna D*lvey from my present obsessions, having blitzed through the hyper-cringe miniseries and comparatively breezy podcast in barely a week, pursued a bunch of Instagrams and finally shut my eyes only to dream of that accent grinding through a void.

Credit card, credit card, credit card
assspiration/respiration

I used to draw pictures of infinity pools and flick through brochures of luxury hotels for no other reason than my dad works in travel.

In Anna’s story, to dream is compensatory for the actual accomplishment of success, and your dreams can be extracted by an app called Shadow…….and all that dream data you uploaded gets aggregated as part of general projects of self-optimisation, leading to what?

I prefer my shadow-realm in dreaming device; what other people dream. You can listen to the stories of other people dreaming by pressing yourself to the groundwork of a landlord nation. So many people have pressed themselves to the skin of these floors and walls. Why the old hard rain or old hard road? It’s nice to stand outside in the rainy asylum of television.

There’s a loud buzzing in my flat like a fly the size of a building is stuck. It’s been going since Thursday.

Today at four o’clock a dark grey cloud.

Everyone on the internet seems to criticise AD for not using conditioner but I like seeing out of context screenshots flash across google — prison is so exhausting, you wouldn’t know — and everyone asking where is she, what’s that bridge — boys with names like Hunter and Chase

Get off on development

Writing this adds to the AD economy, but I can’t help making notes. For a while now wondering what a dream is and wanting it always to be more than compensation for the struggle we’re put through — dreams are not opiates for mass depression —
ineluctability. luxury.

We are suffering a mass shortage of pleasures at least in the narrow world of these isles and especially what I imagine to be england……..who else watches this and thinks, I don’t even like champagne. I wanna be adored comes to mind………I find the soundtrack flashy and intrusive like TOO ON THE NOSE but perhaps being gauche is aesthetic necessity……if you are trying to do a satire on the people whose lives you incorporate fully by lassoing the loop holes of their own system — weakness, lust for novelty, a good story.

Court fashion. What it is to be well-heeled. Attentive to somebody’s daily post. I miss outfit posting thus Polyvore and lookbook but also, ouch. It’s all in posture? Like how you present the myriad proprioceptions of finance itself, plus conceptual finance & platonic finance. Get your eyebrows done.

Obviously this whole show is about whiteness and how this is performed, tacitly stratified and constructed for actual material consequence, a f f l u e n c e.

What would you do with access to an app called Shadow? What invocation of the shadow realm does this offer? My eyesight is getting worse the singer is a blurred intimation of human blue on the stage. My dreams blur as with eyesight, so become less of narrative detail & character — more of feeling. I wake up with spillages of emotional pigment all over my chest, belly, brain. Sometimes it makes you wet too

which is to say, we read each other.

Deeply? Every time I blink there are several billion more tweets in the world, you have to know that. Know it all the time like feeling your white blood cells come up. I have a bulimic consciousness I don’t want any more info, the words are burning my throat

for how long has acid been pouring upon them

Los Angeles in fall?

You can tell by the podcast voice. Someone says ‘scammer and scammer – a match made in heaven!’

spoiler alert for other fake vocal fry heiresses.

This one is the largest dream database in the world, it’s in her heart. You gave all the dreams by watching it, like & subscribe. Self-identity as Futurist means you floss everyday on the internet. I’ve been studying the little bits.

Last night a tiny centipede crawled out of the spine of my copy of Susan Sontag’s As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh. I want to go to San Francisco. I want the noise to stop.

AD = After Death. Anno Domini. Anna Delvey. Advertisement. Advantage. Analogue to Digital.

Bin man outside is singing INXS.

Dumb socialite lite lite extra cherry diet coke

‘I wanted to learn everything. So I could be anything’.

The Anna D*lvey aporia of February.

Scam trends of 2022 as response to crypto?

Tindering loneliness, paying for soap operas of algorithmic advantage, buying virtual real estate including the non-fungible artefact of a HEX number.

I wonder who I spent a long time being real in.

How much I paid a month to use all that purple.

It’s so convenient to log into all the channels at all times, listen to other people talk of their dreams in computerised accents, dream exactly their dreams until you are what kind of god posting anyway, just to reblog them in the 24 hour window of the story

you feel accelerated then smoothed, depressed as in self-love

just to be in their world at the click of a button

I like her best in the lilac pantsuit and classy copper

abyssal sensation that some of this is really true, even the fashion. Slip diamanté talk of I love Dostoevsky accordant to telly

A book she says her father passed onto her, it’s all about struggle, and telling the psychiatrist, Look, that character who said he was going to america, “he shoots himself in the head” — you know what happens

resultant

cesspools of debt

“to girls like me”

precognitive data analysis [ crisis ]

augmented saturates of the dream economy

surplus love

love

plus size appliances

Turns out, a scam, you can use right now for free

taking out money the same as taking the bus to just get somewhere

none of this is real

no land

forms a bubble

My Black Dog

Life changed the moment I minted my depression as an NFT. The process was long and boring, but now I am a clean one who has never grasped the meaning of silverware. Let me try to explain the process of having a life thus expunged of its fungibility, which is to say, I feel now worthy of anything. I don’t even need to log on.

This is not a book of ‘the environment’, nor do I profess care for the precise expenditure required to fuel that sluice of the blockchain which facilitated said transaction. Honestly I am just glad to have sold my black dog to an eager buyer.
I can hear someone crying thru the walls most nights, the kind of wail that angels do, having no sex to think about they might body millennia of pain. The quality of having no carnal emotions owing to calorific deficit is guaranteed.
The black dog was adopted from more or less insipid childhood fantasies in which more or less I could not have lived this far. Small red marks on my glyph flesh. Not to be dramatic but there is a reason why I am scared of cars. The first time what is called Marlene sat behind a wheel I freaked.
Communiqué over Excel spreadsheets had led me to believe my sadness was extractable. I started feeling it everywhere, standardised and flashing among the long trails of light exposure.
Imagine buying a thing for its absolute exclusivity, only to release its essence, bit by bit, in meatspace! The ambience of my original sadness spread across the mall, where generally I was to be found weeping by the ceramic fountain, where people tossed coins as the wanton value of wishes.
[Autumn redux]
Dramatic monologue of the dog: I am a dog! A fucking dog! You better not touch me.
I tell you, I freaked the fuck out. She did. Is it better to have someone crying or having sex thru the walls? Irritability is a relative condition. I’m so tired and fucked up. Moan.
I want my black dog back Why are they not a blue dog, someone asks in the comments. The internet is so fucking literal. I paint my nails hot pink and chew them so all the polish flakes into my mouth like itsy bits of sext.
Have to stop myself reading Lauren Berlant’s blog again. Get kinda sentimental at night. ‘I was lucky to be the dreamer because the dreamer never stops being interested. People know when they haven’t said enough, that’s why they dream’. I never say enough, that’s why I write. There’s something I always wish I told you, but you never could tell.
Every time I sit next to a man on the bus, I assume he’s gonna reach for something intangible, a long red thread you could tug from my cunt with this terrible thing at the end, that’s it.
The black dog had impossible puppies and the puppies are always following me, especially onto the bus. Ten black puppies is a lot of transport coverage. Driver winks and goes, ‘you’re just a pup’. When I close my eyes, we spit in each others’ mouths. I hear a Belle & Sebastian song in the distance.
Scenery passes, etc. Static poplars.
Everybody started to ask, Where do you see your future? I see my future in NFTs, is the prepared, p(r)eppy answer. No, not as an investor. I’m not even a flip in bed, where it counts. Can you guess?
Everybody who doesn’t have a choice has a price. I used to text M. like, what do you think I should do with my life. There’s nothing to buy at the mall. You should go home, she says.
Earlier I lied. I kind of do care about the environment. Black dogs let loose among burning forests.
I have no memory for the feeling of rain.

Non-fungible errors cluster my dashboard. That I had my sadness minted and then accused of bad metaphor. Darling, I was the economic downturn all along.
I eat with my fingers among the dogs. They love me.

Warm-Up

The exercise involves lying full-bodied on the floor for another to draw around your form. The purpose of said exercise is to articulate a sense for the flow of immobility, immobility as flow and thus possibility. Many groups attempted similar activities to great aplomb and connection. Artists collapsed upon their models. Models rose to heights of personal ascendence. Poetry collections were published. Limbs grew lithe in artificial moonlight. The studio upgraded its entire rigging. We brought new humans to practice passivity. Every pairing was a pool of pleasure. Who knew the flesh untouched could be so malleable. To cultivate the necessary unrest, ambient ocean sounds may be played directly into the model’s ear. Arousal. Here we are, rhythm of intermittent tide, a pencilled warble. This man has muscles that articulate a paradoxical vulnerability. It’s in his tattoos, which only the artist sees. A he or a she or neither, in which case a very special effect is reached. Systems fall into perfect error. Undulations of hair leave their impress upon carpets, but admittedly parquet floors were instructed. Recommendations swept away in paper flakes. Controversies stirred at the death of a single participant. They had scratched, I am just looking for a way out. It never occurred to the artist that the model was in fact referring to their very own body. Doors were locked and provisions made. They ate tinned peaches and dripped the slippery juice across each other’s faces. Some of them miss the practice as it was before. No good to dwell in the past. No good at all. The snapshots were flushed when authorities arrived. Time will tell, how else? Little white lines. Social media profiles in the boom era broke down when the 404 parade came round, desperate and percussive. I make of you a blade of rain, they said. This isn’t the eighties, the skin replied. There were twenty-two poems explaining aesthetic paralysis. A great deal of laughter and stuck-together A2 paper, resonant scent of impermanent ink. When your felt-tip skims my shoulders I melt like infinite butter. His tattoos twist, I drink them.

(Response to the #FlashFictionFebruary challenge…

(04/02/18: ‘create’)

Tag: flash fiction