This story appears in SUM FLUX, V.4: “Fragmentation,” a curated collection of boundary-pushing original fiction. Read the full lineup here.
She wrote “stanning for the moon” on her Hinge profile which I thought was cute because I, too, fear obsession unless it’s pointed at something too dumb to answer back. I messaged her something about moonquakes. She said “hot” and here we are at some place called BEET where they serve “food” in medieval helmets and charge $9 for “saponaceous water” that smells like eggs. The waitstaff wears blood-red aprons; they all have names like Riley and Finn and refer to the menu as “a body without organs.”
Her name is Robin. She works in UX and has fourteen unread texts from someone named “Mom (New).” She’s wearing a shirt with puffed sleeves. I’m itching to reach over and squeeze her downy fluff, feel it compress and test if she squirms at proximity.
“A date in the ’20s is literallyyyyyy no different than a job interview—like literally the same—okay, like, I guess, maybeeeeee a job interview but with like worse lighting and better lies, ha!”
I nod and smile—a muscular twitch that feels issued to me, something I'll return at night's end in a slot labeled DIRTY or USED.
“Ha! Totally...”
I fork-poke my slab of beet. It’s bleeding. Is it supposed to look so medical? So real?
“...totally...”
The first time I saw my blood was in a dream. I was in the woods, woods I didn’t recognize. My knee was scuffed and spotted with bubbles of blood. I stood, triangulated by coyotes, one on each side, the biggest in front. The air was sour with mange and my hands were too small to make fists.
Robin is trying to get me to listen to a podcast. It’s hosted by twins. Or it’s about twins? Either way, I nod.
“So cool.”
She giggles. She’s the type that laughs with her shoulders. My water does that Jurassic Park ripple. I look up at the ceiling tiles. I was late to potty training, very late. Like, concerningly late. The tiles are mom's; they throb. I’m three again. Three and naked. Three with a full bladder crouching on the same tile, legs X scissored, trying not to pee.
The potty is purple and duck-shaped. It’s grinning. I hate it. I don’t want to feed it. I tried my best to starve it but the yellow pushed out and drowned my toes.
Mom turned the handle. I ran behind the laundry hamper, toes wet, warm, glistening. She entered and slipped. Her arms flailed. She hit the tiles with a cranial thud.
She screamed an adult word, stood, and threw the duck potty into the tub. It splashed and buoyed, its purple break slicing the surface like a shark fin.
She’s dipping her tempura beet in aioli: "Hinge is sus af, like I went on a date with one dude who, like, this one time faked a seizure just to get out of jury duty ha!"
I’m sloshing beet blood in my mouth. Looking down to adjust my napkin I notice my soles no longer touch the floor. I push, trying for earthly contact but it's no use.
I swallow.
It's fine. It’s nothing dramatic—just a little lift, some extra height. Actually, it’s quite pleasant. I’m a shirt floating in a pool before it becomes obese and drowns.
The speakers are blaring bebop. I feel my ass divorcing the chair's palm. After the duck, Mom bought a singing potty that rewarded me with saxophone licks if I shit in it.
The trees didn’t look like trees. They were too regular. Copy-paste verticals. The blood bubbles became molasses-thick tributaries marching past my tibias. I thought if I move, they’ll move. I blinked. One blinked back. The middle one. Its eyelids closed sideways.
Robin asks if I’ve ever been in love: "Hey, so, like, have you ever been in love? ha!"
I chew some beet. I want to say: I cried when my neighbor’s dog got neutered, so I guess, yeah, probably.
Instead: “I thought I was,” I swallow red pulp, “once.”
She nods and shoulder-giggles. On Hinge she listed her favorite meal as “cheese.”
“That’s not a meal,” I said.
“It is if you eat enough of it, ha!”
Someone’s wearing too much musk. Someone’s laughing the way you do when you’re about to say “no offense but...” A fork scrapes enamel; my nape is gooseflesh. The air is roasted soil and artisanal dairy. My body feels helium-thinned. I'll pop if I hiccup.
I’m hovering a foot above the chair, give or take. A whole foot or perhaps a meter? I’m not good with distance—distance and directions. I shift, my feet hit the table, it shudders, Jurassic Park. Robin doesn’t notice.
She asks what I do: "So...like...what do you do? ha!"
"Health logistics.”
“Oh...cool,” she says, which is what people do when you’ve presented them with something they can’t visualize.
I miss the chair's kiss on my ass.
“You give off, like, Virgo rising energy, ha! What’s your moon?”
I think about telling her. Think about saying, perhaps yelling, I’m floating! I’ve been floating this whole goddamn time! Fucking stop sitting there and HELP!
“Ummmmm, capricorn?"
“mmmmmmmmmmm,” she hums, her brain exploding in understanding.
The coyotes never moved. They just breathed. I watched their stringy ribs erect and strike little tents of skin. I asked what they wanted. One said “obedience.” Another said “warmth.” The third bared its piss-yellow teeth. I woke up with the taste of pennies in my mouth.
"...you know, like, the moon? And you know how, like, they don't really howl at it? ha! Never at it…”
"...totally..."
By dessert, I’m two feet (meters?) off the ground and I’ve sweated through my shirt. I try monkeying my toes around the chair frame but evolution has stolen my pedal dexterity.
A man two tables over says “What the hell?” except he’s talking about something on his phone. Robin still doesn’t notice. Her head is down. The ceiling fan flutters her auburn bangs. She’s probably texting “Mom (New),” spilling tea about how I talk too much or not enough or maybe she’s Googling “signs of dissociation in men.”
She says she had fun. She says “you’re interesting,” which can mean anything from “I like your brain” to “you’ll be a good story for my therapist.”
After the coyotes, I wet the bed every night for three months. After the coyotes, the saxophone toilet refused to riff when I fed it. Mom stopped changing the sheets. I'd wake her, wet and crying. She'd throw down a tarp—get back to bed!—and hose it down in the morning.
No one cares.
I am a nose hair, a yoga class fart.
I’m not panicking, just noticing. Noticing and rising.
I’m eye level with an Edison bulb and some hanging plants—are they real? Fake? I can never tell. I bump into one. It doesn’t react. I'm not sure what I've learned. I press my eye to the bulb's smudged glass. The filament trembles.
Robin is saying something about a trip to Croatia and how everything there tastes "cleaner."
I nod.
"Totally..."
"But...I did it and it's supposed to play for me, and—and it's not!"
I feel the hot ring of tears in my eyes. She's on the couch nursing a thick glass of Jack.
"...it's supposed to play the sax!"
She doesn't turn to look.
I'm in the ceiling now. The innards of concrete smell like preschool chalkboards. It's shaking, jiving to Bird going feral on his sax. The pink insulation pulses like eager lungs. I look around. Fiberglass. Screws. Duct tape. Rat shit. A pack of Mentos wedged in a joint. One is missing.
My blood reached the pine needles. I wanted to wipe it, cover it— apologize to the ground for leaking. The middle coyote sniffed the air but didn't move, letting my scent come to it.
I don't know how high I am. I can’t see the restaurant but I hear it—distant and watery. A waitress: “Sorry for the wait.” A spoon drops. A man: “Do you want to split it?” A toilet flushes. Someone whispers “I love you” and someone says “I’m trying.”
Robin is still talking, her voice helium-high from the distance. She’s talking about the moon again, how it messes with tides and people, how she doesn’t trust anything that shows the same face every day yet always ends up loving what she can't trust.
"Totally..."
I'm in the clouds. White, unshaped blobs. Drifting. Stupid. I taste nickel (pennies?) I smell the top of a baby’s head. I smell chlorine, cinnamon, a whiff of singed toast. There’s a pressure behind my eyes like I’m about to sneeze or remember something important.
I blink and sound implodes. It's quiet. Too quiet. Not peaceful quiet—gap quiet, like something crucial’s been raptured to hell.
Something pecks at my ear. A breeze? It’s hot and fingers my drum with swinging paradiddles. It says I should keep going until the earth looks like a scab. I obey.
I need to piss. I close my eyes and clench my bladder.
In my dark, they’re there again. The three of them. Fuzzy. Sharp-eyed. The one on the left licks its paw. The middle one is bigger. Bigger and...taller? Wider? Hairier?
They don’t speak. They don’t move.
...not at it—they just like…they, like, kinda howl to keep count...
I infer I’m not allowed to leave.
...they like—just like to know they've got friends nearby...
I sit in the bloody needles, letting the middle one’s panting atta-boy my hair.
...and, like, the rest of us are out here ghosting each other and blaming our signs, ha!
Something sticky is on my hands. Grass. Or sap. Or blood. Or jelly.
My bladder scrapples apples in my abdomen.
I place both palms in the grass.
I scrunch my eyes and wait for gravity to remember me.
Will also wrote this piece for SUM FLUX V.2: old times
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Every time I read this, it feels like I'm whipping my head back and forth—rubbernecking and decidedly feeling part of the scene and the fragmentation theme. Surreal and psycholgoical and such an orginal way at it. Love.
Dissociation never looked so exciting and intriguing. Mine tasted of plastic if you licked it and I never got to see the stray pack of Mentos (that was a brilliant touch!). You portrayed how the world just carried on, but at a slant, never noticing your detachment, so brilliantly.
I hope you made it back down to Earth safely. And you kept off Hinge!