awinterleaf - Tumblr blog

[awinterleaf]

Season of Death

When you watch autumn trees on a windy day steady shedding leaves, the scenery is changing. Only now will it change this quickly on its own. Sure, man can rip down trees, man can dig valleys, man can build mountains. But this is the only time nature transforms herself before your eyes. Soon there will only be skeletons, all brown, grasping at nothing. Or mighty pines, storing cold, stabbing omnidirectional. Season of death. That is what my grandfather called it: 죽음의 계절. It revealed itself before me. Behind me lagged the boys.

“Sam, what are you thinking about?” Travis asked.

“Birds,” Sam said.

“Babe, how bout you?” Travis called up to me.

“Photography,” I said. “Of course photography.”

“I got you beat,” Travis said. “I got a good one.”

For a few steps, quiet, only wind, footsteps, Travis’s loud but wordless yearning for someone to ask him what he was thinking about.

“I was thinking about,” Travis said. “How, really, I think I have a responsibility to tell my dad that he could look at pornography on the internet, and, if necessary, show him how to find it.”

“Huh?” Sam said. “What? A responsibility to show your dad internet pornography?”

“Yeah,” Travis said. “Y’know, he’s not great with internet stuff, like, only a month or so ago I got him started on Youtube.”

“What does he watch on Youtube?”

“Mostly World War II documentaries.”

“My dad watches sports bloopers,” Sam said. “I’ve never heard him laugh so hard.”

“So, yeah, it’s good our dads know about Youtube. But now I’m thinking, like, would he have figured out on his own the porn possibilities? Or is he still going for shitty old magazines when mom’s not putting out?”

And then I tuned them out. Sometimes, I knew, Travis would only bring up subjects like this so that I would turn and give him a look of disgust, an eye roll, a mock-gag, something. Why he wanted that reaction, I have no idea, but I wouldn’t give it to him this easily. I focused on the path ahead. As I walked, I kicked around the leaf litter with my big Ziploc bag-covered hi-top Jordans. Not too much traction, but the look was good. We had seen no animals. Well, maybe a squirrel or something. Little birds here and there. But no rare animals, no deer, no porcupine, not even a chipmunk. No fox or rabbit. I wanted a rare animal. Rare animals made things easier. Photographing the trees shedding leaves was proving the behaviour of nature in absence of humans. But it was basic. With something like a raccoon in the woods, one grasps an aspect of the more complex and hidden functions of nature, the lifestyles, the habits. We are reminded that-

There! I saw it in front of me, a few feet off the path. A squirrel, but a perfectly white one. An albino? Some unknown species? I grabbed the camera from around my neck, swung the viewfinder up to my face. The lens cap! I fumbled it off. For a second I tried to focus. Then, a few steps behind me:

“It’s like, a quality of life thing, you know? So even if we agree that it’s insulting his intelligence, or it’s uncomfortable or gross or whatever, it’s such a quality of life increase that it’s worth doing.”

And the squirrel was gone. In a flash, or less than a flash: I couldn’t even get one snap off. I thought about cursing them out, but what good would it do? The animals all had their own agency. That’s what I was out to prove. Maybe it was just its time to go. Just as it was the animal agency of my boyfriend to talk loudly with his friend about internet porn. But I knew that I had missed my chance. White squirrel, rare animal. To ask for more than that would be unreasonable. Did that squirrel even know it was white? Was it albino? Some rare subspecies? I dangled my own hair into view, it had been bleached bleached bleached then dyed platinum grey. Rare.

“Look,” he said, “if I really wanted to do something like that, wouldn’t I try setting him up on OK Cupid or whatever? Try to get him some dates maybe? But I just don’t think that’s a line you should cross with family.”

“Sam, you ungrateful fuckboy,” Travis said. “There are no lines with family. Drawing lines with family is an aberration. Karma’s coming at you, you piece of shit.”

Sam was looking up and to the left, a small smile, this was always his look when Travis was laying into him about something. I began to iterate, from basic principles, for literally at least the one hundredth time, the dynamics of the relationship between us three. Sam and Travis have known each other since grade two where Travis would always… Then, in grade 9, they started the esports club… But then, two months, near black-out drunk, Sam messaged me to say… But did he remember that? Would he ever bring it up again? Should I… No. No. I knew I could never, would never, arrive at any sort of understanding, I never did. I had to focus on photography.

What is nature doing? What is it doing that we have forgotten? What is nature doing silently? What is it doing when we aren’t looking?

Overhead, a goose soared much higher than I expected a goose would soar. Its wings were flapping rapidly, it seemed stressed, I couldn’t imagine where it could be going. To look for food? Or a mate? Where were its goose friends? Where was its “V”? Is that what it was looking for, so frantically, from such a height? Was this a matter of life or death? Was everything a matter of life and death in the animal kingdom? Did animals wake up every morning expecting to die that day? I hesitantly steadied my camera up at it and the viewfinder confirmed my fears: an uninteresting photo. It looked like a small bird at a reasonable height. All the urgency was lost; all the struggle evaporated in the camera’s stillness.

Travis patted my head. “Got it? We Gucci? Ayyy, Sam, let’s head out.”

Sam made a long spluttering horse noise and spun on his heels to face the way we came. Travis lingered behind, plopped his chin on my shoulder, looked down at the camera.

“Lemme see,” he said.

“I didn’t actually take a picture, idiot,” I said, pushing his face back with my hand.

“Well shit, I dunno what the hold up is,” he said. “I don’t think we’re in for anything else here. This way, trees. That way, trees. Leaves, trees, a stick, a squirrel, a moose…”

“A moose?” I said, quickly glancing up to where he was looking.

“I was just kidding,” he said. “Dummy.”

He went ahead of me. “C’mon, Sam,” he said. “Let’s go find some more fucking trees, or something.”

The season of death approaching. Take the current frame and skip ahead five, ten, years. The urge to break up with Travis right at this very instant was hot inside me. But the chill wind moved it past my head.

I tried to look at the scene with fresh eyes. The leaves streaming past me. The wind screaming in the distance. It was October 15th. Half the month had passed and I still did not have a picture. Presumably my competitors had been going out every day, into nature every day. What had they become? Full of the world and not of themselves. Held at the whim of the day and night and the sun and the rain and subservient to the steady passing of the seasons, that being the sum of their world, like a farmer, maybe, and me, what was I, Ziploc bags on my feet, dragging about two hypebeasts, or, more accurately, a hypebeast (Travis) and a hypebeasthypebeast (Sam), into nature, at the mercy of nature. Here is where nature could kill us; we had exposed ourselves to nature’s terrible wrath, but, somehow, I felt, that if we were in nature’s wrath, then nature must have some equivalent splendor, or…

The trail turned a bend and before us laid an opening, several felled trees. A brief whirlwind of leaves formed in the middle. Brief, too brief to even think to reach for the camera. But there. I set down my bag and pulled out the telescoping tripod.

“What now?” Travis said.

“I think there’s something here,” I said.

“Ahhhhhh,” he said, and squatted down, started poking at his phone.

Sam squatted next to him. “I thought you didn’t get signal out here,” Sam said.

“I don’t, I don’t, I’m just like, going through pictures saved on here, for like, amusement, nostalgia, whatever,” Travis said.

Sam shuffled over next to him to look too.

“Lotta porn,” he said.

I tried to ignore them and started positioning the camera. The season of death. How would it reveal itself to me? How could I find that urgency, that fragility? But also that stillness, that silence? Think of the bunny family. The end of papa bunny. Food too scarce in the winter. That must be. Something that had happened. It must be. Find it now. See it now. I could hear it in the howling wind. I could feel it in the leaves swirling around me. I needed to capture it.

“Oh shit,” Sam said. “Is that from that party at, uhh…”

“Yeah, yeah,” Travis said, cheesy grin.

“What’s that?” Sam said. “Mario Party?”

“Haha, yeah, this is with the soccer guys,” Travis said. “I wrecked them.”

“I don’t really know Mario Party.”

“This number here being so much bigger than their numbers, that means that I wrecked them,” Travis said sagely, wisely.

“Huh,” Sam said. He got up and wandered around the clearing. Took out his phone and snapped a few pics. Why was I watching him instead of what he was watching? He was looking down at his phone, his jacket fluttering around him, looking like the last clinging leaves of the season. Travis, down on his haunches, staring at his phone too, snickering. What did Sam see in him? The athleticism, maybe? His muscular calves? Maybe his e-athleticism? He was the best player on their team, I was pretty sure. But why was I making rationalizations for why Sam might like my boyfriend? Weren’t there reasons that he was my boyfriend to begin with? Shouldn’t they be like, obvious? What did that mean? Did Sam love him more than me? Wait, why was I thinking about this at all? I needed to take a picture. There must be something I could find. Something that-

“Holy shit,” Sam said, and there was a urgency in his tone completely unfamiliar to me.

I turned to face him, my heart in my throat. Travis rose uncertainly to his feet and took a few steps closer. Somehow, we already knew.

“What?” Travis said, much more quietly than normal.

“I just got a Facebook notification that, uh, it was a post his mom made, and I guess that, um…” Sam said, blinking rapidly, his hands visibly shaking. “Last night, I guess that he, um…”

“What? What?” Travis said, walking closer.

“Jay Park crashed his car,” Sam said. “Jay Park is dead.”

“What?” Travis said. Then he shouted, “holy shit!”

Sam looked up at him, his eyes already wet. “Jay Park is dead,” he repeated.

“Really? What? You had cell phone signal this whole time?” Travis said, his words spluttering out on top of themselves. “No, wait, what, that doesn’t… he’s actually dead?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like my brain had been knocked a foot back from my body. Like I was my own ghost watching myself. From a distance I saw my body slowly walk over and try to hug Travis.

“Don’t touch me!” he shouted, stepping back, and then, shocked at himself, clasped his hands over his face. “Don’t touch me. Sorry. Don’t touch me. Why would you touch me now?”

“I just wanted... I just wanted to comfort you, right?” I said, my voice shaking. I didn’t really know why I did it either.

“I don’t need to be comforted,” Travis said. “Comfort doesn’t help right now.” He slid his hands off of his face and clapped, loudly, twice, fast. I thought that he too must be controlling his body with only a delicate thread. “I need to face this head on,” he said. He started to walk away.

“Where are you going?” I said. “Should we go back to the car?”

“No, I want to stay out here for a while,” he said. “There’s nothing for us to do back in the city.”

I turned to Sam, who didn’t say or do anything.

“Try to take some pictures. It’s not like you aren’t going to enter your contest because my friend died. That makes no sense,” Travis said, and turned back away from us.

I didn’t know what to do but I certainly couldn’t take pictures. I walked over to Sam and slowly embraced him from the side. He was so thin, I thought this every time I hugged him. He didn’t respond at all, just kept looking at his phone. I leaned my head into his shoulder so I could look too. The Facebook thread was open; comments, “sad reacts”, and messages of support popped up continuously from the bottom. Notification windows popped down from the top, showing messages in group chats, most of them “what the fuck” or things like that. For a moment I was so hypnotized by this steady flood of information that I couldn’t parse what any of it really meant. Never before had the scenery of Facebook transformed so rapidly before my eyes. I could only describe it as lively, but I knew this was the wrong word.

Then someone posted a picture, and I saw it briefly before it was swallowed in the stream. Jay Park. Yes, that guy. He was on their e-sports team before, but not now, I thought. He was with them when they played League, before they switched to Dota. Or was it that he played Dota with them, before they switched to League? I suppose it didn’t matter. I could think of three times I had met him. He came to a party at my mom’s house once, and puked in the bathroom sink, or really more just near it, and he came out asking for paper towels and apologizing over and over and over, he was beet-red from alcohol and embarrassment, but I was already pretty drunk too, and so I told him it didn’t matter, to not worry about it, but then I ended up cleaning it up in the morning and kinda resenting him, but I guess it was my fault, I don’t know.

“I guess he swerved off the road to dodge a deer and went right into a tree,” Sam said, quietly, the first thing he’d said in a while. “Isn’t that crazy?”

“Yeah,” I said, squeezing him tighter. “Crazy.”

Then there was a time where I had to pick Travis and Sam up from a party with Travis’s friends from soccer, they had gotten way too drunk, and Jay Park was there too, he had come of his own accord to try to stop them from getting way too drunk, they had some big game the next day, but it was too late. We walked them out to my car, me shouldering Travis, him shouldering Sam, and he seemed a little upset, or a little worried, but he was trying to hide it, and he said to me, “they aren’t bad guys, really”, meaning Travis and Sam. And I was like, I know, of course I know, but I guess he was probably saying it as much to himself as he was to me.

Sam, for no discernable reason, without replying to any of the messages he received directly or posting in the Facebook thread, unceremoniously turned off his phone’s screen and then, a second later, tossed it softly onto the leaf bedding. He let out a long low spluttering noise.

“Y’know,” he said. “He told me once, that if he died, that I should go on his computer and delete all his porn.”

Sam turned to me and smiled. I didn’t know what face to make, or even what face I was already making.

“I think it was a joke, though, like, he didn’t give me his password or anything,” he said, and let out a weary, shuddery laugh. He sounded, for better or worse, like himself again. I let go of him and he walked a little bit towards where Travis had gone. His phone was still laying in the leaves.

“I’m gonna go try to see if Travis is OK,” he said. “I really hope he’s OK.” Then he left.

The third time I saw Jay Park was at a birthday party for Travis. He had gotten him a poster signed by some player that he liked, I don’t know who. And I was surprised, we  don’t really do presents for friend birthdays, like, Sam didn’t get him anything, I don’t even know if I did. But Travis was really happy. Couldn’t stop saying “holy shit” with that stupid grin. I was happy for him, happy that Jay Park had done that, Jay seemed happy that we were so happy, it was happiness. I don’t think I had thought about the other times I’d met him then. I don’t think I’d thought of all three times together before now. I’d never put him together. And there were probably other times, too. I’m sure he was there often when I met Travis at the internet café, but I could never really distinguish between his friends there, just one loud blob, all of their game faces the same; sometimes I couldn’t even pick out Sam. But now one face was gone forever. I began to silently cry, the tears steadily pouring out as my breath became more stuttered and raspy. I sat down on a log and looked at the odd still life of the erected cameraless tripod and the phone on the ground. No animals emerged.

What is nature doing when we aren’t watching?

She is dying.

[awinterleaf]

Fall

Leaves are all orange and red and yellow. It is maybe the last day of the year where you can wear just a t–shirt if you want, a sweater is optional. You'll never know if it is truly the last day until it's way too late. Emma stands at the train station hedging her bets in a maxi–skirt and a long–sleeved top. It is her favourite outfit for this ambiguous season and wearing her favourite outfit out to shop for clothes is like she's setting the bar very high. Above it is just blue sky, fluffy clouds, the sun so yellow it's like a cartoon. All good feelings.

 As the train comes in, she plants herself firmly on her spot, and begins to shout at each passing car: “One! Two! Three! Four! Five!” She starts to get nervous. It hasn't slowed down enough yet. “Six! Seven!” She flops her head back and grins as seven rolls past. “Eight, nine, ten, eleven...” she adds, grumbling, as the train comes to a rumbling stop. Well, she was a bit off. That's okay. She walks briskly back to seven. She knows not everything can be perfect. And so because that wasn't perfect it means that absolutely everything else can be perfect.

 In the car Hotaru is completely alone, sitting perfectly still, her backpack on her lap, her hands hugging her backpack, staring into the middle distance of the aisle. She's playing it safe in a fluffy hoodie and jeans. Everything is washed in crisp light and it would be a wonderful painting, Emma thinks, if it weren't for Hotaru's expression, which she can only describe – although she wishes she could be kinder – as “dumb confused”. She plops down next to her, and Hotaru finally realizes she's there.

 “Whatcha thinking about, Hotaru?” Emma asks.

“I'm trying to remember – because I know I knew at one point – why leaves change colours in the fall.”

“Ah, that's a good one,” Emma says. She frowns in concentration for a second. “I definitely did know this.”

“My best guess is that it has something to do with why people get tan,” Hotaru says, nodding at her own wisdom.

“No, Hotaru, I don't think so.”

The train groans into motion and they sit silently through the barely audible announcements. Not that they needed to hear them; it is a journey they have made many times before. Emma isn't sure what sort of silence they're in, if it's a comfortable one, one where they're just basking in the security of their friendship, assured that nothing needs to be said, or if its a welling one, one signifying some incompatibility, a silence that challenges them to break it, and if they can't, that might be it, that might be it forever. Emma is pretty sure it's the first type of silence but still wants to say something. Just in case.

But it's Hotaru that makes the first move. She unzips her bag, pulls out some small thing, fiddles with it, pops it into her mouth, and then drops something back into the bag. Emma sees all of this indistinctly in her peripherals. What was that? Candy? Medicine? She wonders if maybe she's supposed to understand what she just saw, if asking would be insensitive, revealing an unacceptable ignorance.

“Do you want a candy?” Hotaru says, leaning her open backpack towards Emma. Emma stares into the open bag: Hotaru's cell phone, Hotaru's cell phone charger, Hotaru's hair elastics, Hotaru's wallet, Hotaru's book, Hotaru's hair brush, Hotaru's opaque bag and, inside of that, Hotaru's mysteries. And then, below that, various candies in colourful wrappers and loose wrappers. Emma reaches inside and pulls out a strawberry Starburst.

“My mom always had candy in her bag,” Hotaru says. “For when I was good. And now I have candy in my bag too.”

“For when I'm good?” Emma says, chewing.

“For any time,” Hotaru says, smiling. Emma smiles back. She folds the wrapper and slips it into her purse, it is a souvenir of this happiness. She knows she will forget and throw it out the next time she reaches cleans it out, but that's far away. It's something until then.

“I have time to go to the bathroom, right?” Hotaru says, gesturing to the train's toilet.

“Sure, but, Hotaru, don't you know why I chose the seventh car?” Emma says, twisting her body in the seat to stare more directly at her. “Hotaru, don't you know?”

Hotaru just blinks at her. This tone of voice, the twist she makes, Hotaru recognizes all of them instantly. She knows exactly what this game is, and she knows it is a losing game for her, but she still has to play. She still has to know why Emma chose the seventh car. She looks away from Emma, it is a half second of weakness. But that's it, that's all she has to do, and Emma makes the next move.

“I read about it online. This poor woman, poor poor woman, she was sitting on this very car, and she had to use the bathroom, just like you,” Emma says, looking down at her hands as if in prayer. The “just like you” was probably unnecessary, she knows, but if she doesn't lay it on thick, it isn't any fun.

“...And?” Hotaru says, right after Emma counts to five in her head: right on cue.

“Ah, well, it was so tragic. The lock, the lock on the door, it broke! And she was trapped inside. She pounded on the door, she screamed, but no one came, no one saved her. And it was a holiday weekend, and the train stopped running that night, so for 48 hours she sat there, alone, screaming, all alone, none to save her, there, in the bathroom...”

“Did she die?”

“Yes, Hotaru, she died.”

“That's... that's awful.”

“Yes, Hotaru, it is awful, but it isn't the truly awful part.”

“What is the truly awful part?” As if reading a script. A very lazy script.

“It's said – I don't know if it's true, but it's said, a lot of people have said it – that on certain days, on truly evil days, like today, if you go into that bathroom, the ghost of the woman bursts from the toilet, and grabs you” – here Emma grabs Hotaru's arm, an unnecessary but delightful flourish – “and holds you! For 48 hours! So you can suffer just like she did!”

Hotaru's face is tight everywhere but her eyes, which seem like they're about to melt. Emma's faux–grieving face has twisted to a sincere devilish smile.

“Why... why today?” Hotaru finally asks. “Why is today so evil?” Emma grins even wider.

“Hotaru, didn't you realize? It's Halfloween today,” she says.

“Ha... Halfloween?”

“Halfway to Halloween in October. The second spookiest day of the year.”

Hotaru's face begins to twitch out of its paralysis, making jumpy strides towards happiness.

“That's a lie!” she shouts, suddenly giddy. “That's definitely a lie!”

“Okay, sure, that might be...”

“The whole thing's a lie, isn't it?” Hotaru says. “Because there's no way to know that car seven that day is the same car as car seven today. And! And she wouldn't die! You wouldn't die, just for being in the bathroom for that long! You could drink the sink's water! You could eat the toilet paper!”

“True, very true...”

“I don't even think the train stops running on holiday weekends. No! It definitely doesn't stop! We took it to see Emily last Easter.” She seems very happy about this realization, as if it wasn't that Emma had tried to trick her, but that Hotaru had saved Emma from this horrible delusion. She chuckles to herself with a closed mouth as she slumps back into her seat, pulls out another candy, and eats it.

“You can't have one,” Hotaru says, grinning. “Because you tried to scare me.”

The train rumbles on. The city begins to fade around it. And Emma thinks, did she forget? Did she forget that she had to use the toilet? Or can't she go? Is she still scared? Scared of the toilet ghost? And then Emma smiles and it feels like she might never stop smiling.

/

Five hours later they are sitting at a cafe and Emma is not smiling.

“If I spend money like this, I can't quit,” she says, her head in one hand, the other tapping her spoon against her temple. “That's for damn sure. That's a damn fact. When I wake up Monday morning and I ask myself for the gorillionth time why I don't quit I just have to remember this and all these bags and this fancy cake.”

“This fancy cake is delicious,” Hotaru says. She is wearing a touque with Moomin on it, a recent purchase.

“I just have to remember this delicious cake and all these bags and what, dinner tonight?”

“Sure, dinner tonight,” Hotaru says, and grins at her. “Sushi dinner tonight.” “Delicious cake and sushi dinner and all these bags,” Emma says. “And I'll know that if I don't get out of bed and get to the office, I'll have to say goodbye to all of that. And then who knows what I'll do then. But I'll know, at least.”

“On Monday morning, when I walk to work, I'm sure it'll be very cold,” Hotaru says. “So I'll think, good thing I bought the Moomin hat.”

Emma's face collapses into a smile, which then collapses into her hands.

“And, I read online, you can take a little bean bag, and put it in the microwave for a second, and then put it under your hat, and it'll keep you even warmer.”

“Hotaru...” Emma says, groaning through her hands.

“See, that's a good thing to read online. Not freaky stories about toilet ghosts.”

“Hotaru...”

“A helpful bean bag trick to stay warm. Do you think that's why it's called a beanie?”

“Hotaru, no... That isn't why it's called that,” Emma says, exasperated but happy. “And that isn't a beanie, it's a touque.”

“What's the difference?”

“What's the difference?” Emma says, in mock–outrage. “How can you even ask that? That's like saying... what's the difference between Moomin and Cerebus!”

“I don't understand,” Hotaru says. Well, of course she wouldn't. Emma isn't sure why she'd said it. Emily and maybe Nadine would get that joke, but not Hotaru. She considers pulling out her phone, messaging the group chat, but the explanation is too long, there are too many parts, it is not that funny. It all seems so exhausting, so unbelievably exhausting, the idea of talking to people. She can't believe it was her that had been talking this whole time. And suddenly she's a little distant from everything. It's like she just took a step back in a direction she hadn't thought she could move. She blinks twice and it's mostly gone. And she doesn't even know the difference between a beanie and a touque.

“Are you thinking about work?” Hotaru says. Emma blinks again.

“No, no...” Emma says. But she isn't sure what she'd been thinking about. Beanies? Touques? Moomin? Cerebus? The end of Cerebus? Hell is other people? The end of Moomin? How did Moomin end? Is that what she was doing? Trying to remember the end of Moomin? Was there something more?

“I don't like when you complain about work,” Hotaru says. “It makes me feel bad when we go out and you spend money. And it makes me feel bad when I'm at work and I like it and I think about you at your work hating it. And it makes me feel really bad on Sunday nights, remembering you complain. But there isn't anything I can do about it, is there? I just wish you wouldn't.”

Emma looks up from her hands. Hotaru has turned about 45 degrees in her seat so she doesn't have to look at Emma directly while saying all this. This little speech, where had it come from? Had she rehearsed it? Had she been wanting to say this for a very long time? Had Emma been complaining that much?

Hotaru is slightly pouting as she continues. “And it makes me feel like I can't say a lot of the things I want to say. Funny things that happened. Interesting things I learned. Good stuff on TV. How could I talk about any of that stuff if you're so unhappy, thinking about work? Work isn't until Monday! It's Saturday! What's the point of Saturday if you just act like it's Monday?”

Emma blinks a few times. It doesn't seem like Monday now, it seems way further than that. Hundreds of Mondays are consumed in the shadow of the day that lurks in her mind.  Now it's some forbidden day years from now, the evilest of days, the day when Hotaru no longer wants to be her friend. The day when Emma makes up another stupid scary story and it's just too stupid and scary. The day when she won't shut up about work and it's the too manyth time. The day when she calls Hotaru cute too many times or says her name too many times or touches her hair too many times. Or she makes too many references Hotaru doesn't get. Or says too many times that something Hotaru read online is stupid. Or something else.

And it wouldn't be the day that Hotaru tells her that they aren't friends. That day she cannot even imagine. Maybe it wouldn't come at all. But it doesn't matter. This day is worse. The day Hotaru's smile becomes fake. The day Hotaru begins to resent Emma. Everything feels so fragile now. It could happen very soon. It could have already happened. Ah. And now she is crying. Generous tears that almost splash when she blinks, which she does several times. She can't believe she's crying.

“Oh my gosh, Emma, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you can complain about work!” Hotaru says, her arms jerking about halfway across the table, rapidly rethinking gestures of comfort. “I didn't know it was that bad! Is work that bad? I'm so sorry! I'm so so sorry!”

“No, no...” Emma says, sniffing. “It isn't that, you're right about that. I shouldn't complain. I'm not thinking about work.”

Hotaru pauses. Most times it's clear what she's supposed to say here: what is it, then? Why are you crying? Just like: why did you choose car seven? Or: what did your boss say then? Or: what is that movie about, then? She knows this game. She knows when Emma wants her to ask. But this time is different. This time maybe Emma doesn't want Hotaru to ask. But Hotaru wants to know, so she asks. And Emma starts crying again.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry!” Hotaru says, sheepishly patting Emma's head, which she thinks is probably the wrong gesture, but she needed something.

“Hotaru, look, I just...” Emma says, her body shaking in something both laughing and crying. Laughing at the fact that she's crying. Crying at the fact that she's crying. “You just have to promise me you'll tell me if you ever start to dislike me. Even just a little bit. Just tell me and tell me why and I'll stop doing it, whatever it is you don't like. You just have to promise to tell me.”

Hotaru stares at her. “I was just doing that?” she says. “Wasn't I just doing that exact thing?”

Emma looks up from her hands. “Oh yeah,” she says. Then she laughs a bit. “Yeah, I guess you were doing that.”

“Right?” Hotaru says. “Like, I'm a bit confused, I guess?” She laughs a bit too, because she's confused.

Emma laughs even harder, then knocks her head back and sighs long and low. “I guess it just made me think of something,” she says. “I don't think I've thought about it for a long, long time. Even now it took me a bit to realize I was thinking about it. But when I did I thought like, maybe I'd been thinking about it the whole time? Like, deep down, it was all I was thinking about? Do you know what I mean?”

“No,” Hotaru says. And then because she knows now that Emma wants her to, and because she wants to too, she asks what the thing was.

“It's something that happened. I was in eighth grade. Do you remember the year when I went to the different school? After my mom and dad split up.”

“That's right,” Hotaru says. “We were apart for a year. I forgot that.” “I sometimes forget too,” Emma says. “It was only a year.” “But you said it was fun, right? You'd made friends. I remember meeting your friends from that school in grade nine,” Hotaru says. Then, in an instant, an idea hits her. Her face goes blank. “But was that a lie? Were you actually... bullied?” She leans in close and almost whispers the word “bullied”, as if it was a curse.

“No...” Emma says. “It wasn't anything like that. It was closer to the opposite, maybe. I was actually really popular. That school didn't get new people very often, let alone someone from the city...”

“And you're so good at making friends,” Hotaru says. “I admire that about you.” At such a time of emotional exhaustion and vulnerability, Emma is stunned by this sudden compliment. It takes her about twenty seconds to recover. Her face assumes maybe fifteen positions in this time.

“So... that Christmas, they were putting on this big pageant. All the grades would sing songs and there'd be little plays between them. And cause we were the eighth graders, we got most of the big talking parts. They gave me the lead role. The class voted on it.”

“Congratulations!” Hotaru says, and then immediately realizes how silly it was to congratulate her on something a decade ago.

“Umm, thank you. So the big finale was like, umm... There was a star hanging from the ceiling, like the Christmas star, right? Hanging way up on the gym's ceiling. And the last scene, the last song and stuff, ends with us cleaning up the stage and discussing what we'd learned in the previous parts.”

“What had you learned?”

Emma is blank for a second. “I can't remember,” she says, laughing. “I can't remember at all. It was probably y'know, typical Christmas stuff. It's not the getting, it's not the giving, it's the loving.”

Hotaru starts to hit the table excitedly. “I know that one! That's Garfield!” she says. “That's the Garfield Christmas Special!”

Emma is beyond stunned now. “Wow, you're right,” she says. “I didn't even realize it, but yeah, that's totally where I got that from. I can't even remember watching that.”

“I got one!” Hotaru says, she pumps her fist. Emma starts laughing, Hotaru starts laughing. For a good minute they're laughing, and it seems like everything can just go back to normal now. It could, but Hotaru knows that it shouldn't. She knows that Emma should finish telling her story. So she asks: what happened with the star?

“Oh, yeah, so... the big finale, we're all trying to figure out how we'll take the star down, and then it was like... a bunch of people raised up this big platform, I can't really remember how, I think there was some sort of handles. And then some more people, like five or six people, climbed on top of the platform, and there was another platform there, and they picked it up, and then one last person, me, this was part of my lead role duties, climbed on that platform, and now I was tall enough to reach the star.”

“Sounds... dangerous?” Hotaru says.

“Yeah, uhh...” Emma says. “Looking back at it now, I guess it was sort of dangerous. I don't think I thought of that at the time, though. I remember being really excited for it, this big finale, being at the top. I think the platforms were decorated to look like a Christmas tree, but I don't remember how. I think it had something to do with the whole thing's message, too, like, working together, you can reach so much higher... Maybe that was a lyric to a song... So much of it feels like a dream now...”

“So what happened?” Hotaru says. “What do you remember?” “Well, there was this girl, Becca. She was probably my best friend at that school. The first friend I made there, too. She was the one who introduced me to a lot of people, who invited me to birthday parties and stuff, right at the start. She was really popular too. She would have gotten the lead role if I didn't show up, I think. That's what I figured. Because... this is what happened. When I climbed up on the top platform, I lost my balance a bit. I don't remember how. I guess it was pretty dangerous, after all.” Emma attempts a shaky chuckle here. It is like a physiological reaction. The mood cannot be this unlit. But Hotaru gives her nothing but an unwavering stare from her watery brown eyes.

“I was fine, though... I steadied myself, I did my speech, the play ended, I climbed down... it was only a second that I was wobbly. But I heard it, in that second. Becca was one of the people holding me up, and I heard her. 'Fall'. She said 'fall', just like that.” “'Fall',” Hotaru repeats, in the same way. Fast, quiet, out with the breath.

“It was only to herself, there was no way she'd think I would hear, I know that,” Emma says, rubbing her forehead. “And she didn't really want me to fall, I know that too. And we were friends after. Just like before. I never said anything about it. There was nothing I could possibly say.” There's distant memories of having this very thought process, lying on her little bed, hugging a plushie Becca had given her for Christmas that year. Then a period where she really tried to forget it. But the energy persisted in her, even without the thoughts. The energy feels so familiar.

“I'm not sure... I don't know exactly why she said it,” Emma says, her face in her hands, her elbows on the table. “But something changed in me that day, I think. I don't know what it was, but I think something really changed in me.” And then she starts to cry again. Into her hands, quietly, so that no one would have to know. But Hotaru knows anyways. She stands up, picks up her chair, walks around the table, and sets it next to Emma's. Silently, delicately, like she was surprising her. Then she sits in the chair and hugs Emma from the side. Buries her head into Emma's shoulder. Squeezes even tighter.

“I don't know what to say, but I thought this was a good thing to do,” Hotaru says, muffled into Emma's shirt.

“Mmm,” Emma says, an affirmative noise.

“If something did change, then that's good, I think,” Hotaru says, a minute later. “Because I love you the way you are right now.”

“Mmm...” Emma says. It is all she can manage at the moment.

They sit like that for a long time, a very long time, who knows how long. Much longer than it takes a leaf to fall from a tree to wrong. Not so long that you could watch a green leaf turn all the way red.

“Hotaru,” Emma says. “What are you thinking about?”

“Mmm...” Hotaru says, “I was thinking... isn't it actually very funny that we call the season fall, just because the leaves fall down?”

Emma smiles. “Hey yeah,” she says. “That is pretty funny.” “It's so silly,” Hotaru says. “Like everything to do with seasons is actually so silly when you think about it.”

 “Yeah, I guess so,” Emma says, and laughs a little. Not just about that, and not just about sitting in a little patio, her eyes bleary red, getting hugged by Hotaru, and not just about the story she told, or about hats or Cerebus or toilet ghosts or anything, not even just her life, but everything, everything there was to know seemed to add up to a little laughter just then.

 “Hotaru, I'm okay now,” she says. Hotaru unwraps herself, leaving just a hand on Emma's back.

 “Oh!” she says, reaching across the table and grabbing her backpack. “Do you want a candy?”

 “I'm fine, thanks,” Emma says, and stands up. “I'm just going to the bathroom.”

 Hotaru stands up and watches as she heads into the cafe. Then she walks over to a planter near the fence. From it she pulls out a blue feather, probably from a jay, that she'd noticed lying there before, while they were hugging. She hurries back to the table, pulls out her book, and slides it between the pages. Safe, secure, secret. No one saw. She feels a bit embarrassed, but she wants a souvenir. Not just the Moomin hat or the pink Adidas hoodie or the black skirt from Kit and Ace or the jacket from Free People or the picture she took of the fancy cake, but a souvenir souvenir, one just for memories. One that can go in the box under her bed with the picture of her and Emma wearing sunglasses and the maps from Disney World and the laminated flower she found near her grandma's grave and the egg timer that her mom gave her that broke and the sheet music for the song they played for her high school graduation and lots of other things she can't remember right then, but that's okay, because they're in the box. And the sky and trees begin to look not so much like skies or trees but a rippling canvas of memory, everything triggering and cascading into each other, even the colours, vivid, meaningful, wonderful.

[awinterleaf]

WFNCC

Now here is a new story I have been thinking about: it is called DANK MEMES.

She got out of my shower and sat on my bed. Her hair smelled like my shampoo, which seemed like it should be really appealing or unappealing but was actually neither.

"I think I figured out a key difference between people." she said. "Like... a previously overlooked factor in how like... a personality develops."

"Um, okay." I said.

"Some people have stall-type showers, standalone showers, right? And some people have bathtub-type showers, like you."

"Like me, right." I said.

"And of the people with bathtub-type showers, they're all like... you turn the tap on, and you get the right temperature on the faucet, and then you like, pull a thing or hit a switch, and it comes out of the showerhead instead, right?"

"Yeah, I think they're all like that."

"Okay. And... no matter what, no matter how hot the water in the faucet is, the water in the showerhead, it's always cold at first, right?"

"Yeah. That's just... how it works."

"Okay. Here's the big split: in some showers, it takes a second to switch over, so you can like... dodge. Dodge the cold water. And then only get your head wet when it's warm again. But some, it's instant. And you get blasted in the head with cold water."

"Ah." I said. "So can you dodge in my shower?" "No, no..." she said. "Hadn't you ever noticed?" "I guess I never thought about it." I said.

"To be fair, I never thought about it until just now, either..." she said. "But I got blasted in the head just now, and it was like... wow. Shocking, you know? I feel like if I had to go through that, every morning, I would be such a different person. I think it would affect my whole day. Each and every day."

"Ah. I see." I said. "But I shower at night, before bed."

"Oh." she said. "I hadn't thought about that."

He minimized the Microsoft Word window and rotated around in my Office chair, probably about a 720 rotation, at first making a groaning sound, which he turned into a sputtering horse noise, which became more rapid until it sounded machinelike. It sounded like the pneumatic ratchet that my dad would use to undo troublesome bolts.

He stopped while facing me. I handed him a picture of a puffin with text disparaging black people on it and the lighter.

He coughed and said "Would you rather be hoarse or a horse?"

I didn't think about this question and waited in silence until he handed me back a The Harlem Shake and the lighter.

We sat in silence a bit more. Then, as I handed him a picture of a bear with racist text and the lighter, I asked "What did you think of the story?"

"I don't know," he said. "That conversation never happened, did it?"

"Nah." He handed me a picture of a cat in a suit with text about laser pointers and the lighter.

"I could tell, which is already a bad sign." he said. "But if you're going to make up a conversation, why not make it something interesting? Don't talk about like... showers and crap like that."

"Okay, what?" I said. I handed him Darude - Sandstorm and the lighter. "What's interesting?"

"Like... how consumerism is replacing captialism, or something."

I squinted hard. "That sounds boring." I said.

He handed me Machine Code and the lighter. "No, no," he said. "It's uhh... like, money has been abstracted from success, and now the average person has no sense of success, they just have... things they want to be able to buy."

"Wait, wait... So... if the conversation in my story had actually happened, it would be okay that it was boring?" I asked. "That seems wrong." I handed him a picture of a duck on wheels and the lighter.

"Umm..." he said. "I dunno, maybe not." "I remember once, as a kid... like, pretty young, maybe 5 or 6, my older cousin told me a story about how he had ordered chicken fingers at a restaurant, and the waitress had said 'which hand?'"

"Hilarious." he said. He handed me Hot Wailord on Skitty Action and the lighter.

"Well, later, me and my dad were telling each other jokes. I was the age that like... you're just learning what humor is, and how jokes work, and you just want to learn a bunch of them."

"I can vaguely remember that."

"Anyways, I told him that joke. Just the 'which hand?' thing. And he said that it wasn't very funny."

"That's kinda harsh!" he said. I handed him Legalize Rainbow Cruise and the lighter.

"Well, it was true." I said "I tried to defend it, by telling him the related anecdote. Like, the whole thing with my cousin, how the waitress had said it. And I said... 'it's funny for something that actually happened.' To justify it."

"What did he say?" he asked. He took out Loss from a ziplock bag and handed it to me with the lighter.

"I don't remember." I said.

"I'm surprised you remember that much." he said.

"I dunno, memory is weird. Sometimes I remember something from that age and it feels like I never forgot it, that it was always... there. But maybe I did? I mean, I probably hadn't thought about that in over a decade. Maybe I'll forget it again." I squinted very hard. "There's no way to know. So I write it down." I handed him Dewritos and the lighter.

"So all that really happened?" he asked.

"The thing with the waitress and my cousin? Or my talking to my dad?" I asked. "But yeah, they both happened."

He handed me Not My Tolberone and the lighter. "But this right now, this isn't happening. This never happened."

I coughed. "What?" I said.

"Us talking right now. This isn't real. This has never happened and will never happen."

I kept on coughing. He spun back around to my desk.

"What's this one?" he asked, single clicking a file called "White Flag Nihilism Club of Canada.doc".

"Oh no," I said. "Don't read that one. It isn't done. It isn't even started." I handed him the Attack on Titan OP and the lighter.

"But the file size is so big." he said.

"It has a lot of stuff, but none of it is part of it. There's zero overlap between what's in there and what the story is. Not a single word in common."

"So what's in there?" he asked. He handed me Nintendo's Lightning and the lighter.

"Nothing. Garbage." I said.

"Nothing comes from nothing." He said, as if quoting someone.

"I think when it hits some critical mass, it could somehow compress and transform, like a diamond or a butterfly."

 "Or a black hole."

"It won't be ready for another two years, at least."

The president of the WFNCC sat on the bus writing. He listened to Swans and looked out the window.

He had an exam for his literary theory class on the next day. Then he had a British literature exam two days later. And then after that he had a long stretch of free time that laid before him like a pasture. But it was winter, and the ground was hard, and the grass yellowed, but at least there was not snow.

And when he thought of what he would do, his mind buzzed with vague ambitions, half-finished, half-started, or half-imagined projects, the sum of which would take more time than remained, but each, individually, would not satisfy him.

And he thought also of just visiting friends, sleeping in every day, spending whole days or consecutive days without leaving his bed, binge-eating junk food and binge-watching anime, having lots of sex with his girlfriend. And his mind ached with emptiness when he thought of both, or either, or compared them.

The president and founder and only member of the WFNCC's iPod was broken, so he listened to Swans on his phone. The DAC of the phone was miserable and there was an additional gap between each track. In that gap, he felt strange.

He thought about his exams, his degree, his graduation, and what lay beyond. He thought about them like he expected a skydiver might think about a plane, the door, the sky, and the ground. He did not think about any aspect of his life in the way he expected a skydiver might think about his parachute.

Yesterday, at a Smash Bros tournament, he sat down for one of his second round pools matches. He saw his opponent had a Sanza Clip player with rockbox. He asked him about it and they discussed the quality of the DAC, the storage capability, the available rockbox features. The president of the WFNCC expressed interest in buying one. After the match, the other player threw his controller on the ground and swore. He then apologized. The president of the WFNCC thought that his opponent wasn't really mad at him, or himself, or the game, but some sort of universal injustice that necessitated that he lose. He also felt that, because of the incident, and the strength of the bad associations that had been created, he could never buy a Sanza Clip.

In the gap between tracks, the president of the WFNCC perceives the gap that is driving something insane. Either him or the universe is being driven insane.

He has things he wants to buy, but not the money. It is that gap. He feels like he ought to be unhappy when he is happy. It is that gap. He can imagine something that is not real. It is that gap.

He can blame it on some fundamental hypocrisy in the universe or in his own mind. Or he can blame it on not being hit on the head with cold water every morning. If he had a parachute, he would just be a burden on it. He squints his eyes tightly but it does not work. He wants to smoke dank memes. He wants to buy a new backpack. He wants to look like other hypothetical people. He wants to understand everyone, even people who do things like fake accents or throw controllers or people who hate his writing. He wants everyone to be friends and everyone to win. He wants everyone to love his writing. He wants and wants and wants.

And then the music comes back on.

[awinterleaf]

Dream

Tapir

On the way to the zoo I asked him what his favorite animal was and he said "tapir", like he had been expecting me to ask that, he answered so fast. And I said "wow, you answered quickly" and he said he had already been thinking about the tapir.

When we got to the tapir it was asleep far away from the fence and we could barely see it. He complained loudly and then started sulking.

"Hey," he said. "Use 'mind swap' on the tapir."

"No," I said. "I'm not gonna use 'mind swap' on the tapir."

"Just like, zip yourself over there quick." he said. "Make him walk over here, easy. It'll take like two seconds."

"But what will happen to me?"

"Well, the tapir's asleep, so you'll fall asleep too. We can sit down first, of course, so you don't fall over."

"No, no." I said. "The tapir's body is asleep, but it's mind is dreaming. If I used 'mind swap', I'd start living out the dreams of the tapir."

I felt myself overcome by a gripping horror. Cold sweat beaded on the back of my neck and my vision grew dark at the edges.

"Aw, c'mon." he said. "That wouldn't be so bad."

"The dreams of the tapir," I said quietly, to myself. "The dreams of the tapir, the dreams of the tapir."

Lucky

We were in the hotel lobby, and she was in an adjoining mail/laundry room. I don't know what she was thinking about, but I was thinking about last night. We were waiting for a taxi. Like every night with her, thinking about it was like solving a little puzzle, or a crossword, a maze of small but tricky questions that seemed that they must somehow fit together. Questions like "what is the difference between friendly intimacy and romantic intimacy when it's between girls?" and "what did she say just before we fell asleep, exactly?" and "what does she think of me anyways, and what do I think of her?". That last question, the last of the puzzle, I always solved in the same way, with me repeating "I love her" in my head, calmly and happily, like a mantra.

Just then, when I had just thought it, I heard her say "huh." in a sort of surprised way. Then, a bit later, she called me in to see something.

The room had a row of mailboxes with combination locks. She was standing in front of one that was open and empty.

"I opened it." she said.

"What do you mean?"

"I guessed the combination."

"No way."

"Really... I tried it on the other mailboxes and it didn't work. But you can try it yourself on this one. It's 4-12-41."

I relocked it and tried. It opened. I looked all over the lock and box for any indication of the combination. I tried it on the other locks. They didn't open.

"This is some sort of prank, right?" I said.

"No, no..." she said. She looked pretty shaken. "And what's really, really weird is that... I didn't guess randomly, or choose this locker randomly, or anything. I just... knew, somehow. It came to me." She seemed a little freaked out, but also a bit giddy. I felt the same way. I felt like I was about to wake up.

The taxi beeped its horn outside. "Huh." I said.

Sucks

"Can you use 'mind swap' to make that guy give me a free popsicle?" he asked, pointing to an ice cream cart.

"I could," I said, "but then he'd be where I am, watching himself give a popsicle to you, and that would probably freak him out..."

"Right, right." he said. "That wouldn't end well..."

After a bit, during which his face was screwed up like he was thinking hard, he said "OK, you tie yourself to a chair. Or I'll tie you to a chair. Then you 'mind swap' with some rich dude. You move all his rich stuff somewhere else, we swap back, go pick it up, boom."

"I can only use 'mind swap' if I can see the other person." I said. "Plus, he'll probably have security, and password protection, and stuff, and I wouldn't know the passwords."

"You could just guess them!"

"That's dumb."

"Man, 'mind swap' sucks."

"You're telling me."

Lotto

A few days later, I approached her with my idea. I didn't want to explain the details. I focused on the cheapness, and thus harmlessness, of the experiment. A "why not" sorta thing.

When we bought it she was very happy and she talked foolishly about how to spend the money, like we had already won. At first I was distracted by my bizarre plan, which I still felt strangely confident about, but soon the silliness of the conversation distracted me and I began to laugh with her.

"I think the real value of this is that you can dream for a bit." she said, and I agreed.

Sheep

"Can you use 'mind swap' to find out if Yume likes me?" he asked.

"How the hell would I do that?" I asked.

"I dunno... 'mind swap' with her and then look for a diary or something."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"Ugh..." he moaned.

"Why don't you just tell her you like her?" I said. "What's the worst that could happen?"

"I'm too scared..." he said. "Oh! Hey! Can you 'mind swap' with me and tell her as me?"

"No, no way." I said. "God, no."

"Why not?"

"Well, to start with, I 100% for sure do not want to let you in my body."

"We can tie you down first."

"Wow, it's screwed up that this plan involves tying me down to reassure me." I said. "But that isn't even the most screwed up part of this plan." "What is?" "Well like, you like this girl, right? And you want to have some sort of long-lasting and fulfilling and meaningful relationship with her, right? And you're gonna deprive yourself out of one of the most beautiful and memorable parts of that... just out of cowardice? Don't you know that cowardice is the only irredeemable sin? I can't think of anything that's less attractive."

"Shyness is cute." he said. "Lots of people think shyness is cute."

"Shyness is stuttering and blushing when you confess." I said. "Cowardice isn't confessing at all."

"Ah," he said. "I see."

"I don't think you two are right together, at all, honestly." I said. This felt a bit mean, and probably was just jealousy, so I added "But if you're going to do it, you should do it right."

"I dunno..." he said. "She just makes me so happy..."

And as soon as he said that, with the tone he used, I knew I had to tune him out for awhile, for like five minutes, at least. But I was gonna let him keep talking, because a person sometimes wants and enjoys nothing more than talking about the person they like. I'm the same way. At one point I even used 'mind swap' on him, just for a second or two, just to see if he'd notice, and of course he didn't, he was so enthralled.

Gucci

The store was a big cube of tinted glass. The inside was all marble and gold. Someone opened the door for us and everyone kept saying "welcome to Gucci!" in a sing-song tone that I felt would be stuck in my head like a pop song. There was cool music that we couldn't identify and didn't even show up on her phone's song ID thing.

The last few weeks had been a blissful vivid waking dream, as meaningless and happy as a long afternoon nap. But she still had reservations. "We shouldn't be here." she said. True, we were both wearing t-shirts, and shorts, and our shoes were obviously cheap, and we were flop-sweating from the midday haze of the city. But we had money, and that was the only part that mattered.

We discussed quietly for like, the dozenth time, our underlying philosophy about how our money ought to be spent. We looked at things and deflected sales clerks, who still sort of scared us. We saw a $20,000 leather handbag but agreed that that was still a bit much. We agreed on a lot of things and discussed what we didn't. We had a lot of fun. I saw the future and I saw a lot more of this and I grinned. I thought "I love her" as a default thought, like a mantra, still.

"I like these." she said, about a pair of black leather sneakers with a red floral print. "I want to try them on."

A clerk came over and she named her size.

"I'm sorry." the clerk said. "These are men's shoes."

[awinterleaf]

28OCT

He woke up to his alarm from a dream he couldn’t remember well. The dream involved his dad bringing him another blanket. He lay in bed and tried to work out whether there was any way he could still have the blanket, despite it being a dream. He felt disappointed when he became more awake and sensible and realized how foolish the thought process had been.

It was a Tuesday, at 7am. He thought about his first class. It was British Literature from 1900-1920. He hadn’t done the day’s reading. He tried to remember what reading he should have done, but couldn’t. He felt that was a good enough reason to suspect that this class wouldn’t have been particularly noteworthy to him anyways. Then he realized that if he skipped this class, he would likely skip his other classes, and he felt OK about that too. So he went back to sleep.

At 10:30 he woke up again and went to his computer. He responded to messages people had sent him through the night. He saw that he had gotten several messages about wanting to buy a SNES controller and felt vaguely insane. Some of the messages referred to him as “Kenny”, which was not his name. He asked one of the people who had messaged him to send him the url of the ad they had seen. The ad had his phone number listed, but in the “contact” section of the ad, a phone number one digit away from his was listed. He contacted the poster of the ad and explained the situation. He did all of this while defecating. Then he looked at various websites until he felt he had seen all the new content that interested him that had been posted on the internet since he went to bed. He ate peanut butter and Fudgee-Os and drank orange juice.

He tried to record a tutorial on an audio manipulation program he had found. He recorded his screen and his voice as he explained his attempt to isolate a particular sound in the song “Condo Music” by Young Thug. His voice was raspy from a cold and he coughed frequently. Plus, he had set up the audio wrong, so his voice echoed. After 30 minutes, he gave up trying to isolate the sound. Despite the tutorial failing in basically every way it could, he still uploaded the video to Youtube.

Then he masturbated using his onahole. He took a shower and washed himself and the onahole. Then he lay on his bed in just his underwear with a blanket covering him and watched an episode of Utopia on one monitor while he watched a muted speedrun of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on the other monitor. When the scenes in Utopia became too violent, he would block that monitor with his hand. He watched an episode of Aikatsu and the latest episode of Denki-gai no Honya-san, wanting to see the end of the speedrun. The speedrunner got a new world record time by over four minutes.

He dressed himself and then looked at sites on the internet. He received an email telling him that the case he ordered for his new phone had shipped, and he realized he had ordered the wrong case. He discussed a surprise party he was going to attend with the person who had invited him and was told that it was a costume party. He felt less enthusiastic about the party. He received a private message on a forum from someone who had invited him to a private site for sharing music. He had been very underwhelmed by the site and did not want to use the account as much as he had promised he would when requesting the invite. The person who had sent him the invitation had been remanded for this inactivity. He had no idea how to respond in this situation so he ignored it.

It was getting close to the time for his first therapy session, so he double checked the address and the insurance information. He went to the bathroom again. He left to catch the bus. He saw it coming down the street, and scrambled to run across the street and catch it on time. Then he realized that the bus was going in the wrong direction and watched the correct bus pass the stop he had just left. He went back across the street and waited for the next bus.

He drafted in his head a story he wanted to write about another time he was waiting for and riding the bus, the Saturday prior, and several coincidences that had happened. He couldn’t think of what the point of the story would be, or what framing device it would have, but he also couldn’t figure out if those elements were necessary.

At his therapist’s office, he sat in the waiting room trying to think of something to do on his phone to pass the time. He looked at his new jeans and thought that he hated them but he hated them much less than his old jeans. Then he thought about how much he hated his backpack and how his shoes were falling apart and idly Googled alternatives. He looked into a scheme for getting fake luxury goods for free and browsed listings of knockoff Gucci sneakers. A girl he thought was in his creative writing class left the therapist’s office. He deliberately did not look up at her as she paid and left.

During his appointment, he discussed with his therapist various things that he was troubled by in his life. They talked about his feelings of hopelessness, his drug use, his lolicon, his family and friends, his academic career, his writing, and his overwhelming loneliness. He felt some relief that the therapist knew the term “lolicon” and that he didn’t have to explain it. They covered these in vague terms to determine which areas would be important to cover in future situations.

When he left, his therapist gave him a printout of various internal cognitive biases and encouraged him to consider them in his day to day life. Then they scheduled an appointment for the following week. When he left, he wasn’t sure what to do. It was 7pm. He felt like he should eat something, so he started wandering north, assuming he would see some restaurant. After walking awhile, thinking of the appointment he just had, he was stopped by a strange man. The man asked him if he knew where the LCBO was. He said that he did, and that he was heading in that direction too, and that they could walk together. The man asked if he knew how much the bus was, and if he would give him change for the bus. The man was planning on buying some cheap hard liquor on credit because he didn’t get paid until Thursday. The student said that he didn’t have change but that he would buy some beer for himself with cash and then he would have some change.

As they walked to the LCBO, the man talked about how he had recently moved from Toronto. They discussed the differences between Toronto and Waterloo. The man used swear words casually and had an easygoing attitude. The student also adopted these speech patterns during their conversation. The man seemed slightly older than the student. The man asked the student what he was studying and the student said English. They discussed what that entailed, and the man summarized it as “Catcher in the Rye shit”. His theory is that the protagonist of the Catcher in the Rye was an alcoholic. The student said that was a compelling theory.

The student bought a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon Strong Beer with a 20 dollar bill and the man bought a small bottle of rum. When they left, the student pointed out an approaching bus that the man ought to take. He quickly handed the man 3 dollars in change and the man ran off, thanking the student. Then the student continued walking north.

At a bus stop, he saw someone he knew waiting for the bus. It was someone that he had talked to only on a few occasions, but they had found they had similar interests: they both played Super Smash Bros Melee, they both were in English, they both read similar books, they both did recreational drugs. He asked the student if he was going to the local fighting game club that night. The student said no. They discussed local events in the local video game clubs. When they got on the bus, the friend found a piece of paper on the seat. He picked it up and said that he thought it was a roach from a distance. They discussed marijuana, and the student said that he was trying to cut down, that he was finding it a waste of time. He said that there was many nights where he knew he would do nothing but eat and watch TV and go to bed, and that marijuana would make that better. But he said that he knew he ought to be doing something better and more productive during that time. The friend agreed. But the student didn’t know what better thing he should do.

The student got off at his stop and went home. His roommates were loudly playing an NHL video game. They swore at the game and possibly at each other. The student put a frozen pizza in the oven. He responded to messages he received while he was gone. He started watching a speedrun of Super Mario RPG. Then he ate his pizza and drank a beer while writing a story. After he finished the story, he planned on watching an episode of TV while going to sleep.

He thought about the day that had passed and couldn’t decide if it was a good day or a bad day. He couldn’t decide if it was a memorable day or a forgettable day. He couldn’t decide if it was a typical day or a strange day. He couldn’t decide if it was a productive day or a useless day. He couldn’t decide if he was happy or sad.

[awinterleaf]

15OCT

She was sitting on the park bench and I was lying with my head on her lap, looking up at her head silhouetted by the sun. It was a clear warm day in October with a chill but infrequent breeze and I felt like there wasn’t going to be a day this nice again until spring.

“Okay, listen to this.” she said. “Picture that you’re walking through a field of grass, and there’s this noise, it’s something moving, some sort of animal. A noise, coming through the grass.”

I reached up to her and touched her cheek.

“Not yet, not yet.” she said. “Okay, so... if you were any other animal, you’d run away. Even some people would probably run away.”

“What is this?” I asked.

“It’s like, a thing. A thing I believe now.”

“Sure.” I said. I shifted a bit in her lap. I listened for animals and heard distant sounds of birds.

“So... you think there’s a predator. That’s what’s making you run: you think you might get eaten. But there is no such predator. You have nothing to fear.”

“What if you’re in the woods, and it’s a bear?”

“C’mon, this is supposed to be like... philosophic.”

“Oh.” I said. My hair was spilling off the bench a bit and I was worried it would get dirty.

“So, what should you do instead? What should you think?”

“I dunno.” I said. I reached up towards her again. In the shadow, I could only barely make out her face’s features. They seemed so perfect. I wanted to sink my hands into her hair, or put my finger on her lips.

“Okay, hold on, I think I know. There’s three things. The first one you have to think is: ‘there’s that sound again.’ Like, recognize what it is, and use that to dismiss your fear. Realize that it’s just a sound and there’s no need to panic.”

“Okay.” I said.

“I think this is what most people do. But it isn’t as good, you’re still feeling fear, you’re just talking it down. So you move to the second thing to think: ‘there’s that fear again.’ You... recognize the fear. You recognize it as an emotion, but you don’t react to it. You notice the effect on your body, your pulse, and stuff, but you know that none of these have to make you react at all.”

“Okay.” I said. I was wearing a bra and it rubbed against me in a strange way when I laid on my back, so I kept adjusting myself. I felt like I wanted to not just be comfortable, but to be perfectly comfortable, endlessly comfortable, because I wanted to have the feeling of believing... believing that maybe I could just lie like this forever, looking up at her face, and the sun would never go down.

“But then, you’re still giving name to fear. You’re still thinking ‘fear’. And I wonder... how much of the psychological reaction we have to ‘fear’, how much of it is like... psychosomatic, you know?”

I didn’t really know. But I nodded anyways.

“So the last thing you think is: ‘there’s that place again.’ There’s the place in your mind, again. That particular junction. It has no name. It used to mean something, but now it carries only the slightest physical reactions, reactions that could be caused by any number of other things, and could lead to any number of other emotions.”

“And what does that get you?” I asked, not really sure what she was talking about.

“Perfect control of the mind.”

“Is that what you want?” I asked. “I’m not sure if I want that.”

“Whatever.” she said. “Do you think I’m onto something there?”

“What were the three again?” I asked.

“‘There’s that noise again,’ ‘There’s that fear again,’ and ‘There’s that place again.’ she said.

“Hmm, maybe.” I said, still not sure what any of this meant.

“I think this sort of thinking can apply to every bad feeling.” she said. “You just think... ‘I know the cause, I know the feeling, I know the place.’”

“Wait a minute.” I said. “You just got this from that song I showed you last night. The lyrics.”

She grinned and laughed and then hummed with cute, ironic, innocence.

“Well, that’s what I think they mean.” She said.

“I don’t think that’s what they mean.” I said, laughing. “You didn’t cover like, half the lyrics.”

“What do you think they mean, then?”

“Um... it’s talking about how there’s such a distance between people, but that you can come together.”

“Yeah? That’s it? You think?”

“I dunno, something like that.” I said. “I think it’s more just about... a feeling. A feeling of something distant, but warm, that you’re approaching.”

“What do you think that is?” she asked.

I reached up to her, put my hand on her cheek, and raised my head to kiss her.

/

Alice hates drum and bass music, or whatever kind of music it was that boomed from Kenji’s car. She likes a lot of music, but not this. She likes music where the artist has some emotion, and that emotion makes them record a song, and then hearing that song makes her feel that emotion.

“What is the emotion this music is supposed to make me feel?” she said, loudly, to no one in particular. Kenji and Aubrey, in the front seat, ignored her, or couldn’t hear her.

Ume, in the seat next to her, also didn’t respond. Ume also didn’t like this kind of music. Her strategy was to immerse herself as much as possible in some other music. She did this by picturing a score and a piano keyboard and slightly twitching her fingers and elbows as if playing the song on her thighs. Her hands didn’t even move, but she heard the music clearly in her head, and nothing else.

“Hey, hey.” Alice said, nudging Ume. “What emotion is this music supposed to make us feel?”

“Hmm…” Ume said. “I dunno, excited?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Alice said. “I think you’re right. It’s getting us pumped.” She nodded her head with ironic vigor. Ume smiled.

“What are we getting pumped for?” Alice said. Ume had immersed herself again in her faux-play and ignored her.

Alice leaned forward and stuck her head between Kenji and Aubrey. “What are we getting pumped for?” she asked again. They both laughed.

“Seriously though, what are we doing tonight? Where are we going?” she asked.

Kenji turned down the music. “Umm, we’re picking up Ume from school, and then we’re picking up Aubrey from work,” he started, as if going through a mental list. “And then…”

He pulled into a parking lot.

“Umm… what should we do tonight?” he said.

“I dunno, man.” Aubrey said. “Let’s just get some beers and relax.”

“I feel restless.” Kenji said. “It’s Friday night, we should do something.”

“I could go either way.” Alice said. “What do you want to do, Ume?”

“I dunno.” Ume said.

“Come on,” Alice said. “You really have no preference? None at all?”

“Umm… honestly?” Ume said. “I kinda want to just go home.”

“OK!” Alice said, clapping. “Can you drive us home? You guys can do whatever.”

“What, really?” Kenji said.

“Yeah, why not.” Alice said. “Lots of other days to go out.”

Aubrey was leaned up against his window. He looked like he might go to sleep.

“Alright, whatever.” Kenji said. He turned up the music again and they drove to Alice and Ume’s apartment without speaking much.

When he dropped them off, he rolled down the window and called out to them.

“Let’s do something fun for real tomorrow. Really fun. Let’s go to the beach!”

“It’s way too cold to go to the beach.” Alice said. “It’s October.”

“C’mon, we’ll get a bunch of people, have a beach party. We don’t have to swim. I’ll try to get Rebecca to come, you can meet Rebecca.”

“Who’s Rebecca?” Ume asked.

“Some girl he’s crushing all over.” Alice said.

“She’s a former celebrity!” Kenji said. “She has like, three CDs out, she was on TV…”

“I think she’s a lesbian.” Alice said.

“You haven’t even met her!” Kenji said.

“I feel like I have, with the amount you keep talking about her.” Alice said.

“You think everyone’s a lesbian!” Kenji said.

“Okay, but you never do. Like, remember those weird vegan poet girls? They obviously were in love with each other.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Kenji said. “But I thought… they loved me too.”

Alice shrugged and walked away. Kenji pulled out. Ume waved to the car. Aubrey was asleep in his seat.

After they left, Alice turned to Ume and saw she was grinning.

“What’s up?” she asked her.

“I wanted to spend time with just the two of us.” Ume said. Alice smiled and hugged her.

/

Act one: The meeting of PNEIGH and KITTIES.

Premise: Despite feeling like a “joke character”, “half a person”, and “an abominable trainwreck”, PNEIGH still decides to meet her new neighbour, KITTIES.

Scene one: The hallway of an apartment building.

PNEIGH looks through her peephole at KITTIES slowly carrying boxes into the apartment across the hall. PNEIGH has her black hair in pigtails. KITTIES has brown hair in a “hime” cut. PNEIGH opens the door.

PNEIGH: Hey, do you need a hand?

KITTIES: Oh, sure, yeah, thanks.

They continue to move boxes. They exchange brief words in the hall as they pass each other. The boxes are heavy and PNEIGH is struggling somewhat.

Their task completed, they stand in KITTIES’ apartment. There is minimal furniture but many cardboard boxes.

PNEIGH: Whew, what’s in these things?

KITTIES: Books, mostly.

PNEIGH: But you have no bookshelves…?

KITTIES looks around her small apartment. It seems as if she had never considered this. There is a strange silence.

PNEIGH: Oh sorry… but what’s your name, by the way?

KITTIES: It’s KITTIES. Nice to meet you.

PNEIGH: Hi! I’m your pretty neighbour.

KITTIES: Do I have an ugly neighbour?

PNEIGH: No, I just…

There is another strange silence.

KITTIES: Listen, I was just about to get lunch, do you know anywhere around here?

PNEIGH: Umm, yeah, there’s a café down the block, it’s pretty nice, I go there pretty often…

KITTIES: Have you eaten? Would you like to join me?

PNEIGH: Yeah, well, I just ate lunch, but I’ll come along and have a drink or something.

KITTIES: Sure, okay.

Scene two: A street.

PNEIGH and KITTIES walk in silence. It is a crisp autumn day and dry leave s blow around the sidewalk. PNEIGH attempts to say something on several occasions but can’t think of what to say. KITTIES looks calm and content as she looks around the neighbourhood.

Scene three: A café.

PNEIGH and KITTIES sit across from each other. KITTIES eats a tuna sandwich and drinks a glass of milk while PNEIGH drinks a glass of orange juice.

KITTIES: So, what do you do? Tell me about yourself.

PNEIGH: Um, I feel like there’s a lot that’s implied just by me living in that building, and that neighbourhood, and all of it is true, ha ha.

KITTIES (smiling): You’re gay? (PNEIGH nods) And poor? And single? (PNEIGH nods more, grinning). I’m basically in the same boat. I have some money saved up, but I have to look for a job around here. I’m from up north, out in the country.

PNEIGH: Wow, so this is the big city, eh?

KITTIES: Yup, I’m pretty excited… but I dunno. Probably a lot of challenges ahead.

PNEIGH: Yeah…

KITTIES: So do you have a job?

PNEIGH: Um, not right now. I had a thing… it didn’t work out. My parents are sending me some money.

KITTIES: Well, we can help each other, then.

PNEIGH: Sure!

They have finished their meals and drinks. KITTIES pays for PNEIGH without asking her. PNEIGH awkwardly thanks KITTIES and KITTIES awkwardly further downplays the minor favor, and explains that it is thanks for her help in moving. This all occurs via mumbling and mysterious sub-aural gestures.

Scene four: A street.

PNEIGH and KITTIES walk back in silence. KITTIES is still calm and silent. PNEIGH also now seems more contented and less nervous. She smiles broadly as she looks around the neighbourhood, as if seeing it for the first time. She is trying to imagine how KITTIES is seeing the neighbourhood: as one of hope and potential. KITTIES, noticing PNEIGH smiling, smiles slightly to herself, too.

Scene five: The hallway of an apartment building

PNEIGH and KITTIES walk to their rooms. KITTIES moves to enter her room. PNEIGH’s face does several contortions as she tries to gather courage.

PNEIGH: Do you want to come in and see my room?

KITTIES: Yeah, okay.

They enter PNEIGH’s room. It is covered in merchandise of a magical girl show called MAGICAL GIRL SHERBET. There are posters on the walls, and figures on her desk. There is also merchandise of other shows but it is mostly of MAGICAL GIRL SHERBET. PNEIGH looks embarrassed and KITTIES looks around in a calm, neutral fashion. She sits on PNEIGH’s bed and PNEIGH sits at her desk chair. There is a bit of a silence.

PNEIGH: Do you want anything to drink?

KITTIES: No, that’s okay.

There is another silence.

KITTIES: So, you really like this show, huh?

PNEIGH: Haha, uh, yeah, yeah. I’m a fan… I’ve liked it since I was a kid.

KITTIES: Is it a kid’s show?

PNEIGH: Yeah, well… The original show was for kids, but there’s like… spinoffs and sequels and stuff, now they market more to the older fans.

KITTIES: Hmmm…

PNEIGH: Ahaha… I don’t really know how to explain it. It just sort of… became important to me. It’s nice to have things that are important.

KITTIES: Why do you like it?

PNEIGH: I dunno… it makes me happy. The characters are really cute. I really like cutesy stuff.

KITTIES: Yeah, I can tell.

PNEIGH is embarrassed and looks away, staring up at a corner of her ceiling. She can’t think of what to say. KITTIES feels an emotion she can’t quite process.

KITTIES: What sort of stuff do you think is cute?

PNEIGH: What, like… physically? Or like… personality?

KITTIES: What about clothes? What sort of clothes are cute?

PNEIGH: I dunno… floral print stuff, pink, stuff with ruffles… hair accessories, like, bows and ribbons… Hats are often cute, glasses… I don’t like piercings too much.

KITTIES: Darn, none of that corresponds to anything at all I own.

PNEIGH: Haha, that’s okay.

KITTIES: I dress very plainly.

PNEIGH: That can be cute too. Or like, someone who dresses plain, that one day adds a little cute accessory… it like, quadruples the cuteness.

KITTIES: I’ll keep that in mind.

PNEIGH: Haha really, if you’re ever thinking about my approval, just keep adding stuff until you start thinking “this is insane, this is way too cutesy”. Then you’ll be on the right track.

KITTIES smiles broadly and looks around the room further. PNEIGH still feels embarrassed but is smiling too.

KITTIES: But, y’know… most of these characters look pretty young.

PNEIGH: Yeah, uh… in most of them they’re in middle school. They’re in high school for this one, though. PNEIGH points at a poster.

KITTIES: They look exactly the same in both of those.

PNEIGH: Uhh…

KITTIES: How old are kids when they’re in middle school? Like, 13?

PNEIGH: I honestly don’t know.

KITTIES: Do you ever worry about this sort of stuff? Like, what people might think if you’re going around talking about how cute 13 year old girls are?

PNEIGH: Well, they aren’t real…

KITTIES: But you also want a real relationship with someone who is real, at some point, right? Don’t you think that could be… problematic?

PNEIGH: I dunno… I just don’t think about it.

KITTIES: Well, maybe you should.

PNEIGH looks away again. She feels like she might start to cry. KITTIES isn’t quite sure why she said what she said, or how it was taken. She felt like she was saying everything “neutrally” but realizes that it probably wasn’t taken “neutrally”.

KITTIES: Hey, sorry… it’s none of my business. But I know that it’s really easy to get into something and end up not really understanding it… sometimes you gotta step back and take a look at yourself. It’s really hard, but I think it’s worth it, sometimes.

PNEIGH: No, you’re probably right, I dunno, I honestly don’t really know how I feel about a lot of things anymore.

KITTIES: Yeah… I think I can relate. Maybe we can help each other out.

PNEIGH: Yeah?

KITTIES: Yeah, I want to be friends.

PNEIGH: Me too…

KITTIES smiles again. PNEIGH feels like she can’t look at KITTIES right then and turns away. She feels like she has made a friend. She revealed some of the more minor and superficial awful things about herself, and it went OK, and the truly awful things about herself she has managed to hide. She feels like she convincingly presented herself as an actual human being. She feels like she might be able to keep up this appearance for the duration of their relationship. The scene fades away.

/

SC: hey rebecca

RB: hi

SC: whats up?

RB: uhh not much

RB: nothing really

RB: why?

SC: um, i just feel strange today

SC: idk

SC: can i say something weird?

RB: lol of course

SC: umm i feel like i’m… losing track of who i am.

SC: ok so like… i’m in this thread

SC: really long thread. one big stupid argument going on and on

SC: it’s about something really stupid, dont worry

RB: lol im sure

SC: its anonymous… and today i was looking at it, and i genuinely couldnt remember which posts were mine

RB: lol really?

RB: isnt there some way to check?

SC: no cause my ip changes a lot

SC: ok so because its anonymous, basically everyone on both sides is accusing everyone on the other side of being the same person

SC: which idk like it doesnt really… matter... but it somehow seems discrediting i guess

SC: and i saw one post that said like

SC: “all anyone can know for sure is that there’s at least one person on each side. but, if you’re reading this, and you’re on my side, you know that there’s at least two of us.”

SC: but they didnt say what side they were on lmao

SC: and i couldn't be sure that i hadnt made that post

RB: cant you tell based on like… what sort of language and “style” and stuff the post has?

SC: no because i try to write in a bunch of different ways

RB: why?

SC: so it seems like there's more people on my side

RB: LOL

RB: oh

RB: cant you look at the times and see if you were on the computer then?

SC: im always on the computer lol

RB: maybe that's part of the problem

RB: irl you can only be one person

SC: that feels weird for you to be saying

RB: no i think i know this better than anyone

RB: but really you should go for a walk

SC: its umm

SC: october 15

SC: it'll be… cold out?

RB: lol are you just extrapolating based on when you were outside last

SC: lol yeah

SC: idk it just seems so lonely

SC: wandering around outside

RB: prolly less lonely than like

RB: posting online

RB: and not knowing if youre alone or not

SC: i guess

RB: how many screennames do you think you used?

RB: like total

SC: umm… i dunno

SC: at least 200

SC: i use around 20 regularly nowadays

RB: which one feels the most real?

SC: this one

SC: spacechappie

SC: it makes me feel completely like spacechappie

RB: thats good

RB: even though spacechappie isnt real lol

RB: but i think of all the roles i had it was the one that felt most real too

SC: yeah?

SC: maybe we’re the same person

RB: no we aren’t

RB: im telling you now that we arent

RB: so there’s at least two of us

/

They were sitting on the roof, just finished eating lunch. Sherbet was lying on her back, staring at the sky, singing softly to herself. Pears was sitting with her back on the fence, half turned to look at a group of girls socializing on the ground below. Through the wind they couldn’t hear a word they said, just the sound of them laughing.

“Alert, alert,” Pears said, in a facetiously monotone, robotic voice. “Christina Spencer is wearing a black bra. Christina Spencer is wearing a black bra.”

“I don’t care.” Sherbet said.

“That’s kinda scandalous, right? I wonder if she has a boyfriend.”

They were silent for a while. All they could hear were the sounds of distant girls’ laughter.

“Hey, where are we gonna eat lunch when it gets cold out?” Sherbet asked.

“Um, I dunno.” Pears said. “The cafeteria, I guess.”

“Hmm… okay.”

“How big do you think Christina’s boobs are, Sherb?” Pears asked. “I think they’re getting bigger.”

“Hey, for all this pervertedness, do you actually have a like anyone?” Sherbet asked. “Like, have you ever had a crush on someone?”

“Nah.” Pears said. “I mean, I’ll like some girls more than others, but never so much that I want like… a romantic relationship or whatever.”

“Hmm…” Sherbet said.

“Why, have you?”

“Yeah, once. I had a crush on a girl in middle school. She was a year older than me. Really athletic, boyish… typical first crush sorta thing. Her name was Tammy.”

“Did you go to an all-girls middle school, too?”

“Uh huh. I think probably a lot of us had crushes on her.”

“And how’d that work out?”

“It was wonderful. Every day had so much more meaning, ‘cause… I could see her. Every day seemed so full of potential. The slightest attention she paid me made me giddy for weeks. And on the day she graduated… she took me aside and told me that I was special, and that she would miss me.”

“Huh.” Pears said. “I wonder how many people she told that too.”

“Shut up. Wow, I can tell you’ve never been in love before. You’d never think of that if you were in love. Not in a million years. It doesn’t matter how many people she said it to. I know it was special for each and every one of us.”

“Uh huh.”

“After she left, I felt so lonely… life felt so empty. There wasn’t anything I wanted to happen. School just seemed so pointless. I wanted to love someone else, but I already knew everyone there too well. I wanted to fall in love again.

“When we moved, and I realized I’d start high school and know no one, it felt like such a perfect opportunity. But I couldn’t love anyone. I could barely make friends. It felt so wrong to feel anything for these strange girls, who seemed to already know each other, who already seemed like they had so many close friends, friends closer than I would ever be. I wanted to find someone like Tammy, someone that everyone was allowed to love, that everyone was almost expected to love. A school prince.”

“I thought you wanted to be the school’s prince.” Pears said.

“Yeah, I realized that that’s what I should do. If no one like that existed here, I could become that person. And I could give everyone the opportunity to love me like I loved Tammy. But… you know... it hasn’t been going well.” Sherbet said. “And lately I feel like really, it makes more sense for me to be the school’s idol.”

“I’m sure that will go better.” Pears said, with a mixed level of sincerity.

“It seems like the only way… everyone else, if I picture loving them, it’s almost like… I feel like they’d take it as an insult, y’know?” Sherbet said.

“No, I have… no idea what that could mean.”

“It’s like, they’d say ‘what’s wrong with me, that a girl like Sherbet would think it’s okay to love me?’, or like, ‘why did Sherbet choose me? What do I have to change to avoid this?’, y’know?”

“Wow, Sherb.” Pears said. “That’s really screwed up.”

Sherbet was quiet for a bit.

“I’m thinking of running for student council again.” She said.

“I think that’s a bad idea.” Pears said, tenderly.

“You have to hear my new slogan, though.”

“OK.”

“Sherbet is a sure bet.”

Pears smiled. “Even then…”

/

Act four: PNEIGH and KITTIES prepare dinner

Premise: Now friends, PNEIGH and KITTIES prepare a meal at KITTIES’ new apartment. They get to know each other better.

Scene one: KITTIES’ apartment

PNEIGH and KITTIES crowd a small counter. KITTIES has some chopped chicken breasts frying in a wok. PNEIGH is chopping some vegetables.

PNEIGH: Is this good for the mushrooms?

KITTIES: Yup, that looks good!

PNEIGH: Do you want them now? I’ll put them in this bowl.

KITTIES: Yeah, just put on the uh… KITTIES looks into her living room, and realizes she doesn’t have a table. Set it on one of the boxes, I guess.

PNEIGH: Haha, sure.

They continue preparing the meal. PNEIGH hums happily from time to time, little tunes she is making up on the spot.

KITTIES: Have you ever thought about getting a pet?

PNEIGH: Huh?

KITTIES: Um, I just thought… maybe if you got a little pet, like, a little hamster or a puppy or something… it would be pretty cute.

PNEIGH: Oh yeah, I’ve thought about that… but this building doesn’t allow pets.

KITTIES: Ah, okay.

PNEIGH: Plus, the responsibility of it… kinda freaks me out.

KITTIES: Oh yeah, I know what you mean… it’s like “This thing stays alive only if I remember to feed it”, that seems ridiculous.

PNEIGH: Yeah, yeah. Is this good for the carrots?

KITTIES: Yeah, that’s fine.

PNEIGH: I think if I could get anything, I’d get a little kitten. I love cats.

KITTIES: I’m allergic…

PNEIGH: Really? That’s tragic…

KITTIES: It’s okay.

PNEIGH: I’m gonna cut the onions now… actually… I think I’ll go cut them in my own apartment.

KITTIES: What, really?

PNEIGH: Yeah, whenever I cut onions I cry really badly, it’s like… super ugly.

KITTIES: Haha, seriously? I can cut them.

PNEIGH: Nah, don’t worry, it’ll happen like, even if I’m just nearby. I’ll go do it quick in my own place.

KITTIES: Sure, I guess.

PNEIGH: I’ll be right back.

KITTIES: Okay.

PNEIGH leaves. KITTIES realizes that this is the first time they have been separated since they met earlier that day, some 7 hours ago. She feels very comfortable but neutral with this realization, this situation. She feels like that itself might signal something. The scene fades away.

/

Sherbet was studying when she heard screaming outside. Immediately she knew: she had to help! She ran outside and saw all her neighbours in a panic. Down the street there was a great terrible beast. It had uncountable tentacles extending from a body shrouded by a shining darkness. People fled from the tentacles as they reached towards them.

Sherbet ran back inside her house and ate a strawberry and was surrounded by red cartoon hearts swirling around her like a flock of birds. She transformed into Magical Girl Strawberry Sherbet, the Archer of Love! Hearts burst all around her and the sweet smell of strawberries flooded into the kitchen. Her strawberry-tipped arrows never failed to strike love into the hearts of evil!!

She ran into the street and let an arrow fly at the beast, but it had no effect!! “What!?” Sherbet shouted. “Doesn’t it have a heart?”

“I am the beast of mortality!” said a voice, booming from the darkness. “I make people realize that they will die!”

“Huh?” Sherbet said.

“Just watch!” the beast yelled. Suddenly, the tentacles were moving much faster! Two people were touched and immediately fell to their knees. Those people felt a voice whisper in their heads, telling them that they would surely die someday. It showed them clearly the formless void that awaited them!!

“Yeah, OK, I know.” The first person said, and stood up.

“Hmm, I hadn’t thought about that, it’s pretty freaky.” The second person said.

“Yeah, it used to really bother me.” The first person said. “But you get used to it, bit by bit.”

The first person helped the second person stand up.

“I guess I’ll try.” The second person said.

“Umm, these are bad examples.” The beast said. More tentacles came whipping out from its body.

People did all sorts of things when they were touched. Some shrugged and smiled and kept walking. Others cried and screamed and then sat quietly, thinking. Most people seemed to get back to normal after a few minutes.

“This isn’t… a big deal.” Sherbet said. She detransformed.

“Ugh, what?” The beast said. “This is weird.”

“What were you expecting?” Sherbet asked.

“I dunno… suicides, rioting, mania…” The beast said.

“That doesn’t really make sense.” Sherbet said. “Hey, are you immortal?”

“Umm…” The beast said. “I’m not sure.”

“You have to make meaning in your life.” Sherbet said. “What you're doing here is just… idk it’s almost sort of helpful, I guess.”

“I have a lot to think about.” The beast said. It retracted its tentacles and disappeared.

Sherbet shrugged and went back to her studies.

/

RB: did i ever tell you about when i got the part of spacechappie?

SC: no!!

SC: i really want to hear it!!! lol

RB: lol i figured

RB: im surprised i hadnt told you before

RB: okay so they were casting for magical girl sherbet

RB: they already had sherbet picked out

RB: you know originally there was no spacechappie?

RB: like in the manga

SC: yeah i know

RB: yeah i should’ve known you’d know lol

RB: they added him so there’d be a male character

RB: wider appeal

RB: plus i think they were gonna add romance stuff at some point lol

SC: haha yeah i figured

RB: but like they needed an actor who was like… young, and could sing and dance, and had handled a big workload before and wouldn’t burn out

RB: pretty hard to find a boy like that

RB: and i had always been a sort of like… tomboyish sorta character, i think, especially at that age

RB: idk looking back it seems ridiculous

RB: like i think this happens with voice acting work a lot right?

SC: yeah, it’s common for little boy characters

SC: usually they use an older woman tho

RB: yeah and this was live action

RB: anyways i made a big stink about it

RB: i was ok with the spacechappie costume, like, the transformed one

RB: even though it clearly made me look like a boy

RB: but for some reason i just straight up refused to do the school scenes dressed like a boy

RB: and i have no idea how but they met me on that one hahaha

RB: and then i was spacechappie, the girl who transformed into a magical boy

RB: i feel like this must have confused the audience or something lol

RB: but the show was really just to push merchandise so the producers didn’t care if it didn’t make much sense

SC: hey

SC: don’t say that

SC: you know how i feel about that show

RB: yeah sorry

RB: i think it was a great show too

RB: but the bosses didn’t really care too much

SC: well i thought it was wonderful

SC: the idea of spacechappie was so inspirational to me

SC: she could be strong and cool

SC: but caring and delicate

SC: and always cute

SC: i couldnt think of anything i wanted more to be

RB: hence the screenname

SC: yeah

RB: did you go for a walk?

SC: nah

RB: look i have some friends near where you live you know?

RB: like in the same city

RB: i dont want to just like… fling people at you

RB: but i really feel like you could get along with some of them

RB: theyre mostly fans so you'd have something in common lol

RB: and actually i know some people who do like a writing circle thing out there too

RB: cause i remember you saying you wanted to start writing

RB: theres two poets there that are especially good

RB: really cool and nice people

RB: what do you think?

RB: sc?

RB: are you there?

SC: sorry yeah

SC: idk

SC: ill think about it but prolly not

RB: yeah that’s okay

RB: just let me know

RB: but you still want to meet up when im in that area next, right?

SC: i guess

SC: no yeah

SC: i definitely do

SC: sorry its just

SC: im really nervous about meeting people

RB: i know, i get that too

RB: even now i still get that

RB: but i feel like i know you really well now

RB: and im sure we’ll get along really well

SC: i feel like i know you well too

SC: but i don’t know how much of that is just me like

SC: extrepoliting from seeing you on tv and stuff

RB: extrapolating lol

RB: but that’s still me

RB: even though ive stopped being an idol, im still that person

RB: you never stop being yourself

SC: sometimes i want to stop being myself

RB: i wont let you, because you are wonderful

/

Act one thousand five hundred and ten: KITTIES says goodbye to PNEIGH

Premise: Having unsuccessfully attempted to find employment for one full year, KITTIES has to return to her parents’ home, as per their agreement. She gives the news to her pretty neighbour.

Scene one: KITTIES’ apartment

KITTIES tidies her kitchenette. PNEIGH enters.

PNEIGH: What’s up?

KITTIES: Just cleaning a few dishes.

PNEIGH: Anything I can help with?

KITTIES: No, that’s okay.

PNEIGH: OK.

PNEIGH sits down on the floor at a low table in the living room. She idly leafs through a book sitting on there.

PNEIGH: What’s this?

KITTIES: It’s a poetry book… I got down by the university. Apparently the authors are local, or students, or something.

PNEIGH: I like it…

KITTIES: Yeah? I haven’t read it yet. Do you want anything to eat?

PNEIGH: Umm…

KITTIES: I have snacks, let’s eat some snacks.

PNEIGH: Sure!

KITTIES brings over a bag of chips and a bowl of small chocolates. PNEIGH unwraps and eats a chocolate as KITTIES opens the bag of chips.

PNEIGH: I was watching some Magical Girl Sherbet right before I came over.

KITTIES: Of course.

PNEIGH: It was one of the high school ones… there’s this beast that attacks that makes people aware of their own mortality, but… the world of the show is so upbeat and genki, that it doesn’t even bother anyone, and the monster just sorta goes away.

KITTIES: Weird.

PNEIGH: Yeah, see, there’s more to this show than you might think.

KITTIES: Maybe.

PNEIGH: Are you alright? You seem a bit… out of it.

KITTIES: Umm, I have something to tell you.

PNEIGH: Oh… is this… serious? Is this like a big thing?

KITTIES: Yeah.

PNEIGH: Am I ready to know? I don’t feel ready… Does it have something to do with this being a year after we met?

KITTIES: Actually, yeah… how did you remember that?

PNEIGH: Of course I’d remember… PNEIGH starts sniffling, she is on the verge of tears.

KITTIES: Hey, don’t cry… You don’t even know what it is…

PNEIGH: Well, is it good news?

KITTIES: No…

PNEIGH sobs. KITTIES moves around the table to sit next to her.

KITTIES: Okay so… when I moved out, my parents said that I should give it a year, and if I couldn’t get a job, I’d have to go home.

PNEIGH: What? You never told me that…

KITTIES: I… I was hoping that I never had to.

PNEIGH: But I thought you were living off money you had saved up from your old job…

KITTIES: No, that ran out after a few months… I should have told you… But it isn’t even about that. My parents just don’t want me to be wasting my time.

PNEIGH: …Wasting your time? PNEIGH starts crying even harder.

KITTIES: I don’t feel like that, it’s just my parents… and I can’t convince them otherwise…

PNEIGH: What will you do at home?

KITTIES: I don’t know, probably go back to my old job…

PNEIGH: When are you leaving?

KITTIES: They’re picking me up this weekend… Probably Sunday.

PNEIGH: This is just too sudden, I can’t… PNEIGH starts crying again.

KITTIES: I have a surprise for you.

PNEIGH: Huh? What do you mean?

KITTIES: Go to your room for a second. I’ll call you back in when I’m ready.

PNEIGH: Huh?

KITTIES smiles and doesn’t say anything. It is a weary, but sincere, smile. PNEIGH leaves, feeling like she is in some sort of nightmare, delirious and scared and sad.

Scene two: PNEIGH’s apartment

PNEIGH closes the door and immediately sits down on the floor. She looks around her room and each and every thing she sees reminds her of KITTIES, of some aspect of their friendship. The idea of not having her around is beyond sad, it is impossible.

She thinks of how much she’s changed since spending time with KITTIES, how much she’s changed in the last year. But more than that, she thinks about the hope she had for future years, how bright and beautiful the future seemed to her. But what could it be now?

She begins to think of all the fun days they spent together. It seemed like every day was theirs to spend how they wanted, to enjoy, to waste. How many days did they start by looking for jobs, only to quickly devolve into wandering aimlessly, talking… It was wonderful. But this was the price.

A long time passes as PNEIGH cycles through these thoughts. PNEIGH begins to worry that KITTIES will never call her back to her room. Perhaps KITTIES has decided that this is the best way… that any more contact would just be more painful. As PNEIGH considers this possibility, she starts to feel a nauseating pain in her gut. But she also feels a strange sense of finality, and of a distant possibility of peace.

There is a knock at her door.

KITTIES (through door): Hello?

PNEIGH stands and opens the door. However, KITTIES is not there. The door to her apartment is open.

PNEIGH: Hello?

PNEIGH walks into KITTIES’ apartment.

Scene three: KITTIES’ apartment

PNEIGH walks into the apartment. There is no one there.

PNEIGH: Hello?

KITTIES walks in from the bathroom. She is wearing the same shirt, but has on a pair of black cat ears and a pair of black sweatpants that has a black cat tail sewed onto it.

PNEIGH stares at KITTIES for a solid thirty seconds without reacting. KITTIES blushes, and looks away, and then fiddles with the cat tail.

KITTIES: …say something…

KITTIES laughs nervously.

PNEIGH breaks down into tears. She sits down on the floor, and is crying hard and also laughing.

KITTIES: Hahaha, what? Is it no good?

PNEIGH: No, no… it’s the best… I think it’s the most cute thing I can imagine. It’s the ultimate cute thing.

KITTIES: R-really? C’mon…

PNEIGH: Yes, that modesty too, that's part of it. And your plain clothes... it's still you. And the fact that it seems kinda amateur, like… you bought the ears at Hot Topic, and I think the tail you made yourself…

KITTIES: How did you…

PNEIGH: And the fact that… I don’t think otherwise you’d ever, ever go to Hot Topic… like, just looking at you now, I can imagine how cute you would have been, a bit scared and nervous, inside that ridiculous shop…

KITTIES: Yeah, it was pretty weird, haha…

PNEIGH: And yet you took the time to make sure it fit right, that the tail looked good, that it was properly centered… you chose the top that looked best with it out of all the ones you owned…

KITTIES: You think so? I tried my best to… KITTIES smiles. Her eyes are tearing up a bit too.

PNEIGH: And you’re nervous, and embarrassed, and ashamed, and you’re way out of your comfort zone, but you still did it, and put in all that effort… for me! To… try to… be cute for me. But still being yourself… To try to make me feel better… It’s everything. Nothing could possibly be cuter than this.

KITTIES just smiles. PNEIGH sobs more on the ground, but eventually looks up, smiling.

PNEIGH: I’m gonna miss you so much. And I want more than anything for you not to leave. And I want to say every useless embarrassing thing again, everything I’ve ever said to you that made you blush, I want to say it again, and some new ones too.

PNEIGH breaks down sobbing again. KITTIES doesn’t know what to do.

PNEIGH: But… I’m okay with it now. Because it feels over. Because nothing could never top this, nothing could ever become cuter than this. Now I’m okay. Now I can move on.

KITTIES (extremely quietly, almost to herself): I don’t believe that.

PNEIGH: Huh?

KITTIES: Sorry, could you leave again? I’ll come get you again in a minute.

PNEIGH: Is this another surprise?

KITTIES: Hopefully.

PNEIGH: Huh?

KITTIES has a strange smile. PNEIGH’s face is red and bleary but she isn’t crying at the moment. She stumbles out of the door in a haze.

KITTIES pulls out her phone and dials her parents’ number. The scene fades to black.

/

They were in their apartment, Alice stretched out on the couch and Ume curled up in a chair. They each sipped a can of beer, Alice considerably faster.

“Why do you think that girl Rebecca is a lesbian?” Ume asked.

“Oh, it’s like Kenji said.” Alice said. “I think everyone is a lesbian.”

“Didn’t you have your heart broken by straight girls like… seven times?”

“Um, yeah. I guess it’s more like… I wish everyone was. Or every really cool girl. Like, really cute and cool girls, they deserve to be with someone as cute and cool as them.”

“There are cute and cool guys.”

“No waaaay.” Alice said. They both laughed.

“What do you feel like doing?” Alice asked.

“Are there any new albums out that you like?” Ume asked.

Ume, growing up, didn’t listen to any music outside what she was learning to play, other classical music, and snippets of the radio in public places. Alice was delighted to introduce her to a whole world of music. Ume didn’t always like it, but she loved sitting with Alice, listening to albums, having Alice excitedly point out her favorite parts.

“Hmm, I dunno, nothing super specifically.” Alice said. “Lately I’ve been listening mainly to Young Thug and Swans.”

Ume frowned. She did not much like Young Thug or Swans.

“Can you play the piano for me?” Alice asked.

“Sure.” Ume said. “I haven’t done that in a bit.”

She sat down at the piano and started playing some short warm up exercises. Alice smiled. From where she was lying on the couch, she could clearly hear the piano, but couldn’t see anything.

“Is there anything you want me to play?” Ume asked.

“Nope, whatever you want.” Alice said. She knew almost nothing about classical music.

Ume started playing the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ sonata, but, knowing that Alice would know no better, she looped some parts of the start and dropped some of the more aggressive and low-register aspects.

Alice smiled from the couch. The music seemed both to be washing over her from all directions, but also seemed very distinct, different, and identifiable. She imagined that Ume was at a piano recital, and that in the other room, there was a stage, and a grand piano, and an adoring audience, and that she was backstage, waiting for Ume. She thought about how powerfully emotional the music was, how powerfully emotional Beethoven must have felt when he composed it. But she wasn’t sure what that emotion was. There was dynamicism, tension, release. There was peace and conflict, movement and rest. It seemed to be both a recognition of something beautiful in the world, and a beacon of beauty into an ugly world.

And she realized that she would never know. And she felt like maybe she would have to be able to play the song to know. And she realized she would never play the piano like that. And she felt dumb, and frustrated. She felt Ume was miles away, in a world of beauty and understanding, and that she was far below, in a pit, a pit of crudeness and despair. She thought for the dozenth time that week about if she was a bad influence on Ume, and felt guilt and shame.

She felt like she might cry. The beautiful music felt like a harsh light from a glittering source. It refracted despair through her with all its intricacies. And beyond that, she felt terrible in other ways, ways that she couldn’t even articulate to herself, ways that seemed to churn in her like dark water, even further down than her stomach. They seemed to pulsate all the way through the eons, from the ink on Beethoven’s pen. The distance of time felt like the distance from her gut to her mind, and the very depth of it made it dark and unknowable.

She felt like she might cry, but instead she rolled over and screamed into a pillow. She wanted to muffle the sound, so that Ume wouldn’t hear, but she screamed loudly, and Ume immediately rushed in and asked what was wrong.

“Oh, I dunno.” Alice said. “Sometimes it’s like… when something is most beautiful, I get really torn up, just because it’s separate from me.”

“Hmm…” Ume said. “I think I actually know what you mean.”

“Yeah?” Alice said. She sat up, and Ume sat down next to her.

“Yeah. There was this… weird thing I did as a kid. I’ve never told anyone about this.”

“Um, sure.” Alice said, very confused.

“I had like… a story in my head. One that I was continuously writing. Not that I ever wrote any of it down, or even planned to. But I would just… zone out, and think about it, like, on the bus, when I was going to sleep.”

“I don’t think that’s so weird. I mean, some kids have imaginary friends.”

“I guess. But this felt like… really elaborate. The story was going on, real time, in my head. And the characters would have birthdays, and age, and celebrate Christmas, just like I did, right along with me.”

“How long did you do this for?”

“Hmm… I started when I was 7 or 8, and I stopped… I’m not sure when I stopped. I never consciously chose not to do it, I just did it less and less in my teens. Sometimes I still think about the story, about the characters, but I don’t imagine any new parts.”

“What was it about?”

“Umm… a girl, who was my age, and who aged with me, called Magical Girl Sherbet. She was a regular student by day, but when she was needed, she could eat fruit to transform into Magical Girl Sherbet. The different fruits gave her powers… I can’t really remember what did what each fruit did anymore.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And her best friend was this girl who wrote all the time, but like, secretly. And it turns out that the things she wrote… like, they somehow turned into the problems that Sherbet had to deal with. I think she had a magic notebook. But since they were both going on in secret, they never put it together.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah, I thought that was actually pretty clever, for a kid, at least. And they also had like… secret feelings, for each other.”

“Ahaha,” Alice said. “Of course.”

“Yeah, I dunno… I think it sorta developed as I realized this stuff, too. When I was in high school, and the characters were in high school, it was often way more about like, relationships and angst and stuff than magic.”

“Ah, I see.” Alice said. “So it was kind of therapeutic?”

“Yeah… because I always gave them happy endings. It was really more escapist. Whatever problems I had in life, I thought about them having that problem too. And then they’d solve the problem. And whenever I couldn’t think of how, they just used magic. And I knew some day that they’d admit their feelings, and get together, and how happy they would be from then on. I knew it would always end like that, so I always felt happy for them.

“But then sometimes I’d think about some really beautiful scene in the story, some great victory, or moment of intimacy, and I’d be… completely overwhelmed. I’d cry. Doesn’t that seem crazy, to cry at your own imagination? But I really would. And then, when I’d realize that it wasn’t real, that none of it was real, that it wasn’t my life, or anyone else’s life, and that my life could never be that, I just felt like I’d go insane.”

Alice put her arm around Ume, who seemed like she might start crying then.

“But now,” Ume said, “I can’t imagine anything I’d want more than this.”

Alice smiled and nodded. “And this is real.” She said.

/

“You know, before I got to know you, I thought you were one of the happy ones.” Pears said.

“Huh?” Sherbet said. “What do you mean?”

“Like them.” Pears said, gesturing to the laughter of the girls down below them.

Sherbet got up and walked over to see who Pears was referring to.

“I dunno, most of those girls probably aren’t much happier than I am.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, yeah. Like, Christina’s parents put like, a ton of pressure on her. If she isn’t in the top 3 for each test, she’s grounded.”

“No way…”

“And Becky, she wants to be an idol, so she’s secretly training and going to auditions, but it isn’t going great, so she’s pretty sad a lot of the time.”

“Woah.” Pears said. “I really want to see that.”

“Emma keeps dating guys, but they always turn out to just want sex, and she doesn’t want to do that until she’s older.”

“Seriously?” Pears asked.

Sherbet nodded.

“What’s wrong with Colleen?”

“There isn’t anything wrong with any of them. But they aren’t that happy, either.”

“What about… Fuuka, in the grade above us, is she sad?”

“I dunno.” Sherbet said. “I don’t know her too well. Why do you ask?”

“Cause she’s really cute.”

“Oh. She looks pretty happy, I dunno. I know that girl she hangs out with, umm…”

“Felicia?”

“Yeah, Felicia. I know she can’t ride a bike and she’s really embarrassed about it.”

“Hahaha, really?” Pears said. “But she looks so cool…”

Sherbet didn’t say anything.

“Hey, how do you know all this stuff? Like, how do you keep track?”

“I know because I’ve been trying really hard for a year to make friends with these girls.” Sherbet said, and then turned away.

“Aww, Sherbet.” Pears said. “You’re twenty times as sad as the rest of these girls.”

Sherbet didn’t say anything. Slowly the group of girls down below began to disperse. Lunch was ending soon.

“It’s the same with me, though.” Sherbet said. “Before I knew you, I thought you were happier.”

“Seriously?” Pears said. “I always thought I must seem so gloomy…”

“No, I dunno, like… you’d always read manga at lunch, and sleep before homeroom, and I figured like… ‘That girl knows what she wants, that girl knows how to make herself happy.’ And I saw you hanging out with the manga club, and stuff… it seemed like you had it figured out, even if you weren’t like, skipping around, grinning, whatever.”

“I guess that’s all true.” Pears said.

“I dunno.” Sherbet said. “It seems like the more you know someone, the less happy they seem.”

“Huh, someone at my writing group said something like that.”

“What? What writing group?”

Pears tried to look away from Sherbet and bit her lip.

“Oops!” Sherbet said, grinning. “Did someone let something slip?”

“Shut up.” Pears said, adjusting her glasses. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s like… a bunch of writers from around here, we meet up, and talk about what we’re working on, and like, offer advice, or connections, or whatever.”

“You don’t bring your fanfiction, do you?” Sherbet asked. “Or your manga?”

“No, no… I’ve been writing actual stuff too. Like, fiction-fiction.”

“Oh yeah? What’s it about?”

“It’s nothing, it’s just… sentimental wish fulfillment crap. Mostly it’s stuff about this lesbian couple, and their friends, and them just like, hanging out and talking. But it’s really blatant fantasizing… I made one girl a little Japanese girl, ‘cause that’s really cute, and I made the other one a blonde girl with big boobs, ‘cause that’s really hot.”

“Does anyone else like it?” Sherbet asked. “At the group?”

“I dunno, I don’t read stuff out loud too often.” Pears said. “And really, I don’t care. I like it. I think writing it down helps me. That’s good enough.”

“Huh, okay.” Sherbet said. “So what was it they said?”

“Huh?”

“The thing about people being less happy than they seem.”

“Oh, right.” Pears said. “Honestly, I don’t know, it was sorta confusing. She was there with this other girl who wrote some poetry I liked. But then she tried to explain her friend’s poem, and her explanation was weird, it was all about thinking how animals lived. She said something about how like, an animal will never show that it’s wounded, because then it will appear weak to predators, but that we live in a world where there are no predators like that anymore.”

“Hmm…” Sherbet said.

“I dunno. They were strange. The poetry girl had long, long white hair, and the other girl had like, green hair, with like, red parts. They didn’t seem real. No one else seemed to know them personally but a few people seemed really excited that they were there.”

“No predators, huh?” Sherbet said.

“I dunno.”

They lapsed into a silence that was broken by the bell for the next class. They both got up and started heading to class.

“You know,” Pears said, “you could always do the opposite.”

“The opposite of what?” Sherbet said.

“Instead of being a girl that it’s OK for everyone to love, why don’t you be the girl who loves everyone?”

Sherbet opened her mouth to reply, but couldn’t think of anything to say. Pears started to run ahead, wanting to not be late for class.

/

“Metro Blooming”

We are the living ghosts of the city We are the nameless crowds The station unvisited The road untraveled The restaurant where you never ate The building that you aren't quite sure What it even does We are someone else’s local We are distant in a network Of intimacy But we are your city

And in autumn, That great urban exhalation, We move freely, Like pigeons But exert that wonderful, secret Will of the city

It is the will of community The will of friendship The will of love The will of aimless walks That start with the first time You see your breath And go past the first snowflake And the last trembling leaf All the way until The last thin ice on ponds And the first robin Come walk with me And out in the country The leaves are changing.

by shay and vaka

[awinterleaf]

Doggy

We were sitting at the park, on a bench.

“I got one for you.” she said. “A little puzzle, sort of.”

“Okay, shoot.” I said.

“Okay. So you’re at a guy’s place. You really like this guy.”

“Already this is hard to believe.”

“Shut up. And you’re eating dinner, and it’s like... really good. Really delicious. And then this dog comes from somewhere and sits next to you. Puts its head in your lap. And it’s super cute, it’s like... the cutest dog you’ve ever seen.”

“I’d pet it.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Even though it’s unhygienic while you’re eating.”

“Yeah, obviously.”

“Is that the riddle?”

“No, that’s way too easy.”

“Okay, go on.”

“Okay so the guy is like, ‘oh, don’t mind him, he just wants food, but don’t give him any, he tries this on everyone who comes over.’ And then he goes and does something in the kitchen.”

“Ah, do I feed the dog?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Hmm...”

“Keep in mind you could get caught. Actually, let’s say that if you do it, you’ll get caught for sure.”

“Hmm...”

“So, on one hand, you want to respect his wishes, right? Because you like him so much. On the other hand, I feel like... being seen as a girl who is so moved by cute and needing things that I can’t help myself would be very endearing and cute itself. Or at least I’d find that very cute and endearing.”

“Me too. Plus, I am a girl who is moved by such things.”

“Yeah.”

“Is the food good for the dog, like, health-wise?”

“It’s neither good or bad particularly.”

“Hmm...”

“But I guess you also have to consider like, what will this actually do for the dog? It’s not like it’ll be satisfied. It’ll just want more.”

“Why are you asking? Does Medium Sean have a dog?”

“Shut up about Sean. And don’t call him ‘Medium Sean.’”

We sat in silence for a long time, at least a minute or two.

“So, what would you do?”

“I’d probably get flustered about what he meant when he said ‘everyone who comes over.’”

We laughed and then fell into another long silence.

“Here’s one for you.” I said. “You see that big building there?” I pointed to some tall condos. She nodded. “Okay, so there’s this big business guy who buys the penthouse suite or whatever on that building. The big top floor nice room thing. He’s a young guy. Cut some crazy financial deal thing. Made millions. And on his first night there, he wants to celebrate. So he gets his friends over, they get drunk, do some coke, whatever. And when his friends leave he’s a bit horny, so calls up this prostitute he’s heard about, this really classy prostitute.”

“Um, okay.”

“Bear with me. So this girl shows up and they’re getting into it or whatever and he says he wants to do her right up against this big window he has. Right up against the glass. And he’s looking over her shoulder at the big city all lit up. And it’s so beautiful and he just feels like it’s all his, that he’s the king of the city, blah blah blah. Soon he’s thinking, maybe even saying, ‘I am a God, I am a God’. And guess what happens?”

“What?” “The glass breaks! They both plummet to their death!”

“Bullshit, no way.”

“Okay, no, that doesn’t happen. But he does think about it, just for a second. He imagines it happening. And he doesn’t even believe it’ll happen, but he realizes that he could... and really, certainly eventually will, die. And he goes like... totally limp. Stops thrusting. Game over.”

“Oh no!”

“And the girl, who is very sophisticated and worldly and kindly, you know, a real pro, this girl starts to really comfort him... tries to talk him through what basically is the first existential crisis of this guy’s life, the first time he really realized he was gonna die.”

“Oh no!”

“Well, he’s freaking out, and she does her best, but I guess something goes wrong, shorts out in his brain, because suddenly he jumps up and reads headfirst into the window and smashes right through!”

“No way!”

“Well, no, yeah, that doesn’t happen. Cause those things are like, super reinforced plate glass. But he does go headfirst into it, and concusses himself or something, falls right into some sort of coma, severe brain damage and all that. The girl calls an ambulance, they rush off to the hospital.”

“Oh no!”

“So, for a few months, he’s sort of in and out of it... he’s lost a lot of brain function. And the company or whatever, his financial thing, it starts tanking. There’s all these investors and partners and press, all demanding that he get up and do things, but he obviously can’t tell what’s up, he’s just bleeding money and burning bridges left and right all laid up in the hospital, getting villainized all the time because well yeah what a fucking idiot.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Well, this whole time, the one person on his side is the prostitute. She keeps visiting. And they have little chats, play games, she wheels him around the grounds in his wheelchair, et cetera... This goes on for like a year, and then he up and dies.”

“Oh no!”

“Yeah, but this is the really crazy bit... a bit before he dies, he changes his will to give all his remaining money and assets to the prostitute.”

“No way, that wouldn’t work.”

“Well, he had no family or whatever... it really held up, she got everything. She lives in that house now.” I pointed at a nice, but not extravagant house. “She’s not like, rich-rich but she doesn’t have to be a prostitute anymore. She works at a flower shop and a book shop part time.”

“Uh huh.”

We sat in silence for a bit.

“Why’d you tell me that story?” she asked.

“Because it’s true!” I said.

“No way. This is because of that whole bus ticket thing.” I started laughing. “Shut up,” she said. “I’m not a prostitute.”

“What was the exact conversation again?” I asked.

“He said ‘you want to visit this weekend?’ and I said ‘you want to buy me the bus tickets?’ and he said ‘are we gonna have sex?’ and I said ‘sure’...”

“Hahahaha, you’re definitely a whore.”

“Shut up.”

“Exchanging sex for goods or services.”

“Shut up.”

“You’re a woman of the night.” “More like early afternoon.”

“Hahahaha.”

“You sure did get out of there quick, though.” I said, after a second.

“He had a thing he needed to do this afternoon.” she said.

“Yeah, but you’re not even staying with him tonight, right?”

“Yeah, I’m staying with you, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, so...”

“I dunno, I wanted to hang out with you.”

“Aww...”

“He said he wanted to get dinner later, though. The three of us and Aaron.”

I made a neutral-to-negative “ehh” sorta sound. We were quiet for a bit.

“Sean’s not that bad.” she said. “He’s sorta pathetic, yeah, but that’s kinda cute too.”

“I guess.” I said.

“The sex is pretty bad, though.”

“Oh yeah?” “Yeah, but he really enjoys it. He tells me so afterward. In detail.”

“Hahahaha.”

“I dunno, it’s like, at some point he got it into his head that he was an awkward guy.”

“Which is true.” I said.

“Yeah, but he just like... embraced it. Like, he felt like the best he could hope for was some sort of ‘lovable loser’ thing, like, just wanting pity.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“He’s pretty nice, though, and he can be funny sometimes.”

“Sure, sure.”

“He’s alright. I don’t mind hanging out with him or fucking him every now and then but I couldn’t ever see anything serious between us.”

“He’s pretty medium.”

“Shut up.” she said. We both laughed.

“I just don’t want to hurt him.” she said. “I hope he finds some other nice girl.”

“Yeah.”

We were quiet for awhile.

“I think I would feed the dog.” I said. “I was just thinking about how shitty dog food is. Can you imagine how much better people food would taste if you only ate dog food?”

“Yeah, I think I’d feed the dog too.” she said.

[awinterleaf]

Yesod

It all started one afternoon when I said “the interior of my asshole itches” and I think he said “I can help you with that” but claims I said “but maybe you can help me with that” but I guess it doesn’t matter because pretty soon he was sure helping me with that.

And after a few hours we stank like sweat and I said “am I a man or an animal?”

He said “Man is an animal.”

I said “What kind of animal is man?”

And he said “I don’t know, but you are not that animal anymore.”

/

A week ago I told him on the phone that I was so scared that I vomited and couldn’t eat and now my vomit was just acidic burps and I also couldn’t sleep and my eyes were red and I had been crying. He said “How are you such a wreck?”

//

I think for as long as I can remember I’ve thought there was something wrong with the universe on a sort of low level, like how you can sort of feel like something is wrong during a dream, something just a bit off or imperfect about how it was created, it has always stayed with me, this feeling, I cannot think of a second where I didn’t feel like this on some level, that something was wrong.

///

A week from now he will be sitting crosslegged on my mattress with a sheet over him like a ghost. He won’t be making any sounds but the sheet will shake a little from time to time. “Hey, hey”, I will say, “Are you crying under there?”

He won’t respond.

“Are you crying under there?” I will say. “Are you crying under there?”

He won’t respond.

////

He had my pillow on his lap and my head was on the pillow, and we were both naked, and it felt like a sauna in my room, I saw the sun coming up from behind the blinds, and I said “Hey, it’s tomorrow” and he said “When’s tomorrow” and I said “It’s Friday morning” and “When’d you think it was?”, and I repeated that question 2-3 times because he didn’t answer. He said, “Friday morning, we got a lot of work to do” and laughed loudly and then said he wanted to take a shower, I said “Let’s take one together” and I repeated it 2-3 times because he didn’t respond. It seemed like life couldn’t go on. It seemed like it was the last day of creation. I didn’t feel the meth anymore. I asked him 2-3 times if he felt the meth anymore and he didn’t respond. I said “Is your dick hard?” 2-3 times and “My dick is sorta hard” 2-3 times. I looked up at him, his mouth was hanging open and his eyes looked glazed. He said “I’m definitely gonna be dead before I’m thirty” as a nonsequitor and I said “Me too” and reached up and touched his cheek. I said “What do you want to do today?” and he said that was too far away to consider and then he said he wanted to take a shower. I told him he was so smart that sometimes it scared me. I told him sometimes I’d realize what a great and amazing person he was and what amazing things he was going to do and thinking that I had one even very small part in his life made me so happy that I would squeal and my dick would get hard and I would masturbate while I thought of him. He said I was so silly.

/////

I am always burdened by the Tzimtzum because I one day had a dream of the world without it. And now I can smell the rotting Qliphoth in the air, they smell of sweat and ether.

//////

[awinterleaf]

Robot

When David got there Tom was sitting in the kitchen playing with a video camera. Like, really just playing around, he was just snapping the viewfinder thing open and shut. It’s unclear why that amused him so much. And he said, “Do you want to help with our movie?” after only the briefest of pleasantries. The movie was called “The Future”. It was about a robot that goes to work at an office. The robot looks like a normal person. He talks and walks and acts like a normal person. However, there are several overt clues that he is a robot. One is that he drinks oil on his lunch break. “Jason's making the fake oil now.” Tom said. “He's making it out of chocolate sauce.” “OK.” David said. “And Martin's recording hard drive sounds in his bedroom.” Tom said. “Whenever the robot is deep in thought, we'll zoom in on his head and play hard drive sounds.” The robot goes to work at the office and completes his tasks with the same efficiency as the average human, perhaps with slightly higher efficiency. He is slightly awkward around his coworkers but it is unclear whether or not this is due to him being a robot. It is also unclear whether or not his coworkers know he is a robot, or whether any of them are robots. “The movie will be filled with all these ambiguities.” Tom said. “That's why it's called The Future, because it suggests that these will be the societal problems of the future.” “Also you should get Future to do the soundtrack.” David said. “Who is Future?” “He's like a mixture of 2 Chainz and T-Pain.” David said. “He's on My Name is My Name.” “Oh, yeah, right. He's good.” Tom said. David went to Martin's room, where he was holding his iPod and his cellphone together in one hand up to his ear. “Sometimes this thing makes really brutal hard drive sounds.” Martin said. “Like hardcore whirring and grinding and shit.” “That's bad.” David said. “Yeah, but it's perfect for the movie. Did Tom tell you about the movie?” “The Future?” “Shit, no. The Robot. Man, I told him it should be called The Robot. We argued about it for like an hours. I thought we'd finally gotten it settled.” In the movie, the robot is asked by his coworkers if he'd like to go out drinking with them, but the robot declines, and it is unclear whether or not this is due to him being a robot. Instead he goes home and sits on his bed, and then reaches behind him and turns off an “on” switch and then just sits there perfectly still but with no other noticeable effects, and it is unclear whether or not this is how the robot typically ends his day or if he's committed suicide. “So how much have you done so far?” David asked. “Umm, we haven't shot anything yet. We're waiting for Peter to get back, because we're going to get him to play the robot.” “That makes sense.” David said. “Also we're waiting on Jason's fake oil. That scene is really important, because otherwise the reading that the robot isn't really a robot, and that the title and the hard drive are really just like, metaphors, for certain types of people who are robotic, which is an okay reading I think, but without the oil scene, which will just be really silly and surreal, that reading becomes like, too easy, you know? And it's sort of a dismissive reading, 'cause then all the questions of 'is it because he's a robot?' go away, and that sucks.” “You think Peter will really agree to act in it?” “No. Shit, it won't make the noise.” Martin said. “It used to make this noise all the time... It really sounded like it was in pain. But I don't want to try to force it to make the noise somehow... because that'll put it into pain.” “I like that you say 'pain'.” David said. “I always think of my electronics as being in pain when I'm misusing them and I'm happy to hear that someone who knows what they're talking about also uses that sort of language.” “I don't know what I'm talking about.” “I think of electronics in like, only two states: OK and in pain... and when they're OK they're like absolutely OK and invincible, and when they're in pain it's just draining some like, HP, until they die.” “Yeah, I think like that too, basically.” “That can't be how things actually work...” “I dunno.” Jason showed up first with a big bowl full of fake oil made from chocolate sauce. “The secret ingredient is vegetable oil.” Jason said. “It makes it look more like oil.” “That makes sense.” Tom said. “It still tastes good.” Jason said. James showed up next with two joints and a bunch of bags of Brownie Crisp. Brownie Crisp is a product made from the crispy edges of brownies. “Brownie Crisp is a dollar a bag!” James shouted. “And it's Friday! Let's get fucking nuts!!” Everyone laughed because they all knew that what James meant by that was getting high and watching anime. Tom, Jason, James, and David smoked joints on the back porch. They sat on Tom's couch and started watching K-On. It was an episode where the characters go to a swimming pool and Azusa gets really tan. They were dipping the Brownie Crisp in the fake oil and eating it. “I want some Brownie Crisp.” James said. Someone pointed out that there was some Brownie Crisp in a bag on his lap and he said “No, I want Azusa’s Brownie Crisp.” Peter showed up and stood motionlessly at the doorway to the living room, looking at the people on the couch watching anime and able to hear but not see the TV. “Which K-On would you fug?” James said loudly to Peter. Peter said “What?” “Which K-On would you marry?” Jason asked Peter. Peter stopped and thought for awhile and said “the blond one”. “Mugi?” Jason asked. “I don’t know.” Peter said. “Do you want to act in a movie?” Tom asked Peter. “No.” Peter said, quickly and automatically, as if he had somehow anticipated that question. His bad back was especially bad today; he was tense with pain. Standing with a neutral facial expression and neutral body language, as he was standing then, required a large amount of deliberate composure. The robot would have no internal monologue, only the sound of the hard drive. It is ambiguous whether or not the robot truly lacks an internal monologue, or if the viewer is simply not privy to it, and this, in turn, raises questions about what an internal monologue actually is, and how it functions, and how it relates to the mysteries of consciousness. Another scene would have the robot pull out an extension cord from his shoe and plug it into the wall. If Peter had agreed to be in the movie, Tom had planned on asking if he could drill a hole into one of Peter’s shoes. “I want Azusa’s Brownie Crisp.” James said, and someone pointed out that he had already said that. Peter slowly backed out of the living room and went back down to his room. He sat on his bed for a long time and slowly relaxed all of his joints while exhaling. Then he sat very still for a very long time.

[awinterleaf]

Pomme

When I woke up I saw him peeling an apple.

“I’ve seen this scene in anime a lot.” I said. “Except you’re not a cute anime girl.”

He shrugged. “Sorry.”

“Why are you peeling an apple?” I asked. “I don’t mind the peel.”

“It’s like a gesture, I guess.” He said. “Like I’m showing you how much I want to comfort you while you’re sick. I’ll even peel an apple.”

“Thanks, but I’m not really that sick. Like, I don’t need you to bring me food, or peel it.”

“What do you want to do then?”

“I don’t know, play video games? But you have to set it up and bring the TV and everything over near the bed. Because I’m sick.”

We played video games for about half an hour. I lost every game. I threw my controller further down the bed, near my feet.

“I’m getting more frustrated than I usually do.” I said.

“Because you’re sick?”

“No, I’m just a lot worse than I remember being. I don’t play this enough. Do you still play it a lot?”

He shrugged.

I flopped onto my back and stared at my light until it hurt my eyes and I dragged a pillow over my face.

“Do you still have that apple?” I asked.

“The air has made it all brown.” He said.

In Greek Mythology, there was a time when Zeus had a big party. He was celebrating Peleus and Thetis getting married. I don’t remember who those two were. He didn’t invite Eris, because she was the God of Discord. I don’t understand how it is that some of these Gods had roles like “The God of Discord” and they weren’t just asked to change what they were God of, or maybe to just do nothing, or maybe they were, but being Godly Assholes they refused to change. Anyways Eris makes this Golden Apple and throws it into the wedding party and says that the most beautiful person (or God, or whatever) has to eat it. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite all say they ought to eat it. I don’t remember who those three were. Zeus says that Paris has to decide to gets it. Paris had proved himself to be impartial during some earlier shit about a bull. So the three Goddesses are all trying to bribe Paris, and Aphrodite says she’ll get Paris the most beautiful woman in the world for his bride, and it’s like wait, hang on, does this mean that these Goddesses are more beautiful than mortal humans, or that the most beautiful woman wasn’t included in the whole apple thing ‘cause she wasn’t at the party? Both of these have sort of confusing implications. Anyways Paris goes with that bribe, which I guess means he isn’t so impartial, but whatever. The most beautiful woman is, of course, Helen of Troy. So she’s made to fall in love with Paris by Aphrodite, and when Paris goes to celebrate her wedding to some other dude, they end up fucking and eloping, and that, of course, kick starts the whole Trojan War.

“Okay... what’s your point here?”

Well, the Trojan War actually happened. Obviously all the stuff with the Gods and probably the Wooden Horse and half the other shit that they said happened didn’t happen, but there was some sort of major war that actually happened. So they took this actual wartime event and came up with this romantic and sorta silly story behind it, one that hinges all around a Golden Apple. The Iliad, the Odyssey, everything, all because of this apple.

“I dunno if I’d say it hinges on the Golden Apple... or at least, no more than it does on a bunch of other stuff.”

Maybe, yeah... I really like the Golden Apple thing, though. Like, it was definitely instrumental in the war happening. I just really like the idea of the Ancient Greeks sitting around and thinking of the devastation of that actual real war and thinking “That damn apple!”.

“That damn apple! Hahaha.”

Yeah... they probably didn’t really believe it either.