day-fiction

[day-fiction]

When I reference peanut butter,

I do so with a small silver fish in my balled up fist.

I can only fit so much salt in my mouth

before the yolks in the pipes break

and a thin yellow spreads all around.

[day-fiction]

I’ve got a town at my disposal.

It is shaped around one arbitrary dead end street

and there is a network of small streams running behind the houses

which the children use to send letters taped to toy boats.

Sometimes the stream switches course

and runs backwards into the ass of a sweet cow,

rinsing her many stomachs with cool water,

diving out between her thick teeth

and back down again through fields and blades of grass.

[day-fiction]

Let’s buy butter for the house.

We are all strung out,

elastic and dreaming of fat and salt.

[day-fiction]

I peered over the horizons dipped shoulder

at a twinkling laminar flow

and thought I’d like to fasten my wiry conviction around it

or wrap it in wax paper and send it to myself in the mail.

[day-fiction]

Crick a crack and the day away, my own mother on the moon and a sailor put the basket on the tail light, told me a story and tucked in. I asked a cookie and she pinched it right, gnash my teeth on heaven. Slime and gore on the walls, mediocre tablecloths, coloring is all wrong, etc. broke the broken thing, then painted the other so it looked off or at least new, and then every time you came over it was like I had turned and turned and turned, picking up and putting down. They call me tornado woman! I’ll put you in an eery, far-away mood.

[day-fiction]

there is a plant called old man comes out of a flower and it blooms every spring and once a year when the flower is in full bloom small old men crawl out of the flowers and stare at the moon all night and make light conversation and sip a little wine and yada yada yada

[day-fiction]

Mack who sucks on toes had been called Mack who sucks on toes since seventh grade, when he had been caught in the girls bathroom with Ruby Dorian by Patricia Kings. Patricia Kings had been listening outside of the door with Bella Jaythorne and Amanda Fenniola at Ruby's moans, which were extremely loud and dramatic. She had wanted to be an actress and whenever she did something she did it big. Mack and Ruby had been dating for ten days and Ruby told Mack she wanted him to do something special for her and she wanted it to be at school because he was shy around her at school and she said that if he really liked her then he wouldn't be. And then she said that if he was head over heels in love with her, he would love her from her head to her heels. So he began to kiss her heels and then kiss her toes and he hated that she was so loud and after this entire incident he broke it off and said he needed some time and space to think, just dramatic enough for her to be somewhat understanding, but of course she still cried, loudly, and told everyone he was terrible, and maybe told her friends he was abusive, but when Patricia walked in the other day she just laughed and said "what are you even doing!" and then ran back out and told her friends, "he's sucking on her toes!"

[day-fiction]

my friend cat cooked tofu and fed some to a frog she caught. then she let the frog go and he went and told all his friends about it, how he was caught and introduced to this strange food. On the outside, it was spicy, hotter than what he was used to, tangier too, and sweeter, but the meat was a familiar texture and underneath the strange spices was a strange blandness that tasted like if a fish were a bug, and then a dry, expanding phlegm.

[day-fiction]

there she stood, watching the sunrise and smoking a cigarette. her face was knowing, knowing that she looked good.

last night she had smoked a cigarette at sunset. these were her first two cigarettes in five years. she was 80 years old and every five years, ever since she turned 20, she smoked two cigarettes watching the sun set on jan 13 and rise on jan 14.

she was eighty-one years old in march. this morning, two men were watching her from far away. they wondered to each other what could possibly be going through her funny little head. they remarked that everyone is a little funny, thinking funny little thoughts in funny little heads.

one of the men thought she was probably thinking about work. the other one thought maybe she was thinking about the book she was reading. but she was really thinking:

this is so great and so funny. i love that it means nothing. it's so low stakes.

the only other cigarette ive ever smoked was that one time a boy i liked offered me one and i said yes. when he offered one again i said no, but that i'd walk around with him while he smoked one. he was so nice.

and sunrises and sunsets are so beautiful!

(written about sunsets and sunrises and switching to an inner dialogue 3/4 of the way through, per mathilda's anti-suggestions)(she might have been on to something)

[day-fiction]

i bought two grapefruits yesterday and today i went to eat one and i opened it up and out popped a little man, oh my goodness. he winked at me and clicked his heels and then he skidded out my room without even opening the door. he was so little he just skidded in the space between the door and the floor.

at first i thought oh wow how crazy how fun how quirky but over the past few hours a sense of dread has blossomed within me. As I write this i am also taping up all the holes in the room, all the passageways to other structures. I've put the halved grapefruit in the corner and it hurts to look at. the tape I'm using right now is my neon green duct tape but I'll run out soon and will have to switch to blue masking tape, which i am worried about. Really I think he could get past any kind of tape if he wanted, but it's the best idea I've got right now, and at least maybe i'LL BE able to hear the sound of him ripping the tape, so I'll have some warning before I am subject to his small, quick person. he is capable of so much. he is so different form every living thing I've ever come across in my entire life. I've got too much going on right now to worry about him. i might've done something wrong to him, or worse he might not even care.

[day-fiction]

one time i was in los angeles and i went to a cafe to buy a croissant. i went to a very small cafe and i bought the croissant and the woman who rung me up told me i had a very expressive face, and i said thank you and she asked me if i was an actress and i said that no, i wasn't, but i come from a long line of actresses and actors and i better not tell her who my parents are or she'll scream. then i winked and ran away.

i ran to my home, which was in shambles. someone had broken in and stolen several things, and i had all these stacks of papers of things that i had planned on making for meals, and they were all scattered about and unorganized.

so i made a list of things to do like call insurance and reorganize everything but at the top of the list was to get to the bottom of the situation and uncover who had broken in. I had left the door unlocked, so the possibilities were endless. luckily, my ex husband had installed security cameras. i called him and asked if he could access the footage. he was a real bitch to talk to. some people get along with their exhusbands but i do not! he groaned and moaned and finally i said "listen Mark! my recipes are all in a mess! my precious keepsakes are gone! I am in a universally miserable situation and it would do you some good to inconvenience yourself from time to time!" then he hung up on me and i waited six hours, because I know mark, and i got an empty email with a png attachment from Mark.

the png was a picture of the woman from the cafe leaving my house with a recipe in her hand for my famous cherry pie. I am from texas, so i can make a nice, traditional, southern cherry pie that gets a lot of compliments. she must have known. i thought to myself, she must be obsessed with me. she must be stalking me.

i went to the cafe and told her i knew everything. she said "what?" but the drive over had calmed me down. i said, "listen, i want to take you in." she didnt say anything so i kept going. "i think you've got potential and i think you're very driven and very capable. now tell me how you got to my house before i did." and she told me that she had been casing my routine for a week. that she had walked towards me on the sidewalk three days ago with a big fluffy croissant in her hand to get my gears turning. she said she was trained in the art of suggestion, and her biggest dream was to open a michelin star restaurant.

i gave her $500 and told her the secret ingredient for my cherry pie, the one i write down as "2 teaspoons secret ingredient": Cinnamon.