FLUORESCENCE BENDS
She figured herself among automatons, beautiful and wretched in their collective falsity. A vulnerable mass of squirming nerves, reactionary in distortion and gesture, yet ultimately detached. A throbbing bassline might stoke one’s libido, lasciviously licked as they were by flavored ethanol and wet wedges of lime, the ones that straddled the rims of well-tongued glasses, damp with condensation or perhaps the anxious perspiration of a disposable commodity. ‘Lovely and oh so lonely. Lovely and oh so lonely,’ women whisper wistfully, eyes aimlessly tracing the curvature of crass graffiti and their own pursed thighs, hovering over a hot stream that one might expect to usher relief. But that’s never quite the
resolution, is it, because she’s up and stumbling again, a wallflower waif, or so she imagines. There are times for talk, and this is decidedly not one of them.
Yet she resigns herself to the horrors of predictability.
“This place,” she murmurs, “reduces consciousness to a closet.”
So begins another tepid exchange, itchy submission to social contract. Masturbatory expulsion of precarious pride, a self manufactured for the sake of presentation, like the archetypal trophy wife, or the
marionette mistress. Admittedly disappointed by the silent reception, which means free reign to roam towards idiotic conclusion. Because there is no conclusion, and didn’t they understand that as soon as she opened her oft-clasped mouth, g’dammit. She imagines a gleaming trident of verbosity and produces a fork, trailing off into mumbled incoherence, confused as to the Where and the Why of the matter. Her company finds no fault in this pathetic performance, as mediocrity is the mantle upon which their glorious quotidian resides, and ain’t she a bloated beauty to behold.
She silently gawks at the withered faces in the interim. This is a desirous collective, populated by passive players. Perhaps their perpetual state of low-level ravenousness is attributable to their ongoing submission to a sinister smile. Brilliant mimes they make. Brilliant mimes, they ache. Their enclosure was divided by a seemingly endless number of plastic shelves. These shelves ran parallel to one another and broke off abruptly at both ends, sending the sickened little rovers into an even greater sea of tantalizing images. Here, the standard grid which generally informed the mobile mammal was confusedly abandoned. As visual stimulants continued to stun, chaos contaminated the beautified artifice. The air was punctuated by heavy exhalation and nervous footfall. Those with miniature rovers were especially threatening to the precarious level of reasonable unpredictability, for they were loud, and could not yet ape the social script of docile merriment. For this reason, she never left her dwellings without a pocket knife and Pepto-Bismol.
“Fluorescence bends,” she’d explain to her suitors. “It makes the world go strange.”
by Lydia Sviatoslavsky
Lydia Sviatoslavsky is a San Francisco-based writer, zine-maker, and purveyor of THOUGHT ROT.