Explanations
A short story about going on a little trip
Snoopy and his siblings. The following is a fictional story, a little bonus, something ephemeral like an offering.
The spring after I applied to graduate school I tried to go on a little trip, all by myself. I thought it would be good for me to see a different city than the one I lived in. My thrift store job gave me three days off with a stern warning that too many personal days constituted a poor work ethic. My girlfriend wasn’t the kind of partner who enjoyed small town whimsy, so I planned the trip alone.
I wanted to go to graduate school and write. Unfortunately so did a lot of other people. I wasn’t very competitive. When my girlfriend tried to get me to outdo her at something—baking, showmanship, wrestling—I simply folded. I was okay with being weak, weak made me look good.
If my girlfriend sounds like an asshole, she wasn’t. I read her my graduate school application and afterward, she told me very tenderly it was “incredible.” I thought about the time I was high out of my mind and told her she was “incredible.” It’s a stupid, sweet, wonderful compliment. She even liked that I used single quotation marks for dialogue.
I don’t like using double quotation marks to denote speech. It looks unhinged. Single quotation marks, as the British use for most things, seem like enough. American excess. The people who read my manuscript never pointed it out to me, they just sat by and talked about paragraph structure and word density.
I was using words like “a thick paste,” one of my application readers said. He’d gotten into a paid fiction program so I was supposed to pay special attention to his advice. He thought I should write characters like “thin slices of paper… women and men that just float away into the night. Your characters are already hardly there anyway. Who are they? What do they want?”
I said I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure anyone could know what they wanted.
“But in fiction, people do.”
“Oh,” I said. The line went quiet and I heard a girl in the background giggle. I thought it was strange that he asked to call me to talk about my work but I figured it was just his way of getting closer to the truth.
For my trip, I decided to rent a room in a small town I could take the train to. The Midwest was full of towns like that. Most of the grad schools I applied to were far away—-on the West or East Coast, places where people still pretended to be free and weren’t forced to go to church. Me and my girlfriend always joked about people like that—who believed they were still having a good time.
I felt stupid for writing at the end of the world. What did it matter? But my girlfriend never made me feel stupid. She thought I was trying to make things more bearable, like hospice care for the apocalypse. I told her the world had already ended a thousand times. It was never any different, apocalypse narratives were popular because of apathy. If the end was inevitable, it didn’t matter what we did.
A famous essayist once said that joy was the ultimate betrayal of fascism. I thought about that every time I got depressed and not once did it make me stop and smell the roses. If anything it only further underscored how sad I felt, how selfish it was that I, in the face of unyielding impersonal political destruction, couldn’t think about something besides the fact some girl wouldn’t text me back for a few hours. Couldn’t my brain switch the channel? Couldn’t it think about the military-industrial complex? Climate apocalypse? It could, I found. And then it said, wouldn’t it be awful to be alone at the end of the world? If the world ended while I was on my trip, I would be alone. I would be sitting on a park bench watching a bunch of yuppies talk about how much they loved going antiquing. I would be implicated at the pearly gates, Peter would ask me what I had just been doing.
“I was watching a couple fight about wicker furniture.”
“And what did you tell them?”
“Nothing. They didn’t ask for my opinion.”
I could see the wrinkles forming on Peter’s cherubic face. Angels get wrinkles apparently. I felt my narcissism just like any other white woman who didn’t have kids. My narcissism’s contours were a little pink, a little bubbly, and a little spiky. Not in equal measure though, more like the notes of a perfume. My top note was lilac.
The morning I left for the small town, I woke up and felt dissociated. “I feel like a character in a story,” I said. I sipped some of my girlfriend’s organic coffee and tried to place the taste.
“You just feel self-aware.”
“No, I feel intensely aware of myself. I can see things happening to me.”
“So you’re dissociating?”
“No, that’s not what I mean at all.”
Nutty, the flavor was nutty.
She was right though, contemporary characters were so aware of the shape of their lives. Characters went on walks in search of epiphany. Little walks to little tasks became fetishes. The zoo, the park, the boardwalk, the Lego store. They sought a singular consumer object that would restore their individual humanity as an alienated figure under the rule of capitalism. Taste.
Everyone was basing their personalities more and more on fictional characters. We decoded each other through saints and sitcoms. Personality quizzes became “tag yourself I’m x.” People were tagging themselves as weirder and weirder things—Hot Cheeto dust on a laptop, scary dogs in paintings from the sixteenth century, skunk emoticons, pop stars bending their fingers like trolls, geese in plaid hats.
On the train, I scrolled my email. There were a few things from work about their uniform policy. Then:
fuck me! Let’s_meet_and_fuck
FINAL MESSAGE this pussy is ready for u
Thank you <3 I sent u (99) sexy nudes
FUCK-ME-NOW I’m married… but I need…
I didn’t want to disappoint them. I wasn’t sure if they were lesbian MILFs looking for attention or they wanted a man. Could the algorithm tell I was trans or had it coded me as a man looking for sex with a woman? Was I coded as a lesbian? A fake bisexual?
I’m supposed to offer something up about my trip. The point of this section is that I wondered if I would, given the chance, fuck a MILF. The difference between a MILF and a regular mom is that MILFs have big dogs and regular moms have small dogs.
A child was crying in the dining car as we glided along the river. I tried to read a book about the economy but started dozing instead.
In town, I decided it would be best to get comfy. I would spend my first day watching TV and eating fast food. Do-nothing. I walked past the cookie-cutter shops and tourist couples. The town was known for its local flower festival but nothing was in bloom. It almost made me feel sad. The air was pleasant though.
In my room, I flipped through endless TV shows, wondering what could capture my attention for a few hours. Another show about grisly murder appeared on the old screen. That one. The room I was staying in was extremely cold so I ravaged a wicker box of blankets next to the dresser.
I had writer’s block. Like any writer who found herself too deep in therapy, I turned to my life. My biography must hold a clue. The problem was that I was happy. The problem was that happiness was too foreign and I needed the familiarity of sadness to write. “Stupid,” I heard my idols whispering in my ear. “Don’t mystify the act of writing. It just is. You’re not a character, you’re a writer. You’re not a mystic, don’t act like one.” Maybe I needed new idols.
Covid melted my brain. Nothing to see here, nothing to notice. I read and listened to accounts of those who found quarantine a time full of “presence.” For a month I almost never left my house. I couldn’t even go into a store for a while without having a panic attack, my girlfriend had to come and check on me. She stood ten feet away in a little black mask and told me what was happening in the world beyond my block. It took a month before I could go into a store and get coffee again, squeezing past people made me nauseous. Then I saw a cat. A little critter in the corner store a few blocks from the graveyard. I don’t know if she was a girl but let’s face it, she was a cat. She turned to look at me with seasick yellow eyes. I went home and journaled about how the cat cured me of my agoraphobia, thinking I’d stumbled on my own great epiphany. I wrote about trauma and growing up in Indiana hospitals. I read it again recently—-it’s terrible. Melodramatic bullshit quoting Susan Sontag. Everyone quoted Susan Sontag for a while. There’s nothing new to say about Susan Sontag. I thought about what she’d said when she turned in one of her books, “But it’s not as good as Walter Benjamin, is it?”
It should be easy to connect words, to link one clause to another in the clear morning light. Crime shows filled the void of creativity. They didn’t enrich my life in any way other than to kill time. I never guessed whodunit and I didn’t care, I just wanted to watch someone stare off into the middle distance while standing on a cliff.
A lot of people wanted me to “have a point.” I rarely had a point. I just walked around. Few times did I have any actual mission to accomplish. I had goals, sure, but I wasn’t trying to get a chemistry degree like my girlfriend.
Every story my girlfriend told was a love story. She used to tell me that too. “Every story is a love story. It’s why stories were invented.” I never had an example to counter her statement. But it’s true, there are few philosophical tracts about friendship. Love and its reliance on nationalism was the closest thing I could think of. Brotherhood was about protecting the beloved country, not about friendship. Novels about communities were usually about how infidelity cracked the whole damn egg. Occasionally a novel or philosophical essay would talk about the friendship of an animal. Like a dog or a pig. They always read as a little too erotic. For instance, would the animal be allowed to sleep on the bed? If I had a cat I would let her sleep on my bed. If I had a cat, I would be the kind of girl who bought fairy lights.
My second day in town was equally slow. For better or worse it was my only full day in town and I had nothing scheduled. I tried to write in a cafe but nothing flowed. I couldn’t write the Ethical Friendship Novel. It wasn’t my crisis to solve so I drank two cups of black coffee and thought about all the intuitive eating specialists online who said no one seriously liked black coffee, we were all just afraid of calories.
I thought about my grandpa who sincerely liked black coffee. He rarely talked about friends. Only a few army buddies he’d gone to musicals with in Branson, Missouri. Decades later he went back with my grandma, who found it to be the most magical place in the world. I think my grandpa was disappointed. He probably told all his army buddies it wasn’t the same anymore. “Gone downhill,” was his favorite phrase, though it could mean almost anything. I thought I didn't miss the Midwest but I did miss playing dominos and my black cat Missy and my aunt talking about UFOs and going geocaching with my grandpa.
One cold winter morning my grandpa told me the secret of storytelling. I had recently written my first short story about a group of nuns in the wilderness trying to find a boat that would save them from the nuclear holocaust. My parents thought it was nice. My grandpa, having lost his yes, was sullen but interested. We were walking through a graveyard looking for a box full of trinkets.
Now I forget. What was it he said a good story needed? We were talking about blindness for some reason and my grandpa had a theory on narrative and asteroid belts and finality. Somehow it all came together. He had written a book on eschatology and the New Earth. He had a unifying theory. If God is up there fiddling with black holes and morality, I would love to have a little freedom.
Around three I felt the intense need to dig out my vibrator and masturbate. I suppressed it and stayed in the small park I’d walked to. There was a beautiful view of the river. It didn’t inspire me but I took a picture and imagined walking into the torrent with a pocket full of Hot Cheetos. I looked at my phone and saw a screenshot from a friend. A conservative pundit was talking about muffing on the nightly news. Without leaving the vista, I downloaded a copy of the zine that taught me about muffing and sent it to my girlfriend.
did u ever read this?
For dinner, I went to the grocery store and bought pre-made deli macaroni. It looked like sludge but I ate it with a smile. On my walk back to the room, I saw a group of stray cats lounging in a plant nursery. It would’ve been a perfect scene for a jigsaw puzzle. I went up and tried to pet one. I remembered one time when me and my grandma were about to visit grandpa in the hospital she stopped to pet a cat. It was so tender. The cat I tried to pet was lounging behind some zinnias and as soon as I got close enough to crouch down, it scampered away.
My girlfriend and I sent short videos of book recommendations back and forth until she fell asleep. I stayed up watching a Nordic detective with red hair swathed in increasingly fuzzy sweaters. I fell asleep around two in the morning. It was a mistake, I had to be up early to catch my train home. It was a short, uneventful trip. I hadn’t even seen a MILF.
The next morning I walked dutifully back toward the train station. As the sun rose, the low buildings looked like slimy ice cubes. Gray, seafoam, and eggshell yellow little boxes. I passed a little box of violets as I entered the train station.
Inside I felt the acute need for caffeine. I tried to search my pockets for change. The man behind me laughed. I tried to laugh back.
I sat down on the bench. My last moment of silence before my hometown would loom above me yet again. I looked to see if my girlfriend had texted me. No, it was too early. Just my manager at the thrift store reminding me I was going to be working the next eight days in a row.
The man who laughed sat beside me on the bench.
“I left my boyfriend behind to come here for a wedding,” he said.
I nodded. So he was gay.
“Why’d you come here?”
“I don’t know,” I stuttered before taking another sip of my coffee.
“It’s a weird place to come alone.”
“Yeah. I realized that,” I mumbled.
“It’s mostly couples.”
I couldn’t tell if he wanted to hook up or was just interested in my presence.
“Okay cutie, looks like the train’s pulling up.”
He wandered off as the whistle trilled. I guess I wasn’t cute enough. The train pulled in across the lavender river. Soon the sun would be high enough to melt the indigo morning.
I found my place in the Feminist Dystopia Novel I was reading. The novel followed an old woman carrying a yellow basket filled with bottles of wine. She was studying sacred texts and dodging fascists. It wasn’t a very good novel. My girlfriend texted me while I was reading, the little ping taking me out of the novel just as the old woman started talking to an old retired fascist.
Do u wanna get breakfast at the vegan spot? :)
sure !
I looked outside and saw power lines sprouting from the water. It was an early enough train that you could notice things like that.
As I chewed a veggie burger, my girlfriend started telling me about her favorite author of the week. It was some man who wrote Cosmically Comical War Novels. I tried to talk about the trend of Women’s Dystopian Fiction but she didn’t seem all that interested. I wondered if her vegan phase would end before the week was over or if I’d have to suffer another almond cheese queso dip. As my girlfriend’s tofu scramble turned gray, I felt the sinking feeling I would not be getting into grad school anytime soon. Not if my world was so full of thin slices of people. I should have asked the man at the train station more questions.
It started raining as we walked back toward my apartment. We sat on my bed and turned on a TV show, a Canadian sketch comedy group she kept trying to sell me on. I knew we weren’t really going to watch it but I still put up a fight anyway.
“It’s just gross out humor,” I said.
She tried to kiss me. I didn’t kiss her back. I couldn’t, I realized I just wanted to nap. I was back in my life.
Church Bulletin:
In memory of Cecilia Gentili for Vogue.
My first short story in print is available in LARB Quarterly.
A sci-fi short story on trans apocalypse for The Seventh Wave.
On the history of conversion therapy for Parapraxis.
Why are so many trans novels in the present tense for The Baffler?
Review of Immediacy and thoughts on auto-theory for LARB.
Thank you for this