a white horse standing in the center of my bedroom

It started with the party, or maybe, it started with an absence.

She had been complaining about the howling void that opened up in the pit of her stomach and screamed for sentience, threatening to consume her entirely, leaving her numb and paralyzed and blind, for nearly a year. When he got sick of it, he invited her to the party.

It was a place where everybody knew everybody and everyone was “networking”. A strange place, one she was alien to due to a profoundly antisocial nature and a deep shyness that nobody believed she possessed except her. Shouting and music and laughter which she remained outside of, observing all that went by her in a sort of fugue state. She was very drunk and trying to hide it. Everybody was talking and only she was listening, but she could only catch snatches of conversation.

“He just sold it for $20 mil…”

“Calvin Klein?”

“It’s a totally radical reclaiming -”

“Have you had the dream too?”

This final snippet forced the world into a singular pinpoint of focus. When she turned to face the speaker, she was met with nothing but light.

A tall boy, very tall, too tall, tall and blond and vaguely misshapen somehow, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps his skeleton outgrew his skin. 

“I’m sorry?”

He smiled, all teeth, a carnivore’s mouth, sharp and pointy and blindingly white. When he leaned in close, his breath smelled metallic. She recoiled instinctually, sensing something rapacious in his grin.

“The dream. I know you’ve had it.”

Maybe he was high. Everyone kept talking loudly about how many lines they’d down, how much they needed another bump, something false in their recital but desperate, too. When she didn’t answer, he kept going.

“The factory. The one outside Pittsburg. The smokestacks. Fumes from the gasoline soaking into the earth. Making you dizzy. Making you sick. The fire. The fire that consumes the factory. And in the fire, the girl. The beautiful girl with the mouthful of blood.”

Dumbfounding. Earth-shattering. She stared at him as though he were a prophet. His grin only widened.

“I’ve been sending them to you.”

And with that, he walked away. Disappeared into the endless crowd.

-

When she got home that night, she was shivering. She always shivered when she was drunk, teeth chattering so hard it created cracks in the enamel, but this shiver was primordial in nature. A deep repulsion to the predator outside the window. Watching. She got straight into bed, still dressed, and left all the lights on. Sleep did not find her.

-

She asked the man who had invited her if he knew the hunter. He laughed, told her, “He’s been my best friend since I was ten years old.” She frowned.

“He told me he was sending me dreams.”

“Yeah, he was probably trying to hit on you.”

She dropped it, but the hole in her gut grew wider. Its edges were starting to bleed.

-

That night, she dreamed. And it was exactly as he had said. She was standing in a desolate part of the country, grey and abandoned, the air crisp. In front of her, made hazy by smog, towered the smokestacks. She knew them. Used to drive out to them when she grew restless as a teenager, stand for hours before them and smoke. Now, they were dark and imposing, rising up out of the starless night like sentinels guarding the true oblivion that lay beyond.

She wrinkled her nose, prickled by gasoline. Yes. The gasoline. The gasoline that soaked into the mud, became part of it, unifying the unconscious with the real. Heat began to envelop her skin, warming her slowly at first, than ravaging her like a fever. The night lit up, blackness giving way to an apocalyptic orange, noxious and nuclear in its brightness. A burning that was not a burning at all, but rather an unmaking, or more precisely, a remaking.

From the flames came the girl.

The girl was not beautiful. This the hunter had lied about. She was simply a negative image of the dreamer, light where she was dark and dark where she was light. Staticky around the edges. When the girl opened her mouth, black blood spilled out in torrents.

-

She opened her eyes to find nothing but her familiar apartment and the gnawing void that remained.

-

On the subway, she searched for signs of psychic torment. Shadowy figures, stange flashes of light. She found nothing.

-

At work, she decided she had invented it all in search of meaning. She didn’t have the dream again.

the dead zone

i am trapped in a sensory deprivation chamber of my own making

stunned insensate by boredom

blindness

burning heat

too much and not enough all at once

sound blankets me like a quilt enveloping my whole body, 

an impromptu body bag duct-taped ‘round my bones so tight it chokes any thoughts

vitality

uniqueness

youth

creativity

etc etc etc

the world beyond is coated in a gauzy haze that obscures my vision and clouds my mind

makes me dull

insensate

useless beyond comprehension

i wander the streets like the living dead, shuffling gait hampered by stupidity and a rotted core, numb to the howling wind and the chirping birds and the dissonant sounds of a lacrosse game, coming as if i am sunk beneath a bathtub, hearing it from underwater

my flesh is pruning and my lips are blue from lack of oxygen, a phantom cosmonaut unable to return to earth, perpetually numbed to sensation. they’ve cut my line and left me floating somewhere among the stars, sucked into the dark void beyond. an empty space defined only by nothingness.

there was never anything here. there has been nothing lost. there is no tragedy to be found.

i am just a girl in her bedroom like every other girl in her bedroom except i am not

In the middle of the night, the bedroom is a space of performance.

Highly curated, museum-like in its spatial integrity: the old box TV flickering in the corner with images from Harmony Korine’s Gummo, the perfectly-made bed with rose sheets and a teddy bear placed between the pillows, and Margaret, her ankles crossed as she lies on her belly, staring vacantly at the screen, her face distorted by the VHS glow. Her hair is braided, and she wears a pair of Brandy Melville sleep shorts and an oversized baby pink crewneck, posed as though ready to be pinned on a board under the name “bedroom aesthetics”. Everything is for the viewer, though there is no audience. She is always performing. She has fully inhabited the role she plays, to the point where she is unsure of who she was before the performance began.

The sound is dull and tinny in her ears, and she can barely decipher what the characters are saying to each other. The TV is too old. She will never switch to her laptop - except when she does, inhabiting a different twist on this role, Spring Breakers mere inches from her face, still in that exact same position on the perfectly-made bed.

That will be tomorrow night’s performance. Tonight, she envisions herself a rural teenager, bored with Midwestern mediocrity, Tia Blake’s sweet voice spinning out from her record player. Everything is analog not by choice but out of necessity. In the early mornings, her chickens will wake her - one of their own has been murdered by a roaming fox.

Or would chickens react with grief to such a sight? Would they wail?

She takes out her phone, Googles, “how do chickens react to corpses”. Results are boring: chickens show signs of post-traumatic stress, blah blah blah. She thinks of Clarice Starling and the screaming lambs, a much more poetic image, but since Jonathan Landis conjured it before she ever could, she resorts to posting, “dead chicken in hen coop. bloody and vile. survivors hid in rafters. felt too real.”

Once it’s been posted, the performance ends. She switches off the TV, wipes her nose on her sleeve, rolls onto her back, and shuts her eyes.

She is not in the Midwest. She is not in the city. She is not in some far-off Eastern European country. As real as the performances may seem, she is simply in ordinary suburbia, and her mom has just texted her to tell her to turn the TV down, please, Johnny is trying to sleep.

She could smother Johnny with a pillow. But that’s just another aspect of performance. Playing at Lisa Rowe-style sociopathy, bleached blonde with no eyebrows and a constant DUI stare, seeing through everything and reacting with casual cruelty that would overwhelm most others. That’s not who she feels playing tonight.

She goes to her window, slides it open and inhales the fresh air. Even this she imagines as a movie scene: a teen girl at her window, late at night, moonlight just barely illuminating her pale features. Cut to: the wide empty lawn, so green and healthy, blanketed by a dark forest.

Of course, there is no forest, and there is barely a yard. Just the sight of the next housing development.

So profoundly boring. So easy to perform more elaborate kinds of boredom.

…

She lies on her bedsheets and falls into her favorite fantasy.

She is either twelve or sixteen, but it’s unclear in the vision of herself in a gingham dress, walking down a dark woodland path, a wicker basket clutched in both hands. She is trembling for an unexplained reason. Her eyes are too big in her face, wide-set and round, round, round, all-consuming orifices from which every imaginable fluid has leaked. Inexplicably, her hair is always blond in the daydream, falling down to her lower back. Golden and shining in the sickle-cell moonlight slowly poisoning her psyche. 

Her footsteps crunch over twigs and dead leaves. There is frost hanging in the air, forewarning a coming chill. Bad for crops. So she has been sent scavenging, to forage in the dark forest that surrounds her tiny village, though why she has been set to this task so late at night is unclear. A low hum surrounds her, quiet at first, but the deeper she wanders, the louder it gets, building to a crescendo of a late-night woodland orchestra: the flapping of wings, the buzzing of near-dead things, the low moans of injured beasts. She shrinks.

There is no clear path, and she has lost her way completely. It was suicide to come here alone. Or maybe it was a sacrifice. 

Eventually, she reaches the shambles of a wooden cabin, chewed up by forest things and rotting into the damp earth. At first, it seems empty. The closer she gets, the warmer it appears. The scent of smoke in the air. A faint red haze surrounding it.

She cannot resist. She crosses the threshold. 

…

The fantasy always falls apart here. Becomes too cliche and trite for her to stomach. A mysterious older woman, blankets of dark hair covering her face, beckons her inside. Invites her to try a delicious red apple, positively dripping with sweetness, bleeding red when she takes the first bite. Once she’s swallowed it core and all, she chokes. There are razorblades within the apple. Her throat is torn to pieces from the inside out. The enchantress kisses the blood from her lips and encases her in wax, then seals her in a glass coffin like all the other beautiful girls.

Or a brooding figure lurks in the corner, lanky and all-bones, crouched like an animal, hungry eyes gleaming in the dark. He licks his lips. She is trapped. 

Or nothing is there. Nothing but the consuming blackness of night and a perfectly-placed mirror. It holds no reflection.

---