Luis told me to come here for my surprise showcase. I dressed for/to death. They look more surprised than they should. All these beady, debilitating eyes swarming my life presence, picking apart the small tear of life behind my eyes, x-raying my flesh and bones with their tyrannical life-policing, sizing up my outline. Cracking through the skin under me.
I can feel myself shrinking in front of them, realtime. I wish I could summon a gun somehow and wipe off the expression off of everyone’s fucking face. This is a moment 3D printing was made for. Yes, a silver bullet for every piece of shit mouthbreather in here. My salivary glands started to secrete like a wild infestation of pests. My mouth needs to taste something, but my brain’s not telling me what.
“Yo, take this”, he says, sitting behind me.
The fuck I look like?
The face I made when saying ‘the fuck I look like’ in my head instead of saying it out loud.
I’m not taking that.
I take the bottle anyway. I set it aside. The A/C is not installed in this room and I feel hotter than ever as I stare past every living being in here into the void of a blank, sterile wall. I hear someone in the second row talking shit and two other people laughing. Everyone wants to kill the fag behind the podium, I presume, but I’ll kill them before they kill me. They’ve got meat, skin, teeth, cloth shirts, and jeans; nothing bulletproof. A stack of papers laid await in front of me.
When I get to unconsciously hold them I realize there are no words on them. I start thinking about the angle and degree of sun rays in the morning on the side of a downtown building next to its adjacent parking lot. Thinking about ants pilfering, and mingling on the carcass of a pigeon fetus on the wooden gray steps in the green backyard. Thinking about a fated event in the future before it happens this week.
Thinking about a random milling of variously melanin people in a busy market center in a pick-your-poison global city; asleep people on the other side of this rock while we stand here awake. About an anonymous animal creature getting its guts anchored under a sedan tire after trying to cross the street, and the driver who may have or have not noticed its existence before he/she felt a bump in the road.
The simultaneous rupturing of every single molecule of life smashing against each other on the Earth like a LHC if it were to be blendered. Human brains careening away from other human brains like deadly car crash scares; highway circuses as if built by germaphobes, in abstraction but in no further titillation unless personally touched. Shit. Can I have some oblivion for dinner?
Like a broken record, I’m reeled back to where I started. I’m in my zone. Still, someone in the second row is talking shit about me. Or the 3rd row now as I should clarify upon inspection. Fifteen others are laughing. Another handful subsumed on their phones. All armed to the literal teeth. They’re bleeding the ghost out of me. Every cough and vacant glance and undiluted motion a carefully predicated violence like a lion’s clamp on the neck of a gazelle. I am not the autograph of my life, I am a mere witness.
Spit has been lodged in my throat for quite a while, blocking the entrance to my esophagus. I uncap the water bottle to only find my animal body resentful of the freshly™ spring water I attempt to rush down my mouth. Water gets all over the podium instead. Fuck it, who needs hydration or expiration? I’m in my zone.
“Hey maybe you want this instead,” Luis says behind me. He nudges my elbow, and I look over to see a little black gun.
Is it possible to say anymore thanks? I close my eyes in mouth-watering bliss.
This is more like it.
Alexandre Louis Pétion is a 19-year old NEET person from Connecticut.