Warming up… truly.
Tag: fiction
aSoSS 40 | Leeway
…and she responds, and doesn’t get weird, or defensive, like you.
[mouth agape]
Yeah, yeah, it’s okay. Me too.
Trader Joe’s, 12:00PM, 11/24/2024
every shipman is aware of the dangers of slack, a knife of potential cutting across the air. and yet we have tiptoed around the topic for too long, each of us too scared to wake the current and lose the line. like a cruel childhood game–whoever moves first loses!–your hands are at your mouth and i am on one knee (as if to tie a shoe, i tell you, but really, do you believe that?) and the moment is frozen in a dream, so vivid a memory could not do it justice. the orange is left to rot on the counter, unpeeled, unsplit. pure and perforated and rotten, at the same time, in all the wrong places.
If you don’t like it, you just hand it to Eileen, be like “cool, now you have two!”
Food Mart, 12:00PM, 12/26/2024
the vice of the human condition is the systematic approach to an unstructured life. you have been tasked with falling in love: go and sit on the bus and hold eye contact and brush the snow out of her hair. a look of surprise overwhelms you. even the most artistic are drawn to scientific conclusions, eliminating every variable at once. everything must go to plan or else it is not the plan at all. a senior thesis: is it, or is it not? the numbers quiver in their sockets.
when you board, the bus is empty, the driver wears sunglasses, and all the snow has melted.
That’s my job, and yeah, you and I have to stick to it because we’ve been way too accommodating!
Traverwood Library, 5:00PM, 1/14/2025
the tap water runs clear and straight–an ominous sign. it was the vietnamese activist Duong Thu Huong who wrote there’s no river without a bend just as there’s no life without its unhappiness. i look around; the room is littered with peanut shells. i am an elephant with a blanket on its back and the room is nothing more than a cage. outside, panem et circenses. the carnival band starts to play and the world is filled with all the notes of an obituary.
LOG_039_HUIJ
Above: the beginnings of a village established on KHEPRI-1c. Though most of the planet’s population were transient researchers, some found their calling among the icy peaks and igneous valleys and sought to become permanent residents. Powered by geothermal activity beneath the crust, their massive radar tower was the main source of communication with the outside world, and it expanded into one of the biggest outposts on the planet. However, less than a decade later, misfortune struck: a major earthquake followed by a particularly harsh storm wiped out most of its population, and the remaining survivors elected to abandon the crumbling town to the mercies of 1c’s eternal winter.
Ringo From the Stars | Chicken Wings
Ringo and their new friend eat chicken wings… chicken wings… chicken… wings….
aSoSS 39 | Suspicion
I never know the next time I’ll see you.
I’m always at home.
By the time I come home it’s 2AM!
Well, I’m probably awake…
Weiser Hall, 3:30PM, 10/19/2024
for Edgar Allan Poe, remoteness is a necessary ingredient of literature. we must detach ourselves from reality in order to best portray it. Muñoz Molina writes that he lives through the death of a beautiful cigar girl. He writes a story in which Mary Rogers becomes Marie Rogêt, substituting Paris for Jersey City and the Seine for the Hudson. like an outsider swiveling a telescope, sweeping the curtain aside, peering into the void of human nature from the neighbor’s window. her murder, of course, is never solved.
the cold is a sedative, the snow a sterilizer. you are across the world and only now do i dare to loosen my tongue. i brush your name onto the paper as i once did to the tears across your cheek.
Registering for classes now is wild. Go inside, they have more wifi inside than outside.
More wifi?
Pierpont Commons Outbound, 11:30AM, 12/6/2024
hey, it’s me. yeah, it’s been a long time, huh? i just got your letter, the mailman told me it was a miracle the machine could read it. he said you have the worst handwriting he’s ever seen, haha. there are just piles and piles of stuff in the back of the room that they just can’t send. can you imagine that? terabytes of information is just lost in transit, as if it had never existed in the first place. isn’t that crazy?
hello? is anyone there?
[holding a plate of cucumbers, hummus, and peppers] I like to get creative with my meals.
Yeah, I guess you could call that a meal…
East Quad Dining Hall, 5:00PM, 1/7/2025
the act of eating with someone is perhaps the quickest way to rewire the neurons. do you think our brains misattribute this relief of hunger? your fork vibrates, ever so slightly, attuned to the heartbeat pulsing through your fingertips. there are things we are not in control of and this is one of them. once bitten and twice shy, why do you keep your distance? the stomach rattles its chains.
aSoSS 38 | Markdown
Oh yeah, how was your birthday?
It was nice.
How old are you turning, 17? Hmm, something’s not adding up!
EECS Building. 3:30PM, 11/21/2024
it has been one year but not quite one birthday. the ball drops. you used to think it would shatter, that the people in the square would be pelted with shards of glass, the previous year burrowing into skin as a final act of rebellion. now i think it is not too far from reality, that the more we celebrate, the more of the self we sacrifice. i tear off the last page of the calendar and notice a message carved into the cardboard backing. you made it! perhaps not everything requires a celebration, but today is an exception.
[pointing to price tags] five, five forty, five forty-five… nothing is cheap!
NCRC Building 20, 4:00PM, 11/19/2024
red circles around black squares, a day to be dreaded either forwards or backwards: either living in fear of it, or looking back and mourning the wisdom gained with hindsight. a markdown on the quality of life, some would say. humans are creatures of structure. we are not beavers, we do not need to live our lives regulating the currents of space, stemming the flow of time. and yet we construct our own complacency. we convince ourselves that our habits pass for our happiness. the red circles have been relegated to excess inventory, to clearance–cash in on the memory today or risk losing it forever. the price to pay? you must tell your story.
They have price tags under their tags that are cheaper…
They’ve gotta pay rent.
We’re not helping!
Rally House, 8:30AM, 11/29/2024
telling a true story is impossible. it is deceptive, the folds of detail stored and scrambled, this perverse act of remembering. in reality, remembering is the easy part; stripping the petal from the stamen, sterilizing the thought so it does not reproduce, is much harder. any emotion associated with an action is boiled away, a chrysanthemum tea prepared for the hanged man–a scribe, tasked with an unbiased account of the emperor, a death sentence in this life and the next. tomorrow I will waste another hour regretting yesterday, whispers the man. a wisdom, distilled in blood, paid for in sanity.
