“Untitled” by Geraldine Kim
want, not you, but the feeling you make. There is no one left on the planet so you walk naked across empty streets. Why not? This world was set before you and it is yours, you powerless, helpless thing. Cease producing saline liquid from thy lacrimal ducts! These thoughts, these feelings, they don’t belong to you: the thoughts of death, of loneliness. You belong to the air above and surrounding you, that scentless, invisible matter. Breathe it in then do something funny. It is the apocalypse and the first thing you think of is raiding a cake shop. An Angry Birds cake is displayed in the front window. You smash the glass with a nearby brick. Kawaii pigs giggle in your mind. The sound of laughter coming from your throat. Your hand grabs a green fondant pig, eyes askew. You splatter it across the sidewalk. There is no easy puff of smoke with some multiple of 1000 rising up. You push the tower of simulated cinder and wood over. Frosting and stale cake cover your hands. You are made of cake and these things, your fingertips, the cake, the fragments of glass catching the morning light, all these things, were made by humans who were taught by other humans, the art of baking and cake decoration and sex and glass manufacturing and destruction. You were made and you survived and you don’t feel guilt, but rather, something else entirely. You lick an angry red bird, black eyebrows a chevron, a shard of glass slicing the surface of your tongue, blood pooling across your tastebuds. You find a sink behind the counter and wash your hands, spitting blood into your mirrored reflection. Out, out! You walk away, wiping your hands dry in your wild nest of hair, and take a shit in the middle of the street, your breasts resting over your knees as you squat. Because you can. Because there’s no one and because you can start sentences with “because” now. Because there’s no one, not even you. You wipe the shit with your fingers and look at them, the smell of brown. The art of excretion was never taught. It just sort of happened to you. Just like this Darwinian drive to live despite the awful farce of it. You wash your hands at the shop sink again, because you fear bacterial infection/death the same way an ant runs from a child’s monstrous foot. Death is a capricious child who squashes you, not out of fear, but out of some strange curiosity or boredom. Some yearning for the basic concept of cause and effect. Death is retarded. Death doesn’t understand that when it kills an entire colony of ants by kicking over an anthill with its baby sneaker from the Children’s Place at the mall that there is an effect. That you, you tiny ant, who was looking for something to do to somehow sustain the colony and then saw a cave and got distracted and wanted to explore said cave out of some primordial desire for uterus/tomb, and when you were done marveling at those fantastic cathedrals of stalactites and stalagmites with your flashlight, at the calm of the dark when you turned your flashlight off, finding your way out so you could tell some members of your colony, your family and friends, about this beauty, you found everyone had perished at the tread of Death’s size 0 sneaker. You wanted to hate Death but you told yourself that Death is a retarded baby that has no future, no sense of cognition. It stares and strains to see how to assert itself, every every moment. It doesn’t understand that its own actions radiate outward like a horrific sonic pulse, causing all surrounding matter to oscillate at its scream for its mother’s milk, its mother who never comes. Death is a lonely, retarded baby and you want to be its mother. You want to stop washing your hands after you shit in the street or mess up an Angry Birds cake display or touch your love’s face after you discover them dead in your apartment or masturbate on the bed while crying after realizing you’re the only one left. That the cave protected you. But it didn’t. There is a once busy street, drivers of cars slumped over steering wheels. Close your eyes. The sun warms your skin while the wind chills you. The cold with the warm, the simultaneity of it.
Copyright © 2012, Geraldine Kim