What’s good y’all, please enjoy this short fiction. It clocks in at 2,624 words, which is a 10 to 15 minute read. I wrote this piece to experiment with how much tension I could create with just two characters as foils who have different and inadequate responses to a crisis. On the spectrum of fight/flight/freeze/appease, how might we become proactive rather than reactive? I owe a lot to Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. So, here we go -cdz

We need food. We need food to move and in order to get food we needed to move. The planes arriving at MSP hung in the air forever like mobiles. The moon spurned us for better deserts. The ivy on the house shivered, brittled, failed to breed. Our shared shared space smelled like French fries from three days ago. Fruit flies materialized from the trash as Tassel threw away another family-size yogurt container. She gets so gassy on dairy. 

I sit across from her and hated that she wouldn’t meet my eyes. She plays with her spoon, tries to balance it on her nose, it slips off, she leaves it on the floor. Yogurt flaked on her lower lip. She has a single long hair that curled under her chin like a pubic hair: either she had stopped plucking it out every 48 hours or she hasn’t spotted it yet. She was making me work too hard, and I can already tell she was losing interest in going to the island. It’s the arriving that is unbearable. But we’re not all determined to survive on no effort like Tassel. I won’t eat corn and yogurt until it makes me sick. 

So we’re going to the island. We’ve already waited for the best of the sun to expire. We’ll need the rest of the light to navigate the channel on the way back. I make to go, knowing she’ll follow me, I cross the strip of trash grass between the houses and mount the dock. The water reeks of algae: there are no other boat wakes: our neighbors, as far as I can tell, eat drugs, or each other. Tassel trails behind me so she can vape four or six times on the dock before getting in. I am reminded that the adjective form of vape is vapid, it occurs to me that I am being mean, it occurs to me to check my teeth in my phone camera, it occurs to me to encourage her to stay behind. “So exciting! The island!” Her voice is like a little girl’s. She reminds me of my sister in that way. My sister is in rehab. 

I grab her hand to help her down into the boat. It is hot. She will not help with the knots. She doesn’t know knots: it is a sore point between us that I am bad at teaching her to make knots. 

I am grabbing the oars when a youngish white guy waves at us, coming down the dock. I am instantly on alert because he is a stranger. He has blue butterflies tattooed up his arm and his face is smooth, taut, like he hardly uses it. I hand Tassel an oar. I can’t make out his eyes and in looking for them I almost get lost. 

The man points at himself. Then he points to Tassle. He raises his eyebrows suggestively. He points at himself and sticks his tongue in his cheek and then raises his hands, palm-up.

It is hard not to laugh at him, because he performs all of this completely silently. I stick my oar in the water. I push the boat away from the dock with my oar. Tassel is not following suit. She may be troubled by our present circumstances. Could this man be someone she used to know? Nobody is born a Tassel. Regardless, I wrangle the boat with one oar until the head, where we sit, is facing away from the dock. 

“I’m sorry for making you come with me,” I said. “It’s nothing. I like the island.” “Did you know that guy?” “No.” “Well, thanks for coming with me.” “Fucked up, isn’t it?” “What now?” “He’s still there, staring.” After a silence, she adds, “I would have been more likely to suck his cock if he used his words.” 

“He looks like an economics professor, they’re all like that.” “How do you mean?” “Little.” “Don’t be an ableist.” It isn’t like her to reprimand me. I have to check myself. 

I don’t mention the blue butterflies, although they were beautiful, and I don’t bother to look at the man again. I feel uneasy. We plunge forward. Tassel syncs her oar with mine. We tear the warm green fabric. We are going to the island. 

We arrive at the same time as a whole bunch of other unfortunate suckers. Three Hispanic teenagers in front of us are talking shit, and one girl is holding court. Apparently, to wear foundation these days is to admit your desire to appear pornographic. “It’s not like eyeliner, which is amplification.” Then follows a long description of another girl’s porn ad: “A cock-and-titty cyborg dominating you, BUT it has no face. That’s the sexiest thing I can imagine right now.” “But isn’t having no face kind of the goal of foundation.” “Foundation gives you a perfect complexion, which is the opposite of having no face, no complexion.” “It just sounds like you have trouble reading people’s faces and would rather verbalize with your body.” “Your honor, tell the bitch to quit reading into it.” “Well, what do you think Serena? Who’s right?” The two of them round on their friend. “I didn’t even say I was listening!” She protests.

I am happy Tassel doesn’t understand Spanish. It was weird of her to make that comment about sucking that guy’s cock. I used to know her cycle, but I lost track of it a while ago, when we stopped menstruating at the same time. I do remember her saying that progesterone-only birth control makes her want to “get bred.” 

An Asian sailor shoos a seagull off his dinghy and loads an air fryer onto the seats. There are a lot of young moms with children about, because it’s August and nobody’s in school yet, and all the summer camps have just bussed their brats home. As we’re coming up the island dock, which is painted red, and I am feeling sun on the hair of my arms, grateful this dock has guardrails, unlike our private dock at home, I hear someone say,“We got a runner.” 

There he is, a security guard, off to the side, a white guy in a groutfit holding his walkie-talkie an inch from his flabface. It’s always unnerving to remember how tight security is on the island. It’s nearly impossible to steal from: if you do, you won’t get through the facial recognition software next time you’re at the entrance. I see a portly older man in a shabby suit speed-walking away from us down the dock with a blender under his arm. At least he got something good for his trouble. 

At last, we make it through. I am now deeply uneasy. I wish I could be squeezed back into myself. I instruct Tassle to touch nothing. I am nervous being in charge, all the more that I have to control her, she makes things more difficult for me. It smells like waxed fruits. A woman with a baby asks us for change and Tassel looks to me. I change aisles even though we should spend more time in the produce section. There are toddlers in self-driving consumer-in-training carts moving with more assurance than us. 

The island is not a person. We pillage the island. The island is the land of ease. Everything on the island came from somewhere else. It is detached: it is not a place unto itself: therefore it is clean. Our hands select and purge and rotate. Tassel is noticeably more hesitant than me. I consider telling her a knock-knock joke to keep her spirits up, but I only know one knock-knock joke and need to save it. Tassel is a bleeding heart and she’s gumming up my process. I brought her along so she would take point on absorbing the feelings of the other islanders. I consider what poundage of rice to buy and accidentally tear a hole in a twenty-pound bag. I put it back, hoping the cameras didn’t catch my mistake. 

I see her hesitating over different types of shrink-wrapped tomatoes. Plastic is cancer and everything is cancer on the island. The fruit looks like plastic toys. She’s probably forgotten how many tomatoes we eat in a month. All she can cook is toasted bread, and she’s negligent even with that. Yogurt doesn’t need to be cooked, and she eats corn raw, too, even though that’s like a cheese grater on your stomach. When we run out of bread, when I throw it away because her infrequent meals are not enough to prevent the runty butt from molding, she either whines, eats cereal with chocolate milk, or starves. Tassel cannot handle coming to the island on her own. She needs me: it is to my advantage that she never learns to cook. 

We are in the egg section. We are leaning over on cliffs, showing off our round asses, lifting our skirts and sunning our buttholes. We dig our perfect hands into the nests of gulls. Everything tastes of salt spray. Or so I imagine. We are in the egg section, where we get most of our protein. Everything is styrofoam and fluorescent and smells like menthol nasal spray. We need 48 eggs a month, and even then we run out halfway through the final week. Where is Tassel? 

I go back to the salsa section and she is entertaining a little white kid who’s climbed up on the second shelf of the grocery store and is rummaging around among all the glass jars of Pace and Tostitos and tabasco sauce and where are his people? He must have climbed up the special endcap display of animal crackers. She’s sticking her arm in the shelf, trying to coax him out.  He’s so small he could stand up inside the shelf: must be like three or so: he looks just like my sister when she was that age, it sucks to remember she was once a human child.  

He looks like he’s about to jump down from the shelf, thank god. Those things are not stable. She is nodding, promising she’ll catch him.  He’s only three feet off the ground, but still.  She’s probably cooing. I’m leaning over my cart longwise, the carton of Fatboy ice cream is leaving a wet spot on my smock-shirt. Where are his people? 

He jumps to the left of her, avoiding her arms entirely. His face finds and enters the ground. There is a crack that changes everything after. I will remember the crack of his face vs the ancient linoleum, because it was so deep, it reverberated in my vertebrae like stone tearing, like stone being shaved. Any nose would be flattened. Afterward the hum of the refrigerators audible at last, some of the customers alerted, but for what? Looking around, sheep in the open, nervous looking for a gun, although there hasn’t been a shooting at the island in at least years.

He shivers and doesn’t roll over. Tassel stands over him. Why didn’t he put his arms out to catch himself? She looks like she expects him to get up. Then she looks away and screams around, braying her screams out like she’s a sprinkler. The consumers that were still unawares are looking up annoyed now, nobody has approached. No crowd forms: accidents do not bring us together. She screams at them like they’re supposed to decipher the scene from her noises. Her eyes are very white and skittish like flies. She still hasn’t touched or helped the boy. She promised to catch him! Her screams are saying, not me, not me, this was not my fault. 

Here comes his mother, hurtling down the global foods aisle. Here comes consequence. Mothers exist so the rest of us can hurt ourselves and watch the pain bloom on someone else. To become a mother, first give birth to a blade of bloody glass, it slides through that baked apple flesh like a miracle, a mirror to her, a dagger to the generation she dies for, a subject coded for the first time is coded twice. She hurries forward, two more kids following her steps in the radius of her overcoat. She ignores Tassel. She goes right for her boy. She lifts him up. He has no face. His face is a mountain pass sealed with a purple boulder. At last comes the anger. She turns to Tassel like a nurse turns to the doctor, for information. Tassel screams, not at her. But an abuse of feeling all the same.

The boy’s mother says something to Tassel. If they’re not screaming, I can’t make out the dialogue, so I make it up. Something scathing like, Stop screaming, Go call your own mother. She will think of that comment, accompanied by the crack of face breaking, from now on several times a day. Then Tassel, she the inciting incident, she who has no mother to call, her screams wilt to cries so that she might be readopted into the crowd of uncomfortable consumers, she unfortunately is still a loud crier. I am so right in hating Tassel. Getting herself involved with other people like this. 

I don’t do anything unusual to connect me to Tassel. I back away slowly and make her cries go reverse Doppler.  I keep my movements minimal and I do not deviate from my original plan. I just need some distance, so I move. I smile and send good karma to the teenage cashier with the infected nose ring. I accept my gifts of life in plastic. Once I’ve paid, I look around for Tassel and don’t see her. Whether you kneel or not, in the end you are always abandoned. The island is already recovering. For the unlucky acting manager, it is not about the boy, it is about saving face with Caution Wet Floor signs. 

I unwrap a Fatboy and give it to a boy on the dock who is not fat, but could be one day. I have seven bags of groceries. I have to leave the second round with the cashier and come back for it, taking a huge risk by leaving four bags in the boat. They’re all still there, though. A speedboat goes by and makes spray. Could someone have called the Emergency Health Services? The spray lands harmlessly on my hair, crowning me with proximity. It occurs to me that the water is not cold.

I fish through the bags until I find the tomatoes Tassel picked out- practically the only thing she did- and chuck them in the water without unwrapping them. Then I start for home. 

The island gets smaller as I row the filthy waters. I need to take care of myself and my food. It will take all afternoon. Tassel calls me five minutes later. I am unsnaring myself from a soggy diaper caught on a log underwater. She is waiting to hear me say I’m sorry, for ditching her, as if it were like that. Instead I make a promise with wine and dinner tonight as the bait. She’s waiting for me at the other end of the dock. Can I promise to forget what happened today? I can. No, I’m happy you came with me. Really. More fun with you around. And do I mean it? I do. I think I forgot your tomatoes with the cashier, I tell her.

She hangs up before making me work any harder, thank god.

I make a play with myself, dangling my fingers in the water, dangling my whiskers in cool joy. Forgetting the pollution for a moment. We got in and out of the island with only a few incidents. A minor run. We will practice our ritualized forgetting tonight. We have a lot of practicing to do. The leaves in the cotton trees along the river shiver like they’re wet, too, and gold.