Petulant Angel – Amie Norman

September 19, 2019

I had lost my mind in many a cubicle. Deciding factors were the owning of a home and a husband, a child and a car. I peered down the office aisle, unable to distinguish any other face. Voices blended together into a drip against my brain. I tended to make people step over me as I cried. They stooped, issuing petting motions an inch from contact, and continued on, vacantly assured.

Figures passed by. ‘Please, help me, which way is out?’ I murmured. Someone bent me over the copy machine and spat on their palm suggestively, or so the report said. ‘Thank you,’ I replied, stumbling free, toward our only source of light. The sun shone through the door’s glass, another preamble to a beating.

I grabbed the handle. Behind me, everyone was waving with their left hands. The parking lot had been emptied of my car. Without a phone, purse, or keys, I was worse than a ghost. Some utterance that began independent of my will began a birthday tune while smoke rose off the building. 

Straddling me, appearing concerned, the gas station clerk pulled a feather out his pocket and balled it down his throat, coughing back the wet wreckage, and finally handed over a cell phone. 

First I called my husband, who did not answer, and halfway masturbated onto his voicemail, for the recognition alone. It was a kind of tennis match we indulged in and that I had just won. Then I told my child goodbye. Then my lovers called, unblocked from every phone. They wanted to get McDonalds together in order to revoke all marriages.

     I said my work just burned to the ground. 

     ‘Whoa,’ they said.

      ‘LOL…’ I said. “…LOL…’

I walked until the sun set and found a bar to write an email to my new boss. I explained to the bartender the fire was a woman’s fault and the news would heyday when they found out. In exchange for this entertainment, he let me use his laptop. I sat in a booth and composed an honest introduction:

Let me introduce myself. I will, slut, cuff your insides out backwards if you dare to speak to me without first understanding that yes, there is a hierarchy. Whose cesspool do you wade in? I dove into a few and there learned the necessity of creating one of my own. I’ll show you a parallel then dip you in it. I embrace trauma by skimming photographs of people I know who’ve died or survived various types of gunshot wound. Your head is large while my face is as small as my child’s, and yet you seem to not embrace facts. I’m aging every day and I can’t escape. Space expands, we go forth. Does it get you down to announce the truth? Hurt! I’ve never been a person. I see you are like a pure child, still. The tents pitched in basements are yet to surprise you. A small, wrinkleless hand, with hydrated skin is angelic even when trying to spill ink. I dare you to twist upon someone’s death, on their insides, your girl body, around and around. Pose to seal the moment inside of the man’s head; he breathes for this only. Women are supremely weak against their will to hold themselves higher than the dirt covering graves of men with no dignity. I can’t wait to see the worm hole into your guts. Men and women, one and all, fall to the ground no matter how blind we become to death in the melting meshes of societies. Perhaps I am just me, in any given time in any given place, smeared with a look upon my face for you to interpret. Like all these selfies I’ve left for you. It is okay, no one likes me when I’m mean. 

I signed it with my sincerest apologies for the slightly superior work I’m about to impose upon her company. Then I had an afterthought necessary to explain before the contract binds. Within the PS I hoped to really please her:

Ask any human, how many times did your mother tell you not to look at girls? In their answer watch for the brow shift, the telling furrow. A girl is an intimate and fragile thing. Break her and you will see each facade of her reality. There are jobs requiring a resume and contract. Being a girl is not one. If you wish to employ her like a toy, then reciprocity is required to maintain genuine perfection, otherwise age whilst make insane the habits of girl engulfed brain.

Blowing kisses on my way out of the bar every head turns down. It’s always been this game, predator and prey. Origination can’t get much heartier. I can’t melt enough anger away. Clout is a whore’s game, attached to fame and in hell, yes, we fan the flames. 

On the street, to every person I greet, I sing “Pleased to meet you, indeed,” and the look in their eye tells me I’m not who they want me to be.