“Why aren’t we in love?” Grace was laying on Samuel’s bed with her head hanging backwards off the edge. Samuel was sitting against his closet door, a notebook full of his drawings in one hand and a pencil in the other.

“Almost done, just a second.” Samuel didn’t look up from his drawing.

“‘Kay,” Grace said, letting her arms hang down behind her head and grabbing the dark blue microfiber blanket that hung down in a uniform length all around the bed. She looked around the room she spent half her time in, there were the same dinosaur stickers that were there when they were in kindergarten. The same tinfoil spaceship on his bookshelf she had made him for his eighth birthday. Nothing ever really changed in Samuel’s room, he just accumulated more things. It might have looked like a mess to anyone else, with books and clothes and papers with elaborate drawings strewn all over the floor, but Grace knew that everything had its place and Samuel would lose everything if he, or more likely his mother, cleaned.

“Sorry, I’m done now,” Samuel said, putting his art pad on top of a pile of shirts, “What did you say?”

“I asked why we’re not in love.” Grace rolled onto her stomach and stared down at the ratty beige carpet. She sounded as if she was asking about nothing more significant than the weather. And she wasn’t, not to her.

“Probably because we’re not, right? I mean, I love you yeah, but like a really cool turtle, or if I had a twin sister.”

“But wouldn’t it make sense for us to be in love? We’re real teenagers now, shouldn’t we be doing that sort of thing?” Grace sat up on the bed, criss-cross-applesauce, and leaned her head back against the wall.

“What do you mean? I guess we are supposed to be dating people now, but why each other?” His voice, like Grace’s, didn’t sound like they were having some kind of profound conversation. They were both just curious about the situation.

“The teen movies all say that one day you’re going to look at me and realize that you never want anyone else. And then we’ll date until the end of time and be disgustingly in love. And have lots of sex, I guess, but that’s in like a couple years.”

“Why me, specifically?”

“Because we’ve been friends since you can have friends that aren’t your mom’s-friend’s-kids. We’re together literally all the time, and neither of us really like being around anyone else.”

“I guess, but to be fair, have either of us tried being around anyone else? I see your, point, but yeah.” Samuel stretched his legs out in front of him, propping his feet up on a pair of jeans he couldn’t remember washing.

“And like, you’re quirky and weird and a nerd and I’m kind of pretty and do gymnastics. And I have too tried being around other people, Remember when you had chickenpox in the third grade and had to stay home for like a month?”

“Two weeks!” Samuel interjected, laughing.

Daisy Blake lives in Garland, Texas and realizes that what she does for beauty pageants could be seen as excessive. For the moment, Daisy is seven months pregnant, but as she drives to the Beautiful Youth Clinic, that’s all about to change. It’s three weeks before the pageant, so she has just enough time to get everything ready.

“Oh dear lord no, this isn’t abortion. How could you even say that to me? Abortion is a crime against god. What I’m doing is ensuring my darling Miranda doesn’t start to die. You’re at your most beautiful when you’re young. You start to die as soon as you’re born, I’m just making sure Miranda doesn’t have to go through that. That’s what Beautiful Youth specializes in.” We follow Daisy through the doors, the walls are lined with  shelves of ornate glass jars filled with glittery formaldehyde. “I can’t decide which Beauty Vase to get, though. My husband says I can get anything under $2,000 and I do want one with an emerald encrusted base.” She pauses in front of one with such a base and clear glass flowers along the top. “Emeralds are Miranda’s birthstone.”

Daisy goes up to the front desk and grabs a pink clipboard with the forms on it. It’s three pages in it’s entirety. She sits down on one of the waiting room chairs and fills out the forms in silence, a blank, almost irritated expression on her face. She finished and regained her cheery expression. Walking back up to reception, Daisy tells us that it’s really only precautionary and they don’t actually read anything on the sheet she had to fill out. “Mary-Ann [a friend and fellow competitor] said that they just threw her forms onto a pile and then let her go on back to the beautician.” And sure enough, as soon as Daisy sat back down they had called her name and she was standing again.

A tall balding man in a pink lab coat leads Daisy through a heavy wooden door. The other side is clinical and white, but with vases on tables every couple feet. The door slams in front of us. A sign with large type hangs on it, “NO OBSERVERS.” We wait.

Fetuses & Tiaras is based around the reality TV show Toddlers & Tiaras. I have tried to write it in much the same way as the show was filmed. This excerpt is the first time we meet the only person the story focuses on who is competing the the Beauty Vase category of the pageants. This is the first piece of Transgressive Fiction I have ever written. 

***

Daisy Blake lives in Garland, Texas and realizes that what she does for beauty pageants could be seen as excessive. For the moment, Daisy is seven months pregnant, but as she drives to the Beautiful Youth Clinic, that’s all about to change. It’s three weeks before the pageant, so she has just enough time to get everything ready.

“Oh dear lord no, this isn’t abortion. How could you even say that to me? Abortion is a crime against god. What I’m doing is ensuring my darling Miranda doesn’t start to die. You’re at your most beautiful when you’re young. You start to die as soon as you’re born, I’m just making sure Miranda doesn’t have to go through that. That’s what Beautiful Youth specializes in.” We follow Daisy through the doors, the walls are lined with  shelves of ornate glass jars filled with glittery formaldehyde. “I can’t decide which Beauty Vase to get, though. My husband says I can get anything under $2,000 and I do want one with an emerald encrusted base.” She pauses in front of one with such a base and clear glass flowers along the top. “Emeralds are Miranda’s birthstone.”

Daisy goes up to the front desk and grabs a pink clipboard with the forms on it. It’s three pages in it’s entirety. She sits down on one of the waiting room chairs and fills out the forms in silence, a blank, almost irritated expression on her face. She finished and regained her cheery expression. Walking back up to reception, Daisy tells us that it’s really only precautionary and they don’t actually read anything on the sheet she had to fill out. “Mary-Ann [a friend and fellow competitor] said that they just threw her forms onto a pile and then let her go on back to the beautician.” And sure enough, as soon as Daisy sat back down they had called her name and she was standing again.

A tall balding man in a pink lab coat leads Daisy through a heavy wooden door. The other side is clinical and white, but with vases on tables every couple feet. The door slams in front of us. A sign with large type hangs on it, “NO OBSERVERS.” We wait.

A Short Story with a Surrealist Slant

I carry them in a little film canister. The same sort of film canister that my contemporaries keep their weed in. That little film canister that looks like a pill bottle. You know the one I mean.

I carry them with me to class. And only to class. My little dead flies. Charlie. Freddy. Marty. Chrysanthemum. My little film canister full of dead flies. I painted it with gold and covered it with gold glitter. And then I covered it with mod podge so it wouldn’t flake.

Every morning I put my film canister full of dead flies dead the front pocket of my back pack. Every day after class I take them out again. And I put them on my desk. And I go smoke a cigarette. I never open my film canister of dead flies. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t. The mod podge has sealed it shut. But I know they’re in there.

Charlie. Freddy. Marty. Chrysanthemum.

My little dead flies who live in their gilded film canister. They never go anywhere without me that isn’t class. I value their education and don’t want to subject them to my vices. I put them in my desk drawer when I drink and don’t take them with me when I smoke. My poor dead flies. They deserve better.

Charlie. Freddy. Marty. Chrysanthemum. They deserve better than a college nobody with bad hair and a history of people telling me I will save the world. My poor dead flies.

Charlie. Freddy. Marty. Chrysanthemum.

I started writing Sam & Grace stories as a part of my senior project in high school. I, then as now, was writing a short collection of short stories. And, then as now, it was largely made up of Sam & Grace stories and Fetuses & Tiaras. What can I say, I like ampersands. My senior project mentor, a poet and librarian at the University of Idaho, told me that I had managed to write one of the most classic love/friendship stories and one of the most truly terrifying pieces of transgressive fiction he had ever read. Now, Sam and Grace are grown up and Fetuses is, I hope, almost finished.

In nearly all Sam & Grace stories, they are the only two characters. Not just the only named, the only speaking, but the only ones at all. Sure in some instances (in a meeting, ordering coffee) there have to be other people, but they act as scenery. I did this to show Sam & Grace’s co dependency that verges on dangerous. There are more characters than just them in the first story, when they meet in kindergarten, because they are not yet as tied to each other as they become. They are a set. They are Sam&Grace. Even years after seeing each other every day, they are still that set. They are still co dependant. They are still almost crossing the point of close friends to losing their own personhood to the set. They are still cosmically and comically bound together.

They grew up together. They grew together. They grey into each other. When they are apart, though, it is not as if a piece of themselves is missing. It’s like when you rest your hand on your  leg and then move it. You notice where your hand was is cold and feels different and you want to negate that feeling, but you also know that it wouldn’t be the same. Or maybe that only happens to me.

***

The engine turned over and Grace sighed at the familiar noise. Then she voiced a question she’d been mulling over for two years.

“How did you find me?” It was almost as if Samuel had been waiting for that. He didn’t ask what she meant and it took him less than five seconds to reply. It was so clean and unfeeling it was almost rehearsed, like he’d been working out an answer for as long as she’d been trying to find the right question.

“I got Charlie to drive me down the road to Altus. I knew you’d be somewhere along there. I saw my truck, told him to leave me and to tell them we’d be a little late. I threw the bag I got together at your house in with you, checked out the damage, and got us back to Lloyd Noble by one.” He said it all in such a measured tone. Stating information, not really thinking about it.

“Oh. That makes sense. Thanks Sammy.” Grace responded, slipping back into the-way-things-were.

“Don’t mention it, Gracie,” Samuel responded, grinning. They fell into an easy silence, a silence of people who don’t need words to fill the space, the engine humming and the tires vibrating along the newly paved highway on the way back home.

She stared down at her hands, raw and red from the cold, “Why are you here? Why are you always here when things have turned to shit?”

“Maybe because that’s when you want me to be.”

“That’s really not it.”

He looked away from here and sighed, “Look if you want me to leave, I will.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. That was a bluff. What’s wrong?”

“Everything. Nothing. I don’t know. I’m tired. Both literally and existentially. Maybe I’m dying. I’ve been dead since I was eleven. Maybe it caught up.”

“Can I hug you?” He asked, taking his hand out of his pockets and letting them hang there at the ends of his arms like a bad joke.

“No.” She was surprised that he remembered.

“Okay.” She didn’t like to be hugged. Didn’t like to be touched at all. He was surprised he had remembered this time.

They both sighed at the same time, glanced at each other, and laughed. William’s hands still dangling from his arms and Sylvia’s sweater caught on the rough brick wall. He tried folding his hands and stuffing them into his pockets. It didn’t help. He exhaled and his nostrils flared, he pulled his cigarette case out from his jacket pocket. He got one out and held it towards Sylvia. She grimaced and shook her head slightly before reaching out for the cigarette. He grabbed another for himself and lit them both with his old clear lighter.

“Sorry it’s such a piece of shit.” William said after it took four tries to get the flame to hold.

“It’s okay, so am I.” Sylvia was looking straight ahead.

“Maybe. Maybe not. That’s not for me to say.”

“Thanks.” She rolled her eyes.

“No. Okay. Look. I fucking love this lighter. All of my friends – well, you know – fucking love this lighter. I’m so damn attached to it. I barely have any skin left on my thumbs from trying to get the damn thing to light. So what if it can be kind of awful? So what if my weird clear lighter kind of hates itself and me. I love it.”

Sylvia wiped at her nose with her sweater sleeve. “You’re uh, you’re real attached to that lighter, huh?”

“Yeah, even if it doesn’t like me very much.”

Sylvia tilted her head back and groaned. She was leaning against the cold brick wall of a 7/11 . With William. Widely – by her – regarded as terrible and – by her – opportunistic.

“You’re a dick. You know that right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Just making sure.”

I’m made out of coffee and anxiety and one always feeds the other. Too much coffee makes me anxious and when I get anxious I drink more coffee. $2.35 for sixteen ounces of Einstein Bros Bagels coffee every morning (either the winter Cinnamon Blend or the year round Vanilla Hazelnut Blend.) Free twelve ounces of Batdorf & Bronson’s Greener Blend during my lunch break for the past week. The first day it happened I had been crying, the second day I hadn’t. Sometimes it’s nice to look like I do. It works for some people. And sometimes those people give me free black coffee.

I take my coffee black. Not really on purpose. It’s partially out of convenience and partly as a holdover from my younger self obsessing about weight loss. And partly because I can.

I’m anxious, abrasive, bitter, and most people don’t like me exactly as I come. I don’t like my personality like I like my coffee? Once, while having coffee with my mother and step-father (who both drink black coffee,) I asked them why they hated happiness. They cracked up and said they like coffee like that. I called bullshit. Whoops?

Now I get headaches if I don’t have coffee by three in the afternoon. I knew a girl, a smoker, who told me that coffee was her worst addiction. She told me that she could probably go a day without cigarettes, it would suck but she could do it. But a day without coffee would be impossible.

I went to academic camp. Satori Summer Camp for Gifted Teens. The only place I’ve ever really considered home, but that’s besides the point. It’s also the place that saw the first budding of my eventual full blown caffeine addiction. We’d go to bed late and get up early, go to breakfast, and then join the twenty person line at Thomas Hammer (an Eastern Washington coffee shop chain) and then go to class. My last year, one of the baristas got concerned. Some thirteen year old kid got a drink with ten shots. We -well, not me- got limited to one drink per day. All the baristas though I was a counselor, so my three daily Jack Hammers (coffee with chocolate, cinnamon, and honey) were safe. God damn. I miss Jack Hammers. That, my mom, and my cat, are the only things I actually miss about living on that side of the Cascades.

I just finished my sixteen ounces of vanilla hazelnut from Einstein’s. I guess I should go see if the barista who gives me free coffee is working.

“Since any human touch can change you.”

That’s a line from James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work. It  hit me like a ton of bricks who  had invited a ton of cinderblocks to the me-hitting party. The quote is on page 69 near the bottom of the page, housed in a paragraph about homosexuality, attitudes and fears about homosexuality in America, and masculinity. The first part of that line, “…simply involves a terror of human touch…” also struck me as being this immense and powerful thing.

We fear touch. In America, especially, this is true. We call it respecting personal space, though I know this is not true. I know it is not true because if it was, why would so many strange men maneuver themselves into my proverbial bubble and then call me a bitch when I tell them to back off. So it is not respecting personal space, or maybe it is, with people they deem worthy of it, with whom they do not try to assert dominance. Maybe that terror is justified for some.

Part of the American fear of being touched has to do with the space we occupy. Last year in one of my anthropology classes I interviewed a woman from Trinidad and she told me they didn’t have the personal space we do, part of it coming from the sense that they are trapped on that island together, that no matter where you go, everyone knows you and your family and has known you and your family for a long time. The United States is bigger and people pick up and move around it constantly. Here you have the option of distance from others, both emotionally and physically.

Human touch is basal. There were experiments conducted in the 40s where no one would ever touch the babies in the study to see what would happen to them if they grew up without touch. Not being touched changes you. It makes you hard. Being touched changes you too. And that’s the thing we fear. Any human touch means they have gotten close enough to hurt us, both physically and emotionally. We have a visceral reaction to touch.