Simone.

New short fiction (an excerpt).

Last weekend, Buckman Journal launched their newest issue. I have a piece of short fiction in it. You can purchase a copy here: Cluster. Many thanks to Edy Guy at Buckman, my editor, friend, and fellow Simone Weil fan. May we never know with certainty how to say her name.

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She wiped front to back like everyone else. She performed elaborate evening skin-care routines of algorithmic active ingredients: snail mucin, menstrual blood, and cheeto dust, took public transportation daily without so much as a traumatic stress response when passengers assailed her, and, if late, she ordered a personal driver without wincing at the price. What else to say other than she was born into and internally organized by a quality of detachment.

Human instinct was not impressed upon her. Despite having been conceived in the same city where she lived, she knew its arteries no better than a tourist. Maps and mapping technology overwhelmed her nervous system. Their aesthetically displeasing design choked her retinas. As others point North without magnetic consultation, having had their poles calibrated young, she insisted on pointing down—always down—without registering the fixed posture of her finger. Onlookers would say she walked through the city as if she followed the scent of a situation about to kick-off. Where her finger tensed, a situation soon followed. The simple fact was that she had no sense of direction whatsoever. Every time she arrived, it was due to luck.

It was not appropriate, her attire. She wore lingerie in public: leather riding boots, crisp cotton boxers, and a retired sports jersey, which belonged to a young boy whom she had no relation to. Her dress was oriented sartorially two months ahead of the times. But prediction was not something she did. In fact, her capacity for immediate foresight was so terrible it made her an unlawful liability on the road. She could not drive. Her preeminent sense of style was instead ruled by an internal digital clockface, the timing of which elided her conscious awareness. She did not believe in the risky choices of her clothes. She did not know they were risks and therefore did not think it was a choice. If it had been a mid-sized sedan instead of an outfit, she would have been dead.

She would have died despite all the best efforts by her parents. As a child, she had a sleeping chamber that her caregivers protected like the Alamo. With organic combed-cotton sheets, weighted blankets, and a fascist dominion over the evening hours of their young nextdoor neighbors, her mother and father devoted themselves, body and soul, to her sleeping-self. For all their efforts, it did not matter. She fell asleep easily under far less favorable conditions. She awoke well-rested and even-tempered. At night, she did not dream.

Her eyes remained open in daylight. On the way to work, from the inside of the tube train or self-driving car service, she saw ordinary atrocities. Demolition equipment appeared in the parking lot of a historic elevator factory, then disappeared with the building. Downtown a man in a neon safety vest lowered the front of his jeans to piss into the back of a moving truck. The commercial ships did not dock at the harbor as they usually did. Their crated passengers did not unload onto the shore. It did not comfort, nor excite her to see these atrocities. Each one arrived without expectation. She simply waved it onward like a somnambulant pedestrian hovering on the edge of a sidewalk. The atrocities came and went, sure as the coming day. Her senses were attuned to a perpetual present that never lowered their hackles. She kept these atrocities to herself.

Men of a certain age and profession saw her and saw a dollar sign. The men were in their late forties to early sixties. They held directorial positions in the decentralized administrative structures of liberal institutions. They were hungry men with beautiful ex-wives and lonely men whose ex-wives were their best friends. They met her in typical ways she could have seen coming if she had any foresight at all. […]