“Regressor”

a short story

I promised/threatened awhile back that I would publish some fiction on here. I drafted this ahead of a reading I participated in a few months ago, though I’ve been mulling its content over for about a year. It is technically the beginning of a larger project that I’m not sure will ever see the light of day, in part because I don’t imagine the end result as prose. However, I am happy with the following as a coherent (albeit brief) work. For those who are interested, please let me know what you think of it and share it if you’d like. For those who would prefer I stick to essays, don’t fret; I’ll have a review up for The Odyssey for paid subs next week.

***

They didn’t leave a note because they didn’t have to. The four of them had run away because Rue was out of a job, and Lee was staring down a bill from the psych ward, and Cal was spending too much on drugs, and Roxy never paid for anything. They couldn’t afford the city anymore, couldn’t afford to get out of the city either. But when they took Cal’s two-tone Toyota Corolla and left me at the Hyatt Regency a half-mile from the convention center, I still felt it was my fault.

I was grateful that it didn’t happen at our apartment. The Hive was a two-bedroom garden unit eighteen minutes on foot from the nearest train. None of us toured the place before we signed the lease, but the cracked caulk in the bathtub and black mold in the pantry wouldn’t have made a difference. The promise - a 24/7 queer-only IRL role-play kitchen-sink community - felt like the only future we could ever want.

None of us kids could be trusted to follow through on anything. We moved in together, kept our new names for the entire duration of our time in The Hive. But our costuming got lazy, especially once we got behind on laundry. We fucked non-canonically; We came home raw from our jobs at the Chipotle or the vape shop. We got in the habit of uttering our safe word before we had taken off our shoes. Rue’s transition made it difficult anyway; eventually I stopped misgendering them during our play, which sorta ruined it for everyone.

Over the nine months we lived together, our Hive had rotted. Every surface had calloused, developing a layer of glitter and rat dust. Rue had made drapery out of some old Lolita dresses and nailed it to the wall. Roxy never left the house. Thus, her sappy, cherry leather perfume never ventilated. It spoiled midair and hung there, threatening. After that first month of stove-and sink-proved too difficult to maintain, we tossed out the dirty dishware, resigned to paper plates and the microwave from there on out.

We loved each other like siblings - we always said siblings and never family even though Roxy was, at 22, clearly Mommy, and Lee, at 18, the Baby. Later, people would tell me that I had been the victim of something - grooming, collective psychosis, a codependent rape cult, everything wrong with fandom - because nobody knew what it was like to live in The Hive. I liked how dramatic it was. The chaos, the cruelty, that wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was getting Cal signed up for Medicaid. The hard part was learning how to spackle a wall.

It’s not like I was innocent in all this. I had stolen my housemates’ money to fix the communal iPad. I let them all think I had dipped into some invisible savings or run up a tab to replace it; I wanted them to feel they owed me something. For a while, I thought they had abandoned me as punishment for being more capable than them. They’d left me to shoulder the worst of it, because they knew I could handle it.

That last night, the five of us shared a single king-size mattress. We had all been picking up extra shifts to afford a room we’d booked too late. But we could only nab one night at the hotel, and after only 90 minutes on the show floor, we had to dip back to the room all weepy and fragile. We had panel tickets and pool invites but none of us were used to this much social interaction. We feel asleep in a pile on top of the sheets. The motion-activated lamp turned off without anyone getting up. None of us undressed beyond our socks.

I was on the bottom. I’m a light sleeper, typically, but that night I knocked out for a full 14 hours. The last memory I have of my siblings is Rue’s stubble rubbing against mine, and Lee’s armpit clamped around my thumb.

I woke up cold. My expired passport had rubbed my skin raw tucked beneath my binder in the night. I knew what had happened before I left the bed. I saw their Snapchat usernames in humiliating lowercase with an “x” next to each one. I started behaving like they’d ditched before I believed it. I had been left with nothing but a pair of six-inch platform boots and the wrong charger for my phone. They’d even taken the hotel shampoo. I showered all the same, letting all the grey paint run off my body before putting yesterday’s clothes back on. I checked out with the credit card I’d opened fresh for the weekend.

With my phone on 2% and three hours to kill before the next regional bus would pull up, I wandered the vendor halls. I kept my eyes on the floor, on the blue-yellow-green-blue-yellow carpet. Only one person talked to me. He was a seller, sold out of his stock before the day was half-done. He told me he had a drawing I might like. I I had no money to give him. He shoved it in my hands anyway.

“I can’t sell it. Some asshole ripped it earlier.” I held a picture of an orange cartoon horse with big eyes and a bigger belly. I couldn’t tell if it was pregnant or it had just swallowed someone whole.

“Why do people even like this stuff?” I asked.

“Because they see themselves in it.”

“So they wanna be the horse?”

“No…they wanna be in there.” He flicked the lump in its stomach, making the paper rattle.

That night, I would go back to Hive - now ransacked of any valuables, including the iPad. I would throw out everything they’d left behind - underwear, sketchbooks, blood-stained sex toys. I would text the landlord. I would put the termination fee on that shiny new plastic. I would couch-surf with my coworkers, reset, pretend the past nine months had never happened.

Twelve years later, my debts would be paid. Twelve years later, I’d be proud of my apartment. It would have natural light on three sides and smell like chlorophyll. I would own the best budget vacuum on the market and I’d get it on sale. I would keep the fan-art the man had given me in a closet bin, next to old tax forms and all those documents you keep on the off-chance they matter someday.

I would know how to take care of myself. I wouldn’t feel bad about getting high when I went dancing. I would joke about cartoons for adults and non-binary food runners named after objects. I would tell people what was upsetting me instead of flapping my wrists like an idiot. I would have a primary partner with a fake job. I would hallucinate dirt particles seeping through the jeans of anyone who sat at the edge of my bed. I would be abrasive to anyone I thought might expect something of me. I would have friends who did not chafe against my ribcage. I would fall asleep under a weighted blanket every night hoping to wake up smothered.

love ya lots,

helmet girl xx