Fruity QT
On Thanksgiving Day, I peed then looked in the bathroom mirror. I saw that I had a fruit sticker on my sweater. The sticker had to be from the apples or oranges or lemons from the cooking and cocktails that morning. I peeled it off and watched it float to the floor like a tick to the toilet. The next day I felt the fruit sticker in my hair as I made a ponytail. It’s a game we play: What’s Fruit Today? So far fruit’s been: refrigerator, fuzzy sock, dog beard, mom’s diary, kitchen island, and a Skechers d’lite.
DIY Girl
DIY Girl turns shit into sugar, men into murderers. DIY Girl is a melted qt-colored crayon remolded into an expensive, smelly, hot-bodied torso candle. Already today, she does great things. She Seroquel-shuffles into the kitchen, plucks the shiny male starling she found flattened on the lawn from the freezer. While the bird thaws in the sink, DIY Girl heals her gut and Lyme with a wormwood bitter tonic. DIY Girl digests her rolled oats. DIY Girl holds the starling by the wing on the countertop and cuts open his soft belly. She guts him empty except for the wing bones and ginzo feathers. She pulls a 1 lb. Screw cap bottle of creatine from the cabinet, measures out ten servings of powder and dumps it inside of the shiny male starling. DIY Girl sews him back together and returns him to the freezer for preservation.
In the littered living room, DIY Girl watches Fixer Upper as she gua-shas her labia majora to prep for her first in-person date with Mama’s Boy. Mama’s Boy discovered DIY Girl’s holistic health and sustainable living videos one night and direct messaged her for advice on making gains. She charged him $150 for an online consultation and protocol and they virtually hit it off! They have been sending each other meal prep memes for a week post consult. When DIY Girl invited Mama’s Boy over for an afternoon lunch date, Mama’s Boy instantly replied with heart eyes and bouquet emojis. A sweet acceptance for Saturday. DIY Girl finishes scraping her lips then continues to self-care with a jelly mask and sitz bath until she hears a knock at the front door.
She opens the door to sweet lanky Mama’s Boy who is on time but without party favor. DIY Girl is naked. Okayyy. She welcomes him inside, gesturing to the laundry cart that’s been refurbished into a spinning corner chair. He spins and snacks on sunflower seeds and cashews from a coffee table bowl while she slips into a quilted housedress and grabs lunch from the fridge. Like a waitress with so much on her plates, DIY Girl plops the stuffed starling bird on the coffee table in front of Mama’s Boy then perches on the couch to suck down a conch shell full of clam chowder. Thick, white paste and shell chalk mutilate her pretty round chin as Mama’s Boy watches. “Eat,” she says, “it’s good for you.” He looks left and right all confused, searching for a scalpel or a steak knife to dissect his lunch with. “Use your fingers?” DIY Girl sasses him. “Oh yeah,” he says, like “duh” and buries his bare fingers deep into the bird’s belly, pulling it apart like a cable cross-over, puffing creatine powder all over him and his spinning chair. DIY Girl snorts then shushes to watch him dangle the carcass above his open mouth and pour the powder inside. He dry-scoops it all in one constipated gulp! He gags on the chemical drip and coughs like an asthmatic yak, dry heaving onto the floor and onto his side.
“Oh my god, NO, the citric acid!” DIY Girl screams, smashing her chowder conch against the floor. Tinseling shell shards spout all over the room, bouncing off of embroidered pillows, wood-stained windowsills, and taxidermied mantle weasels, landing on and shocking Mama’s Boy with a sharp sprinkle to the torso. DIY Girl rushes to the kitchen and returns to the warped figure with a bucket of well water, some stud earrings, and a nail file. “God, you’re stupid!” she says, scooping Mama’s Boy up and onto her lap like a fallen angel. She tips the cold, galvanized bucket toward his mouth for some sips. His teeth are already demineralized from all that citric acid, rotted and falling from his gums onto the floor. He blubbers like a baby. She gets the ick and drops him onto his own teeth. He passes out. She picks up a handful of broken conch and uses the nail file to chisel the radiant slivers of shell into canines, premolars, and molars with hollow insides. Once done with 32 implants, she grabs Mama’s Boy by the back of the neck, forces his head to turn toward the beige popcorn ceiling, then presses her thumbs at that pressure point that unhinges the jaw. His mouth opens and oozes out creatine and blood. She grabs the stud earrings from the coffee table, removes their backs, and begins to meticulously jab them into his gum wounds, plugging up the bloody pools. She caps the studs with 32 hollow shell pieces all shiny and worldly. They looked like puppy teeth and she thinks that makes him more appealing, to be honest.
Mama’s Boy eventually wakes up and goes back to where he came from; dude can’t hang with DIY Girl and won’t be invited to again. Right now, she’s bleaching his teeth in lemon juice and baking soda to attach to gold chains and sell as necklaces on Etsy. She will be sending her mother the 100% profit to help keep the heat on.
