Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

It is the plight of the Asian goth to be denied the act of dyeing one’s hair black, it being black already, so I indulged a sort of ill-considered impulse to shave my head with my mom’s Venus razor.

She liked that I cared about money and stayed put in the basement all day, which meant I wasn’t selling drugs or gender.

One of those houses where you just know everyone is walking around with the most devil-may-care pubes.

This, with the kid gloves of gentility white libs always use when they want to make your annoyance feel unreasonable; the flopsweating jargon invoked to signal their literacy on the subject of your existence; that fart-holding wince when they sense their good intentions going unrewarded.

People said Mmm at the phrase “refugee family” like she’d fed them something delicious.

No one’s taken the true measure of the early-aughts shock site, I think; the occultist compulsion to see all that no one wants to see.

This was the primordial cumbath the modern troll, edgelord, groyper etc. slithered from, as did I.

I can’t explain why I believe that privacy is the mainspring of personhood, that the more you reveal the less there is to reveal.

In my apotheosis from human to spam, I’ve ensured that the facts—which do exist—are spread over billions of iterations and perfectly unverifiable.

(It’s noteworthy that not only Kant, but every protagonist winds up a writer of some sort, committing acts of grotesque self-exposure—and self-destruction—by text.)