Gifted & Talented

by Olivie Blake

Then she looked into the crowd and felt her heart cascade into her vagina. I know what you did. And I’m going to publish it.

like CONGRESSMAN WREN TOO BUSY TAKING SELFIES, BUYING AVOCADO TOAST TO VIRTUE SIGNAL OPPRESSIVE TERRORISM FUNDED BY ACTIONS OF OWN GOVERNMENT.

hello Arthur, can you hold the first weekend in December open for the holiday party or do you intend to throw your career away before then?

Not that this was the time to think about his father, a surefire erection killer if ever a thing existed.

In sum: To everyone actually in Congress, Arthur was far too liberal to be taken seriously. To everyone who had put him there, Arthur wasn’t liberal enough.

She was very beautiful, but more importantly she was incredibly weird, a buffet of idiosyncrasies. It created this mystique about her, this sense that she was not exactly for everyone.

“Arthur, open your mouth,” said Yves, who was definitely Yves, because other people did not usually say things like that to Arthur.

“What is it this time?” asked Arthur gaily, or as gaily as it was possible to be after a seven-hour flight. Which was surprisingly gay indeed, because Congressman Arthur Wren of the twelfth district of California was about to be (for once) the good kind of fucked.

Standing there in the doorway of a party—where, for once, Arthur could feel properly accepted, not an underachieving product of nepotism (for who here wasn’t that?) but simply a man with a very fine cock and the heartily won know-how to back it up—Arthur felt his heart flood with elation.

The pilot had somehow left his microphone on and was crying audibly, which was not very beneficial for the vibes.

Meredith did not have resting bitch face. She had active bitch face, because everything she did was with purpose. (But in moments of rest it was extraordinarily bitchy, too.)

A Brief Note from God

Here’s what you need to know about the Wren family: Aside from being assholes, they’re also fucking frauds.

The only thing more virtuous than an ingenue was a dead ingenue, which was something like a saint.

I’ve learned to expect the least out of the people I thought the highest of.

The point is: Magic has existed in various shades throughout history, alternately called by names like technology or witchcraft or shamanism, depending on who authors the story—but I, of course, am the God writing this one, and I choose to call it what it is.

That increase could be purely circumstantial. What if she got a better job or just bought a new vibrator? Fuck,”

“It’s just clinical depression, for fuck’s sake. It’s not like it’s bipolar or schizophrenia. This should be like pushing a goddamn button.” “So should the female orgasm,” said Ward, “and yet.”

because her mother had been dead for years and now her father was dead and he had never taught her how to react appropriately to death in general. And now, probably, nobody ever would, because she was thirty years old and expected to already understand how to respond to normal social situations, such as being told one’s parents were dead.

“I have frankly always had my suspicions that the best kind of lover for Arthur was multiple lovers,” explained Gillian. “His ideal form of intimacy is lots of it, simultaneously.”

“What? Why?” Oh yes, their dead father. “Right, sorry, come here.”

Throughout her childhood, Meredith watched it happen, and although she did not then know how to fix it, she did understand that her mother had a disease, and the disease was hatred. Persephone hated herself, which was absurd to Meredith, who loved her mother more than she had ever loved anybody—more than she thought she would ever love anyone again.

But the point is that Meredith had an obsession, and that obsession was rewriting the past into a version where she had the power to save her dead mother’s life, which would ultimately become a tool that could make you happy—an invention that Meredith called Chirp.

“How can you think about photographers right now?” Eilidh flung accusingly at her. “Our brother just died!” “Oh, I know,” Meredith agreed from a fugue-like stupor. “I’m furious. I honestly can’t feel my face.”

This, Meredith had thought upon waking, was exactly the kind of masculine hysteria she did not have time for.

Eilidh’s memories about her mother were hazy, or rather, clear in a way that suggested they weren’t memories at all but just stories she’d been told to ease the fact that she hadn’t really had a mother in any of the ways that counted.

Eilidh wondered why, in her memory of the moment, which seemed so oppressively, brutally clear, Thayer wasn’t meeting her eye.

it is Arthur who is always the most beautiful person in the room. And yet right now, absurdly, Arthur is thinking to himself how lucky he is to be in the room at all, which could strike you as very sad but should really be kind of annoying.

“But I don’t really want to talk to you if I can’t have sex with you.”

Meredith agreed with the professor, and that it wasn’t even the first time she’d heard it, because Meredith’s father called her talentless all the time.

“Are we having an affair?” “Right now?” asked Jamie. “Yes.” “I, personally, am having coffee.”

It was about four by the time Arthur later regained the motion with which to partially dress, unaware that his wife had been out with his boyfriend in an attempt to explore the constraints of her sensuality. His girlfriend, however, had reentered the room in time to join him at the mirror.

at least she had something that Meredith would never have, which was the knowledge that for at least one person on this earth, she was enough.

Meredith says her first word a month later. It is “no,” and seems to apply generally, without specification.

Meredith asks how such things can coexist with Catholicism and both grandmothers tell her to be quiet unless she wants to go to hell. Lou is mostly just happy to have a friend.

At the time Meredith says it, Lou is late for a date with the football captain who doesn’t look her way in the halls but tells her he loves her under the bleachers, when her bra is off, while Lou tries to feel something like desire, which is a sexier form of fear.

She might have been a genius, but he would be a hero. She might be a star, but he was still a man.

“So I will love you, but not choose you.” “Christ,” said Meredith, after a minute or so had passed. “I really, really want to have sex with you.” “I know. I’m pretty sure I’ve been hard for the last forty-five minutes.”

Biologically speaking it all seemed so unlikely, borderline absurd. A penis, in this economy?

gone, i'm gone. i'm out of here

“Oh, Arthur,” she sighed when he opened his eyes, speaking before he could fully break the rigor mortis. “Dying just to manipulate a woman is highly frowned upon, just so you know. Very gaslight-y behavior.”

Though I have to say, a baby? With times as they are, politically speaking, you really shouldn’t play around with that kind of thing. Reproductive autonomy is very important to Arthur.”

Arthur noticed because he was thinking about Riot—Schrödinger’s baby, who both existed and didn’t exist.

Did you like me more but respect me less? Did you confide your real concerns in others while sedating me with praise, anesthetizing me with false assurance? Was it easier to love me because you could control me, because you could send me on silent retreats and I wouldn’t argue, because every time you sent me away you knew that inevitably, helplessly, I would come back?

The brief thrill of sex, the rotting sensuality of intimacy that had subdued Eilidh for a few hours that morning faded away then, capitulating to the clawing, shrieking feeling festering unstably in the ricocheting of her pulse, her noisy, battered heart. It was loud, and more than that, it was big, it was infinite, stretching beyond the confines of Eilidh herself, bursting free like sweat from her temples, like radiating beams of light.

“I JUST WANTED MY DAD TO LOVE ME, AND NOW HE NEVER WILL,” said Arthur Wren to the grove of heavenly trees. To the indifference of nature and a universe who hadn’t put him into motion in any particular way; hadn’t given him the fate it did for any particular reason.

Your dad might have three children he cannot love equally. He might love you the most unfairly because you’re some weird mirror-sliver of himself. Because someday, he might be gone and you’re what will be left, and perhaps he has always been too selfish to imagine a world without him in it.

“People are mostly very easy to love,” he said. “I don’t find it difficult.” “Even me?” She wondered if she even wanted to hear that answer. “Oh, Meredith, it is so fucking easy to love you. The hard stuff with you is the being loved part.”

The cut of the dress would be classic, maybe tea-length, something vintage to match the aesthetic of caring about happily ever after, the thing she had very deliberately spat in the face of for so many years.

she looked at the edge of the cliff, the proximity of Jamie to the bottom of the fucking ravine, and she reached out with both hands and she pushed.

“I wanted to get a good grade in life, in adulthood, in existing—but who was ever going to give me that?”