Tilt: A Novel

by Emma Pattee

And IKEA. On a weekday. Dear god. Another reminder that I’m officially unimportant. Only the old people and college students and bartenders shop for furniture on a Monday. And of course the other pregnant ladies. Milling in the crib section like hungry alligators.

All of my alternate lives, spinning out away from me like Frisbees.

It’s insane, but I start to think about what I would post on Instagram. That semi-ironic melodramatic Instagram earnestness… well, didn’t think my morning would go like this.

This was 2011. Nobody should have been reading Sylvia Plath. If you liked Plath that much, you should have been posting homage pics to your Tumblr or starting a YouTube channel with Plath-inspired makeup tutorials.

This was before our phones started to buzz with BREAKING NEWS: FOUR DEAD IN SHOOTING AT SHOPPING MALL every other day and my fingers could flick the words faster than I could read them.

Yes, I want free shit too. But see, my feet hurt too bad for looting.

I read somewhere that in the case of a natural disaster, you should not look strangers in the eye in case they die later and you’re forced to eat them.

He moved to Portland to escape his childhood, and now he wants to move somewhere else to escape his adulthood.

And we stare at each other, in that endless slow gaze of two women who are both surprised and not surprised at all to learn a man has lied.

Wanting to be famous is like a rash. Just when you think it’s gone, that you’re cured, there it is again, on your leg, your face, your elbow. So itchy. Bright red.

The president is refusing to send help because he hates socialists.

“I love the idea of being a cheetah, because they run really fast. But it feels like a stressful life.”

At the end of the world, the men with the guns make the rules. We’ve known this forever.

Leave those dishes, I should have said. Come play with me in the forest, I should have said. The world will end tomorrow.