Stop Me If You've Heard This One

by Kristen Arnett

My heart is thumping like it wants me to let it out, free it from the prison of my rib cage so it can take off down the street and away from this terrible decision. It’s smarter than me, I think.

They live in the kind of neighborhood that has made it impossible for anyone from Orlando to own a home, transplants from up North who’ve decided to help gentrify the parts of Central Florida that used to belong to the locals.

I constantly feel as though I’m on the verge of contracting scurvy from a lack of vitamin C, which should be impossible since I live in Florida with yearlong access to citrus.

“Loss is still loss, even if we insist it isn’t,”

So I make what should be a fifteen-minute drive magically turn into a ten-minute one by simply ignoring the speed limit.

A reminder for myself: not everyone parents like my mother.

I try not to get defensive about money with Darcy—we’re best friends, and one of the top ways you can alienate someone you care about is to drag finances into the relationship—but there are times when I’m sobbing over a maxed-out credit card bill that I wish she had just a little less; that way we could talk about things more often without all the finance walls firmly erected between us.

Another way for me to press the bruise, forcing myself to watch the dynamics of a healthy parent–child relationship.

The rat that runs my brain roots through the file cabinets that hold my memories.

In order to perfect my art, I must let it swallow me whole.

And one thing she’s certain of is that all dolls have souls. How we treat them determines how we come back in another life. “I don’t want to come back as something no one loves,”

“I’m not giving anything this nice to my slut daughter.” She sighs deeply. “Well, she’s not a slut. I’d like her a lot better if she were.”

I’m my own audience, first and foremost. Shouldn’t all things funny start out with a joke that’s just for me?

That’s how the magic begins. Not with an invitation, but with the assertion of control.

People who think they’re in control are always the funniest.

All kids need that reassurance; without it, our passions wither and die.

People ask: Why do you want to do it? How do you expect to make a living? What exactly are you looking to get out of this experience? My answers to these questions change on a daily basis. I know that I want to make people laugh. I know that a lot of why I chose this passion project for myself is because I miss my brother so horribly, and I think that I’m trying to re-create myself in his image.

Sometimes there’s just nothing a person can say to make a situation better. It’s just going to suck, and that’s it.

It’s like whiplash. That’s the only way to describe it. Over and over again, violence, and then we’re expected to immediately return to normalcy. But I’m not sure we know what “normalcy” is anymore.

Is it normal to be a queer person living in a place with a government that actively tries to harm you?

Art is hard, sure, but so is home. Florida’s not always nice. And sometimes the mean can be too corrosive, acid eating out the bottom of your heart until the whole thing drops free of your body, leaving you cold and empty inside.

The times when I have to take off the clown feel too hard to bear sometimes. I want to sit inside my greasepaint and hold out the flower, to make anything bright for even a moment. I can’t stand how hard the world is, how much like the blade of a knife home can feel when wielded by people without empathy or care.

I can’t think of a single meal that I’ve had in my mother’s lonely house where I haven’t mourned the loss of my brother’s bulky, oversize presence. I can feel the hole of him in every room, sucking up all the air.

Dwight never gets to change now. That’s part of being dead: you’re the same person forever.

Every time I enter my mother’s house I’m struck by the keenest sense of vertigo. The place stays essentially the same—same blue-gray terrazzo floors, same brown leather furniture, same configuration of pastel-hued desert prints full of cacti on the walls—yet every year or so she’ll abruptly change some small thing, which leaves me feeling like I’m inside one of those Highlights magazine’s “Can you spot the differences?” pictures.

“Meeting the woman that your mom is boning.” “Jesus Christ, Darcy.” The box topples off my head again, and I scoot it along with my foot. “My mom is obviously a bottom. She’d be the one getting boned.”

the two confiscated each other’s trademark moves. I wonder if that happens with every couple—a shared dialogue made up of inside jokes.

What better way to build serotonin than to manufacture situations in which we can strike a chore off our list, essentially mark the mission as complete? It’s witchcraft for soothing our anxiety-riddled minds. Finish the ritual and you’re safe.

Creativity requires an audience. In order to make the art you want to make, you must first learn how to finance it.”

I can tell exactly who’s being scary in this parking lot, and it’s not the frightened clown just trying to get into her car after a morning spent entertaining sick kids. No, it’s the large baby of a man who’s the nightmare here. But his fear has turned him violent, so I’m the one who’s terrified.

We copycat first, you see. We make the thing we wish to become.

not sure if I should be telling this woman about my artistic endeavors since my mother hates them so much, but at this point we’ve shared liquor and her ex-wife’s pussy, and she’s seen me cry, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

“If she cared, she’d ask.” “She doesn’t have to care.” Her voice is gentle but firm. “You’re the only one who has to care about it.”

She courts your goodwill because a laugh means you like her, that she’s necessary for this world, that people couldn’t possibly do without her!

The confidence is a cape, draped artfully over her insecurities; the mirror catches the light, showers sparks of glitter in order to distract from the hollow center.

But hey, that’s humanity! It’s silly and pointless, aside from punctuations of brightness afforded by love and friendship.

Because in my childlike mind, mortality was a concept as silly as a knock-knock joke, and now, as an adult, I understand that there’s not much of a difference.

The big cosmic joke is that apparently what I wanted all along was to be wanted.

In the middle of all that beauty, I find two lizards fucking on my windshield. I chase them off and settle into the car, plastic crackling around my thighs.

My mother doesn’t get the joke. Must be a day that ends in y. “Never mind,” I say.