Black Light

by Elizabeth Hand

big seemingly empty room its bare plank floor coated with a layer of cigarette ash so thick it looked as though it were upholstered in gray velvet.

“But they stuck to their guns and named me Hillary, damn it. They’re good people, my parents. Good damn people.”

like the fading signal half-heard on a radio late at night, the chopped echo of a song that sounds more beautiful than anything you’ve ever heard before, a song you never hear again.

I think of this often.

Duncan Forrester’s father had remarried a famous feminist sculptor who filled their rose garden with enormous bronze castings of her vulva.

Laszlo's mother? #wwdits 🦇🦇🦇

ormolu.

A gold with copper & zinc added to it

Axel solemnly assured me was mastodon, from a corpse recently uncovered in Siberia.

I would wear the ever-loving shit out of these.

“Down with the bodie and its woe, Down with the Mistletoe; Instead of Earth, now up-raise The green Ivy for show. The Earth hitherto did sway; Let Green now domineer Until the dancing Sonbuck’s Day When black light do appeare.”

Somehow it never appeared strange to us. After all, what else did we know? It was the early 1970s, we were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. We absorbed Kent State and the Manson Family, evacuated our classrooms for bomb threats and stayed home from school when Albert Shanker called our teachers to strike.

I remember seeing Jonestown on the news. I was 4.

Death just seemed to be an occupational hazard if you were young.

downed a beer that had been abandoned on the old Seeburg,

No. We don't do this anymore. Ffs, folx.

Hillary facetiously wore a NIXON’S THE ONE! button to school every day.

Nixon's administration founded the EPA. Too bad it was already too late, and the immense pushback against it exists to this day.

No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en, In brief, sir, study what you most affect.’”

Yeah, a job doesn't feel like work if you're doing what you love. I hate doing everything on my resume.

Wae-Be-No,

Similar to Wendigo

Someone thrust a joint into my hand. I sucked on it, my fingers damp with someone else’s spit; then held it up over my head to be snatched back.

Ewww, so heckin' gross!

An extremely pregnant woman in a dashiki dress, holding a wine glass and looking very drunk;

Yeah, this is very bad.

To imagine that life could be ordinary and barren; to know that nothing I did would ever matter, that the visions of another world and another self were nothing more than bad dreams, the bitter aftertaste of bad acid and too much Ripple wine.

You got a chip on your shoulder, I’ve got a monkey on my back—it’ll be fucking great!

“Down with the bodie and its woe, Down with the Mistletoe; Instead of Earth, now up-raise The green Ivy for show.”