I Miss The World

by Violet LeVoit

“Yeah, Mom’s ban on the news and Looney Toons because they were both too violent.” She snorted. “Yeah, as if violence was a spore you could catch from somewhere else, instead of a weed that just grew inside humans. She bans Looney Toons and then whacks us on the ass when we act up. Do you remember the afternoon we were at each other’s throats—” “Pssh, right, which one?” “—and she just lost it and took me by the neck and screamed ‘I’m going to bang your head against this wall!’ Maybe she watched too many Looney Toons as a kid. Just expected me to bounce back with a clang and an explosion of stars and fluttering birds, cuckoo, cuckoo.”

I remember the ‘70s as just this constant assault of texture, between the burlap wallpaper and the raised decorative stitching on jeans and those suburban psychedelic fabric prints that look like the sparkly maroon and tangerine paisley that you see when you press hard on your closed eyelids—”

“So the first night I go back to my room and there’s a note to dress in comfortable clothes tomorrow, and oh yeah, no big deal, but we ask all the men to shave, and by the way, it’s optional, but shaving your eyebrows for men and women would be helpful too. And I’m like, that’s my first clue that something’s up. Maybe I should just go home. But it’s late and I’m tired and I know that nobody can force me to shave my eyebrows and the kale sausage bonfire cult doesn’t scare me and I’m going to bed. “So I just go to sleep, and the next morning someone slides a schedule of events under my door. So I go to breakfast, and you guessed it, smoothies. And all the guys have shaved, so I don’t recognize the ones who yesterday had mustaches or beards but today just look like pink scared babies. And you know it’s always the men with weak sunken chins who grow a beard. So I’m snickering a little bit at how chastened they look now, with their little chins slumping into their necks. And yeah, a handful of fanatics shaved their eyebrows. And they look freaky. You wouldn’t think something so benign could do that, but I know faces. Burn victim alien freaky. None of the instructors have shaved their eyebrows. So whatever’s happening, it’s not going to happen to them. That should have been my second clue.

And we get the alginate—it’s this gritty, adobe-colored powder that they tell us is made from diatoms, calcified microscopic organisms that are prehistoric, just like dinosaurs, they’ve come all this way over 50 million years just to sit on your face.

So I put up the notes and I take off my clothes and I draw a bath and as the water’s going in the tub I think about all the baths my mother drew for me, all the times she sang me to sleep, all the care she invested in me. And for what? Keeping a fucking inevitable suicide on life support. And that’s why I’m in this mess, because she didn’t want a C-section, she forced a vaginal birth when the doctors told her she shouldn’t, I came out breech, not breathing, and one of my pupils is permanently bigger than the other, sign of brain damage, that’s why I am this way, I had nine months of a guaranteed bright future and then I was born. And that resentment puts me in the tub.