Bloom

by Delilah S. Dawson

This place feels like Stardust and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Labyrinth had an orgy and popped out a slightly bougie baby behind a baseball field.

and the girl behind the counter looks like a goddamn elf, like the apotheosis of cottagecore, like if a Studio Ghibli heroine could be a pale white girl with long hair as tawny and true as corn silk.

Before this moment, she was fairly certain she was straight, but now she is thrown into utter chaos.

Ash makes her want to wear pastels.

But Debbie…Pastels?

Jessie Aleppo, doing a monologue from Gone Girl. That tracks.

she’s talking to a girl who dresses like Laura Ingalls Wilder and doesn’t have a cell phone, so there will be no Weirdo Olympics here. Ash has already taken gold.

The guy snorts and shakes his head and calls her a bitch under his breath as he turns away in the universal sign of a loser recognizing that he’s lost.

She read somewhere once that if you walked through life like you were shooting lasers out of your breasts, you would exude power. She wants to incinerate this man on the spot, pew-pew-pew.