In your dream, you are that “other guy” in the movie. The unfortunate second lead, face just cut out of the frame, who tries and tries but just can’t get the girl. The awkward outlier pitied by audiences who argue through mouthfuls of popcorn over the girl’s final choice. Every time, Hollywood fate pulls you up by the bootstrings, dusts you off. Tells you kindly that, per the script, you will never succeed.

So what do you do?

You spit in its smiling face.

He jolts awake in the muggy midday heat, clothes askew and memories dripping out of his ear. The motel room is decidedly seedier than it looked last night, but really, considering the emptiness of his bank account, he’s counting his blessings.

There’s a knock on his door and it’s the maid speaking at him, good morning, would you like your room cleaned? He shakes his head no, offsetting a deep, persistent throbbing in his temples. Somewhere in this sorry stupor, grating television static drowns out a soft whisper of regret.

SCENE I:

It’s a sticky sort of night, the bittersweet kind that lingers on your skin like spilled honey and tastes like hindsight. The streetlights are sharp and warm, and they trap themselves in the bits and pieces of your friends. High above, the moon rolls her hollow eyes, exasperated at the sight of you, silly-drunk on delirium and Cat’s perfume and the cheapest liquor Sydney has to offer. You don’t care.

He finds his phone in the back pocket of his jeans. The clock ticks past two in the afternoon, and he wonders briefly what drunken mishaps were born of last night’s debauchery.

The headlines on his phone are humdrum in their monotony. He sits on the scratched floorboards, a glass of water between his fingertips, nursing a dreary hangover. Watches a spider spin webs in a dying houseplant with glazed eyes.

SCENE II:

The club spits you out all piled on top of each other, trip-tripping on the rough cobblestones, and the street twists in time to your stumbling steps. Strangers and friends jostle around you in a messy tangle, and for now, the world narrows to arms and legs, amidst trashy clubbing outfits drenched in the stink of alcohol.

You tuck your jacket around Cat’s shivering frame, pretend not to notice when she spills her drink on it not three seconds later, and all you can think about is the stranger on her other side. Words, of caution and confession, spill out of your mouth and slip unnoticed into the cracks of the pavement.

His fingers pause their scrolling. The letters are matter-of-fact – Sydney Man Punched Into Coma Saturday Night; early investigations suspect head trauma and he looks away. He’s never liked blood.

SCENE III:

Cat has his arm slung around her neck and fingers twisting her hair, and you’d think it’s a touch too rough for comfort, but you remind yourself, again, to look away, because it’s not your business what she does behind closed doors. It doesn’t bother you, the way his hands grip her waist hard enough to bruise, the slight drag of her toes on the concrete.

And you’re drunk anyway, you won’t remember a thing. So you tip your bottle up and toast to the lonely, lovely moon.

He glances back at the screen, where the victim’s parents cling together in a puddle of grief. Their son beams below them, a clean-cut Australian bloke, someone he’d split a pint with at the bar. White teeth and kind eyes. A cold revulsion pools inside him, but he can’t explain why.

Yet there’s a whimper. Ever so quiet, and cut-off before it carries, but you hear it anyway. Through the crowd, you spot her struggling in his grasp, his leering, shadowed face poised greedily over hers. Like a butterfly in a flytrap, you think idly, but somehow your heart is pounding and your fists have clenched.

Her eyes meet yours, wide and desperate. Time stills.

They call it the “coward’s punch”. The article condemns the attacker, implores readers for further information. Donations for his medical bills can be made to the GoFundMe linked below. Anything helps.

And suddenly all you can see are whirling lights in your head and blind fury, the thud of your fist crunching on flesh and bone, adrenaline flooding your veins and lungs until you taste it on your tongue. His goddamned white teeth, stained red.

The liquor wipes clean away your inhibitions, whispers at you to do it again, and again, and again. It feels good to be the hero, doesn’t it?

But it doesn’t, and so you run, Cat’s hand in yours, farther and farther away until everything feels clear for once, here in this sad, safe little corner of the world, because she’s looking at you, smiling at you, and you know you did the right thing. You did.

His fingers twinge, and he scratches absently at the blood on his knuckles. She sleeps on in the next room, unaware.

Fin.

Trigger warning: Depictions of sexual assault and body dysmorphia

Sometimes Ava wished she could step out of her body. To leave her clumsy human flesh on her bed one day and just float away in the wind, dandelion-like. Bone, sinew and bloody tissue sliding off of her like dollops of fatty mayonnaise so that she slips free, in dishabille. She wondered if she might look prettier as a not-human.

Just for a day, it’d be nice. A week, a month, maybe.

“You’re a bit...big, that’s all— it doesn’t matter to me though! Yeah, I’m cool with it— it’s cool.”

She’d asked her friends about it once, and they all agreed - how cool it would be to just not exist? It’d be so much fun. No thick thighs or bloated stomachs or concave chests to wage war with, no aching muscles or drooping eyes. No heartbreak, no pain, no stress.

Being a human, they decided, was irritating, and collectively agreed that reincarnation was therefore the most optimal state of being. They had briefly considered the possibility of becoming ghosts together, before something else caught their seventeen-year-old attention spans and they forgot all about it.

Their words floated back in her mind now as Ava examined herself in the bathroom mirror. Clad in her underwear, her critical eyes scanned her body—calves, thighs, breasts —before settling decisively on the day’s point of order. Her stomach, Ava thought, her stomach was unbearable.

It mocked her in the mirror, this gargantuan expanse of white (white like pus, like infection, like lard), heaving and swelling and growing by the second. Ava watched it pulsating in the mirror, and holding her breath, ran her hands over it. She dropped them in disgust. Texture like bread dough. This simply would not do.

His fingers poked her stomach playfully, and she giggled. He prodded again, harder, and dimly, Ava wondered if it might leave a mark tomorrow. She’d always bruised like a peach.

She’d have to start abdomen exercises tonight then, before the summer started.

Twisting experimentally, she watched, transfixed, as lines creased her lower back in an upended V, wrinkling and collapsing flesh into folds, soft pleats of white skin and flesh and fat. White speckled with pink and red bumps, and tan lines criss-crossing her shoulders like angry caution tape. Warning, warning they said, this is a crime scene; avert your eyes.

His eyes slid away from hers, travelling further down her body. A sort of grin, grimace crossed his face and she felt his hands on her stomach, her back. A red rash worked its way, unnoticed, up her neck.

Like an anatomical diagram, Ava observed herself. She knew the lines that shaped her body- the curves that enclosed the ebb and flow of her flesh into her breasts and back. Straight vectors across her shoulders and down her legs that hemmed her in from the blank space next to her. The notches at the tip of her head and the soles of her feet compressing her, like a mold, into one point seven three metres and sixty-eight kilograms of Ava-pulp.

This was Ava’s safe space; a discreet conversation held between only herself and her body.

It asks her, “What do you want from me? What more do you want from me? What more can you take?”, and she tells it, “Perfection. I want perfection. I want to escape.”

“Ava! Breakfast!”—

and the spell was broken. She stepped out of her bathroom and put on her school uniform. Her blouse buckled and strained in all the wrong places and she thought, again, of floating.

Floating— she was floating above the two of them. Her body, almost incandescent in the dim room, tensing away from his lingering touch. He was almost entirely on top of her now, hands not on her back but her wrists. Her twisting turned into writhing turned into thrashing on the hardwood floor. As she watched, bizarrely detached, the distant thump of party bass faded away and her quiet protest with it, until all Ava could hear was his stale breath at her ear.

“Ava. Ava. Come on. Don’t be like that—relax! It’ll be fine, I swear—”

“Ava— don’t be boring now. Please. Don’t tell me you don’t want this.”

And so her body relaxed and her mouth said, “Yes, of course, sorry”. Far above them, drifting through the ceiling and the roof and into the stars, Ava waited.

Six months later, she could barely remember that boy now. He wasn’t important, and she was certainly not going to be upset by something so trivial. But the more she thought about it, she supposed he had a point. Sure, she looked good, but she could look so much better!

She could eat healthier, exercise more, smile more, until she became the best possible version of herself, until her body was hers and entirely hers again. It was self-actualisation— the poets would call it character development! She would finally be light enough to float.

So Ava kept that memory filed away. Now and then, she pulled it out, re-examined the body lying on the hardwood floor that night. She needed to kill it, she thought, to escape it. To laugh in the face of the stupid boy who thought that he could have her and say, “Not a chance in hell. You don’t deserve me.”

But for now, Ava wore bone and sinew and bloody tissue like fetters, and her bathroom mirror a prison.

her fingers trail along his jaw, stubbly and speckled from the harsh colchis sun, her voice dips in a whisper, trembling, quivering. “i can’t”

his answering rumble chilled her blood.

“it’s the only way.”

he asked, with the sweetest hint of malice,

“you love me, don’t you? if you love me, i will love you too.”

_____

blood pounds through her ears, sunspots cloud her vision. she sees her brother, face tight with betrayal and grief-stained wrath, chest puffed out in a hapless attempt at intimidation; blinks back tears and memories of a chubby, fair-haired boy hugging her tightly around her middle as her father and his advisors argued in the next room, as battles raged around her home and her gilded world began to crack and melt slowly around the edges. blinks them back as the same fair-haired man strides towards her now, boots clanking on the ship deck, soon to be inked red and black with his blood.

she knows already those stains will never really wash out.

(“medea. return at once to corinth. please, come home. leave this foolish bastard behi-”

blood spatters the wood. her eyes blurs with tears and her mind swallows itself in waves of pain, but her traitorous hands grasp the blade /stabbingstabbingstabbingstabbingstabbing/fleshandskinandbone/weavetogether/inalurid

masterpiece/

and her lips twisted into a bright, manic leer.

those lips, which she had kissed her brother goodnight with countless times, bade goodbye to her mother, said “i love you father” every night like the filial child she was. those red lips were now pressed against jason’s, tongues thrashing, a display of desperate fervent crazed passion and love. because this was love, wasn’t it? this embrace, blood painted across her arms and offal embellishing her robes, hair a rat’s nest, and all she could see were his blue, blue eyes.

in the background, a steady plop, plop, plop sound as her brother’s arms, legs, torso were tossed into the seas.)

he did have a name. absyrtus, her baby brother, her bloodline.

but he is no more, and all she knows is jason of the argonauts. jason, her hero, with she, his heroine.

——

but readers, who know the rest of their damned passion, cemented in mythology; you see, don’t you?

jason broke his promise. he strayed for another woman, and when he did, he tossed medea aside. left her stranded outside of corinth, her only home, with nothing left and no-one to trust, the blood of her brother crusted in her fingernails, the tears of her kingdom salting her eyes, and the black ink of remorse splitting her heart.

and so she didn’t really owe anything to him, or his pretty little lady, or anyone else, did she?

she was a free fucking woman now,

and free women always had the most fun.

{railway station, 4am}

I exhale, breath crystallising briefly under the harsh fluorescent lighting. The cold bench digs into my hip, but I lean back anyway, eyes fluttering shut as my mind wanders. How strange, I muse, that I sit in the veins of a monstrosity of a suburban metropolis buzzed up on adrenaline; yet, for all the company I enjoy, I might as well be nowhere.

I could stay here, suspended in this moment, forever. How ironic, choosing to stay permanently in a place designed for quick transport. How would it feel, to watch countless silver snakes shoot past to various Exotic Destinations, with no sense of urgency to go anywhere, to do anything at all? I wonder. What kind of a warmth can a railway station yield when all people can do is leave them, over and over?

The answer is simply, none. Or perhaps the opposite, the definitive absence of any warmth at all – the kind of cold that overloads the senses to somehow convince the human brain that, yes, you are in fact feeling a fiery burn- but of ice, not fire.

The sharp tang of cigarette smoke teases my nose, and I turn my attention to a shadowed figure farther along the platform. We regard one another for a second; in that second, mutual wariness and something else is shared; in that brief moment, we are bound in our isolation. They look away- the spell breaks, and my eyes follow their footsteps as they fade away to Somewhere Else.

All I know in this moment is the Solitude. If I were to leave, what would the Reality greet me with – a kiss and a welcome back? I doubt it.

“Miss! Ma’am, this is the last train to the city for tonight. Are you boarding?”

I open my eyes, leave the vestments of my mind’s reality, and stand. I leave the hard wooden bench, the harsh white lights, the unknown stranger who may have never existed at all.

“Of course.”

(I'm sorry for what I said)

No, I'm not

but hey,

someone has to be the villain here,

right?

yes i was wrong,

probably should have stayed quiet

kept my "nobody asked you" words in my mouth

because all i ever spit are poison

and dirt

and other black stuff

on your shiny white plastic

but if your plastic is my witch's bridle

then my words are the belladonna blooms

creeping, toxic, fatal

(take a bite,

and I hit back,

just hard enough)

the bitter truth is the acid rain

and so you open up your umbrellas

but i am suspended

amongst the storm.

Your Honour,

Permission to question the witness?

who gave you the right to wield a gavel

like a toddler with a sword?

I do hope you enjoy your make-believe battles,

How's the cushion fort going, by the way?

to condemn, sentence, acquit

who allowed you to decide justice

yes I simply must know, Your Honour,

if you yourself are a felony dressed up as an

actual

living

human being?

blind as she is, even Lady Justice dumped you

who sat you on that chair, wrote you your script and told you

"wreak corruption and equality amongst them"

to paint a beautiful facade

until the people themselves do not know

black from white

right from wrong

or is it left?

so Your Honour,

I hold you in contempt,

Thank you for your time.

I'm sorry,

I really am very sorry.

believe me

please

Like the pied piper and the rat

though now that I see

Am I the piper, or are you?

Am I the rat, or are you?

probably me

I'm sorry

For the mask that I wore

that I made you see

for the strings I so lovingly tied to you

as I told you to dance

and so you danced

danced for me

So that I might be entertained

I, who gathered the fragments of your shattered heart

and pieced it together

and framed it,

signed it:

"With Love."

so yes,

I'm sorry