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the archive(s):
issue no. 1:
The End of Suicide / Tom O'Hare
So I said this, I said I am stuck to this girl who couldn't care less, who was just giving me a ride home from a place I didn't want to be. She frowned vaguely in her speech, as if expecting me to announce something more optimistic and cheery, less truthful and strained. She took a right. I asked if she'd ever felt stuck, Well have you? but she didn't get it. She looked like a fig tree lathered in honey, and I've never even seen a real-life, honest-to-goodness fig tree. I wanted to have her. So she grimaced, not wanting this conversation, searching rather for empty pleasantries, the big game of catch in the backyard, where the game isn't on the line and it doesn't matter if you drop the ball too much, it's sort of expected, if inwardly frowned upon. So I told her the truth and wanted her to take that baseball and fucking heave it towards home in a beeline like her goddamned life depended on it. But words just fell onto the grass, dull and dead weight, and she watched them with a stupor on her honeyed-up fig tree face, trying to decide whether she wanted to play catch with that particular notion.
How could you not comprehend the blistering humanity of that statement? I seethed. How could you not honor it? I am fucking stuck here, and I'm drenching you in the graceless insanity of my soul, and you're going to look at me like that squirrel on the road up ahead, with the look like a deer in the headlights on his face?! How could you? And holy shit, slow down you fuck! Do you not see that squirrel on the road up ahead?!? Slow down, you fuc-
The girl hit the squirrel and I squirmed as the tires crushed its bones, a tingling I get even when I'm re-running over days-old roadkill. Sometimes I gag when that happens. This time I gagged. My first time in a car killing an animal on the road. I looked back and saw its carcass bloodied on the road. Finality. There is no dignity in death, I decided. Which is a fact that's been decided a million times before.
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