“The Light of Jackie Onuma Kennedy” by Johnny Day
1
A new inscription appears, Jackie Onuma Kennedy says materializes, on the inside of the door of the fourth bathroom stall every Monday morning, and while no one has claimed to see The Fatidic Message in bloom, to see the jagged, heavy metal font etch itself onto the industrial khaki matte just above the sliding privacy bar, Tillie Elpis claims to have been inside the bathroom at the exact moment of The Message’s arrival.
“Listen, so here.”
Tillie Elpis confesses this at lunch on Tuesday, her fork skinning the cheese off of her wallet-sized fiestada. The three well-dressed girls sharing her cafeteria table chew their salad loudly but save the Caesar croutons until after the story has ended. Tillie Elpis clears her throat and plops the steaming pile of cheese guts into an empty compartment of the Styrofoam lunch tray. She clears her throat to gauge the captivation of her audience.
“Here, but let me back up.”
Tillie Elpis was dropped off an hour early, something to do with her mother’s hair appointment, the best salon in the city having a waiting list months long—and so used the eerie morning stillness of Lebanon Senior High to get some work done, that is, to redecorate the inside of her locker. Before she had finished setting the burgundy gift-wrap that would serve as her wallpaper and baseline of her color scheme, she wandered into the women’s bathroom, that dimly lit, tiled echo chamber on the second floor, to apply some makeup.
Here her lunch partners squint their eyes in suspicion: they suspect a vulgar call of nature, since Tillie Elpis would never have left the house barefaced and open to ridicule.
Tillie Elpis ignores their reactions like a seasoned politician.
“But this is where it gets totally weird.”
As she set to work on her foundation, the single florescent light blinking out intermittently, the water of both faucets plipping as they had for years on end: a terrible metal on metal crrrrkkkkk tore out from the fourth stall. Had Tillie Elpis been at all familiar with the decibel scale, she could have specified the screech at 90 decibels, akin to the sound of a hair dryer or a lawnmower, but she had, regrettably, skipped that day of Science 9 to get her eyebrows waxed with Lola Antwerp, Miranda Yapinski, and Rebecca Chu Video.
“Pretty much pissed myself.”
Tillie Elpis broke out in a flop sweat. She tiptoed toward the fourth bathroom stall as if it were a wild dog on a chain of indeterminate length. A bright yellow Out of Order sign was taped to the door, of course; the sign had been there for at least the past year. Tillie Elpis held her breath and bit her lower lip and pushed the door open, committing to all three actions at once. Her heart wasn’t racing so much as it was preparing to detonate. Makeup or no, her face was wan and resembled the porcelain of the toilet. For a moment she thought her fingertips were literally on fire, having made actual physical contact with the cursed stall door, but the thought passed when she realized it absurd and, worse, utterly childish.
The door swung open with more force than she anticipated and clanged against the brushed steel of the handicap grip bar. When she stepped into the cloister, a rush of bleach rose up from the toilet like a chemical ghost to greet her: the janitorial staff had recently been at work. Her eyes shimmered. With all the respect she could muster, Tillie Elpis gently closed the door behind her, and, hunched over, read The Fatidic Message above the door’s metal lock.
The Message’s letters were similar in shape and incline to the rock band Metallica’s typeface. She read, then reread it.
The Fatidic Message claimed that Senior Jana Zhang would lose her scholarship to Brown. The scrawl also predicted Sophomore Esther Bode’s sexts would be made public by the day’s end.
Miranda Yapinski takes a noisy bottom-of-the-can slurp from her Diet Dr. Pepper, wipes her mouth with the back of her braceleted hand, and shakes her head, ready, it would seem, to call total BS.
Tillie Elpis lifts a thin eyebrow and calls on Miranda Yapinski in the manner of a frustrated teacher.
“The shit’s your problem?”
Miranda Yapinski’s signature facial tic is making a duck face with her lips, something she does now before telling Tillie Elpis that she (Tillie) is full of dog excrement.
2
Principal Feesh gapes at the arms of the spilled coffee before him.
“Why did you do that? What on God’s green Earth are you thinking, Miss Kennedy? You’re getting at least one detention, probably more. Definitely more. What am I saying? You’re not getting out of here alive.”
There aren’t any clear rules about intentionally spilling a teacher or administrator’s gourmet coffee, but it can’t possibly be within the realm of OK-ness.
Principal Feesh’s desk is covered in chintzy awards and rhomboid plaques and a couple old coffee mugs (and now coffee). Pony-sized Ikea ferns lend the room a greenhouse feel, plus he never opens his window, since doing so would blow away the stacks of blue teacher evaluations he has skyscrapering on an empty chair. It’s about ten degrees too warm for long sleeves.
Following a chiropractor accident, Principal Feesh is perpetually turned around at the waist like a bamboo stalk or a Cheeto. He has a tobacco tan and dandruff that strikingly resembles the Theater Department’s fake snow.
Jackie Kennedy’s leg won’t stop bouncing. She’s acutely aware her cell is vibrating with the intensity of a crashing airplane.
“I need,” she says, enunciating carefully, and points at his chair, “you to listen to every word I’m about to say.”
A stunned Principal Feesh sits down at the honor student’s request despite himself.
She begins by saying, “I’m not getting out of here alive.”
3
The thing about high school is that it remembers.
Without fail Miranda Yapinski sits on the right side of the bus in the morning and the left side of the bus in the afternoon. Miranda Yapinski wouldn’t categorize herself as superstitious, but then again she’s unfamiliar with the post hoc fallacy, and anyway she’s actually under the belief that if she sat on the wrong side of the bus given the respective time of day—somebody in her life would die. This is her belief anyway. Given to bouts of melodrama and hyperbole, Miranda Yapinski has any number of quietly egomaniacal beliefs involving her controlling The Fates via inane choices, e.g., wearing blue underwear will cause everyone in English 11 to fail a test, spilling a mocha will result in painful menstruation for her friends. But the bus rule is clearly the most important edict in the vast cross-indexed Yapinski Bylaws.
Right side: to school.
Left side: the way home.
The green vinyl bus seats all have 1-to-2 inch rips in their backing: angst-ridden students use house keys to saw thready but relatively innocuous incisions in the seats in front of them. This happens with greater frequency on sunny days, for reasons beyond this narrator. Once this is accomplished the next bored transient passenger usually increases the width of said tear by pulling the green vinyl apart with their fingers. The ripping sound it makes is remarkably similar to that of widening kneeholes in denim.
On the Monday morning (bus, right side) of March 27th Miranda Yapinski finds an empty Snickers wrapper sticking out of a vinyl tear in the bus seat ahead of her. Because of budget cuts the bus is overflowing with humans in all but one of the seats. The inside of the wrapper is splotchy with melted chocolate, and the sight of the brown smears cause her real biochemical discomfort behind the general vicinity of her jewel-encrusted navel.
To what extent the bus driver or school district is aware of the state of the green vinyl in their bus armada is of no concern to Miranda Yapinski, who is only vaguely aware that the school district makes financial decisions that affect her life, or for that matter that there even exists a district oligarchy.
Don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf don’t barf—
Miranda Yapinski’s neurotic seat choice is similar to many students’ with regard to their choice of seating in any given classroom, most finding their geographic home in the classroom on Day One and more or less sticking to that seat regardless of whether or not the teacher has a seating chart, which they, the teachers, usually don’t.
Miranda Yapinski’s only option at the moment is to jump across the aisle to a left side open seat.
She looks between the bowel-hued candy wrapper and the sole open seat and back again, imagining the second-hand of a grandfather clock tripping toward the 12, whereupon at 12 the clock will chime and Miranda Yapinski will toss her cookies, i.e., puke, ruining her cute-as-all-get-out denim skirt.
A good denim skirt’s hard to find.
4
DIRECTIONS TO THE FATIDIC MESSAGE
Head to upstairs girl’s restroom across from Art Room & adjacent to drinking fountain that just barely gurgles[1] when you push the button.
Enter 4th bathroom stall.
When sitting on toilet, The Fatidic Message is straight ahead, above sliding privacy bar.
SUGGESTED AUTHORS OF THE FATIDIC MESSAGE
The Lord. The ghosts/poltergeists of various deceased LSH students/teachers. A rumored but never verified stillborn fetus born to an unnamed pregnant LSH student sometime in the late 1950s. A Cassandra-like female member of the existing student body who also uses telekinesis to inscribe The Message with her mind. The Devil.
THE SIX IMPLICIT RULES OF THE FATIDIC MESSAGE
- Do not produce lewd graffiti on The Message’s wall[2]
- Do not respond to The Message on any walls of the 4th bathroom stall[3]
- Do not mock/roll one’s eyes/denigrate in any way The Message
- Do not suggest The Fatidic Message is anything but 100% Predictive & True & You Know It
- Obey every single command given by The Message no matter how batshit nutty it might at first seem
- Breaking any of these rules even a little will result in 1 or more curse(s)[4] for life
[1] Melda LaHote tried unsuccessfully to drink from this fountain on her third day of Freshman Year, resulting in rumor that Melda LaHote “makes out with water fountains,” coupled with insensitive “La-Ho”/“La-Slut” name derivations to result in unsubstantiated and (let’s just go ahead and clarify) medically impossible rumor that Melda LaHote contracted Gonorrhea and AIDS and cancer from said drinking fountain, so it, the fountain, is now unofficially quarantined.
[2] Other bathroom stall walls are perfectly OK for lewd graffiti provided graffiti does not break 2nd or 3rd or 4th rule
[3] Other bathroom stalls are perfectly OK for written response, assuming response does not break 3rd or 4th rule
[4] Curses may include Yogurt Breath, B.B.O., Sir-Dumps-A-Lot, Text Fingers, The Natalie Portman, Saggy Butt, Stink Butt, Unnamed Gym Short Curse, Creamed Corn Pit, The Blotchy Bitch, Skank Eyeliner 4 Life, Pitiable Perm Curse, The Granny Panty Line, and any future curses heretofore unmentioned and unspecified.
5
Jackie Kennedy is ¼ Japanese, ¼ Mexican, and ½ Caucasian, which doesn’t really seem to matter to Jackie Kennedy at all but sure as sandwich matters to her parents, both of whom drop abstract conceptual nouns like heritage and culture and nationality at seemingly every opportunity. Except for interactions with her family, Jackie Kennedy is only consciously aware of her racial makeup during pretty crappy life moments: either a white girl slants her eyes and makes an onomatopoeia noise, or else Jackie’s taking an early morning preparatory college test and is asked to fill in the bubble that corresponds to her ethnicity, toward the beginning of the test, after she fills in the alphabet bubbles that correspond to the spelling of her sorrow-laden famous name. The ethnicity question is serious BS since there’s no single bubble for ¼ Japanese & ¼ Mexican & ½ Caucasian. Jackie Kennedy hates to fill in the bubble for “Mixed” or “Other” since she’s not a compilation of dog breeds and anyway she never agreed to participate in that whole system of Otherness; plus she doesn’t walk around thinking:
Jesus, I’m a sundry being.
Not to mention she’s also perturbed by having to use fractions to describe her identity, which makes her feel like she’s repeating a recipe.
She intuits that the ethnicity question is an anachronism (though she wouldn’t yet use the term), that the question is asked and recorded by a generation of statisticians who have no real fathom of understanding regarding the new colors of America. Every time she has to take one of the stupid bubble tests her heart drops because of the (in her mind) offensive probing of the questionnaire. It’d be like a standardized test asking for body weight or virginity status or date of next menstruation, to her. Other students taking the test around her are sighing and neck-rolling and leg-bouncing: their reasons for discomfort have to do with the simple drag of taking a standardized test and all the psychological hiccups that accompany trials of memory.
Feeling ornery, Jackie darkens every single ethnicity bubble. In her head she releases her best villainous laugh.
(Is this what ruins her karma?)
(Because Christ there has to be something.)
6
Lola Antwerp’s pantsuit is secondhand. It has a musk the dry cleaners couldn’t or wouldn’t take out, a scent of long-term storage and burnt bread, its pungency detectible even when way distanced from her nostrils. When she finds in the front pocket an oxidized penny from 1968, Lola Antwerp is neither impressed nor particularly surprised by its year and blue cheese coating: even if the dry cleaners had dunked the suit in a vat of acid, the penny would have incinerated well before the suit so much as wrinkled. It’s a suit of armor, really. She hates riding the city bus because it makes her feel poor. Toward the front of the city bus a gameshow ding signals the next stop. Over the intercom: 99, 99, 99. The material’s uncomfortably stiff, riding high in the armpits and refusing to buckle when she moves her limbs. The old man across the bus aisle smacks his lips and hums the blues like a lifer in prison. Lola Antwerp halfheartedly tosses the pocket penny to the floor of the city bus—a floor already littered with pocket fuzz, used tickets, drifting spiders of hair, fingernails, 20 oz. bottle caps, condom wrappers, white Chapstick caps. Again, a cackle of: 99, 99. The old lifer stops humming, looks at the discarded penny, up to Lola Antwerp, back to the penny. He is visibly displeased, slightly sneering, as in, the fuck do you think you are throwing away money like that. The shoulder pads are Twinkie yellow and spongy, and about as thick, and didn’t so much as budge when she tried tearing them off before leaving her family’s cramped apartment. Now when she leans forward to hide her face in her hands the shoulder pads levitate as if part of a Vaudevillian act. The bus driver clears his throat in the manner of an alley cat doing the same. Next to her in the unoccupied seat is a fake leather binder, diagonal on the seat so it looks like a diamond. Inside the fake leather binder are notes for a Communications class presentation.
Her cell phone rings from inside her purse: it’s Jackie Kennedy or Kaylee Flamingo—or her own mother. Her stomach growls or else the bus has run over a cougar. Her cell phone rings, again. A moment later, again.
The old whistler across the aisle asks if she’s gonna get that or what, bitch. Lola Antwerp looks at him with the weariness of a much older, much saltier woman and says something to the effect that if it’s ok with him she’s choosing what, motherfucker.
7
Your eleventh-grade teacher rises to full height like a robot about to destroy a city. A bundle of notes flutter in her arms. Monday’s sweater is highlighter yellow and tennis ball fuzzy. Knee-length black skirt; tinted panty-hose; tall heels that klunk in your ventricles with each step. Ms. Moon speaks in half-formed thoughts. Part of her charm, one might suppose, but actually a contrived communicative practice. She speaks(!):
“Vocab. Test. Now.”
Blood pressures vamp up to adult numbers. Here is your teacher in all her monstrous beauty. Could unhood a clitoris with just her voice. Students wipe everything off their wraparound desks except a single erasable pen and a torn ragged-edge college-lined notebook page. Erasable pens are low-quality writing utensils that rarely function as they should. The eraser nubs tear off during first or second use. Even if one were to completely erase all blue marks from the page, the deep carved gutters of the writing still show. Nobody fucking likes erasable pens, not even erasable pen retailers.
Except Ms. Moon requires them. She believes they’re required for students who want permanence but are psychologically/culturally rooted in transitory thoughts, feelings. For a culture of students raised with: 15-second commercials. Facebook statuses. 140-character Tweets. Texts. Tumblrs. GPS short cuts. Spark Notes. Acronyms. So on. Moon’s students are themselves fleeting copies of a copy of a copy, boys and girls that are replaced the following year with boys and girls so similar in dress/slang/appearance as it to be just plain creepy. Nobody lasts so everything’s the same. Everybody’s the same. It’s pretty common for Moon to call a girl by a previous year’s girl’s name. You notice this but never connect the dots. Her entire pedagogy is in actuality centered around the student of today being a symbolic erasable pen. Other teachers think she’s nuttier than a bag of trail mix.
Here she goes.
“Q One. Define Usufruct.”
[Pause]
A few brave mutters of bullshit.
A sprinkle of gasps.
Ceiling glances for divine assistance.
“I say again. Q One. Usufruct.”
The first two and a half rows of desks contain students who are now scribbling the definition. Half of them are correct. The back three and a half rows of desks contain students who are all trying without luck to peek at one another’s still-blank pages.
“U-S-U-F-R-U-C-T.”
A C student who does not know the definition of usufruct incorrectly believes the word to describe her feelings at that very moment. Later she will mutter usufruct when Tara Column back-ditches Dania Hamstring, who is way ahead of them both in the lunch queue.
“Q Two. Subterfuge.”
No mutters this time, but a peppering of sighs. General shifting in desks: adjusting pants, underwear, bras, shoes. Anything to delay having to write. A lumpy B- student unattractively dries an armpit with the palm of their hand.
“S-U-B-T-E-R-F-U-G-E. Subterfuge.”
First few rows of erasable pens mostly upright and wagging like batons in a novice class for conductors. Scribbling madly. A D student sketches a butterfly on her desk (actually on a corner of the desk where the plastic-laminated coating has torn off to reveal regular brown wood) using her erasable pen. A C- student catches her cell phone vibrate in her purse but does not dare to see who the text message was from.
“Q Three. FATIDIC.”
Major.
Uncomfortable.
Pause.
It gets completely quiet. Nobody breathes. Nobody rolls their eyes. Nobody dares to cough. Moon doesn’t seem to notice.
“F-A-T-I-D-I-C.”
Stomachs collectively gurgle, flip.
A C+ student passes gas and nobody, not even the F students, giggle.
Everybody shuts the hell up.
Ms. Moon, of course, notices the lonely fart, the fart without rejoinder or chuckle or claim to have dealt it. In her eight years of teaching to include student-teaching and teaching-assisting she has never heard a fart without some response. Any response, really. Laugh, blush, whatever.
She decides she imagined the fart, then, and repeats, “FATIDIC.”
Every student A+ to F blinks at her. Nobody’s sure if they should write the definition or remain frozen out of respect/reverence.
Moon realizes that she really did hear a fart, coming from she thinks Dymphna Wisniewski sitting like a pile of tires in the back row. But Dymphna Wisniewski and every other mound of slacker around her look funeral.
“Fatidic?”
8
Miranda Yapinski, Lola Antwerp, Jackie Kennedy, and Tillie Elpis all Venn diagram their arms outside the fourth bathroom stall.
Someone’s gummy pink flats are sticking out of the second stall, so the quartet begin their conversation without speaking for fear of being overheard.
Lola Antwerp raises her shoulder pads. (“What’s going on, Miranda?”)
Tillie Elpis has this tripping eye blink that irritates adults. (“You’d better impress me with new information, Miranda.”)
Jackie Kennedy rubs her face. (“I’m exhausted. What’s up, Miranda?”)
Miranda Yapinski’s expression perfectly matches that of a frowning emoticon, which she aims directly at Jackie Kennedy. (“Oh God, I’m so sorry, Jackie.”)
Hands collectively search the air. (“Sorry for what, Miranda?”)
No change from Miranda Yapinski. (“Oh God, I’m so sorry, Jackie.”)
Tillie Elpis taps one crossed arm. (“Hurry up, Miranda.”)
Miranda Yapinski points. (“The Fatidic Message. Oh God, I’m so sorry.”)
They open the fourth bathroom stall with the care of not startling a butterfly.
From the cold point-of-view of The Message itself, we see four quadrants and a girls’ head in each.
Four pairs of lips equal-signed in horror. Four pairs of cheeks evacuating color. Eight eye’s circles spreading black iris. And one future’s end spreading—
Jackie Kennedy runs the fuck out the bathroom first.
9
When a text message virally spreads The Fatidic Message and Jackie Kennedy’s location, there’s a mass exodus of young women from every classroom across LSH.
10
Principal Feesh’s suggestions are as well-intentioned and utterly naive as you’d expect from a middle-aged father of two.
Why not ignore The Fatidic Message?
Why not write your own Positive Message?
Why not come to the administration with this sooner?
In fact most of his questions are rhetorical and on par with the most tone-deaf points of advice he pawns off during study hall detentions, e.g., “What if you just stopped using the Internet altogether, Shawna?” or “If you really want Jolene to stop bullying you, why not become her best friend?” or “Why can’t you wear less revealing clothes, Maxine?” Of course Jackie Kennedy’s heart matches the bass of a German techno song and it sure isn’t from the threat of detention.
She says: “Listen.” And then she says: “They’re already here.”
It takes Principal Feesh a moment to decipher what her pointing at the door means.
11
The crowd outside the Principal’s office chants for blood with the synchronization of a much more practiced group. Rita Loder, musical theater nerd, can’t help but imagine a clap- or sing-a-long. Clinically depressed Zoë Nevermore twirls a roll of duct tape on her skinny wrist in a manner that can only be described as murderous. Even sweet Sally Wong, who has a mushroom haircut and passes gas in the library, even Sally Wong takes a hammer (stolen from the Shop room) out of her Minnie Mouse backpack.
We want Jackie Kennedy!
Joy DeBrazio can’t keep from checking her cell phone even in a moment like this. The dance team stands together, you can’t help noticing, while the Quiz Bowl girls hover at the periphery of the mob, unsure of what to do with their arms.
We want Jackie Kennedy!
The look on Shirley Al-Jibouri’s face is one of total constipation. Bobbi Jo Gallagher adjusts her eyeglasses and readies a pair of scissors. Hattie Keebler, proud to have a sexual act named after her, drinks from an iced tea and threateningly raises her eyelash curler; sorry, her posture seems to say, it was the only weapon she could find on short notice.
Perfumes, deodorants, lotions, and body sprays: the particles in the air above the angry mob shake with anticipation and heat.
Principal Feesh opens his door only to have the mob shut it again. Someone threatens his sight if he doesn’t send out Jackie Kennedy immediately.
Volleyball-quitter Pearl Margins, religious, diabetic but managing it, Pearl Margin’s got the only sad eyes out of the whole bunch, these green downcast nouns that make everybody verb in tiny, depressed ways. Pearl Margins mutters the Lord’s Prayer through the entire ordeal, adding an undercurrent of blue to the silences so long as they last.
12
“Wait!”
Her padded shoulders down, Lola Antwerp comes barreling through the mob, screaming that everybody needs to get the hell out the way.
Students popcorn left and right to each side of her. She repeats with a lilt:
“Get the hell out of the way!”
Lola Antwerp’s formal appearance lends her all sorts of credibility in a crazed moment like this. And though she’s been preparing to give a speech on the amorality of the housing market for Communications class (which is really just Speech class), Lola Antwerp now tries to use her public speaking acumen to save Jackie Kennedy’s life.
She opens with a hook:
“The Message has changed!”
It’s a lie, though. She distantly recalls that false hooks can irritate the listening audience.
“The Fatidic Message has changed!” she repeats, going all-in. “It’s changed who we are!”
Multiple groans.
If Mrs. Pellegrino, tenured Communications teacher, were here, she’d just about have an aneurism. The false opening’s pretty much canceled out any points Lola Antwerp earned for the pantsuit.
“We’re better than this! We can’t let The Message turn us into monsters!”
Collectively, there’s a fat OMG.
“We’ve done so many terrible things. We turn on each other in a heartbeat. If The Fatidic Message says to cut ourselves, we cut ourselves. When The Message said Esther Bode was going to get humiliated, we did nothing to stop it. Milagro Gomez will never look at post-it notes the same way. Beverly Lakewood still has that limp. And poor Wilma Dangles… Well I’m done. I’m done with this whole business, friend.”
Before Lola Antwerp can continue her failing act of bravery, Joy Debrazio holds up her phone as if much too proud of its make and model. “Jackie Kennedy’s texting everyone!” she blurts.
See one-hundred downward faces suddenly lit by cell phone screens. A settling.
You want me to kill me
A half-minute later, another text.
You want me to be sacrificed
And then, a half-minute later, another text.
Sorry but I’m not a victim
I’m coming out swinging
You darlings had better be ready for a fight
Miranda Yapinski will later apologize on Facebook that the whole mess may or may not have been her fault: something to do with riding the bus incorrectly? It’ll be the sort of comment that earns a smattering of LIKES but that nobody dares comment upon in case it sets her off. Plus anyway, Miranda Yapinski’s here, armed with the pointy end of a mathematics compass. She looks ready to stab and draw a circle on her friend’s body at a moment’s notice.
A shadow passes behind the marbled window set on the principal’s office door, the door that’s squeaking open now, the door, opening before the noise and pummel and flurry of violence that won’t be described here, creaks louder, and out comes Jackie Kennedy facing her future with way more courage than anyone you’ve witnessed before or since, looking like nothing The Message could have ever predicted in a simple water closet.
13
O Muse, sing to me of violence, of a throng’s easy rage, of anguish, of Dionysian obliteration and rebirth, of apotheosis as the pinnacle of the human voyage—but do it quietly, please, a test is in progress.
Jackie Kennedy can’t help but look back down at Lebanon Senior High shrinking in the marble below her.
The school’s pink brick facade blurs into a pink smudge, a thumbprint caught on a glass pane, something on or the wind itself—but then it’s already gone, the school, just another building among buildings.
The innumerable similarities between prison and high school are too obvious to be listed here; this of course does not make the similarities any less true or biting. Rising faster now she barely makes out the latticed grillwork of street and plot, the brown chessboard of pasture, the whispering water and the bluer water that feeds it, and even eventually the curve of the Earth, cresting on the line of space, but then it too disappears into a fog, silent.
When Jackie Onuma Kennedy finally ceases her atoms dance and dance and dance.
14
A new inscription appears next Monday morning but no one knows what to make of it.
we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all sundry beings we’re all beautiful sundry beings
Maybe the thing about high school is that you can only survive it.
Johnny Day’s stories have appeared in many national publications including Black Warrior Review, Third Coast, Indiana Review, Squalorly, New Orleans Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, and others. He’s currently working on a romantic fairy tale slash comedic adventure story in the same vein as The Princess Bride or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. More of his writing can be found at johnny-day.com.