i am just a girl in her bedroom like every other girl in her bedroom except i am not
In the middle of the night, the bedroom is a space of performance.
Highly curated, museum-like in its spatial integrity: the old box TV flickering in the corner with images from Harmony Korine’s Gummo, the perfectly-made bed with rose sheets and a teddy bear placed between the pillows, and Margaret, her ankles crossed as she lies on her belly, staring vacantly at the screen, her face distorted by the VHS glow. Her hair is braided, and she wears a pair of Brandy Melville sleep shorts and an oversized baby pink crewneck, posed as though ready to be pinned on a board under the name “bedroom aesthetics”. Everything is for the viewer, though there is no audience. She is always performing. She has fully inhabited the role she plays, to the point where she is unsure of who she was before the performance began.
The sound is dull and tinny in her ears, and she can barely decipher what the characters are saying to each other. The TV is too old. She will never switch to her laptop - except when she does, inhabiting a different twist on this role, Spring Breakers mere inches from her face, still in that exact same position on the perfectly-made bed.
That will be tomorrow night’s performance. Tonight, she envisions herself a rural teenager, bored with Midwestern mediocrity, Tia Blake’s sweet voice spinning out from her record player. Everything is analog not by choice but out of necessity. In the early mornings, her chickens will wake her - one of their own has been murdered by a roaming fox.
Or would chickens react with grief to such a sight? Would they wail?
She takes out her phone, Googles, “how do chickens react to corpses”. Results are boring: chickens show signs of post-traumatic stress, blah blah blah. She thinks of Clarice Starling and the screaming lambs, a much more poetic image, but since Jonathan Landis conjured it before she ever could, she resorts to posting, “dead chicken in hen coop. bloody and vile. survivors hid in rafters. felt too real.”
Once it’s been posted, the performance ends. She switches off the TV, wipes her nose on her sleeve, rolls onto her back, and shuts her eyes.
She is not in the Midwest. She is not in the city. She is not in some far-off Eastern European country. As real as the performances may seem, she is simply in ordinary suburbia, and her mom has just texted her to tell her to turn the TV down, please, Johnny is trying to sleep.
She could smother Johnny with a pillow. But that’s just another aspect of performance. Playing at Lisa Rowe-style sociopathy, bleached blonde with no eyebrows and a constant DUI stare, seeing through everything and reacting with casual cruelty that would overwhelm most others. That’s not who she feels playing tonight.
She goes to her window, slides it open and inhales the fresh air. Even this she imagines as a movie scene: a teen girl at her window, late at night, moonlight just barely illuminating her pale features. Cut to: the wide empty lawn, so green and healthy, blanketed by a dark forest.
Of course, there is no forest, and there is barely a yard. Just the sight of the next housing development.
So profoundly boring. So easy to perform more elaborate kinds of boredom.
…
She lies on her bedsheets and falls into her favorite fantasy.
She is either twelve or sixteen, but it’s unclear in the vision of herself in a gingham dress, walking down a dark woodland path, a wicker basket clutched in both hands. She is trembling for an unexplained reason. Her eyes are too big in her face, wide-set and round, round, round, all-consuming orifices from which every imaginable fluid has leaked. Inexplicably, her hair is always blond in the daydream, falling down to her lower back. Golden and shining in the sickle-cell moonlight slowly poisoning her psyche.
Her footsteps crunch over twigs and dead leaves. There is frost hanging in the air, forewarning a coming chill. Bad for crops. So she has been sent scavenging, to forage in the dark forest that surrounds her tiny village, though why she has been set to this task so late at night is unclear. A low hum surrounds her, quiet at first, but the deeper she wanders, the louder it gets, building to a crescendo of a late-night woodland orchestra: the flapping of wings, the buzzing of near-dead things, the low moans of injured beasts. She shrinks.
There is no clear path, and she has lost her way completely. It was suicide to come here alone. Or maybe it was a sacrifice.
Eventually, she reaches the shambles of a wooden cabin, chewed up by forest things and rotting into the damp earth. At first, it seems empty. The closer she gets, the warmer it appears. The scent of smoke in the air. A faint red haze surrounding it.
She cannot resist. She crosses the threshold.
…
The fantasy always falls apart here. Becomes too cliche and trite for her to stomach. A mysterious older woman, blankets of dark hair covering her face, beckons her inside. Invites her to try a delicious red apple, positively dripping with sweetness, bleeding red when she takes the first bite. Once she’s swallowed it core and all, she chokes. There are razorblades within the apple. Her throat is torn to pieces from the inside out. The enchantress kisses the blood from her lips and encases her in wax, then seals her in a glass coffin like all the other beautiful girls.
Or a brooding figure lurks in the corner, lanky and all-bones, crouched like an animal, hungry eyes gleaming in the dark. He licks his lips. She is trapped.
Or nothing is there. Nothing but the consuming blackness of night and a perfectly-placed mirror. It holds no reflection.
