Creative piece published in Issue 10 of Portrait Magazine, page 66.
Edited by Lucie Ai.
I finally feel pretty now, and what of it? I need more stories. I need more than the stories my dreams bring to me. I need to make up my face all perfect and then transfigure into something else under the full moonlight and rip up the pretty girl that isn’t me. Something else with claws and hair, and hair- I wish I could grow so much hair (hair to cover me, envelop me. Hair on my legs and arms, hair to kiss my belly)- and tear that pretty face apart.
Sunset brings with it the taste of bitterness. I am alone, so I cry out into the ethernet, into the fiber-optic cables, their roots snaking deep underground. I want to chew them up and spit them out. Look down and watch the moonlight bounce off my tiny rat claws so pearlescent.
Dig and dig and dig with my little claws searching for something so elusive yet so whole in itself. Yes, yes there it is: a perfect pizza crust, yes, yes. Chewed through to where your lips’ ghosts can meet my raccoon teeth and nothing else matters. I am kissing you, critter to human, and you don’t even know it.
The rabbit in the moon palace watches me and we are free from your human notions of beauty. Girl beauty, boy beauty… I don’t care. I am rabbit beauty and my eyes glow so bright red under the midnight sky. And I let the wolf know it’s time to howl and wake the neo zodiacs and we will sharpen our claws and fangs to rip your face while you sleep, girlboy boygirl, and you can join me in the moon palace and be so far away from it all. And you can stop feeling so weightless because weightless you will be!