A Summary of Parts
1. Bona fide drawer
I am selling what no longer serves me in pursuit of nothing at all. A body is money, never mind time. Half-priced, used, one of a kind. A body is money. I have put a price tag on the parts of my life that are considered foundational. My mother who swipes her credit card with a delicate sharpness, a practitioner of conditional living. Sign it all away, think less. Spend money on your kids before global warming snatches them up.
As a child, I only ever played with adult tools, which felt, to my tiny hands, like toys. Old keyboards and strollers; pans minus the heat. I’ve never been one to enjoy tri-colour sand kits or slime mixes. I have always valued structure and utility. My skull feels more like a Play-Doh bridge, a mockery of stability. My skull will be hard to sell, like a handbag with ‘KILL ME’ written on the tag. But selling is not necessarily the problem, sustaining a life from selling is. My brain will die with me, buried undermind that still itches for more hours to sell and more soup to stir. I will die with only thoughts of making, for the rest have either been sold or extinguished by selling.
2. Lickin’ Good
My lips after I eat minestrone soup feel like my brain after I attempt to calculate how much a refund costs for a customer. It’s a throbbing embrace that eventually subsides as the flavour weakens. There’s a stinging pain in good cooking, like maybe the taste lingers too long, and you don’t know how to tell it the moment has passed. I am willing to sell this tactile organ to never taste again, to never admit that sustenance can have a nice afterfeel. Minestrone soup will become a muddy bayou, where the only goal is to see the bottom.
Skull -$4, Lips -$2
*½ off Minestrone
3. Cavernous
I sit next to an elderly woman on the train after sitting hungover in a dentist’s office. He probes my teeth for answers and when he gets none, he sends me away with a bill. The woman looks like my grandma with a slightly melted face, and she shakes while trying to secure her shopping cart. I’m still deciding whether to sell my teeth individually or as a package. They tend to function better as a unit. My two top front teeth will be hard to sell on their own, so large and thin like ice caps. They are yellow from too much coffee, and they ache with desire for a new owner. I hope to scare people on the train with my gaping well of saliva. It will be difficult to eat at dinner parties when I’ve run out of things to say, blending my salted pretzels and poke bowls into a decadent sludge. Mainly, I’ll miss being able to tell someone that I need them or that I am better off alone. People will watch me gesture with my cratered hands and big toothless grin, all bark and no bite.
4. Slur before slurp
My stomach is starting to resemble the colour of a boiled pig’s foot. Sometimes I punch it just in case there’s anyone in there who wants to talk to me. But I am at dinner with my mother and I’m shushing it beneath the corduroy pants that hike up to my breasts. I thought it would hold everything in, but now my stomach is wailing, and I have to pet it as if I don’t hate it. ‘Eat more,’ Mom says.
The waiter brings us mac and cheese balls that drip oil onto the plate. I investigate the deep pools hoping to see a reflection, something to remind me why I’m here. When I look up, Mom is watching me. She pushes the plate towards me with her finger. I’m acutely aware of the carcasses decorating the walls of the restaurant and the small stains on the tablecloth. If comfort were a dish, it certainly wouldn’t taste like this.
I eat so I can stay awake and laugh at my mother’s jokes. I pat my stomach to mimic that I am full and sit back like a gluttonous Al Capone. My right hand acts as a mediator between me and my stomach, knocking apple cider to the back of my throat. My stomach is a sad drunk. A drunk that sits in the corner and watches the record player get caught on the last note of the final song.
5. Stormy weather
I am out with a friend and drinking like it’s breathing. He’s telling me the drinks are on him, but I seem to be the only one floating across the velvet carpet to the hideously smug bartender with the lampshade haircut and the EFTPOS machine. I like drinks that look as if they’re made for a child, like if they put a strawberry daiquiri in a sippy cup, would it be welcome at daycare?
I can feel the rum and coke taunting me.
‘You’re drinking your paycheck away.’
‘Are you gonna be proud at the end of the night when you flush me down the toilet?’
It chuckles while a strange remix of Hall & Oates ‘Maneater’ descends over the room.
Sometimes I wonder if I can preserve my money in my liver for the rest of time. I wish it were like a sponge, retaining my guzzled vodka and rum in its walls. Maybe there’s one on the market like that. Suddenly I want to curse my body for not being a preserver.
When I get back to our table, my friend is clawing his way across the leather couches, either attempting to locate me or my thighs. I work too hard to shout at him. I manage to leave the bar only because I tell my friend that I have a shift the next morning. My liver starts to whirl, the money becoming a cyclone with no centre.
Teeth -$3, Stomach -$4, Liver -$7
*Thursday Dinner Special:
All You Can Eat Strawberry Daiquiris
and Mac and Cheese Balls
6. Dead weight
My left hand is like a cousin to me, closely related yet so detached from my portrait of myself. My right hand performs all the tasks—covering my mouth when I’m chewing a breakfast sandwich, wiping semi-permanent stains off cargo pants, filling the pan with water after I burn my halloumi. My left hand is silent through all of this, a careful observer hiding in the pocket of my jeans. We’re taught that whatever doesn’t serve a purpose must serve the purpose of being discarded.
7. Cooked
My supermarket is sandwiched between a newsagent, where old Lotto posters claim fortune is only a scratch away, and a Salvos, filled with fuzzy chairs and old family photos that feel more like sacrifices than donations. Eerie snaps of children in overalls and couples on black and white beaches no longer belong in attics or oak chests, they can now give someone a recycled history for $2.75.
It is an intimate thing to help people buy food. You become acquainted with what sustains them. There is an elderly customer who always has lipstick just above her top lip, like she was putting it on and trying to steer a car at the same time. When I see her, I always try to inquire on the recipes she cooks. But she can never remember the question once I ask it. She sort of stares off and I swear I can see death wiping the lipstick off. Or maybe that’s just her.
She often wears a Latvian flag pinned to her sweater vest, which she tends to itch like a tick. I whisper one day, pathetically, that I am part Latvian, and point to her dried apricots as if I know she will soon make Latvian stew. Her eyes widen like kotletes and I feel as though I’ve overcharged her. Her expression seems to tell me she thinks I’m ugly and useless, so I pack her bag and excuse myself to pull my hair out in the bathroom. I hope her lipstick fades into nothing, that she eats too much stew and rubs it off, a testament to the ugliness of the daily bread.
A few weeks ago, I asked her what perfume she was wearing, and she seemed to sniff the ceiling before replying, ‘can I have a receipt?’ I want to tell her she should be paying me for how hard I’m working to know her.
8. Stranded
When I’m home alone, I imagine myself on a deserted island. In this vision, I spend most of my day lounging on the beach and drinking beetle juice cultivated from thin air. But even here I grow bored, restless. Itchy. I want to create but there’s no one around to see me make anything. As artists we are told to always approach from the personal, from what is ours. This island, which my brain has perfectly concocted, is populated with all my body has created. Memories, connections, things I can hold in my calloused hands. But they’re my body’s to claim, not mine.
Even in my fantasy, I get desperate. I chop my ears off and carve drawings of landscapes into them, rolling hills of sunflowers and squiggly churches. I want my self-portrait to show my desperation for life in quick, colourful brush strokes. It’s said that no man is an island, but without another face, my art can only speak back to me. Before he died, Van Gogh sequestered himself in his room for two months because the fields of Auvers-sur-Oise seemed to stick to his mind like wet sheets. It is easier to sacrifice yourself when you’re the only thing around.
Left hand -$2, Nose -$3, Ears -$5
*Buy 2 strips of Halloumi,
get one free
9. Memento of the Western Front
There’s a war-cry radiating from my chest. I’m keeping my heart for myself, a reminder of the fact I was a person. But I’ve fallen out of love with my chest. I used to splay my right hand over it, rubbing the thick of my palm along its surface. How do you tell your body you’re here? My chest no longer accepts my touch. Though it is the site of crooning and declarations of love, it’s become a grave for my soul. How deep does my life really go? All my chest seems to do is beat for lost time, pumping through each day just to dig itself a little deeper. Though my body pumps and limps between coffee shops and decrepit doctor’s offices, its only interest is war. It doesn’t want to win, it wants to go down fighting. There’s a difference.
10. Dissolve
I am melting into the apartment complex’s shared swimming pool and my reptile skin is showing its true colours. My ninety-eight-year-old neighbour emerges and tells me that her granddaughter has just had a baby. I smile and say congratulations. She tells me that delivering a child is the single most painful and most rewarding experience of life. I nod and tell her that I’ll take her word for it. She says no, no. You will have one. I want to drown.
When she leaves, I stretch my body out in the centre of the water, floating for a moment before I begin to sink. I wonder what would happen if all the parts of me just slipped out of my skin and began to drift through the pool like weathered lifeboats. If my neighbour were to come back for a lawn chair, would she be surprised to see no Chloe, but fragments of a being? I could be anyone when you take all this stuff out. I am only the parts that make me. I am an alien in this big, freckled organ.
Chest -$4, Skin -$10
| MC (SWIPE) | |
|---|---|
| Auth#4547888 | 3345 |
| Lane #224 | Exp Date **/** |
| 28/4/2021 02 : 39 PM | Cashier 875 |
| Skull | -$4.00 |
| Lips | -$2.00 |
| *Sale: | |
| ½ off Minestrone | |
| Teeth | -$3.00 |
| Stomach | -$4.00 |
| Liver | -$7.00 |
| *Promotion: | |
| Thursday Dinner Special | |
| Left Hand | -$2.00 |
| Nose | -$3.00 |
| Ears | -$5.00 |
| *Special Offer: | |
| Third Halloumi Strip Free | |
| Chest | -$4.00 |
| Skin | -$10.00 |
| Total | -$44.00 |
Chloe Komesarook (20) is an emerging writer from the USA, who studied Creative Writing at RMIT. She’s been published in Bowen Street Press Review and Adelaide Literary Magazine.