Hi, Friend.
Thank you for being a subscriber. I’m getting some new people signing up to this, so I just wanted to express my gratitude for that.
Those of you who haven’t just subscribed know that I’ll be jumping around and forward some in the excerpted creative writing, so forgive me for that. The point is just to give you a little sample of my autofiction project each month. Hopefully so that new readers can come along anytime, too.
A Work In Process is an experiment in openness, I’ve come to realize, through my own resistance to sharing what would otherwise be unfit for sharing, not polished enough or at the stage for consumption by relative strangers yet. Truthfully, I’m tired of exporting imagery out into the world, in hopes that the world will accept it only with a certain level of polish (and this is the case whether it’s “personal” material or not). The ordinary way goes against unconditional acceptance.
What’s happened in the novel since last time: Elliot’s gone to study abroad in Paris and left Rae in Dallas, where she falls in with a group of stoners, Misty, Ace and Duncan.
I came up with a concept for the illustration, then kept on magnifying it and going back to the initial sketch (now painted over), a cropped area of which I’ll share below, along with some handmade and digital collages and images I took for inspiration.
Below the images, you’ll find the excerpt of writing. Then below that, for paid subscribers, I’ve left an audio recording of me reading the work.
Last thing I want to leave you with—and actually, if it’s the one thing you look at in this post, I’ll be happy—this beautiful film with the voice & narration by Matt Garrett and visuals by Will Darbyshire, Seek Not This Dream. It’s only 2 minutes 36 seconds so I couldn’t resist.
In love and gratitude,
Rachel
“Inhale,” Misty instructed, her voice smoky as pulled pork over an open flame, breath hot on Rae’s neck. She was close enough that the bill of her Von Dutch hat tickled the back of Rae’s head. She could of licked Rae’s ear. Her perfume sang a sweet song in dark olfactory pathways, to the tune of vanilla and woodchips.
“Go on, sweetheart,” Misty breathed. The scent and sound of her hit registers complementary as maple syrup on salty ham, her command entering soft as a cast of shadow puppets playing on the screen of Rae’s imagination.
Dead ahead of them stood Duncan’s water bong, a pillar of rainbow-colored glass, serpents slithering up it in a helix pattern. Rae put her mouth to the open end and Misty sprang into action, flicking a lighter and touching the flame to the bowl. Dry herb crackled, water bubbled and smoke rose up through the canister. Then the crackling stopped.
A round of sighs in the room. Disappointment on disappointment at disappointment when disappointment might of known better.
Rae pulled away, and wisps of smoke escaped the bong’s mouth like pearls of mother’s milk gone wasted.
“Nah,” Misty set down the lighter and leaned back. She raised a set of French-tipped acrylics and made a wristy motion like she were shooing away a Texas horse fly from a barbecue pit. Misty came from Houston. She was a Misdemeanor doppelganger, Rae’s Elliott with two t’s to replace the one who had gone.
Ace couldn’t stand to watch. He turned so that only the back of his head was visible, his hair cut close to the bone, bleached the color of surf. There was the wobbly scraping sound of plastic moving across a laminate surface, Ace marshaling little white powder lumps into lines.
HHHNNNHHHNNN
Because what else were a driver’s license with a DUI slapped on it and a desk good for.
See, Ace had roughed up Lady Luck one too many times, until finally she cast him out of her good graces. Gave him the boot. On the night he lost his driving privileges, she came up to his Escalade window, churning the air with her hand, motioning for him to roll it down. He’d been cruising ‘round downtown Dallas, sound system vibrating three tons of steel painted the color of a hole. Up to no good, so far as the officer could tell. To her, he was a night crawler ready to burrow into the mud away from the law. This is how he tempted fate, by acting too slippery for it. Ace rolled down the window, pot smoke billowing out like the car were a big baby releasing a burp in her face.
I’m ‘onna need you to step outta the vehicle, baby.
Invigorated, Ace turned the dial hard on Duncan’s freestanding speaker. He was always shaking the walls with The College Dropout, that Kanye album tellin’ you all you needed to know about Ace’s life philosophy. All you needed to know about the difference between him and Rae.
They were up on the 3rd floor of freshmen Boze Hall, in their usual gathering place of Duncan’s room. Rae’s first time on the 3rd floor, Misty took her somewhere nobody asked her name. A group of boys sat around ignoring a blow job on TV, fellatio playing like an infomercial, everything extraneous cropped out, just lips moving mechanically on a penis, the elephant in the room of life. This is what Rae thought of, not looking at Duncan sitting in front of her now. He was one of those big and tall types who had some bulk on him without any of it feeling in excess. Easy on the eyes and so she tried not to let hers linger on him for too long. Rumor according to Misty was that Duncan had a baby on the way, or had gone all the way and then some with a girl back in California—one of those Santa cities, Barbara or Ana or Cruz, she couldn’t remember, calling to mind palm trees and gemstones and dreamkatchers (paradise just slightly askew, wobbly enough that you could picture it tipping over into a fault line)—and so Duncan was fixin’ to have his hands full, not into exploring any new options. But Misty might of acted a wedge between him and Rae anyway. Or that’s what happened one night Rae had over a Hardcore drummer to watch a movie in her room on the 1st floor. Misty came careening in, vodka seeping out of her pores, to insert her ample person beween Rae and that boy with no meat on him. Purple crescent moons under his eyes, popping out from behind slats of hair as Rae shoved Misty off of ‘em. Not saying a word but had he spoken, his breath would of smelled like cloves and his voice had the raspy sparkly character of crystal deposits tearing up larynx tissue.
Rae realized that she had been holding her breath.
She bent forwards and Misty started a tiny forest fire, moving her lighter all over the overstorey of that twinkling green mound, and this time, Rae did as instructed. She pulled that Skunk smoke up and into her lungs like it were the Holy Ghost.
Faint murmurs of approval in the room as she held it inside of her, that glass pillar restored to a clear central channel, not a lick of fog remaining in it.
“That’s better,” Misty beamed, her teeth bright under the bill of her ballcap pulled down low, a radiant white such as might of belonged to the Cheshire Cat at a field party. Brighter than a glow stick.
Rae sat back and there was a tingling, and then a sputtering, smoke spewing out of her mouth and her nostrils like it might be trying to get out through her ears too. And then it was lights out even as her eyes stayed open, some chemical hand yanking down the interior shades real quick, and Misty’s grin blinked like a lightning bug in a cave, popping up here and there, there and here, no body attached to it anymore but like it had never been any other way different. Rae groped around for something stable to moor her, everything free-floating in this strange new place. She got Duncan’s bedpost in her hands and lifted herself up onto his bed where she lay down her body flat.
Her body didn’t stay that way for long. It started flopping like a fish out of water, her teeth clacking like dentures on a skeleton dipping its bones into an ice-cold bath, feet jumping like odd little flippers hankering after her primordial past. No use taking off her shoes ‘cause they were miles away at the foot of the bed. Her legs occurred in a long line of legs having nothing to do with her. Vision came and went. She had a white-hot flame in her chest though apparently the Holy Spirit had departed and left a void for demonic possession to fill. Something fierce grabbed ahold of her and wouldn’t let go, shaking her body this way and that. Language garbled, her thoughts like a pile of Lincoln Logs not wanting to stack in their usual manner, or form a coherent narrative structure that she could take refuge inside of. Her heart got to pumping like her life depended on it. A wave of panic swelled up in strange conjunction with a sense of sinking into the calm eye of a storm. Losing all ability to operate the machinery of her own body, she felt how heavy it all had been, how she’d never been at the wheel in the first place.