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- Herausgeber: Salt
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Salt Modern Stories
- Sprache: Englisch
'This new short story collection from Clare Fisher explores of feelings of failure around gender, sexuality, and work, that arise in a success-obsessed capitalist culture. Dazzling, playful, and experimental, it veers between the real, the surreal and the absurd.'
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Seitenzahl: 211
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CLARE FISHER
THE MOON IS TRENDING
SALTMODERN STORIES
Contents
WTAF
The moon is trending. There is a spider crawling across Sophia’s forehead, it is a very small spider; in fact, I’m not sure if it is or isn’t a spider, but it is, nevertheless, a creature that she will not want anywhere near her body; she will probably yell at me for not telling her sooner, which I could only do if I were to interrupt her story about her friend’s boyfriend and how he sets timers at three-hour intervals throughout the night so that he can ‘feed’ his avatar in some computer game to which he is unhealthily attached; he hasn’t left their flat in months and there is a constant crust at the corners of his eyes, as if he is constantly waking up, Sophie says that her friend says, but if she were to turn off his alarms, he would cry; the friend knows this even though she has never seen him cry, she has never seen any man cry, she is not sure men can cry, which she knows is a cliché, but hey, clichés exist for a reason. The spider is now on Sophia’s cheek, and the boyfriend, he has actually stopped going to work, he expects Sophia’s friend to pay his rent as well as cook and clean and fetch the gaming paraphernalia he keeps ordering from her—well, it’s actually her Dad’s—Amazon, and every now and then, she thinks: this can’t go on, which is exactly what I am thinking re Sophia’s attachment to her friend’s boyfriend’s attachment to his computer-game avatar; she tells me it almost every time we meet, and even when she tells me other things, e.g. the moon is trending, she is telling me it; she is telling me it when she tells me that on the way home for work, she saw this massive queue outside this massive warehouse, she thought it was for something really exciting and she felt annoyed that all the people in the queue knew about it and she didn’t, so she joined it, and after what felt like forever but was probably about six minutes, she asked the woman in front what they were all waiting for, and the woman looked at her like she’d said something very rude and she whispered something to the child who Sophia had only just noticed was standing beside her, and the child asked what she’d asked, and she told them, and the child said nothing for what felt like another ever, and then they said, it’s for food, and then she said, oh, and she turned and she moved away from the queue as quickly as she could without running; she didn’t want them to think that she hated them, it was more that she hated herself, or something, and the moon is trending, the moon is trending, although how, exactly, can the moon be trending, does it have a twitter account and who on earth runs it, wh—what
The actual.
Fuck?
She slaps her cheek. Was there something on my face? Her eyebrows crease at an accusatory angle.
No.
I felt something. She slaps it again. I definitely felt something. But you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?
Of course, I say, and how I feel is like I’ve snorted a glass of Prosecco, which is how Sophia says her friend says she feels when her boyfriend turns the volume of his console down so low that she hopes, for a second or sometimes two, that it’s off.
No Sense of Direction
The Girl was absolutely not going to look at her phone because mindfulness
because the last time she looked at it, which was literally just now, it said that the distance between the bobbing blue dot that was (not) her body and the hipster tap room that would soon or might already contain the Boy (who might just be The One)’s body (which she imagined as a bobbing blue dot, even though it wouldn’t show as one on her phone, only his, though maybe, if he did turn out to be The One, they’d find an app that would change this) was a 1.78 km straight line along the canal tow path that she was now on because focus
because looking at her phone was only gonna slow time down to a dribble and not a generic dribble but the dribble that dribbled out of her night-mouth in such quantities such that she frequently awoke with an entirely wet pillow, which was the last thing she should be thinking about on her way to meet the Boy (that might just be The One), surely.
What her phone didn’t know, not even in satellite mode, was about the dog shit; how it was dangling from the bald branches of the bushes that lined the towpath. Some psycho’s idea of a Christmas decoration! Maybe she would tell the Boy (her Best Friend would tell her off for thinking he might be The One but who she couldn’t help thinking might be The One; yes, they’d only talked via Tinder chat, which was less intimate, somehow, than WhatsApp, but there was a Vibe, there defo was) all about it. Maybe it would make walking this straight line seem dangerous and exciting. Maybe it would make her seem dangerous and exciting! But—wait.
Wait.
Dog shit.
Dog shit?
Dog shit in plastic bags dangling from branches?
Dog shit and psychos?
On a first date? Was she mental? Best Friend would by now be wiping laughter-tears from her eyes and whilst she did so, she’d be looking at Girl’s body in that way that made her feel certain that if she were to look at her phone, the blue dot would have exploded all over her Maps, which of course it hadn’t, and of course, she should not be thinking about it because thinking about your phone was halfway to looking at it, which is what she was now doing, bloody hell, did she have no self-control!? Evidently not, but that was not the sort of self-talk the sort of Insta accounts she’d never admit to Best Friend that she followed would tell her to use, though it was possible, given there was no way to make your followers secret, that Best Friend already knew; she might, as Girl shortened what now felt like more of a wiggly gravel smudge than a straight line, be lying on her bed and scrolling through Girl’s followers, which was a thing Girl often—
But no.
No message from Best Friend to see how it was going.
No message from Boy saying he was excited; no words to confirm her suspicion (that was really an intuition, that those Insta accounts said was the only real real) that the increasing density of emojis in his last few messages meant that he, too, was trying not to wonder whether she was his One.
No new Tinder Likes.
No new Reactions to her Story about failing to water her plants.
No other notifications, not even from Facebook, not even the sort of notifications that aren’t notifications, e.g. that some girl you don’t even remember friending is ‘interested’ in a macrame workshop in Cardiff, even though she lives in Newcastle.
When she looked up from the screen there was somehow less to look at than before. As if all those not-notifications had gobbled up part of the sky. The platform trainers Best Friend had
insisted made her look like a spaceman slash Spice Girl were now caked with mud; and in the bright artificial H&M lights Girl had believed it, but now, now, with no one to look at her, not even the geese, who were more interested in whatever goop or fish were living under the water, she felt like a hippo like a weirdo like some ‘o’ too weird to name.
Why wasn’t she there yet? No more poo bags; no bars, either. The blue Google Maps dot, the one usually throbbing wherever she stood, was still at that awkward cross-roads outside the station. And it did not throb. Had it died? Dots didn’t die, stupid! Stupido hippo weirdo psycho arrghh oooohhh! What even was she?
Late. That’s what. Or was it a where? Boy was probably worrying she’d stood him up. Probably attaching various ‘o’s to her name. But she couldn’t even message him—the app wouldn’t load.
Fuck.
No one around, so she said it out loud.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
FUCK.
F U C K.
She skimmed her fucks across the water.
It made her feel the sort of good that did not depend on someone else watching, maybe because she was watching herself almost as if she was someone else, or two people—one the one she’d known her whole life, one she’d never met, despite being, like, twenty-two, which was probably too old to be thinking of herself as a Girl, but woman sounded much too serious and she didn’t take herself too seriously, but not to the extent that she would put that sort of thing on her dating profile: that was one of the things they’d bonded over, her and Boy, and how much they hated the sort of people who were too stupid to realise that doing that sort of thing was a sign, ironically enough, of how seriously they took themselves.
At last! A turning. This had to be it.
But no.
No.
She was now at The Windmill, which was not the hipster tap room where the boy had probably had just about enough of waiting, maybe he was downing his pint of what he’d claimed was the best real ale in the whole region, she didn’t like real ale, or fake ale, though she’d not told him that, so maybe he’d bought her a pint that he was now having to down; maybe he was running outside to throw up, or to burp massively, though boys never ran anywhere to burp, they just let their bodies burp or do whatever they wanted, wherever.
The journey from the station to The Windmill was a zigzag, and The Windmill was nowhere near the canal, it was literally at the top of a hill, and so how had she got here? Maybe she had actually agreed to meet Boy here? Maybe the tap room was disguising itself as The Windmill? Yes, maybe it was an April Fool’s (in September).
When she walked in, an old man stared at her. She stared back at him, focussing on his chin dimple, which was so well-defined, she wondered whether he’d done it with a pencil. Then he resumed staring at the television screen that all of the other men, a lot of whom weren’t even that old, were staring at, and she was glad; she was almost getting into this whole not-being-looked at thing.
There was no TV in the back room; no men, either: just grubby velvet chairs and a truly terrible painting of a horse galloping towards some clouds containing a golden gate that may or may represent heaven, and—
Best Friend.
She was there. Which was almost Girl’s here.
She clearly believed herself to be eating a sandwich whilst reading a book when what she was actually doing was holding the book half-open with her left hand, which was stuck in a painful-looking claw, whilst staring at her right hand as if this would magically stop the slices of mayo-slathered tomato falling into the gap between the pages of the book that her claw was just about holding open, which of course it didn’t (this wasn’t that dumb Netflix series where the teen girl who looked like a lesbo but, like all the other TV girls and women who were not psychos, fell in love with the guy who basically stalked her for several episodes, could make things move or blow up or shrink or triple in size just by looking at them, which they both agreed was pretty cool even though they also agreed the show was totally babyish and dumb, and they’d never tell anyone else that they’d watched it not once but twice, the second time in lieu of going to a house party, and in only their pants and strap tops) and so the tomato slopped all over the pages but did Best Friend admit defeat? No, she did not, she was Best Friend after all; she just dropped the sandwich back onto the plate and tightened her claw and wiped the tomato off the paper with her finger and then put it all (finger, tomato, mayo, and probably some microscopic particles of paper and ink) into her mouth and closed her eyes and smiled as if she knew perfectly well that a more accurate way of describing her current situation was reading a sandwich whilst eating a book and that this, moreover, was exactly what s—
t ripped.
Yes, in some pocket of time that refused to fit into any sentence, Girl had tripped. And now was spread all over the carpet like a spaceman trying to be a Spice Girl trying to be a starfish.
How did you get here?
I don’t know. She tried to explain about the lines and the dots and the shit bags, but when Best Friend’s book thudded against her foot, she stopped.
Best Friend’s mouth twitched at the corners, like she was trying not to laugh. You’re actually interrupting my date.
Oh god! Sorry! With who? Is he in the toilet? Though he’s been gone a long time … Does he have IBS?
No. Best Friend play-slapped Girl’s hand. With myself.
With yourself!
Yeah.
And is it going well?
Better than expected.
Then Best Friend’s finger was in her mouth. It had been in her mouth for some time—longer than the time it would take to suck the sauce off it. Girl moved around the table and sat right next to Best Friend. Their shoulders bumped. She grabbed Best Friend’s hand and pulled it until it popped. Then it was as if all the versions of them that had been skulking in different corners of the room rushed together, and their lips rushed towards each other’s lips, and even though it wasn’t the sort of thing Girl had ever thought about doing because she wasn’t gay and neither was Best Friend, they’d both been dating guys for as long as they’d been friends, and yes sometimes she did think about Best Friend’s and various other friends’ shoulders bums hips boobs smiles when she was fucking the boys who she fucked but that wasn’t exactly thinking, and how could be she be gay if she was fucking boys; but how her lips felt when Best Friend was kissing them was like they were the lips of the boy whose body was the only place this line could possibly end.
Where’s Your Head At?
Nobody knew where they came from, not even the internet.
One moment, the air between the walls and the furniture and the people was filled with nothing besides dust, water droplets, thoughts of things people wanted to do to other people but would never dare, thoughts of things people did not want to buy but wanted to think about more than they did the things they did not really believe they had ever done to other people, and other things so small that they looked like nothing; the next, it was filled with furry headless bats.
The bats were the size of over-fed domestic cats. They flapped their wings with a frenzy that was at once terrifying, pitiful and hilarious. At first, everybody thought they were a dream that was probably also a nightmare. Nobody knew that this same thought was in the body of every other body in the country, almost like a virus.
Of course, the air quickly filled with words that attempted to untangle the truth of the bats. The words flapped and flailed between bodies in much the same way that the bats were still flapping and flailing between walls and objects, and even after approximately 29183957172948 of them had been shared online (although 29184 of them were repetitions of the same seven memes), everybody still believed, in the place that would never make it out of their bodies or into the internet, that they were in a dream; yes, this was really happening; yet it was also impossible.
Some people clubbed the bats with the other sort of bat. Other people sprayed them with poison. Richer people paid poorer people to club or poison their indoor bats; outdoor bats, they shot for fun. The clubbing and the spraying filed time to an arrow that pointed, ever so elegantly, towards a batless future in which nobody would ever complain about anything else ever again. This future lasted no more than five hours, during which everyone lay about in a stunned silence, not daring to see what lurked in each other’s eyes, nor even in those of memes and gifs, which of course did not really have eyes, only to resume, by the sixth or seventh hour, their complaints re those aspects of their lives that were unrelated to the absence or presence of bats, such as their sofa, and how it was too wide in a way that felt very narrow. By the twelfth hour, the air between the walls and the furniture and the people between the walls and the furniture was so thick with complaining, that when the bats reappeared, everyone was relieved. They immediately uploaded photos of the new bats to the internet, accompanied by all manner of complain-adjacent emojis. Can’t believe the little fuckers are back again. This time we’ll beat them once and for all. Oh, yeah!
But there was a significant minority of people who did not club or spray their bats. However, because not clubbing or spraying the bats was now a criminal offence—those who’d been caught were blamed for the bats’ continued existence, even though the ones who did the blaming knew, also, that the clubbing and the spraying only discontinued them temporarily—so these people did not tell any other people that they were this sort of person, not inside, not outside, not even on the internet. These people just lived with the bats. Some did this by flapping at any bat that was in their way; the more accurately they mimicked the bats’ movement, the more space they cleared between their bodies and the bats’ bodies. Others constructed special wafters; these they propped by the door of every room in their house. Others did nothing to postpone the moment when their bodies and the bats’ bodies collided; the bats flew into their foreheads, and they did not die, they did not contract any of the 291835 diseases that the internet claimed that physical contact with the bats would cause: the bats’ fur tickled their noses; many sneezed.
A few began to look forward to such collisions, or even to move in ways that they hoped would make the collisions happen. The bats, however, despite their headlessness—which still no one had explained—sensed when a person was trying to force a collision, and if, as occasionally happened, a human, in an effort to stretch out the collision into something like a relationship, attempted to clasp the bats’ delightfully soft and furry bodies to their chests, the bats screamed a scream so horrendous, the offending person would let go immediately. The bats did what the bats did and no human could stop them from doing it; this was a truth the non-clubbing non-spraying people learned over the course of many screams. If they were lucky enough to touch those bodies that were so like yet unlike human bodies, they did their best to not-hear the place in their chest that wanted more more more, amplifying, instead, the part that understood enough. When these people came into contact with other people who were in this significant minority, they did not think: we are the same sorts of people. They thought: these other people are unbearably smug.
Leak-Proof
There was something wrong with our swimming pool and I knew it and Dad knew it and Mum knew it and Jess knew it and we all knew that we all knew it but no one was saying it, and if we went on not-saying it much longer, I’d explode.
I tried to say it whilst Dad was driving me to swim practice. The words scraped the backs of my braces, desperate to leave the home they’d outgrown, but when I opened my mouth, out came the sentence: Isn’t it sad about Trishy Brownfield?
Dad made a face at the roundabout. You always used to cover your ears when I put on her records.
So? That doesn’t mean I want her to die in a pool of her own—
—How did you hear about that? Have you been spending too much time on the internet?
—We all spend too much time on the internet.
By now, we’d stopped in the leisure centre car park and he was reaching for his phone.
—What?
I didn’t really care about Trishy Brownfield; neither did most of the internet people who said they did. The problem was, I’d read so much about how much other people cared about it, it was almost as if I did.
I pulled at the door but it was child-locked. Dad?
He grabbed my hand. I’m sorry I couldn’t build you a pool big enough to properly practise in. He was looking into my eyes. He was looking into my eyes even though he never looked into anyone’s eyes, and how it made me feel was like a prawn that was about to be peeled. But it’s better than nothing, no? And it’s still good fun, all splashing around together?
Yes, Dad. It is.
All I ever wanted, growing up, was a pool. A pool of my own.
I know. He’d been saying this one to four times a week for years and years.
There was lots we didn’t have, lots of things most people would say were more necessary than a pool, but it was a pool I missed. I wanted somewhere to just … float.
Coach Laska is going to make angry eyebrows at me again.
But after two or three seconds of floating, he went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, I bash into the side. Mind you, you’re a lot small –
Open the door.
But—
—Dad!
He hung his head. Sorry.
The warmup was almost over by the time I slid into the water. Coach Laska’s eyebrows burrowed towards her nose: how is it you have parents to drive you everywhere and do everything for you and you’re still late? Then her mouth told me to do twelve lengths of front crawl. I nodded. But I did backstroke. I kept on doing backstroke after she shouted at me for doing it.
◊
What was wrong with our swimming pool was that no matter how many gallons of water Dad pumped into it, it refused to stay full. At first, it stayed at the three-quarter mark. Mum said it was stylish, showing off the pretty tiles round the side. Now, though, six months since we’d installed it, it was closer to half-full; when Dad flopped onto the lilo, he crashed right down to the concrete bottom, pushing even more water out and onto Mum’s new dress. She said the sort of nothing that made even me doubt whether what had just happened had actually just happened. (She’s like that with her nothings, my mum).
Every few days, he’d wake us up by rubbing our damp swimming costumes in our faces, then making us hunt for treasure before breakfast. By treasure he meant mouldy pennies. By hunt, he meant shiver and kick and dive, whilst he watched, en-fleeced, from the side. I let Jess catch it every time, though it took her a while to notice:
—You’re not even trying.
—I hate this game.
Dad flinched.
—You used to love it.
—Yeah, and people change. Anyway, it’s no fun in a pool this shallow. My words opened a window I didn’t know was in the air, and fresher air rushed through it—or maybe it was just the breeze.
—And I’m freezing. We live in Yorkshire, not California! And, and, and—
