re(mix) by Seneca Basoalto
“She was sucking on her teeth and neglecting the ability to remember what skin was meant to feel like.”
Fiction by Seneca Basoalto
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Cherry lollipop lips stained like a mess of Crayola marker—there’s an art in sulking behind heart-shaped Mylar balloons floating in a tinsel mess of sparkling, pink metallic. It’s a flashback to a preteen 80’s birthday party, bubblegum burst leaving a gummy crust against the chin. Someone spiked the cake with amphetamines and the dust was left crawling down her throat.
………………………………………An hour earlier, she was alone in the shed guzzling oral morphine and sniffing the raw unshaved lumber from the walls. Now,
SHE was sucking on her teeth and neglecting the ability to remember what skin was meant to feel like. Something about the stars and moon? Something about black lights and dry humping when she was thirteen. Something about her grandmother’s old furniture and the smell of pudgy girls in the summer. Something simulating nostalgia under the lens of unambiguous downtempo remixes meddling with her eardrums.
There was a lightning bolt stuck to her lashes, and they dropped like a crow’s feathers onto the rug—where she bent, in beads, bracelets, and baby doll dress—to collect them back one by one. With mirages and a lisp, she made wishes one by one as she blew them up towards the ceiling fan.
I wish for all the buttons to fit between my fingers
I wish gold liked the way I said its name
I wish Tennessee
That was it. I wish Tennessee. There were question marks that didn’t know how to organize a proper thought. A silence that overcomes the unmitigated created from noxious cake and coral frosting.
I wish in pictures
I feel like a telecaster
Bambino sombrero
I think I can speak Spanish!
Rotary cake. Camilla. Corset.
I need to buy Chips Ahoy tomorrow
There was that place in Tennessee…
Who is that? Wait…who was…what is that. My tongue likes words.
I love buttons. I wish for all the buttons to fit between my fingers. Pink. Ink. Danny Pink.
Up or down? Up. Or down. Warm Prosecco or Mr. Pibb? Both taste like the phallic jizz of a thirteen-year-old boy in the bathroom at a military bowling alley. Bi-curious girls see something Floridian in the way she moves; cubed art deco spider monkey, pastel pink with green trim.
The shadow of a cactus left stranded on the sidewalk, the miniature palm tree tattoo on the back of her knee. Silver lining. Fleshy schoolgirl, screams like superglue on maple leaves—a sticky way to leap from one veranda to the next—following the party and a ten- dollar bill lost in the air. These trees thicken with age and adequacy, the left molar seizing as the roller coaster dropped its hands to take notes.
Whirl away.
Smoke me to death. The Girl she loves times seven. The Girl –lipstick vest—carries a black label gun as a handbag and hides plastered perfume in her hair. You can’t see her behind her eyelids. James Dean shades and a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s last typed word stitched to the membrane of her metacarpal. There could be a death in France and she’d know about it. The Girl challenges taste buds and list making like licking a matte finish lunch off puckered lips. A literal Halloween day, 3:54 EST before the sun sets, while the clouds are budding, the personification of knowing everything light will be dark and the winged eyeliner will be a clandestine pop in plain sight.
SHE lost her voice box in a veil of smog. Smoke me to death.
….Set fire to my youth.
SHE and The Girl slither on the Keanu Mood Scale—the example of a nude dusk and exhaustive sighs replacing dialogue. The difference between a pill and prosecco.
…………..“Consider what life has delivered. Then forget those things. They arrived too late to be useful, and I’m too poor to be this kind,” said The Girl.
“This kind of what?” SHE provoked her tonsils out of stillness.
The Girl swallowed her glass of bubbles and caught the reflection of torches with her frosted husk.
“I always wanted to be understood without words.”
“Yet we’re all words without being understood.”
Seconds are a scenic route,
…..Beautiful things are meant to disappear.
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Header image courtesy of Ryota Matsumoto. To view more of his work, visit his website here.
Seneca Basoalto is a student of psychology with two decades of involvement in published creative writing. Having a background in the backstage music/movie scene – she’s adapted her unusual experiences to fuel her insightful writings. Seneca’s Iberian lineage can be seen influencing the attitude and magnetism of her diverse range of work.
Some of her works include poetry collections published through Terror House Magazine, Glasgow Review of Books, Words Dance, Breadcrumbs Magazine, North of Oxford, and Pamplemousse.