WARBLE
In Conversation with Sasha Colby’s Lipsync of Zombie by The Cranberries in Episode Two on Season Fifteen of Rupaul’s Drag Race
I watch red splotches emerge on my thighs as I sit on the toilet and try to pee. My blood finally coming back into me. I want to ask where it went, why it disappears when Marc is inside of me.
My mother taught me how to breathe by punching me in the stomach until it was flat. I rest my elbows on my knees, holding my head, letting my back and breasts drop. I imagine my mother tracing her fingers down my spine. Whispering in my ear to get up and smile, to look pretty and not let the world know how angry you are.
My thong starts to slip past my knees. Marc likes to stick his fingers in my mouth and pull my body side to side from the corners of my lips. After he finishes, I watch him smoke a cigarette as he talks about how much he hates capitalism, the education system, and that self-checkout machines will slowly and inevitably contribute to the end of the working class. I think the only thing Marc loves is talking about what he hates.
When I was sixteen my mother told me that I am destined to become her and for that she is sorry.
My thong falls down as I keep pushing, desperately trying to pee. I wonder if I will die like this. A balloon full of urine that must eventually pop. When I do, Marc will walk into the bathroom and be so disgusted by what he sees that he won’t even bother to call 911. He will instead put his fingers in my mouth and drag my empty body out of the bathroom so that he can at least take a piss. I’ve been in the bathroom now for ten minutes. I wonder if Marc thinks I am shitting or dead.
I came home from a high school party one night purple, my mother swaddled me in ACE bandages and told me to leave my body alone. We ate plain pasta for dinner and drank light beer. If I wasn’t so sad I could’ve found beauty in the little moments we shared together before we became two cracked mirrors staring at each other.
I touch the lower part of my stomach. Move my fingers across it and feel the crystallized urine within me.
Drinking milk on an empty stomach as a little kid. Tapping the shoulder of my mother. Pulling my shirt up as I shaked my hips side to side. Listen, do you hear it? Milk splishing and sploshing. My mother is smiling and I think she looks so beautiful. She kisses me just above my belly button and calls me her little maraca.
I pull my thong up. Flush nothing down the toilet. Wash everything but piss off my hands. Look in the mirror. Don’t look in the mirror so long. Walk out. Marc doesn’t say anything.
He is sitting on the ground, smoking a cigarette, and reading Kafka for no damn reason. I hate him but he doesn’t even care enough to hate me.
Last week I dreamed of my mother killing herself and when I woke up I drafted her suicide letter in an email but never sent it to her.
I met Marc a couple months ago at a bar. He bought me a beer and told me I had nice teeth. We laughed and talked like normal people do. Zombies by The Cranberries began to play on the speakers and he stopped smiling. I asked if he was ok. He said this song makes him sad but didn’t say why and I didn’t ask. So, he bought me another drink and I drank it and in that moment I knew two things as true as the fact that my mother would die soon:
1. Marc and I would sleep together
2. He has no idea what the song Zombies is about
Livvy Krakower (she/her) is currently an undergraduate student at UMass Amherst. She has previously been published in Wrongdoing Magazine, Roadrunner Review, Writers Resist, and elsewhere. You can find more of Livvy’s writing on Instagram @littlepenguinswrite.
