The Girl With No Shadow
112,000 words| Literary Fiction
Synopsis: To try and save her marriage, a young woman named Zaftie goes to a hoarder farm named Halcyon to try and get over her obsessive behaviors.
112,000 words| Literary Fiction
Synopsis: To try and save her marriage, a young woman named Zaftie goes to a hoarder farm named Halcyon to try and get over her obsessive behaviors.
(Chapter Excerpt)
Zaftie checked her email and there were no messages from Lenny, the panty hunter-sniffer-gatherer, so she went to her Facebook page and checked it. She had read that Halcyon had strict policies about using computers and particularly social media. It was part of their hoarding therapy—clearing the pile—and the pile including everything in your life that was getting in the way of making you the best person you could be. First she perused the friends she had on her Facebook page. All the women she knew were now at that stage in life where they were beginning to look masculine, some more masculine than their husbands. Gone was the dainty freshness of post-pubescence—instead, were broad shoulders, strange hairdos that had morphed into haircuts and with the hair in colors and hues of purple and red that had no natural name. Broads. Like in a Frank Sinatra movie. She had never understood what that term really meant but now she understood. Broads—these Facebook women—were somewhere close to menopause. Their ovaries were betraying them, on their last leg, pulsing out pitiful amounts of estrogen and now the women were beginning to look like men. Androgynous but not in a good way, a broad androgyny.
Zaftie noticed other oddities on the women that came along for the ride when the estrogen supply became depleted— facial hair, receding hairlines, jowls that looked like they belonged on swine and in general, a sallowness and thin skinned-ness. The men, on the other hand, were beginning to go in the other direction, and starting to look feminine, complete with breasts large enough for training bras and equally strange haircuts that were parted in odd places on their heads. The color of their dyed hair was most always a mouse-like grey-black which with its stringy quality and contrast to their pale pates, made the men look like 19th century daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe. She stared at all the poor women—and men—her friends, her ex-friends, her enemies—some now beginning to become unrecognizable from earlier days. And these were the good photos, some of the best photos they could take for themselves. She started to ponder the whole social media thing. Why did this beastly thing exist, this Facebook? And here were images, personal information, intimate details of the lives of people. It was out there for all the world to see. It was a new type of pornography, voyeurism—safe and acceptable for middle class hausfraus. What delusions were people under, Zaftie thought? Had these people no idea what they looked like on the other end?
And then she looked at her own photo. The lighting was bad, her skin looked more than just oily—slick. She had wrinkles that she’d never seen before, wrinkles within wrinkles. The image began to look worse and worse until she imagined it to be a photo from am old horror movie. Thank God she was going to this place called Halcyon. It would give her five weeks to work on herself—she’d get facials every day if she could, enjoy all the spa benefits if they had any. Surely they did for this was mostly a place that was fleecing well-heeled women out of their money. If they didn’t produce a better product than what entered the meat grinder, then the place would certainly go out of business. It had after all been a fat farm in an earlier incarnation.
For a moment, she was about to update her status to let the world know where she’d be for the next month, but then something about the whole social media thing hit her. What the fuck was she doing with all the little flowers and trite sayings and flat-out bullshit on her Facebook page? It looked as if she had the mental and emotional state of a five-year old girl? With whom was she sharing all the little gems of truth and wisdom she’d accumulated? What did she even have a Facebook page for, or any page for that matter that people could find and read and laugh at? Anonymous people, so-called friends? It was all bullshit. Total bullshit. It was beyond bullshit. It was lies. All her smiling pictures and happy talk and soulful sayings that sounded as if they came out of the mouth of a stony-eyed guru at an Esalen seminar in Big Sur, California. There were beatitudes and blessings and platitudes and truisms and altruisms and homilies and benedictions and ponderings of all manner—chalky bromides—placations for weak-minded and guilty people that circled back on themselves like ouroboros eating its own tail. It was as if the floodgates of realization had been opened, but this was different. Zaftie read one of the altruisms.
The path to enlightenment is first to do away with selfishness.
She couldn’t believe those words were on her page. She started cackling with laughter. She laughed so hard she fell onto the floor and rolled around in a quartet of plastic bags filled with clothes and Goodwill runs. She rolled around until a puke green spatula flapped her in her right eye, bringing her out of her madness. She sat up. Her face was wet and slobbery with laughter tears. Her eye was hurting. What a crock of shit, she thought. The whole idea of Facebook was putrid indulgence, masturbation for the self—a projected imaginary being into cyberspace that was imaginary. An alien. People never put the pain on their Facebook pages. It was all smiling ridiculousness, platitudes, shit. Zaftie was beginning to understand that maybe the pain in her life was the only thing that was interesting about her. Maybe it was a moment of clarity, courtesy of the Goodwill spatula in the eye. Or maybe it was more bullshit, like the stupid sayings on all those stupid fucking Facebook pages, like the shit gurus fed women at places like Esalen and writing retreats. She knew one thing though. None of the fakirs in the Facebook universe would never put the real pain up there, the hurt, the fucking truth. Maybe most of them would never understand that, the idea that projecting falseness from something as dumb and stupid as your Facebook pages isn’t lying to the Facebook universe, it’s flat out lying to yourself. Facebookers would never go to those dark places because they lacked one thing Zaftie knew she had--a soul.