Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country by Chavisa Woods

Author:Chavisa Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: zombies, magical realism, gothic fiction, flannery o'connor, american gothic, rural america, aliens, paranormal fiction, addiction, meth addiction, iraq war, 2000s fiction, gaza strip, palestine, short stories, feminist fiction, lgbt fiction, lgbtq fiction, lgbt author, lgbtq author, feminist author, feminism, poverty, creepy stories, creepy fiction, transgender character, lesbian character, trans character, queer character, Bush years, memoir, coming of age, punk lit, goth lit, gothic lit, brooklyn, brooklyn author
ISBN: 9781609807467
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2017-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

I’m still circling this East St. Louis strip. I’ve taken to waving back at the whores. They are very polite. This is my last time around, though. I’m gonna go ahead and drive to my hometown for the night. To hell with this.

She failed the test, of course. And the rest, it’s hard to explain. She just sat there quietly in the car as we drove away from the house and the scene of her worst embarrassment. When they tallied the results and announced them, her mother just quietly excused herself from the party. She started trembling, and the other guests comforted her, saying that she could try again soon, that she just wasn’t feeling well. But she bombed. Of course she did. She was tripping. I drove her home in a drug haze, finally starting to come down, and she didn’t say a word until we got into the apartment, and then, well, I finally got to meet Rose, the person she becomes who does things she doesn’t remember doing.

The apartment is destroyed. Most of her breakable things are broken, in pieces. There is a golf-ball-sized welt on her head (her own doing, not mine) and I have a swollen jaw, and she is sleeping now, as a result of many anti-anxiety medications I insisted she take so she would stop ramming herself headfirst into the walls and tearing her things to pieces. I am driving this disgusting strip of a road, over and over again, trying to figure where to go for the rest of the night . . . for the rest of my life.

There’s that fucking song playing on the radio, the one that always made me think of her, even when I was with her. I should have noticed this as a sign before tonight—“Where all the bodies hang on the air”—that’s not a sweet song at all. The fact that this is the song I most associate with my romantic relationship, there is definitely something very wrong with that. She’s gonna miss me. She destroyed everything else. She’s gonna tell me she can’t go on without me. And she probably can’t. Pretty soon now, though, I won’t really care. I crossed the waters. I’m gonna go home through the town. I’ll pass the shadows that fell down from when we met. But I’m gone from there.

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