Unamerica by Cody Goodfellow

Author:Cody Goodfellow [Goodfellow, Cody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: King Shot Press
Published: 2019-11-26T23:00:00+00:00

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Ida Scarfe gives him shit like he wasn’t expected, and makes him wait outside while little kids shoot spitballs at him for ten minutes before letting him in.

He gets it. This decompression period is necessary to check his privilege. In big cities all over the world, he’s seen places like this, embattled bulwarks, bivouacs in an undeclared but eternal war. How much worse must the atrocities in that war be here, where everything is ultra?

“Go inside,” Ida tells him. Her ruddy, grief-creased face studies his long enough for him to feel flayed. “Follow the blue line. Touch any of my sisters, look anybody in the eye, and I will fucking end you, little man.”

“Fair enough,” he says. The blue line was one of several that goes through the maze of cutout containers and partitions and curtains, borders between group spaces where women cook, teach and counsel and cut each other’s hair and spaces where women and children sleep on cots, futons, the floor. Once or twice, he pauses to watch and hears a thick, smoky throat clear itself, and he moves on before the tattooed doorlady can lay a hand on him.

He follows the blue line to a big, open room with a scrap-wood floor, where the ladies are dancing, and all his irritation melts away. Surely, she’s arranged for him to see this.

The music is unsettling at first. He can’t recognize the time signature. Lilting polyrhythm rolls and skips like a top eternally on the edge of tipping over, both fast and lazy in a way that lulls and galvanizes his nerves so that his head bobs and he sways with it, in time with the ladies.

They move like dervishes, spinning and floating spokes of a wheel, petals of a flower, feet scarcely touching the floor as they twirl away in a cascade of snowflake patterns too intricate to have any designer but chaos and nature.

It’s utterly unlike any group of dancers he’s ever seen. The movements of the women, in baggy shirts and sweats and plain dresses, delineate flowing sleeves, fluttering fringes and towering crowns. Their faces flow with emotion, now grinning, now weeping, now silently wailing and gnashing teeth, bliss and agony being drawn out like poison by the river of rhythm.

Jude comes around the dance floor to him. She’s not smiling. “Go watch the door, Ida.”

He flinches but doesn’t jump as he realizes America’s most infamous female spree killer is right behind him. He braces himself. “Watching you,” she whispers, and then is gone.

Jude leads him away down the hall, shushing him until she closes the door behind them. “I’m sorry. . . We’ve been overwhelmed by a new wave of cases. . .”

“That was remarkable. . . the thing back there, I mean, the dancing. . . That’s amazing, what you’re doing. I can’t get that rhythm out of my head.”

She cracks half a smile. “Four-four is great for group dancing because it captures the heart and the id—everyone has a heartbeat, everyone likes to fuck—but it’s a trap.

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