Wild Failure by Zoe Whittall

Author:Zoe Whittall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2024-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

This Is Carrie’s Whole Life

When Carrie is alone with a stranger, she imagines how they might kill her. She used to think her imaginings were an evolutionary instinct, the body’s way of creating the neural pathways required for the worst eventuality. But when someone really tried to kill her, she changed her mind. Her imagination hadn’t prepared her at all. Now she knows her limbs are useless props, as worthless as daisy stems after a week in stale vase water.

Carrie is slicing limes with the good knife, the one that cuts clean. The knife stays sharp because Carrie wrote NO EFFING DISHWASHER on its handle with a Sharpie. She’s listening to a mix labelled Opening! Duties! at the Dark Hearse! The bar is called the Dark Horse, but everyone who works there calls it the Hearse because eventually it makes you feel as though you’re in one. If you consider what happened to Carrie, that’s pretty funny. Whoever made the list doesn’t work there anymore.

Her nails are polished yellow like a child’s crayon sun. She juts out one hip, sings along to a chorus of a song that is simply the word Barcelona. She throws the limes into their plastic tub, setting it beside the box of straws. She rinses the cutting board before walking it over to the dish pit. Elin is stacking pint glasses in the sterilizing machine. She wears a snapback and baggy shorts with a white tank top. The tattoos of finely illustrated rabbits up and down her right arm appear to be hopping on her flexing muscles.

Here, Carrie says.

Elin holds the cutting board and smirks.

Thanks, doll.

The sexual tension between them, if harnessed, could power the dishwasher.

A few weeks later, after the incident, Elin stops by Carrie’s apartment with a stack of Jane Austen novels and a box of cinnamon doughnuts. Elin sits awkwardly on the end of her bed as Carrie tries to explain how she has always imagined being murdered every time she was alone with another human. She’s only told a handful of people in her life about it. Elin is the first person who says, Oh yeah, me too. Of course. If I’m alone with any man, I imagine my murder.

Carrie is about to express how much this means to her when Elin stands up and says she has to split. When Carrie thanks her for saving her life, all she says is, It was nothing, you’d have done the same thing. Then she shows herself out. She didn’t try to kiss her. They only ever hook up at the bar in a way that feels mutually transactional, like they don’t exist in each other’s lives outside of work.

Isn’t there some sort of Buddhist saying about admitting your human frailty? Or maybe it was from the corporate leadership book that Carrie’s ex-boyfriend left on the back of the toilet. It was good to roll joints on.

This is Self-Help 101, she said during their last week together, but marketed to men.

That book changed my life, Carrie, he insisted.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.