the district of dreams

1.

I suck the head of a live snake while getting tattooed by a man who gives my friend, Kate, a mechanical dick, instructs her to sew it to her body with a curved saddlery needle and her very own pubes, still attached to her skin, so she can fuck like a man instead of getting fucked, like a woman, and she does. 

2.

I am transported to my grandmother’s house where giants play with boulders like they’re bouncing balls in the back yard. They crash through the trees like the creatures in the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are and ignore me when I, afraid they might hurt the trees or the house or me, beg them to stop. I feel the boulders flying behind my back, listen to them land with devastating thuds, flying so close to my body that my shirt moves from the wind of it all, and I wonder about the narrowness of the margin of error when people say, close call. 

3.

A key crumbles like soft cheese when I turn it in the lock of the door I need to open to get to the room on the other side. It holds its shape just enough, I think, to open the door one last time after this one. I grieve the future because the room feels like part of my body, and I feel the start of a dull but building pain, the cruel, pulsing thud of an insistent phantom limb, the throb that feels like a pulse in the place where something used to be. But when I share the terrible news, something in the cavalier way you say, That’s ok, we’ll just change the lock and replace the key, makes me hate you. But maybe you don’t know that the key and the lock and the door and the room are all part of me, that I am the key and the lock and the door and the room and everything in the room—that there is no other lock, that there can be no other key, and that I may just forget myself if I’m stuck here on one side, while the realest, tenderest parts, tucked away to keep safe from the violence of usefulness, are stuck there, on the other. 

4.

I find myself taken with a very tall, very broad-chested man—tall and wide like André René Roussimoff as Fezzik in The Princess Bride—and I clamber at him like a declawed cat trying to climb a tree. He is mysterious with a fuzzy, out-of-focus face, and I wonder how silly the photos of us will look with these several feet between us, his face all the way at the top of the frame, mine bobbing bodiless at the bottom. He gives me drugs that make me feel vague and bright. He gives another woman drugs, too, and tells me to put her pussy in my mouth. I don’t notice when he starts fucking me from behind because I’m absorbed by the softness of her flesh and the wild smell of her pubic hair and the thought that isn’t it curious how men are grossed out by such a decadent, animal thing?

5. 

I pull off the highway into a strip mall parking lot, eyes darting from the bank to the market to the empty storefronts there, there, and there. I search for a spot away from cameras and cars and the busy street where I might hide a body—a construction dumpster, an overgrown bush, the mouth of an animal. I know I must get this thing done, but I don’t know why or what happened, who is at fault, or how you came to be dead and also with me. At first large and heavy, an adult-sized human, by the end of my futile-feeling search, your body has withered, small like a baby, small enough to fit into a plastic shopping bag, the small, thin, translucent kind they give out at convenient stores and pharmacies, the ones environmentalists hate because sea turtles mistake them for jellyfish.

I drive for miles out of town, rural where surveillance cameras start to thin, pull into a gas station where I won’t be seen, park and start to pump, squeeze the handle and clip it in, squeegee the windshield with dirty water and clean out the car like normal people do while gas pulses into the tank. A quiet place with nobody else around, I can deposit the small, unsuspicious plastic bag, handles tied tight around your body into a tidy double knot, into the trash can that sits between the two pumps. I can push it down into the bottom of the can, pile on empty cups and bottles and licked-clean bags of potato chips, napkins crusty and brown from sopping up coffee that spilled from overfull mugs, worn out chewing gum bleached white from worry, the filth of an old ash tray kept full long after quitting, just to be able to smell it once in a while. I can empty everything out and pile it all on, make it so dirty nobody would notice, make it so dirty nobody would look.

Ryan-Ashley Anderson is a conceptual artist, writer, and creative director from the rural South whose written work can be found at X-R-A-Y, The Bulb Region, Farewell Transmission, and Initial, among others. Anderson is EIC at Pool Party, Accessibility Dir. at Rain Porch, and Board Secretary for Refuge America. She has an MFA in Visual Studies and an MA in Critical Studies.