CASES OF CONSCIENCE
Betty Parris, about 300 years after, eating a sub in the Bay Area.
Ann Putnam was a total shit during the witch trials. She made innocent people die because she wasn’t getting laid, no one told her they loved her and she wanted to spread out in the sun on her neighbors’ fenced off yards. I got about thirty ticks clearing out her gravesite with an after-school volunteer group. I know where all the pins are that she used to prick herself with, pretending the “witches” were the culprits.
I remember ramming a pole into a girl’s back because she was on my property and was better best friends to my ‘best friend.’ Collecting ants in Dixie cups and giving them the bare necessities to survive became an everyday past time. It was more of a maternal feeling than anything else, until I became addicted to computer strategy games like SimCity and Roller Coaster Tycoon.
There’s not much use in trying to differentiate reality from fantasy these days. I used to Masturbate to my high school English teacher in between periods. I wore animal hats in college to make a trademark for myself but after graduation, my roommate told me I needed to be an adult.. I learned what “furries” were and never wore one again. I drove 2 hours to the forest and got a 15 minute park pass to burn everything from a 3 yr relationship (including a painting of a pig) and drove back. In gearing up for grad school, I’ve been making art that looks like “real art.” I take photos of myself in the woods and pretend to do a performance or I pretend that it's all a part of a larger story that actually doesn’t exist. I just glued weave to my boobs and rolled around in poison oak.
I had nightmares for years thinking about people being hanged and getting crushed with stones. There was usually a narrator’s voice on a loudspeaker and a red pentagram that lights up on the floor. I could levitate all the way downstairs to the kitchen, through the sunroom window and up to the old burying grounds on the hill. I believed that I had invited spirits into the house and to this day I still think there are ghosts trapped there. I sleep in my parents room; a much more intrusive thing than the elderly yelping cat that my mother has to silence by throwing slippers at. My father goes to the basement and screams at the ghosts to leave, which, even in adulthood, freaks me out even more. I was the only female to participate in the revolutionary war reenactment in Concord. I can play Sons of Liberty on the fife.
I’ve watched my father doing congratulatory convulsion dances when he advances in his business career. I was always convinced he was possessed or had hemorrhoids. The men in my family are Eagle Scouts, they keep badges in their sex drawer. Last week, I took a shit at a Boy Scout of America camp because I wanted to be a part of their group. When I was old enough to work, my father made me get a job at our local McDonalds. I couldn’t make change, even though the computers told me how much to give back. I was embarrassed, so I played strip basketball with a co-worker, without the basket and without the ball. I quit and started working at the sugar shack across town where I gave free ice cream to the Mexican field worker who drove a tractor. You can only get Girl Scout cookies once a year and the timing is limited. The precise dates to spend dinner budget money on those eleven lovable variations are February 1st - March 1st. The cookies help girls do great things, like try to make more friends by handing out Chicklets. Spuds Restaurant & Pub is still my favorite restaurant in the entire world. When I worked there, I wore pants so tight with a thong that I got urinary tract infections.
I recently took pictures of my bosses shoes and printed the images onto custom Keds. Now I can walk in his shoes while dropping off his dirty underwear at the dry cleaners. My invisibility skills are on and off. My mom says it’s dependent on lipstick but that’s a lie. I set up a glass studio apartment in the Trans America park across the street from my office and went to work from there. I carry a travel chess set in my purse and sit alone in cafes until an older man sits down and calls me European. Sometimes I watch the bison in Golden Gate Park and feel like just as much of an outsider as they are.
At age 6 I thought my Ski-wee instructor was in love with me so I wouldn’t want to leave when my parents picked me up. I was an Abercrombie and Fitch model for a month but I didn’t like how my male counterparts sandwiched me between their dicks and blew farts. All of the girls lined up wearing the same Abercrombie stuff. Their vaginas looked like razor burned stubbly chicken. My roommate in high school wanted to compare vaginas because hers looked like an open-faced turkey sandwich with fangs. She knew that wasn’t really normal. I can’t do yoga anymore because the vaginal flatulence got way out of control. If I ever see student vagina paintings again, I’ll buy them just to destroy privately.
I slept with my English teacher four years after graduation but now he’s engaged to another English teacher.