She wore out that little black dress as if the very fabric of her life depended on it. She wasn’t a seamstress, not by any means, but whenever tears would appear at the touches of seams, she’d grab the little sewing-box kit kept at the bottom of the Miscellaneous Drawer, and get to work with a fervour edging on fanatical. It was almost impossible for her to not draw blood when doing so, for the frantic impulse to repair that aged old rag replaced any desire for the maintenance of health.
For she treated it like a talisman; an object or omen dictating her luck. For when she’d wear the dress, she found herself attracting the glimpses of passers by more frequently than was usual. For she was not of an exceptional beauty; her face really melted into crowds, but that dress in all its simplicity seemed to add a complexity to her rather hum-drum self. That dress, wrapped tightly around the plumpen edges of her form, seemed to bring wanted glances her way. And so, through the depths of steel-blue winters and the heavenly heights of drunken silver summers, she wore it without fail or question.
Drifting through the labyrinthine shell of her empty thoughts, she found herself replacing stitch by stitch the contents of her personality with that little black dress. Without it, she felt as vaporous as air. That there was simply nothing of worth or note to contribute from her mind to the daily-workings of everyday life; that everything had already been decided for her. Life felt, as it always did — excruciating, punishing, pointless. The axis of feeling that held onto her with an iron-clad grip always tilted downwards into the abyssal shelf of 17-year old nihilism fused with that deadening fear of growing old and useless.
And so, she understood that there was nothing left to experience but the feeling of that shoddily constructed dress against her skin. Everything outside of that experience was a mere coincidence not worth thinking about. She never once dreamed of laborious gardens or thickets of brambles flowering winter raspberries, or catching burs on her tights and twigs in her hair, she had never once considered that she’d never seen a Raven, nor had she ever thought of dipping her toes in the frigid foam of the Atlantic. For stealing the glances of weary men with weary bones gave her the only thing close to a satisfaction that the entirety of the natural world had never achieved within her. Sitting with legs clenched together in that childlike pose, in that seat we take on in the manner of receiving Christ, she’d search for the eyes of her sullen-sunk men anywhere she went. There was no wander into the dense thicket of This Great City that did not urge her to pursue the wilting glances of men with blue-or-brown-or-grey-or-bloodshot splattered eyes. Deep in that disused hole of hers cawed a magnificent screech of pitiful fury that to the ears of those primed to hear it; appeared like the apparition of some wraith-like siren down in the depths of some black sea.
That silent siren-song was the only noise she felt capable of making. In the dark, wrapped around the flailing limbs of a man, his sweat dripping like liquid-gold down her back, she wouldn’t make a sound. Rigid, lifeless, doll-like under the weight of human toil. Eyes half-mast as if drunk on wine, she’d lie there in a silence that made the room thick. Brain-dead, half-empty, she’d let the sounds of flesh-against-flesh ring through the lonely apartment as sweet as unheard birdsong in the night. She wouldn’t want to ruin it by the broken-notes of her voice. And so, lying under him, whoever he was, she would imagine herself as the threads of fabric ruched and pulled and stretched to expose herself in all the right places. She would picture herself bent-double, folded and crooked, forever at the mercy of another’s touch. The dress stayed on, always.
The only time she’d make a noise, is if any tried to make a movement towards removing it, a guttural snakes-hiss would pull itself out of her throat and fill the space between her and him. Usually, that was enough to dispel the other. It stayed on, through the depths of blind fingers in the dark, fumbling through the rumpled gathering of fabric round her waist or thighs, through sweat-slicked pleasures of the flesh, through the numb rushing of dead-sensations prickling from the base of her spine through the very delicate crown of matted hair on her head. There was nothing, not even the eternal rapture we must all face, for she had on several occasions dreamt of being buried in that dress, that would compel her to take it off.
Most of the time, she liked to find her men in inopportune places. The more the place lacked any discernible sense of sensuality or sex appeal, the more likely she was to score. Libraries, butchers, on the bus (the less travelled the route the better, the smaller the bus the better, a double decker reeked of chance, the word that she hated above all other words in the entire system of language), filthy forgotten pubs drenched in must and piss, work toilets, park-benches carved from rotting wood. She kept a thumbed and yellowed notebook in her fake designer bag, filled with lists of the best places to find these men. She’d spend countless hours roaming through the copses of steel and glass, empty headed, trailing vapour, in an attempt to document the spaces ripe for plucking rotten fruit. She and the dress had orchestrated an entire cartography of pleasure, held in the cheap-nylon threads of a pocket that held all that she had to offer in life.
On one of these cartographical excursions, fingers held tight between the softened paper of the notebook, she finds herself snaking down a colourless high-street. Bleaker thoughts bleed themselves into even bleaker territories of mind and spirit when, staring down the barrel of this desolation—a sight made gauzy from the thick drapes of grey that hang heavy from the sky, clinging to the flat roofed terraces—she experiences that curious sensation of having been there before. She reaches for her notebook and begins tearing through the scribbles on the pages. But no, she hasn’t been before. Goose-prickled skin rises like a wave of hives across the skin of her biceps. Nothing but dead space and even deader thoughts. She weaves brushed yarn through the throngs of elderly ladies with carrier bags that sag limp to the side, through the ant-lines of truant children pilled up outside the corner shops, through that interminable beeping of stolen electric bikes. The smell reaches her before her stained eyes have a chance to latch onto it. The smell that reaches into the very folds of her grey matter, the smell that clutches onto her tongue, the smell that sucks the blood from her strangled heart.
And so she turns into the open-doored shop without thinking. Chlorine, vinegar-glass cleaner, ground-up entrails of dried shrimps and squids, algae, fertile swamps, raw flesh, salt and sea. Rows and rows of disordered glass-tanks fill the small box-shop from foot to head. Clusters of goldfish, butterflyfish, tiny catfish and even tinier sharks, tetras, water-frogs, axolotls with their dead little eyes. She reads a label on an empty tank which reads, Burton’s Mouthbrooder. Toward’s the shops end, a hand-written note on a scrap of cardboard reads—EXOTIC FISH, ASK—in a scrawl that in its faint lines and strange angles transmits an aura of deep insecurity. The lights are dentist office bright. The mosaic of glass and water shimmers violently beneath the carpet of pole-length LEDs mounted to the ceiling. Faint splashes and water bubbles.
She walks further into the shop without thinking, pulling down the fabric of her dress as it rides up the curve of her buttered thigh. The counter, the one beneath the crudely written sign, stands empty. Behind it a frosted glass door, a sticker with all caps red-and-black lettering shouts PRIVATE on the peeling wooden frame. She moves, slowly, past the counter, and pushes the door open. It’s a store-cupboard, filled to the brim with piles of empty boxes, unlabelled miscellaneous food-stuffs, papers with important sounding titles strewn carelessly into the room’s corners. Faded posters half-assedly blu-tacked to the yellowing stucco walls show a world map, the word FISH translated to 17 different languages (poisson, Fisk, psari), and a portrait of a great blue whale. A large cardboard box sits in front of another door—but this door, rather than the frosted glass that only hints towards a sense of privacy, only winks at a sense of secrecy—is metal. And it’s open. Surging electrical impulses like tiny cuts from needles take the place of cogent brain matter. She clambers haphazardly through the shrine of disorganisation, pushing past half-stamped on boxes and kicking littered styrofoam on the floor, stepping on documents and plastic packaging, and she places a calloused palm on the surface of the door’s dull metal. Resting her face to it, her left eye peers through the ajar-gap left by the stupid, unsuspecting shop-keep.
She sees the outline of another small room. But this room is darker, save for one strip of LED lights, that are affixed to the far northern edge of the room. A cold air flushes against the growing pink of her cheeks. Lighted by this meagre strip of LED, she can see the edge of what looks to be the largest fish-tank she’s ever seen. Her face is pressed against the cold door, lips open, tongue searching the corrugated roof of her mouth. Sounds of mechanical water-bubbling blow a muted death-march rattle that saturates the atmosphere, that vibrates through the rubber soles of her shoes. She’s squinting now, furrowed brow. On a sharp inhale, the flick of a pearlescent tentacle strikes a lightning bolt into the vague centre of her being. Something akin to ecstatic pleasure starts ruminating in the bottomless pit of her soul. She sees it, only for a second, before the tentacle moves out of her sight. She laughs, softly, imagining plastic shopping bags being dragged through the blackened river.
Without thinking, she pushes the metal door open.
A gelatinous mass, bursts of purples, pinks, blues, shades of grey, impossible colours, an horrifically bulbous air-filled head perched on the water’s surface. The thing’s head is so big that the tank’s lid is cracked open. A string of feathery tendrils float like a mass of coiled hair in the bubbling water. It’s just floating in the centre of that ginormous tank, barely moving. Paroxysm of the flesh has frenzy coating the tips of her fingers, as she rubs and pulls harder and harder and harder at the stretched fabric on her legs. In that heap of a body, she can’t see a single thing, not a brain, an eye, a stomach, not a stitch of life that she can recognise. The coiling tendrils wrap snakeskin through that thick water. She can feel them pulsing—she can hear them talking.
She starts taking off her shoes and peeling off her cotton-blue socks. The floor is cold against the hardened soles of her feet, cold against the crooked tips of her toes. She rips the elastic band holding up her long fine hair. Noticing a plastic foot-ladder in front of the tank, she takes thoughtless steps towards it, her mind filled up with the sounds of water bubbles. The plastic is wet and slimy against her skin, as she clambers slowly to the top of the four-stepped ladder. The tanks height now rests at the crux of her clavicle, the height where the seam of her dress dips down to reveal the slightly sagged contours of her breasts. The thing glugs and pulses beneath her, shimmering like coins at the bottom of a dirty fountain. She shadows a hand across its skull-less head, its empty face, its body like a sack of air. She plunges both forearms into the thing’s water-bed, grabbing its jellied head and crimped mane, and with the strength that has seemingly been conjured from all the grimoire’s upon the earth, she heaves it out of its tank. She falls backwards off the stool, its mass of tentacles knotting and flailing atop her. Water pools around her like a chalk outline. Burns ripple throughout her fleshy body, scraping, biting, burning, stabbing onto every slab of skin. She doesn’t scream, she doesn’t breathe. It’s stinging coils wrap themselves around her, snaking around her limbs, choking her bare-throated neck. She writhes in frantic ecstasy under this great thing, this great mass, this great heap of fat and jelly. And, as its burning kisses rip through the fabric of her being, she imagines peeling off her little black dress, sinking.