Story from last night’s reading (1/6/25)

At Drink More Water Store, organized by Page Garcia

I spent a lot of December pacing around inside the restaurant where I work, empty through much of the holiday season, staring out the windows at the tourists and passersby. I was annoyed when the coffee shop across the street installed a massive candy-striped bow above their doorway, arranged sprigs of pine in the windows and stood back again and again to take an ostentatious photograph from the middle of the sidewalk. They were always inventing new displays to entice the influencer, VSCO girl vlogger types and men with cubic backpacks that might pay a premium monthly rate to make mood boards in their co-working space. I watched people stop by all day to ogle and pose beneath the bow, which hung like a thick python from the green west village wall. I don’t like that instagram picture culture, I don’t like tripping over people standing halfway in the street, squinting nearsightedly through their phones, dead to the world in a moment of intense, idiotic focus. How vulnerable, like a dog taking a shit, is a person creating content in public. Of course I’m guilty of it, I watch them with scorn because I judge myself. So when this giant Instagram-able bow was installed across from my workplace, I hate-watched the hordes that came to hover around it like flies and block the coffee shop’s doorway. As I turned over the chairs at the end of my shift, the bow hung like a luminous worm, blurred by the dark and the smudged window glass. There was something about its shape and posture, there was something about it that chilled me.

The next day I was leaning over the counter reading an article about the rising number of selfie-related deaths when one of the smooth skinned, athleasure creatures in front of the coffee shop collided with a dog walker. She had been backing towards the street to get the fullness of the holiday bow in frame, and now toppling forward groped instinctively for a handhold, brushing the bow’s trailing left side with her fingers.

It happened instantly. The moment she made contact with the bow’s sensitive red stripes it was as if the very air and daylight split open. If you have ever heard of or read about explosive decompression, first of all, I am sorry. Without going into too much detail, it’s kind of like what happens in the movies when a hole opens in the side of the spaceship and someone is sucked through it. In reality the violence caused by that kind of rapid decompression of a pressurized space happens mostly on a cellular level, and in the soft cavities of the body that hold oxygen. Sometimes the body is ripped to shreds, especially if it is forced through a small opening. Suffice to say she died instantly without suffering. Nobody who witnessed it knew what had occurred, and  it is only after weeks of distance that I can allow myself to wonder what happened to the parts of her body that were not found. And where, or what, was this other “space,” with such a different atmospheric pressure than that of the street that day, which caused this catastrophic death in the first place?

The massive holiday ribbon was removed that evening by police officers and maybe members of the national guard or something. I’m not sure who all they called to come research the spot, a few of them interviewed me of course. As they were taking down the bow I couldn’t help but think it moved strangely, had a weird physics to it, and a kind of sentience. It looked like it clung to the wall, wanting to stay, then relented, allowing itself to be folded and zipped into a big blue bag. It looked luminous again, in the dark evening light, like a deep sea creature.

In the weeks that followed there were a few articles about bone fragments found in the ball pits of several “experience museums” around the city. There were missing persons whose locations should have been easily traced thanks to time-stamped, high-definition, site-specific selfies posted minutes before they vanished from sight. These selfies became viral sensations among the morbidly curious, whose perversion drove them to scrutinize these strangers’ last moments etched in pixels, blithely posing against colorful backdrops that threaten to swallow them up.