by Jenny Slate
Put on very fancy classical music and make yourself sit still and listen to it. Say the names of the different instruments to yourself in your head. Horn. Violin. Harp. Cymbal, baby! Now, of course imagine the orchestra and the instruments and use what energy you have left to imagine different animals playing the instruments. Break a few rules. For example, if you want, a horse can be sitting in a chair or playing an instrument that obviously requires fingers. It doesn’t matter. It’s fake. But the feelings that you will have when you think of the thing will be real feelings.
Write a note of encouragement to yourself and put it in a drawer that you use a lot. Later in the day, when you go to get a spoon or a sweater, there it will be, looking up at you, saying something like “You are a little sweetheart, aren’t you?” or something like that. It will be good to feel a little embarrassed by the heightened emotion of the note. It will be good to have a treat and a non-gross secret like this note.
Clean a room and tidy it with an air of fairness, like you are doing what is fair for the room. Say something like “There you are, now,” to the room when you are done fussing over it. Sit in the room for at least a few minutes and listen and do that and only that, which is actually hard and different than spacing out. It is hard to sit still and listen to everything you can listen to on purpose.
If there is an animal to hold and soothe or just smooth the fur, do that.
Turn your head to the side and give yourself a little kiss on the shoulder.
Wash your face and hands.
Put on an outfit of all one color.
Only do a little gossip and make sure it doesn’t make any dents in anyone.
I Died: The Sad Songs of My Vagina
Oh, somebody write a letter to someone else, please!
Let them know that I’m dead now because I died.
Before I totally died, I was fatally ill.
Symptoms: I’d started to fall down all of the stairs every time I tried to descend. Something was saying, There’s no point in trying anymore. Just get down to the bottom. Just be a heap.
Also my clothes kept flying off me.
I would be in a store, buying a small wooden animal for my mantel, and suddenly my pants and underpants would rip right off. They would frantically flap away, always in the same direction. My pants and underpants, as if yanked on a line from someone as strong as Poseidon, knocked things off shelves and smashed through the glass in the window of the store and there I would be, revealed as a terminally ill woman with both bare butt and vagina. I would also get stuck with a large bill for the damage to the merchandise and the structure of the store itself.
If it were just a table clock or a vase, we would absorb the cost, especially considering your condition, Ms. Slate, they would explain meekly, as I stood there still holding a wooden fox and choosing to cover my vagina with both hands and fox. My bare butt cheeks were greeting new customers.
We’re a small business and the cost of the window is just more than we can take on.
I totally understand, I would say, with a kind smile that showed an endearing glimpse at my humiliation without making the shopkeeper feel my actual despair or pain. I would still buy whatever thing I was holding, even if it was something that I had just grabbed because it was falling off a shelf.
Other symptoms: My bush turned light pink.
My nipples grew diamonds right in the center of the center.
My vagina started singing only the sad songs from a jukebox in my childhood home, a jukebox that I would listen to as a young girl and then imagine falling in love, a jukebox as big as a refrigerator. It was big. Love seemed big too, like an elephant that you can have if you are good.
My vagina never sang the Andrews Sisters, like it could have. It didn’t even croon out any Perry Como. It was just Jo Stafford “Keep It a Secret” and sometimes it sang “Ghost Town” in a minor key, with a lot of snark. My hair became thousands of strands of fine golden necklaces and they got tangled all of the time and they made little cuts and chafes on the back of my neck, on the soft skin of my back. Little red slits on my delicate shoulder blades.
My disease was rotting me, but more quickly than rot usually happens. That was because I was suffering from supplemental illnesses that came on when my immune system got weak:
Heart-worm, wish-rot, brain-foam, butt-sag.
I had taken to my bed. I was a grand little dame, so young still, such a shame. I was lying in my bed and I was wearing very beautiful pajamas. Oh, isn’t it just too desperately sad?
I was dying of a disease but I was never in a snit about it. I was so nice still, and everyone was coming in to see me. They craned their necks at the door.
“Hi, boo-boo,” said my friends, walking in softly like the floor was made of a thin layer of that sugar glass that they use to break over people’s heads in jokes on TV.
My sheets were crisp. No nail polish, just clean hands. I wasn’t covered in sores, nor was I unsightly because of cracks in the epidermis. I didn’t suddenly have wiry hairs growing out of my face like you sometimes see when it all goes to shit. I didn’t leak. Proximity to death never meant that I compromised my dedication to being chic and elegant.
I was a pro at dying. I bore it with dignity and grace and light jokes. The jokes were clear and weightless. They did not drag anyone into my pain. Nobody got a whiff of anything.
And then the moment was there. I started to formally pass away.
My friends came into the room. I was very accomodating. I took the death rattle wholly into myself, like when you shush people before a play. If you got close it just sounded like someone was jingling nickels and dimes and maybe plastic buttons in a velvet bag, somewhere else.
My friends were all around me. They stood closer than shoulder to shoulder. They smushed into each other. They broke the rules of personal space just to be in my bedroom and say goodbye to me. They bawled. They cried tears the size of dumplings. They felt each other shake.
They looked at my face. My weak little peepers opened up just a bit. I saw that they had broken their own rules for how close to be to other people. I saw that it was possible to do it, to be closer than is allowed. Maybe I never got it for myself, that kind of closeness during which emotion fuses you together and you can only see that there is a separation between you and your beloved if you use a microscope. Maybe I never got it for myself but I did see it for myself. I saw it with my dying eyes.
Colors started to ascend in a wave, right out of my body. They got clearer and more concentrated. My colors became the nice easy shapes that babies learn. There were triangles and squares floating in the air. There were at least five hundred circles. There were shafts of color pirouetting during my death. There were random blasts of colors with no shape but the sounds of French horns and bicycle bells and forks on wineglasses when they announce a toast.
A swarm of small lights came out of the tips of my fingers and toes and they sounded like crickets in the night. Each little pill of light in the swarm had wings but no face.
The whole room shimmied with the sound of the xylophone, drowning out the sad songs of my vagina.
Bing. Bong. Bing, plinked the xylophone in the lights and shapes and air.
I knew it: That is my sound. It was like a doorbell that rings, but so I can open a door to leave, not bring anyone in. I was my own guest and host at once at the end of my world.
I heard the sound of the bing-bong, and the electromagnetic field around my heart blushed maraschino cherry red. As my eyes fluttered and closed for good, the lights behind them blinked purple red purple and the blinks sounded a plunk and a fizz and everyone couldn’t help but laugh at those goof-noises, like how babies laugh at sneezes.
The room went black, even though it was only the late afternoon. Then it was very quiet.
Write a letter to someone. Tell them that this is not a tragedy. The rest of me went home to the universe.
There is a rumor that I vroomed out of town on a red maraschino cherry with a
wagging tail.
Mouse House
Hello, have you met me? I am a Mouse.
In the mornings of my life, I wake up and I blink my eyes open and I stretch my body with a shudder that holds tension like a string pulled so tight that it makes a musical sound when you pluck it with one finger.
When I wake up my body reacts so immediately to a new day that you can hear one high, bright note. I am so tuned to being alive that if you touch me it makes music.
My love is the first one who may hear that private sound. My love is a sexy rabbit. His heart beats in such strong thumps and his heart sounds like, far away, a wild boy is dribbling a hard ball all alone, practicing so that he can be the best, by his own standards. An earnest dribble. Full focus. My love has a heart beat and heart bounce just like me even though he is a different animal, and that’s that.
I love to smell morning air and I always do. I love to walk quietly through my small mouse house. My feet are clean and rather long and my butt is a soft little pumpkin-rump and my tail is a chestnut-brown treble clef but yes I am a mouse. This is just how I name my parts because it is very pleasing to me to adorn myself with descriptions that I wear like clothes.
The floor is dry dirt that is packed down so that it is not dusty in here. I walk through my mouse house every early morning and I look at all of my own things, like my small table and my windowpanes and my acorn that I keep just for decoration. I walk through each bashful morning with renewed pride, and my heart is perky and smart as I open the door so that I can put myself into the world.
I step out into the sun and air and globes of dew. I can hardly take it, how full I am that there is a new day to have. And there right outside of my house, I have made a little flag for me, to signify that I live on my own personal land. Every time I see that it still stands and has not been trampled in the night, I drop open my tiny little mouth and sing out a victory note because there it is, a flag made of twig and blossom and leaf.
Holding the Dog
I stand in the middle of a room in the daytime when I should be doing a number of things, enough things to fill a list, but I do not do any of the things, I only stand in the middle of a room in a hotel filled with people who (I imagine) have un-ruined hearts. I stand there so still and look out the window and all I can think is maybe I will see your dog and all I can think is a made-up story: “I am on the street and the dog breaks free of you and free of your hold, and the dog runs away from you but I catch it.” And while I’m putting this together in my mind I think, “But isn’t the dog very strong and rather wiggly? I could never hold it.” But I let myself have my thinking again, make the image, and in the image I hold on. I hold on to the dog and you come running up, sort of stressed but not as much as anyone should be when something runs away from them, because the crazy thing about you is that in almost every way you are an example of limits. And then the fantasy starts to melt or have an invisible morphing energy like flubby, distorted sound. I try to hold on. What should I be? I suppose I want to be the hero, but not really, and I want to be the one, but not really, anymore. Mostly I want you to look at me and realize what happened and say sorry at least, and really consider me for a moment in your own padded organized mind and then let me give you your dog back and I will take that tiny chunk of my identity back, the one that you walked off with, and I will take it back and hold on. And then you will just actually dissipate right there on the sidewalk and the dog will somehow be fine and I will stand up and maybe even have no memory of this whole thing, or just a vague memory of holding a loving dog in place for a moment on a street in another world.
I Died: Bonked
Well, let’s see. This one is fun but also serious.
I got bonked on the head by a zig of lightning, and then I died.
But then somebody put my body in the ocean and I got yoinked around by the waves and that helped to get the gloop going inside of me and so I was born anew and I was alive again and I’d really only missed a few minutes of the world. But still, I felt shy and different. And then I glugged up out of the sea and onto the beach and a Big Sweetie blinked at me and even though I was shy, my clothes whipped themselves into a bikini and he blinked at me again and I knew my bikini would just woosh off completely if he blasted one more blink from his peepers, and I was so jumpy about the idea of what that would do that the pumper in my heart konked out and I died again!
Darnit. I was so close to being clasped by him! Timing is everything, little one.
But, listen, right when I died a good zag of lightning was zooming through the sky and it saw what had happened—that I had died from being eager to use my heart and get my body touched—and it decided to blow its last charge on me so that I could have what I hoped, and so the bolt bombed down and bonked me just like the other one did before and I sat right up in the sand and the Big Sweetie was blinking at me because I was a four-time miracle of dying and living and he said, “Do you think you’re well enough for a dunk?” And I said, “I could probably manage a little dip,” and so we splashed into the sea, and that’s the story of how I met your grandfather. And we fell in love and we were together for a long time but it only felt like a zip, because that’s what true love feels like. And we saw the sun and sipped our coffee together every single morning with our legs all tangled up under the sheets and we snoozed together every night and were each other’s only boo-boo until the day that he croaked.
The Pits
I’m always picking at things when I am nervous or working up a real lather in my thoughts.
I’d gone to town on my fingers and I wasn’t about to bite off my lips or fuck with my feet, so I went ahead and peeled the rind off my heart. Then I sort of ripped it apart and down to nothing, and I looked at what was there and I said factually, This is the pits.
The pits are also the seeds. The pit is also a deep place with an actual bottom. You could argue that the bottom of the pit is where you plant the start of the thing that is made to travel to the light. You could prove, if you tried to or wanted to, that the bottom of the pit is of course the start of getting up to the top.
But it is the planting of the pit that is the hard part. The part where you have to go down there and cover a small hard thing with dark matter. The part where you are supposed to believe in a process and the part when you must admit to your desire for the thing to work, and that is hard too. But you can do it if you want to try to do it, and the act is singular and special even though also you may have to do it many times over and a few of those times the pit will simply stay a pit. You will have to be comfortable with the truth that there is a stone in the dark, a grave for a hope. But if you can get a better view of what is going on, you can see that the problematic pit is really just a small hole along the path that is otherwise lined with the other living things that shot up toward the light.
To Norway
I got on the plane and I went from Los Angeles to Norway.
Every time I’m in an airport alone I have to remind myself that I am neither an orphan nor a plain virgin governess on her way to be insulted by the competitive and haughty family of her disagreeable ward.
In an airport in Norway, I was alone and looking at the different candies and snack foods. This is one of my favorite things to do in other countries. Also, I love being alone in airports and sitting at the bar and drinking a pint of beer. I do not get glasses of wine because that seems sad to me and even when I am happy, it sometimes happens that the slightest things can tip me into nonspecific sadness when I am alone. A glass of white wine would be devastating, for example, if I were alone. That’s the kind of thing that would make me feel—again, for example—very divorced.
A pint of beer just keeps everything steady. Hello, I am just a beer drinker, in neutral transit.
I was drinking my beer and I saw a business lady buying a hot dog, and she was doing this in her business outfit and it was normal to her. In the USA, a businesswoman would not feel so free or dispassionate about buying a hot dog in
an airport. I can’t really imagine an American businesswoman doing this without imagining her either laughing or crying about it. Her hot dog purchase would be a sign of something going on with her. This Norwegian woman was just having lunch.
I thought that this was good news about what it might be like here in Norway, in terms of what this culture is and how the people are existing within it. They are eating what they like and doing their different works. No big deal about being an adult who is eating a hot dog in the middle of the day like a kid at a birthday party on a weekend. Here, it is hot dog on Wednesday in your midforties and there is nothing to even say about that but “Of course?”
On my connecting flight, there was a young baby with a huge bag of potato chips. The bag was as big as the body of the baby, and the baby would not let go of the bag even though its mother was trying to help it bear the burden of such a large parcel. The baby wanted to hold the bag but also it was thirsty. The baby spoke Norwegian to its mother and must have said in baby-Norse that it was thirsty, and so the mother got a drink out and the baby started drinking water through a straw and saying “Ahhhh” with great satisfaction.