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WHAT YOU NEED TO BE WARNED (OR: INVENTORY AND APPRAISEMENT OF NEIL GAIMAN, HEREAFTER "DECEDENT")
prepared by Elisa Chavez
I. Do you know how much beauty there is in the world that you didn't create?
II. The whole time, I wanted to put my hands to the screen to stop you coming through. In 2007 while you squirreled away another victim, I met you in San Diego. Asked a question. She and I were both 18 that year, our hair and skin the same shade and more in common with each other than we'd ever have with you. But of course, I didn't know that. Then.
III. I have read your poems.
Yikes.
If you understand you have failed, and if you pretend not to understand you have also failed. Eating is not sacrifice. Even birds know how to mimic. For years I wished I'd never seen those poems of yours, but I couldn't forget what they taught me: your hollow. Your knowinglessness.
IV. Some of us are starting to feel like all these stories that gleamed stardust were really bits of ground-up glass you tricked us into swallowing. This is complicated by knowing that watching us swallow ground-up glass would probably get you off. When I cut myself on something in my house, the blood is scarlet. Once I stepped on a pin, saw an inch of it vanish in the meat of my big toe, and all I thought was, That's got to come out.
V. Other men got to me, of course, which I think is my point: Even at your worst, you are replaceable.
VI. In the forest, just past the thorned-over castle where the princess sleeps, there is a woman. Do not rape her. Turn left, where there is another woman. Do not rape her either.
Do not trust the you that breaks the wishbone of no between his fingers and spells success with it. Do not trust the little chorus you raised up from radishes.
Sometimes the act of handing out instructions demonstrates why they will not work.
VII. Don't worry. Most of us will outlive you, and then we'll get to tell the story. I'm drafting your eulogy as we speak: It's an anthology of tricks women learned to survive you, how they chewed through your paper cages to hold each other, how they are putting out new leaves.
VIII. I get my mushrooms from the supermarket or the farmer's stand. I am not a myth about creation. Just like you are a master of holding the truth underwater until it stops moving. You ghost. You could strip a thousand women and you still wouldn't have anything.
