#kate nacy

[microscenes8-blog]

Assessment 4

How should we do this, Santa?

Should I just list them off?

That would be fine.

Great.

You know how every person has at least one outfit that repels other humans? Right? I wear that every day. When I go places that are obviously fun I have to say stuff like, This is a really fun place. I cry into my foods. Chris Hansen is the #1 television journalist I would cripple if it were guaranteed no one would find out. My asking price in the event a millionaire business traveler propositions me sexually is $2,000 or a pair of military-grade night vision goggles. The fact that I don’t have cancer is appalling to science. Some of my hairs have lost their pigmentation. They’ve become albinos. Albini, if you will. I’m 99% positive orgasmic synchronization is a farce invented by Hollywood cinematographers.

I think that’s enough, Frank.

Well?

What do you think, Santa? Can we beat this thing?

How about relaxation therapy, Frank?

I live next to a park where you buy donuts and horse tranquilizers from the same person. I know how to relax.

Chromology?

Look, Santa, I would have liked this appointment to take place in a sweet old farmhouse, and for you to be Kathy Bates. I wish I could call you Kit-Kat and put my feet on your coffee table and tell you about my black wrists. I wish we had a zany relationship, and in the end you help me and maybe I even help you. But those are wishes. Let me ask you this: Is it true there’s an extremely high rate of alcoholism and suicide among those in the profession of helping people self-help?

Please get off me, Frank.

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Kate Nacy lives in Berlin. You can find more of her work at www.katenacy.com

[matisse1907-blog]

We check for signs of my unraveling. Not yet, but soon. Soon you’ll tend to my cancers. You’ll give me pamphlets about my infertility and expound on the ways I’ve poisoned myself, on the toxins I’ve swallowed and the chemical agents and the pesticides, the oxygenated gasoline, the deranged equilibrium. The times I didn’t sleep didn’t listen didn’t check, the times I didn’t do the things everyone says are very simple things to do, the things that take only an hour but could, allegedly, alter the entire course of one’s disease one’s recovery one’s continued reluctant survival. I do not do those things. I stand in front of microwaves; I sit close to the television; I mix things that don’t mix. I wait for a car door to bash the teeth from my face. And, then. Then I will bring you my amnesia, blurred vision, phantom limbs and sluggish cognitive tempo. You will make guesses as to why my body is dying faster than it should and you will tell me we are the pulpy throbbing colonies of tens of trillions of cells and I will beg beg beg you to please please please take the gravity from my hair.

Excerpt from "This Is Called Agnosia" by Kate Nacy