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Lavons Le Linge

Lavons Le Linge

"Is it you?"

26 Dec

Fiction Week continues with a short story by Daisuke Shen. This week, we’ll also have a two-part series on the State of Hardware by Michelle Santiago Cortés.

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— Daisy Alioto

Detail from Marc Chagall's ‘Lovers among Lilacs’

Daisuke Shen is the author of the short story collection Vague Predictions & Prophecies (forthcoming CLASH Books 2024), and the novella Funeral (with Vi Khi Nao, KERNPUNKT Press 2023).

1.

She is familiar with this place, where her body often resides when not inside of its chrysalis. Though she has no way to name the place (to name a thing requires a sense of self-recognition) and no way to describe it (to describe a thing requires the ability to perform simple division), there is no way to delude herself into thinking it is not real.

Her soul, when not forced to occupy the miserable position of “humanity”, is even more hysterical and thus even more discerning. Thus she watches her ex-lover pace inside the middle of this shared space, his movements restricted to a moment in time where they can neither move forward nor move back. He has no bones or limbs, indeed, he has no body. Where his anatomical parts should be, there is only absence, and this absence is the color of mille-fugue nabe. Inside of the lattice-leafed network of albino cabbage, she chases his ghost. The broth thrashes about to reveal more broth.

Where his anatomical parts should be, there is only absence, and this absence is the color of mille-fugue nabe.

And inside of it a particular figure is being cut: though she no longer knows in which way his bones move, how he processes the air as he walks through it, she is painfully aware it is him; even though his voice is a distant object, just a sound cluttered with other sounds — (a man indignant on the phone outside of her window: “You’re not going to come into my fucking house and give me a fucking blow job!”; a car alarm that just won’t stop) it is undeniably and irreconcilably him.

She calls out to the labyrinth of cabbage: Is it you? There is no response, but to make contact with the nothingness is always a mistake: everything slopes blunt and indifferent. The world melts back into her apartment; unwanted meaning replaces emptiness.

Time can be best described as the sensation of someone vacuum-sealing one’s lungs.

What she can regurgitate is just a matter of what she chooses to digest, what she chooses to purge.

2.

While making coq au vin, a dish she doesn’t know how to make, she looks down to find not chicken, but a bouquet of cauliflower, their great white heads dangling at strange angles from the stems. She hadn’t had enough will to cut through them completely, it seemed. When had she become so hesitant at cruelty?

- This is fish, she says out loud. She cracks one open to reveal a craniate head. Inside each are neural crests and three-part brains.

Outside of the window, passing birds clap at her confusion.