THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 25
SHOUTS & MURMURS
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
H
ello, I am a woman on a blue-
and-green sphere that has dol-
lops and doinks of mountains all over
it. Some of the mountains on my cos-
mic sphere splooge out thick liquid
fire spurts that run downhill and cool
and turn into vacation destinations
after a few thousand years. I am a
woman living on a planet that has
noodle-shaped guys squiggling si-
lently in the soil and four-legged
mammal kings with hammer feet, or
horns on their heads, or coats covered
in spots and stripes. My planet also
has live, feathered, beaky skeletons
flying through the environment, and
big, heavy creatures that are tusked
and trunked and have sad, long mem-
ories and wash their bodies in cold
mud puddles and know who their ba-
bies are. There are large, deadly cats
watching everything in the dark,
sneaking through the fanned-out ferns.
There are delighted pigs and gossip-
ing geese and dogs that sprawl with
their mouths open so that they can
cool off after running around.
There are arrows of extra electric-
ity ripping through the air, and loud
drum noises in the sky when two tem-
peratures collide. Deep, wide dents
filled with water are populated by an-
imals with scales or blowholes or no
eyes, and ones that live in shells that
look like tiny purses made out of lit-
tle plates. There are white puffs float-
ing in the air here; they hover high
above my house. The puffs turn into
wet water bloops and fall down and
turn my hair from straight to curly.
The water bloops also make the flow-
ers open up; they turn dust into mud-
slides; they can intercept sunbeams
and make them into arches that you
can’t touch because they are only
swoops of colored light.
Tonight I am going to the restaurant,
where I will eat a killed and burned-up
bird and drink liquefied old purple
grapes, and also I will swallow clear
water that used to have bugs and poop
and poison in it but has been cleaned
up so that it doesn’t make us ill. I am
so excited at the thought of consum-
ing the burned bird and the grape gunk
at the restaurant that I put skin-col-
ored paint all over my face and dab
pasty red pigment on my lips. I also
swish peachy granules onto my cheeks
and use a pencil to draw a line around
my eye, so that people know where my
blinkers are.
Next, I take a little brush and swirl
black paint over each eyelash, and then
I heat up a metal stick and wind my
head hairs around it, so that my face
is surrounded by spirals. I stuff each of
my breasts into a cloth bag, and then
secure the pair of boob bags against
my torso with straps, I guess to pre-
vent the boobs from floating up past
the white puffs and into outer space.
These are important tasks to per-
form if you want to leave your house
and go to the restaurant and not have
to stay home and be alone forever,
which, on Earth, is bad.
I cover my body with a piece of fab-
ric that has been cut and sewn into a
certain shape so as to remind others
that I have a butt and a vagina, but
without showing the actual butt or va-
gina that I have.
I am a woman here on this ancient
ball that rotates along with a collec-
tion of other balls around a bigger ball
made up of light and gases that are
science gases, not farts. Don’t be im-
mature. I wear this paint and these
boob bags and this butt-vagina fabric
map so that I can be here on the globe
and go to places like the restaurant.
At the restaurant, I pay with the
money that I earn from pretending to
be other women. I get that money so
I can afford all the face paint and boob
bags that I need, so that I can go to
the restaurant and eat the dead burned
bird and sip the purple grape gloop
that sometimes makes me fall down
or throw up all over this globe. I re-
peat this cycle so that I can go to even
more places on this sphere, as it re-
volves through eternal darkness and
endless space.
RESTAURANT
BY JENNYSLATE
