Had my own woman dancing. She was mine and I was nothing.
Open your eyes. Open them.
She was slim torso, long legs, full breasts, firm and encapsulating. She began as a nebula.
Open up. John, help me.
I slap my face. I slap the other side. Open my eyes. I’m awake. I slap myself again.
I’m awake. I’m awake. I’m awake. I’m awake.
John, I’m going to drive us home now. You need to help me.
I open the windows and shake him hard. I pull onto the road. I move in one direction.
Mom, please.
My arms are heavy and at the same time liquid.
I drive toward the silver gas of the city and the road’s margins.
I can’t do this. Mom, help me.
I shake and swerve and pull into another lot. I am always entering another lot. I am always arriving somewhere I didn’t intend to be.
I put the seat back and the car spins around me. John wakes at the sudden movement. He’s looking for what?
Where are we?
I don’t know. Mercury.
John, I can’t do this on my own.
My mentor finds me in the supply closet clutching coffee in one hand and a tissue in the other. Bits of tear-soaked tissue cling to my face. I am leaning on the pencil shelf.
What’s wrong?
I have a thyroid disease.
My last night in Chicago, I helped John design our distro’s logo. We’re calling ourselves Black Masque. We’re selling zines, t-shirts, messenger bags, and the ideology of veganarchism.
And general Earth liberation.
We print the zines for free from the Internet and then we take our printouts to FedEx and make as many copies as we think we’ll need — 25 or 50. We keep them on shelves in his apartment.
We buy solid t-shirts from American Apparel because American Apparel doesn’t use sweatshops. We screenprint them with white ink if the shirts are black. If they’re earth-tones, we use black ink. The ink is vegetable-based and nontoxic, and wasn’t tested on animals. We ordered it online.
Our messenger bags will be sewn together from old jeans. I’ll sew them myself, this winter, after the school year is over. Then, I’ll mail them to John for screenprinting.
Most of our screenprints are the Black Masque logo: a freestanding figure holding a dog, wearing the signature mask. Other screenprints are anarchist slogans — some we found and some we devised:
Today’s empire is tomorrow’s ashes. We are the crisis.
People are not profits. Longer leashes / larger cages.
One direction: Insurrection. One solution: Revolution. This is my favorite.
In Arms! with a picture of a revolutionary hugging a rabbit.
We’re planning to put the money we raise into a new project, one that’s still crystallizing.
We wake at dawn in the parking lot of a Sealy mattress warehouse, hearing a tap at the window. A police officer asks us to step out of the car and show him identification. My keys are still in the ignition and my headlights have been on all night. A line of crusty drool has dried to the side of John’s face. I motion for him to wipe it off but he doesn’t see me.
I haven’t eaten in over twenty-four hours and it’s apparent that we’re both hung over. I lean against the car for balance. My head throbs. My hands shake. I’m faint. I feel like crying.
The officer leaves us standing with his partner by the trunk of the car and takes twenty or more minutes checking our records. When he comes back, John is rubbing the flesh between his eyes and looking around impatiently. He spits on the ground.
What brings you to New York?
Her.
What about you?
I go to Adelphi.
He hands our IDs back.
You all out drinking last night? Had a little too much?
We nod. He looks at John.
You got in trouble a few weeks ago, yeah? Assault? Drunk and Disorderly? Think maybe you should lay off for a while?
John keeps his eyes on the ground. The officer smiles at him and then walks to the front of the car and looks in the open door. He reaches inside and picks up something.
Ativan. You got a prescription for this?
Yep.
Can I see it?
It’s in the backseat.
He waits while John opens the back door and rummages around in his duffel bag. John pulls out the box. The officer reads it closely and hands it back to him.
Why don’t you go on home now.
He takes a long last look inside the car.
And maybe spend the next few nights there.
Greetings from the other side of the killing field.
We, Students for the Liberation of Animals, call for a non-violent revolution against all governments and organizations that aid or support the illegitimate terrorist state of the meat, dairy, and vivisection industries.
We are a decentralized group of autonomous cells. Any and all non-violent actions taken against these industries may be claimed as actions of Students for the Liberation of Animals.
From this day forward, we refuse to perpetuate or tolerate the killing of millions of innocent livestock, victims of vivisection, and our brothers and sisters of the sea. We will use any and all means of non-violent direct action including civil disobedience, the building of checkpoints at slaughterhouse and laboratory entrances, online insurrection, arson, vandalism, infiltration, and leafleting. We will no longer stand by and witness the needless slaughter of our brothers and sisters.
The time for revolution is now. We want the world to know that it is not the ALF, SHAC, ELF, Earth First! or Students for the Liberation of Animals who are the terrorists but rather the capitalist state that forces us into roles as passive consumers dependent on factory farms and vivisection laboratories. Comrades, you grow fat, dumb, and indifferent on our couches and in our shopping malls while our brothers and sisters suffer and die at the hands of slaughterers and murderers in lab coats. Hear the cries of our brothers and sisters.
Animals and human animals alike have been forced into a position of desperate self-defense. Chickens endure painful debeakings and lifetimes of confinement in battery cages. They are forced to lay over twice as many eggs as is natural per year, molt and suffer constant abrasion against cages and pecking from other prisoners, only to be sent down the shaft and ground alive for Campbell’s.
Cows are confined, constantly impregnated, milked dry, and fed a battery of hormones and antibiotics that harm them and their human consumers, suffer painful infections in their udders, and then are sent to slaughter when they’re no longer useful for pouring milk over our Cocoa Puffs.
Monkeys and dogs cry from behind the bars of their prison cells, bleeding from the ears.
We are no longer deaf to their suffering cries.
We stand up in arms in their defense.
It’s time for Americans of all backgrounds to protest and bring to justice those who oppress their brothers and sisters. Let us bring the struggle for the liberation of animals to the streets. Our numbers may be small, but we have passion and the dedication to use all our means to end this genocide.
We will bring freedom to our brothers and sisters by any means necessary.
We will end their suffering.
In solidarity,
Students for the Liberation of Animals
I’ve been in the university library since seven o’clock this morning. It’s almost eleven o’clock at night. I have eaten two apples and five half-sticks of celery, a handful of almonds, and time. I have opened Adderall capsules and dropped them into water. I’ve crushed lines with my university ID and snorted them off the study desk. I’ve taken breaks to buy coffee from the food court, and have tried to take two ten-minute naps with my head on my arms, but failed. I hear everything around me. I’m alert and buzzing. My skin shakes on my flesh, I’m so cold.