I was a woman. I had to remind myself of that sometimes. Whenever I looked into the mirror, something different stared back at me. Sometimes it was a dangerous warrior, a thousand reasons not to approaaybe it would be a person. That oute was rare, and every time I saw something different, I reminded myself of what I was. Medium height, sometimes pretty, especially to the people who knew me, and “very strange.” I had been receiving that criticism (pliment?) for a long time by that point, sihird grade, probably. I had always seen it as a pejorative, something said in order to make me feel worse, and most of the time, that was its diretention. But, my friends were always trying to make me feel better about myself. They called me strange as a loving term, not as any kind of slur or attay character. It seemed nice, and it was hey told me that I had to shake the stigma eventually, or I would have grown up to be bitter and angry, and when you’re old and gross, it’s imperative that you have a nice personality. No one be a slut forever, not evehey didn’t say the word imperative, though. They would usually repce it with something like “necessary,” or, if they were feeling really naughty, they would fo words with more than two sylbles altogether, and say, “You know, you have to be nice when you’re old. How else are you gon fucked?” They were usually on some kind of brain numbing substance when those words slopped out of their mouths. They would also offer that substao me, usually for either twenty dolrs or some kind of cheap and easy sexual gratification. I took her offer.

  I had mao stop staring at myself in the mirror for long enough to take a shower a dressed. There wasn’t any food in the fridge, as I had ed to go to the store for…two weeks at that point. I would get all my food from school, or I would steal it from pces that could hahe loss. I didn’t bme my situation on myself, though. I always bmed it on the people who said I had to go to college in order to get a degree in order to get a job w somewhere in the big city. I was about three years in, and I was absolutely miserable, just like I had told everyone I would be. No one listehough, and I got pressured into it by a rich friend of mine who told me that she, out of the goodness of her heart, would put up one year of money, right out of her own diamond encrusted pockets. I couldn’t say no. I was now 730 days into paying on my own, and I had paid over 32,000 dolrs in fees, fines, and eneral and very necessary expenses. I hated every sed of my time there, but the sunk cost falcy was starting to ki. If I just stuck out this one more year, then I’d have my degree, and then I’d be able to move to the big city a a job that would pay back the debt I had accrued in months. Never mind the living expehe groceries, the car, the hospital bills, the life that I led, which was not expensive, but would immediately bankrupt anyone who was not born into money and lived in the big city.

  The big city and the degree were spoken about in hushed whispers around the college campus. It was a more popur secret than the copious amounts of trolled substahat everyone would i everyday. I was told a story, when I was very muot in the mood for it and pletely unprompted, about a gentlemen’s friend who had proudly corrected a fourteen year old for not getting the terminolht for a certain drug that both the gentlemen and his friend were very fond of. “ you believe it,” the gentlemen said as if we were both in on some hirious joke, “smoking a weed cookie? Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard in your life?”

  “Yes, yes it is.”

  “You’d never make a mistake like that, right? In fact, I hear you’re pretty drug and…” He looked around spiratorially, as though to make sure no one else would hear the shog thing he was going to say .

  “I hear you’re pretty drug and sex savvy. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  At that point I just got up and walked away. The gentlemen did not follow, because he was a drug criminal, not a sex criminal. As I walked through the hallway, I heard more things about the degree and the big city. The degree erhaps the most mysterious. Everyone could visit the big city for a day or a weekend, but to actually get your hands on a degree, you had to have enough money (or be willing to destroy your life to get a loan), have the gusto in order to show up everyday to all of your csses, and most important of all, be able to join into the various social clubs that one o attend if they actually wao get the degree. The actual csses mattered far less than who you knew. If you already knew someone who khe President of the school (yes, that was actually what they called themselves, they had that much ego boung around their fragile bodies) you would get the degree without even having to attend a single css. For people like me, it was just a matter of meeting people who might have had some kind of e to the upper echelons of the strange hallways and displeasing floors. The big city was another matter entirely. You simply could not go and live there without knowing at least nine people who were either rich or extremely iial, or both.

  You could see the big city from the bus I was currently riding on. It was hazy in the distance, giving it an almost mythical quality. That was where all the good jobs were, all the people who khers and all the life altering decisions that were made everyday. In the big city, there was this ephemeral feeling of something big happening, somethih shattering that was just around the er. Naturally, nothing of the sort ever actually broke through the he advertisements promising gigantic gains for practically no money ied never came true, and people still threw all their moo them every time they came up on their ss. I did not know if I would ever move to the big city. It seemed so obvious that I would, after all, everyone who got their degree would move to the big city no matter what. Even if yree had to do with ichthyology and demanded you dove uer the majority of the day, only surfag to eat, sleep, and maybe if you were scared, you would purchase a house directly in the middle of this metropolitan area.

  I looked to my right instead of my left, and saw the city that I had the “misfortuo live in. The people seemed all used up, and you could see something absent in their eyes, something that was required of most people. At least, that was how the people from the big city, and most of the people from the college told it. In their eyes, this pce was an omnishambles, a pce of inhuman tortures and unfathomable desperation. If you listehey would say that thousands of people were murdered here every day, and it was actually extremely brave of the students to even step one foot onto the campus, let aloo this sick world. There was a river betweewo sides, and it was at one point a source of tentioween them. I had heard the arguments from both sides, and they were as follows. The ragged city’s idea for the river was to keep it intact, and even remove the dam which had beehere by the big city hundreds of years before. They even offered, as a twisted measure of payback for the damage that the removal of the dam would have doo up the river at their expeirely. They had said that this would help immeasurably with the deaths that had beeed from the big city. The big city’s proposition was this. Drain the river entirely and repce it with apartment buildings, which would cost the renters 1000 per month, naturally, as it was on very special nd. It was sacred to the people who had inally lived there, and the river was a vital source of water for every person on both sides. It was expined, very carefully, to the big city that such a pn would be pletely impossible and would not only categorically fail, as this river was ected to two os, but would pletely destroy both of the cities’ access to water. It was said that at the meeting, after both sides had spoken, the big city had smmed its fist down oable and said that they would do it anyway, no matter what they tried to do. Within the month the phrough. Two massive dams would be created to block the o from reag the river, and then the river water would be drained out into the o. The big city did two things at this time. They started a propaganda campaign that called all river water utterly and totally disgusting, making the term river water a dirty thing, something that you could get in trouble for saying. That was the first thing. The sed thing was that they totally borked the entire operation. It didn’t eveer its third month before things started to g. First, a diver building the dam drowned under mysterious circumstances. It was revealed after that he was a secret supporter of the ragged city, but that was disregarded when the big city revealed its 1,000,000 donation to a charity of their choosing, most of which was taxed and the charity iion had beeed just several weeks before. , multiple draining lines snapped in half while they were in use, killing more people and spraying water into the big city, whijured at least one more. They didn’t stop until a gigantic wave smmed into the dam, basically taking it out entirely. After that happehe big city fled the area, leaving the materials to fester uhe water, ultimately leaving the river worse off than it had been before. All we could do was stare and watch as the big city immediately engaged in a sid vicious crackdown, saying that the operation had actually been a rousing success and they would be starting stru on the apartments within the year. Of course, this never happened.

  I was at the campus now, and as I got off the bus into the heavy rain, I thought it odd hoeople on this side had been tricked by that kind of rhetoric. They were outsiders in this city, they could see how ridiculous and false the cims were, and still they joihe big city. I wondered if they were happier there. I thought that they certainly could not be, because of the rampant siess and horrible violence, but I was not able to say exactly, because oneone you knew went over to the big city permaly, they would alk to you again. It was an unfortuhing, especially because I wao know if life was really better over there, but they would never speak to me, not even if I requested one paragraph, or even one word. I ehe great hall of the campus. The wreat, evocative of rulers who quered the world, was being stretched to its limit in this pce. The ehing reeked of cigarette smoke, something that would probably take several lifetimes to actually go away in its ey. I walked through the halls, and received a few sneers from the people around me, but nothing too serious. The people who s me were as follows: A man with sunken eyes who smelled extremely strongly of sweat and weed, and was colpsing onto the floor every time I saw him. A different man who had a very small body, and it seemed like he was disappearing into himself at all times. He always dressed like a spy from some straion movie, and he walked around like the character he thought he ying. A third man who always smelled like sex, and was always looking around with wild and ravenous eyes, but by his own admission had never had sex before, and often masturbated instead of doing any of his schoolwork. These were the people who judged me like I was some kind of barnyard animal. It should not have bothered me, because I khat their judgments came from a pce of jealousy instead of actual truth, but the fact that someone would say something like that, to me, someone who was just walking by and trying to get on with her day, was truly astonishing. I imagined what they would do after they left my sight. I thought that they would go to css half an hour te, show up and do no work, and then go home and enjoy themselves to the fullest. Even though I hated school, I would still do the work, because it was actually the easiest part for me. I could go home, away from all the cigarette smoke and ughter, and just do everything. The funny part of school was that the actual work that we were assigned, not the funny bunny group activities we did while we were in css, but the stuff we did at home, was actually extremely easy. It took me about thirty minutes a day to do the work, because there was so little of it and because it was so unplicated. The people who I had to talk to in order to make myself known and hopefully get a degree hung out at school all day, crag wise and sitting on plush chairs, almost yelling at their friends about the news, and how awful it was, about the sick men who they’d seen, about God and the book they were reading which was four hundred pages of strange and uing drivel about two people who really want to kiss.

  I did have some friends, and they were all standing in front of the css that we had together, waiting for me. The first one, a bound small woman named Sarah ran up to me and embraced me. She was very warm, probably from her general energy. The group had a joke that she was always “coked up”, and whenever I tried to get them to stop, saying that it wasn’t funny and I didn’t appreciate it, they would ask “How could it possibly not be funny?” and we would move on. I had eventually stopped asking them if they could stop, because it ointless and they were so stu their own ways, while being so entirely open to ge in others, that the joke would never leave, no matter what.

  The person was Audrey, a blunt and buxom woman who had e from the big city and had chosen, against all odds, to e and live in our inhuman nd. She had scars down her body that she said was from immeorture sustained while in that city, and I was ined to believe her. I was ined to believe anyone, as a matter of fact.

  The st was a man named Will, and he almost never spoke, unless it was to request something or defend himself in a versation. He was standing away from us, and Sarah had spoken up after pulling herself off of me.

  “See the sign on the door? It says css is celed! Let’s all go do something, won’t we?”

  We all agreed, and we all cluded that we would go to the big city. It was kind of a ritual in roup, us going to the big city once every month and mog it relentlessly, as we thought it deserved. We quickly walked out of the campus, no o me coughing on the wafts of fumes that permeated this pce, and I had to stop for a moment once we were outside to had wheeze. They waited for me, and they uood my plight. All of them used some kind of substance, but they hadn’t always been that way. They had actually been drawn into it by the allure distributed by the college students, the glitz and gmor of parties and the supposed social climbing it would reward you. After they had ruiheir lives outside of the college, they had bee extremely protective of me to make sure that what happeo them would never happen to me. That was one of the funny things about it, they khat there was no point and that they were actively destroying their bodies, but they could not stop.

  The street we were walking down was exceptionally busy at this time of day. It was full of people going to work, and they all seemed to be angry at one another. Naturally, everyone was smoking cigarettes in their cars, often with their windows closed. The pure rage that everyone was feeling could only be sated by screaming and pounding the horn, and sometimes even that was not enough. I watched cars deliberately swerve into each other, and the drivers would get out and fistfight each ht in the middle of the street. This would cause everyone else to get more angry, which caused some people to run right through the fight, killing both of the drivers instantly and moving the cars slightly out of the way. This would tiil the dead men were pulp on the ground and the cars were scrap metal on the sidewalk. I walked past a few of these ses while following my friends. None of them seemed to care all that much. Audrey said that no matter what happened, at least it was better than the big city. She said this many times, sometimes every day of the week. Sarah and Will were both of the same mind on this issue, that if it was not happening to them, it could not be a bad thing. And so, we walked, my mind the only one ed about the dead people. Eventually, after seeing about four of the ses, Sarah shouted in delight.

  “Look! Look at what I found!”

  Iy, this was something that any one of us could have found, but she had cimed it all as her own. As I passed a wreck which had apparently appeared pletely separate to the ses, and which had a mangled and bloody corpse in the passenger seat, I saw that Sarah ointing at a goat carcass that y gutted and torn to shreds on the ground. Most of its internal ans were missing, and its iines were hanging out of its body, attrag flies and maggots. Sarah was boung around in delight, and she turo us, and said very excitedly, “Isn’t it so quaint and wonderful! Oh, I wish I could just take it home and snuggle it to pieces. Don’t you?”

  Naturally, we all agreed, as there was also a butcher knife in the carcass, which Sarah had taken out and started to wave around happily. As we quickly moved on, Sarah started to run into the street, bashing the knife against cars and windshields, shattering gss and making men so angry that their eyes popped out of their skulls. The cars stopped afterwards, and although they were being pushed along by other incessant drivers, the pace was slow enough for Sarah to loot the cars without putting herself in any danger whatsoever. At points, other people would lean out of their windows to scream at her as if they were running away from a bear attack that they had witnessed but not been a part of, and she would move oirely unafraid of being hurt by any of the bald and sweaty men.

  Will and Audrey and I tinued past her, hoping that she would catch up with us. I believed that she would, only because of the massive amount of wrecks and ses that blocked our paths. Audrey and I talked for a little bit, catg up with each other and hoere doing. I had experienced a very bad week, with bouts of extreme depression and suicidal ideation, which was only staved off by talking to one of my friends on the phone. Audrey had worked basically all week, as she was saving up money in order to move to a special pce which she described as “happy” and “generally pleasant.” When I tried to get more information out of her about it, she cmmed up, basically tellihat it was a nd of hedonism and happy days, where the wellsprings ran free and bunnies hopped through houses no matter the time of day. Of course, she did not say it in so many words. Audrey seemed to have nothing to talk about except work, how awful her boss was, how awful her ers were, how evil the business was, even though she was directly being from it. See, she worked in the fast food industry, and although she was aware of how purely evil the industry was, she ate enough of it to make herself fat, which was not a bad thing. The majority of it was not her fault, because she worked so mud she was struggling with her own problems, some of which were the exact same as mine.

  Will was totally silent during everything that had happened. He had this strange ability to climb over things without any struggle, even car shipping trucks that had crashed at what seemed to be a 45 degree angle fag upwards, with bits of shredded metal and the engine leag waste all around. He hated to be touched, and when I was not with him mainly slunk around the city, doing nothing much at all. He was the st to start abusing drugs, and he did so seemingly out of obligation, not because everyone else was doing it but because some outside force was pelling him to. Will had a ghost-like quality. He was extremely pale, even though he spent the most time outside out of anyone in the group, and he never quite seemed like he was there, actually there in physical space. He was always looking around, trying to find something that wasn’t there. On that day, I had caught up to him because Audrey wao be on her own for a time, something that she never unicated but I always was supposed to have intrinsically uood myself. I did not try to talk to Will. If he wanted a versation, he would start it.