Little Blonde Bitch

LITTLE BLONDE BITCH BY AUSTIN ANTONIO GOMES **W**ho am I? I am a bewitched traveller. I awoke as a raw nerve ending, wiped against black satin. The only thing that brought me back was a lemon. A single, perfect specimen that I carefully selected some days prior for no other reason than to possess — to meditate on like some sort of charm or trinket. A *talisman*. I wasn't sure why I had chosen a lemon, but I had certainly always equated them to *little blonde bitches*. It's here, in my kitchen, while waiting for the coffee to brew, that I first truly amuse myself with its qualities. It's both bumpy and smooth at the same time, like Her skin. It's made up of many layers, contributing to a final opacity and translucency much like Hers. Individual pores can be seen. It has a navel and a nipple. It's yellow, of course, like Her hair. It's sour, it's sweet, it's bitter, it's perfectly imperfect. It's like Her. Like *them*. It is an awful, and beautiful metaphor for the *Divine Feminine* and I am holding it in the palm of my hand. I stand at the window, leaning on the ledge, rotating it back and forth on the axis of my wrist, watching the light play on Her pores, embossing them, showing their height, and the depth of their meaning. I’m in awe at the entire universe inside of it, and the very nature of this stumbled upon practice — meditating on the compulsively purchased lemon. I begin to giggle and write down my thoughts: “*Both bumpy and smooth at the same time, like Her skin.*” I am still a *living artifact*, yes, but I have remembered why: I am fighting a Holy War. Men don’t really like flowers, do they? She was the most beautiful shade of pink I had ever seen — when I think about Her, I almost want to cry. I want to go to Her, open the page of the book where She rests, pressed and preserved, but I know that Her power has faded. I spent many late nights turning Her by the stem, staring into the petals, and feeling like a pervert for smelling Her in a bar or coffee shop. I felt I needed to sneak a hit. I *took Her*. She was alone. *Unworshipped*. Seen by no one, and “sheltered” from the Sun. The only flower on a dead bush, Her backdrop a wall of plastic siding. How could I? How dare I even consider who She belonged to — when I knew with certainty that I would preserve Her. I would love Her. She was a sign. My Holy War, at Her absolute peak, waiting to be smelled, touched, plucked, and felt. Denied observation, denied worship, denied experience. The most delightful natural fabric let slip into the world of men by its flawed creator. I wanted to share the scripture of Her skin, a text legible for only a fleeting moment in time, but nobody cared — they just asked who She was *for*. The smell of Her. Oh my god. *Oxytocin*. The pastel pink hormones of seventeen thousand healthy, *ectomorphic*, milk-fed, blue-eyed Slavic girls inhaled through a whisper of puffed cotton and chalked sweets. She was light and airy, like a flash of blonde hair across the shoulder, but She had depth — a putrid, rotting core that radiated from Her center, inspiring every spectrum of colour and every note of sound in Her beautiful decay. She was intoxicating. She was an entire universe, and She was dying. I hate myself for not spending enough time with Her. She smells like *Nadja* now. Dead paper. Sometimes I think what it would be like to roll Her up and smoke Her. It is profoundly heartbreaking. It paints the most vivid image I have ever conjured up of the twisted hellscape that is the Gray Man’s world. Picture a boy in a roadhouse bar, the *Temple of Profanity* itself. He feels like he has to hide a flower. He feels like a creep to be seen with it, yet, it is the reason he is here to begin with. He's sipping two ounces of whiskey with a splash of cola and counting Her name on his pink string of six prayer beads; given to him by his *acolyte* without request — a rite. “You gave me a *lemon* and then *left?*” echoes in his mind. A man haunted by beauty — eyes blown wide with awe, leggings in *contrapposto*, curtains of silky ombre hair, and a quart of *blueberries* all obtrude into agony. Leaving his surrealist book on the bar alone feels like leaving Her. It *is* Her — a piece of the same fragmented soul of *Sophia* he has been searching for. The soul they want to be “normal” and “safe” and *dead inside*. They want a *consumer*, not a Goddess. I hate it. He is sitting in a place where they truck in the hewn-off wings of thousands of innocent little birds who grew up in a dark shed, only to be sacrificed to gluttony and paired with intoxicating liquids that poison your blood. A place where your bill will be several times more than the person who served you made in the last hour. A place where the man who prepares the meals knows everything about bloody *sirloin* vacuum-packed in *plastic*, but nothing of dermaplaned and moisturized *vastus lateralis* compressed in *Lycra*. And so, of course, in a place as soulless and disgusting as this, worshipping the last days of Her dying scent — showing such a level of reverence for nature and beauty itself — would be seen as perverted. Meanwhile, industrialized death is just dinner to them. *Ghouls*, who do not see the *Sacred* in the *Profane*, nor the *Profane* in the *Sacred*. Men don’t really like flowers, do they? In early June, I’m several months into exploration and definition of a concept I still don’t have a good name for. I’m studying beauty itself, and I have been pulling on a thread of such substance it has begun to unravel me. A decade earlier, on the song “Diamonds,” as a twenty-one-year-old poet, I expressed that after having my client sign the deal on a $60,000 car, my next immediate interests were to go out looking for *Sightscenes*. *Ghostlight*. *The Glimpse*. This behavior was automatic. I had no observation of it in a sense that led to analysis; I was simply engaged in making life look and feel like a movie, just as anyone else truly wished to. In my most positive service industry aspirations in my present, I found myself longing for this feeling. I’m often found lamenting, by my coworkers, that there aren’t any *pretty girls* coming into our establishment. I’m bored of serving geriatrics, families with children, and all sorts of other kind patrons who make the only enjoyable part of the job a thing to suffer through. I remind them that at our location the year previously, the demographic was so fun and exciting, and that our time closing out the year was just one big party in my eyes. I didn’t need this part-time job, I did it for a *vibe* I wasn’t even feeling. Away from the seedy heart of my hometown, on a strip of nothing but commerce and signs for several kilometres, this place felt like an office space by comparison. No matter how much graffiti and 2000s throwback art was on the walls, “Do you girls wanna buy me a shot?” was met with the exact sort of awe and wonder I was looking for last year, but here, the very idea of it seemed like a *faux pas*. Back then, it was just good fucking service. The old world of Capers Bar had died. The manager told me not to do it again (I did, and more) but I refuse to believe that he, a club bar god in his own right, wasn’t a little bit proud of me. Perhaps he just never saw how cute they were. They squealed when I asked them. He certainly didn’t see the glimmer in their eyes — and I didn’t either. I had the *sight* of it, sure, but I wasn’t so aware of my *vision* then. One afternoon, slow as usual, the immigrant cook is urging me to talk about them again. He’s hung up on my use of *supermodel girls* in conversation and is asking me to walk it back. “What is a *supermodel girl?*” — he’s heard the term, surely, but he knows that here, in my meaning, it’s something beyond a profession, or having sat in a white box watching bulbs flash at you. I’m still unsure entirely myself, but I’m certain on this: “Man, I could give you three thousand words...” I tell him, and all at once I am already exasperated. Because even after I get through the first handful of them, the questions — the interruptions — will start again. *Vermilion border? Hip-to-waist ratio? Zygomatic arch?* In these details I see proof of divinity — that God was here. He wants to hear about sex in my world, and he asks me explicitly one afternoon, “I want to hear about you, I want to hear about your world, but not about the store, because that makes you angry,” and still, for the next two months, I will only ever teach him lessons or tell him about my failures. I don’t mention my partner from my own early twenties, and I fear to even begin on the girl I’m seeing at the time, but I do tell him about the uncanny circumstances that led to my last consensual sacred couch experience with a demon. The end of the story is so brutally embarrassing and betrays Her trust so much in regards to how I could not satisfy Her strange kinks, that I am forced to remain vague, while they press on, hungry for detail. Even my most despicable, but for these guys, exciting stories, will end on a solemn reminder that I wasn’t happy, and that the circumstances for them, too, to enact something similar, without that terrible feeling, were so unlikely that they may as well stop looking for it. Even when blessed, the real world starts knocking. This reality of American media they’ve built up in their heads, as they are now seeing, is nothing like what they are about to live. I’m beyond disillusionment now — I’m preaching it. “I just thought it would be like the movies” is his answer when I ask him what he thought coming to Canada would be like. He hears *Her*, or *She*, and he wants me to tell him pornography, but I want to tell him his coworker is an *icon* and he’d be wise to tease Her as such. He keeps asking about *us* — and it feels like I’m letting him in on a fucking conspiracy when I tell him She is one of the supermodel girls we’re talking about, there is no *us*, and I’ve ma