MAYBE ALL THE BOOKS I'VE READ WILL BE WORTH NOTHING TO ME WHEN I DIE
ISSUE FIVE: July, 2020
MAYBE ALL THE BOOKS I’VE READ WILL BE WORTH NOTHING TO ME WHEN I DIE
“Go intuition, go intuition, go intuition!”
Jazmine looked at her friend like, what the fuck? “What is wrong with you?” she said, with a small smile, not unkindly.
“If I make one wrong move,” replied her friend, “say one wrong thing, do one dumb, idiotic action, everything could be ruined; everything could be done.”
“That is...paranoid; and not a healthy attitude.” She looked back to the magazine she was flipping through.
“Eh, true.” A moment later: “But it can’t be helped, maybe.”
She flipped a page. She wasn’t reading anything, particularly… Just looking at the photographs. “It can absolutely be helped.”
Her friend shrugged.
“You have self-sabotage syndrome.”
“Maybe,” her friend said again, with an air of fatalism about her. Then she said, “And you have impostor syndrome.”
Jazmine allowed, “I have a whole range of things.”
“We’re only human.”
“...”
“There is a dark cosmic force working its way through the world.”
Jazmine said nothing.
“I heard we actually chose our bodies. We chose to be born...into our bodies. And I heard that from a reliable source.”
What felt like a long time passed, though it was really only about a minute, until Jazmine said, finally, “I guess.”
The two women had never had a conversation like this previously and they never did again. The closest they came: sometimes one of them (sometimes Jazmine; sometimes her friend) would refer back to the conversation, and the other never tried to act like she didn’t remember it, or didn’t know what the other was talking about.
TAYLOR NAPOLSKY has a novel coming in '22 with Unsolicited Press. Their fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Impossible Task, and other journals. Visit them online at taylornapolsky.com.