JUICE

[AND I SIP DISGUST THROUGH A STRAQ]

Originally published in 1978 - the SASS diverse gender and sexuality journal (2022)

January is an Alsatian being walked in the park down the road, slogging through dried grass with its tongue, fat and lolling out over its jowls, bounding and dragging itself towards a drying creek. The small river in January has an undercurrent of black filth and sewerage with a top layer of scum that’s left strewn across the mud and mangroves at low tide. The stench of low tide in January is a wall of stinging nettles, blooming through nostrils and across retinas, raising itself by its pestilent talons from the bed of the creek. The Alsatian in January, desperate for relief, slobbering with sweat, throws its body into the stagnant water, sick with joy. The black dog emerges from the furrow blacker, and putrid.
I decide to go on a diet. I stand up from watching the dog across the small strip of yellow grass and trash, and throw the half-picked scraps of bread, lettuce, and almost-rotten mayonnaise in the bin. It bounces off the garbage already overflowing from the top lip of the metal and falls, with a slop, onto the baked dry ground. I leave it there, next to scraps of striped napkins and deflated birthday balloons. Even the plastic seems to have already begun to decompose in the rot and mould that quickly creeps its fingers over the trash that even the dumpster has rejected and the sight makes my stomach turn. The walk home is hot, and I think of the dog’s paws getting singed by the asphalt.
The house is still. Next to the sink there is half a bowl of porridge, now with a hard crusted layer on top. I scrape this into the bin, and follow it with the rest of the packet of quick oats from the cupboard above. Then the pasta, rice, lentils, tinned tomatoes, canned chickpeas, walnuts, sugar, flour, vegemite, chicken stock, pepper, salt, until the shelves are empty. With a slick sheen building across my forehead, I take the trash to the bin out back, and, when returned inside, begin the same process in the fridge. The only thing left behind is a bunch of carrots, a half-litre of milk, various green vegetables, two apples, and a banana that is already half covered with brown spots. I feel like my life is about to change for the better.
For the next six days, I eat one or two items of produce three times a day: morning, noon, and night. If I begin to feel faint, I drink half a glass of milk and shower immediately after. I try to write a shopping list for when the carrots run out, but I can’t shake a pressing feeling in my bladder every time I sit down and pick up a pen, no matter how many times I urinate. While clear, it smells foul and strained. I defecated after I had taken the garbage out on the first day, but not again since. It seems my body has already grown more efficient. My skin tightens and the flesh of my palms itches constantly. It keeps my hands moving, scratching and waving incessantly, trying to clear the white fuzz around my vision growing over my home. These clouds become denser when I sit down, but sleep evades me and my hands are so busy I can hardly put them down. The garbage truck came on Tuesday just past dawn. It gave me a splitting headache that arched between my ears, and when I felt it possible to leave my bedroom the sun was near setting, though it felt like it had been mere minutes.
The seventh day comes and I make my debut on the hot and windy streets, almost floating down the pavement. My kitchen is empty and my organs roll over each other like pebbles in a river. Though my shadow totters nauseously behind me, grace runs through my digestive tract uninterrupted and I walk tall. The air is orange and made of golden syrup. I feel lightheaded. My haloed stupor is only briefly interrupted by open bins left in the gutter from the day before. Though I am not one to disparage my neighbours, I am stung by the feeling that some people have such little control over their lives, such little self-respect and autonomy, that they would leave these plastic husks, stinking of garbage and rot, on the pavement before their house for all to see. I shake my head and exhale a sigh of sticky remission. The road is very long and the sky is very wide.
I find myself at the yellow strip of parkland again, brittle and barren. Looking over this tiny wasteland, the people in it, the picnic table by the creek where I celebrated my sixth birthday, the tree where drunks piss and vomit after dark, the dirt path formed by footsteps instead of concrete, something like pity begins to well up inside me and drops into the deep pit of my bowels. The scrub around the edges is shrivelled, any semblance of moisture evaporated up and away, and the park seems to be empty. Dread hangs hot and dry over the yellow grass, I notice, and I take a seat on the bench across from the stagnant creek. Although today, it appears to have an added vitality, a supplementary current flowing, perhaps from recent rain inland. The creek has maintained its usual film of foam and small debris, though the water beneath runs smoother; clearer of muck and mire. That dog, rancid and ecstatic, may have been spared a coating of putrefaction had its owner possessed half a brain to wait until the tide had risen. The bench grows rigid, my legs grow numb, and I take my leave of the park past the garbage bin, now cleared of the sprawling refuse, and scrubbed of malodour.
The squalid streets appear more miserable when empty. I advance to the centre of town, my heart craving and clawing to see people; pink, dimpled, and wretched. On Maine, my vision begins to reel. Pedestrians, with no obvious explanation outside of obliviousness or idiocy, collide with me, and I clutch their stumbling bodies to right myself. An uncoordinated mule of a man asks incredulously, you ‘right there?, as they also bowl me over with their huge, infantile forearm. My fingers feel grubby, my palms itch and itch. The sun widens its glare again, clean and cruel. I see a family of five marching in attack formation down the pavement trampling all in their way, pram jutted out like a battering ram, jaws chattering like rifle magazines with their targets obviously set on me. Tensing, I survey my options, hunting for a refuge to dart into, out of the way of the destructive phalanx gaining ground on me by the second. My haven has a toxic lime-green sign with tongue-pink letters reading PORK ROLLS AND JUICE BAR. My skin and everything within it twists itself into knots as I enter.
The door chimes behind me, and I brush the trembling out of my limbs onto the tiled floor below my feet. Aquamarine coolant drips from the air conditioner down my throat and I realise that my oesophagus is on the verge of blistering open like old paint on the side of a battered, tin-roofed home with two miserable retirees wasting away inside. Averting my eyes from the repulsive columns of bread rolls and trays of slop, meat, excrement beside them, I order a watermelon juice. The poor woman behind the counter seems lame and mute as she slowly works through the three shit-simple steps it takes to make this order in three times the duration it would take anyone else. I collapse into the plastic chair by the front Perspex window of the store and watch the slobbering, sweaty masses pass outside.
Eventually I am brought my drink and it smells sweet like polished steel. I take my first sip as a woman, dark haired, slender with firm arms, walks by on the other side of the road, holding the leash to a shiny dark Alsatian. Watching the clean, lithe movement of its paws I see the limp, pitiful shape of my mouth in the smudged glass reflection. Disgust takes my innards in its grubby paw, folds its fingers in and begins to crush my guts to a pulp. Before the juice hits my stomach, bile rises up in me and I double over on to the floor. I try to stand quickly, to regain my footing and my dignity, but my feet won't obey me and my knees buckle in pursuit. Stumbling away from that awful beast I push my way to the back of the shop and to the customer bathroom outside. Belting in without time to lock the door behind me I bunch my underwear in my hands and shit pure liquid.

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