Libby Pratt & Amanda Davidson {Part 1}

The Diary Campaign

The girl in the baggy purple one-piece was printing P U L S E in slow square letters across the top of each blank page. She had pushed her chair away from the others, just a little bit, so that there was a noticeable amount of space on either side but not enough so that she seemed like a major loner. And yet, after deep staring on his part, he confirmed, with inner confidence, her tenuous status amidst the rank and file members of the Diary Campaign. The limp/frizzy bangs. The actual hair on her actual legs. A shy tucking inward of speech. Sentences would start to curl out and then draw back in, vapor-like, leading Emael to wonder whether she would be the one. 

His body made an inadvertent wiggle in the humiliating chair. When he first spotted the hand printed index card posted in the laundry room, he had dreamed that he might sit upon an elevated metal stool. More than a stool. A throne by the edge of the pool. Not that he had ever seen such a throne in there before. Also he felt certain that in the royal mist of chlorine his acne would vamanoose. Just another example of his magical thinking! 

Now the summer was almost over and the blow job possibility insinuated by the club house manager, Barry, was fatally diminishing. Barry’s nose was actually purple, just like his grandfather’s. It was probably related to a smoking/drinking thing.

The other members of the Diary Campaign now reaffixed the silver lockets to their diaries’ covers. He looked at their organized bottles of suntan lotion and after-sun spray, and a certain premonition bloomed through his torso: that one day, in a future he could just begin fathom beyond the apartment complex gate, they would crush him, one by one, en route to high office.

Libby Pratt is a visual artist whose work draws from her relationship with her three siblings and from her job as a sailing captain in the New York Harbor. Born in Seattle and currently living and working in New York, she attended Vassar College before completing her MFA in the ICP-Bard program in Advanced Photographic Studies. Her work has been included in solo and group shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris. { www.libbypratt.com }

Amanda Davidson's chapbook “The Apprentice” is forthcoming on New Herring Press.  She blogs for City Lights bookstore and Homoflix. Visit her online at { www.partedinthemiddle.wordpress.com }