KEEP PLANNING time / space / about #030 Audrey Snow Matzke In Point of Fact I Do Not Want the Other One Gone

If it would raise him, or lower him, or whatever-it-takes him in the mob’s estimation for me to announce that the girl before my mom was not his, or anyone’s, student (She was somebody rare—she saw how the world will end soon not, as you might think, in great death, but in chilled consolidations of energy, persons having no one original or new to make contact with) then I will be glad I volunteered it. But the case for him that bests mine and everyone’s, well, my mom makes it simply through being alive! She has been alive 56 years, and he 42. The girl before her was my age a terminal 22; she had dropped out of college to become a “firewoman” was the story she told her parents, and that was to be her retreat. Well now she is going to freeze a lonely “firewoman,” insofar as her Liam now belongs to my mom! His range in women is incredible. Try and find a pattern by which to catch him in anything. Mondays to Thursdays up-river, I help my mom with her line of soaps and am paid more than I rightly deserve. And Liam and his electrical currents. He mans this little hot tub; patients come from around to be dealt small shocks, which relax them in the end, typically put them to sleep, in fact, and beneath the torporous yellow spa-lights they each might slip under and drown, were it not for the fact of the additional shocks Liam deals which keep them awake just long enough, at least, to get up and dry off and move over to the futon. My job is to wake the nappers. “It’s unnatural,” Liam says, for a man to be the first thing one sees when one wakes. “Your mother,” for instance, “needs to suspect we are always making moves in the world.” It’s the intimate winter, his apartment smells like ice from a bag. On the train I saw horses in their blankets conspiring. And I can’t wait, I think, to learn how to live among others, I knew it for a while and then I lost it, no matter, we can act as if my mom and Liam are the start. All told, a very fine start. Sun-poisoning is what I would get if that woman ever banned me from her shadow. I am so pleased with myself, I could kill myself. My mom and her enjoyment of large numbers: it took me 27 hours to be delivered, she’s always crowing to people. A “traumatic birth,” According to Liam she had waited too long. He forgives her even though I’m not his. I forgive her even though I can’t remember it. So for once he would like to treat me, to baptize me in shock-water, to wash away all memory or “memory” of her womb. I pick a swimming-costume hewn to triangles and strings. I X the top-strings over my chest to push the top-triangles up, to make the top half appear more impressive. This bottom half, luckily, speaks for itself. And I have currents inside of me too. They start in my head and run all the way down to my digits. They surge and demur in my heart. In fact the goal is not a full rerouting but a short synchronicity, if I am one with the tub for a few minutes that will be enough, Liam says, before returning to my regular state, to make me a whole new woman. ⬤ I am a new woman…now! The city with its hidden black ice reaches out to me, and on the train I make the special kind of window seat mine, one of the ones with some window behind your head too. The one who buys me dinner is way south getting writing done, getting surgery done, because it’s cheaper down there, and in a while he is to return a new man, a slippery new thing for me not to have any understanding of. I make contact with the ones who could buy me drinks, J1 and J2. J2 is a lot like J1 except J1 has just won an award that changes everything. They’ve been good friends forever. I join the two of them out, talking hot dentists. Hot hygienists rather. J1 had this one who flossed her tits with his head while she was flossing his teeth, who said congratulations he was flossing just enough; she couldn’t say the same for most men. J2 had had a pleasingly fat straddler. I want to tell them about my hot childhood acupuncturist, a bald Boston-Irishman who was one of my mother’s ex-boyfriends. The year she started going out with balds was a sharp corner in my life; I turned it so nicely and look at me now. But these stories just aren’t impressive in a girl. I wish I could say I had a fetish for needles. I see needles in the world and it just isn’t sexual. I see them stabbing the skyline, I see the sun or the moon casting lights on their glass, yes, I see skyscrapers as kind of like needles, except of course for the fact that they are too large, too wide at the bases to prick me individually. It would be a great flattening instead.

*** Audrey Snow Matzke was born in 2002 in Chicago. 13 January 2026