CW: Abuse
SET LIST
INT. SHADOWPUPPET DARK – TIME?
INT. KALEIDOSCOPE – BRIGHT
KICK THE CAMERA AND OPEN THE RIBCAGE
EXT: THE SCARF AROUND MY NECK – BLUSTERING
STEP BACK INTO A GALAXY OR TWO, I’M NEVER READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP
INT. I REFUSE TO STEP INTO ANY CLOCK THAT I DON’T ALREADY KNOW THE TICKING OF – COUNTERCLOCKOCLOCK
INT. KALEIDOSCOPE – ON AND OFF ON AND OFF
OVER THE SHOULDER SHOT
USING THE DECADE-LASERING CLOSE-UP LENS
EVEN CLOSER
INT. PIANOBONES OH SO SILENT – PALMOLIVE LIGHT
EXT. BLISTER COLD – THE DARK
CLOSE-UP ON OUR BREATH FOGGING
INT. RENE MAGRITTE, THE SON OF MAN – LOOKING GLASS
INT. VERY FANCY RESTAURANT WE COULD HARDLY AFFORD – NIGHT
HESHIRE CAT- MOONTIP BRIGHT
CLOSE-UP BENEATH THE SKIN, THE CAMERA AS TOOTH
CLOSE-UP ON MY BODY, A MOTH KISSING ITS OWN LIGHT
CHARLIE BROWN TREE – LIT INSIDE
INT. OPENING CREDITS – WHENEVER BINGING
EXT. OPENING CREDITS – REMIXED
SCAR TISSUE
INT. SHADOWPUPPET DARK – TIME?
In December 2019, Kim and I are at my mom’s house in New York celebrating the Christmas holiday with her and my grandparents. Mormor is having trouble recognizing me, but she keeps sitting close to Kim, whom she has always loved, on the couch. She is laughing a lot. It is nice to see her happy. She notices I am wearing some bracelets, so she slips one off her wrist and onto mine. She tells me it goes with my blouse.
I could only hear “I have to treat Mormor like a r——- child” so many times before I couldn’t calm the echo of that word from my own childhood. It’s humming a trauma, a gash. One night I took a short walk around my mom’s neighborhood. I distinctly remembered my friend accidentally riding his bike over my armpit after I had fallen off mine. There was quite a bit of blood that day. I still have a light scar.
INT. KALEIDOSCOPE – BRIGHT
The shape of my mind when it’s paisleyd on the grid of memories that I shake and shake and shake until the color shifts and the dark familiar streets become tumblers syruped by the heat of past paths scuttled through the milked up dark.
My mom was pacing outside the house when I got back from the walk. She told me that I was ruining Christmas for her, then stomped her feet and tore at her hair. When I sat on the porch, she finally went into the house. Every minute or so she would open the front door, glare at me, and slam it shut again. It wasn’t long until she came outside to again tell me that I was ruining Christmas before stomping back into the house.
KICK THE CAMERA AND OPEN THE RIBCAGE
If all my scars knit in the skin of my neck like yours, Buffy, I might be mistaken for a tree branch. You as well. In another world, we are willows reaching toward one another through the looking glass.
THE ICE SHOW
EXT. THE SCARF AROUND MY NECK – BLUSTERING
To hide the wounds inside if they ever escape their deep graves. They could bluster through the skin anywhere but my suit of armor is in the spooky castle of my nightmares where the rats teethe on the bellies of our drought. So, for now, this scarf will do.
Buffy, perhaps the only place we ever are really is at the ice show. You with your father, me Mormor. I still remember riding home on the bus with her and her apologizing for how bad the seats were, as if I would not have traded a thousand Scott Hamiltons to have been with her that night in any lousy seat. Perhaps that’s how you felt when your father stood you up on your eighteenth birthday. When Giles was too busy injecting you with poison to realize that the allure of Brian Boitano singing Carmen was mostly a cover for how much you believed he would never let you down. Until he went and fucked it up like everyone always does.
STEP BACK INTO A GALAXY OR TWO, I’M NEVER READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP
Like Mormor did time and time again when she watched my mom shove me into the bricks in front of our wood stove. Watched my face turn blood, threatened to drive me back to my birth father if I told anyone my mom had struck me. The same birth father that my mom told me had lifted me from the crib at a few weeks old and dashed my skull against the ground so that he could lie in the crib himself. “I saved you from him,” my mom would say as she pulled me from the bed by my hair and pushed me down the stairs so that I could wash the tears from my face.
INT. I REFUSE TO STEP INTO ANY CLOCK THAT I DON’T ALREADY KNOW THE TICKING OF – COUNTERCLOCKOCLOCK
I have calibrated myself shakily thus far in this precarious pit of my stomach. Don’t think I’d be able to digest any more noise.
A therapist asked me years later if I had memories of my birth father hurting me. I nodded. She was skeptical that I would have remembered anything from when I was that young. She thought the memories might have been implanted by my mom. She wanted to hypnotize me to find out the truth. I still don’t think I would be able to handle this truth. Buffy, at the ice show I could forget all this, see a triple axel with some cotton candy, discuss the merits of an ice dance set to blue suede shoes. And you could perhaps forget that your mom almost died that night, that you are the slayer. For at the ice show you are just Buffy and I Erik and happiness isn’t just something we try to convince ourselves of as we hold sharp objects in the dark.
[…] […]
INT. KALEIDOSCOPE – ON/OFF/ON/OFF/ON/OFF
Pink Elephant trauma spiderplanting into the slow spreading of blue gaslight spreading at the frame.
I asked my mom to stop continuously using the word “r——-” to refer to Mormor and she briefly switched to calling her a “mental patient.” Referring to her as a “person with dementia” took apparently too many syllables and “my mom” was perhaps too compassionate. At the same time that she would talk about Mormor as if she was subhuman, she would praise herself for being the most compassionate person Mormor’s doctor had ever met. His words, she insisted.
OVER THE SHOULDER SHOT
She continued to use this term, despite me repeatedly correcting her, despite the fact that she had worked in a school with disabled children and should have known better. The problem is I know she knew better.
USING THE DECADE-LASERING CLOSE-UP LENS
Knew better when she lost her job at that school when accused of hitting an autistic child.
EVEN CLOSER
Knew better when she used the word anyway, almost defiantly, feigning ignorance. “Oh I didn’t know, I won’t use it again” she’d lie, only to use it again minutes later. Wash, rinse, repeat.
[…]
INT. PIANOBONES OH SO SILENT – PALMOLIVE LIGHT
A symphony on one instrument is a sound is a puppet is a pop of bright vocal linen on the straight line of time. “Only Connect,” E.M. Forrester said. That’s all I ever wanted. But I was scattered bones. A graveyard before baptism, a slight warble in the gravel. I rug up time like a rat, wiggle it loose of its tooth.
On Christmas Eve, my mom wanted to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas with me and Kim. Quality time, she said. Unless she was live tweeting the film, I assume she wasn’t paying attention, since she was glued to her cellphone. When she did engage, it was only to express how stupid the movie was, how much she hated it, or to ask what the hell is going on and why is everyone a skeleton on Christmas.
EXT. BLISTER COLD – THE DARK
This snow is the swallow I saw through a window. A drop of wreckage into the deep waters of all I ever prayed for in the throated mud of this world. I’m always exiting through doors that I had to skate my body through to keep my shape. I am always breaking earlier than the morning.
Mormor and Poppop had left in the afternoon on Christmas Eve after a very early dinner. That evening, I asked my mom if she could drive us the mile to my grandparents’ house so that I could see Mormor one last time. My mom immediately accused me of caring more about Mormor than her and told Kim and I to get the fuck out of her house.
CLOSE-UP ON OUR BREATH FOGGING
Kim and I took our bags to the curb and called an Uber in the frigid air. We spent about an hour with Mormor and Poppop.
INT. RENE MAGRITTE, THE SON OF MAN – LOOKING GLASS
If you aim for the apple, you might puncture my face.
At Kim’s parents’ house later that night, her mom asked me, in response to the news that my mom kicked us out, “and what did you do to deserve it?”
I EXIST
INT. VERY FANCY RESTAURANT WE COULD HARDLY AFFORD – NIGHT
Crowds shale my mind like possums in the pudding of the night. How many tongues can you fit in a skull? Count the flames of mine.
When I passed my comprehensive exams in 2014, Kim and I went out to dinner to celebrate. As we were eating, she asked me if I was feeling over the moon, after which I excused myself and threw up in the bathroom, repeatedly.
CHESHIRE CAT- MOONTIP BRIGHT
The possum curls around the Cheshire Cat’s Piano-toothed grin as he disappears. I play an ode to my skin on its keys as I too begin to fade and am replaced. Always replaced. A snake on two feet howling at the moon for a reflection.
Kim has noticed that I frequently try and punish myself after getting good news. I suppose I’ve always done this. To preempt the violence of being punished. Growing up, only one person in my house was allowed to be smiling.
CLOSE-UP BENEATH THE SKIN – CAMERA AS TOOTH
Buffy, when others tear your skin you slip your own teeth into the wounds to imprint yourself as perpetual culprit. Guilt a membrane on your tongue that spores.
CLOSE-UP ON MY BODY, A MOTH KISSING ITS OWN LIGHT
My blood too identifies itself as a foreign body. So, we cuff ourselves thin, and convince ourselves that we don’t deserve this world, this body, this script.
BREATHLESS
CHARLIE BROWN TREE – LIT INSIDE
If you continue to ornament me with your garland, I might start to look more tree and less like me. This forced drag drags me down. I, a wild iris, wild horses, the fire of a thousand blunts smoking in the mouths of The Rolling Stones as I paint this goddamn town gowned.
That same trip I told my mom I might want to start using “they/them” pronouns. She said she was supportive, yet immediately started using the term “he-she” and got angry when I told her that this term was pejorative, saying she loved gay people, particularly referencing “faggy Bryan,” her best friend’s gay son, and got angry again when I told her being non-binary was different from being gay and that she was again using an offensive term. She asserted that Bryan loves it when she calls him that, which she claimed was her pet name for him, along with “my favorite fruit.”
THEME SONG
INT. OPENING CREDITS – WHENEVER BINGING
Mormor used to tell me my brain was music. I could melody myself through the night in any cold. I lost my bells somewhere along the way. Perhaps I dropped them like breadcrumbs. Perhaps somewhere a sea witch hatches their music in her throat and jugs the world drowned.
Buffy, we are both face/ down in the hellmouth and we are/ both wearing the same white dress/ only I haven’t shaved my legs/ since the moon/ got stuck in my throat that day/ I tried to climb the egg/ of the ozone to escape/ my own body. See/ I heard the edge of the world/ was tonic for what flies/ at the edges of the skull/ the winged/ the worn/ the demon borne.
EXT. OPENING CREDITS- REMIXED
Drowned jug a sea witch my bells were breadcrumbs in my brain a melody of the night somewhere cold.
Buffy, your breath stolen by the water/ we both tonguetouch yet dare not cannot drink./ You still pretty, I still sloth, we shake the marks/ from our skin but not our bones. Deep/ runs the bloodtooth into the streams of our bodies/ and I know you slay to forget and I drown/ to remember and we are both fireflies/ in the tarlight as our humming/ becomes the theme song/ in which we jacket ourselves.
FROM THE DESK OF ERIK FUHRER
FEB 2021
Dear Buffy,
There is a grotto where I have studied. Worked. It is a hollow cheek. A stunned child. The bread from the sky is stuck in the horizon, blocking the sun. My mind a wick that did not light fast enough. Wax breach.
What does it mean when I can carry my tears in a bowl like pecans? That I am finally real? Or that I am finally not?
Buffy, while Christ hoarded the gift of the savior, you gave me, gave us all, the gift of the slayer. When you gave your speech, I stood up. All Christ ever did was keep me on my knees.
In Power,
Erik
Erik Fuhrer is a nonbinary poet, memoirist, playwright, and scarf-tie aficionado. Imagine Buffy Summers meets Blanche Devereaux with a touch of the Cowardly Lion. Their writing explores queer trauma, pop culture, and queer icons like Virginia Woolf and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Erik’s 2023 poetry collection, Gellar Studies, reflects on Gellar’s iconic roles and was praised by Addie Tsai as exceptionally delectable and devastating. Their forthcoming memoir, My Buffed Up Life, continues this exploration of queer trauma, using Buffy Summers as a lens. Erik holds a Ph.D. in creative writing but a Ph.D. in SMG Studies might be more accurate. A lifelong fan of My Little Pony, Erik runs hushlit: a journal of noise, teaches at UCLA, and writes personal essays about pop culture while coaching writers and creatives. And let’s be real: they’re still obsessed with Tenderheart Bear. Icon. Their favorite revenge story is Ringer (2011-2012). | Website | Instagram
