Thereabouts

Thereabouts

‘Now is that or is that not totally fucked?’

Mum smiles, reaches over, pauses the screen.

We’re watching a doco.

‘Really? Not the no blemishes?’

She shifts a little in her seat.

The doco’s on the slave trade.

We’re looking at a ship’s manifest:

Seventeen men, five women and a child.

A little girl with no,

Like Mum says,

Visible blemishes.

‘Yeah, that’s fucked.’

But it’s not the blemishes for me.

Nor is it that they put her at the bottom;

Least important, lowest on the list.

No,

For me it’s that her age is

‘Eight years old or thereabouts’

Thereabouts.

Nobody knows her birthday.

Well, that’s not true,

I bet her mum knows her birthday,

But she didn’t have an angel cake with pink icing,

The kind I did on my eighth birthday,

Or a copy of ‘Anna Karenina’, gold-edged,

Or a bow for her hair.

Just the field,

Or the kitchen, maybe, if she was lucky,

With no one there to help her count the days.

“You're asking me what I want for breakfast and I'm telling you about how when the worst thing happened, I didn't even cry. You're handing me a receipt from the laundromat down the street and I'm passing you a bundle of letters that I wrote to God when I was fourteen and scared. You're passing me the milk after you drip it into your coffee and I'm half laughing about the psychiatrist's office and how there's actually a couch and it's made of blue tweed. You're trying to do the normal things and I am throwing up dull pieces of truth onto our kitchen table. I can't lie anymore. These are the things I've done and they're mostly sad. These are the places I've been and they're mostly awful. This life has woven itself into the notches of my spine and I hear it creak every time I stand.”

— Fortesa Latifi; Dull Pieces Of Truth

In the early 70s Sesame Street was created with an eye towards educating poor, inner-city children for free, and became a massive hit with all children. In 2016, faced with going off the air forever after facing conservative efforts to destroy public broadcasting since basically its beginning, new episodes became a timed exclusive for premium cable network HBO. In 2022 HBO Max, newly merged with and taken over by reality TV channel Discovery, removed Sesame Street episodes and spin-offs from streaming as a tax write-off and scheme to avoid paying residuals.

OKAY CAN SOMEBODY EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THE FUCK YOU SHIP A PACKAGE OF COOKIES TO A FRIEND WHO LIVES IN NEW JERSEY, ONLY TO HAVE IT NOT GET THERE ON TIME BECAUSE IT SOMEHOW ENDED UP IN GUAM?

I JUST

GUAM?

The future is unsuspecting

I am the sight of the blind, a child's foolish game

the hope of a chance in the ramble

like marbles in the pocket of an errant god.

how do i move on from this.