Screen Shots: in a new series of flash fiction for AnOthermag.com, critic and essayist Philippa Snow looks at the interior lives of female characters on screen.
Once it starts, it spreads out like a wine stain on a light teal couch, billowing darkly until the offending shape is a Rorschach blotch, and the Rorschach blotch looks like a mushroom cloud, or a cancer cell, or some appliance your husband bought you to apologise for fucking someone else. It looks like certain death. You are a cashmere sweater being gradually unravelled by an unseen hand. Are you always tired? Do you smell fumes? Suffocation is not what you would describe as an entirely new sensation, but it’s never been this literal before, so now you look at the dry-cleaning in its plastic body bag and you think: yes, that’s me, trapped and antiseptic. You have memorised the dictionary definition for the word “carcinogenic”, and you turn it over and over in your mind as if it is a small, smooth gemstone in your palm. You bleed in ways you are not used to, even as a woman. Your nose hasn’t bled like this since Dr Nelemans re-set it for your sixteenth birthday, by which time it had become clear to your parents that a thing being close to perfect was not quite as good as it being truly perfect, and that you had the potential to be flawless, really, pale as marble and as wordless as a statue – an appliance that a man might buy himself as a reward for being rich. Do you have trouble breathing? At night you can’t sleep, so you go out in your nightdress – which is white like your exquisite redhead’s skin, and also like your surname, White – and walk around the garden looking at the roses, but not seeing much. One of the neighbours looks out of the window and notices you not really noticing those roses, and believes he’s seen a ghost. You’re not sure you disagree. Is your drinking water pure? Do you suffer from irritation of the skin? Are you allergic to the 20th century?
Drinking milk is meant to make you stronger, but you drink milk every day, and you have never been so weak. I’m a total milk-o-holic you say to your doctor, the closest thing you’ve made to a joke all year and no one laughs. When people ask about your son and you correct them, saying he’s Greg’s son and not yours, you know it isn’t motherly or feminine, and you aren’t so far gone that you don’t notice them wince. Still, you don’t know how to take credit for the things you really have done, so why would you take the credit for another woman’s work? All that time spent staring at the ceiling in the dark, the redness of his looming face and your mind elsewhere, floating, out in space, wondering if the maid refilled the ice tray and the drapes you ordered match the bedroom carpet, and no change. You bleed every month, in the way that you are used to as a woman, trying not to leave a stain. And now, this sickness, which you think might be a punishment, but which you also sometimes think, in your maddest and most ferine moments, might have been sent to unshackle you from everything you know, and set you free. Symptoms include weakness and fatigue; haemorrhaging from the mouth; mysterious bruising on your face; an inability to look amused when your husband’s boss’ is telling a crass story about a beautiful, shapely blonde with a vibrator stuck inside her body. (You just make a face, and the face says help.) Symptoms include disorientation; brain fog; joint pain; noticing how rarely you are called upon to speak in daily life. Where are you right now? You’re in the house. You’re in Greg and Carol’s house. You’re Greg’s Carol. You’re Greg’s, Carol. You’re sorry. You’re so very sorry. You know that it isn’t normal, but you can’t help it. All you can do is look in the mirror and say I love you, I love you, I really love you to yourself as if you are trying to perform an invocation – as if you are summoning the demon of your self-worth through the surface of the glass.