Cut Outs

I’m lying on the floor of Mall’s posh office, about five hundred stories in the sky.

“We have a couple of colonization problems,” she says, her bare feet up on her huge desk.

“Well, yeah,” I say. “Obviously. And, like, way more than a couple. It affects almost everything.”

“I mean in your book, love,” she says. Kina like I’m an idiot.

“Oh,” I go. “Where?”

“I mean, they’re littered throughout, but we can slip by most of them. There are two chapters which we can’t.”

“Which ones?” I ask.

She scrolls on her reader for a moment, then says, “Git and A Small Misunderstanding of Epic Proportion.”

“Oh?” I go again.

“Yes,” she says. “Git features a white innocence thing, and A Small Misunderstanding has you using your White privilege to exploit a Black Mexican man for sex and then kind of mocking him for being upset about it.”

“Okay,” I say. “What do you suggest?”

Mall scrunches her mouth but her eyes don’t change. They can’t. Too much ‘tox. “Let’s just cut ‘em,” she says.

“Okay,” I say again.

She tosses the reader on the desk, stretches, then takes off her glasses, gets down on the floor, and crawls on all fours toward me.

I look down the length of my body as she approaches me lika jungle cat.

So I go back to the other thing. “You think we should cut them, huh?”

She stops crawling and sits up. “Absolutely. We don’t want you getting cancelled for being a fascist colonizer, now do we?”

“People would have to be watching for me to get canceled,” I say, but she doesn’t hear me. Then I say, “I mean, I am descended from fascist colonizers. And their apologists.”

Mall shrugs. “We all are, mate.”

“But you’re Black,” I say.

“Well, yes, on the one side. But the other is white. Making me a colonizer baby.”

I smile at her, unsure of what to say.

“Let’s make love and get Chinese,” she says. “I’m positively famished. In both regards.”

I want to make love to her, almost desperately. But I don’t think I should. I don’t want to keep making these mistakes. And I don’t want to keep writing about people in this same way.

“But I’m not a character in your book,” Mall says, and I realize I was thinking out loud again. She resumes crawling toward me. “I’m a real, flesh-and-blood woman who desperately wants to shag you.”

She says that, but we know the truth, don’t we?

And I ponder if it’s even possible to change. Not the world. I gave up on that awhile back. My own thoughts? I know I can change those. I’ve even changed my behavior, especially with killing and hurting people. But I can’t seem to fix this lust thing, this desire to fuck and be fucked by literally everyone.

Not yet I can’t. Maybe never? I don’t know.

I should probably cut this chapter, too.