Lit Mag Initiations

Holly Ur-Thanthou thought she could smell nostalgia as soon as she walked through the wine-stained door. As a woman, she was mysterious. When men said to her, “Do you even know how to read?” she almost never responded, which made her frigid but also sexy in a sickly way. She weighed 105 pounds and was built like a Carolina cattail. Her allure was unmatched.

The door creaked open with a Whitmanesque yawp, revealing a sentient tweed jacket with an underbite and a chain-smoking habit. Holly was immediately attracted to him. He was the ugliest man alive.

“Before you come in, you have to swear on this bible,” he said, holding up a copy of “Infinite Jest.” She put her hand on the book and it instantly melted into goo, sensing that she had never read it.

Tweed jacket peered at her through round tortoiseshell glasses with plastic straws shoved down the frames (he’s an environmentalist). “Sigh,” he said, and was about to smack her right back to her plebeian life when a terrifying waif in black appeared behind him.

“hello.” said the waif, in a voice so waiflike as to evoke waifs. She approached Holly on 10-inch platforms, rendering her just over 4’2”. She only spoke in lowercase letters. “do you dream of impermanence?” breathed the waif in a way that sounded skinny. Holly applied more eyeliner in response, which the waif approved of. The waif led Holly into the artfully dilapidated house, using the beam of her glowing eyes to light the dim.

Through a melting window in one of the house’s most filthy, most literary rooms was a lonesome telephone pole where hardly anyone had ever pondered mortality. Inside, members lay in a heap, surviving on smoke and metaphysical poetry, which was more than nourishing. “I am about to self-actualize!” someone exclaimed, which made everyone think metaphorically.

Jared approached Holly with extra honey in his raggedy beard. “May I interest you in a dripping candle? Or a handful of bees? Or perhaps a bacchanal?” Holly found these suggestions blasé so she impounded his hand with a coquettish snarl. But then Holly thought of her dead grandma’s opacity and shivered. Why is the world so endlessly humorous?

“Where can one get a stiff drink and a cold dose of reality?” These were the first words she’d ever spoken out loud. She grabbed Jared and consensually licked his uvula. “You’re my tenacious waterfowl now.”

Tweed jacket saw Jared and Holly in passionate embrace and felt human emotion. He said, “I feel human emotion.” Then, he wrote a 1,079 page book about a messed-up family and a tennis academy.

“You’re my muse, dear Holly, I thee praise,” said Jared in iambic pentameter. “Yes,” she mused. He took a Polaroid of her nipples and blew around some aesthetic smoke. “Will you teach me how to read?” Holly pleaded, with meteoric character deterioration. “As long as you keep dancing to the music, my thatched Honda Odyssey.” With those words, Jared became immortal.

—Magazine writer Serena Jampel can be reached at serena.jampel@thecrimson.com.