🗽❤️🌃
Her butler Kieran was the one to bear the news.
It is worth mentioning here that while Nancy’s parents had played an integral role in supporting the monetary sector of her existence, Kieran had been the true parental figure all along. Although she had never seen them in the person, Nancy was quite certain that her mother and father genuinely existed, based both on the monthly encrypted emails they sent Kieran as well as by the fact that she was allowed to speak to them over the phone during birthdays and holidays (it must also be mentioned though that in these cases their voices were so damn distorted that they could very well also just have belonged to anyone). True, it was most likely that Nancy’s parents did not care about her enough to actually want to keep tabs on her life, but that they probably still housed some sense of compassion considering that they were actively burdened by the effort of keeping her alive.
While naturally a bit awkward and not particularly friendly, Kieran genuinely did have a warm heart and had secretly grown to love Nancy more and more as she matured and became less of a teenage nuisance. Moreover, Kieran had, as a rule, done quite well in terms of her upbringing: Nancy was one of the few young debutants residing in the Big Apple who had no black stamp of juvy decorating her permanent record and no hospital overdose scares to speak of.
Notwithstanding, there were two noticeable repercussions from her childhood freedom. The first were her seven piercings. There was one in her right cartilage, two within each of her peachy earlobes, one shot through the gummy projection that was her nose, two smack bang at the centre of her ‘lady lumps’ and ….one well that one won’t be addressed here, but the reader can probably make an educated guess.
The second and in her mind the more regrettable following were the tattoos:
Nancy had got at her first at age 14 when she had been drunk on Jean-Carlo’s moms Chardonnay. Jean-Carlo had allegedly been quite intoxicated as well, causing the duo to have stumbled across the marvellous idea of venturing into one of the dodgy tattoo parlours in St.Mark’s Square. This event had occurred circa 2005, long before the stricter rules and regulations deterring minors from entering such establishments had been enacted.
The danger of decision in their drunkness had alighted from the fact that the day had been marked by a depressingly significant milestone. Indeed, the Chardonnay was stolen to commemorate Nancy’s first heartbreak. According to the combination of accounts by both her and Jean-Carlo, the ordeal had begun the previous Saturday, when her then boyfriend, Cresil Pameila, had, prompted by a game of spin-the-bottle, made-out with a certain Giselle Bertille during the course of Rosa Hermoza’s legendary Quinceañera Celebrations. Nancy, one of the few to have lacked an invite to the event, managed to retain an air of blissful ignorance of the affair till the following Monday, when Peter Galdman had passed a crumpled note up to her desk during fourth period Science class. To the amazement of Mr.Fsaaan, the well-meaning knowledge bearer three-quarters of the way through presenting a colourful and well-constructed power-point explaining the atom, Nancy had stormed straight out the classroom. She had then proceeded to clamber manically down the second story window of the school. She had been lucky to encounter the guard she regularly bribed with her mother’s stolen diamond amulets. The fluke of fate had allowed her to launch aggressively onto the pavement.
Abruptly, by her own doing, an angry ‘Beep, boop, beep,’ had originated from the lump of plastic held within her palms. She had been in the process of dialling Jean-Carlo on her pink Nokia. This conversational mechanisms had admittedly been slightly outdated for someone of such a prosperous upbringing, but was possessed by Nancy as a result of one of Kieran’s successful parenting strategies, the aim of which had been to keep Nancy away from Smartphones for as long as possible.
Now speaking as a 22 year old, Nancy was ‘totally over it’ but still refused to like Giselle’s or any of her other ‘stupid-slut friend’s’ posts on Instagram – of course she still followed them for prime shit-talking material to bring out as conversation starters to Jean-Carlo in times of minimal drama.
An appropriate parallelism had therefore been selected as the skin-bound target. To this day, the dark, unsteady lines of the phrase: ‘Real Eyez Realize Real Liez’ endured as deep black marks etched into the ball of her right foot.
Nancy had acquired the second tattoo merely a year after the first in the period following finishing the reading of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ as her elective book for English. She had been incredibly inspired by most of the content of the work and had even watched the film thrice with Jean-Carlo. They had both agreed Julia Roberts to be very beautiful despite her larger than average mouth. With hindsight, this cinematographically questionable creation had probably been the reason she had gotten into yoga in the first place.
Therefore, she now sported three L’s ‘LLL’ standing for ‘Live, Love, Laugh’ plastered on the inside of her left wrist.
Nancy now hid these underneath a thick row of bangles.
The third was a shooting star springing across her right hip that had been acquired in the presence of Xena Plrebla – this was not his real name but no-one, including his parents, had any conception of what this could really. It happened to be the case that Xena had made the executive artistic decision of keeping his identity under wraps in case his ‘SoundCloud blew up for real’ and he would have to hide the fact that he had won ‘Best Idea’ in his middle school science fair in 2008.
Nancy and Xena had only dated for three weeks, but this had not impeded Nancy from being completely in love with him. It was therefore no surprise that she had listened intently when he had suggested it that it would be ‘like so fucking sick’, for her to get something from one of his ‘masterpieces’ – he refused to refer to them as songs as this was too mainstream – printed onto her pale skin. She had initially considered taking on a headless zombie tramp stamp, but had, even in the heavy heat of her infatuation, inferred this to be a bad idea, settling instead on something slightly more discrete.
By comparison to the rest of them, her final tattoo of an ohm sign on her ribcage was actually quite wholesome. This had been designed and imprinted upon her right before she had left for her fifth yoga retreat from which she had managed to get herself kicked off of – her retreat Guru had not approved of the sleeping aid he had discovered to exist underneath her pillow. She had attempted to argued that these had been prescribed by a well-knowing professional (her Psychopharmatherapist Kevin), but her refutations had been left hanging to no avail.
Kieran’s unnaturally-high voice awoke Nancy from her zoned-out contemplations.
“You are 22 now and it seems you are the family’s only hope at survival. Judging based on your parents correspondences with me, they have disappeared into the Bermuda once more. I have also noted that they have failed to provide your monthly care package so I am afraid to inform you that Ms. Roberta and I suspect that their self-endorsed exodus might be for good this time. We are in the process of planning your future, yet you must be aware that we do not have the legal rights to help you to cope with selling this property or any of the stocks that exist in your name. We know we could let you try to do this by yourself, but realistically speaking this would probably be a disastrous idea considering you can barely keep an internship role at an office job. So we have come up with a solution. You will marry a son of one of the other families part of the ESB Clan. Many of the other wealthy families are also struggling and want to secure their children marriages with other high-class individuals. I have been speaking with Mr. Koch, who has a son just about your age. We have agreed that once the marriage between you young souls has been consummated, we will transfer all your remaining assets, both liquid and other, to the Koch’s undertaking,” he explained.
As you may have already guessed, Nancy was fuming. But before she could begin her protest, Kieran stopped her.
“My dear, you must understand that we have to do this for the family, for the company,” he reminded, “We have lost our millions and now only have our possessions to speak of. I have posted photos of your house in the Hamptons and of the Yatch on ‘The Rich People of Ebay’ forum, but it would bring us so much security if you could simply do as I say. It is a fact of life that the brain power of two wealthy families always trumps the force of just one,” he asserted.
Nancy brought to mind the case of Antony and Cleopatra and saw his point. Notwithstanding, she remained salty about having to be the one to bear the burden.
“Alas,” she thought, “I shall wear it as a badge of honour, an amulet which I shall display of my allegiance to my family tree.”
Erroneously, she remarked aloud:
“What’s his name? Can I like at least see a photo of him or something? I need to least need to know what I’m working with.”
“His name is Liam Koch,” replied Kieran, whipping out his sleek black coverless iPhone. With the press of a few buttons, the screen depicted an immaculately clear image of the face of the suggested suitor.
Nancy’s pupils focused on the origin of luminance.
He was attractive. Reported by the public to be at least a 7.5-8/10 along the conventional scale.
“Thank God,” she though.
“Ok, I think I can work with this,” she said aloud. This statement, however, was only produced in the heat of the pressure created by Kieran and a spore of doubt skilfully an unmistakably attached itself to her device of reason.
“Let’s also see a full body one then…” she continued, now much less excited.
Ok…there it was….not too bad….except…as her eyes travelled down the pixels she spotted it. Clinging tightly around his chicken legs; the thick blue cloth of horror.
Nancy believe it be an act of modern chivalry, potentially one of the most indispensable aspects of the ideology, to ask a woman for her consent before displaying the crown jewels. It needed to be a conducted in a sort of private showing situation, in which both parties agreed, consented and were having a good time. It was self-evident then that in all other circumstances, these glimmering wonders were to remain tightly locked within the vault of secrecy.
Liam was yet to be informed of this fundamental truth of the universe. The photo depicted him standing with his legs wide and chest puffed, suffocated by skin-tight jeans and proudly demonstrating all 10-carats and more.
She had entered the maze and exited, forever ground into the stickiness of a situation that was hers by name and not by merit.
Nancy knew that she could not do it; she could not marry this man.
Not Kim Kardashian style and not Tiger Woods style.
Full-stop, there was just no way.
🗽❤️🌃
That night, cradled into her feathered duvet, Nancy outlined her process of escape.
She opened her rose-gold initial inscripted Macbook air and typed ‘Coachella’ into the search bar.
She clicked on images.
No, this was definitely not what she was looking for. The people were much too clean cut and much too famous – it all reminded her of festival re-enactment of her high school. Another unavoidable issue was that it was nowhere near the right time of year for her to even consider attending. Summer was currently coming to a close, meaning that she would need to wait nearly an entire year till the end of April.
Out of nowhere, an advertisement revealed itself at the bottom right of the webpage.
Google was at it again.
It was an advert for ‘Burning Man’.
She felt an eerie air overtake her resulting from such an obvious encroachment on her privacy but was also pleased to have been put forth such an alternative.
Nancy glanced at the dark poster. An image of the night sky and of twinkling stars, all alight in a Eton mess of fluorescent fire.
The advertised main artists were alternative as fuck. She both recognised and appreciated her ample span of musical knowledge, but could honestly only pinpoint two out of the multitude of the artists cited in bold.
What also drew her to this particular idea was that she faintly recalled her high school friend Leah having explained her experience of having been an underage chick allowed into said festival by the grace of her older sister’s ID, who had according to Leah, been an almost identical but slightly uglier version of herself. The plot line of Leah’s recollection of events unfolded in a generally disorienting manner, but Nancy had been clever enough to make some things out from the midst. The most laughable and alarming of the intelligible sections had included the first first episode to have occurred for Leah after having set foot in the festival. Apparently, approximately forty-five minutes after having ingested an unidentified substance on the morning of the first day, Leah had been ‘tripping so damn hard’ that she had cocooned herself onto the ground into a foetal position whispering:
“There’s nothing as perfect as an egg, there’s nothing as perfect as an egg.”
This account was supported by other festival goers who had added:
“Yeah it was wild. She just like stayed there for pretty much the rest of the three days. We would’ve called someone but like we didn’t like wanna get her in trouble you know.”
“Wow, the ideal place for me to travel now in a time of spiritual crisis!” thought Nancy
Then it hit her then. She had no way of getting to Coachella. She was also lacking outfits to wear. And wait a second…she was also lacking a ticket. With the aim of righting these wrongs, Nancy opened her laptop and wiggled her credit card from the second compartment of her L.V. cardholder.
“Shit, they’re almost out!” she exclaimed as she attempted to book one of the last tickets. Oh, she had almost forgotten the most highest hurdle of all. Yes, the world was locked in the soul sucking cyclonic of the Bitcoin crash! With the currency down, there was no way she could book anything.
Ruminating in the heavy muck of utter despair, Nancy thought back to primary school, when she had learned that it would take approximately 17280 minutes to walk from coast to coast. This might have just been a sort of exercise to get young students to understand the vast dimensions of America, but her sentimental self believed it nonetheless.
A brief idea of floating all the way around the coast in a sort of ‘Life of Pi’ finding yourself, transcendence operation flitted though her thought process. No, that would be a stupid idea. Even wearing sunscreen and covering herself completely with outerwear, Nancy knew herself to be way too devoid of melanin to embark on this journey. In addition to being sunburn averse, she also doubted she would have the mental stamina to be away from her iPhone for the duration of such a journey.
The she searched: ‘American Airlines’.
Maybe she would just stare emptily at the flights for a while longer to keep torturing herself to a coveting degree.
This left Nancy propped overtop the steaming volcano of despair.
She knew she needed to snap out of it, so she performed her ritual that she used to deal with every time she felt sad about being a person, particularly a woman, stuck floating in the abyss of the universe.
She pulled up BBCiplayer on her laptop, diving directly into the brunt of it. It was just there, under the recently viewed tab.
Killing Eve Season 1.
It took only a slight instance of frantic searching to discover the desired minute of the first episode.
It was Oksana Asankova a.k.a Villanelle in all her psycho killer glory. The ingenuous madwoman flicked the long thin hair pin out of her bun, letting down a voluminous cascade of twinkling light. The pin became a Katana Sword that elegantly traversed the interior of the eye socket of the unsuspecting gentleman.
Nancy had no idea why this scene appealed to her so much. The poor old guy was no villain. Could she be enjoying this due to some hidden masochism? Probably not considering there had honestly been a time when she had toyed with the idea of becoming a Buddhist to allow for more of a complete immersion into her yoga. It was really no matter what portion of the scene that made this real because this particular instance of blood and gore brought her more strength and reassurance than anything else she had ever seen.
🗽❤️🌃
A few days later, Nancy was still pretty shattered by the prospect of the broken possibilities. The first meeting with this new man was meant to occur in the next few days. She acted calm, cool and collected in front of Kieran and deeply did wish to feel this way. Regrettably, there was no stopping the ghost of excitement that pushed her to wish for her dream of a new life to be revitalised.
It really was a shame that Jean-Carlo was away this week, off visiting his Nonno in Sicily. Nancy attempted to Facetime him to grab hold of some of that affectionate energy she missed, but was force ended the call even more upset than before by the red-eyed Jean-Carlo crying and explaining how his family are all “veeery upset” as his Nonno’s “time is coming near”.
In a tick of a timer hand, a passing cerebration flitted through her sadness.
If she really wanted to go, why had she given up in the first place? After all, all she really needed was herself. Her parents money and her own youth would carry her there.
As Nancy re-watched Oksana’s legendary kill, a plan teetered carefully on the boulder of insanity, bolstered to tilting towards upper reaches of her chasm of reasoning.
She would escape!
She would hitchhike!
She would sneak in!
Nancy was now so excited that she observed her insides stirring. In an episode not completely unlike a manic tantrum, she tossed sun cream, a hat and a bundle tiny skimpy summer rags into her leather rucksack.
She sped out the door.
🗽❤️🌃
Surprisingly, there was a lack of interesting substance to report from this period of travel.
Overarchingly, what happened is as follows: Nancy now became a pilgrim propelled from town to town, from roadside to roadside, chatting random shit about life with each of her approximately dozen drivers. Before our risk-taking main character knew it, she had made her way across the country and was stood in the queue for what was to be the best experience of her life.
By this point, the excitement of the getaway had thoroughly worn off and Nancy realised how utterly alone she was on this journey.
She spied a group of sorts and went up them in a friendly manner. By another stroke of pure luck, these individuals happened to be likeminded. Nancy spent the duration of the initial part of the queue attempting to dissolve smoothly into their well-rounded squad. Despite her best efforts, she had not been as slick at she hoped to be; after having momentarily sauntered off to pee behind a tree nearby, her new crew had managed to sink into the free-moving swarms of sand and people.
Standing alone and drawing her toe along in random shape in the sand beneath her feet, Nancy heavily regretted her decision of coming.
“Why am I this crazy, I should’ve just stayed home, gone on some shitty dates with the tight jeans dude and had his equally unstylish babies. What did I even expect to find here?” she contemplated.
The only thing cheering her up were the insane outfits these people were wearing. These were some truly wild getups! Some had decided to embark on a journey through time, adopting eclectic combinations such as Native-American head-dresses combined with ripped neon underthings, while others mooched towards increasingly astral frontiers.
Nancy heavily suspected that this year’s theme to be exoplanets and the societies that would one day be discovered to reside on these. There was no other means to have inspired the festival goers to have dressed thus.
It was magnificent.
Each person was a piece of a puzzle, fitting perfectly into the mesh-mash that convulsed and pulsated and shivered like an overpopulated ant nest. Light glowed and bounced off the shiny attire, creating a mirage of fantasy in the dusty desert.
In that moment, a green figure brushed up past Nancy’s left arm and chose to occupy the spot in the queue right next to her.
At first, Nancy was taken aback by the care that had been taken to compile the other’s outfit. For real, the level of detail of this costume was comparable to the minute attention used to craft the garbs on HD movie sets. Nancy was not only alarmed by grace of the obvious care that had been taken in compiling together the outfit, but also the fact that there were quirky aspects here and there that revealed the true self-made nature of the composition.
The creature in question had a thick bunch of tentacle hair that was held back by a black Adidas sports band. Its skin was green and scaly but not disgustingly so. Nancy knew this because it felt soft and pleasant against her elbow.
She proceeded to carefully check out this life-form. Its outfit was impeccable: a retro pantsuit paired with flared bootlegs (Nancy later found these to be hiding a set of clunky platform boots) and a low cut top that revealed both the arms as well as the back. The outfit was completed by a tight knot bunched up underneath the straight mass of hair-like tentacles that had evidently been brushed straight down the back of the being.
“Hey, you good?” asked the alien of Nancy (it was the Alien Babe in the flesh!).
“Uhh yeah I’m fine. Cool get up you got there…” replied Nancy in awe.
“Yeah I found it on one of the sickass vintage boutiques on Pluto ,” replied Alien Babe, “How come you’re here all by yourself, you seem to blend in really well with the rest of these earthly organisms,” she asked.
“None of my friends could come and I just wanted to become spiritually enlightened. Kinda lame but didn’t wanna be stopped from doing something that I wanted to do cause I couldn’t find someone to do it with,” explained Nancy.
“I see,” answered Alien Babe, drawing her dark eyebrows together over the icy radiation imprinted upon her looking devices. Nancy’s mental energy broke through its stagnation, allowing her to place what this being reminded her of. The being was a cooler, greener and scalier version of one of those things from Avatar.
“You know I’m here by myself too,” remarked Alien Babe suggestively.
🗽❤️🌃
Later that night, they lay out in the open desert holding hands and watching the stars.
Nancy felt as if she had already known the Alien Babe for years.
“You know I’m named after one of the most famous Native American female leaders,” blurted Nancy, managing even to surprise herself. Due to the small but important factoid that she had always hated her name, speaking of its origin had become private, something to be kept only for the times when she was extremely drunk and believed this to be an important and insightful addition to the conversation. It had just happened that she had never before racked up the courage to speak about it to anyone else while not under the influence (not even to Jean-Carlo).
“Swaggy 😎,” responded Alien Babe, giving Nancy’s sweaty hand a reassuring squeeze.
Alien Babe’s closed her eyes and thought. Then, she let loose the idea she had been crafting:
“Come with me Imma take you on a ride on my spaceship 🚀 ,”she proposed.
“Fuck yes,” thought Nancy.
They walked over to the vehicle that was conveniently parked hidden from the rest of the humans in the midst of a huge spiky desert-bush. Nancy could see that it covered most of the spaceship’s surface from view, but Nancy still suspected there to also be some space shield controlled by the tiny remote that she had seen to be jutting out from Alien Babe’s purse (Nancy was later to learn that this was an invisible shield that could be modulated by the Alien Babe and allowed whomever had been selected by the system to see it).
The entrance to the door of the vehicle slid down. The inside of the cosmical craft was a womb, opening up in reverse to accommodate them from the outside in.
As they tread inside, the moment had finally become ripe.
The cycle of negative energy that had circulated a controlling, continuous loop through Nancy for was suddenly shattered. The dam that had been holding her back was broken, releasing with it a gush of thoughts, feelings and contemplations kept back by the iron curtain of stupidity for all this time.
Accompanying this mental activity, a warm feeling was released into her abdomen. This spread through the rest of her body, traversing through every organ, through every cell, through every single thought (Nancy later complained the portrayal of this Nirvana moment to be even lamer than the first flower metaphor about dating, but this was once more overruled due to it being an on the nose description).
Alien Babe closed its eyes and gave Nancy some unforgettable advice:
“I can tell that your past interpersonal interactions have made you much too overly conscious of your human form,” she noted, “I understand where you are coming from. I was myself once allowed the opportunity of try on a human skin before settling on my current appearance. The most important thing for you to understand is that to always feel the good things you are feeling now you need to actively keep shutting off the ‘validation’ and ‘intense need for physical affection’ settings programmed into you. If you can successfully manage this, you will be able to achieve anything,” said Alien Babe.
Nancy knew her companion to have a point. This creature was clearly the most beautiful and intelligent being she had ever encountered.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here!” exclaimed Nancy.
And off they went, right into the belly of the organisms; they had become one of the colourful particles of the system, moving along the grid towards the nucleus.
🗽❤️🌃
Someone knocked loudly on the door. Nancy started awake.
“Eggs in the kitchen if you want some!” yelled Kieran.
In an attempt to make better sense of the situation, the tousle-brained reached for her phone.
A soft green hand arrested the impending arch of her arm.
Posted up on her second pillow was the Alien Babe, smiling from inside the duvet that had been perched up to form a soft cocoon. Nancy thought she caught a glimpse of lacy pink pyjamas spilling from the top of the void.
“Shhhhhh,” whispered Alien Babe, placing her forefinger on the mouth that was now gaping wide open.
🗽❤️🌃
WAST WRTNG 