Every hangover, after all, is a mystery; every hangover is a whodunit.
— Martin Amis, The Information
4 am
A light switches on. A wide-eyed, caramel-haired child holding a cereal box peers down at her. Staring. “Hello,” the child says. Still staring. Propping herself up on her elbows, Frances feels a familiar headache kick in. The sort that hits the back of her skull like a shovel. She seems to have slept on someone’s Chesterfield sofa, in some kind of office. Books lining the two nearest walls shift into focus. The Master and Margarita nestles next to Oh Baby! and a stack of vintage 70s Vogue magazines, organised chromatically.
“What’s your name?” asks the child, who has a constellation of honey-puffs stuck to her flannelette pyjamas.
“I’m Frances, and you’re...”
“Reko. After the Tūtūrau chief! Master explorer and storyteller. Want breakfast?”
Frances falls back into the sofa. “Breakfast? No, thank you. I just need to lie for a while. It’s very early.”
“Ok.”
The child pads out, a couple of honey-puffs falling to the carpet in her wake. Frances turns to her side, covering her eyes. Should have asked Reko to turn off the light. Opposite her is a large bay window with a view to the sea. In the mauve early morning light, she can just make out yacht masts lining the marina. Can hear their halyards clanging in the wind. She must be—in Ōhinehou, Lyttelton. At least a $50 Uber home. Over $80 to work. Which day was it? Thursday. Book Club was last night. They were reading Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays. Frances’ suggestion.
Frances shoves the mohair blanket and duvet aside, approaches the window. A cargo ship’s lights stud the horizon. Closer in, in the belly of the harbour, the clank of containers and cranes—shifting, loading—dancing their mechanical ballet. She feels another, deeper, familiar ache. Guilt or regret? The booze blues? Scribbles notes on her phone.
Falling out of love is like
forgetting how to read music.
You won’t know when or why
but one day you’ll discover
you can’t read the notes anymore.
5 am
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse
and worse.
— Fleur Adcock, “Things”
She’d been dreaming—something just beyond her reach kept returning in flashes, relapses. A palimpsest, a remnant, the shaded imprint of a heated discussion. A debate she couldn’t leave alone because she’d started it. Something unspoken. Amid people she barely knew but wanted to like her. She’d overshared something. What had happened? The strange, layered dream kept repeating, haunting.
5.54 am
“All days are nights.” Just
ask the Dark Lady: who broods
inside us all…
*
“Bridge-et! Bridge, Bridge, Bridget JONES! Bridge-et! JONES! BRIDGET JONES! BJ, BJ, BEEEEEEEEEE JAAAAAAAAAY!” Across the rippled bitumen of a quake-ripped road, the neighbour’s banter with his chocolate labrador sparks Frances into action. She has to get across town. Get the truck. Get changed. Go to the gallery. Or maybe she could call in sick. She watches Bridget Jones and the dressing-gowned, mug-in-hand neighbour shuffle up the road.
“Can you tell me a story?” Reko’s returned. “I bet you tell funny stories. You were funny last night.” The child climbs onto the sofa’s far arm and perches. Watchful. Waiting. “Two stories. A made up one and a real one, please. Something about the fairies that live here. And one about your kids. Where are they?”
“I don’t think I have the right kind of stories. And I haven’t got any kids.”
“Oh.” Reko tucks her feet under the duvet. “Do you have any pets?”
“No. I have lots of plants though. Grown from seed, on my kitchen bench. Wild harvested from remnant patches of ancient forest.”
“What’s remnant?”
Frances folds and unfolds the corner of the floral duvet cover, revealing its ATAAHUA hand-stitched label. She worries at its raised writing with her fingers, as if to rasp some sensitivity back into them. The Arts and Craft touch was very Seraphine: the Book Club’s secretary.
“Small parts that are left over when the main part has disappeared or been destroyed. A trace, remaining.”
“Oh. I’m remaining home today. And I’m having yoghurt and pears for my breakfast.”
“Lucky.”
“Do you think fairies like pears? Do you think they nibble on pears that have fallen on the ground? Those ones with the little holes? Is that from fairies eating them with tiny spoons? Can you do plaits? Could you plait my hair? Bun plaits, like Thumbelina?”
“I suppose...they might. Fairies might like pears. No, I can’t do plaits, sorry. Anyway, Thumbelina plaited her own hair because she didn’t have any parents. I’m closing my eyes for a little while, okay? The sun’s not quite up yet. I’ll wait until the hills turn golden, then I’ll get going.”
*
She did not have the knack for doing a plait. Braid, fold, weave, crease. So many kids’ books and YA novels feature an orphaned protagonist. They’re so often abandoned, betrayed, or neglected by their parents. Is the trope relatable to every generation, or is it even more so for Gen Z, inheriting the climate crisis, inaccessible housing prices and the rest? What kind of world would it be to bring a child into, anyway?
Now she’s thinking of the meaning of thread which, by its nature, is composed of lots of smaller threads, twisted together. In computing, a piece of code is thread-safe if it functions correctly during simultaneous execution by multiple threads. Thread is also something continuous or drawn out, as in a line of reasoning or train of thought. It can be used to describe something solid as in part of a screw or clothes. It can be used to describe liquid; the topic of a conversation on the internet or in the physical world...Thread: the main drift or gist. Or to pass through...
*
6.17 am
“The cleaner’s looking after me today. Mum’s at work and I’m sick. I have a fever. Hot head. Hot, hot, hot.”
Sun’s first tendril spans an inky horizon, staining everything bright mandarin. Reko trills weee-oh, weee-oh! Lines up her toy cars along the windowsill, chromatically. Tow truck, ambulance, fire truck, police car, race-car. All vehicles linked with disaster, Frances ponders. We teach children to make siren sounds at the same time they learn to mimic farmyard noises. The first Sirens swayed Odysseus. These days sirens make us question if this is real or a drill, where they’re going and if it could be someone we know. Some people touch a button when they see an ambulance with its siren on. Siren, siren, sigh sigh. Why did she drink so much $9 wine?
“Does your mum have coffee in the house? Panadol?”
“Dunno. We could go exploring though, to find some. Reko was a chief, who knew lots of crossings and paths by heart.”
Au Au Aue Hā…he!
“That’s the waka ama. Reko was famous for how fast he could paddle waka and mōkihi. Across the Mataura, Mata-Au, Waitaki...”
Reko pulls Frances across to the window.
Au Au Aue Hā…he!
They can hear the paddlers but they can’t see them.
Frances wonders if maybe last night she blurted out something about—no, she wouldn’t have, surely? That old homesick feeling again. Followed by a more medical nausea.
“Where’s the bathroom, my love?”
“Down the hall, at the end.”
That’s right. She’d snuck into the bathroom for a conspicuously long time last night. Grimaced into their Pinterest-perfect, Hollywood-lit mirror, clutching the basin. Willed her jagged breath to settle. What is it about the bath toys in other people’s bathrooms, the bright plastic teapots, My Little Ponies, and Barbies with crew cuts that give her the pangs? She splashes cold water on her face. Bathrooms are so fricken confronting. Twists the old-fashioned Methven taps back, hard. Parts her hair. Smooths it twice, three times, then ties it with a sparkly hairband she steals from a jar on the shelf.
*
6.45 am
On the kitchen blackboard, there’s a note scrawled over another clumsily rubbed out note.
Frances—Help yourself to anything. Off to work. WE WILL TALK!
The capitalised “WE WILL TALK” seems threatening. About what? She’d dreamt of people fighting, crying. Now she feared it was real. The last thing she remembered was Harriet the neighbour coming over while they were amid some heated literary discussion. She gave them a sample of a new strand of hydroponic weed she was testing for her blog, HashItOutWithHarriet. She needed “opinion leaders”. Their Book Club was the ideal focus group. Open to new ideas, good communicators. She recorded their feedback on her phone. It was meant to be fun. They wrote their reviews as haiku on the kitchen blackboard. Harriet took photos. Then they started talking in haiku.
Ultra-heavy
indica delivering a
one-of-a-kind buzz
Sweet sedative, hugs
like a straitjacket fresh from
the dryer.
Love this strain: potent,
punchy, Pineapple Express
= Trainwreck +++ !
*
Does liking liminal spaces make you less able to make decisions? What was it she had said or done? The faux pas, she guessed, might somehow be linked to the book they were discussing. She needed an Uber soon or she’d be late in an obvious way. If she arrived during morning stand up or just after, she’d be able to rock in, unnoticed. But right before the first tour group, in a rush—she was bound to be clocked by someone.
“This one cries; she has holes in her eyes. This one spits. You have to put them in cold water to see what happens to them.” Reko lines up her LOL Surprise dolls along the bench. Frances glances at the row of pretty future landfill, murmurs mmmmm, and continues opening and closing kitchen cupboards, looking for coffee and painkillers.
Standing on a stool, Reko holds one doll under the kitchen tap and waits.
“You peel away the plastic ’til you find your very own teeny tiny LOL Surprise inside the egg.”
“I see.”
“Read the clue: this one says Break A Leg! It changes colour when it gets wet.”
“Really?”
‘I know ’cos I cheated. I love my girl. There are no boy ones.”
Frances finds organic dandelion root coffee. No caffeine but it will have to do. Waits for the Uber to take her to her car. Shuffles last night’s Cards Against Humanity deck into a series of found poems she photographs then leaves on the kitchen table. The words will be useful for one of her zines.
Welcome to the
jungle! We’ve got:
Buildings.
A bit of a tarantula
problem.
Tentacles.
Sponsored content.
Lying face-down
in wet cement.
Falling down
the stairs.
A burrito that’s just
sour cream.
Holding a lantern
and saying
“Who goes there?”
Everything.
Getting blasted
in the face by a
t-shirt canon.
Seizing control
of the means
of production.
Salsa Night at
Dave’s Cantina.
Late-stage
dementia.
Loud scary
thunder.
Sudden and unwanted
slam poetry.
idk lol
Make a haiku.
What?
Maybe there will be time for a shower and/or breakfast, if she’s quick.
7.47 am
*
Back home, there’s a layer of frost on the truck’s windscreen. Frances jams the key in the ignition, cranks the heating, scrapes off a patch of ice on the driver’s side with her credit card. It’s daybreak, the Concert AM announcer says. Daybreak. Day, break. Break. A monarch at the traffic lights. Frances considers the unseasonable, unreasonable amount of butterflies she’s noticed lately. Wait, what? The indicators aren’t working.
Frances straightens her arm out the window into the cool morning air every time she makes a right turn. The old Landrover rumbles around the coast between rows of road cones. Ōtautahi has the most road cones of any city in the world. Each one costs around $100. She knows this because she googled it once on a road trip with friends. Cutting across the plains, they spoke of the precariousness of existence here. How road cones punctuate the highways. New roads and detours appear daily. Google maps can’t keep up.
This hand-action for indicating feels antiquated and hokey, like she’s in Driving Miss Daisy. Frances avoids left-hand turns and continues straight ahead if she can, or speeds into each turn without indicating then feels like a prat. This results in That Look from a few people: the palms raised, eye-roll, what are you up to gesture.
Hands unsteady on the steering wheel, she’s on three hours’ sleep, desperate for coffee. She thinks about something she read, about how to train your mind for lucid dreaming. Find places in the day to stop and look at your hands. Then do that in your sleep if you realise you're dreaming during your dream.
Frances switches to RNZ. Puts on her makeup at the traffic lights. Thinks of women the world over, putting on makeup at traffic lights. Or crying in the shower. Applies concealer, mascara, and eyeliner to make things better. Make her eyes look more alert, open. Clear-Eyes will stop the redness. On your worst day, wear your best outfit. Hopefully, no one will notice she’s teary. And hungover, again. The Landrover rattles across another bit of road that’s still being fixed post-quake.
The head of a task force proposing a major overhaul of the school system is aghast...they’re setting up an alliance to fight the plans.
Business News. Sports. Competition in the fuel sector. Medicinal cannabis. Dryland carbon. A new era for tree growers. Thousands of pines being planted in Taranaki, Tairāwhiti...
Pines is another word that gives her pangs. She has a whole glossary. Something about its onomatopoeic-ness. And Nirvana’s cover of the Appalachian folk song...in the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine — I’d shiver...the whole...niiiiiiiiiiiight through...
Brexit shambles. Remainers regretful. Passing Red Cliffs, they’re making the sea wall higher. Building a proper cycleway. This could all be canals one day—like Venice. Or this part of Ōtautahi will all be little atolls, connected with a monorail. Lots of dykes and bridges, linkages as the wetlands resurge and the sea level rises, rises
...tell me where did you sleep last night?
An interview with a Syrian migrant comes on. It’s been eight years. Eight years since the Syrian Army first started shooting at civilians. Out of nowhere, your whole childhood has been set on fire. That is quite hard to process. Now the radio says it’s getting harder for Wellingtonians to get house insurance. And for those who live on the coast. There’s an interview with the mayor who was friends with Frances at uni. They used to have great dress-up parties at their flat on Hyde or was it Clyde St? Parties always end up in the kitchen, Frances muses, replaying last night’s strange snippets. Down Brougham St, streams of trucks in every lane, going both ways. Loaded with cargo: imported cars, QR-coded logs. Pines being shipped offshore then sent back as cheap furniture.
*
That pining feeling. Ache, urge. Frances recalls following Jek, Seraphine’s wife, into the kitchen to get more wine...Somehow, they kissed. Saying stupid things like You remind me of someone. Something about that defiant stance, shoulders squared, arms slightly out...those eloquent wrists. As if she were some younger, wilder version of herself, she’d pulled Jek towards her, behind the open pantry door, below the spice rack. Earthy-sweet-scent of cardamom, cinnamon dust. Carefully re-joining the party, separately. Pouring wine after wine to blot out the shame and replace it with something dark, red, brooding.
*
8.35 am
The beetle sheen of her nail gel catches the light as Frances punches her plate number into the machine. Car parking and the Nor’wester are both high on her list of things that can set her day off-kilter. She loathes having to pay the company that turned the rubble into overpriced car parks all over the CBD. Adding meters and little white fences to cleared bare earth, they were quick to extend their empire after the disaster.
She knows a back way to get into the office, discreetly. Through an old warehouse that’s been transformed into a rec centre for rangatahi. Ducking under the gym’s half-open roller door, she glances up at the court sign staring down at her: LIGHT / TIME / DARK.
*
Frances makes a capsule coffee in the kitchen, opens the gallery door slowly so it won’t squeak. In her mind, the words keep rolling and turning light time dark time light...
Jek reminded her of Maxxx. The street artist she befriended launching his artworks when she was Event Coordinator at a Sydney gallery. They exchanged hundreds of emails. Professionally at first. Maxxx agreed to the exhibition if he could attend on the downlow, incognito, like Banksy. Which Frances thought wanky. At the opening, she felt an energy shift. After the launch, they went for a drink at a dive bar down a side-street near Hyde Park. Paint peeling off its art deco facade, the bar felt like a secret. Its low-lit velvet, gold and crimson decor made Frances feel like she was inside a body. She told Maxxx this. Someone sang an acoustic cover of All Apologies, drawn out and sultry. The night unfolded something inside her unfolded
*
Sydney, 2014
Nestled into a corner booth, they toasted the sold-out exhibition; the praise of the city’s art darlings. Touching her shoulder, Maxxx murmured thank you for making it all happen.
It’s all happening, Frances enthused, quoting Penny Lane in Almost Famous.
When he replied Rock n roll, she knew he was referencing The Rules of Attraction’s Sean Bateman and this was the start of a game in which they’d speak in song lyrics, book quotes, and movie lines for the rest of the night, maybe longer —
Frances traced her fingers over the lines someone had carved into the wooden table: Live East, Die Young. Maxxx took the straw from her drink. You should say no to straws. Plastic kills.
I know. Should have said hold the straw. This is the last straw! But really, it’s the fishing industry killing our oceans, way worse than a billion straws floating around...
Several whisky sours later, Frances and Maxxx walked through the park towards a dress-up potluck in Darlinghurst. Stopped for a spliff under the Offerings of Peace statue; a huge bronze stallion with rider clasping the Greek Tragedy and Comedy masks. Opposite them stood the Offerings of War; a similar horse-mounted figure with a bundle of swords and broken spears. Folding the dusty green leaves into the wing-thin paper, Frances read the inscription aloud: The Real and Lasting Victories Are Those of Peace and Not of War. Inhaled the dank, beefed-up basil scent of the dak. Passed the joint to Maxxx. Leaned back, beneath the peace warrior’s bare left foot.
They fashioned Maxxx’s outfit for the party en route. The theme was ‘disguise’, so he wore a headdress of foraged greenery: twigs ripped from hedges; garlands of jacaranda (the dream tree), and Illawarra flame flowers they climbed over fences and ran through dark city parks to collect. After piercing the stems with a pen, they looped, knotted and stitched a veiled crown with hair ties and tights.
On the balcony at the after-after-party, in a serotonin-spurred confession, Frances gushed I’m on a two-year waitlist for a sperm donor. By the time my name gets to the top, it may be too late. The wait is longer in Aotearoa. One of the main reasons I moved here. For my chance to be a single mum by choice. Aka a Choice Mum!
To Frances’ surprise, Maxxx replied I’d be open to that. Helping you out. Talking about it in a more sober setting, anyway. Obviously, no one could ever know. Leaning closer, they conspired—
Then someone else came onto the balcony and they were swept into another conversation, another round in the midsummer fug still soft on the skin at 2am —
They mingled with night creatures dressed as Carmen Sandiego, Scooby Doo villains, and Eyes Wide Shut extras. Discovered they both liked Pollock’s art but not his arseholeness. Debated whether the art and the artist could be separated. Made vague plans to go up the coast, stop at the beach where Home & Away was filmed then drive to Maxxx’s hometown Newcastle to the Float Centre for hypno-floating and sensory deprivation. To be suspended in silence, stillness, to just breathe and
f l o a t
Down, down, downtown, where the bollards were thick with flyers for gigs, collapsed in the coat check of a hidden alley club (press the buzzer and whisper a special code like you’re in the Jazz era), the two of them entwined like a glove as coats and jackets and scarves piled up: oblivious bliss and this—new skin feeling. Stamps on wrists. Gold shadows flash. Distant thud of drum’n’bass. This could be the wardrobe to Narnia. No wait, this jacket feels like Falkor from The Neverending Story. Or maybe they've both folded into the index of an ancient book in that Library of Babel. Later they’ll wake up, walk out—take a long time to get home, stumbling and laughing as a murmuration of starlings swirl around streetlights—but for now, this is perhaps perhaps, just quietly, the first day of love.
*
They shared a cab to his place and slept it off. He had an interview the next morning. Left her a map for Messina: the best gelato in town. On her way back to work (t-shirt inside out, a new neckline cut so it didn’t look like she was still in last night’s clothes), she made some street art of her own. Turning her limoncello gelato cone upside down, she turned The Offerings of War horse into a unicorn.
*
She remembers drunkenly writing some haiku on Seraphine’s blackboard. Frances hoped she’d rubbed them off straight away but when she went searching for a glass of milk in the middle of the night, she noticed the words were still legible through the smeary residue left by the duster. Had anyone seen?
*
Maxxx was now a brand, a piece of art. She didn't know how to contact him. She knew he had a partner. After his exhibition, they’d messaged a bit with plans to meet up. The heatwave lasted days, then weeks, that summer. Became an excuse people used for erratic behaviour. A month or so later, they almost organised to go back to that secret speakeasy where they’d fallen asleep in a pile of coats. Frances was seeing someone else who she'd met online. A thin blue spectra on the plastic pregnancy stick made her feel happy and sick and indecisive. She didn't go back to the laneway club. She went to Wild, the Cheryl Strayed film with her internet date instead. Kept what the blue line meant to herself. Herself and herself alone, with no one influencing her decision. Yearned for space; to lie down in some long grass or sea dunes and stare at the sky or the ocean and figure things out but—
The decision was taken out of her hands when one morning, she started bleeding. Patchy spots, mild cramps at first. At work, she googled “spotting” and “signs of miscarriage” and used tissues in place of pads since she didn’t have any in her handbag. The cramps worsened. Frances read an article about the “common, though often invisible loss”. She found the darkest room in the gallery. Stopped at Douglas Gordon’s Phantom (2011) installation. Sat on the floor, against the wall, knees curled to her chest, remembering her grandmother’s advice: Scrubbing floors is the best cure for stomach cramps. If you want the pain to go away my love, get on your knees and scrub.
With eyeliner, she drew. A sketch of Gordon’s video still from Rufus Wainwright’s All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu in kohl. The tragedy of a Steiner piano on fire dragged hot tears unexpectedly down her cheeks as the sonata repeated: You can’t be the one...
Later she flushed a gush of clots down the toilet. Next morning, called A&E. Waited hours at the clinic as people came in after Saturday night accidents and injuries, with broken limbs or sick kids. The disinfectant scent, fluorescent light, moaning, snot, coughing and torn tabloids made her feel worse.
#bringbackourgirls / TAY TAY / #blessed / KIM K’S BUTT BREAKS THE INTERNET / #sobyronithurts / SOCHI’S OLYMPICS ARE A JOKE / #killingit / HOUSING PRICE HIKES / BREAKTHROUGHS IN AI / #IliketheInternetversionofyoubetter / NAKED SELFIE HACKER SCANDAL / Mum, mummmm make it stop make it stop make it go away / #wecouldbepharaohsjustforoneday / #Tansuit / #WhyIStayed / EMINEM SUES NZ NATIONAL PARTY / MILEY SENDS HOMELESS GUY ONSTAGE/ EVERYTHING’S A REMIX / DOOMSDAY PREPPERS EXTREME PREP EDITION: It’s all gonna hit the fan / #fuckfashionletsdance.
A woman, face bleeding, was brought in by two cops. One male, one female. (A friend in the force once told her they often did that. Sent women officers into crisis situations, for their calming presence). Pigs! Pigs! Get away from me, the wounded woman shrieked. Frances told the nurse she’d wait outside. Lying on the cool damp lawn, watching clouds roll in from the west, eased the pain. She lay like this a long time, thinking of deep dark ti-tree lakes, resurgent seams of native forest, until it was her turn.
“It’s all part of the hideousness of womanhood,” the examining nurse wryly observed.
Frances stored these details to tell Maxxx later. Someday. He’d get the grotesque humour of it all when they were talking and laughing like normal again. He was housesitting in Newcastle soon. We could stay a few days, read magazines on the beach, drive to Byron. Cool place for creatives, he’d said. We’ll swim in the ti-tree lake. Soak all that goodness in.
She googled the lake. Read up on its sacredness to Bundjalung women. Decided against soaking or floating. She wanted to do something.
*
Weeks later, Frances collected the ‘human tissue’ from the hospital. Down a long corridor, she had to walk past doors labelled Print and Mail and Mortuary before finding the Acacia Room. She was given a leaf-patterned envelope and told she was welcome to sit here for a while. Frances didn’t sit. She took the small packet and buried it under the mokimoki, kangaroo paw fern at her flat. Offered a name, in her head, which she would never say aloud: Lulu.
*
Under a full moon on a clear winter’s night, Frances returned to the Offerings of Peace and War. She was brazen and quick. Her construction helmet and hi-viz ART DEPARTMENT jacket exuded enough authority for her to execute the bluff before surveillance cameras or security clicked. Looping climbing rope around the bronze forelimbs, she scaled the pedestal and tjuzed the colonial statue in under two minutes. Her hand-made ceramic unicorn horn held fast. King Edward VII on horseback in Haymarket was next.
From its random conception after an all-nighter, Frances’ guerrilla art movement grew. Gradually at first. None of her friends suspected her midnight marauding, when she’d ghost them at a party to make street art. With a head torch, rainbow-striped spike, and industrial-strength Blu-tac stashed in her handbag, she adorned the city’s horse statues with unicorn horns. Photographed each one and sold the prints through the gallery as collector’s items (pretending she was protecting the identity of their maker), though she kept each first edition for herself. Named them and framed them as her heart swelled with pride at her growing mob. A trip home to see family in Timaru that Christmas saw Phar Lap get his unicorn adornment, inciting praise and condemnation on both sides of the Tasman.
A holiday to Europe for her 30th birthday seeded the chance for the steeds of Prince Albert, the Duke of Wellington, Charles I, Richard III and Ferdinand Foch, and finally the stallion outside the Gucci store in Serravalle to be transformed into unicorns. She filmed each mission and started a YouTube channel. Overnight, #unicornaggedon went viral. Changing her Insta to a professional creator account, Frances sold DIY sets of the biodegradable moulds and adhesive online, then branched out into sustainable glitter and all things eco-unicorn as people all over the world joined the movement, adding cones or horns to their local horse statues. When the courier came to collect the mountain of packages each morning, they didn’t ask any questions, saying there are people all over the city selling weird stuff out of their bedrooms.
When TikTok and Twitch sent more traffic her way than her website could handle, the stampede was unstoppable. Frances upgraded her hosting plan and took on two employees to run the webstore full time, swearing them to secrecy. Her boss asked her to source #Unicornaggedon merchandise for the gallery shop, as she heard it was a must-have.
*
11 am
Frances’ phone bleats a notification, disrupting her nostalgia for the fledgling days of her ruse. The caffeine’s kicked in and she’s just finished the first tour of the day. Surreptitiously, she checks the hits on her socials and the latest merch orders. She laughs when she notices Maxxx has started a #unicornaggedon Fan Account. She has bigger, brighter things to think about. Like the deposit she’s paid to set up a women’s art retreat in an old apple-pickers’ cottage amid regenerating coastal forest on the shores of Waimea Inlet, overlooking Matahua peninsula.
4 pm
Matahua has a certain ring to it, she thinks as she cuts and pastes her latest zine. Someday her secret would get out. Especially if any of her Book Club deciphered the message she’d left in her haiku:
I am the artist
formerly known as MaXXX’s
(ex) baby mama.
I am the artist
who sparked #Unicornaggedon:
#streetartglowup
Unicornify
the patriarchy
with me, my darlings!
Frances embellishes the cover of her new zine with an image of the Clydesdales in Clinton, unicornified. Inside, she writes a new haiku in Vivid:
Unicorn stampede
The parts are less than the whole
Rewild the horses.