If I click within 38 minutes I can be the first ghost.

Hybrid/Experimental, Lauren Harkawik

Seventeen absolute truths.

1. 

We shouldn’t buy things on Amazon, because: fire, earth, Bezos, spaceships, ozone, union busting, unfair working conditions, international trade war, sweatshops, and black plastic utensils, which aren’t good for you.

2.

The black plastic in the utensils is recycled electronics, according to my friend, according to an article she read. We should throw away our spatulas. That’s what my friend mentioned that the article said.

3.

A shirt in my closet: hardly worn, artful vibe, embroidered with gold thread. The tariffs are coming and the planet is burning, and among other qualities, I am a financially insecure artist and a lover of the earth. I should be, and am, searching the shirts in my closet for those that are hardly worn. To see if they should become frequently worn.

4.

I like the shirt with the gold thread. I like it and its neck is too wide. 

5.

Broach: a sometimes sparkly sometimes intricate pin sometimes worn on the lapels of great aunts who are sometimes heavily perfumed and sometimes have sing-songy voices.

6.

Broach: an ornament I could use to pin the gold-threaded shirt in the back so its neck seems smaller.

7.

I live in a farm town filled with practical people and devoid of Target and Walmart and TJ Maxx or wherever one buys new broaches on foot. The only objects to buy here are inside the thrift store.

8.

Things practical people say of thrift store objects: Good as new. Don’t make ‘em like that anymore. Deal of the century. Glad it found you. Glad it’s going to a new home. Glad, glad, glad. 

9.

Thrift store objects are haunted.

10.

Thrift store objects are haunted with: the life force of whoever they belonged to; all of said person’s anxieties; all of said person’s relationships; all of said person’s intimate bits. These include the smell of their pre-showered skin and hair and the sound of their cough and things like toenails and earwax and spit collected in the corner of their mouth.

11. 

Thrift store objects are also haunted by: the notion that their former owner may or may not be dead now and the act of the object being discarded.

12.

Discarded objects get packed in soggy Amazon boxes. They get put in the trunks of cars filled with pebbles and mouse droppings. They get carried from the trunk to the thrift store, which has never been clean but also isn’t dirty and also smells that certain way.

13.

If I click the button in the next 38 minutes, Amazon will deliver a broach to me tomorrow. It will look like a luna moth and it will hold my shirt together in the back and the shirt will stop falling below my shoulders, which is a fine look but is sexier than I can afford to be in a farm town full of practical people.

14.

Luna moth broach: designed by a computer, printed by a machine, cut by a machine, glued to the pin part by a machine, put into a plastic sleeve by a machine, put into a tan bubble envelope by a person imitating a machine, labeled with a sticker printed by a machine.

15.

Machines are stealing our jobs and are besmirching the reputation of my favorite piece of punctuation, the em dash. 

16.

Machines: impersonal, anonymous, unfeeling, unknowing, unknowable. Machines are back alleys where the only source of light is the reflection of the moon on shining pavement that’s wet from a rain that just passed, and it’s creepy in this alley and maybe there is danger right around that corner, we’re not sure.

17. 

Machines do not have great aunts do not have perfume do not have handwriting do not have memories. Machines do not have skin cells, do not have intention, do not discard things, do not pack them into boxes, do not place them in thrift stores among other objects discarded by other skin cells with painful heaving coughs from the years of smoking that led to the emphysema that led to the long crackling inhales and the blue lips and the—

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Lauren Harkawik is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. She lives in Vermont. Her work has been published in journals including Cutleaf, Autofocus, and Salt Hill, among others. You can read more of her writing on her website, www.laurenharkawik.com.