RACHEL ZAVECZ / SWEETH♥RT
Salt-rim trim like anything else martini under club lightning the delicate glass stem morphs fluorescent into rose gold and violets flowering up the dusty current of Moonᵀᴹ’s slender wrist, glides soft and marbled with her brilliant veiny metallic glitter and formaldehyde mix injected only hours before this and any celebrity appearance All cameras zoom out to frame the exhibition space flickering across television screens four celebrity children dusky under light representation of the lurid cinematography is melodramatic and mechanic and the spotlight through the youthful racks of meat on silver-wire skeletons youthful meat on silver racks skeletal meat on youthful silver wire and silver-skeletal racks & racks & racks of meat
“Do you know how they make blood-salt?” melancholy Moonᵀᴹ sliding one chrome-plated nail down the crystalline flute of her synthetic designer drink, Sweet
Hart the suggestion unique to spill heart’s blood in red through sharp gold-capped superstar teeth
Darkest figure answers, “Not a fucking clue,” adjusts steel joints into her semblance of interest, whirrs “tell us Luna Luna”
“They breed all white-tipped harts in corporate factories carefully manufactured, small wire-bound bones under velvet moonlit fur it’s
almost sad the way the muscled
organs slender spread as they watch their lovers on the rack
bleat in the blood-letting hollow
one ruby drop for each pound of salt eye rolling
tender flesh spoiled with
fear and blood like syrup hot torture
more delicious after watching
in its knotted platelets red salt aorta pouring
from the screaming
cut --
(pain)
(pain)
(pain)
(&c.)”
The club’s halo
b
u
r
n
s
o
u
t
&in, golden figure + honeyed eye-roll, “Shut up, Moonᵀᴹ No one wants to hear that depressing shit right now”
“You’re so fucking basic”
Dark polish across her eyes as Moonᵀᴹ looks up into the black not exactly black or caring or not exactly not-caring Money moving abstractly through ### outside of (that is, fringing) meatspace and dropping out of wallets like some kind of wet numeric alchemy The funds abstract harts and their hearts so invisible along the factory conveyor belt like they’re weeping quietly and like the salt is flowing like deliciously and like with real feeling like, is anything ever more real then when a club bleeds into any scene of the factory floor? Her heart is a vortex yawns wide and the blood is a yearning in her hart that splits her living and dead tissue and who will care for any hearts or harts if she doesn’t fucking make them?
“I’m basic because I don’t wanna think about animal rights or some shit while I’m out at the club, or because I have 3000 more insta followers than you?” cruel shot of red through gold, and it’s just so totally on purpose
SNOW slinking wry between twinned stellar bodies,
“you guys seem like you need some alone time” &Darkest figure disengaging her mechanical parts, moves across the floor, falls into the press, small flashes against the thickness of the interior space, &c.
There is a bristling silence underneath the thrumming of music and
script unfolds,
Moonᵀᴹ: I may actually be partially dead inside, but you’re making me feel figuratively dead also
Sunᵀᴹ: God, fuck, Moonᵀᴹ I just can’t understand why you have to be such a fucking dick sometimes I mean seriously why the fuck are you talking about animal processing right now Fucking good for you if you wanna give a shit about it but don’t fucking order a luxury drink just so you can bitch about it’s ingredients in a long dramatic poetry reading or some shit when you know I’m trying to increase my nighttime profile in Star Gazing
Moonᵀᴹ: O-M-G seriously fuck you and fuck your new girlfriend and fuck fucking Star Gazing too Who seriously gives a shit You know we shouldn’t be here We were supposed to be going to the laboratory tonight
Sunᵀᴹ: Fuck fuck fuck Can’t you just drop it? He’s not going to help us
Moonᵀᴹ: You’re so naïve He knows something
Sunᵀᴹ: No shit And how are we supposed to make him tell us He’s basically a god the god in every surgical industry
Moonᵀᴹ: (to recap) You don’t even want to try to free our helpless mother from her forced Saturn contract aka slavery you just want to let her corpse be dressed up in slutty costumes, paraded around to shitty pop songs, and constantly assaulted by her rapist in the most highly distributed sex tape of all time forever because you’re afraid of an old nerd who stuffs dead cats in his spare time, yeah?
Between the stilted exaggeration coils cold atop the table even Moonᵀᴹ aware of danger omitted and the swollen power (Finch’s) against small bones of two fragile necks
Sunᵀᴹ: We both know that this is about revenge
Moonᵀᴹ: You know it’s not At least not entirely
Sunᵀᴹ: Look I want to kill him as much as you do but we don’t even know if the things we want are possible Mother is totally dead and the King is immortal, probably
Moonᵀᴹ: So I guess the real difference between us other than in instagram followers is that I’m just not a fucking pussy
All paparazzi capture the lunar Moonᵀᴹ storms into darkness moves out into the lightening skyscape of the club veranda and out of cloud cover
Sunᵀᴹ’s eyes slick back hook click onto the glittering black scales of SNOW all dark and defiant across the body-littered floor he slips mirrored glasses over the pupils of his snake eyes obsidian, similarly slitted, a faux pas in any circle when two icons reflect similar celebrity too closely in orbit trending He imagines disengaging the delicate black pearl of her plated armor and fucking her mean and bloody against lit glass of the transparent wall, their eyes absorbing every prism of light shaking through the time and space of the shining factory Imagines splitting her throat against the sharp vein of a butcher’s knife He’s hard and painful and now everything he sees is only red racks of white & racks & racks & racks on racks and how is there an absence and overabundance of light always in these situations, eclipse shading and burning deep under the skin simultaneously?
(a fissure widening)
The mirror eventually revolves to Sunᵀᴹ fucking himself down the reflectionary corridor of his own glittering teenage stardom and something familiar in its mode of self-destructive and destroying caliber is the stupid heat of entrapment when he looks at his own designer face in the mirror of his silver-plated vanity, sweet
* * *
Come back to meeee
I'm bored
Eyes rolling Moonᵀᴹ paws the cellular keys to her twin’s heart with lack of care and responds a frigid,
Sec
In the outside chill dusting Iceᵀᴹ from her emerald case across the wetness of her gums and crystal-clusters she snorts cold lines more off the shining surface of her gilded seashell compact sets the dead neurons afire hot synapse to an overstimulating brain in color
necrosed flesh
attempts reanimation and
she can hear the harts bleating sweet
hearts beating
into the
harts beat
hearts bleat
h[e]art b[l]eating
e
h a r t
h e a r t
bleat
sweet beat bleat
b l ea t
b l e at
b l e a t
bl e a t
beat
beat
b
e
a
t
#TakingForever
if you use up all that ice you'll give yrself brain damage 🤯
wtf are you doinggg
meet you at the car
Moonᵀᴹ rises resolute and still sultry presses the small jeweled case into place between spine and lining of her white-frosted coat
Rachel Zavecz is a book artist and writer currently living in Salt Lake City. She co-edits the small press Carrion Bloom Books with fellow writer Jace Brittain. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Notre Dame, and is a PhD candidate in fiction at the University of Utah. Her writing has appeared in Fatal Flaw, DIAGRAM, Sporklet, and Fairy Tale Review, among others.