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*Welcome to chicken house we are clucking CRAZY*

In the week Dorsia breaks off contact with him the weather turns. A sky the not-quite white
of sublet porcelain, streets filled with the dank communal breath of the steamroom.
Growing up somewhere uneventful the weather was always said to be ‘turning’, by which
people were taken to mean ‘finally displaying its truly malevolent qualities.’ The weather
turned as frequently as friends, politicians, or charmless men were said to ‘show their true
face’. Trust nothing, love no one, don’t forget to take your umbrella. At something calling
itself a ‘salon’ the other night he had watched his least-blinking most-underslept friend lean
somewhat too far forward and explain to the rapt group around the large glass table how
certain post-war German intellectuals had understood the sudden passion for small-plot
gardening following the war as a way of the population sublimating its newly-forbidden
fascist impulses, a way of filing and organising an intemperate natural order that was
always turning, turning, turning against the Germans. Dorsia had told him early on that she
once slept with a finance bro who, after they finished fucking, confessed he hadn’t cried in
a decade. He unthinkingly hews to the rigid desire lines traversing Potsdamer Platz on the
phone to his mother, struggling to boil down the fullness of his latest sudden attachment–
in all of its strange dimensions–and pour it through the receiver. Checking his phone on
the UBahn for signs of when Dorsia was last online, parsing once again the feeble
phraseology of his last message, he overhears a smart Puffa jacket declare into its mobile
‘regrettably it’s now almost totally over for Europe.’ He imagines the Puffa is filing its copy
over the phone to some far-off news bureau, sees ‘EUROPE: ALMOST OVER (BUT NOT
QUITE)’, P. Jacquette, Berlin Correspondent, fluttering in copperplate on a sepia gazette in
a wasterpaper basket as fan blades dice overhead. Following the turn in the weather no
one dares to visit the freshly squeezed orange juice stand in a small marquee adjoining
the unexceptional Vietnamese restaurant near his house, where he eats every day.
Its desolation is almost unbearable. It would be madly inappropriate to drink freshly
squeezed orange juice in such turned conditions. He imagines mould working itself
through the static mound of oranges perched at the top of the juicer. Not blinking is a
strategy they teach you in assertiveness training. It is said to turn your interlocutors into
play-doh in your giant mitts. Did he blink too often? He remembers as a child being
instructed by a family friend–a spunky out-of-work actress with short cropped hair and the
irrepressible elasticity of a children’s TV presenter–on how to make people pay attention.
It is quite elementary darling, the actress demonstrated to him in a square in Barcelona’s
Gothic Quarter as he blushed a deep raspberry, first you throw up your arms high
(LOOK!), then you extend them fully in front of you (AT!), then you drop to your knees and
clasp them to your bosom (ME!).

George MacBeth