Genocide Girls Has Pretty Alliteration

Jordan Davidson, USA

Jenna tastes like light. Not the gentle kind you get from the sun setting over the country houses back home, where kissing a girl would get me a lashing with more than a tongue. This light is sticky-sweet tequila and mango vape fluorescents hanging over clubs filled with grinding girls and gay bars the city’s tried its best to burn out of the woodwork like rats.

No one wants us here.

Not that we mind—we paint ourselves on every open concrete edge: if both of us are going to die anyway, then we might as well die here, works of fucking art. Some call it a biblical plague, others of us call it a bio weapon and bio terrorism and go to sleep thinking about how genocides take place so easily when no cares to clean off a prior victim’s grave.

I said this to Jenna one time, when we had gotten so fucked up on shrooms that I spent eight hours hunched over the toilet, seeing stripes fade in and out of our wallpaper. Between kissing the inside of the bowl, I told her, “Why the hell would anyone want to kill us? We’re so cool.”

She took a drag off her pen and blew a cloud with her nostrils. I meant it as a joke. She didn’t find it funny. We aren’t perfect matches. She smokes. I don’t. She keeps everything alphabetized, color coordinated, and its proper place. The floor on my side of this crappy apartment hasn’t seen daylight or stars in over a month. Jenna asks how I still have clean underwear: I tell her with maybe months to live we shouldn’t have to worry about doing laundry anymore, come on, splurge a little, Baby, buy some lingerie with me.

We did. She bought red and I bought white and together we ruined our virgin sacrifices in candy colored sheets with her head between my legs and me licking powdered sugar off her shoulder.

She tasted like light then too. Because light tastes like the sugared margarita rims we traded for vodka with cranberry chasers. I tried to drink it thought a straw, and shot shots through my nose; I coughed up less than blood. Jenna said, “If you fucked this up that bad, how bad are you going to fuck me up?”

Bad.

Me and Jenna. Jenna and me.

Me. Doubly bred and blooded for this genocide, the kind of girl who couldn’t decide who she wanted to kiss because hell, why would she want to when girls and guys and enbies all kiss better than fresh strawberry jam and her fake mama’s flip flop? I’m as white and as jewish as my Ashkenazi bones. To hell with the Catholic responsibility of adopting children—the mother who took me to the holocaust museum at eight and gave me her freckles will always be more my mother even if the car accident left her dead and me in foster care.

Burn me at the stake or in the gas chambers, bitch. I love who I love, I worship who I worship: God and Jenna.

Jenna. Doubly dead too for never kissing anybody but girls (telling me she loves me), and being blacker than a staticky tv’s portrait of a night sky. Don’t know much about her past; she just knows that where I came from I was desperate enough to leave with nothing but a rusty red bicycle, and a train ticket, and fifty four stolen dollars wilting in my left c-cup.

We fuck each other up all kinds of ways. How me met doesn’t matter. Only Jenna matters, Jenna with her head on my chest. Both of us coughing up blood.

“Not to long now,” she tells me, fingers locked in mine.

“Fuck the bio-terrorists.”

We knew we’d get it: the stuff spread from lip to lip hand to hand head to head couldn’t touch a subway railing or buy chips at a gas station without getting sick. When we learned about it Jenna turned to me and said, “let’s live our last days, Livvia, instead of hiding in them.”

Took me a day or two, but I relented.

That we lasted two months is more than the miracle that I prayed for, adding candles like Hanukkah candles to the windowsill, letting them burn till they burnt out.

The candles are all flickering now. I get up and blow them out: just because Jenna and I are passing doesn’t mean everyone else in this building has to too. I can barely walk to do it. Cough, cough, down on my hands and knees crawling back to her. My lungs fucking hurt. There’s blood streaming all down my chin. Damn. This used to be a cute shirt.

“Is the last thing you want to talk about the bio-terrorists?” Jenna asks.

“No.” I want to talk about her, to taste her.

She tastes like light. Like the fluorescent signs I stole hanging above us, like sugar and candy sex, like Jenna. She tastes like Jenna.

Like—

Jordan Davidson is a student at Yale University where she majors in Procrastinating by Writing, specifically concerning calculus. It’s worked out alright for her: she’s been honored by the National YoungArts foundation for two consecutive years, and her work has been previously published in Aster Lit, the Common Tongue, and Corvid Queen among others.