What Work Is
Nicolle Elizabeth


The night I drank three-thousand martinis all I wanted to do was talk about looms. A loom is a machine which weaves cloth. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads. I wanted to talk about this because I found myself sitting alone outside a closed bar. Two dudes rode by on bicycles and one said to the other, "I could steal any one of these cars." He had a playing card wedged into his back bicycle-wheel spoke which shimmered silver in the moonlight, and the sound the card made got to me, it sounded like a frozen lake cracking. I started thinking about looms, as I felt as though I were coming out of a long winter. I looked at my feet, which were out of my shoes and dangling off the short brick wall I was sitting on. I looked at my hands and wished they were more calloused. A cop car pulled up toward me and said, "You going somewhere?" "I don't know," I answered. He got out of the car and came toward me, smelling my three-thousand martinis from four feet away. He said, "Public drunkenness will get you a night in the tank. Do you have someone to call?" I said, "I will speak for me."






Nicolle Elizabeth's second collection of very short fictions, Read This Sh*t Out Loud, is forthcoming from PANK.

Detail of illustration on main page courtesy of Gustav Klim.

Read more of NE's work in the archive.







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