BY CHLOE PLASMA
#Chaosartist Chloe Plasma channels the message from the Mothership and molds it into creative expression. Master’s in History, Master’s/All but Thesis in Creative Writing. Sun Scorpio, Moon Aries, Ascendant Cancer
Jehoshaphat! he strutted in
like grape-bunch firecracker.
Jehoshaphat! his two discombobulated eyes screeched with gears of raw metal as they swiveled like a godless jalopy around my studio. He paused to think, I think, then dodged the red light and spoke out of turn, if we had bothered taking them; for I was about to shout at the arrogant mind-screw eyeing my canvases when he submitted the following:
“Well played, sir.
Well played.”
I gaped my maw to speak but my tongue didn’t possess a single red cent to pay for my thoughts. A speechless poverty was my response. What had I done to invite this timeless entity of incongruous meaning’s praise? I studied my hands as if they were equipped to point me in the right direction. My fingers paused to wipe off a bit of grape-colored splatter from the left ring finger’s nail and shrugged an “I dunno.”
“Well. Played. SIR.”
Jumping Jehoshaphat.
In an exploding trench coat.
Was it a statement of fact.
Or a question?
“But…I’m a girl,” was the phrase which bubbled up from the depths of my logic. A stopgap’s errand. A last ditch effort to pay off a debt I couldn’t calculate to an entity who’s sole purpose of existence, I presumed at this point, was to swerve into artist’s studios at midnight and portend praise for unheralded works. Oh well, I thought. Own it. I nodded in solidarity with my gender correction.
It rolled its wayward eyes at this.
It stretched a long and seditious finger which pointed to the various artworks pieces strewn around, glancing off my ink and watercolor invocations of the mysteries. Then it spoke.
“By your works.
By your revelations.
By the course of the Great Magnet.
The sacred name of God is Creator. Translation: Artist.”
With that, it jettisoned its finger at me.
In turn I pointed my previously gobsmacked finger towards myself and screwed up my face in confusion. Was this blasphemy? I uttered a staccato revelation. “Me? Artist? God?”
It raised an eyebrow, which muttered something about me finally wrapping my monkey-mind around the point.
“You. Go. GIRL.”
And with that the portentous explosion vanished back into the nebulous Aether, back into the dreaming mind of God.
The studio settled into its per-visitation quietude. But for all the excitement I had just experimented with, I was omnipotent. An Artist. An emanation of God. The message delivered by the angelic beast was clear.
It was as if the plague year had never simmered with the suffocating miasma of its vile loathing. All the disappointments that swung from the rearviewmirror, all the self-doubt which stalked me like a malcontent semi truck, all the feelings of unworthiness like a perpetually empty tank; all these things fell off the map with the jet fuel of my outrageous confidence.
I took up my faithful ink pen, set the speed limit at infinite and careened my life full-throttle into an unexpected future.
