Mutual Aid, Mutual Lust, Mutual Regret

by Onion Madder

A revolutionary's descent into clout, carnality, and cancellation.

Content Warning: This book contains references to farts.

Chapter 2: The Trap is Set

Salvia's breath hitches, heat blooms in her belly, a shiver creeps down her spine. She clicks his profile, skimming his tweets. Walls of text dissecting labor alienation, the praxis of lewdity, the dialectics of desire. All interspersed with grainy black-and-white selfies of his hollow-cheeked face. He is angular, sunken, underfed in a way she finds intoxicating. A fellow vessel. A fellow sacrifice.

She thumbs a reply. "What would you do to smell my unholy iris?" The response is immediate. "Anything." She shifts, repositioning herself on the cum couch. Flower, her neglected rescue ferret, stirs in her cage. The sound of her rustling through days old bedding is faint, barely cutting through the rhythmic chimes of her neglectful owner's notifications. Her roommate groans. “Jesus, Salvia. I’m serious. You haven’t fed her."

Salvia’s lips purse. "She’s fasting." Her roommate’s expression contorts. “She's not fasting, she’s dying. You can’t just-” The iPhone chimes again. "I want to bury my face in your radical stench," the Marxist poet confesses.

Salvia exhales slowly.She can feel the power radiating from the screen, feel the weight of a thousand digital eyes upon her, hungering, waiting. She swings her legs off the couch, the Che tee barely clinging to her bony frame as she rises, fingers still twitching over the screen. "Come find me," She types. Her roommate lets out an exhausted laugh, bitter and disbelieving. “Oh my God. You're actually inviting this guy over?”

Salvia ignores him. She steps over empty kombucha bottles and discarded copies of The Communist Manifesto, her bare feet padding toward the only mirror in the apartment. A tall, cracked relic, stolen from a roadside pile months ago. She studies herself. The reflection is harsh. Her eyes drowning in dark circles like smudged kohl. Greasy hair clinging in limp tendrils. Her collarbones jutting, her belly soft from a gas station diet, she tilts her chin up. Swiping a clammy hand over her massive, glistening forehead.

She is beautiful. A martyr. A monument to the cause.She lifts the iPhone, angling for a selfie. The low, flickering light casts shadows in all the right places. She types: "A true comrade loves me in all my raw, unwashed glory."

She hits send.Her roommate groans again, louder this time. “I’m moving out.” Salvia smiles at her reflection. "Good."

Salvia checks her phone. 7:42 PM. He should be here soon. She gives herself a quick once-over in the mirror. Stringy hair, smudged eyeliner from three days ago. Ragged, filthy tee hanging off her bony frame. Her reflection is harsh. A thought slithers into her mind. Half impulse, half instinct. "Tonight requires more than just ideology." she half whispers, "Tonight requires *theatrics*!"

Her roommate groans loudly from the kitchen.

With a slow, deliberate movement, she peels off her damp, sweaty top and tosses it toward the tangled mess of lice-ridden filth where she sleeps. Rifling through the discarded clothes piled in a heap near the stained mattresses that occupy most of the floor, she finds something more fitting: a black mesh bodysuit, fitted with leather straps that crisscross over her ribs and hips like a human manifesto against modesty, a reeking miasma of old sex and dead ambitions. It is perfect. Raw. Revolutionary. She yanks it on, tightening the buckles, admiring the way the harness digs into her hips and collarbones. A vision. A martyr of male desire. A knock at the door. Her roommate, scrolling on his laptop at the kitchen table, doesn’t even look up. “Oh good, your little Lenin simp is here.”

Salvia rolls her eyes but doesn’t have time to dunk back on that war-crime committing fuck, because her phone suddenly chimes in her hand. Mom.

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