Meta Life Lessons
Trigger Warning: Dog
by Chris Clemens
No, that’s the name of the story, not an actual trigger warning. I mean, there MIGHT be a dog to watch out for. But that’s part of the fun of reading, isn’t it — the infinite horizon, shaved down, bit by bit, into a sharp surprise. Will a dog suddenly appear, a huge Saint Bernard, slobbering all over you like a clumsy rapist in the basement? Unclear. But now that the seeds of this idea have been planted: probable. At least if it’s a good story.
However, this is not a good story, as you’ve surely noticed. For one, it’s calling too much attention to itself. There’s no main character, no narrative drive or sensory experience. There is an oversized dog, disturbingly characterised as a rapist. Me, the writer, becoming odious through my weird intrusions. And you, the reader: the only cool one of the bunch.
Now the vague outline of a horrid word appears. Trace the four letters with your tongue and they taste like ashes: M E T A. The all-knowing smirk, the selfish negation, the juvenile unravelling of love and safety and earnest passion. Nothing even matters, man! Just look at me, writing about writing about writing to the very centre of meaninglessness, wasting everybody’s time when the world lies beyond the boundaries of screen, of page, of room. In deconstructing, we lose our opportunities to taste the sun, to grow tomatoes on sticks, to tuck a child in softly, to squeeze corporate throats, to smell freshly laundered clothes, to fend off an amorous beast.
We miss life in attempting to spool it through our belly buttons.
“Um, who is this WE?” you ask. “I’m not doing this shit. I’m barely on my phone these days.”
Well, sure. I already know you’re cool. You have hobbies, responsibilities. You’ve got stuff going on, like this whole Saint Bernard situation. But I tend to make sweeping generalisations — it is my nature — and so you’ll just have to know that this meta-slog doesn’t include YOU, and we can laugh together at all the rubes entrapped by the self-referential worlds in their bellies. Ha!
Of course, creature comforts have their appeal. Living this much can tire one out: running from a careening cannonball of teeth and fur, hiding behind an overturned couch, gasping into the scratchy wool. Is it comfortable? When I get sleepy I like to watch reruns of The Office, but only the earlier seasons, before servility to capital seeps in. Now people pay fifty dollars for a photo tour through the show’s sets. They pose with replica spilled chilli, pretend to cry on TikTok. It’s hard to remember where reality should be sometimes.
Maybe I shouldn’t have laughed earlier. Is it funny to pretend we’re not trapped? Imagine taking a break from made-up things for a while: lying in a field full of tomatoes, trying to lick the sun, licking a tomato instead. Imagine smelling rich corpses in fresh suits. Imagine your child already asleep. Imagine escaping a passionate basement. Your mind probably won’t let you.
Have you ever noticed that life is boring, even when it’s scary? Pull the trigger: bark bark! What if your clothes were linked into your nervous system, subtly influencing your mind? Have you ever thought of your clothing as autonomous alien beings?
“What the fuck? No,” you whisper. Fabric weighs against your skin as you crouch, breathless, beneath the stairs.
If this sounds like a convenient distraction, like something out of a Japanese anime, well of course it is. Kill la Kill is about high school politics, powerful costumes from outer space, and a cartoon dog who gets horny nosebleeds from perving out on panties, which is off-putting, to say the least, but that’s an issue with a lot of anime: uncomfortable sexualisation of schoolgirls intruding upon a fun premise. Surely fantasy fiction MUST be possible without the threat of shattered innocence looming over every scene, every paragraph.
Anyway, the point of the anime is that freedom is nudity, and if you take off your torn-up jeans or skirt or whatever you’ve got, whip the Saint Bernard mercilessly with that writhing alien cloth, it should buy you some more time.
I hope you know that not all passion is worth having. Sometimes the answer is NO for a reason. Sometimes the locked door at the top of the stairs remains locked; that’s just reality. And when sharp teeth sink into your ankle and drag you screaming and bumping back down, when despair is at its most honest, maybe you’ll find new value in the simplicity of survival.
Scratch and kick and bite while I comment annoyingly from the sidelines. Feel the immense furry weight of the world on your chest, holding you down.
But pull the trigger one last time — bark! — because, no matter how strange or misguided, stories only work if there’s some kind of hope, and YOU know that I know this.
A gate of golden light opens above. Through the doorway children are dreaming, and fragrant red tomatoes crawl toward the sun. A wide-eyed girl flexes her enormous scissor blades; together you will inflict great vengeance upon executive suits, upon all horny dogs. You’ll retire at the Michael Scott Paper Company, where there’s never a dress code.
And as you scramble up the stairs, away from this insane, aggressive Saint Bernard, out of the claws and maws of darkness, realise that you left your ruined clothes — lost something else, too — down in the ill-described basement of this shitty story.
But don’t worry: I’ll save it all here for you until next time.
Chris Clemens lives in Toronto, surrounded by raccoons. His stories have appeared in Invisible City Lit, Apex Magazine, and elsewhere.
