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Back behind door number nine there was money for everything if it looked like stuff. Could you chop it in 22 minute episodes. Good, let’s shoot this fucker. And that’s the main reason I drifted right on the set of a small screen vehicle for – he’d starred in a season of cheese commercials and he was in the process of being turned into a leading man by people who fed off way too many separate sound demons, nobody seemed concerned about the fact they were making a product that would eventually stir awake gain sentience and reach out to the world at large, rolling around just saying shit, and they had positioned a giant aquarium on the dinner table as a central conversation piece, a simulation of what a wacky town apartment would become, provided the core four roommates had been in wacky college long enough, and your average no-face player had a line about dolphins, but was it aired or was it cut: the other girl actor on the scene, she had the same name I had at birth, for weeks or months she had been allowing every single fortunate soul on board to believe we were a thing, her and I, she claimed, and never in a million years this girl, a stranger, would have thought she’d get caught in the lie, and then I showed up. Balloon pop, brought to you by the devil wind.

And she had to break for lunch with me. Had to sit down at the opposite side of a cafeteria bench with the real thing.

And people asked if we were one.

And what could I say there.

–

Barbara Genova (she/them) is the pen name of an actress/writer who got stranded in Central Europe during the first Covid lockdown of many. She’s the author of Dirt City, a monthly column hosted by Bureau of Complaint. Poetry and stories written as Barbara have been featured on Hobart, Strange Horizons, Expat Press, Misery Tourism, FERAL, Last Estate, The Daily Drunk, Anti-Heroin Chic, Sledgehammer Lit, Scissors and Spackle, surfaces.cx, 433, Fahmidan Journal, The Hallowzine (2021), The Bear Creek Gazette (issue 6, winter 2021), A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Roi Fainéant Press, Poetry Super Highway, Gutslut Press, the New International Voices Series at IceFloe Press, and the Hecate Magazine anthology issue #2 (DECAY, winter 2021).

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