Madeline Cash: Earth Angel (excerpt)
Madeline Cash
purchase link for: Earth Angel
Anika picks up Jake Willner for dinner. She tells him she’s made reservations. Jake Willner says he doesn’t feel like going to dinner, he feels like going to her parent’s house to fuck. Anika tells Jake Willner that they can’t go to her parent’s house to fuck and he asks why and she says because Dominic is there and he asks why and she says because he’s a fourteen-year-old with an injured tibia from the skateboarding incident and where else would he be? Anika suggests that they return to his house, the house he alone owns at the age of twenty-five, after dinner for which she’s already made a reservation. This suggestion fills Jake Willner with rage. He asks Anika to drop him off.
“I thought we were going out.”
“I don’t feel like it anymore.”
Anika pulls the car over to the side of the road. There are billboards for AIDS and strip clubs and small defense lawyers above them.
“This isn’t where I live,” says Jake Willner.
“I’m not your driver,” says Anika.
They sit in silence. Jake Willner imagines scraping out Anika’s tongue with a soldering iron. There’s an ad on the bus stop across from them for a skincare line featuring a well-known model.
“She’s so pretty,” says Jake Willner. “Perfect body.”
“She doesn’t have arms or legs,” says Anika.
“You’re just jealous of her,” says Jake Willner.
“She’s literally a torso,” says Anika.
They stare at the model in fluorescent light hocking face cream. She stares back. Anika thinks how beautiful she is, how she really deserves to be a model and didn’t deserve that quadruple amputation. Unless it was a career move in which case she gets it. It’s hard being a woman in the workforce.
“Come on, Jake. What do you want?” Anika asks.
Jake Willner considers the question. Tonight he wants to punish Anika, but not so much that she’ll leave him, just to test her limits. In general, he wants Anika to be lithe and chic and upbeat despite his despotism. He wants her to audit her weight when she’s alone but not appear to watch what she eats when they go out. He doesn’t want to know about the intricacies of her beauty routine. He’s not the type of guy whose thoughts and desires are dictated by feminist rhetoric. He wants Anika hairless like a little girl but strong and opinionated like a woman. He wants to know that he comes before her career and wants her to know that she doesn’t come before his. He wants her to understand that when they break up he’ll find someone skinnier and chicer and better in bed and he wants her to question what she could have done differently, to understand that it was ultimately her shortcomings that drove him away. And he wants her to feel inclined to keep quiet so that her accounts of their relationship don’t later damage his public image.
“I want to go home,” says Jake Willner.
“I don’t understand.”
A couple breezes by on an electric scooter. Anika stares out the window. Jake Willner stares back from one of the billboards outside. Ghosted Season 7. Who will be giving up the ghost? Anika starts her car and drives Jake Willner home.
“I love you. I’m just feeling off tonight,” says Jake Willner.
“Okay. Whatever,” says Anika.
“What does whatever mean?”
“Whatever means whatever.”
“It sounds like you’re tacitly implying that I don’t love you,” says Jake Willner. “I’m lucky to have you. You’re my rock. My earth angel. You hang the moon for me. I’d walk through hot coals for you.”
“I just wanted to have dinner.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay,” says Anika.
*
Anika drives back to the canyon and walks through the streets, which are now lit with old-fashioned lanterns, LED lights burning instead of Kerosene or whale oil or whatever—she doesn't know. The CCTV cameras on the streetlights are disguised inside of birdhouses. The cool night air is thick with 5Gs. She walks until she crests the hill and looks out over the city with ownership.