Girls Against God

and to enchant men into impotence. They are tried for the following: murder, abduction, causing impotence, cursing, hexing and not giving birth, all paraphrases of the greatest sin: resisting power, asking questions, hating God.
But what if these divisions ceased to exist? What if you stopped drawing a distinction between women and witches, between production and reproduction? What if you no longer separated arts and crafts from witchcraft? What if you examined what happens in the bindings, in the channels, in the blasphemy, in the dark triangles?
That’s our band.
The whole world could be our witch’s dorm.
We stay only partially visible now. We keep to the underground, in the shadows, in the apartment, as we plan the future, our future as a band.
The triangle rests.
Venke can be seen sleeping by the kitchen table with a tablet on her belly. Terese is hunched over her laptop, and I open the coat closet and stare into the darkness, thinking about the girl from Puberty and her shadow.
I give her a place on the page here, and hope I don’t insult her. I just want to be close to something by being close to someone, and if I’m near her, I can perhaps be a little less primitive and pitiful; I can open up and get even closer to Venke and Terese, other people, you. Perhaps Puberty could rub a little paint off on me. Her pigments – the red and white flecks in her skin, the black background, the brown bed frame, are made from rock and metal oxides. They look like the colour charts of my own skin, my skeleton, my organs.
Or maybe it’s her shadow bringing us together, that smouldering texture up against the wall that’s so easily folded up nicely and forgotten inside a psychological metaphor or an expressionist historical detail. We step into it, into this space that’s dark and a little thicker than air. The hatred gathers into a compressed texture. There’s so much hope in here, hope that the shadow will finally get so dense that you could take it with you, or hope that you could mount it, step up off the ground and get out of here and into somewhere else. Maybe, inside this shadow, I could get closer to you, maybe in there we could change our own texture, get something and leave something behind, in a place between imagination and reality, life and death, myself and the world. We could hate together.
The palms of my hands are sweaty now, and my breath a little too quick; the way it gets when I stick my hands a little too far down into fiction, or too far off in the margins. I look increasingly like a cartoon character, sketched in a few lines, or perhaps more like that accelerating, sleepless online network. The internet is everywhere and reminds me of midmorning gruel filling up the house. Gruel is fairy tale blood, or fairy tale Wi-Fi.
Rats rummage in the basement under Venke’s apartment. They always find another impossible way into the basement storage. Even though rats don’t know about capitalism or the internet or contemporary Oslo, they know the only thing necessary, the thing I also seek. They know the underground, the ways in, the colours and the walls, and they understand how the world expands in the spit bubbles, in the uneven surface between canvas and dried oil paint, in the air pockets between our hands when we hold them, in the spaces between us; there’s always space.
We follow the rats. The rats are always just ahead of us. First come the rats, then comes the plague, call-response, and it’s never just one rat. The rats are a band; rats are always plural. Rats are always we. Ghosts, gruel, aura, fantasy, magic.
An episode:
A band composed of six girls plays in a bowling alley with gloomy lighting. They are dressed in black and the music they play gradually becomes darker and slower.
Suddenly their instruments are made of paper.
The girls begin to touch their instruments as if they don’t understand what just happened.
They pick up pairs of scissors from the floor and begin cutting up the instruments instead of playing them. The music continues as if nothing has happened.
Suddenly the girls are made of paper, too.
The girls look at their scissors, smile, turn toward each other in pairs and cut each other’s throats in one synchronised snip. Their heads topple off their bodies and massive amounts of red fibre silk paper streams from their empty necks.
THE END
The Gig
Where is God?
God is in the knitted hats of the humble billionaires, the heirs’ sailboats, and the shareholders’ velvet-lined inside pockets. God is in the pillboxes and the protein powder at the gym. God watches over the reality TV producers and the media corporations’ financial advisers. God surfaces in the threshing machines separating bad art from good art. God’s hand rests protectively over the hand that slaps your arse at school, at the rock club, at the university and on the underground. Because God is always in the system, in the sewers, in the trash, in the garbage. With the whores and the poor, like they teach us in school. In the 1990s the word whore is used frequently in the South; it’s apparently biblical enough to be used in public. Society’s trash. God looks after them, though. That’s why it’s good to be poor and exploited. You’re closer to God that way; you know better than others what it’s like to live. You’re a straight-talker. And God’s a straight-talker, too, Let there be light, he says, and there was light, and now the sun rises