Meese is the Plural of Moose

Her eyes were not fixed on god but rather on the large taxidermied moose head fixed above the choir on the wall across from where she sat. It may as well have been him. She didn’t think she believed in god, or at least he hadn’t made any statements compelling enough for her to believe in his existence at this point in her life. Giving the moose the same straight-backed attention she should be giving the concert, she pictured the moose dictating the silly thoughts she thought, the silly actions she acted. Her eyes began to burn from the staring contest inadvertently struck up with Moose, so she dropped her locked gaze from the black glass beads substituted for eyes back to the choir. Soon, her mind again drifted elsewhere, this time to the program fidgeting between her hands, sliding underneath her fingernails. She frowned at how the nice list of songs had been broken up by the feature of Byrd’s Mass For 5 Voices, which deviated from the one-line title rule followed by the rest of the program with all of its Voices.  

The girl concerned a great deal of her time with things like that; correctness, exactness, and mostly being right. This manifested itself within many a list in her head, of possible answers to questions that could be asked of her. The questions didn’t have to be probable. More often than not, they were unlikely to be asked in any situation at all. Her favorite list to consider was of words, ones she liked and ones she didn’t. Currently: trivial, superfluous, and tragic; for the words she did like. The first favorite word she could remember having was Cornucopia, in the 3rd grade. She liked to remember this fact because if anyone did happen to ask her about her favorite word, she could tell the asker how she thought it absolutely necessary to have a favorite word at the age of nine. About how she had grabbed a dictionary and flipped to an arbitrary page to pick the best word she saw. The best word on the page had been, apparently, Cornucopia. At that point in her life, she hadn’t known if she actually liked it, but she supposed she could get used to it, especially if it were to be her favorite. Even then, it had been nice to have a concrete piece of information about herself, other than her name and age. This was the story she’d tell the asker, maybe leaving out the last line. She supposed it dulled the obscure comedy of her nine-year-old thought processes. Other than this situationally changing detail, she liked to imagine herself not caring about the asker's perception of this information. Those words were her favorite, she certainly didn’t have to spell any meaning out to the asker, and they could decide whatever they preferred about her. She did care, though. 

As far as her least favorite words; pleasure, facade, purge, and embody were strong contenders. She was aware of how carnal these words were, and often considered the metaphor it held, emblemizing her disgust of bodies, the whole pulsing systems of them. Pulsing, too, was a horrid word. She hated sitting in herself, the sweating, crawling lumps that suffocated her. She couldn’t stand how her blood never seemed to circulate to her fingers, making them perpetually icy. The frizzy mats attached to her scalp infinitely yanking her head every which way, snagging on everything and nothing at all made her want to scream. The understanding that she had been sentenced to rot in a suit of flesh from the moment she was expelled from her mother’s womb and would be forced to carry out her sentence until she died.

She didn’t particularly love the idea of being around other people either though. In social situations, her skin tended to sweat more, crawling faster. The only way to avoid this was to shatter her silence, diverting her attention from the ubiquitous problem to something less tangible. But this wasn’t a simple feat. Her head would go blank, the only thought seared in her mind was usually “Say something, you fucking idiot.” This was likely why she found comfort in the lists she made, perfectly rehearsed vignettes of life. She didn’t have to be concerned about the perception of her in those moments, they were all vetted multiple times over, assured not to be construed in any other way than she had intended. 

The girl shook her head as if clearing an etch-a-sketch. She refocused her eyes on the program gripped tight in her hands. The choir had made it all the way to Hagen’s Love/Light Benedictus, and she had missed most of the concert. Her head rushed hot with shame, a bit for not paying attention but mostly because the time not paying attention was spent conceitedly thinking about herself. Her lungs tightened; she tried to inhale enough air to shake the feeling but her lungs wouldn’t let in anything more than a short breath. She thought everything might be okay if she focused on the choir, and really focused, so she could forget about her racing narcissistic mind. Instead, her eyes drifted back up to the space above and back to the moose who was seemingly amused at his newly realized incongruity. She was drawn back into his beady eyes, and in response to her intent stare, he winked.

Abruptly, the girl stood up from her seat. Causing the commotion one does as they exit a filled row, she hurriedly made her way to the aisle amidst grumbling elders. She would usually care about each specific grievance, but she had no time to apologize. Besides, what would it matter by the end of the concert anyway? Reaching the aisle, she walked briskly to the door of the church, not stopping to fix the wrinkles in her pants like she usually would. As she came to the Victorian double doors, she turned around briefly to bid farewell to the moose. At this further distance, she realized how still and stuffed he was mounted on that wall, a dismembered head, and thought better of it. She turned back around, pushing the doors open to the welcome razor-sharp cold. 

As soon as the doors were shut, she gasped in the crisp January air, gulping in as much refreshing night as her lungs could hold. She rushed down the church steps as quickly as her shaking legs would take her, and they carried her through the old snow crusted over with a sheet of ice, her feet sinking just through the top layer and contributing to her unsteadiness. She could feel clumps of ice and snow clog the space between her socks and the insides of her ankle-high boots. She didn’t fish them out, but let them dig into her tendons in resignation. Her chest heaved, sobbing with no tears until her body collapsed on the church’s front lawn, her crumpled figure illuminated by a streetlight. 

Feeling the gritty cold of snow seep into her hair and down her neck, melting in contact with her body heat, she remembered how tragically trivial it all was. Herds of concertgoers swarmed out of the doors toward their cars to go home, and she knew she would be okay.