SmokeLong Quarterly

and it’s affect theory in action: watch them become the creature the dim bass-shaken pub demands they be. Posthuman peacocks up to the counter, tells the pretty bartender with the seven cartilage piercings i’ll have a sex on the beach. She winks a curious black-winged eye, says oh will you now? as she rims a glass with sugar crystals. Posthuman ducks their head and blushes—they’re a sucker and a sap for a beautiful modified body, and the bartender’s got such a lovely sleeve of tattoos, golden honeycomb inked along her forearm, humming bees, hexagon on hexagon. Posthuman perches on a barstool and assumes the demeanor of patron, nursing their skinned knee of a brain with alcoholic tonic. The liquor’s warmth makes a mess of their esophagus and their etiquette too, and a mere three seaside fucks later Posthuman finds themself in a dingy graffitied bathroom stall with the bartender, walls scrawled with expired declarations of love and numbers to call for a good time, and after they have kissed against the door so hard Posthuman feels their organs pressed together, heart on heart and guts on guts, the bartender pulls a tattoo gun from her purse and says what do you want and where do you want it? so Posthuman rolls up their pants leg and chooses a sublet of skin above their right knee and says go crazy and they are not afraid, not of permanence, not now or ever, because really what is there to do on this earth that doesn’t mark the body, doesn’t remake it again and again, cell by cell, into something perpetually new, and the needle buzzes like a honeybee, no, a whole hive, a collective consciousness inscribed in skin, as all consciousness must be. Posthuman leaves the bathroom with a brand new purpling hickey below their jaw and a bee’s knees pun carved into their skin and blood-ink dripping into their shoe and it’s just the kind of night they needed, to break out of the rut of forced personhood, to remind themselves that they are always first and foremost a creature caught in flux, which mires us all but can never be called a trap because it is forever loosening its sharp-toothed jaws and letting its victims become the next real thing, sending along that upspike of serotonin, the woozy spiral of a cocktail, or the night air that breathes relief into Posthuman’s heart-throbbing body as they push open the bar door like the exhale of so many smog-hidden stars.