The atlas has these qualities: it reveals the form of the women that do not yet have a form or a name. The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its woman, new women will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of women begins. In the last pages of the atlas there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end, women in the shape of leaders, thinkers, writers, mothers, friends, humans without shape or borders.
Women & the Dead 5
By tomorrow morning, the woman down the hall will be dead. We wish this were some kind of petty prediction, God knows we do, but this is all true. We wish it weren’t because the truth of the matter is that we love the woman down the hall. She is our favorite tenant, but the woman down the hall, she’s cursed with clairvoyance, and she’s known since she was a child. She’s known exactly when she would die.
We remember the very first time we met her. She came to see the open apartment, and when we saw her that very first time and she saw us, she said, “Yes, this is it. This must be it.” And we had no idea what she meant, but it only took us that one meeting, those first few words, and we fell in love with her. We wanted to know more. We wanted her to stay here with us forever so when she told us about her death, we shut off our ears and refused to listen, but the truth remains that by tomorrow morning, she will be dead, and no matter what we do to try to prevent it, we won’t be able to.
We think it would be horrible to know the things she knows, but the woman down the hall is grateful. That’s the kind of woman she is. She’s the kind of woman it would be impossible not to love, and we hate her for all her kindness and understanding. We hate her for her wisdom. We hate her for her mortality.
Women & the Sky 4
The woman down the hall does not really exist. She is foam, moving between walls and into our noses and throats. Quite often, we can feel her in our bodies, moving things around. It isn’t an unpleasant feeling and we generally do not even mind. We know that the woman down the hall is trying to help us because that’s what she does. In exchange for a room for her to expand in, she offers us immunity from disease. She enters our mouths and ears and boosts our bodies with her magic.
We often wonder about this woman down the hall, why it is that she is the way she is, and she tells us that we wouldn’t understand, but that if we knew our folktales, she’s in there. She is the shadow that was left behind for our benefit, and whereas we are flattered — no honored — we can’t help but be sad for her, that she must live here, with us, when she belonged to a time so very long ago, a time of folk tales and magic and sublime fairy tales, a time without maps, a time of legends, and that she must endure this, just for us.
Continuous Women 3
The woman down the hall has hair longer than is even possible. Sometimes, we think she is Rapunzel, but we don’t believe in fairy tales so we ignore this possibility. We should note, however, that she lives at the apex of this building, that even though we say she lives down the hall, she really lives up the hall, high up, higher up that we can even see.
We’ve never seen her room, this woman down the hall. We’ve never even seen its door, although we’ve tried. Lord knows we’ve tried. Just the other day, in fact, we took the stairs up to her room — the elevator doesn’t go up that high — but we kept stepping and stepping until we’d stepped for days, and even then, there was no door. Our building isn’t so tall and yet we couldn’t reach it’s top. So we stepped for more days and days until one of us, we’re not sure who, passed out of exhaustion, but still, we forged upward. We hiked our way up until we literally couldn’t go one step further. Then, we rolled bodies into tight balls and bounced our way down. We simply could not have endured all those steps again.
And yet, when we see this woman down the hall who we like to call Rapunzel we do not ask her how she gets into her tower. Instead, we prefer to watch her knit her hair in the lounge. We try to not to disturb her, lest she lose count of her stitches and must begin anew.
Hidden Women 2
The woman down the hall is anonymous. She could be any woman. She looks like every other woman. There is nothing particularly noticeable or unique about her. The woman down the hall is a faceless woman among so many others, another person wandering in a crowd.
We have never seen a woman so plain, so utterly unremarkable. Perhaps this is why we are so interested in her. We try to speak with this woman, but she is so plain that she slips away without us even noticing, and another woman, equally uninteresting, has taken her place. This is not something we notice at first, but there is some small glimmer of difference between the two or three or however many of them there are. We notice only because we watch. We observe her and her other anonymous friends. We are certain we can unlock the truths behind every woman if only we can know one of them.
But they are not really every woman, and they are not truly anonymous. We have learned that they too have names and homes and some of them live right down the hall. Imagine that! These women that we’re only now learning to recognize have lived right down the hall all these years if only we’d bothered to notice.
Women & the Sky 5
The woman down the hall, she’s a crazy old loon. She’s not to be trusted. The old crone is the devil, we swear. We’ve never seen anyone so wretched, just for the sake of being wretched. She twists our ears to watch our eyes swell with salty tears, to watch our eyes clench shut for the stinging, to see our noses begin to drip, and she doesn’t stop until our mouths are filled to the brim with snot, and even then, she makes us swallow it in one gulp before she releases us, and we hate her. We’ve never hated anyone so much in our lives.
And yesterday, you won’t even believe this, yesterday, that old bitch down the hall pinched a cloud from the sky and crumpled it into the smallest ball, and that old witch down the hall punched us square in the jaw so hard that our faces broke, and that old woman laughed and laughed.
It was then that we decided that she had to die, that we can’t stand even one more moment of her alive.
So we killed her.
Continuous Women 4
The woman down the hall simply doesn’t know how to shut up. We swear she talks and talks like she doesn’t even need to stop for air, and when we see her, we run. We call her Dragon Woman — infernaled — and it wouldn’t be so bad if she only talked about more interesting things, but she doesn’t. Dragon Woman gabs about the most banal things. She goes on and on about her pewter plates and how she chose pewter, and sometimes, the mere imitation of the sound makes us sick. Sometimes, we hear the word computer and by default, we want to spit up. She’s insufferable, this Dragon Woman with her continuous words. Seeing her, we want to plug up our ears, but even then, her voice has this way of sneaking in, the nasal squeak makes us want to shove a whole box of tissues down her throat.
Hidden Women 3