IMPOSSIBLE GIRL - 8

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He looked good. Hair impeccably styled to make it look casual. Well cut suit and shoes that were conservative enough to not look audacious but out there enough to give him a fashionable edge.

He smiled when he saw her and only the slightest hints of lines crinkled the edge of his eyes. IGirl guessed botox but perhaps he just aged well.

“You’re not leaving already?”

IGirl looked him over and weighed up the idea of sleeping with him….. again.

Mark was an element of her past that had made his way back into her present. Or perhaps she had made her way into his, either way neither of them were going anywhere.

An agent and occasional producer she had met him as a teenager, a naïve model hopeful trying to making it big. He was charming and exciting and successful and she went out of her way to make him notice her.

Eventually he did and there was probably about a year’s worth of mistrustful dating, sex and mind fucking before he dumped her for another model.

The model he dumped her for was three years older than she was and had fat thighs. It made her feel worse because he hadn’t chosen someone better looking than she was, he had chosen someone closer to his own age, more interesting to him.
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IMPOSSIBLE GIRL - 7

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She can hide behind her mask. Camouflage herself with attitude. It makes her stand out and appear more mysterious. It’s what people want but also something they don’t understand. Couldn’t even if they wanted to, and she knows no one here wants to.

In her hour of glory she is completely alone. Isolated by secrets and lies and plasticity and an impossible hunger. Happy only in short bursts of forgetfulness.

With him she never felt lonely or fake. When they were together her mind was clear and her body alive. Their happiness an epiphany so all consuming that she couldn’t see the end coming, which of course it was. An end of sorts anyway….

Roly was doing his best diva imitation, ranting something at the poor new assistant and pawing at a skirt worn by one of IGirl’s favourite models. It was clearly pissing them both off.

She took over, getting the model out of the skirt and sending Roly out the front. He was better value as a schmoozer and she could do without the tantrums.

Everything went smoothly. The latest IGirl collection fed to an eager audience. Bouquets and congratulations all round. The money wheel given another sweeping turn. She lapped it up. Took her shot of happiness. Quaffed vintage champagne and accepted her accolades. An hour later she was making her way to the exit when Mark arrived.

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EVINRUD - 3

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Game on
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EVINRUD - 2

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It’s my friend. My tool and my friend. A symbiote maybe. It has known and forgotten more than I can imagine. It’s more efficient than me and possibly even more trapped. We exist together, Evinrud and me in the moment, in the pulse.

It’s 5.52am on Sunday the 8th of December and the pulse senses there’s a job pending. It pulls me out of myself, out of the deep meditative state I have been in for how long now? Oh, there’s the dank smell of the sub-basement. I check the DTM through crossed eyes and almost throw up. It’s… it’s been two weeks. Two weeks of virtually incognizant training, strategic gaming and drip fed sustenance. Not asleep, not awake but I remember dreams of trees, masses of them.

I’ve seen the planet, a hundred times, but its always going by so fast. I see places that only a runner ever will. But I’ve never seen that landsacpe, not close up, amongst it... those silos. It’s a precog local I know that. I’ve been doing this for that long. The planets remaining green zones are closed, secure, you need clearance, military clearance. That will make it tricky.

Ahh, there’s the adrenaline. My first thought is coffee and my second is boots. The shoes, boots they’re going to be good, I can smell them box fresh. The latest. Oh and the coffee.

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IMPOSSIBLE GIRL - 6

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The hotel venue was packed. Hungry looking fashionistas flanked the catwalk. Big eyes eager, hoping the excitement, the look will make up for the voids in their stomachs. IGirl knew that hunger, or worse, as a model she had starved herself for work. When she left that world she had sworn she would never feel hunger again. The irony now was that she felt constant hunger, it was a different hunger from that of the skinny women seated around the stage but came with the same gnawing emptiness.

She was sated now, or reasonably. Enough to get her through this night, perhaps even enough to enjoy it. But not fully sated, for that she would have to cross a line.

It was typical chaos backstage. Designers fretting, models glaring and bitching over the outfits. Roly was backstage with another newly acquired assistant.

People stared at her as she walked through, jealousy and vitriol in their eyes, perhaps a bit of fear, IGirl couldn’t tell but she wondered how she had become so popular so quickly when everyone in the industry appeared to hate her.

‘The more they hate you the better off we are,’ Roly would say.

And weirdly it was true. She flicked a closed mouth smile, an occasional nod and made her way through to her own camp.

Tokyo Fashion Week and she was headlining opening night. An ornate mixture of gothic historical and dark urban influences sensitively combined and almost brutally displayed had made her designs the toast of the year, so far.

Applause, money, envy, she was both drawn to it and repulsed by it. It was like an addiction to be loved and hated, habitually fed. Another habit to feed, to run parallel with the one he had given her. But that was a disease not an addiction, there was no rehab centre that could cure her. Pointless even to think of it.
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IMPOSSIBLE GIRL - 5

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Eyes closed she thinks of him. Imagines him by her side, arm around her, brushing her mini coat, the coat he had inspired with his touch. It wasn’t over, not yet. But it was definitely complicated, love misplaced in the mire of what they had become. What he had made her. What he had made of himself.

They’re playing his song now, as if to torment her. The sound caressing the air outside the hotel. The opening riff electric, lyrics addictive, the song another thread in the Impossible Girl mystery. It was the most downloaded song internationally for the past two months. He too had become a success, a public entity.

His critics ascribed the bands success to the IGirl phenomena and his relationship with her. It was a sword in the side of their once passionate alliance. Stupid really, she had always felt like the symbiont to his creative self. It was only one of the swords anyway; there were others that cut deeper. That dream had all but collapsed.

Still she makes fashion. Spends hours cutting, painting, sewing, transforming. Inspired by the dark, cutting at the ugly until she can expose its raw beauty. An ongoing obsession, a desire to distill elegance from the gloom to find strength in life’s weakness. She used to think it was about expressing herself, now she fears it is to find her self. An attempt to recover an impossible something from the endless rolls of black textile.

Roly would say it was all for the money and that this was a worthy enough cause. Champagne and luxe hotels. What else could she possibly want? Perhaps he had a point.

‘You can’t be a fully satisfied hedonist with integrity. Just thinking you can is greedy,’ he would say.

Roly was her manager, faithful assistant, number one wheel in the publicity machine. He was the true sculptor of IGirl, had molded her for public consumption. He knew everything and nothing about her. He didn’t know her secret. Would he care anyway?

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Title - D

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IMPOSSIBLE GIRL - 4

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Bones like antlers protrude from the back of her head. Face painted as if for war. The Impossible Girl steps from her impossibly long car and into the impossible space she has created for herself. A flash illuminates her. Stony faced and bare breasted with a split black skirt. Paparazzi heaven, they lap it up, their latest enigma knows how to grace the stage.

Still that is. When she moves it’s stilted, robotic, not quite real. The eyes betray her too. Conflicted.

Who are these creatures and what have I become?

A flicker of fear, conscience… which she quickly wipes away. Steels herself against it and moves forward. An odd slow shuffle. She stops to smile, closed mouth, lips purple and fleshy covering the secret make up can’t hide.

There are no questions for the Impossible Girl. The gossip feeders aren’t interested in cracking the veneer. It’s enough to observe and dissect her image, wait for the publicity machine to pump a story their way, and if it doesn’t arrive on time they can fabricate their own. It’s the charade that people want, the element of the unreal.

Her closed smile is captured, still lifed by another dozen or so flashes before she moves on. Pointy heels scrape the tired red carpet beneath her. She’s not the first momentary idol to have graced its surface.

The door looms nearer, act one in its closing stage, act two about to begin.

Writing by N K Curtis.

Sketchbook - 2

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IMPOSSIBLE GIRL - 3

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"BUT WHAT AM I BECOMING?"

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IMPOSSIBLE GIRL - 2

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"MY REASONS FOR BEING ARE MY OWN"
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