- Olivia Brooks
- Oct 27
- 8 min read
Updated: Oct 30
If This Matters
1. The night spills into you. You cannot walk to clean your sheets so you writhe in them,
sweat-tangled and always, throbbingly awake. Like the acid dissolved more than skin, dissolved
the membrane between days. You tumble from one into the next, do not sleep, do not speak
except to the open mouths of your wounds.
When it first happens, the burns are birth mark-red, thrilling across your knees. Then your skin begins
to fall. It is slow, white bubbling under red, and then it is all at once, for weeks on end.
You crack, crust, and weep. You roll in slivers of discarded selves. One night the whole skin of
your knee lifts off, drying, desiccating, and underneath it all, flesh a ruin red.
IF THIS MOMENT WAS INEVITABLE, GO TO SECTION 2
IF THIS MOMENT WAS RANDOM CHAOS, GO TO SECTION 3
2. You have spent your life blinking in and out of existence. It is like – suddenly you are
elsewhere, time disappears and you don’t know where it goes. Where are you in that time? What
are you?
IF YOU EXIST WHEN YOU LOSE TIME, GO TO SECTION 4
IF YOU STOP EXISTING WHEN YOU LOSE TIME, GO TO SECTION 5
3. You got this summer job out of high school because you emailed your now-boss and her PhD
didn’t prepare her for rejecting overeager seventeen year olds so you followed her around the lab
for three years, even though you decided freshman year that maybe the pre-med-to-coroner plan
wasn’t a great backup for if the creative writing didn’t pan out because you couldn’t read your
organic chemistry textbook without wanting to kill yourself. Joking. Probably.
IF YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN IN THIS LAB, GO TO SECTION 6 IF YOUR BOSS
WAS THE PARENTAL FIGURE YOU NEVER HAD, GO TO SECTION 7
4. Noah was kicked out of your high school because a teacher caught him having sex on the
school grounds with her daughter. You meet him five years later at a friend’s terrible rap
performance in the Bronx. Your friend skips over the rhythm like a careless schoolgirl in summer
and Noah watches him–smirking–and you, you watch Noah. His eyes glitter beetle-black. He
drives you and your friend home and your friend texts you, Don’t do it, but your friend’s also
been trying to sleep with you for years and besides, you texted Noah before you left the car.
Your and Noah’s song is Closer by The Chainsmokers, which would be the biggest red flag if
not for the fact that he spends ten minutes on your first date telling you, I just feel bored around
most people. I know how they work and so I just don’t connect with them. He says he’s a drug
runner for a gang and you’re pretty sure that he’s lying but it doesn’t really matter. You kiss him
first, pushing him onto a mattress on your floor, and when you fuck, it is like drowning.
The night before the acid burns, you stay awake until the dawn creaks into the sky,
sending Noah texts that are all tongue and skin and when you walk into work the next morning,
the world sways, snaps, spills.
GO TO SECTION 8
5. You live in France with your aunt between high school and college. Her disdain arrives in
trickles, then like a dam unloosed. She stops talking to you altogether. You walk the streets each
day until she sleeps. Caught between languages, you do not speak for days and when you open
your mouth the wind whistles through like no words left anymore.
Your parents call you–your father to tell you that Delphine hates you–But why? you
ask–your mother to tell you, We’ve moved! When you return to New York you are just residue.
Your parents divorce, your father returns, moves in with his girlfriend. You walk the long way,
always, at night, postpone returning to the place they used to live, now a shell just running out its
lease. You sit, often, outside it, on the street corner for hours and watch the streetlights change
colors and you think about lying flat in the middle of the street, not because there are cars
coming, but because there is nothing at all.
When the acid spills, you are surprised you can feel it.
GO TO SECTION 8
6. Before the acid burns, the other intern nearly spills a chemical on you. This chemical can
cause Cancer, capital C, like you tell your friends later, for dramatic effect. It probably does other
things too. Earlier in the summer, your boss gets stuck in the mouse room–you have to break her
out, she stabs you with a heroin needle, you lose a mouse and spend fifteen minutes on your
hands and knees, crawling. When you spill, maybe it is like catastrophe, long trapped, breaking
free–like that mouse!–when you spill it is because no one explained to you how far back
chemicals should be under the fume hood.
GO TO SECTION 8
7. When you call from the bathroom, she is already scared for you. She brings you new
pants–hers–because the acid eats yours, and she carries you down the hall–you limp on devoured
legs. Her pregnant belly bobs in front like lost at sea, like she carries both of you now. The
morning after you do not die, she comes to you,tight-wringing wringing hands, I couldn’t sleep,
she says, I couldn’t sleep at all, I was just thinking of you.
GO TO SECTION 8
8. Pain. Searing, blistering, breaking, not meant to survive this pain. Your boss sits with you as
you scream, for two hours, scream.
You call your second job first, don’t know how to explain to the gelato shop manager that
you won’t make your night shift because you are in the hospital with acid burns. Then you call
your father. Silence, then, Well does it hurt?
I mean…yeah.
Oh. Well is it urgent? Do you need me now, I was just about to go have drinks with
friends.
I guess I’ll still be here after.
After two hours, he arrives, boss leaves. He stays for fifteen minutes, takes a picture while you
are in your bra, while the nurse attaches monitors like leeches, sends it to your mother. Then
leaves. The doctor says you might have permanent nerve damage. The acid might absorb into
your bloodstream, reach your organs.
IF THE ACID IS A QUEER METAPHOR, GO TO SECTION 9
IF THE ACID IS A MENTAL HEALTH METAPHOR, GO TO SECTION 10
IF THE ACID IS LITERAL, GO TO SECTION 11
IF THE ACID NEVER EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE, GO TO SECTION 12
9. You started fighting with your father years ago when your agency became inconvenient. He
has never said so directly but some of it must have to do with your queerness, when the tensions
are the deconstructive parts of you, the sideways bits. You spill acid on yourself and if this is
metaphorical acid, you are liberated, absorb acid into queer body, exist as joyfully, intentionally
other–the acid as a metaphor for the deconstructive nature of queer ideology.
IF THIS IS A QUEER JEWISH STORY GO TO SECTION 13
IF THIS IS A WHITE QUEER STORY GO TO SECTION 14
IF THIS IS A STORY ABOUT QUEER FOUND FAMILY GO TO SECTION 15
10. Can one element in a story be a metaphor for another element, when that second element is
already there? Isn’t that just redundant? You call Dmitry, your dance partner that you’re sleeping
with, I spilled acid on myself.
By accident? he asks.
IF THIS ENDS IN A DIAGNOSIS, GO TO SECTION 16
IF NOAH AND DMITRY DUKE IT OUT, GO TO SECTION 17
11. Before your father leaves, before he even arrives, you sit in a shower with a nurse.
Someone, maybe the nurse, sprays high pressure water onto your knees. The pain is white sun
hot and you cannot see his face. But he holds your hand, lets you squeeze his so tightly his
joints crackle. It hurts.
I know. I’m sorry. We have to do this.
What’s going to happen to me?
I don’t know.
Will it scar?
Probably.
Will I still be able to dance?
I don’t know.
You spend the night in the Emergency Room in Spanish Harlem, so busy there is
nowhere to put your cot. It sits in the middle of the room as if someone rolled it there and then,
maybe their name was called. The doctor forgets your IV, the thing washing acid out of your
blood, for those keeping track.
IF THIS MATTERS, GO TO SECTION 18
IF IT DOESN’T GO TO SECTION 19
12. Technically, Phenol is an acid, but only a mild one. The burns on your legs are chemical
burns. You think it’s more dramatic to call them acid burns.
IF YOU TELL THIS LIE IN A MEMOIR GO TO SECTION 20
IF YOU TELL THIS LIE TO YOUR FRIENDS GO TO SECTION 21
13. Your father, comes from family fled from Holocaust, aunts and uncles all dead, he is not. His
father tucked Judaism away like diary like secret, like never again, tucks everything away like
this. Your queerness is too visible, too loud– diary read screaming. You spill acid on yourself, if
this is a metaphor it’s about the dangers of hidden blood, father could not bear to see it be made
manifest, leaves the loudness of it.
GO TO SECTION 22
14. You spill acid on yourself because you stayed up too late texting an emotionally unavailable
man. Your father takes two hours to arrive and you are white and he is white and he works on
Wall Street and you have spent years waiting for him to arrive and we all know this story. The
queerness is incidental.
GO TO SECTION 22
15. Your friends bring you cookies, Thai food, and a face mask. They sit on your cot, so close to
your burned legs, stay with you, with it, until midnight. And don’t forget the boss.
GO TO SECTION 22
16. Which one? The depression? The anxiety? The burns? Does the father have a diagnosis?
Does it matter? Why does the medicalization add validity to one type of breaking, make for an
uneven breaking, why does one person have to carry that break?
GO TO SECTION 22
17. Noah and Dmitry aren’t the point. Six years later you meet a beautiful boy with no
father. Yours asks where his is, Gone, you say.
Your father says the beautiful boy should still talk to his father, He is his father after all,
maybe misunderstanding something about the word “gone” or the word “father.”
GO TO SECTION 22
18. The doctor tells you that your heart rate will accelerate if the acid reaches your organs. You
press your fingers into your neck so hard you leave bruises. The next cot over, your neighbor
receives a terminal Cancer diagnosis, begins to weep.
GO TO SECTION 22
19. When the nurse asks who is picking you up, you say no one. She asks how you are getting
home. You say you will walk, then you will take the bus. You do not understand her facial
expression until later, when you are in bed for many days, now not able to walk anymore because
the skin-now-gone shows what your knees look like on the inside.
GO TO SECTION 22
20. You don’t mention the father at all.
GO TO SECTION 22
21. And what does this fictionalization do? Replace the word with something more dramatic,
something with a hazier relationship to truth, does it drag the whole story down with it, does the
haze of fiction un-burn you, un-hospitalize, un-spill, un-leave you?
GO TO SECTION 22
22. By the end of the summer you do not have scars, as if your body swallows up all evidence, a
swamp a crime scene. You spend hours poking, scratching, staring at each new mole like it is a
clue, like it matters, like it will save your life.
SARAH "SAM" SALTIEL is a queer and nonbinary artist, writer, and game designer based in Olympia, WA. They have a Fiction MFA from Brown University and teach creative writing and game design at Evergreen State College. Across mediums, their work is relational, positioning art-making as an act of community-building through interactive and collaborative pieces and practices. In particular, they are interested in process-based stories that demonstrate an active and ongoing process of thought, rather than centering the writer as an authoritative or declarative figure.
More work can be found at http://www.sarahsamsaltiel.com.