Kazden Bracket
Fieldwork
Henry Woodland
The Experiment
Jscob Elordi Poem
Olive Parker
Bones and the Angel
Bones ate nothing. Her frame was a collection of edges held together by the lightest suggestion of skin; every waxy limb seemed to have been elongated on a medieval rack. When her stomach fought rebellions, she crushed them, and each protruding rib was a medal on her chest. Bones had feet so narrow that her shoes needed to be stuffed with paper to prevent them from falling off, and she stank of rancid garbage. Her skin had a stillborn tinge, and the clumps that
remained of her hair looked as though they had been pulled up from the shower drain, but her face, with its symmetrical and shadowy grin, was narcotic.
She had been sitting in the same spot for so long that her pelvis had bored small indents into the hardwood floor beneath. Most of the girls in the room ignored the competition, but Bones stared out. She wasn’t intimidated by the crush of clavicles and midriffs, because she was the thinnest. Bones was pressed between a particularly nervous blonde and a stink-eyed Mediterranean with a monobrow.
It was skinny bitch gridlock; this would never make it into the ‘day in the life of a Fashion Week model’ video she had been editing.
The studio was full of beautiful young women who had travelled the world to attend this casting. The models waited for hours, hunched over their phones, some wearing headphones, others sucking on vapes or bottles of still water. They fanned themselves with comp cards – glossy printouts featuring dishonest measurements and a retouched image of their face – and some cradled heavy folders of their most flattering photos. There were no
windows in the room, only strip lights and mirrors that endlessly multiplied the bored girls’ bodies.
Smile, pout, strut. The waifs strained their tongues against the tops of their mouths to make their cheekbones pop. Bones felt pleasure when they were dismissed by the notorious casting director, who seemed like he would rather be engaged in a GHB-fueled train formation than doing his job. Those selected for some combination of face, body and vibe were asked to try on a look from the upcoming collection. The rejects gracefully moved on to
the next address on their schedule.
When the blonde in front of Bones was called, she rose,
smoothing down a large and fluffy ponytail. Bones checked out her body – on the wrong side of sample size, but radiant, like a softly sweating angel. A shock of cleavage bulged from her camisole. Below a blue miniskirt, her thighs brushed together as she tottered over to the trestle table where the casting team held court.
Bones had spent hours on her outfit, perfecting the right balance of model-off-duty and medieval harlot to stand out to the brand, which was one of the most anticipated on the biannual circuit. The night before, she had researched and made moodboards. She looked at everything the casting director had ever posted on
Instagram: his loved-up selfies with his now-ex-boyfriend, the twin pugs they had adopted together, the sad haiku he posted when they broke up. Then, on the forums, she came across his leaked photo. He stood over the unflushed toilet, stark naked, shaved and barefoot, clutching his big fat cock in his hand.
The Angel held out a comp card to Fat Cock but he was giggling at his phone. He motioned to his assistant – an albino male model Bones recognised from several seasons ago. The assistant placed the card onto a tall pile of portraits, face down, so that the Angel’s pillowy cheeks copulated with the contours of the feline beauty who
had just walked.
“Go!” Fat Cock trilled. On top of her cringe style and
childbearing hips, the Angel had a bad walk. She wobbled in heels, her broad shoulders hunched and her gaze unsteady. As she moved, Bones got a glance up her skirt. Between her legs, a sanitary pad’s adhesive had come unstuck; its white plastic wings hung down,
askew and fluttering.
When she reached the end of the makeshift runway, Fat
Cock leaned onto his assistant’s streetwear-clad shoulder.
“ZZZZZZZZZZZ-” he buzzed, “you’re sending me to sleep, girl!”
“I’m sorry. Can I try again?” The Angel pleaded, her whole-milk skin now a violent strawberry.
Fat Cock lifted his head to clap his hairy hands together. “I – Want – Sexy!” he chanted, “Give – Me – Horny!”
The Angel turned and paraded towards the wall, her body
swaying in a now-forced rhythm.
“Try to relax, darling,” Fat Cock groaned. “It’s giving Victoria’s Secret reject visiting Auschwitz. Just be–” he threw out his arms, almost backhanding his assistant’s Roman nose, “–natural.”
He pranced over to yank her shoulders back and down. Looking up into the Angel’s teary eyes, his manicured beard just about reaching up to her cleavage, Fat Cock pouted and put on a baby voice. “Can you serve cunt for twenty fucking seconds?”
He grabbed the flesh of the Angel’s stomach and shoved it inwards, before returning to his seat. Core clenched, she glanced around for sympathy, but Bones was the only one watching. Their eyes met and the Angel felt as though she were leaning out the window of a very tall tower. She let down her hair, raised her chin, and focused on a dirty mark on the wall.
This time, the Angel’s legs moved with conviction: gilded curls bounced on her shoulders in time with each seductively placed step; she seemed almost to float. Bones gloomed and pulled at the pulpy skin of her knee.
The Angel stopped in front of the casting table and waited. Fat Cock didn’t look up from his phone. He hadn’t been watching. His assistant grimaced and scratched his head. “I think you’re free to go.”
The Angel stumbled blindly through a maze of limbs. When she reached her bag, she dropped down to rest her chest on her thighs and take long, deep breaths. When she looked up, Bones was striding triumphantly. Bones didn’t need to mew or suck her stomach in as she walked.
Fat Cock opened his mouth widely, then put his hands into his assistant’s jaw and forced him to do the same, “We LOVE!” He swivelled round to the stylist who sat behind them, “So good for Look One.”
The stylist pulled Bones through a curtain to the chaotic realm of interns and seamstresses. She had an Eastern accent and eyes like needle points. “I tried modelling once,” she snarled. “It wasn’t for me.”
The opening look was a black crinoline dress with a short frou-frou skirt and a laced bodice. “Strip,” the stylist ordered, so in the middle of the room, Bones took off all of her clothes and tried on the dress. It fluttered as it moved, and it gaped at the hips, waist, and bust.
The stylist stepped back and looked at Bones. “Way too big,” she muttered, “Take it off.” She grabbed the loose fabric and shook it with violence, “OFF!”
Bones gagged; up close, she could smell salad on the stylist’s
breath. She stepped out of the dress, and the woman snatched it away, muttering to herself as she headed back to consult Fat Cock.
Naked aside from the skin-coloured thong which threatened to fall off her hips, Bones gazed down at her body. She touched what were once round breasts – the nipples now deflated bruises that had lost their capacity for pleasure – and then touched her rib cage, pinching and poking it, wishing it would go flat. She ran her hands down the many angles of her back to rest on her jagged sit bones. When a mousy photographer glanced at her, Bones grinned
and arched her back, wiggling her papery folds back and forth in a gruesome twerk. The photographer scurried away, clutching with one hand his mouth and with the other his camera.
The stylist returned and lifted the gown back onto Bones, jabbing and fretting at her spine with pins. Each scrape or poke intended for the fabric raised wounds, but Bones didn’t flinch. The stylist fussed around with her footwear, pulling socks on and off. The obsidian stilettos she chose were several sizes too big, but Bones couldn’t acknowledge this – it might cost her the show. The stylist
nodded her reluctant approval, and then pushed Bones out into the spotlight.
Combs stopped in hair; wands of gloss froze against shell-shocked lips. A sea of girls looked up from their phones as Bones walked out. Her ankles rolled, and her ligaments crackled in a horrible cadence. Slavic dolls and Brazilian bombshells began to retch and heave at the
stink of sulfur and the size of her thigh gap.
Fat Cock inhaled deeply. “Diva!” he howled and jumped to his feet. “So fabulous.” He beamed a botoxed grin and pretended to wipe away a tear. “Confirmed!” Then he began to hum the viral banana song and wiggle his crotch in approximation of the corresponding fruity dance moves.
The Angel meanwhile sat on the kerb outside waiting for her ride request to be accepted. Her phone wobbled in her hand as ghost cars drove past onscreen. Even the drivers didn’t want her. As she mentally prepared herself to take the bus, the Angel heard a peculiar clamour from the studio behind her.
In her excitement, Bones had forgotten to stuff her shoes, so as she sprang out of the studio, she tripped and was launched into mid-air. When the Angel looked at Bones, she could see the faint light of the sun shining through her translucent skin.
Then Bones crashed and tumbled down the stone steps. Joints and sinews popped! Epidermis contorted and torn cartilage was exposed! A cloud of ash rose as femur, fibula and tibia ground together.
The Angel leapt up as the crunch reverberated. Bones lay crumpled, arms where legs should be, feet turned the wrong way around. The Angel rummaged through her tote bag for anything that might be of assistance. The only compress she could find was a sanitary pad.
The Angel knelt in front of Bones and unwrapped the smooth plastic parcel. “Sorry, this is all I have,” she whispered. “It’s clean.” She pressed the pad to Bones’ knee, which was smeared with a substance that resembled cremated remains.
Bones dashed the pad onto the floor, then shot up. She towered over the Angel and placed a hand on her face, running five spiny fingers over the girl’s cheek then lifting her up by her buccal fat, and smiling. “They confirmed me,” Bones said, and then spat into the Angel’s shaking mouth and dropped her onto the ground. Bones then limped a cackling danse macabre down the alley onto the busy street, where she vanished into the crowd without looking back. All that remained of her was the discarded sanitary pad on the ground.
The Angel lay sprawled and dazed in the cold sun. She picked up the ash-stained pad and held it over her nose and mouth, breathing in and out until she had stopped trembling.T.C. Hell
A flat massive thing already
Jane Dabate
Cup Drove Daisy
Reid Williams
Made on Honor, Sold on Merit
Sunset Limited
Rachel Dastgir
The Rabbit
Sedrick Chisom
G 32 22 32
Colton Karpman (Founding Editor)
Editor’s Note
Dilara Koz (Art Director)
Em Bauer (Illustrator)
Isaac Zamet (Poetry Editor)
William McGuire (Prose Editor)