COURTNEY BILL holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Victoria. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, PRISM International, The New Quarterly, Plenitude, The Malahat Review, Canthius, The /tƐmz/ Review, Eavesdrop Magazine, and elsewhere. Her fiction was a finalist for Adroit’s 2024 Prize for Prose judged by Ocean Vuong and Kaveh Akbar.
Vogue says that she is angelic, moronic, a roxy confection. She is your Dream Girl. A golden retriever lesbian. Glossy-lipped all-American only-child beauty. She is a fan favorite. Unmissable. She excels at the New Yorker crossword. She is good at unbuttoning jeans one-handed. She is so organic and fresh and feminine. She's so off-limits, she’s so gay. She is misted and packaged and thin and white like an overpriced vegetable on a produce rack. Everybody wants to bite in.
Vogue doesn’t say that she loves the hesitancy with which cars navigate parking lots. She loves the forty-year-olds who pump their hair pink and sleep outside venues before alternative rock concerts and write smut about the lead bandmates even though both have wives. She loves her dad and her cat Frosty and she loves to be fucked by a nondescript woman she picks up at a bar who doesn’t know about the beach house or the plane she has to catch tomorrow for a season of Love in Translation or her middle name. And sometimes she hates being so good at pretending. Just once, she would like to be visibly suffering, she wants acquaintances to know, middle America to see it on her face. In these moments, she thinks about moving to Switzerland, becoming a farmer like her great-grandmother, gutting pigs, not being afraid to take a life and squash it in her hands. That would feel so good, she thinks.
The Netflix description for Love in Translation (Coming Soon) reads: “Singles from different countries with no shared language must communicate and connect purely through gestures, emotions, and shared experiences.”
Faye and her partner are placed in a beach house on the California coast for the weekend. The stranger’s name card says BETH, BELGIUM. Sharp shoulders like a license plate. Faye holds a bouquet of white azaleas. She has six years of Reality TV behind her, five seasons altogether, and is poised exactly on her mark.
They film their introductory scene on the beach house veranda, though they met earlier this morning before makeup. There is a crew of twenty stretched across the lawn and inside the house. Monitors, and wires Scotch-taped to the floor. Faye and Beth greet each other with a hug. They laugh and both speak in their respective languages before remembering they cannot understand each other. Je lijkt wel een fata morgana! Oh my god, this is so weird.
Jared’s plane lands in Vegas at two-thirty p.m., six hours before his Foosball competition. Many things have led him here: his love for rabbits (there is a large population of feral rabbits in Vegas), his thirteen years of Foosball (started in his basement, then local tournaments, then became the president of the Toronto Foosball Club at nineteen), and also, an irrational, violent urge. Where it came from, he doesn’t know, but for two weeks he has felt this ugly twist in his stomach, like the tension in a stick before it snaps. Maybe it’s just competitive anticipation, but when he channels the destructive feeling into Foosball, he doesn’t perform any better. He has to ice his wrists with ice cubes in a Ziplock bag.
If someone were to ask, he’d say that he feels quite simply like he needs to destroy something. He tries to reassure himself that he is only going through personal evolution (breakup with Nat, et cetera), and the desire for destruction is only his body removing old versions of himself.
While he waits for the rows in front of him to empty the plane, he refreshes his YouTube notifications. He’s actually kind of famous but only among Foosball players and twelve-year-olds in India. Nothing interesting, so he puts his phone back in his pocket and tightens the strings of his hoodie. He thinks of his bunny, Needle, back home in Toronto. Then he thinks about Nat, and the usual guilt hurts his stomach and makes him think about killing himself. Not seriously, just.
The girl in front of him is wearing headphones with rabbit stickers on the ear cup and he wants to say something to her but is afraid he’ll come off as flirting and he’s not interested really, and also hasn’t felt love or emotion for a long time, that’s kind of why he broke up with Nat, she wasn’t the kind of girl whose phone number he would want to memorize, and he feels bad about it, but also he feels nothing about it. Dating app culture ruined him, he thinks. All the girls he goes out with seem bored most of the time, and he can’t dredge up the energy to be non-boring. Actually, he feels like most women hate him. He hasn’t done anything to deserve it, he doesn’t think.
The line moves ahead of him and he feels a quiet joy shuffling off the plane, and thinks about the bunny dump sites. There are many of them across Las Vegas, home to hundreds or thousands of feral rabbits. The animals dig up public property and hate the government, probably. Jared loves them. He has spent many hours on a Facebook wall called “Bunnies Matter in Vegas Too,” where successful adoptees are posted. Oreo, Felippe, Mick Jagger. One of the most legendary dump sites is a state-run mental health facility in the center-west of the city.
When he gets off the plane, Jared asks an airport help desk, “Which bus will take me to the Nevada Mental Health Treatment Center?”
Susanna is living in Bern, Switzerland and is haunted by her ancestors. She can hear them yodeling. To combat this, she makes Züpfe and tweets to her ninety-seven followers, “grief cannot touch me while I am making bread.” She is a family lawyer working primarily with marriage agreements. She watches YouTube videos about how consumerism is a scam. Why Nobody Cares About Cyber Monday. The TRUTH about Decluttering. She is extremely anxious about accidentally paying for auto-renewable subscriptions, which she considers an act of evil.
But more importantly, she can feel her ancestors inside her body. There is a whole pack of them, clustering inside her shoulders and belly, curling into alphabet-shapes in her uterus. To combat this, she watches back-to-back episodes of an American Reality TV show called Divorce Court. A Black couple from Georgia discusses their “boundary-crossing behaviors and patterns.” The jury is a panel of Zoom screens. “Show her rather than tell her,” the judge says. Susanna nods along. “If you want something different, you have to be something different.”
On her break at work, she walks through Bern, and examines with hatred the medicinal nature of the streets. Sterile, clean, intense. They remind her of the words “Bang, bang.”
Susanna is thinking about a post she saw on social media recently that said “the sign of wear is the sign of a soul,” and how her life is untarnished, shiny and untouched, as if no one has been here. She has no tattoos or scars or birthmarks. She is smooth and hairless and always cold. She wants to be dirtied by life because otherwise she will forget that she is alive. Instead, her ancestors stack on top of each other inside her body.
Women on bicycles pass her. There is no gum on the sidewalk or smog in the sky. Susanna wants to lean down and lick the pavement. Inside her body, her dead grandparents wrestle.
Faye and Beth peel tangerines on the patio, the sun low in the sky, metallic, glinting hard on the ocean like it is trying very hard to burn through. Faye read in Beth’s sheet that she is an actress, famous in Belgium for winning a queer spin-off of Survivor. She has a mullet and a masculine jaw. Forearms. It seems illogical that she doesn’t speak a word of English but here she is. Beth offers Faye a tangerine wedge.
The editors will probably save this for an erotic smash cut montage: fingers digging past rind, petals of orange skin beneath her nails while pop music plays. They will place this clip after Faye and Beth have unlocked a new level of intimacy in their gestures, whatever that will look like. But for now, in this version of events, before it is edited by a crew and chopped up into glossy, flattened pieces, she is sitting in the sun eating a tangerine.
“Tell each other about yourselves,” the director says, with a Dutch translator repeating for Beth.
They are supposed to speak aloud to each other so that audiences won’t get bored. Viewers can laugh at poorly gestured emotions, or the obvious miscommunication between partners.
Beth speaks in rapid Dutch. “Ik heb drie jongere zussen, en zij zijn de wereld voor mij. Ik hou van rotsklimmen.” She makes three little circles with her hands, then pulls the imaginary shapes to her chest, cradles them. Faye imagines: triplets. Beth grapples with the air as if pulling herself upward. Faye imagines: trying to get to heaven.
Beth starts laughing at herself, embarrassed. Her cheeks are dimpled, and she has a sweaty rash on her upper chest. She pauses, looks at Faye. “Ik hou van mooie dingen.”
There is no accompanying gesture, so Faye assumes that it is Beth saying, “Your turn.”
Faye knows the camera wants chemistry, tension. She touches Beth’s elbow across the table. She looks at Beth’s eyes for a very long time, longer than is physically normal, long enough that her eyes sort of sting, but the editors need this much footage so they can get different angles, splice in close-ups, so that later, in interviews, Faye can say: “I didn’t need to say a single word. What I felt between us was enough.”
After a crew-wide lunch break, Faye and Beth cook together. They are both full from catering, but say in their respective languages, “I’m starving.” Beth draws pictures in the air while cooking as if she is telling a story but Faye cannot read them. She imagines a water cooler, a vagina, a mouthguard. When Beth has exhausted herself with animating the air, she whisks cream, cornstarch, egg yolk. She chops onion, leeks, carrots and celery. A broth. Chicken. They avoid putting trash in the garbage bins, which are not actually meant for garbage, but for decor. They ignore the cameras and monitors and cables and lighting rigs and boom operators.
In between shots, Faye smooths her hair with one hand. A makeup designer removes an eyelash from her left cheek. “Here we go,” someone says.
He does not see the rabbits at first. It is just a yard and a building, empty except for him. He knows it is unusual for the grounds to be empty based on the web pages run by hundreds of volunteers who take care of the feral rabbits. This is the main dump and everything.
But he does finally see them. Rabbits clot the yard. They twitch and bolt and seem to growl at each other and disappear. He is filled with joy.
Jared walks around slowly, careful not to scare them, but they are not scared at all. They approach him eagerly, but he only has a Clif Energy Bar, which would kill them if consumed. He sits on the lawn and thinks about writing a poem. He writes poetry on his laptop sometimes but it's mostly shit about streetlights and collarbones. Nothing good. Last time he wrote anything of worth it was for this French girl he met on the internet when he was sixteen, who he’s probably still in love with. When he wants to feel something, he imagines their Whatsapp calls in the basement of his parent’s house. They watched Before Sunrise together and she always laughed at things he didn’t find funny. He would try and laugh too, but there was a delay and he could feel himself mimicking her, and would start to hate himself. But after the call, she would send three heart emojis and say “i’m so giddy right now” and he’d forget all about it.
He takes a video of the rabbits to include in his Tuesday vlog about the Foosball competition. He tries not to watch anything other than his own videos these days. His YouTube algorithm is mostly professional Foosball players who are all much better than him, and watching them gives him a weird pressure in his chest afterward, this terrible feeling that he is far behind the rest of reality, a delayed, awkward laugh.
He doesn’t know why he has a public platform anyway. It’s not like he has a lot of thoughts about what it's like to be a person in the world today, but presumably he should. Everyone has a great deal to say about how we are living in unique times, and maybe that should stir something in him, a flame of agreement, that yes, his life and the lives of others around him are all fucked up in a way that is unique and new and fearsome. But Jared is a twenty-two-year-old man who just wants to see a rabbit. He wants to run his palm along one long ear, and feel its nose snuffle in his palm for food. Not for any grand or glorious reason, only because he thinks it would make him feel good.
One rabbit—a bulky rabbit, somehow a bully, he can sense—circles another, tail up and ears back. There is hostility in the air, a crackle. Like when he shows up at the Foosball competition and sees his competitors. The second rabbit darts awkwardly around, unsure what to do with itself. The bully continues circling. He swears the rabbit has red eyes. A foaming mouth? God, his hands are sweaty, and suddenly, the rabbit lunges, and Jared can see its mouth, small, greedy, red. There is snapping and hissing, sounds that Jared did not realize rabbits could make. He throws himself to his feet. Heart racing. If there is a pure form of evil in this world, it is here, Jared can feel it, in the body of this rabbit.
Or maybe this is just something he tells himself because he knows what he will do next.
Susanna makes it to the cemetery. The air is thick and swollen, the park very large. Her family has been buried here for years, back to the great-great-great-greats. She stops at her great-uncle's grave, his wife Rosanne, their daughter Maria. All of these people who once looked out windows and washed their pillow sheets. Said “aww” at a cute cat and ignored something they shouldn't have. People who forgot to say goodbye when it mattered most; who forgot that life would end, and them with it.
Susanna has two dead grandmothers named Susanne. She inherited their pointed chins, French braids, rosacea. She thinks about these women a lot and wonders where they are now. The inside of her elbow? The patch of her ankle that she always misses shaving?
An old woman sits on a bench, either asleep or dead. A man sits next to her looking at something on his phone. Susanna moves past them and sees that he is playing an online football game, manipulating the players with his thumbs. He is handsome, and maybe she should be attracted to him, could even say something to him, “Are you winning?”, but instead she breathes through her mouth and moves along.
Earlier, Susanna's co-worker said, “Have a good lunch break!”
Her client emailed, “Here are the financial documents you requested.”
Her therapist texted, “Are we still good for nine a.m. Tuesday?”
And her dead ancestors whirred like air-conditioners inside her body, like they were regulating the flow of oxygen by pushing themselves around, just trying to fit.
She turns her phone on Do Not Disturb.
Every three hours, they are brought into a room for interviews. Faye blushes and laughs and mentions Beth's toned arms. She pretends like she is embarrassed about her desire for Beth, which is real, though the container it sits within is not. She speaks like the teenage girls on their couches want her to speak: “I just want to connect with someone, you know? I feel like I walk around all the time just waiting for someone to touch me, to look at me over the produce in the grocery store.” None of these things are true for Faye, but she is good at saying the words which is enough. She thinks of Beth's awkwardness and softens a little. “I really need this,” she says.
It’s evening. They are about to film their getting-ready-for-bed sequence. Intimacy coordinators stand next to the monitors in case they need to be called in. In Love in Translation, the new couple must spend the night together in their beach home, though in reality Faye will likely sleep in her trailer in the parking lot, where she can FaceTime her assistant and see how Frosty is doing.
For the past hour, Faye and Beth have played a card game without following any determinable rules. The scene will likely not make its way into the final cut.
“I’m so nervous,” Faye says in the final interview for Day 1. “Spending a night with a stranger I can’t even speak to. How am I going to say, ‘Is it okay if I turn the lights off?’ And in the morning, ‘What did you dream about?’”
Faye and Beth lie on the bed. Nobody needs this many pillows, she thinks. They are so stiff too. Faye laughs for the camera, covers her face, pretends to be embarrassed by the predicament she shares with Beth.
Next to her, Beth is lying on her side facing Faye. A metal ring on her left thumb. Faye reaches over and touches the ring, asking. Beth opens her eyes, makes a gesture like, “It's a long story.”
“I want to hear it,” Faye says, and for the first time she feels sadness in their situation, how unable she is to properly know and understand Beth. How terrible this whole setup is really.
The director is asking for a little more. A little something.
The beats have been rehearsed so many times in Faye’s career—and yet—when she reaches toward Beth and smiles and puts her lips on the woman’s lips, there is a jolt, an unexpected something, a misstep in a beautifully wrong direction. And it shocks her. Not the touch, but the way it has suddenly become less than, and she needs the real thing, tongue at the edge of her lips. She says, “Cut.” She says, “I'm done for the night.”
It takes an hour for the crew to clear out. The director pecks Faye’s cheek as he exits. When the house is still and empty and dark, Beth is waiting. Faye is too.
And hours later, when Beth growls something in her ear, Faye does not need to know its translation.
Rabbit’s neck in his hands. Grass stains on his knees now, the rabbit is fighting against him, its body thrashing, more strength than he expected, and his wrists keep going. He knows how to twist them, coordinate, be deft now. He knows how to shoot a goal with these wrists. Twist a neck until it pops. All those bones that link together, white and fragile. The rabbits watch. Thousands of little eyes.
Susanna starts digging. Fingers in the soil. "Let me in," she says aloud.
Faye orgasms.
Jared sits on the lawn, knees splayed. He hurts all over without any obvious source. He checks his watch. Two hours until the competition. He feels disoriented and apocalyptic, a sort of pitching beneath him, like waking up to an earthquake. He feels like he has done something criminally wrong and needs to follow the logical next step, whatever it is—a prayer, repentance, a lawyer.
A rabbit is looking at him, the one he saved from its bully. Small, understanding eyes. He reaches out with one hand and it scatters. He puts a tongue in his cheek and falls back against the grass, unrelieved.
Susanna lies in the dirt, in the soil, in the dead. She is only barely covered, a thin layer of dirt, a wreckage but not a burial. And she thinks about how it is impossible to exist without overlapping others, her body above and consumed by her dead ancestors, but also the woman on the park bench. She is only herself because she is living in this precise context, because somewhere in the world a man in a yellow wig is performing a dance at a kid’s birthday party, and a woman is mourning her thirty-year-old son, and she really believes this. Whether she knows their names or not, their lives are affecting hers, creating hers, and she is only herself because everything else exists.
Faye lies in the dark next to Beth and whispers aloud: “La petite mort.” She laughs. Sex as a minor death. What is real death then? Maybe the ultimate pleasure.
Beth is asleep now, or maybe she is dead.
Volume 15.2 ✧ Summer 25
Courtney Bill
Nobody Wants To See This
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