The Rot
by Julianne Cordray
I used to hide things under my bed. Or in the closet. Any place out of sight, any dark crevice, where no one would look. Least of all me.
Every day in the cafeteria since the start of the school year in September, I opened my lunch box, unzipped a small plastic bag and raised a sandwich to my lips. It was like a performance—one that would inevitably end with me slipping the remains discretely back into the baggy, as if preparing for the next show.
Looking around, I noticed the crumbs and goo sticking to the table, the half-eaten meals and mushed up bits abandoned on crusty plastic trays, the mingling smells of industrial cleaning products and over-cooked frozen pizza drifting in from the kitchen, while the other kids grinned and shouted and chewed their food. Then, biting into the soggy white-bread slices, feeling them melt into the rubbery cold cuts between my teeth, I was instantly nauseated. Once, I even puked straight into my lunch box. No one noticed. So I carried that home to hide away, too.
Before I could do anything about it, an evolution was occuring in those hidden places: sandwiches were binding themselves more and more to the Ziplock bags that contained them, shriveling up under a mossy coating of blueish green.
That’s how the rot stayed. It grew. Each time I moved to a different city, I took it with me. I couldn’t see the thick white fuzz building up behind my eyes; I couldn’t feel what was seeping through my skin, leaking out of my pores in discolored droplets, or the sticky residue that it was leaving behind. I couldn’t tell that, underneath, my skin had become brittle like dried-out leaves crunching under autumn shoes.
And now: I can’t stop thinking about how much plastic I’m ingesting. Maybe I’ll just become a plastic bag—a container for someone else’s stories.
Julianne Cordray is an art writer, editor, translator and publisher based in Berlin. She has written for local and international art magazines, and her essays and translations have been commissioned for exhibitions and catalogs by artists, institutions and galleries. She co-founded textur in 2018 and has been slowly developing the project since then—as a place for considering art through text and text as an art medium, as well as tracing threads between text, publishing, and textiles.
