Chloe Barker on a Monday Afternoon

Chloe Barker sat drinking away her problems in a white, middle class condominium in a pristine beach town in the middle of August. What the pristine beach town did not know, however, was how much Chloe hated it. It was completely unaware that Chloe wanted to write all over it with paint, and then burn it all down, preferably while she was naked and shouting anarchist ideology about the terrible bourgeoisie. It’s probably a good thing the little town had no idea, because it would make it very sad. And there is nothing worse than a depressed tourist destination. That’s why Chloe saved all the depression for herself. That’s why Chloe drank wine with ice cubes on a Monday afternoon.

As she sipped the sadness, she realized the irony of her situation. While she hated her mother for trying to drink the pain away, she was attempting to do the exact same thing. Jesus Christ, Chloe did not want to become her mother. She did not want to adopt the characteristics and catch phrases of the failure in the next room. But luckily, her mother was currently in bed, passed out at five in the afternoon (as per usual). So Chloe concluded that she still had a leg up on that sloth she called her mother.

Chloe had an inkling, though she realized how juvenile it was, that she might perhaps be adopted. Unlike most people, Chloe had not cultivated this idea as a child or as an angst ridden, perturbed teenager. It had only recently dawned upon Chloe that she could, potentially, be adopted. It was well known that her mother had had a difficult time conceiving...countless hormone treatments and trips to expensive specialists had been regaled to her many times....a passive aggressive guilt trip, Chloe supposed. ‘I went through THIS MUCH to birth you, and LOOK AT HOW YOU TURNED OUT’ was the subtext to each conception horror story. Anyways, the moral of this paragraph is that who is to say that her parents didn’t turn to adoption in their quest for offspring? It’s totally plausible. They had the money and the desire. And who white people in ‘love’ with money and desire can buy and achieve just about anything. Even an emotionally defective hand me down kid to call their own. That’s some branch of the American Dream, right?

The sun was too bright on Chloe’s back.
The wine was too bitter on Chloe’s lips.
The world was too heavy on Chloe’s shoulders.

Chloe closed her eyes.