“Pretend We’re Dead” by Melissa Ragsly
The lyrics to L7’s “Pretend We’re Dead” begin with a question, a snarky flash of simple wordplay that asks, essentially, “What is happening?” In this short piece of the same name, Melissa Ragsly proffers a similar inquiry, framed through her perspective at age sixteen. Ragsly excels at capturing the doldrums and disorientation of the teenage experience. Her narrator drifts through mundane scenes, detached and ethereal, much like the sylphs she desires to become. She forgoes human connection, opting instead for sisterhood with a giant papier-mâché witch and the grunge music blasting in her headphones. “This monstrous hag was not only a physical manifestation of a witch, but also a symbol of all the things women were not supposed to be,” Ragsly states in her author’s note, honing in on the piece’s undercurrent of feminine identity.
The younger self Ragsly presents isn’t void of emotion, but she longs for something more than her Long Island trappings can provide. She describes the women of L7 as “playing ugly” in the song’s music video. Decked out in flannel shirts and tattoos, the band stands in protest against antique concepts of femininity, a refreshing sight for a young woman so alienated from her surroundings. She wishes to levitate away from her prosaic summer job, into otherworldly climes that exist only in the imagination and music videos. Until she’s able to strike out and discover more for herself, she’ll go on overwatering the begonias and pretending she’s dead—a timeless teenage defense used to circumvent unwanted attention.
Ragsly writes in short, staccato bursts. Her sentences—quick and declarative—are as simple as they are beautiful, mimicking the music that possesses her. The power of L7’s hit song rests in its anthemic quality, a bold assertion that rails against authority and embraces ennui. In her own rendition of “Pretend We’re Dead,” Ragsly creates a teenage anthem of her own, unearthing deep emotional resonance in life’s slower moments, in the desire to transcend. —CRAFT
My first job was at a farmstand with a twenty-five-foot papier-mâché witch named Winnie towering over the parking lot. Eyes like a lizard’s with vaginal slit pupils and a boulder of a nose. She enchanted people. Drivers would pull off 25A just to gaze up at her. An ugly slapped together thing, dangling a girl on a stick, held up like a torch.
My uncle took me there once to buy pumpkins. For a dollar, you could ride a pony in wide circles around a pole. A cigarette hung from my uncle’s lips. His pout bulged, mimicking his protruding belly. He bought me a ride but I was too afraid. Not of the animal, but that I’d be too heavy for its back to carry. I was seven.
I had been working at the farm for the summer. In the morning, my boss would come down with the cashbox. Five feet tall with a tight perm, she’d plod down from the main house as threatening as a wombat. She was Winnie in human form.
Before I opened up the farm shop, I watered plants with my headphones on. L7’s “Pretend We’re Dead.” My fingers splayed across the hose spout to strengthen and lengthen its stream. I made my way down the long aisle of annuals. Drowning the last flats of red impatiens, I could see Winnie through the plastic tarp windows. A hunter, she could see me.
Once the farm shop opened, I wasn’t supposed to listen to my headphones. Instead, I snuck lines from a grocery store paperback of Deliverance hidden under the register.
At home, a VHS of 120 Minutes played while I slurped long strings of spaghetti. In the video for “Pretend We’re Dead,” the band, four women from Los Angeles, played at ugly. Greasy, unkempt hair covered their faces. Heads banged to the up-and-down rhythm. Flannels and jeans everywhere, captured by a panicked camera.
The guitarist, Suzi, levitated. Hung by a wire, her slim body bent back into a bridge pose. So light. So easy to pluck from the ground. Another girl for Winnie’s stick. They don’t have to be beautiful, but they need to be sylphs.
My next shift. My boss told me I watered the begonias too much. Their plastic containers leaked, fat with mud. I picked off the wilted petals and kept them in my apron pouch. I read a scene in my book about a man who fell from a tree onto one of his own arrows. I waited for customers.
When I took out the trash, I tempted Winnie with an offering of dead petals at her skirt hem. Lift me in the air, featherlight! I pleaded for capture. Am I worthy to be your prey?
My feet on the ground, Winnie’s face peeling and pockmarked. I wasn’t scared. I was sixteen.
MELISSA RAGSLY’s story collection We Know This Will All Disappear was published by [PANK]. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Iowa Review, Joyland, and other journals. She’s a graduate of New York University Tisch School of the Arts and is currently writing scripts, books, and stories and working at an independent bookstore in the Hudson Valley where she lives. Find her on Twitter at @90sMelissa.
Featured image by Artem Maltsev, courtesy of Unsplash.
