Gwyneth Platrow Sneezes at Erewhon by A.A. de Levine

     Taber Andrew Bain CC



Gwyneth Platrow Sneezes at Erewhon


    Gwyneth Paltrow doesn’t usually do this. 
    But Gwyneth Paltrow is prepared for anything. Gwyneth Paltrow wears sunscreen imported from Korea. She does Pilates. She avoids nightshades and nitrates. Her posture is enviable; her white linen two-piece set is available on her website. Her hair is like cornsilk and free of parabens. She visits professionals who press on her abdomen and tell her she is eating too many acidic foods. They explain that the gut and the mind are connected. Think of a string, they tell her, connecting your belly to your brain. Gwyneth Paltrow nods when they tell her this; she knows this whole world is filled with secrets. She can feel there is another world below this one–crackling, hidden from her–and she longs to find it. 
    Gwyneth Paltrow is making a quick trip to Erewhon. She needs a certain tincture, made with lion’s mane, which is a type of mushroom. Gwyneth Paltrow has read about it online. 
Usually, an assistant will do the shopping, pick up the dry cleaning. Take the little white dog to get its anal glands expressed. This is because Gwyneth Paltrow is very famous. And even if she weren’t, she is a tall, blonde woman in white linen.
    Gwyneth Paltrow finds the perfect parking spot. It is hazy outside, hiding birds and cell phone towers. Wildfires are eating mansions in Malibu. They are burning large beige rooms with nubby white furniture and art inspired by Donald Judd or actually by Donald Judd. They are devouring hotel patios and family pets. They are making the air thick with ash, and so Gwyneth Paltrow hurries indoors.
    She does not feel well. 
Of course people recognize Gwyneth Paltrow as she walks down the aisles at Erewhon. They pretend to scan QR codes on packages of activated almonds as they really take pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow with their phones. She is just so tall and so blonde in her white linen in this aisle so full of nuts and legumes. 
The tinctures aren’t here. The layout of this store makes no sense to Gwyneth Paltrow. 
    There is a veil over Santa Monica Boulevard, over Erewhon, over women in expensive leggings. June gloom, hiding ghosts Gwyneth Paltrow can feel but not see. She is worried about breathing in too many ghosts. The air is so polluted. The bees are dying. Our phones are giving us cancer. The global South is choking on fast-fashion bodysuits and aglets from Shein hoodies. There is plastic in our bodies, in our blood. Our teeth are rotting in our mouths. Our hair is thinning. Our gut microbiome is utterly fucked. 
    Gwyneth Paltrow is sweating. The string inside her is fraying. She is all too aware that her body is a machine of soft gears, ever-churning in the dark. It all began, she suspects, with the waitress at Chateau Marmont. The waitress was sniffling. She touched Gwyneth Paltrow’s white linen with a slick, pink hand and when she spoke, Gwyneth Paltrow could see a bead of sweat forming on the young woman’s philtrum. There were two distinct drops of sweat on her iceberg wedge salad, she is sure of it, her salad without tomatoes (no nightshades) or bacon (too many nitrites and nitrates, and the sodium can cause inflammation which can cause cancer to grow like clumps of grapes all within the velvet expanse inside Gwyneth Paltrow). There were drops of sweat in her room-temperature water with two lemons. Drops on her cloth napkin. Drops in the air. The air was pregnant with droplets falling from open, laughing mouths. 
    Most wildfires are man-made. And shouldn’t dogs, even the ones that are so small and so white, be able to express their own anal glands?
    The hidden, cracking world is somewhere within the fires, beyond the Erewhon sushi bar. Gwyneth Paltrow knows that if she makes eye contact with the other shoppers, she will see their longing, too, their naked fear, the knowledge that glaciers groan as they die, that elephants mourn their dead, that there is another world hidden from this Erewhon. Their strings are all knotted together. They are all fraying. 
    Gwyneth Paltrow leans against a shelf of gluten-free macaroni and tries to focus on her breath. Gwyneth Paltrow breathes in through her nose. She holds her breath, counting to four. She breathes out. 
    She is always so careful. Her posture, enviable.
    The wildfires are eating parking garages and megachurches and hair salons. Cells are oxidizing inside her. 
    Gwyneth Paltrow knows that if the fires don’t kill you, the air conditioning will.
    Gwyneth Paltrow waits until a woman in expensive leggings passes by, and then Gwyneth Paltrow lets out a sneeze. 

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A.A. de Levine's work has appeared in Taco Bell Quarterly, New Gothic Review, NoSleep, and other places. She reads short fiction for Coffin Bell Journal and has two dogs. That's about it. 
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