Gagapocalypse

By Moxie Mezcal

Three audacious and darkly satirical short stories about fame, media obsession, and men behaving badly.
:: Viral :: A YouTube star reflects bitterly on his fifteen minutes of fame.
:: No. 1 :: A honeymooning couple accidentally film the suicide of a famous pop star.
:: Gagapocalypse :: A music critic imagines that Lady Gaga is brainwashing listeners into Manchurian Candidate sleeper assassins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Moxie Mezcal
• Release date: Dec 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9780463763308

Moxie Mezcal

Moxie Mezcal lives under an assumed name in San Jose, California.

Book preview

Gagapocalypse

Moxie Mezcal

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Moxie Mezcal

Moxie Über Alles

San Jose, California

MoxieMezcal.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or institutions, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A Singles Collection

Tracklist

No. 1

Viral

Gagapocalypse

No. 1

It starts the same way every time.

Zero seconds. It’s the last day of our honeymoon. Sarah is standing on the Champs-Élysées, the sun setting behind the Arc de Triomphe in the distance, the early-evening foot traffic rushing past her in either direction. Sarah looks straight into the camera with that big, toothy grin of hers. The same grin that caught my eye when we first met. The grin that I used to say would always make me melt, no matter how many times I’ve seen it.

Are you messing around with that stupid thing again? she asks, trying to adopt her best sternly-nagging tone of voice, but that grin gets in the way.

Nine seconds. I zoom in tight on her face. She hides behind a cluster of overly-ornate shopping bags, her haul from an afternoon spent maxing out what little was left on our credit cards after a two-hundred-guest wedding and a pair of intercontinental plane tickets.

The camera zooms back out, and a figure appears in the background, emerging from a side street on the extreme right of the screen. She stands out from the rest of the bustling crowd immediately, her lithe figure looking statuesque and regal in a white summer dress.

Thirteen seconds.

Off-camera, I say, Hey isn’t that...?

I zoom past Sarah, focusing in on this new figure. Sarah whips her head around to look, a motion that I barely catch in the blurry foreground before she completely disappears from view, crowded out by this new woman. The pop star.

Seventeen seconds.

She’s wearing oversized sunglasses with dark brown lenses, and her long, platinum blonde hair keeps falling in front of her face, but it is unmistakably her. That face has gazed alluringly from magazine stands the world over, reproduced millions of times on everything from glossy fashion rags to pulpy gossip tabloids. Those full, pouty lips have been plastered on an infinite sea of CD covers, those lips that sculpt the notes with such melodic conviction that she makes even the most clumsily-suggestive lyrics seem somehow enticing.

But now she doesn’t look glamorous or seductive, having dropped the well-practiced mask of her public persona. She looks raw, real, almost human.

I zoom in closer. She turns to look at the camera. I think she sees me. She’s looking right at me. I zoom in closer, so close I don’t see what she’s doing with her hands, can’t see what she’s pulling out of her handbag until she lifts it into view and slides the muzzle into her mouth.

Twenty-three seconds.

The shot rings out loudly, even over the camera’s weak microphone, and a burst of red explodes from the back of her head. For a split second she keeps looking at the camera, but then she collapses out of view, dropping to the ground.

The video goes chaotic. Screams and terrified cries overload the microphone, turning the audio into one garbled, distorted sonic shriek. The image shakes violently as I jog towards her, crossed haphazardly by the incoherent shapes of the panicked crowd surging in both directions - half running away to safety, the other half running closer for a better look.

I’m close enough that I can muscle my way to the front. Like a ghoul, I keep filming. I couldn’t tell you why - I wasn’t thinking clearly, just reacting, pure instinct. The image stabilizes and I am right on top of her, looking down at her strangely unchanged face. Her glasses have fallen off, exposing her still-open eyes as she looks straight up. Her hair is spread out across the sidewalk like rays from the rising sun over the horizon, and a puddle of blood crowns her like a halo from a medieval painting. I zoom in closer on her eyes, which still seem so vivid and alive, still look like they’re staring straight at me. A strange sensation comes over me, like for just a moment I forget that she’s dead, for just a moment it feels like she can still see me, like she’s caught me spying on her deeply private moment, and I feel a brief but intense pang of guilt. I shut the camera off.

Thirty-three seconds.