Real Jobs

By Lenia Lenient

Julia, Hayal, and Kiwi have several things in common: They're all artists, they're all queer, they share the same apartment on the second floor of a concrete cube, and none of them are making it. Hayal struggles with depression in the aftermath of turning her art into her livelihood, Julia is ready to write herself into an early grave if that's what it takes to turn hers into a job, and Kiwi's fear of himself - and of being disowned - keeps his glam punk dreams from coming true. 

The only thing that's worse than being a young artist in a world where people expect you to have a LinkedIn profile is to be roommates with two more of them. 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lenia Lenient
• Release date: Oct 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9783982038919

Lenia Lenient

Lenia Lenient writes books that fall within at least two categories of the ECG framework: Existential dread Capitalism bad Gay Lenia aspires to one day hold the speedrun world record for Barbie™ Horse Adventures: Mystery Ride (2004).  If you have something important to say, contact me at [e-mail].  If you have nothing important to say, contact me on Tumblr (lenialenient). Follow me on Instagram (also lenialenient) for "content."  We don't talk about Twitter.

Book preview

An Oddity, a Nonentity, or a Disagreeable Man

I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD’VE warned either of you, Kiwi says, trying to sit on the metal bench in a way that wouldn’t have him freeze his ass off. Throughout all of December there’s been the cold without the snow and that trend is continuing well into January.

We can handle it, says Tien. We’re all adults here. She’s given up on the bench, instead leaning on the glass wall of the bus shelter, partially blocking out an ad with a grotesquely big and uncomfortably close face of a white woman with white teeth that watches over the bus stop.

Kiwi and Tien may have occupied the glass house, but they’re not alone at the stop. Three teenagers on their way home from school and two older women shift impatiently. Kiwi can look at them through the ad-free wall to his left and they can look right back. Which, he supposes, is the reason why they’re staying outside, limiting themselves to the occasional outraged glance thrown his or Tien’s way. The teenagers whisper and giggle with each other.

Kiwi drags the soles of his boots – five centimeters thicker than they need to be – back and forth over the concrete and fidgets with the straps of his guitar case. It could be the eyeliner, it could be jeans so thoroughly ripped that he’s wearing tights underneath to not freeze to death. It could be the fact that his hair is green – or meant to be green, as it’s also bleach-blond where Hayal’s missed a spot or two with the dye, and dark brown where the roots have grown out. It could be the fact that all that spills over a wildly outdated glam-punk bandana. It could also be the fact that he’s a man* with an asterisk that, no matter how hard you look, never leads to any tangible footnotes. At least Tien is flashier than him. And at least she’s here. Had he been alone, he would’ve had to tone it down.

Kiwi pulls out his phone and texts Oskar.

Kiwi [14:11]: We’re on our way

Kiwi [14:11]: For real this time

Kiwi [14:11]: Sorry

The bus turns into the street just as he shoves the phone back into his pocket. When they get on, Tien manages to snatch seats facing each other. It’s not too crowded yet, just enough for each double-seat to have – in true German fashion – exactly one person and one bag on it.

Kiwi doesn’t want Hayal to be the topic hanging in the air so he says: I’m just gonna need five minutes to work on the essay at Oskar’s, ten tops.

You’re not gonna do it.

Am too.

Wait. Tien’s eyes focus on something Kiwi doesn’t immediately manage to pin down.

Wait, let me see your tongue.

Kiwi scans the interior of the bus – he catches the gaze of one of the women from the bus stop, who immediately averts her eyes – before he turns back to Tien and reluctantly sticks his tongue out just enough for her to see the piercing.

Goddamn, says Tien. When did that happen?

Last week. Saturday. Kiwi lowers his voice. Does it look infected? Because it’s kinda... He gestures vaguely.

Yeah, no. It’s just gonna look shitty for a while.

Kiwi’s phone buzzes.

Oskar [14:13]: oh nice cause mona and I realized songs arent quite the same without any strings

Kiwi [14:16]: I said SORRY

Oskar [14:17]: are you bringing food as an offer for forgiveness

Kiwi [14:17]: I’m not

Had no idea you were planning on getting something like this done, says Tien. Her legs are stretched all the way to the seat across from her. I could’ve recommended you a place.

I wasn’t.

Tien slides a few centimeters up on her seat, props her elbow against the window, and tilts her head against her fist. Did you have beef with your mom?

"Why is that – why are you the second person asking this?"

Tien gives him an overstated shrug. Kiwi squints at her before he goes back to typing.

Oskar [14:17]: boo

Oskar [14:18]: but seriously

Oskar [14:18]: you ready for now?

Kiwi [14:19]: If you mean the song you gotta put that in quotation marks or something because otherwise that’s confusing

Oskar [14:20]: youre the one who named it that

Oskar [14:20]: ready for now, the song?

Kiwi [14:21]: Actually I think we should take out the spoken part before we try the whole thing for the first time

Kiwi [14:21]: The I tried wanting less, I tried wanting more part

Oskar [14:22]: kiwi, my dude, my love

Oskar [14:22]: weve been revising for the past like month

Oskar [14:22]: you have that is

Oskar [14:22]: and i mean didn’t you text me at 2 in the AM about how we need that part

Oskar [14:23]: about how important it is

Oskar [14:23]: about the emotions

By the way, Kiwi taps his fingertips on the phone screen without actually typing. He speaks very slowly. Did I mention that she invited herself and dad over? Again?

Tien grimaces. Seriously?

They’re still guilt-tripping me because I didn’t come home for Christmas so I couldn’t really, you know, say no.

Slowly, Tien’s face transitions from empathetic disdain to suspicion. He sounded too prematurely apologetic just now, didn’t he? When did they say they’re were gonna come exactly?

Kiwi shifts his weight, keeps his eyes on the phone. Friday.

Tien rises in her seat, lips thin. So, what, you’re gonna miss practice?

I’m trying to move it to Saturday, okay? My mom just takes two days to reply to a message.

Tien drags a hand down the side of her face. Kiwi...

’I’ll be there. I’m gonna make it work somehow. Promise.

Kiwi [14:24]: I guess it’s too emotional

Kiwi [14:24]: Kinda cringy

Kiwi leans back against the squiggly bus seat pattern and looks at Tien. You’re so serious about this lately.

Maybe, says Tien, I’m getting kinda impatient. We’re not really doing much.

We can’t really do much until my finals are over. Kiwi bounces his leg. On the other side of the dirty window, towering gray blocks start to make way for yards and fences. At least I can’t, anyway.

When’s that?

The last one’s Monday in two weeks.

Hmm, says Tien.

Oskar [14:25] were not gonna film today 

Oskar [14:26] so id say lets try it out anyway

The outskirts of town harbor a now empty house that belonged to Oskar’s grandparents before they died two years back. In those two years it’s been left mostly untouched, which is why Kiwi would never dare to actually go inside the house, but the shack that stands in its yard – formerly a workshop and equipped with electricity – couldn’t be a more convenient place for Divine Discontent to practice their songs.

Kiwi and Tien haul their instruments off the bus and walk the rest of the way through a desolate early afternoon suburbia. Fewer eyes means Kiwi doesn’t feel compelled to powerwalk constantly, but there’s something eerie about this place. Like it’s saying that if he only changed the trajectory of his life five centimeters to the right, he, too, could have a lawn and a fence someday. 

Because you can’t hear the doorbell in the workshop, Tien hands Kiwi her bass case, vaults over the fence, and opens the gate from inside. The stiff winter grass crackles under their boots as they make their way across the yard.

Mona’s spinning idly on the stool behind her drum-kit as Kiwi opens the door to the practice shack. Her drumsticks are fixed behind her ear in her rose-colored hijab, and with the matching pastels and expertly carved makeup, she looks like someone who either has fifty thousand followers on Instagram or who aspires to have fifty thousand followers on Instagram. Oskar rests one of his arms on the mic stand, the other in the pocket of his sweatpants. He wears big shirts and lets his dark hair grow to his shoulders. Hayal once said that nobody in Divine Discontent looks like they’re playing the same music. Tien argues that they can make the lack of consistent style work as a style in itself. Kiwi, meanwhile, maintains that post-progressive pseudoglam queercore cannot be reduced to a singular cohesive look.

Oskar and Mona abruptly turn and start clapping in formal unison as Tien and Kiwi enter.

Oh, fuck off, says Kiwi. A grin sits on his face though, and he can’t seem to wipe it off. After easy greetings and one-armed hugs, he squats down to unpack his stuff. There’s no point in taking any jackets off, since the workshop is barely any warmer than outside.

So, are we all good to go? Oskar asks.

I’ve been for weeks, says Mona. I really wanna know what it sounds like in all its glory.

Kiwi sits there, backpack unzipped, his hand inside instinctively grabbing his laptop.

He looks up, at Tien, her bass guitar hooked to the amp, and at Mona, drum sticks in hand, hovering over the toms. One second passes, two seconds pass.

Yeah. Yeah, sure. Kiwi zips the backpack shut again.

Oskar picks up the mic and throws Kiwi a glance. So, with or without the spoken part?

Kiwi breathes in. Without.

Disappointment flashes over Oskar’s face for a second, but he shrugs. Sure thing.

Kiwi leaves his backpack by the door and unsheathes his guitar. He throws it on and takes his spot in Divine Discontent’s formation.

Times New Roman, 12-Point, Double-Spaced

JULIA KICKS THE DOOR shut behind her. Her legs are sore, her backpack is heavy, a grocery bag dangles from the crook of her arm because her hands are busy – one with the keys and the other holding the phone that she, under no circumstances, can take her eyes off.

It’s all about the tiny 1. All about that little symbol and the promise of 1 new message(s). She saw it on the tram home, the sender, the subject, everything but the actual email. Reading the actual email requires preparation and a specific setting, but she can confirm that the email’s neither from Amazon nor Duolingo and that is, in fact, a Re, and what’s more, it is Re: QUERY SFF.

A drawn out Welcome back wavers over to Julia. Groceries in her arms, she crosses the living room, past Hayal who’s sprawled over the entire length of the couch, eyes staring up at the ceiling and the drawing tablet on the floor.

Having a crisis? Julia asks, pulling discounter pasta, tea, and soup cans out of the bag and stuffing them into her third of the cupboard. There’s no time to actually cook dinner tonight.

Yes.

Julia stocks her part of the fridge in record time and throws the shopping bag on the shopping bag pile. An unheard-of amount of energy is bristling within her, as she slips into her room and re-emerges with her laptop. What’s the crisis about?

"I thought I could take a break and play Animal Crossing for like an hour," says Hayal.

And you can’t? Julia props the laptop up on the kitchen table, presses the power button, and sits.

I can’t.

The moment the laptop whirs to life, Julia starts drumming her fingers on the table. Deep breaths. She knows there’s nothing to expect. She knows that everyone who’s ever published anything will tell her that they’ve collected fifty or seventy or a hundred or two-hundred rejections before there’s been a trace of interest from a literary agent. So, this is going to be a rejection, and that’s fine.

But aren’t you having a break right now? she asks Hayal.

I guess I’m having a break.

Julia’s desktop appears and her fingers fly over the trackpad. Her inbox still shows her the same notification when it stretches across her screen – as if she needs reminding. This wasn’t the first agent she messaged, but it was the first who responded. Okay, reject me.

"Then what’s stopping you from playing Animal Crossing?" she asks, hovering the cursor over to the email.

Gee, Julia. Hayal says. Am I supposed to have my break and enjoy it too? Like some hedonistic glutton?

The notification dissolves as Julia clicks the email. Then it sits before her, open, accessed, unveiled. It’s shorter than expected, just a small block of text, but you can’t start a message like this at the beginning. You start in the middle, you start where your eyes happen to look the moment it appears, and you start with keywords. And there is one:

Unfortunately.

That’s a rejection. That’s a rejection, alright.

Julia reads the whole message, beginning to end. Beginning to end, again. Still a rejection.

Julia breathes in and out. A rejection was fine five seconds ago and it is fine now. She expected nothing else. It’s time to say ‘okay then’ and close the email and make soup for dinner. But the cursor doesn’t move a pixel and neither does she.

A wave of some type of emotion washes over Julia, and that’s a problem. There’s a problem and it needs to be reviewed right now, or she’s not going to last.

She opens a blank Word document.

You got your first rejection, how are you feeling?

Bad.

But why so?

Judging by the immovable blinking cursor, she’s already written herself into a corner.

Am I arrogant? I didn’t really think the first rejection wasn’t going to be one. This is the first agent who responded. Of course it was going to be a rejection. It would be so incredibly arrogant of me to think it wouldn’t be one.

Behind her, the couch rustles. She turns and watches Hayal collect her drawing tablet and pen from the floor. Julia refocuses on the Word doc in front of her and tightens her lips.

Did you hope it wasn’t going to be a rejection? She types.

I guess. But wouldn’t everyone?

She taps her finger on the table and straightens up.

Why did you hope it wasn’t going to be a rejection?

Julia already knew she wouldn’t be able to answer that question when she typed it, so she’s not surprised when all she can do is sit and stare at the letters.

A few seconds pass before Julia hits the table with the palm of her hand and rises from her chair in the same motion. Hayal jumps.

Sorry.

Writing problems?

No. Not at all. Laptop in hands, she scurries off to her room. There, she powers up her old printer. While it sputters ink onto paper, Julia rummages through her drawers until she finds a roll of tape and rips a piece off with her teeth. She snatches the email – still warm – from the printer, climbs on top of her office chair, and tapes the rejection to the wall.

Carefully, she steps back down and takes a moment to behold her work. A white A4 paper – two thirds blank and one third standard rejection lingo – taped to the center of the wall above her desk.

She can work with that. 

Julia is sixteen

AND THE PATTERN OF her room’s carpet stamps itself onto her calves as she sits cross-legged on the floor, leaning in on the screen in front of her.

Once you know what you want, you can start to figure out how to get there, Michelle says. Very emphatically, because it’s very important. You break that huge goal into tiny goals and then you set yourself one or several tiny goals every year, or half a year, or even every month, whatever works best for you. You’ll be there before you know it.

Julia pauses the video and pats the carpet in search of her journal.

Monthly goals, she writes down, underlines it.

Monthly chapter goals.

Monthly submission goals?

She unpauses the video.

"But you need to put in the work, Michelle continues. It’s not going to be a walk in the park, alright? If you don’t ‘have time-’ she does air quotes -to work on your project, you need to make time. If you don’t feel like writing today, that’s just a feeling, and you can push past that." 

The background in Michelle’s videos is one giant bookshelf. Some of the books are facing forward – those that have her name on them.

Number three. Effective time management is pivotal, says Michelle. "Try taking the twenty-four hours of the day and assigning them a purpose. If you mark down work for eight hours, plus getting there and back – that makes it nine hours – and sleep for eight hours, you are at seventeen. That leaves seven hours you can potentially spend working on your project."

Julia seesaws her pen up and down against the pages of her journal. On bad days, school’s also eight hours. But she needs to account for homework. The view count below the video hits around thirty thousand. How many of these people are still in school, Julia wonders. Not a lot, probably. She’s got a head start.

"Number four. It’s obviously a long-term commitment, maybe a forever commitment, and putting in the work is key, but there’s a useful thing that you can do right now. It sounds cliché, but I promise it’s going to give your confidence a boost, and it seems like it worked for Octavia Butler, if that’s anything to go by. That is, speak your goals into existence. Say ‘I’m going to be a best-selling author.’ Or write it down, after all, we’re writers."

Not all thirty thousand are going to be bestselling authors. Or authors at all. Who knows how many of these guys even have a finished novel to their name? Julia does. Almost. 

"Say it not like it’s a thing that you want to happen, Michelle says, but say it like it is a thing that is going to happen. Make it destiny. Make it inevitable."

Julia grabs her journal and her pen. Then she puts the pen back down it in favor of a sharpie. She dedicates one page for each statement.

I am going to be a published author before I’m 20.

She flips the page.

I am going to be a renowned author before I’m 25.

She flips the page.

I will be extraordinary.

The Sad Lesbians, Not the Cool Ones

WITH A SINGLE TAP OF Hayal’s pen, gray fills the entire canvas. She sighs and reverses, zooms in and squints for gaps in her line-art. Ah, there we are. A shirt line doesn’t quite connect to the skirt. She draws in what’s hardly more than a dot and tries to match the pressure so it’s the same weight as the rest of the lines. Good, fixed. On the next, resolute tap, gray spills over the entire canvas again and Hayal hangs her head in defeat.

She shoves her tablet closer to the edge of the bed and drops onto her back, closes her eyes, and takes a second to very purposefully, very consciously, groan. With a question of what’s the time, anyway, she pulls out her phone. 22:31, the night is still young.

A couple of seconds later, Hayal’s scrolling through Twitter. And another couple of minutes later, a notification pops up on the top of her screen.

What-!, she yells, before the phone slips out her hand.

For a moment Hayal lies there in silence and accepts that she dropped her phone on her face. She picks it up and rubs her nose. When she turns the screen back on, she does so carefully, with the lightest press of a button, like the message is going to disappear if she looks at it directly.

No, it’s still there.

Tien [22:34]: How are you?

What! Hayal reiterates.

She stares at the message until another one comes in.

Julia [22:36]: What are you yelling about

Hayal pushes herself off the bed, zigzags through her mess and, two seconds later, stands in Julia’s room, gripping the doorframe.

Tien messaged me, she says.

She did?

The tidiness of Julia’s room is passively shaming. There’s