The Art of Injury

By Tennison Long

The Art of Injury explores the melancholic realms of Becky's fleeting existence which revolves around medical appointments, vaccination timetables, mystery illnesses, well-timed accidents, and other self-inflicted wounds—or what she considers to be performance art for her moveable audience. In her quest for validation from a deadened society, she overcomes victimhood by rising above the pharmacological push and past traumas. Through elaborate role-playing with her friend Chad, she is able to outrun the phantom sadness that chases her. Within this presentation of proxy suffering is the dissection of the perverse connections between caregiver and patient, performer and audience, revealing the lengths to which one woman will venture in her pursuit of purpose before an untimely end. 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tennison Long
• Release date: Apr 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224242719

Tennison Long

Tennison Long is the author of a dozen novels and three non-fiction books. He likes to take his readers on a psychological thrill ride, blending the macabre with the sublime while sewing seams of mental confusion with emotional clarity, while offering a uniquely imagined prose that sustains "moments of sputtering haunted brilliance." He lives in Northern California.

Book preview

Table of Contents

The Art of Injury

The Art of Injury

Tennison Long

Fiction by the author:

Glorious Verve

When We Ran The Master Plan

Of Tribe & Empire

On Becoming Yesterday’s Actors

tex●tu●al

How to Fake Your Death (& Other Illusions of Exile)

The Devolution

Signal Fire

The Disaster Agent

You Will Be as Gods

The Folktale Mysteria Catalogue & Otherworldly Creepypasta

The Enchanted Theory of Ideal Ends

American Incel

The Bellwether American

Private Islands

Non-fiction by the author:

Post-COVID Stress Disorder: How to Escape the Fear Matrix

Virtue Simp: Emotional Tribalism in the Age of the Current Thing

Sudden Death Cleaning: How to Live Your Best Life Now

Long Hand Publications

www.tennisonlong.com

Copyright © 2024 by The Estate of Tennison Long

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.

Long, Tennison. The Art of Injury.

Reprint.

ISBN:

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.  

Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Introduction by the Author

The modern landscape is dominated by post-truth ambiguity which limits our opportunities for authenticity.  Add in a low-grade amnesia in regard to the past, and our future becomes dimmer in its predictability.  Reimagining the present, we are devoured by the opinions from others, and instant satisfaction from a locked-in infantilism.  Because of this it has become more difficult to write fiction, as if reality and fantasy have somehow reversed themselves.  Everywhere you look you see fiction, even if you are not looking for it, as if we are inside the comfortable confines of a well-plotted storyline and the fiction writer is now tasked with crafting reality outside of this bubble.  The boogeyman once existed in tales and nightmares, but now the contention is that he is all-involved in your life.  

The Art of Injury is by design an imaginative alternative to the self-enclosed world.  Is it possible to still harness the undreamed-of attention sought by a tapped-out audience while exploring the exploitations of today’s world with the warnings in the overlit landscape of injury–societally imposed and self induced–and the quiet resolve and redemption in such committed acts? 

Tennison Long

Northern California, 2024

...dedicated to Frank Valbiro

We have to begin somewhere...

Through the offset of a blackout curtain was the signal that it had become daytime.  Becky’s heart hurt like it always tended to these days.  A giant invisible weight on her chest, as if a large man was sitting on her to fulfill a kink, or possibly it was the inward collapsing of clotted and knotted veins.  She was well past the wondering stage.  What she still could recall was a blur and not necessarily from factual events, but merely the imagined ailments from her body and fading promises from past loved ones.  She knew enough to know that the brain stem was key to the entire operation.  It was the chip in the computer that connected the spinal cord and the brain.  If it went out, so did your body.  You wouldn’t die but you would be paralyzed.  She was willing to go far and do wild things but this was her red line.  The idea of prolonged agony in the form of any sort of locked-in syndrome lost its allure rather quickly.  The imprisoned mode was intriguing at first glance, the idea of garnering all of the attention, of the necessary 24/7 attendees, and the idea of all of the beauty rest forced upon you.  But then the counter mood with the inability to speak or move your limbs, the remaining forms of communication being a joystick moved around with your chin or a new language code via blinking eyes.  It wasn’t for you.  At least not yet.  

Boundaries

It wasn’t that she was from my past, because I didn’t know her until now.  Yet there were reminders from her charming affectations, the glistening of a running nose or the pre-spina bifida gait in her walk.  It wasn’t much but was enough to create a longing inside me.  But like everything else there was a roadblock that kept me from going there.  A no-go zone of increased possibilities toward violence, but instead of violence it was an emotional carnage from making any attempt at having a go.

Maybe it was the resemblance to one of those influencer internet models, free of sought-out perfection via an embracing of her cellulite.  Or how she liked to look others in the eye when she talked to them.  A long lost art, that of gladly floating in and out of awkward moments.  Even how her hair was expensive but well overdue for a color job, with the half inch long roots of gray, enough to force thoughts of her as an older woman.  Handsome, fit, strong and independent.  All turn ons indeed.  She possessed a reservoir of tricks in her magician’s bag.  For example, how she turned her head to expose a nape she wanted kissed, or the key fob she continued to drop to let everyone know she drove an expensive sports car.  

I don’t like winter because of the bulky clothes.

When she spoke to you it was as if the audience was a crowded room.  You could almost hear the hisses from the women and feel the swelling of boners on the men.  The open dreaming of getting your hands up and under her sweater, sliding beneath whatever padded bra encapsulated her 2nd gen boob job.  

I stopped wearing a thong years before they became all the rage.  Now everyone wears one regardless of ass type or whatever stage of neglect they are in.  I guess why not, God bless them.

It was about shadowplay with her movements under the daylight fluorescent cans as well as a staccato in the dancing of her word choices.  She had to have known.  Half disguised comments about what she would do to you if alone in a motel room.  The question remained, if there was enough hot water to shampoo her hair then take a warm epsom bath.  This vintage outlook only came with a certain age type, everything else was lost on all subsequent generations.

How in childhood our parents weren’t involved with our naughtier affairs, and did not partake in the private parts of life.  That is if they had boundaries.  This lent its own erotic naughtiness.  And you got in this space when you dabbled with those of the same age or the older kids.  There was comfort in knowing what you would be getting.  A certain level of trust in experience.  Not left in the dark with an experimental physical play but guided by hands of rote memory.  Analogers versus the digitalverse kids.  As if augmentations of reality would be another read-through audition for a starter job or intro to girl-on-girl softcore porn.  Something to get in the door, opportunity knocking in the form of relief from the narrowing embattlement.  

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, or so goes the pick-up line from certain nights when the unknown was just too daunting, or the horror mentalscape of anticipating what tomorrow would bring in an out-of-control world.  The only grounding effect was the waning level of intimacy from a different world.  We forgot about each other and lost the ball in the floodlights.  Lungs filled with sadness and the possibilities in prescriptions because mother knew what was best for you when she took you to the doctor.  All that you learned since in the psychology books about mother/daughter relationships gone bad.  At least she protected you from strangers, while only feeding the demons on the inside.  You survived thus far physically unscathed, fit and not obese with layers of protective buffer from predators.  No tattoos or piercings as you don’t feel compelled to take back ownership of your body as you never relinquished the title.  It could have been so much worse.  A chilling reminder you tell yourself when the mania wanes.

Her tic it seemed was a deliberate affectation, one which made her seem focused with her thoughts, or a tell of the vaccine injured.  Either way it was a grounding trigger when talking to her, as it kept you going back to your own sense of wonderment.  Was she being flirtatious, was she a cock tease?  When her jaws gnawed out silent words you could see her potential but was it related to low-grade meth addiction?  You didn’t stare to stay polite but you could watch her endlessly on loop if you had a bodycam fixed on her face.  This made her vulnerable and human, half frightening in the idea that she could just die suddenly.  She didn’t have back up people like family or friends to call, only 911. 

When she would approach it was with a hesitation both fearful and exciting, as if her princess wave hand would turn vertical to part the curtains of your oversized plush robe.  You stay fixated on the hands, and fingers, no time to gaze into her eyes for intent.  It’s in these moments you feel most alive, the racing heartbeat amid the cock teasing.  You process quickly the idea that everything is based on regular human attraction.  There are no victims therefore no guilt.  It was odd to wear such a robe in the heat but coverup was necessary for the eventual reveal.  Unwrapping the package was part of the game.  The agape surprise and wonderment dancing around her head of what awaits.  This may have been one of those times that I was overdoing it and merely setting myself up for letdown. 

In the moments when you ask yourself who you must be fooling, you must double down.  Despite the murmurs and small talk, going big doesn't equate skill sets.  And the excess of partners is not like the Indian being photographed with each still taking away a slice of his soul.  There was urgency for a reason.  Awaiting the sudden death, or worse, full debilitation from a clot or a stroke-out event you do not return from.  Limp dicked forever.  The urgency is that you begin getting tired earlier.  You try to convince yourself it’s not because your heart is fatter and swollen, but that it’s the new beach body regimen.  Machine weights, cardio, low carb diet, keto flu.  Beauty is pain and you are here for the sacrifice.

There is a dilution effect, like you are drowning and any effort at physical salvation is ebbed and flowed out to sea and back but each time the patina of a delicious edge is rubbed off, like driftwood, with you presented as a watered down version of something from youth.  A long forgotten but nostalgic memento, flashbacks to strange fashion that involved ski trips and family dinners, finger banging sessions and four-packs of wine coolers.  You always managed to find somewhere to go in the remembrances and this was the magic of firing brain cells, those recall elements of a hardened present for a more delicate past.  K-Mart submarine sandwiches.  Adults who were in their thirties but you thought were in their fifties.  Thin people before the messy obesity.  Exposed skin and body part reveals in National Geographic, lowrider mags and lingerie catalogs.  Graceful curves of women with meaty hoof-like camel toes.  Big beach curl hair and large-rimmed prescription glasses.  Years before lasik and diligently-designed yoga pants.  Stills of life that had to be taken in with a tilted head to validate their authenticity.  

Are you nervous or apprehensive?  I know that go time can be overwhelming?

No, as long as it doesn’t keep coming up as an issue, I replied.

It was pre-outrage in that we were spoonfed our distrust in government.  Now it’s everywhere and cooked up for all sides to ingest.  Any good psy-operator will tell you that first you make the pitch, then go in for the undeniable close, making your customer feel convinced they need what you're selling.  Your own settling of the sorted logic of why would they be trying to kill you when you would be one less customer.  Perhaps just collateral damage or a new class of victim which will sustain decades of prescription drugs.  Dope fiends and porn addicts.  Nobody outwardly mad at society, only an internal anger from the poor judgment of trust and believing the spin.  No chance to check out from the psycho drama in order to pause the intake hose of propaganda and lies.  

Where are you now?

Physically, or in my journey?

I guess both.

Down the street, just left the bushes outside your bedroom window.  In my journey I am somewhere in the gray pill zone.

Gray pill?

Yeah, between the white pill and black pill.  I had hope but it currently seems lost.

Do you know when enough is enough or is the do not pass line moved like the goalposts of your heart?  Plowing forward without regard for redemption because you need to get to the point when it no longer matters, just your collapsed shoulders buoyed by the sea water.  Your body an island in the archipelago of skinny dipping smoke over water mirrors.  Would it be bad to declare I never loved you but I loved your body, more specifically what your body could do?  And on the topic of loose limbs it was only in these moments of incredulous abandon when the swoon was stamped outside of me, leaving me to express my love via ulterior motives.  It was later in life I went hardest for the alabaster, ivory white skin.  Almost as if virginal in its