Your Ass is Grass, Hot Girls Are Ugly,
and other lines of inquiry.
It always starts this way: Dusk, and I am walking. The night is laid out like a half-rendered treasure map, blurred symbols, wonky coordinates. My bag contains what it always does:
Flashlight
Camping chair
Baggy of pills and powders
1L Vita Coco
Notepad
Pen
On the night in question, I was on my way home, nursing the boba I always picked up after a day on campus, waiting for the streetcar in a neighbourhood I would prefer not to be spotted in. You’ve been there. Tiny dresses, biceps. Repressed sexual tension. Packs of women stampeding from one bar to the next, high-heels kicking up clouds of perfume-scented dust. Boys chanting Thunderstruck by AC/DC while their friend vomits. Girls crying on curbs, makeup running like inkblots, their friends force-feeding them slices of cold pizza.
I boarded the streetcar and stood staring out the tram window, sucking on the straw while scoffing at my professor’s suggestion, an hour prior, to Start brainstorming our independent thesis projects. In my daydreaming I hovered slightly over the man who slept on the nearest seat. He smelled mostly of urine but I caught a whiff of feces, too. My knee bumped against his, waking him from his stupor. He stood up rapidly and grabbed me by the jowls.
“YOUR ASS IS GRASS, KID. YOUR. ASS. IS. GRASS.”
The warning was growled at my face from an inch away. Bits of spittle flew from his teeth and one even went into my eyeball. I remember being surprised by how cold, almost refreshing, the spray felt against my skin. The density of freckles on his face dispelled any risk of him being a threatening man. He released me, clapped my shoulders as if wishing me good luck, and got off the train. The chief tragedy of the event was my spilled tea. I imagined the streetcar conductor slipping on the tapioca balls strewn across the floor as he traversed the corridor to check on me. In his and other onlookers’ eyes I could see the desire to claim the crisis as theirs, the headline quickly formulating: Innocent girl accosted by homeless man on the public transit. Wanting no part in their narratives, I hurried out the door and walked the rest of the five kilometres home. All the while I repeated the freckled man’s mantra, moving the emphasis around in the sentence. Your Ass is Grass. Your Ass is Grass. Your Ass is Grass.
By the time I reached home, I had a framework for my thesis.
I outlined the concept to my professor the next day. He nodded enthusiastically and waxed poetic about Grass and the Gluteus Maximus, once naturally occurring, now firmly in the claws of Neoliberalism, lawns and Asses exploited and fetishized, vessels to be optimized, resource sinks, status symbols… he kept rambling, the words bringing him no closer to the thing. It sounded like there was mud in his mouth. My brain was calculating his drivel at a quarter-speed. All the while I was staring out the window watching a rollerblader do wobbly figure eights around two manholes, carving out infinity symbols. I’d seen my professor’s art and it was nothing special. He was always stealing glances at my breasts, which is embarrassing for him because I’m flat-chested. I needed him to approve my project budget. Otherwise he could fuck off. The world gives you all the instructions you need.
My project hours were split between two research activities. Activity one: laying in the Grass, trying to make myself bug-sized, surveying other humans interacting with the Grass. Activity two: sneaking into gyms around the city to observe other women sculpting their Asses.
From the gyms, I learned that the wealthier the demographic, the less willing they were to divulge that Ass-sculpting was why they were here. High-status gyms used terms like “functional fitness” and their workouts included flipping tires and climbing ladders, simulating productive, blue-collar labour. Their bodies were the most beautiful of any, but since body sculpting was vulgar to them, they perceived their physiques as happy coincidences, the results of rigorous usage. Passersby were invited to gaze at the bodies pushing sleds and slamming balls through windows so pristine that bumblebees kept flying into them, bouncing off with hollow pops before continuing on their way. The bodies of a few bees that popped too aggressively collected along the windowsill. The poor-people gyms, meanwhile, were in windowless basements, attracting neither bees nor passersby. They upheld no facade of productivity; women with the most massive-est Asses I had ever seen stared at their Asses in the mirror as they isolated their lower glutes and then upper glutes and then side glutes and then switched legs.
My park research revealed that few people were comfortable touching Grass, despite the trending sentiment. The parks they frequented were manicured, the seas of green they sought out pristine; they nonetheless smothered the Grass with blankets before settling down. Despite being unworthy of touch, the Grass was subjected to strict standards from the humans. Teams of leaf blowers were set loose by the taxpayers, progressing in a line from one end of the fields to the other, blasting fallen leaves, brambles, and uprooted weeds into the street, then spraying the Grass with mysterious perfumes.
I carried on with my research for several months.
After a busy day installing my thesis exhibition, to be opened to the public the next morning, I left campus to pick up a well-deserved boba. I then stopped at a bar to pee before catching the streetcar. There was an unusually long line for the women’s toilet, from which a man emerged after some minutes. His unfocused eyes hardly seemed to register the line. His face was red and splotchy. A full pint in his hand.
“Wrong bathroom, dude!” said the lady at the back of the line.
He stumbled towards her and stopped well within her personal space, pushing his face near hers as if peeking through a foggy window. I readied my body for a sacrificial insertion between his and hers.
“I didn’t pay attention to the bathroom I went into,” he explained, “because gender,” he twirled his finger around her nose, “is not,” he landed his finger gently upon her nose, “fuck, I don’t know.” He shrugged and walked away.
I scanned the bar for this man after using the toilet. Serendipitously—but also unsurprisingly—he was having a beer with the freckled man who inspired my thesis, eight months prior. I went over and invited them to visit my new show. “An exclusive first look,” I said. “Press only!” His friend from the bathroom grabbed my tea, sucked on the straw, spat out a tapioca ball, and said, “what the fuck is this shit.”
“Come on, get up off your Asses. I’ll pick up your tabs.” I was feeling confident from the line of ketamine I’d snorted fifteen minutes prior. They rose wearily and I led them through campus and up to the exhibition space. There I flicked on the lights, plugged my phone into the soundsystem, and pressed play. The room came to life with the whirring motors of several leaf blowers, recorded on my phone from the park, layered into a haunting drone sustained at the appliance’s average output of 95 dB. The men covered their ears.
The room was split into three sections. Two were modelled after gyms, the bougie side with astroturf and “functional fitness” equipment strewn about, the cheap side with hard rubber and filthy dumbbells. The third section was lined with real sod, rolled out over a tarp, the grass springy underfoot and surrounded by a white picket fence preventing access. Digital clocks were installed on the scuffed-up walls, with red lines rearranging into numbers reporting the leaf blower GHG emissions and water volumes required to keep the tiny lawn pristine. I yelled at the men, who lingered by the entrance, describing the two teams of women actors who would be working out here tomorrow, in their respective sections, targeting their Asses, grunting and groaning and drenched in sweat. This seemed to excite the men. The freckled one started slamming a weighted ball on the bougie side and his friend started doing bicep curls on the cheap side. The wattage output from their exercises popped up on a leaderboard beneath a giant wall poster, which read as follows:
The leaderboard made the men pump harder—just as I’d hoped. I led them to a corner containing a defunct leaf blower I had discovered in a landfill. A plaque on its body read,
I was born in America in the 70s, during a long drought. Water consumption limits were enforced by your government, forcing your people to restrict usage to tasks you deemed “high priority”, such as showering and maintaining your lawns. Thus you invented me: the perfect alternative to hosing down decks and driveways. You loved me, it seemed. Tens of millions of my brothers and sisters were born, sharing your homes. And then something changed. A subset of your species called “Democrats” clamped down on our freedoms. Your sons and daughters labeled us an abomination, sentencing us to the landfill. Perhaps your people should weigh the consequences before birthing and abandoning an entire species. It is an intolerable existence, to not know if one is loved.
I turned to the freckled man. “I only have one question. You told me that Your Ass is Grass. Which implies you were referring to my Ass. But my Ass is not sculpted. I’ve never exercised, not even once. Did you mean to say One’s Ass?”
“This is some bullshit,” he said. His friend laughed.
“That’s true,” I said. “I lodge social commentaries from pristine white rooms as if I’m excluded from the world. But the rejection of sculpting is an aesthetic choice, too. No-scaping is an act of landscaping. I still look at the mirror every day, and I usually look at my flat, saggy Ass.”
I guess I had closed my eyes while conveying these thoughts. When I opened them, the men were on their way out the door. The freckled man turned around and asked if I had any money. I gave him what I had and they left. His friend was carrying a few of the dumbbells, having ripped off the sensors I attached, which was fine.
I popped on my headphones as I passed through the club district to catch the streetcar. Jazzy Belle by Outkast was playing as I walked, vibing, high as a filament, thinking Damn this access to good art is convenient, what conveniences will we have in the future that will change my life the way Spotify has? Perhaps if I pursued this line of thought far enough, and regularly enough, in that same future I would be a wealthy founder whose fortune could subsidize wars in foreign countries. But I did not do so because Jazzy Belle sounded good.
André 3000 told me to walk home instead of the streetcar.
As the sun began to set, I passed by three young men smoking outside a bar. One finished his beer, burped, and proclaimed, with arms outstretched, as if Zarathustra coming down from the mountain, that “HOT GIRLS ARE UGLY.” His two disciples nodded, and I found myself joining their ranks, nodding along. I followed from a distance as they sleepwalked down the sidewalk, side-by-side, occupying its width. They paused at a streetcar stop, where the dark figure of a woman waited in the glass enclosure. Her silhouette framed by the neon lights from the diner across the street. We could only see the back of her head. But the scene, and the drugs, were doing their thing; she was not hot, and she was certainly not ugly. She was beautiful.
“That’s wonderful,” the Zarathustra-man said. And then he blushed.
“It’s full of wonder,” said one disciple.
“I’ve seen a lot of less interesting things,” said the third.
The Zarathustra man had already entered the glass enclosure to introduce himself to the woman. The disciples looked at each other.
“What a strange temptation,” one said, “to disturb something so wonderful.”
But both men were clearly jealous.
Instead of going home, I went to the park, where I set up my camping chair in the Grass. Hot girls are ugly. Hot girls, are ugly. Hot. Girls. Are. Ugly. My flashlight was one of those high-powered police-grade models that I kept for safety. A moth was attracted to it, and as I considered the maxim, he hovered happily around the beam. I shone the light on him while flitting in and out of sleep from dusk through sunrise. I gave that moth the best night of his life.
The next morning was my exhibition opening. I received an email from my professor, as I packed up at the park, with the subject line, Your Ass is Grass: Project Nomination for Best Overall Concept. The email preview text read Despite the shambolic execution we discussed, the jury found your project to… I deleted the email without opening it. This is some bullshit, diagnosed the wise man, correctly, before passing his hat off to the three wise, young men outside the bar. I reached home as the city awakened, taking note of its indifference to that austere exhibition room, to my professor, and to the whims of an arbitrary jury, selected from a faculty of failed artists. I was ready to start my next project.
Why don’t you attend your exhibitions? I am often asked. Because the art itself is nothing. It does not matter. The only thing that matters is the life I lead, the things I do that result, somehow, in art. Like a hyperactive puppy, my job is to chase bubbles delicate and fickle, whose sheen is glamorous in the light, not caring if they pop upon contact and I am left flailing at nothing. Think that’s a cop-out? Congratulations. Go make your own art.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this piece, you’ll also enjoy Confessions of a Gallerina, told from the same narrator, who describes herself as a Chinatown art wench.
In other news, here is a snippet of feedback from my friend, and most trusted reader, after reviewing my debut story collection (Anvil Press, June 2026). Can’t wait to share it with you all.
