Associate Editor Lisa Low: In Anna Cabe’s “For All These Traces,” the superfan of an unnamed K-pop boy band breaks and enters her idols’ hotel suite. Illicit comical moments spent “writhing over their unpacked Supreme hoodies, dabbing their snail serums onto my scaly palms and dehydrated chin, cramming their leftover pizza crusts into my mouth” expand into a larger conversation about global popstardom, racial self-reflection, and the relationship between technology and the self. Cabe’s story is powerfully cinematic, and the sense of self she presents is provocatively zoomed-in, future-thinking, and for our moment.
To hear Anna read her story, click below:
For All These Traces
When the K-pop boy-band’s managers caught me butterflied on the marble floor of the hotel bathroom, I was already trapped. The hallway camera had long before captured me entering the group’s suite; even if I had escaped, my image would have been blasted across newsfeeds and videos and fan sites by terrified/furious/jealous fans desperate to save their oppas. My pixelated face blown up, every pulsing zit, every errant eyelash, every gaping pore so visible that the whole of my face would cease to be in focus, like I was broken into parts, like I was no longer real. Just like them, my pouty-mouthed beloveds, my neon-haired darlings, my poreless dolls. These foreign boy-men, still uncanny novelties to most of America. The rumors and gripes that dogged them: That they lip-synched during live performances, were synchronized dancing robots, were too slick-sheened to be relatable. That only one of them spoke fluent enough English. That they didn’t write their own songs or choreograph their own moves. That their real names were hard to pronounce. That they didn’t even pick their band name or their bandmates. I had my own beefs with them, for all my ardor. That they weren’t the same Asian as me but were the closest thing I could get in global mainstream pop. That I was a year older than the oldest member, a noona to the hyungs. That I couldn’t pronounce their real names either. That they weren’t even there when I crashed their temporary sanctuary. They were on a late-night show with James or Jimmy or the other Jimmy, sculpting their images into a block of butter for the judgment of the half-adoring, half-gawking audience. Look at those boys smiling gamely, molding greasy butter into approximations of their bandmates’ perfect visages, a dairy pop Mount Rushmore melting into oily puddles under the hard studio lights. All while I was writhing over their unpacked Supreme hoodies, dabbing their snail serums onto my scaly palms and dehydrated chin, cramming their leftover pizza crusts into my mouth. It’d be called a stroke of luck later that the group was away, but any stan would know I had memorized every second of their schedule from trawling their agency’s website and their social media accounts and the dregs of fandom forums. Why would a grown woman with a steady paycheck teaching Hamlet to droop-headed, bored Catholic school teenagers explode her shit this spectacularly, risk an actual stay in jail, waste her goddamn time settling for this shadow of fleshly contact? If I had to go there, why not fucking go all the way and be like those bold brats and bitches who rush the band at the airport, scramble onstage during concerts, throw their yeasty panties as the guys enter and exit limos? I confess—I understood that they yearn to be known, and I to know. That we approach our lucent idols with different forms of hopeless reverence. All I wanted was a photo, trace evidence I was there. But when I zoomed onto my face, onto the crumbs and cream flecked around my cracked lips, onto the cavernous pores being obliterated from view, I was transfixed. Lost in the gorgeous sight of all this blank space. All this void. All these silhouettes, of people who weren’t there.
Anna Cabe’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slate, Bitch Media, Vice, decomp, the Masters Review, Slice, StoryQuarterly, Gordon Square Review, The Toast, Jellyfish Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Fairy Tale Review, among others. She received her MFA in fiction from Indiana University and has been supported by organizations like the Fulbright Program in the Philippines and Millay Arts. She is currently a fiction editor for Split Lip Magazine. You can find Anna at annacabe.com.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE
