Zara T’s Zine
Let's back things up a bit
[Y’all, Mad Art Project has nothing to do with the actual strange and intricate Gorillaz mythology, but that song “Cracker Island” is something. Every time I want to find out what’s in the next chapter of Mad Art Project, I give “Cracker Island” a listen and it tells me what to write.
This story takes us back to 2023. The student Zara T is writing a zine about Jethra Holloway and her mad art project. All those quotes from the first couple chapters, the newspaper clippings and bits of the Bible and so on, are from the zine. You can picture them hand-written. The hand belongs to a trained letterer writing block print loosely at great speed using black grease pencil.
We’ll leave Tim and Jethra in spring 2024, Tim on his way to find out what the sheriff’s deputy wants with him and Jethra locked up in Donnie Ross’s storm cellar. They then catch up with Zara T for the last bit of this story, or she catches up to them, temporally speaking, so we know nothing too terrible happens to them — YET.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
On Cracker Island it was raised By the Collective from the grave —Gorillaz, “Cracker Island”
Zara T wrote lying on her stomach on a rug and a couple of quilts. Up on the desktop computer, a rotating geometric pattern cast purple lights over the painted cement-block walls of her dorm room. With Zara T down on the ground, the general effect was that she was under water — a purple lightening storm above, maybe, and a ship wrecking somewhere, and Zara T hard at work below.
Usually she worked to Paris Paloma or Kate Bush, but today she had the Gorillaz on heavy rotation on her Spotify channel. From there, the algorithm took her to trance and EDM tracks. The cerebral rhythms helped her think. She lay in the middle of a circle of torn, written- and drawn-over pieces of paper, arranging them in patterns around her.
Long ago, folks might have scoured the library and Xeroxed quotes they wanted. Now, Zara T found them on her computer. Since she had no printer, she copied them out by hand on pieces of construction paper torn to the right sizes. On other scraps she sketched pieces of scenes — a conversation, a face.
Just now she was making notes — mostly sketches, some written — about the proper names that littered Jethra’s social media posts.
Diotima. Zara T had to look that name up. A woman in a toga? Or was it secret code? Dio-Tima. Dio-Tina. Tina? Amitiod? Ammonite? Izod?
Penelope Moonchild. A hobbit girl? A younger cousin of Luna Lovegood? A resentful Gen-X child of hippie boomers who saddled her with a ri-DUCK-ulous name?
Lisa Lespedeza.
Philiprecipitaton. Californication? Parapluie?
Vinegar Vetch.
Maybe the named characters weren’t that important. Jethra was finding names in things she saw around her, Zara T thought. Lespedeza bent flat under an April flood, rain dropping on the arch of a dusty foot, vetch curled around a child’s plastic dragon toy.
The names didn’t repeat, Zara T noticed, except the Dio/Tina/Diotima/Tiny Tina cluster of names.
What did repeat across Jethra’s Facebook and Instagram were the up-close, often blurred or overexposed, photos of dug-up earth, a buttercup, grubby knuckles. Hands digging, hands cupping something red-black and gerbil-sized, hands twining clover into a coronet, hands scrubbing a cast-iron skillet or welcoming a bumblebee on a fingertip. One hand, usually — the other hand would be holding the phone. Jethra must have used her phone settings to get the overexposed and grainy effects.
Occasionally there was a picture of a thumb on a cracked phone screen, about to hit POST. Who took those photos? Zara T wondered.
Then again, there were the blood photos.
A toilet bowl full. A couple of clots in a stainless steel mixing bowl. Drops on a white ceramic toilet seat, splatters on green vinyl tile.A trail across emerald grass.
Zara T’s favorite was a faded red and white plastic globe, bisected at the midline and cupped open, holding a glistening near-black dollop of blood. A metallic chain trailed from the globe into tall grass where it nestled.
Zara had a similar globe hanging from her backpack: a Poké Ball, container for a plastic Pokémon toy. Hers was a Snorlax. She wondered what Pokémon had lived in Jethra’s Poké Ball and where the tiny inhabitant was now.
She scrolled on to the last picture in her downloads folder.
A hand flushing a toilet, a hand so past-the-wrist bloody you’d have to put it behind a sensitive content control even on a fetish site. The muscular, tanned hand with its dimpled knuckles and gnawed-down fingernails belonged to Jethra Holloway.
Jethra. Zara T knew Jethra by now. They’d been exchanging DMs. Zara T might drive up and see Jethra next week.
For a while she considered the possibility that this was no art project but the truth, that Jethra Holloway was, in fact, having spontaneous or induced miscarriages of some kind month after month. The documentation was, after all, copious.
ZaraT: Those aren’t, yk, actual …??? I mean you do give them names?
TinasGrl: ROTFL no, i mean that’s my actual period, sometimes it never stops, clots size of field mice, but not actual EMBRYOS … but for a zine you cld pretend they were. might make more of an impact keep the plot rolling
ZaraT: No, I wanna make a zine about YOU.
TinasGrl: but i’m just me it’s the project that matters
ZaraT: You matter. YOU MATTER. That’s what got me into this line of work, documentary zines. I want to draw and write you, just you. I’m not a fiction writer. The art project can be present as itself, as the focal point, but the zine won’t act as if it’s real. I mean, I won’t take a counterfactual editorial stance, ya know?
TinasGrl: …
ZaraT: The zine can take a neutral stance as to the art project’s reality? After all, I really don’t know. And I use pictures more than words. Readers can make up their own minds.
TinasGrl: ok cool
A sturdy-looking woman stands on a ridge. We see her from behind. She’s wearing cut-off denim shorts and a kerchief over her short, curly hair. Her feet are bare.
In front of her opens a deep gorge. Beyond the gorge, ridge upon ridge, the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee march west. The young woman is drawn in grease pencil over top of a washed-out photograph; the details of the photograph have also been pointed up with pencil. The woman is dwarfed by the scene.
The whole thing has been copied on a Xerox machine, giving the image a flattened-out, black-and-white emphasis. It isn’t a political pamphlet or a Chick tract, though it looks a bit like one.
Or maybe it is.
In the sky, and partly over the furthest mountains, long-tailed cursive lettering reads:
Oh wonder! ... Oh brave new world!
I was sitting in the front of Donovan Holloway’s Suburban, squashed up against the door, with Zara T, whom I’d just met, likewise squashed between me and the bulk that was Donovan. We’d driven up into the hills past Dunlap, I remember, anywhere to get out of Bethlehem, and had parked to go through the zines Zara T brought with her. We were searching for clues to Jethra’s whereabouts but, as generally seems to happen, we turned up more questions than answers.
Below that quote, which I did not recognize, the Chick-track style block lettering, now written very tightly, responded with a quote I’d heard many times. It was from a Winona Rider movie, back in the 80s or 90s, and I liked that Zara T had happened upon something Jethra and I had shared.
Quis hic locus? quae regio? quae mundi plaga? What world is this?... What kingdom?... What shores of what worlds? It’s a very big question you’re faced with —
Still, looking at Zara T’s half-finished zine in spring of 24, I was puzzled. The woman in the drawing looked substantial enough. In fact, Jethra-shaped. But the quotes Zara T had chosen seemed to describe a girl on the precipice of life.
“Those seem like quotes for a young woman,” I said. “But Jethra’s about 45, I think — closer to my age than yours. What made you light upon those words?”
Zara T wasn’t sure she trusted me yet, but she trusted Donovan. She cut her eyes at him and he nodded.
I remember he had parked his Suburban out on the edge of a different overlook. Same shores. Same worlds. Same meth houses down in the hamlets. Or was me, was it only I who could see no difference?
“I think she knew very much who she was,” Zara T said finally, answering my question.
She drew a point, a line, and an arrow on the notepad she held in her hand. A vector. Like Donnie Ross, she was a leftie, I noticed. (I had met him by then.)
“But she’d come to the middle of her life — that’s not rude, is it?” Zara T was suddenly conscious she had called a woman younger than I am middle-aged and therefore me past middle age.
I smiled and shook my head. Zara T went on: “ — And she found her art had taken her out beyond all familiarity. You know the saying The personal is always political? She’d left both personal and political far behind.”
Zara T looked at me again, then took her phone out of her back pocket. She thumbed through it and passed it over to me. She wore her nails short with black polish, much chipped.
“You knew her in Chattanooga in the 90s, right?” she asked. “What do you make of this? It’s from late last summer, before I met her in person.”
ZaraT: Hi! Quick question.
TinasGrl: sure thing
ZaraT: Who’s Tina?
…
…
TinasGrl: a girl i dreamed about one time back in the nineties
TinasGrl: politics aside, sometimes i think all this is a votive — an offering, you know — an offering to make her real
ZaraT: a girl you dreamed about? like a spell?
TinasGrl: then again, i think more and more the past doesn’t matter. i’m creating something no one has seen before — not me, anyhow, though who knows what that means, since i’ve never been anywhere or done anything
TinasGrl: but nothing feels familiar. everything is strange. each step is a moon landing. ever since i was arrested and let loose again. like the horizon’s cracked open and the world is bigger than i ever dreamed
TinasGrl: the strange part is, i’m not afraid
Zara T had a cautious, sideways way of looking at folks. She looked at me like that as I finished perusing the exchange.
“Did you and Jethra know anyone named Tina?” she asked. “And what do you think she means about magic and moon landings?”
“I don’t know anyone named Tina.” I handed back the phone. “And I have no idea.”
Then I relented. Zara T was, after all, a very young woman. If she had no right to get in my business, still she had every right not to be baffled and misled by older folks. I said to her: “Even back then, I always felt like Jethra was somewhere out beyond me. Beyond everyone. On a precipice, just as you draw her here. At the same time, though she probably couldn’t articulate it, I think she knew exactly where she was going.”