So These Visions of Francine
fiction by Lily Gareth Cunningham
This is Lily’s second published story, and I’m glad we’re in early. “So These Visions of Francine” is surreal and hilarious and scary. After my first reading, I sent Adam a two-word note: TAKE THIS! Spend time with Francine below, then join us next week for Little Blanksgiving. We’ll co-publish five new pieces with Blank from dirt.fyi.
Avery, submissions editor
SO THESE VISIONS OF FRANCINE
by Lily Gareth Cunningham
In ninth grade I accurately predicted that Francine Druly would piss herself and be escorted from the cafeteria during the Spring Quarter Masquerade Ball. There would be two dry rough elbows in crisp beige shirts holding her limping pissy body. Royalty-free classical music would roar to a room of slow-swinging tweens. They’d stare like gobsmacked puppets. Her piss puddle would shimmer beneath a disco ball as they all tiptoed around.
In my premonition her reasons for peeing were unclear. But I felt, at first, that it was an exciting and positive vision because high school dances are dull and pissing yourself is funny.
Francine Druly was perceived as a lonely oddball by students and faculty alike. This characterization frustrated me because in my visions she was not odd at all, and if she was lonely I could not tell from watching.
I’d begun psychically studying Francine before and after school to substantiate these rumors of her weirdness; I’d learned from an instructional video posted by a now-retired clairvoyant content creator in a subreddit for mystically-inclined lesbians called r/SaphPsych.
I’d lie supine on my grandmother’s plastic-covered flannel couch, making eyes at the yellowing popcorn ceiling, summoning these visions. I’d been living with my grandmother for the past year and a half. It was unpleasant to think about why. It was better to draw clockwise circles with my feet, tap my fingers one by one, concurrently stream Radio Disney’s biggest hits of the year 2003 and binaural beats from SleepTube, and visualize the dilation of my third eye as it became open to receiving. The reddit psychics advised one could only receive what allowed itself to be transmitted. I only ever received Francine.
Every vision I’d received of Francine, up until the piss one, had been more tedious than the last: Francine at a clear plastic table in a large white room spooning worm gray rice from plate to mouth; Francine nodding blankly at her desperately cheerful mother; Francine grabbing beige clothes from her closet and wearing them with no hesitation, curation, or second-guessing.
Francine gnawed on stale bread yesterday. Francine will gnaw on stale bread tomorrow. Francine is gnawing on stale bread for the rest of her godforsaken life. Francine, whose complacent pink lids shutter boring black pupils inside sallow gray eyes. Francine, whose long gaze never deviates from the object or task directly in front of her. Francine, a sickly stick figure with boring brown hair, who never looks down at her feet, not with reticence or fear, and who never looks out the window of her house, not with longing or desire. Did Francine want, literally, anything at all? I imagined shouting at her like she was an insufferably dopey contestant on a high-stakes game show. But in those streaming visions of mine there was no prize worth rooting for, only the strange and simple act of being. I got nervous thinking about this, about Francine having to exist so blandly without winning anything for it, and wondered how she felt about being, quite possibly, the dullest person on Earth.
In the mystical subreddit I asked for feedback:
I’m receiving visions of someone who, I’m fairly certain, doesn’t want anything. Do you find this quality admirable or terrifying? Have you ever seen this?
My question received no upvotes and only one comment from a user with a questionable karmic score. Their username was u/imcheetahgurrl03 and their comment was an array of indecipherable characters sandwiched between a rat emoji, a cartoon jam jar, and a GIF of a dancing dog.
Several feverish nights later I received the piss vision of Francine. It was an exhilarating development, my first unprompted vision and it finally involved Francine doing something very odd. I was in the middle of switching resting positions on the couch when I saw the hot yellow streams gushing down Francine’s pale calves, frothy as they were pushed, the adult chaperones grimacing, and the mortified gulps from the students dancing nearby. I decided to sit with her at lunch the next day.
Francine never sat alone; instead she camouflaged herself among alternating groups of friends. The table she sat at that day, the Yarn Club table, would be folded up and tucked in a corner for next week’s dance. Then she would be dragged away in front of it by the two beige-shirted elbows and a little bit of table leg would protrude out just far enough to nearly trip her, but not enough to seem out of place. I imagined even the table would judge her when she passed by on piss day and suddenly I felt protective. As dull and bland as Francine was, I didn’t think she deserved that.
The president of the Yarn Club clacked his long silver needles together and fumbled through a puke yellow scarf. Francine sat at the far right of the table. She was gnawing stale bread again, with an open jar of oily peanut butter that remained mostly untouched. The small loaf expelled brown crumbs whenever she ripped a chunk. Some of the crumbs were soaring and landing in the Yarn Club president’s scarf-in-progress but he hadn’t noticed yet. I squeezed in at the table’s edge. I introduced myself to no one in particular. The Yarn Club continued clacking their needles. Francine gave a thumbs up and chewed on some bread. We sat silently for a bit and I noticed Francine hadn’t swallowed all of the bread bits she’d been chewing. Instead she’d spat them out and rolled them into small moist balls combined with peanut butter oil.
She noticed me noticing and said, “They’re not for me.”
At the sound of her voice, the Yarn Club stopped clacking, as if anticipating a great disturbance.
“They’re for the dogs,” Francine explained, and the lunchtime bell rang.
The ninth grade Spring Quarter Masquerade Ball was a week away and fliers were posted, memes had been circulated, outfits had been discussed, and couples had formed in preparation for the event. Our bi-weekly gym classes had become compulsory dance lessons led by our school’s Director of Fitness, Darlene Montana.
Darlene Montana no longer danced and rarely ever stood. That day she conducted us from her seat on the bleachers like a maestro under the influence of downer narcotics. Her pointer finger dragged left and right in midair slightly behind the tempo of the royalty-free classical music booming from the gymnasium’s speakers. She hummed and rocked her head side to side, eyes fluttering open only when a student screamed that another student had accidentally tangoed over their toes. That day I noticed, for the first time, the wobbliness of Darlene Montana’s upper arms compared to the sleek stiffness of her forearms; the two limb parts were conjoined by elbows so rough, wrinkly, and gray that it seemed the joint might disintegrate. It arrived to me, not as a vision but a feeling, that she would drag Francine from the floor next week.
A windy tango screeched on while our sneakers squeaked out its steps. We all clasped hands when needed but avoided eye contact. I had my arms on the shoulders of a quivering eighth grader who scuffled his fingers along my waist and fixed his terrified eyes to the floor. Francine boogied in the corner by herself. She had acquired the Yarn Club president’s half-made yellow scarf and bundled it over her head and around her chin like a Babushka, with tufts of her brown curls poking through the gaps in the yarn. Darlene Montana snapped her crinkled fingers lazily to signal a new music cue: the waltz. I didn’t mind it. When we waltzed, our toes tapped and glided us around the gymnasium as one delicate mass. I liked being a part of something so smooth. I yanked the quivering eighth grader over to Francine’s corner so she’d naturally become my partner after him.
Francine knew the steps very well. With her hand on my shoulder blade she guided us through nervous couples and wheeled around on her toes like she was skating. I tried looking at her eyes but she was looking upwards, staring at the metal beams in the ceiling and tapping her fingers in rhythm to the waltz.
As our waltz was ending, I complimented the way she’d styled the Yarn Club president’s half-made scarf.
“The yellow with your hair poking through,” I said, “is like funky dark spots.”
The music stopped, and Darlene Montana released us from class with a lackluster wave.
“Ooooooh,” Francine said, “like a cheetah.”
Francine’s house was one I’d passed before on my walks home from school. It was a long white one-story farmhouse at the intersection of a nature trail and a dead end road. There was a small fenced-off enclosure to the left of the house. I’d tried many times to see inside but found myself blocked. There were blackout curtains, an opaque white tarp over the outdoor fence, and an aggressive smell of spoiled salmon. I hadn’t realized the impenetrable house was hers until we approached it that afternoon.
I’d asked Francine if I could come over after school mostly to gauge her response. Her cheetah comment left me rattled. Francine rapped several times on the rough wooden door of the farmhouse. It creaked open about two inches and revealed a long bulbous nose belonging to her mother.
“Hurry,” hissed the face behind the nose, “the dogs are coming.” She ushered us inside while something warm and furry scurried across my ankle, making a rubbery chuckling sound as it darted across the room.
“The dogs steal the ferrets,” Francine explained, “and eat them, probably.”
Her mother winced. “They got sweet Meghan last night.”
I’d seen the house in my visions, my visions that had conveniently failed to transmit the hundreds of ferrets on its floors or the tented enclosure attached to the living room window housing even more. The ferrets clawed at the tent, scratched the window pane and flung themselves at the glass like rabid bats. I looked around, trying to comment on anything besides the ferrets in order to be polite. I felt a nibble at my toe and came up short.
“What’s that chuckling sound they make?” I asked.
“It’s called ‘dooking’,” Francine said.
“It means they’re all so happy,” her mother said.
“Or terrified,” Francine countered.
Her mother scooped up two of the nearest squirming ferrets and plopped them on her shoulders like sandbags.
“You girls need anything? I can make some rice?”
Worm gray rice.
“No, thanks,” Francine said, leading me towards her room.
White room. All beige clothes.
“I’m going around to check the doors now,” her mother said, “and make sure those damn dogs don’t get in.”
Francine’s floor was also covered in manic ferrets. She shut the door behind me and cleared a path towards her bed by nudging the ferrets aside with her feet. I followed her and we sat together.
“Don’t worry if you step on them,” she said, “they can handle it.”
“They’re kind of cute,” I said.
“They’re weasels,” she said.
The ferrets scurried in circles like Tasmanian devils and excreted tufts of fawn-colored hairs from their coats. Many hairs were sticking to my black pants but I felt it would be rude to brush them.
“You call in the dogs to eat the ferrets,” I said. The oily bread treats. The Reddit emojis.
“I have,” she said, “and it hasn’t been working.” She picked up a squirming ferret and stared down its cloying face.
“The population hasn’t thinned at all; they are multiplying rapidly.”
She cradled the ferret in her lap and stroked its back, releasing a bale of listless beige hair. I sneezed.
“Listen,” she said, “it’s been a nice day with you.”
I wanted to touch her, but I couldn’t, because one ferret was nibbling her hand, another was climbing up her torso, another was relieving itself in the corner near the closet.
“Yes,” I said, “it’s been a nice day with you, too.”
She got up to clean the corner ferret’s mess and the others tumbled to the floor, yelping.
“We won’t be here much longer, I’m afraid,” she said, bending down. The ferrets slithered between her feet and chuckled, begging to be pet.
“Why?” I asked.
“The longer we stay, the bigger the litter gets.”
“Francine,” I said, “I’m worried.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, wiping the floor with a towel, “it’s just pee.”
I wondered how to drag out our time together. I wanted to confess my psychic abilities. When she came back to the room and stood in the doorway, backlit by a yellow light, dusts and furs and dander bits danced behind her. A gaggle of ferrets circled her feet and wheezed out a chorus of squeaks. She was wearing beige. So much beige. Small black eyes surrounded her, glinting spectral green in the darkening room. I sneezed again.
“I’ve been having visions,” I said, sniffling.
“Shall we feed the dogs?” she asked.
I sneezed again.
She led me down a long dark hallway. I could hear deep humming in a minor key. We passed a door to the left, cracked open just an inch and I could see Francine’s mother haloed by a yellow lamp. She was painting the wall with a large foam brush. She was painting slowly, painting the white wall with strokes of beige. A docile ferret splayed along her right shoulder, its tender pink toe beans gripping her shirt, its head upright and undulating as if under a spell, and Francine’s mother swayed side-to-side in lullaby. I was seeing something I shouldn’t, like watching my dad cry when I used to live with him, or catching my grandmother being lowered onto the toilet by her nurse. We kept walking.
At the end of the hallway, we exited the house through a sliding door. I’d expected darkness outside but I could still see the ferrets through the purple night; tufts of coarse ochre fur with mauve flecks in their beady black eyes and blush pink noses leading the way. They swam around the grass with frenzied yowls and it haunted me. I pitied the ferrets, daft and clueless creatures that they were, but I could also see how they distressed Francine. She’d stuffed her long white skirt pockets with oily bread balls and whipped them across the yard, one by one. Each doughy missile landed heavy and scattered the yelping ferrets like a bomb.
I felt bad for the dogs, too. Francine whistled out a long steady siren. Did they know what they were called for? Did they wonder how it would end? Or were they oblivious to the future beyond the smell they followed, night after night?
“Don’t feel bad for the dogs,” Francine said, her pockets emptied.
I must have been frowning. I tried grinning, but felt I was snarling, so I stopped.
“They’re really hungry,” she said, “or they wouldn’t keep eating.”
The grass outside the fence trembled, as if chilly. I looked down Francine’s left shoulder and realized she was really short. She’d felt so tall in my head. In my visions she was lanky with cold gray eyes, towering over everything with perturbing and robotic sameness. I had been really wrong about that. I had been wrong about her house, her mother, the ferrets, her dullness. I started to wonder if I was right about anything, or if the images I’d conjured were transmissions of spiraled lunacy, not pings of practiced magic. Being right meant it was okay to know these things about her and to have seen them. Being wrong meant I was losing my mind, like my dad.
“So these visions of yours,” she said.
I looked down into Francine’s eyes, still bright blue in the fading light, and imagined telling her the visions.
I imagined her gently guiding me off her property and away into the night, politely waving, vowing to never see me again, and then correcting herself, she would have to see me just enough, so as not to rouse suspicion because who knows what I might be capable of. I imagined her, terrified, telling her mother to call my grandmother, or worse, the police, or worse, the high school psychologist Mr. Nardene, who was fifty-seven and still lived at home with all three of his parents.
I imagined explaining that it wasn’t just me, it was an entire subreddit of one thousand one hundred and thirty-seven of us supposedly clairvoyant, definitely lesbians, only to find that the subreddit had been scrubbed from the internet.
I wanted to check my phone for proof but Francine grabbed my shoulder and crouched.
“Get down,” she whispered.
The white tarp slapped the ferret fence, billowing in the cold night wind. I heard the scraping first: steps scuffing along the unpaved driveway, rocks colliding and upending themselves from the force of some stomping creature. Then I heard the wails. There was no softness to them. They were sharp sobs slicing the air around us until it was paper thin.
“Oh wow,” I whispered, “your mom cries too?”
The sobs waltzed in tandem with the wind as Francine’s mom paced back and forth on the opposite side of the fence. She was heaving. There were no ferrets at her feet, only a half empty gallon of beige paint that she poured on the driveway, shaking the can as if punishing it. The paint smelled like glue and sludged through the gravel cracks in buff streams. The can made painful clangs as Francine’s mom beat it empty, then she retreated, stumbling her way back into the house. The sliding door slammed.
I looked at Francine. She was looking down at the gravel, watching the slow trails of paint crawl towards us. I reached out and touched one, dipping my pointer finger into a line of goo. I was surprised by how cold and rough the paint was. It was the exact same color as the ferret’s fur.
“Our old house was entirely beige,” Francine said, leaning back against the fence, “from floor, to ceiling, to fixtures of fixtures.”
“So you couldn’t see the fur,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “every house starts out white but then… she paints.”
I nodded.
“The fur is dreadful,” she said.
“It’s not so bad,” I said, thinking of my grandmother’s mildewing yellow tub or my father’s hanging shrine of used glue fly traps. “We all have our things.”
“It is so bad,” Francine said, “that I can’t see the floor half the time.”
“You can vacuum,” I said.
“No, Natalie,” she says, finally looking at me, “I can’t.”
She was right, and I knew it. The ferrets would never allow a vacuum. They would squeal, or convulse, or pee, or snake along the rubber hose like demonic slinkies.
“We have to move,” Francine said. “It’s the only thing that works.”
I thought of traps, or crates, or leaving all the doors open while Francine’s mom slept, or tranquilizing the ferrets and sweeping them into boxes and depositing them into the woods in droves.
“And convincing her to move,” Francine continued, “is getting harder and harder.”
Francine’s left eye reflected the moon in its pupil: a sincere yellow beacon of the forthcoming night. I envisioned school desks toppling, angry red marks on failed assignments, anguished sobs and tantrums on the hairy floor.
“I see,” I said, “she has to be concerned, guilty, but not angry.”
Francine nodded, and tucked her black hair behind her left ear.
“Have you seen the Disney Channel original movie The Cheetah Girls from 2003?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “but I’ve been listening to the soundtrack a lot.”
“I really like their outfits,” she said, “all the sequins and colors and velour.”
It was so dark. I couldn’t see anything. I wanted to ask her something. Or maybe hold her hand. But it didn’t feel right. I could hear the dogs: rustling, barking, hungry.
On the night of the ninth grade Spring Quarter Masquerade Ball I funneled half a liter of lemon lime Gatorade mixed with cedar oil (for the smell) into a rubber hydration pack Francine had strapped to her inner left thigh. The pack was ballooned by so much liquid that even the gentlest movement of Francine’s right thigh against her left would cause a very believable gush through the coiled rubber straw.
She would piss herself during the waltz, about halfway through the ball, in the center of the dancefloor. I would jump back, aghast, disgusted, and catapult into the row of slow-swaying tweens. I’d shuffle my ballet flats around in the mess of piss and Gatorade and cedar and cry. Francine would be silent. Everyone would see. It would be totally, brutally, weird.
We rehearsed this in her room in whispers and giggles with the ferrets as our audience. They greedily slurped up the Gatorade, chirped around in crackbrained circles from the sugar, and slumped in a snoozing pile from all the stress. I remember looking at the mound of ferrets snoring pleasantly while they slept. Then I looked away.
The last time I ever saw Francine was that night of the ball. We wore matching beige dresses with silk capped sleeves, dropped corset waists and finely pleated skirts, both from Francine’s closet. We wore black and gold sequined masks and pale pink lipstick and pale pink ballet slippers and huge silver stars in our ears. In the picture her mother took of us that night, in the background in deep shadowed taupe, and in the hazy buff doorway behind us, and on Francine’s sand linen headboard where a stray ferret perched, and at our pink silk feet wiggling with nerves, and under our beige pleated skirts ironed so crisp, and all along the half-painted hallway, you can see hundreds of tiny black eyes glimmering green in the dark.
But thanks to all the beige, you can barely see the fur.
LILY GARETH CUNNINGHAM is a writer, filmmaker, and visual effects artist based in Los Angeles. Her first feature film, Acute Failure, premiered at the Cinequest 2021 Film Festival. Her writing recently appeared in Bruiser Mag. Find more at lilygareth.xyz.
I LOVED this piece! The ferrets!! Thank you.