FUCK YOUR EXTINCTION IMPACTS BABY YOU DON’T KNOW SHIT! i’m the bombshell here and we both know it. not in the sense that i’m beautiful (which i am) though i am no atomic bottle blonde but i am something to be dropped and something that explodes in the war and we both know i will ruin your lives. you have the words and you hold the cards but any teenage girl can tell you a whole lot more about what it means to face the threat of dying. the first time i fell in love with the only boy to ever call me beautiful he said all my fire was holy. i knew my fire was a fire and thought i’m so gonna regret this. the first time i fell in love with this place i thought the same thing. i fell in love under stage lights with a different kind of destruction. i fell in love with a place where i choked on statistics and recited other peoples’ words like the only religion i ever believed in. i fell in love with being wrong and winning anyways. i fell in love with four years spent waiting for the inevitable. i fell in love with my own crash and burn because it made people look at me and tell me i was blazing. i fell in love with a place i knew wanted me dead and i loved it anyways the same way i fell in love with the beautiful boy the reason i started carrying a switchblade. you spin the story, shine your trophies, talk in circles. you debate but hate to give an answer. i’m not nice and i don’t lie and i’m not skinny enough to make up for being a bitch, especially not the kind of bitch that smears your name and takes your fame and turns your place into a nuclear winter. you don’t know what to do with me. when you asked i told you i sexually identify as a problem. it's true i’m beautiful but you can’t fuck a bomb. bombshell is another word for shocking. bombshell is another word for disappointment. there are a million different ways to call someone an issue and i know all of them. our coaches asked me what i wanted to say to you and i came up with nothing but fucking really, dude? again? alternatively, your school is ugly and your boys are too and i’m three years too deep to get out clean. alternatively, i hope my heat death hurts like a bitch. you built and armed me. no take-backsies. i call a fuse a fuse. alternatively, a whole world revolves around me. i am large and remote and terrifying and incandescent and i will burn you if you get too close. i can’t control that, but i’m not that sorry. all of that is to say, an atomic bomb is just another kind of star. all of that is to say, love and war are never fair but it’s easier to fight with fire than to lay down your arms. all of that is to say, it was your finger on the button and your hands are stained in radiation from a reason, and honey, i know about war. anyways, it was a stupid question. you don’t get to talk anymore. phosphorescence is just another word for shining. look at me as i explode. look at me if you’re not afraid. i’m the brightest and the hottest thing in this place. look at me and watch me as i burn, i burn, i burn.
Campbell Brown (she/her) is a queer, Hapa writer from Arizona. She is a co-EIC of Bus Talk Lit. She likes homeric epithets, Oxford commas, semicolons, and em-dashes; she hates self-writing these bios because she’s scared of sounding pretentious instead of quirky and cool and oh god please help. Her work has appeared in The Empty Inkwell, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Major 7th, among other publications. Find her on Instagram at @p0cketwatch3s and on Twitter at @cambrownwrites.