ASMR U OKAY?
A desperate streamer pines for freedom | Witch Craft Magazine
by Lyz Mancini
“Popcorn, popcorn, popcorn,” Lolasparkle whispered, dragging her glitter beige press-on talons over the foam mic cover. She was captivated by the image of herself in the lower right-hand corner of her computer screen, pupils shimmering with bright white from her ring light. Her glossed lips lowered sensually to the microphone and she chewed cotton candy bubble gum so the snaps would sound satisfying to her four thousand viewers. She envisioned who was on the other side of her screen – the shivers, the trances, the release of stress, the lowering eyelids.
She stifled a yawn – she’d been Live for almost three hours and had to pee so badly her legs trembled beneath the desk. But this was her sacrifice for her viewers, even if the lowly peons beyond her bedroom door disagreed with her. Lola started out as a nobody in the world of ASMR streaming, but her star slowly rose. She hit the Top 10 last month. Science half-backed the fact that some people, when experiencing a certain low register of sounds, could experience a pleasant tingle in their brain. Lola likened it to a scratching deep inside your head, or if your brain could swallow Pop Rocks. When sustained – one hour, two hours, more – it had a trance-like, meditative effect.
Everything about her set-up was built to be aesthetically and audibly pleasurable. Purple swaths of fabric laid over her lamps so the room glowed as if she were filming from inside a grape. Fairy lights hung around her bed posts, twinkling in a soothing rhythm. LolaSparkle herself looked as though a horny teen had drawn her in a notebook, with her cheap rayon wig in pastel colors and gemstones adhered across the bridge of her nose as if they were freckles. Faux lashes fluttered up to her eyebrows and she was squeezed into a busty milkmaid dress bedecked in silver moons and stars, one of many bulk-ordered off Amazon. Most of her viewership were women, who peppered the comment sections with sweet compliments. They could be surprisingly pure.
It’s giving Sailor Moon
Can I be you?
The few creepers who made their untoward intentions known were blocked. Her personal attention videos were especially popular – pretend haircuts and massages and spa facials, using professional tools like gua sha rollers and shaving cream and expert-grade salon scissors. She whispered words she wished were whispered to her.
You are so special.
You are perfect exactly as you are.
You are not alone.
As soon as she could pay a bill, she quit school, gave notice to her mall job at Auntie Anne’s, and devoted herself to her channel full-time.
She was making the world a better place. Her followers said so. She’d been listed in the top five most-viewed the past two weeks. She wanted to make it to #1. #1 meant money. Her phone buzzed and her stomach dropped. We’re out of fucking pop-tarts.
Lola tried to hide the darkness that flashed across her face as she turned back to face her viewers.
“I’m going to take a break now,” she whispered to the screen. “I’ll be on at ten tonight. Never forget that Lola loves you.”
Lola shut the camera off and pulled a particularly painful bobby pin from her hairline, tossing it under her bed along with her wig. It always made her scalp itch. She stood up, cracked her back, and stared in dread at the bedroom door. “Megan Ashley Byrd, get in here,” a voice barked.
When she entered the kitchen, her brother Dave hocked a loogie into the sink “There’s no fucking food in the house,” he said, gesturing to the whole of their double-wide. Their home had been nice at first, the whole place had been clean and fresh and new. But they let it go to shit like they did everything. Things only worsened once her mom met Jared at Bingo. Double-wide trailers can be nicer than regular houses. But not this one. Not anymore.
“You just gonna sit in your damn room all day, Megan? Jesus Christ,” her mom rasped from the table. She ashed her Camel Light into a Snoopy mug.
“The hell you wearing, girl?” Jared sneered in feigned disgust. “Porno fairy or some shit?” Lola often sensed a leering obsession with her, the creeping confirmed when he logged onto her livestreams.
Lola breathed through her nose, trying to maintain a calm and gentle heartbeat. She could feel rage in her tightening stomach, like bubbles in pasta water.
Simmer.
“I haven’t had the chance to go to the shop...”
“What’s the point of you doing your gay little work in there and being home if you’re not gonna pitch in?” Dave asked, scratching at an angry in-grown hair that pulsed red on the side of his neck. He wore old flannel pajama pants besides it being three in the afternoon. A cardboard 12-pack of Budweiser sat at his feet.
“Get Mountain Dew,” her mom said. A phlegmy coughing fit took over. “Jared’s right, fucking change before you go. Try not to get raped at Shop Rite.”
Hack. Hack.
Lola’s stomach turned sour, cottage cheese and bile. Her “gay little work” had been paying for said Mountain Dew, Dave’s mysterious trips to the ER for Oxy, and just about anything else they needed. As soon as she made enough money, she was out of there. Her true self lived far, far away. When she tried to envision what exactly that was, it appeared amorphous yet luminescent to her, like whatever lives inside a firefly. Phosphorescence dancing in the distant trees, not smeared across one of Dave’s crusty sweatshirts after dark.
They’d always been mean to her. Lola’s first memory was of her mother drunkenly filling her sippy cup with liquor, then bitching for days because poison control had to come. The scar that ran bilaterally across her pinky finger was from Dave slamming it into the hinge of a door once on a dare.
Jared told her their vitriol was because she looked like her father—the uncanny likeness made everyone mad. Lola didn’t know what her dad looked like. Her mom once claimed her dad was Mike Rowe, the host of the network television show Dirty Jobs. Lola didn’t think that was true.
“How’s the job search going, Dave?” Lola asked. A few months ago in a blackout, he’d dropped a toaster oven onto her bare foot because she’d rolled her eyes at him. Still she refused to fear him.
Dave snorted, his head bobbing gently like a bubble with his jaw gently opened. He was clearly high and smelled like stale cigarettes, BO, and skunk weed.
“Assholes,” he said as if that answered her question. He worked as a line cook but always got fired for his attitude.
“Stop yapping, Megan, and go,” her mom yelled. “Ya gotta start dinner soon. And not freaking spaghetti again, your brother’s goddamn sick of spaghetti.”
The words “worthless bitch” were thrown after her as she walked out of the trailer. The press-ons dug so hard into her palms, white half-moons decorated her skin. She ran over a Coke bottle in the parking lot, luxuriating in how satisfying it felt to crush something.
Later that night Dave shot beer cans in the garage, and her mom and Jared watched YouTube conspiracy videos about politicians eating children. Lola went Live again. But before she did, she checked her ranking.
#1.
She screamed then clamped a hand over her mouth. There was no one to celebrate with her. Joyous tears spilled down her cheeks. She threw a new bright pink, sheer scarf over her lamp, changed the fairy lights to match, and pulled on a perfect pink wig in a short bob style. She slicked on a matching lipstick, affixed a brilliant smile to her face, and hit “Go Live.”
“You guys,” she whispered, making every word twirl and curl like gum on a fingertip. “I can’t believe you got me to number one. I couldn’t have done this without you. To celebrate, I’m going to open up the comment section and take requests for free. Let’s make ASMR magic tonight.”
Lola went extra long that night, cycling through every one of her favorite sounds and techniques. When she tucked herself into bed at three in the morning, she dreamt of living her whole life this way: shrouded in the love of her fans in a room she never had to leave.
Come morning, Lola logged on to stare at her rating – seeing that bright gold number one at the top of her profile would power her through what was sure to be a hellish day. Instead, she opened the screen and her bowels went tight.
#2.
The saliva had been sapped from the back of her throat. Lola licked her lips and, blinking twice, clicked through to see who now sat at number one. Her heart dropped to her stomach like the bottom of a rollercoaster ride. It was like looking into a mirror. LaylaShine wore a sunshine yellow wig and faux freckles as she clucked her pink tongue against a microphone. Her backdrop was identical to Lola’s – fairy lights, the golden glow, everything was the same.
“Never forget Layla loves you,” she whispered. Lola looked down, where her coffin-shaped drugstore press-ons had pushed so hard into her thighs that a bubble of blood appeared. She smeared it on her pajama shorts and clicked into LaylaShine’s account to see she’d only begun to post a week ago. How could this be? What was she doing that was better?
Lola hit “Go Live.”
“Guys, we have a major problem here and I’d only come to you because you’re my family,” she said. “LaylaShine is stealing my content and my identity. Please unfollow, call her out, and report her. Our community is in danger of being infiltrated by a fake and a phony.”
Her eyes floated to the comments that were quickly rolling in. Some remained loyal – her true fans loved her, but a poison quickly began to permeate her feed.
Don’t be lame
STFU, guys. ilu Lola Girl do less
Yo fuck Layla, you the OG
Team Layla
Lola’s palms began to sweat.
The more she watched, the more the hate comments outweighed the ones of support. She logged off, praying it would all go away by her afternoon session. Maybe if she ate a piece of toast and came back, the nausea and nightmare would disappear. The queasiness grew when she saw only Jared was home, one hand rummaging in his boxer shorts while Judge Judy blared. A bouquet of ashed cigarettes threatened to light the rug on fire.
“Ya gonna make eggs?” he grumbled, the thickness of sleep and mucus threaded through his every word.
Lola ignored his request. She was still on the verge of puking. If she couldn’t get back to the number one spot, she didn’t stand a chance of escaping. She needed the sponsorships. She reached for the loaf of bread and popped a slice into the toaster.
“I can see your ass cheeks.”
She heard the creak of the couch and felt his weight lean forward to watch as she reached up into the cupboard for a jar of peanut butter. From the corner of her eye, she could see his hand rummaging more in his boxers, this time with intention. His top teeth grazed the unshaven grizzle below his bottom lip. Was he…
A cockroach ran over the big toe on her right foot. “Fine, I’ll make your fucking eggs!” Lola said. He grunted in vague thanks. His hand stopped moving and he went back to watching a woman sue her landlord for killing her pet cockatoo.
Lola cracked three eggs into a pan and stirred the runny mess around until it began to harden. She closed her fingers around the glass salt shaker, held it high above her head, then dropped it, grinning as it exploded onto the ground. Thousands of salt crystals scattered across the sticky linoleum.
“Jesus H Christ,” Jared yelled. “You better clean that up.”
Lola scraped a pile of steaming eggs onto a plate then bent down to pinch a mixture of salt and glass. She sprinkled the sparkling mixture on top of Jared’s eggs and presented them to him with a smile.
“Enjoy,” she said, then loomed over him with a sick grin as he grunted and began shoveling the spiked eggs inside his nicotine-rotting body.
“Are there shells in this shit?” he said. A single curd of sunshine-colored egg clung to his patchy beard. She shrugged and carried her toast back to her bedroom. Would his stomach lining become wet ribbons like sweetbreads through a paper shredder? Or would nothing happen?
She noticed her anger didn’t feel like arsenic anymore. Instead it simmered beautifully inside her. Not a disease passed down. A gift. A blessing. A superpower.
Lola logged back into her account, clutching the rungs of her chair. Soggy globs of acrid bread spilled up from her stomach and over her tongue as she saw where her username ranked. She held the bits and pieces inside her mouth, pushing them down against her molars and against the fleshy pillows of her cheeks, and swallowed it back down.
#27.
She scrolled every account above hers – twenty-six identical girls with L names. Lizzy, Linda, Luna, Leah. All with moonstone eyes and meticulously curated bedrooms. They clicked and tittered and whispered into twenty-six identical microphones. Pretend haircuts, massages, and spa facials.
#28.
#29.
#30.
It wouldn’t stop.
Lola felt a searing heat cooking her skin like the crisp on a duck breast. Everything blurred as she joined LaylaShine’s Live, inundating the comment section with the vilest imagery she could find. Animal carcasses crawling with maggots. Steaming garbage in the middle of summer. Splayed-open ribcages from medical research, wet and streaming.
Blocked. An admin had blocked her.
Lola pressed “Go Live” on her own account, not bothering to pull on a wig or a matching costume. Her cheek had a pimple patch stuck atop a blemish.
“Guys, I desperately need your help to understand what is happening,” she pleaded. She sounded deranged. Her pores looked like caves. “Who are all these creators stealing my brand?”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her skin was clammy as the comments began to roll in.
Pathetic.
Silly bitch.
Check the NYT article.
Lola logged off and went straight to Google.
There it was:
ASMR Gives People The Tingles (No, Not That Way)
Lola skimmed the feature about the growing fad. There were thousands of views and shares. This had to be it – a bunch of pile-ons thinking they could make a quick buck. Not understanding it was an art form. Not understanding how much Lola needed it.
She grabbed the microphone and bashed it into the wall closest to her. It barely made a dent. Jared coughed from down the hall. She imagined the tiny shards of glass.
Somehow days went by. Then a week. Then a month. Two. Lola stared and stared at the growing list of girls. It seemed to be global now, creators with thick Russian accents and backdrops of Tokyo. Her number kept moving until she was nothing. All her work, every dream, was as invisible and vaporous as the Cloud she saved her videos to. They enjoyed success and she kept her family in Pop-Tarts.
Maybe she could buy a bus ticket, and visit some of these posers, and she could talk them into quitting. They weren’t all as desperate as her – surely some of them could go to college, and get a cushy job in marketing. This was all Lola had. Her hands looked silver, almost blue as she logged into her bank account to see how much of her savings she could invest in a voyage like this. Her bank account was empty. How could that be? She’d had almost $4,000 the last time she’d checked – a small brand deal for a tooth gem company helped bump it up a few months back.
Lola could barely look at the screen. The tears would not stop coming, a rushing fever river over her cheeks. Then a thought. Something missing off her desk. The flimsy pink Post-It she dumbly kept with every password, fluttered to the floor the day before. A constantly snooping mother. She wouldn’t. But Lola knew better.
She stormed from her bedroom and down the hall. The living room was hazy from the late-summer evening sun. Jared and Dave were cracking another twelve-pack with a pair of toenail clippers at the kitchen table. Then there was Shirley.
“Mom, why is my bank account empty?” Lola screamed. The volume of her own voice caused her to jump.
Shirley was poised over the stove, enrobed in lacy rayon, with a hand supporting her back as a soup-stained spatula dripped onto the counter.
“The hell you say to me?” she said, baring her teeth.
“My money is gone.” She was now inches from her mother’s face and could smell the Oreos she’d housed for lunch. She was no longer afraid of what they would do to her. She had nothing to lose anymore. “You took my money. Give it back.”
Shirley’s laugh blew Lola’s hair back. Then her delighted smile turned nasty.
“You live in my house, it’s my money,” she said. “It’s not my fault you left your pin on a fucking Post-It in your room. What kind of idiot does that?”
“So where is it? My money? Now?”
Shirley poked the spatula into Lola’s sternum, leaving an orange half-moon just below the bust of her milkmaid dress. Shirley sniffed. “Lost it in Bingo.”
Lost it in Bingo.
“Lost it in Bingo?” Her inside thoughts became outward screams.
She spun on her heel.
If she was going to return to #1, she needed to find a way to offer her audience something new. A fresh hook, a twist on her niche – a way to stand out from the vastly growing crowd. All the existing content was polished and perfect – but Lola knew that people were ugly. They were gross. They were selfish. And they wanted to know that they weren’t alone in their grotesqueness. They wanted to know what they felt was normal. Maybe if Lola shared her deepest self with them, the truth would resonate. She would make her way back to #1. She could show the world that what she had inside of her was not something you could just replicate. And she would get out once and for all.
Her rage could be special. The part of her she used to find mortifying, because it came from her family, she now saw as the key to it all.
#1 forever.
Jared owned six guns, all stuffed under their mattress loaded and with the safeties off. She’d asked him once why so many and he’d insisted that each one held their own purpose. When pressed to name them, he could only come up with two. Lola chose the one that looked like it would make the most sound. Before she hit the kitchen, she grabbed her phone, opened her app, and hit “Go Live.” She placed her phone on the counter, the camera pointing outwards.“The hell are you going, you little…”
Crack.
She shot Jared first, with his leering stares and looming entitlement to viewing her body and taking over her home. The bullet hit him between the eyes and he slumped to the dirty brown carpet.
A sopping thud.
She could barely hear her mother scream, paralyzed at the stove. The woman knocked into Lola’s brother – her waste of a human brother with no ambitions, no purpose, just cruel delighted violence and the inability to add anything but venom to her life. That bullet went straight through the neck. His head fell into an open bag of Cheetos.
Crunch.
Lastly, and without a second thought, Lola turned to her mother. The woman who’d given her nothing, insisted she was nothing, and had made it her life’s mission to make Lola feel like the feculent goo inside a sink drain. Everything that was wrong with Lola was housed in this bag of emphysema and filth. That bullet went straight through Shirley’s neck, and a pulsing pearl of blood, more stunning than any necklace Shirley had ever owned, bubbled then dripped like a waterfall of stones.
Burble.
Bubble.
Gasp.
Flop.
There was that crackle she craved, that breaking open of light like the gooey insides of a glowstick. No. Like a firefly. It filled her, streaming through every cell and filling her up. Delirious, dazed, and dazzling.
Lola wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead and dropped the gun to the floor. The room was silent, save for the soup on the stove and Lola’s breath. She floated over to her phone, the Live going strong.
#15.
#14.
#13.
It was working. It was working! Lola leaned forward so her face was perfectly framed in the camera lens, the bodies behind her. Her eyes were bright orbs, her lips trembled. She stretched her mouth wide, a smile pulled like taffy across her face
“That’s all for now,” Lola’s haunting voice whispered into the mic. Wetness on her tongue, clarity in her deliverance. A message for her followers. Her fans. Her real family.
“Never forget that Lola loves you.”
about the author
Lyz Mancini is a Catskill-based beauty writer who works with brands like MAC Cosmetics, Morphe, and Clinique. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Slate, Catapult, Shortwave, Salty, and more. She is working on her first novel. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter.
news from fuck, marry, kill
FEMGORE, the two hour workshop with Elle Nash, Charlene Elsby and Lindsay Lerman, is still enrolling.
A virtual seminar complete with generative writing exercises that explores writing the gruesome, saying what’s supposed to be left unsaid, and pushing creative boundaries.
We’ll discuss some of our favourite examples of writing that explore the beauty and brutality of femgore — from predatory characters to the philosophy of what repels society most about unredeemable or unlikeable female narrators and then together we’ll all write together, in the moment. You’ll leave with tools to help you write deep into disgust and elevate your work.
Cost: $100
When: Sept 1, 12pm PST / 3 pm EST / 8 pm GMT
Please write your name/email in the notes section. From here we will email you everything you need to attend the workshop. If you have any questions, DM me or reply to this email.
Goth Book Club! Writing sprint returns!
I’ve had to jumble some things around in my calendar this month as August and September are busy with travel and events.
Upcoming dates:
August 25, at 12 pm PST / 3 pm EST/ 8 pm GMT. We’re reading Triadic Intimacy by Emily Leon, a personal meditation on art, desire, and more (I need to read it to figure it out, its an enigmatic book) out from Inside the Castle.
September TBA: Love Letters to Dawn by Aileen Wuornos. We’ll be joined by author Nicola Maye Goldberg, author of Nothing Can Hurt You, to discuss this work and writing about crime-adjacent subjects.
October 27, at 12 pm PST / 3 pm EST/ 8 pm GMT: Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn. We’ll be joined by the author for a live chat and Q+A!
The return of Brute Force
August 25, at 1 pm PST / 4 pm EST / 9 pm GMT, after Goth Book Club, I’ll give you all a writing prompt and you’ll sprint write for 30-45 minutes. We’ll do a Q+A at the end.