Deborah Schamoni

Elizabeth Ravn is my neighbor. On Sundays we ask each other for sugar, contact lens solution or a power bank. It was, however, a weeknight when she asked me to write a rant about her. This confused me because ranting about her isn’t typically in short supply. She’s a little bit of a b. To coax me into it she said she was taken by my rant about our vicious landlord in the building’s group chat. Not only she’s a b, she’s also a s*** c*. More confusing was her friendly demeanor. We were playing Ludo, or ‘Mensch ärgere Dich nicht’ in German, translating to ‘Man, Don’t Get Angry.’ She was holding back both her tongue and her tokens from hitting mine in the game. Usually she’s relentless in grimaces, eye rolls and casually sabotaging board games, even when it’s not serving her on the board or elsewhere. Because she’s a c extraordinaire. One time she started a rumor about my breakfast being copied after a friend’s dog’s sugar cravings. Another time she went public and then viral with a meme I had made for our private chat. Naturally this was unattributed. Once she berated me for not knowing how to pronounce her last name correctly. I reasoned I had never uttered or heard her name out loud. She shook her head in disappointment, or disbelief or perhaps disgust—another classic move by her. B is terrifying. And she’s proud of it too. Here I am howling on demand even though forming alliances with her lasts about the swoosh of a wind. Off she goes with the next wind, knocking out tokens along the way and throwing someone under one bus after another after another. It’s a gruesome sight unlike her bright paintings. She’s in fact the C*** of the Century.

Performance by Alizée Lenox: “Movements for a painter’s wrist”