by say

The fish and the whales, all with gaping mouths, motion the people, the animals, the hybrids, all, to gather in their bellies. My mother had taught me how not to go, how to resist the temptation. What was forgotten: the simple definition: temptation… what is it? Is it the pull to engage in what is not desirable in outcome, or the attraction to what is not desirable in principle? Or has it nothing to do with desire, only with theoretical disobedience of the habits we have been memorizing?

What is a trend? Is it enviable fleetingly, or is it a modified tradition? While conceivably it could be both, for these purposes it must be a form of tradition only, never as fresh. How complicated, how maddening it would be if temptation was focusing on what had once been correct. How could desire be fleeting?

An inclination to inquiry does not mean that I am a polemicist.

Therefore I went, dragged, but not against my will. I had no will at the time; I had not inherited any yet. I indistinctly recall being turned inward, perpetually recycling.

She paused, took the pen out of her ear, and put it in her mouth. It tasted like unwritten

How could something as complex as an emotion run away from you? Why keep track of anything but the theoretical?

It tasted like heart balloons, scuffed again and again against the things she writes on… paper, plastic, wood, skin. You can see the mutual appreciation when they write on each others’ skin; you and him, like it’s been for a while.

But rhetorical devices aside, I was drowning until yesterday.

There were three flowers, one was wilted, one was dried, and one was fresh. Oh yes, there was one more, and it was painted. There were four people there too: one was more special than all the others. She got first pick, and she picked the flower painted, lacquered, like her eyes. The others took the three remaining flowers and planted them in little knots in the trees, like they did when they were ten. The fresh one wilted, and then his flower and her flower were the same. The dried flower was for the gender-free person made out of water, who alone could have kept the fresh flower or at least revived the wilted one. When the curtains fell the audience stopped clapping. It was time to leave, and now only a few of us clapped to drown out the murmurs of nearby theatergoers who were naïve enough to speak, breaking the claps that still echoed in our ears. I asked my mother what was going on, and she shushed me, whispering frozen peas, eat them raw.

I save a lot of money to put on my desk. I might have had a hundred dollars by now, except that when people come by they take the ones, the fives, and the quarters. They drive up the price of beef by eating the grass from the pastures where the cows feed, complaining that they can’t afford this, five dollars, ten dollars, twenty. We are then offered an alternative food source by the directors, which is many, many numbers; all ambiguous, irrelevant percentages which we cannot afford but may have some special significance in their heads. Giddy with hunger, we drink each others’

blood is what makes us alive, but we cannot spare any. We are not a collective or anything. We cannot keep up in mass, and some of us always float to the top.

Yesterday I found out that there were giants, giants that pull the boat along by walking on the bottom of the sea. There heads stick up just a little. You would never guess that they were as tall as the people who live on the islands. And I smiled because they smelled like home… only I am not that tall.