all girls who text in lower case are sexual deviants. this is a well established phenomenon and i am not the first to make this observation.
the lower case i is the cutest of them all. if you are on the receiving end of one, consider it your invitation to the underground, a hovel where translucent snipes shovel manure back over themselves leaving exposed only the iliac crest of the pubic bone.
don’t buckle to prettiness, but surround yourself with it, so that the serifs of strong words make swingsets from your buttonholes, and if done correctly, you shall never have to owe her $60.
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Jane always had fruits in the fridge. She ate them slowly and coquettishly, never breaking eye contact. Her skin was just like them, like the spritzed sundries at the grocery store, all damp and dewy so her dress wouldn't whip with the breeze, but cling on, dry up, and release.
When she went to dip in the waterfall the dress would come off and her blue bruises shone like rare gems for the inspecting thrushes.
It was there, many years later, where I’d find four robin eggs of a similar hue and I cried in the blown out bunker where I would later graffiti someone else's name.
She waved with a lank hand.
She held it quite still in the air,
curiously angled as if her wrist had been snapped,
a painting askew, and her skeletal fingers were knotted oxbow feeders.
The light broke through the trees and ricocheted
off the droplets for the day’s last shadow puppetry.
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So the advisory council met to discuss everyone’s availability for the next meeting. Then, at that meeting, they could really get this whole Google Docs thing down, so they can all meet there in words, to set up the Google Meet for next month’s monthly advisory council meeting.
Carol clicked the eye icon to reveal her password behind seven black dots.
That’s just a built-in feature, Carol. I know, someone could look over your shoulder and see your password. Just shut your laptop lid if someone tries to look in.
They’d have to come in, run around this clanking, punch-the-knuckles-out table, shuffle behind you, squint in, get a peek, get away.
That gives you enough time to shut your laptop lid Carol.
I don’t know why they put it there. I can’t do…I can’t do anything about it Carol,
it's a…I know…It’s a…It’s a built-in…Yes it doesn’t really…It doesn’t make sense when you think about it. I…ye…yes. Why have a password at all…right. If you can just click to reveal it. It’s for typo…no, typos, not psychos, typos.
Right. I'm sorry Carol, you’ll be fine, I just don’t know, It’s a built-in feature from the developers. I'm sorry Carol. I don’t know.
I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know
I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know
Consider the bottomless culvert. Like an upside down u, like half of a vernal pool standing on end, the water trickling up, as if local government contained
other dimensions. Defer to Jim in all matters of trout and migratory eels,
even reptiles.
Good meeting everyone. I’ll see you on the last Monday of every month
until we slit our wrists with the fine edge of a Macbook Air.
Agenda subject to change
This was Carol’s password: hidemefromtheworldinaplacefartoopleasantandletthatpleasantnessovercomemeuntilifinallyleaveyouonbignightyou’llneverseemeatthislinkagainallconnectingrivuletswillswellallparkwaysasignthatyou’rehomefinallyI’llseewhereallthisisreallygoing.
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Your bedroom was an overhang. The gaps between the floorboards were wide and I could see through them at the unanswered question growing from the soil below. It looked up at me with a sick sunflower face all scabbed over, and it smiled as it grew slowly closer. You were cutting my hair, humming to your firm fingers, ribboning my hair in good healthy measures. The wet dead ends of my hair pressed around my ears like hearingaids made of nesting centipedes, and between my feet the stalk of the unanswered question got lankier and closer to the slats, and its smiling face turned into more of an orange snarl in the hum of the streetlights.
It was around this time that I realized I was not in the center of things, and I started to pick fights with you. The combination lock of my words made the whole world uglier and I forgot to busy myself with far more beautiful things. I kicked the damn floorboards. I fell off the chair I crawled to the door, scraping at the wood until my fingernails bled and eventually tore completely off until it was just the bones of my fingers protruding from my gangrenous hands, rapping against the panels in a gentle wood on bone hobble. The unanswered question slithered into the room through the slat gaps and filled the room completely. It tore down your crochet from the walls and pulverized your lightbulbs into dust. The unanswered question multiplied itself like a splintering liquid virus, vomiting more of itself continuously. The unanswered question erupted into hundreds of sobbing voices eeking out drythroated cries over each other like crankshaft cars sputtering into their short pathetic lives, and beneath it all was the sound of a neverending tub of silverware clattering into a forever-widening sink. I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the window through the din and I saw I had grown a long beak and my eyes were spinning plates. Your overhanging room rattled like a subway carriage careening through the counties of unpaved roads flanked by moaning dead trees, and it stretched like a subway tunnel into a far off vanishing point, and perhaps in the distance, but I couldn’t quite make it out, was a small man standing with one foot on a spur, frozen there by the volts of electricity coursing through him and I saw his skeleton x-rayed through his melting skin.
You smiled at me and asked if we should have peaches with the film.
A while later, after many clamorous vignettes, mosaic faces, and endless nights
of figuring out if all of my time thus far has been wasted or extremely well spent,
I realized that everything I wanted to achieve in life and how I wanted to act in the world had not changed at all. Rather, I only just now, just right this second, remembered to peer into the convergent lens of the periscope as the neck pierced the meniscus of the sea.
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