The evening before the event there was heated discussion regarding who would bring which items. Everyone wanted to bring potato salad; it was like that every year about the potato salad. God, who just wanted to enjoy a cool bath, threatened to cancel the whole thing if everyone didn’t come to an agreement pretty damn soon. 

The arguing continued long into the night until an exhausted God silenced the group, “That’s it. The cookout is cancelled!”  And so it was. 

The next day a tall fellow who had been looking forward to barbeque approached God with a business proposal, suggesting that he would be happy to manage the entire event. God, happy to be free of the pains of planning an annual cookout, agreed to let him host a cookout year-round at an offsite location.

I know, right, but don’t you wish they were really good?

There is very little space. Take a few steps back. Things tend to seem heavier in small spaces, because there’s no room for stacking. Everything is layered, simply and firmly. There’s no splinter in the middle as before. Vagueness abounds, but there is no knocking on the door, no telephone ring, no notepads, not thumbtacks, no real wounds of any kind, save the obvious. 

When one accepts that the sum of all to be another extension of self, what’s next? 

It’s Wednesday. Something’s gone awry, and someone is drawn awry. There is a scuffle, the sort that shifts tenses.

I hope you can read lips. Look closely, closer still… What is she saying? Can you make it out? I thought not. Something is about to happen. It’s decent, not descent. See, your prognosticator just made a typographical error. Yes, I’m sure it happens all the time.

She drums her fingertips, taps beats on a new’s years table. She doesn’t know this song and that surprises her. She likes it. She misspells things often but always looks out when below.

It’s Saturday. It’s raining. She considers a career in finance and seems taller in the rain.

A sitcom just ended. Her dress is filmy, chiffon, perhaps, but that would be odd. She misses her friends, is remembering too severely now and wants to stop. She grabs a pad of paper and finds a dark pen, but it’s too familiar- finds a mechanical pencil that someone left behind; she doesn’t want to know who- She wants to draw something beautiful but lists words she pronounces well instead. She numbers the list, which starts like this:

1. Septum

2. Fervor

3. Often

4. Throng

and continues on to twenty-something, words all but filling the page. Looking back, she wonders why she capitalized them. These are not proper nouns. She makes simple anagrams from the first and last letters of the words.

She lies on the bed with her arms flung wide, a curious spittle on her lips. It’s past time, but I will read to her or perhaps play the piano for a bit.

Do you see? It was like an animal, a strangely beautiful animal.