I don’t understand why this is still a problem,” the ACS Director says, point-blank from behind the line of tiny crystal goblets filled with discreet, elegant sips of sherry. The Director’s flight, and that of every sherry-flight at the table, glistens in the muted light of the cabin. He stares on through the front windows of the yacht’s dining room into the night. The city is partially hidden on the horizon, and, up above it all, almost insignificant pin pricks of light lie scattered like fallen sequins.
I am locked up in a cell. The captors are conducting medical experiments on us. They give us metal wires to stick in our necks, which I know instinctively will erase our memories.
They crawled from shallow darkness out of a crack in the sidewalk. They each stood as tall as a man and a half. Their bodies were covered in hazelnut fur and their nose tendrils writhed like skinned octopi. There were three of them, and one of me.
I fell backward onto my ass in the street, whimpering and whining, completely expecting to have my brain eaten out backward from my skull like a stew by these terrible, loathsome, horror-inspiring… Psychic Moles from Outer Space!
When I was in the seventh grade I found a scalpel after school. I think it belonged to my mom. There was nowhere else it could have come from. And this scalpel almost glowed. The black, black, veiny marble counter it was sitting on reflected a kind of halo around the silver knife, anything but subtle.
The highway fired like a neuron down the Oregon coast, and I was an electrical impulse. Off to the right side of the road, the waves surrendered over and over again against the shore. I imagined that at night, each individual house, cars in the driveway, shone as its own lighthouse, for whatever that house had lost to sea. Each one had lost something, some thing taken, something discarded.
I
absorb the pain
from the feet that tread
on me. I’m not sure why they do it—
move their silly little ligaments until they break,
and suck in wind through paper-thin lung tissue until it
shreds. I guess they like the view, which is strange, because
they’re only looking out at more of what they just climbed. Once, one of
them scuffed up their feet so badly they bled streams, but they kept walking,
and whooped as they inhaled dust, and swirled into the blood
cascading down my slope were
tears of joy.
