The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

We are all our worst best friends. Don’t agree? Go fuck yourself.

Maddeningly beautiful. and faint as an insect choir, like standing in the dark and glimpsing—the barest peripheral, an image behind your eyelids—the passing of your one desire, close enough to nuzzle if you could only fix its motion, see it all the way.

“So what’s all this got to do with me?” I didn’t really want to know, I’d heard enough on the subject already, but it was one of those questions you have to ask.

I always made it worse, in all my simple strategies, my convoluted acts, invariably I always made it worse. Why was that? Why do birds fly? Why does metal conduct electricity?

All bodies are, in some sense; engines driven by the health or disease of their owners, jackets of flesh that are the physical sum of their wearers. But to become your disease? To become the consumption itself?