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A summer evening glaze of gold varnish coated our yard with the fat frog fountain and that shitty little smug-faced gnome that I’ve been trying to sabotage since I moved in.
A torrent of warnings, stories, adages, poems, threats, how-tos, real estate info, survival tips and non sequitur jokes are available for those who tap in. Everything talks, you just have to be willing to listen.
weevils. It was as if a Sunday morning had flown in and made a permanent nest.
Case in point: one of my Mediocre Servants left her arm in the living room, which I believe speaks to their general ineptitude. I played with it momentarily, but found its pungency off-putting and resumed licking my anus. My instincts were always right—they were never to be fully trusted.
Dennis had succumbed to his own ailment. He’d been ambushed by an invisible assassin, which had blown into his body uninvited and was slowly eating his heart from the inside out. It drank his hope and anesthetized his feelings. Depression.
Butterflies live short lives because they have mastered the art of living. They serve to pass it on with luminous bursts of joy, bright flickers from the other side. I listened to their bell-like beckoning.
It seemed that being female meant to be prey, even among your own species.
Listen; life is worth a fight. Expectation must be shed like winter leaves. Even in death, there is wondrous beauty. And death is not The End.
If you are alive—whether of blood or bark—you will be struck by pain, love, longing, fear, anger, and the particular ache of sadness. There will be joys that quiver your leaves and betrayals that will sever your roots, poisoning the water you pull. These are the varying notes in the music of living. Look up, to close your eyes is to stagnate. To rot and stop the song.
cannot recommend this to you enough: find something that you believe in, right down deep in the depths of your silvery plumage, and then throw your heart at it, blood and valves and veins and all.
Her name translated as “Survivor,” but she told me she didn’t like it much. I asked her why and she said because she is a female and all females are survivors so it was massively redundant.
Trust, it turned out, was a very beautiful and fragile thing with a taste like wild raspberries and experienced only by the very brave.
