Cleave the Sparrow

by Jonathan Katz

Once upon a time, says the Stonefish in a breathy baritone, we wanted to understand the body. To control it better. So we chopped it up into pieces—head, neck, shoulders. There’s a pain somewhere in my body. To soothe it, I have to find it. So I create the fiction of a neck—a thing that’s separate from the rest of me. Now I can better control the pain, because I can isolate it. But that act of isolation has a cost. I now believe, falsely, that the head is not the neck. That the body is not the air or the sunlight that sustains it.