Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

I worry about living the life of an unwashed vessel.

I can feel my necessity slipping away with every extra minute; it’s a rich, complicated sort of sensation, like napping, or dying.

At first I considered this a kindness, a way of manufacturing work when there was none. I now understand it to be a sort of game, the kind of constant undoing that leaves no actual accomplishment, that makes a person question her very existence.

When Farren says to answer honestly, it really means to please be more comfortable lying.

The gods had to pin her down so she would not float away, so distracted was this new kind of soul, so subject to drift. To be fair, they had not yet invented gravity.

“There are only a few kinds of jobs in the world, it turns out,” says the captain, who is the type to pontificate and listicle on subjects varied and profound. “Jobs on land,” he continues, “jobs at sea, jobs in the sky, jobs of the mind, and working remotely.” “You mean like working from home?” I ask. “No,” the pirate captain says. “Working remotely is what we call being dead. Pirate lingo.”

I think of my many available selves, coagulated and discrete, compromising themselves for one another.

ovoid

I start to wonder. It’s all very convincing. It’s all very confusing. No one is ever exactly who they claim to be, but some people are closer than others. Who’s to say the prisoner Pearl is still even Pearl after all her time away? Who’s to say I’ll still be myself a year from now? Twenty years on, someone might be more my current self than I ever could have been.