The Nothing That Is

by Kyle Winkler

I found a snake for you. And I did all this. I fed you, pulled apart that poor animal and shoved a metal object into your body—which I am sure no doctor would recommend. I’m a bit put off.”

Every pore in my body had a mouth. And in that mouth was a hunger for the next mouth’s teeth. I would tear myself apart. This is how I felt.

I marveled at how we, everyone, pretended to be King Shit in our everyday lives when really we were just galactic varnish on some more monstrous and vast body, simply an electric jelly sneezed into space demanding all protons and electrons come to their knees for our whims.

I don’t even know what Mr. Dinosaur was. A god, a devil, an alien, a solar system come to life? Who the hell knew. Its teeth. Its mouth. However large. However expansive. Just pressing down lightly. Teething on the skin of the earth. The gullet long. Dark. Forever.

We’re all merely chaos temporarily held back. Our cell walls hold back the juices. Those walls scale up into veins, tissues, organs, skin, skull. We’re bags of chaos sauce slopping our meaning into each other’s sightlines because our head meat wants more fun drugs. Was pleasure a by-product of pain? Or was pain a by-product of pleasure?