Out There

by Kate Folk

Such uncertainty was the nature of existence. We brought things into our lives, and time passed. Things exited our lives. That was about all that ever happened.

I’d had every opportunity to be fully present with Sam, but the absence of distraction had only revealed our disconnection.

The Last Man on Earth dies with resentment in his heart.

My female friends have all coupled up with men who are feeding off their organs and whose organs they are feeding off of, a symbiotic process that will continue until they break up or one of them dies.

The more someone loves you, the more he’ll want to meddle with the most vital parts of you, and vice versa. The only way to not hurt someone is not to love him enough, to remain unmoved by the thought of his organs pulsing beneath a thin layer of skin.

My dream is that we will marry and he will allow me to take his brain from him, year after year, a tiny bit at a time, through shock treatments and partial lobotomies, until he can’t function on his own and I have to care for the drooling husk of his body until it expires. It is only for this that I’d surrender pieces of my literal heart.

So at this point I was starting to regret that everyone hates me and how all I do all day is sit in the median, this like three-foot-wide strip of grass between six lanes of traffic, and pretend I’m writing in a notebook or pretend I’m playing guitar. Pretty soon I’d run out of guys to text to come over and help me with the human head coming out of my floor.

By night our bones dissolve into our blood like sugar in tea.

Even through the cloak of morphine, this pain is like nothing I’ve felt before. It is many magnitudes worse than reconstitution. It feels as though my skin has been peeled off and coarse salt rubbed into the open wound of my body. My mouth opens in a silent scream. The air is pumped with high doses of bone-girding medication, acrid clouds that sear my trachea. I remain awake, in agony, for hours that stretch into days.

taste his skin, wishing I could unhinge my jaw and swallow him whole.

Coyotes wail in the distance. Soon they will find me and sink their teeth into my boneless flesh. I pray that my bones will reconstitute inside them at sunrise, piercing their organs, killing them.

The heart kept beating after our bones were pulverized and excreted into the abandoned yard. The heart kept beating after the ground thawed and our bonemeal fertilized the soil, nourishing weeds that grew to the height of a man’s shoulder. Slowly the house healed itself, and by August, just in time for fall semester, it was ready for new tenants.

Your boyfriend finally remembers to pick up his sleep prescription at Walgreens, but the drugs only make his nightly acquisitions more bizarre. An airplane flight recorder, battered and corroded by seawater. The slashed silver top worn by model Gisele Bündchen in Alexander McQueen’s groundbreaking spring 1998 fashion show. Three passports of Americans born on August 18, 1973.

You consider jumping into the wormhole and emerging in a universe where your boyfriend doesn’t bring terrifying things to bed in his sleep. But the parallel boyfriend might have some other, even more upsetting defect, such as snoring, so for now you stay where you are, in a sleeping bag on the floor, waiting for your boyfriend to sleep-ferry home another object that will make you shudder at the arcane puzzle of your own existence.

Roger was not quite tired, so on his phone he performed one of his favorite Google image searches: “woman in hat.” The grid of photos displayed women of all nationalities and of various ages, though most, Roger observed, were young. They wore many different styles of hat. Wearing the hats seemed to gratify them. A feeling of peace overtook Roger as he looked at the hatted women. He closed his eyes. He dreamed, as always, of Big Sur.