Talking to him is like talking to myself, by which I mean it’s the most natural thing in the world. He’s like a sentient, awesome-mouthed diary that I never actually wrote. So either the dawn has just risen on the fact that I’ve been talking to myself since birth, or I have the hugest crush since the emergence of the trash compactor.
Being insane would be so much more convenient.
But let me tell you a story about convenience. About how one pea-sized girl, with veins like copper wire and just as conductive, glowed white. In this story, convenience is another word for safety. When she was even smaller, she walked across a newspaper and paced out an article line by line as she read it. The capital letters were twice as tall as she was, and her shadow barely spanned them.
The article was about the electric chair and someone who had sat down in it, and when she read that his eyes had rocketed from their sockets, she clamped her hands over her own eyes to keep them there.
She wound herself in rubber bands and made a bucket-hat out of a rubber thimble that kept her sweat and metallic arteries on the inside, and they stayed there, and she stayed there, except for all the bouncing.
In this story, bouncing means going through the motions.
The only contribution she made to society while wrapped in rubber was to prove that skin can suffocate and still stay on.
But there was a calamity one day, or an apocalypse, or some kind of holy mess, and whatever it was there was no power in some places. And whole cities were black and whole populations were trying to make fires from paper clips and then scratching their heads.
No people came to beg at her elastic feet, so instead of wanting nothing and being happy nowhere, she decided to turn herself into an electric chair, and she tore off rubber in chunks, and it came from her in huge swaths. She wound silver, which is pure and passes electrons politely, around her instead and with one rubber arm she touched the sun, and with another she touched the cities.
The energy took to her immediately, and it passed through and free of her without singing her smallest cuticle, making her skin translucent and crackling under it like alarmed tree branches. And the cities, which became hers, were suffused and satiated.
She glowed white.
The End
Yeah, if you can actually put a word to the mood I’m in now, you’re a genius, and I will let you lick me.
Next time, on demented analogies: Rubber Meets Glue.
