“There is a bubble, no, a nodule sort of, in there. Up and in the back.”

“Far?”

“It is…hard to tell. We had the light on strong and I could make it out, but it might just be small. It is…hard to tell.”

“What do you do?”

“There is a long, flexible, thin syringe which we believe can pierce the nodule and deflate the blockage.”

“Now?”

“Well, soon.”

“Does it hurt much? I don’t want it to hurt much.”

“No, not much.”

“Then?”

Razor lights! Crushed into Frisbee discs and catapulted through her, so much nothing as so to not be felt at all, all through a morphine sleep. When they come it feels menacing and a gut spins miles away. Something small in her bursts and is cosmic and is by being cosmic infinitesimal and then is gone and she is asleep still. The inside is bleeding on the skull cave walls it is dripping and it feels wrong and it isn’t so much bleeding as pimpling maybe, throbbing up and pulling the skull cave inwards are those stalagmites or -tites? Can a room with no walls still collapse?  Hearing a heartbeat through mesh wraps. And just a minute and just a minute more.

And, then?

“Does it hurt when I do this?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.” 

That is or was what I was doing. Which is to say that falling from such a toppling thing as that was not so bad, in fact, it was to be expected. I saw friends which came up along the sides and said “Well I imagine that he will not so long be up there for” and walk away and lose atoms in hot tornados that carried no dust and would someday carry those electrons back in the form of a hurricane storm. I said “Aaaaaaaaah” as I flipped airborne, my genes trying rapid to splice with those of a fly passing nearby so as to maybe grant me some semblance of a netted wing, or an exoskeleton to cushion me. The DNA said “No such luck” and I hit the glass ground and I shattered layer and layer and slivers shot through me and it was colder than I would have thought considering how close to the equator we were. After the twelfth or so and I started to get bored there was a blue flash like a cop car, but I said there aren’t any roads in the subterrains and so it was not a cop car and the thought left me stupidly. The light spoke so, “Kashaw kashaw.” Not sure what exactly to make of the spoken I said, “Kashaw kashaw.” The light seemed to approve or to not disapprove I guess more so. It luminescenced at me neutrally. I smashed through layers seventeen and nineteen, slipping through eighteen rather well considering. The light tried to undo my belt and I had to be a bit forceful with it. I fired off all my warning shots. It purred angrily and left me on twenty-two. I thought that was moody of it. I said, “That was moody of you” as I licked sharp glass bits and my tongue felt just like the end of something which it was.

And it was past layers three-fifty-five  and three-fifty-six that I could see the heat of something and the shards had made me a bit of a bloody porcupine and I could feel the heat I saw and it felt like the end of something which it was.

When she was small L.B. climbed trees with more primitive proficiency than any of the other kids, to the tops where the branches were thin and easily snapped, and she could sit there for a long time. Now, at nineteen, she was falling from a broken green branch.

She said, “Shit!”

The thorns of a palo verde tree are particularly brutal, they do not detach from the plant like the thorns of a cactus, or hold a sort of anesthetic symbolism like those of a rose. They were more like knives than arrows, maybe more like a shank than a knife. Jagged. The existence of a palo verde thorn was to cut, exclusively. They tore through her sleeves and her denim shorts and she bled spots on the way down, but palo verde trees are not tall—it was not such a long trip.

She landed on her back. She felt tiny shards of quartz and bedrock shit poke into her—the Earth was forced up into her. Then the pain became like the warmth of a blanket, nonspecific and enveloping. She tried to curse again, but when she opened her mouth the air launched from her lungs. The Earth had pushed the air from her lungs. Reclaimed its wind. She made a noise like choking.

 It was night and the moon, though full, seemed inadequate. As if it would flicker out. It illuminated mountains weirdly, accentuating pointed angles, turning up the contrast, making everything sharper. A knot she had used to climb at the base of the tree looked like an eye socket. The dirt was blue. It spiraled around her body and rose up and up and up and up all the way home to the Moon. She watched it on its way, as it became a thin strand made of single grains.

She thought it might be her soul. She had gone out “soul-searching” and that looked like it might be a soul. But it was leaving again, and it would be hard to follow it so high. Maybe the rope had begun to twirl up just before she fell. Maybe only the soulful could climb a tree.

She coughed and felt dried up. She kept coughing and her abdomen tensed up and she curled on her side and she thought of empty oceans—big pits filled with high, impossibly high, mountains. Where her soul was going there would be no water.

When once there was a simultaneous nothing, Silver, then decidedly ubiquitous, erupted from it. Silver, then wrapped around the simultaneous nothing and held it still. The simultaneous nothing quivered and from it came VOiD. VOiD, rejected then from the simultaneous nothing, despite being the thing which, prior to expulsion, had held the simultaneous nothing intact, without a floating form, fell into Silver. Without the influence of VOiD upon it, the simultaneous nothing allowed for the release of what would become Silver’s kin: Gold death, Green home, Grey earth, Brown fauna and flora, Red mind, and Blue intuition. The simultaneous nothing, emptied of its floating form, fell, as VOiD, into Silver.

Frisked up by their new existence, they fucked upon the falling forms of VOiD and the simultaneous nothing.

It was shitty having to take Geometry three years in a row in high school

Because I am awful at math

And each year the people around me got younger and more unsettled by my presence

And each year I had one class which, exponentially, became more embarrassing to be in

I would lie about why I hadn’t advanced

Schedule error

Bitchy counselor

I stopped talking about it

And each year a teacher would tell me that I had potential—

What do you say to that?

You always will sound like an asshole

‘I know’ or ‘Thanks for, I guess, noticing’ or something?

—I wanted to slap them in the face

Be snarky

Tip over a pencil cup.