STILL NO WORD ON WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CREATURE'S GOLDFISH

Innocent victims know

their tonsils. Or know the sound of their

forceful removal.

Their mangled beauty is the grain that has gracefully substituted

all the limb-hacking.

The creature used to have a friend whose gestures were very harmless,

and were meant to be harmless; they wouldn't harm a thing but

inadvertently lead to eye-gouging sweeping a ridiculously wide perimeter.

It made the creature realize, looking at the casualties of its friend's clumsiness,

that people indeed stumbled through life like so many wrecked puppets.

Through Texas the creature had swung its sex tail. Thick and hairy,

it splashed and pronged, its insanity honeycombing the landscape,

something subterranean about the creature's movements, whether now

tiptoeing or now plodding. Or just standing still trying to

make out shapes in the distance.

But choking on a heady mix of humor — the taste reminiscent

of the creature's herbal supplements festering into some sort of

gastronomic petrol orgasm.

Its tongue a cactus glazing over.

And regularly also inflicting other, pretty mundane skidmarks —

consisting of a multitude of semi-transparent mutilations,

digital blocks underneath which the victim feels

claustrophobic. Wearing a TV game show smile.

By aid of a horse shoe.

In this miserable weather system — boy,

the polymers of the creature's sweater!

Like soup eating itself, its noises'

hints of monstrous depravity.

No wonder the creature began to melt all over.

Like a wounded animal sitting in the shade of a tree,

huddled and taking pleasure in licking the oatmeal

dribbling steadily from its pituitary gland. Hypertrophied head and feet.

Speculating whether it was the same tasty excretion that

turned the creature's goldfish's pelvis into bubblegum.

The creature decided no.