Most days, we did not have a fever. We had not observed
a man wearing an old-fashioned ski-mask carrying
in his bare arms what appeared to be scorched blankets
swaddling thawed meat. We had not seen him walking
slowly down the sidewalk, but nonetheless refusing to pause
at intersections for traffic. We did have headaches,
but the headaches were normal for us. Or the headaches
were, now, normal for us. We had not encountered
any variety of wasp. Or, so we thought, until imagining it
a fine pendant slipped from the chain, we unthinkingly
plucked it up and felt, a second later heard, the crackle
of whatever remained inside. Its antennae curled as finely
as any two iron gateposts. And though we wished we were
no longer holding the wasp we had mistaken for a pendant,
it was wrong to throw it away, or even to burn it, so we put it
in the box with two coyote teeth, a dried aster, a pheasant’s foot,
and a nineteenth century syringe. We rarely had a sore throat.
We knew absolutely no one who’d rented a moving van
for the sole purpose of transporting supermarket refuse
to dump on the lawns of the city council members who voted no.
Our dreams had not been more intense than usual, actually. We always
had intense dreams, and could quote from them the long conversations
we’d conducted with ourselves therein, though sometimes we simply dreamed
we were shouting fuck you to death or spooning enormous quantities
of granulated sugar from a laundry basket into our mouths, then into
the mouth of a boy named spat’, which we could recall was the Russian verb
to sleep, and that when spiders appeared in the sugar basket, we said nothing.
We had water enough for four people to last one week. We had seen
apricot trees, bracken, blackberries, branches, and all the lovely things
from later in the alphabet, and that was why we were reading their names
so regularly, testing to see if they appeared as we called them.
We had no interest in paying off the interest.