>> BROOKE WILSON
-There-
Walking through this place always makes me thirsty. It sucks the life right out of me to see these statues of people molded like they’re happy, throwing Frisbees and miniature footballs, playing guitars and mandolins and jaw harps, sitting on blankets and singing. They have no idea how disgustingly trite their lives really are. They’re safe, though, as long as they never find out. And there’s no guarantee they will find out. Some people go forever without knowing. They just continue lapping at the shore of reality instead of stepping right on it. Like limp sea-grass that probably dates back to a time when men believed the earth was flat, or when heroes could hold their hot breath for days in order to save Denmark from Grendel’s aching mother. It hits some people, but others…remain sea-grass. Maybe it’ll happen while watching a movie, maybe it’ll happen if they meet a homeless guy that confronts them about why they deserve an ice cream and he doesn’t. Maybe it won’t happen until they’re old and married and have a couple of preteen kids, and are having a sordid secret affair with someone from "the office," and they’re coming in late one night but realize they don’t even care about coming home. All they can think about is the piece of ass they were just getting at the Holiday Inn two hours ago, and how they got married too soon. And this is reality. And so they run off.
Whenever it does happen, you see, that’s when shit’s going to hit the fan.
This girl walking in front of me today, wearing a t-shirt that reads "make 7, up yours", I can’t tell about her. Her body is boneless. Just a big heap of skin and liver and gallbladder, sagging and sagging. Something about her makes me think that one day she’ll give birth to a child with a serious defect and then kill it. I hate her. I hate her because on this Wednesday at high noon it somehow makes me sweat a little more to imagine how she feels, eight feet ahead of me, laboring up this concrete hill with no shady, arboric relief at all, wobbling right and left, feeling out-of-breath, probably resenting the fountain for the distance she has to walk to get around it. I feel the same way about her and all I can think about is the water from the fountain before me. It is liquid now, and can be solid and can be vapor. It can be everything. Water can be any damn thing it wants to be. But I am flesh. Flesh I am until I die. Then I can be ashes and dust. So I drink from it, and it calms me, whispering between splashes that it will be the ice for me, so I can stand upon it, and it will be my steam, so I can breathe. In it’s confinement, I can see my reflection, but paler and flashing. Until a tennis ball falls right into my face, making it disappear. Someone is here, looking for a ball he threw.
"There," I point, at the water, where my face appeared seconds before. He leans over and I push down. Struggling, but I hold. And squeeze. Holding, pushing, splashing, then nothing. He knows now how it feels to be water and I am jealous.