Girl

Girl has straight teeth, the only girl I’ve spoken to

with them. She has a birthmark under her lip, and

a steady job. She says she gets high like

the birds and swears she doesn’t care about

anything anymore. I think she’s lying because

I heard her cry over the phone. I cried that night

too.

I keep searching for Girl on the playground. I’d

like to see her legs, covered in pink bumps and

bites, pushing through the air on the swingset.

She falls and crashes into the blacktop, and I

pick her up. The touch of her hand excites me.

If I were a bird, I’d be a hummingbird, flying for-

wards, backwards, and sideways. It doesn’t really

feel like flight when you watch it. It’s more like a

vibration. They don’t really die if they stop flying,

but sometimes it feels like they do.

Girl doesn’t really care about birds. She tells me

about the cows that escape into her backyard from

the farm just down the road. She lives around a lot

of land, none of it inhabited by people, but by bugs.

She crushes them beneath her feet when she walks.

She doesn’t know it until she wipes off the sludge.

Maybe it was just mud.

I find a stinkbug stuck in between the screen and

the glass in my bedroom window. I watch him for a

few days before he disappears. I search for him

within the glass. He isn’t there. I look on the

window sill, and find his body. There’s nothing

I can do now. He’s dead, and he isn’t coming back.

Girl doesn’t call me today; her usual time is 9

o’clock. I do my homework alone tonight. I write a

paper about the possible invention of mechanical

hands that will do everything for us, connected by

a chip in our brains. She will never read it, nor will

she care to. She has work in the morning this time.