I broke down and called Arianna Huffington on this one. I know that she sold her periodical to some company or other, but she is still the managing news manager. She keeps her ear to the ground. I asked her what she had heard about this, period.

What would  her mother say, back in Greece, if she read this article? Or wait, are young women actually asking their mothers questions like this today? If I looked into a high-school classroom during third period – or any period – would I see teenage boys chatting with the girls and then impulsively resting their ears on the girls’ stomachs?

My hearing is none too good. I almost got run over by a truck this morning and I couldn’t make out one word that the driver was shouting at me. A woman at work cut her finger and I hear her squawk, but I didn’t hear the bleeding.

The other thing is that a gentleman does not acknowledge, or even notice, any sound that might emanate from a woman’s body – or any odor either, of course. You’re sitting at dinner in a fine restaurant, or in your loge at the opera, with Lady Betsy, and no matter how violently your senses are assaulted, no matter what mutters or actual cries of outrage are to be heard from those around you, you remain oblivious, the slightest smile on your lips, and you bend toward her and offer her a mint and your opera glasses, clouded though they may have become.

A lady down the block wore a dress with two tassels on the front when I was a kid. It was the start of my interest. I thought that there was a tassellated woodpecker; it was why I liked birds. But there wasn’t. Tessellated darter, tessellated moray, tessellated cheese, tessellated fundus. No good. I’m not interested in tesssels.

When my wife was planning the wedding was when she learned of my particular interest. I can be quite demanding and fussy and precise on the subject. Not just about tassels on the bridal gown, but on the underthings as well. There is a honeymoon, isn’t there?!?

If you bend over, the tassels hang out under you. See, they don’t change position; they were hanging down before and they’re still hanging down, only now you’re bending over. In the same way, if you bend to the right, the tassels sway to the left. No they don’t, though. They just keep hanging down; you’re bended, not them. You can learn from tassels. That’s how they do.

Get yourself some tassel earrings, a tassel necklace, some tassel Uggs. You are sending a message, making a statement: don’t tread on me! Question: How is a tassel like a snake? Answer: If you step on your shoe tassel, your shoe is upside down.

There is a tassel fern. If you come over, you’ll see a house full of them.

I have a gift. I’ve always kept it a secret. My wife has an inkling and my kids have inherited a part of it, but otherwise, I’m alone with the knowledge that I am different. Perhaps I’m a mutant. Perhaps I’ve taken an evolutionary step. Whatever the reason, I see things and know things that others don’t.

I lay still in bed. My wife had already gone to work and the kids had already left for school. I lay waiting. I didn’t have long to wait. My cell phone tweeped on the end-table.

They called me in. Jane Forsch was in the hospital with a case of appendicitis. I was her replacement.

The launch protocol ran three full days. I called home each day, called my folks, call a couple of buddies. Everyone knew that I was on the list for a trip to the space lab. Finally, after two years of waiting, it was my turn to go up as part of a crew.

We were busy the three days, but the time seemed to crawl anyway. My strong sense of an impending event did not decline after I was notified. Instead, it grew.

Reclining in my launch chair at the end of the three days, sitting on top of a rocket, my dream was about to come true. But then, I had always known that it would. I joined the Air Force and entered the space program because somehow I knew, from earliest age, that I would leave the planet on a journey that would change everything for me.

The trip up was exciting but uneventful. Still, I was almost overwhelmed by my continuing foreknowledge that my life was about to change.

In orbit, I was so busy during the first hours that I didn’t have time to look outside. When I finally did, all I could do was stare at what I was seeing. Finally, I tore my eyes away and glanced back at the other crew members. It was obvious that none of them saw what I saw. I looked back out, then away, then back. I rubbed my eyes. I closed them and counted to ten. Opened them again.

The Earth was resting on an elephant and the elephant stood on a turtle, which stood on another turtle, which stood on another turtle. Of course, I immediately thought of Terry Pratchett and Bertrand Russell.

“Welcome, John,” said a voice in my head. I knew that it was the elephant.

“Am I still sane?”

“Quite sane. You can see what others can’t. That’s all. You’re something new.”

“How is this possible? I’m imagining it.”

“No.”

“But… what about science?”

“Scientific explanations always seems reasonable, until some new facts come up. Before the discovery of plate tectonics, professors in geology classes would explain how mountains are built. They sounded quite reasonable, but their explanations were baloney.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “but an elephant? You’re bigger than the planet.”

“You think I’m big? You should see what the galaxy is sitting on… Never mind. Look down at the Earth.”

I looked down. The blue and sandy and cloud-streaked globe seemed fuzzy to me, transparent. Looking closer, I saw that it was layered somehow. If I focused, I could pick out individual Earths, uncountable multitudes of them, perhaps an infinity of them, one upon the other.

“Are they alternate versions?”

“All the same world,” said the elephant, “but at different times. From creation to destruction. Concentrate and you can see the continents move. You aren’t far enough along to make out the alternate versions. That’s a whole different thing.”

I wrinkled my brow and picked out one instance of the world where humans had not yet appeared. Another where the lights of cities sparkled on the night side.

“You’re holding the whole thing up?” I said.

“Of course. I’m outside time. Although somebody has to hold me up, too.”

“It’s turtles, all the way down, like they say?”

The elephant laughed.

“All the way down,” he said.

“Can I talk to the one you’re standing on?”

“You’re not ready for that, John. He’s hard to talk to, even for me.”

I looked back at the planet. Time felt like a string stretched taut down there, a torus running through the core of the stacked worlds.

“You can check out the past,” the elephant said, “but I wouldn’t advise any future-gazing. That never works out well.”

I knew what he meant, that I shouldn’t look, but I did anyway, and as I did, I was reminded of a time when I sat in a doctor’s office and, after a series of routine tests, was told, incorrectly, that I was fatally ill. I remembered again the feeling that I had had, sitting in a chair in that office, the doctor saying something that I didn’t hear, me sitting and knowing that I was a dead man. It felt like that again, now, in space, as I gazed into the future of humanity. Only, this time, the doctor was not making a mistake.

With Bob’s implementation of virtual reality in this imperfect and unhappy world, most of us traded our lives for that of our avatars. A few at first and then in a torrent (literally), our minds were downloaded to cyberspace and our bodies were composted. Why not?  In the virtual universe, we could live forever. Who wants to risk walking around in a body that could get hit by a car tomorrow? But Bob stayed behind.

As the human population shrank on Earth, physical resources became more abundant. The planet began to repair itself. The few maintained the many – until the population shrank past a tipping point, that is. Then, there were not enough folks around to keep the wheels turning. The living began to lose interest in the billions of us existing within the world’s networked machines. Someone needed to save us before those still walking the earth faded back into the forest and our computers, and our virtual universe, went dark.

Enter Bob the genius again. He realized what was happening when he could no longer hire an adequate number of technicians to maintain the system. It was up to him to save us. To pull us back out of our dreams. To return us to the real world, into bodies that approximated our avatars, not our original selves. Bob did this by reversing his original process – by allowing the virtual to become real again. Not just our bodies, but everything else in our world as well. The Earth now became a planet of fantastic landscapes, castles, and dragons. Bob loosed total Minecraft on Earth itself. Fortunately, our composted bodies were still available as raw material. Bob also used up all of Antarctica and a piece of the Moon to build what his imagination, and ours, had created.

We lost our immortality with the transition back, but none of us had had it long enough to make its absence matter. Nobody missed it.

At this second moment of triumph in his life, Bob fell ill. He lingered and then he died, without telling us about the one big string attached to humanity’s return. Paco.

For years, Bob owned a pet chihuahua. Paco. A feisty beast. When everyone began immigrating to the virtual universe, Bob sent Paco along with one of his sons. The dog was growing old and Bob wanted the dog to go where he could live forever. Later, when Bob became convinced that he could safely convert anything from the virtual back to the real – to the physical – he began by re-materializing his dog.

Six months passed as Bob globalized his techniques and prepared for the re-physicalization of all the rest of us. During that time, he tested and retested the mutt. Paco showed no ill effects. With that, Bob announced his new process to the world, not that many on Earth at the time were interested. Within a year, we were all back, and the better for it.

Bob’s last words were “Keep an eye on Paco.” Naturally, we took that to be the concern of a loving dog owner for the future welfare of his pet. In retrospect, Bob had probably noticed, there at the end, that Paco had grown a little. Not so much that anyone but Bob would notice, but some small amount that tickled the borders of Bob’s perception.

There is evidence in the analysis of Bob’s final work, as recovered from the computers in his lab, that he had begun an attempt to calculate Paco’s rate of growth. Whether or not he lived long enough to deduce that it was exponential, as opposed to linear, we don’t know.

Bob had no family. He willed his dog, along with a big chunk of his fortune, to my  sister Greta. I often thought that I saw a glimmer in his eye when he looked at Greta over the years, but it never went beyond that. It took Greta a month to notice Paco’s growth. By the time the pet was the size of a collie, the world knew. What the world did not know was whether Paco’s growth would continue and whether the rest of us would follow suit at some point.

Visiting my sister, I quickly learned that a chihuahua the size of a collie is a menace if his personality remains unchanged. Paco had to be caged.

Before long, as he grew, the dog was transferred to a lion cage at the zoo. Then he was transported, tranquilized, to a desert island in the Caribbean. The distribution of Bob’s immense fortune was dependent upon the care provided to his beloved canine, not just by Greta, but by the world. Otherwise, the dog would have been put down. A chihuahua the size of a tyrannosaurus would take down the tyrannosaurus, strictly because of its crazy attitude.

Paco was growing at a fantastic rate by then. Bob’s protocols replaced the virtual with the real, but his boundary conditions must have been marginally unstable when he did so. If he had waited for a year, say, rather than six months, before bringing us all back, he would have realized this. His disease didn’t provide him with that luxury, however.

The world watched via video, in horror, as Paco dog-paddled from his island to Florida and came ashore at Boca Raton. By then he was three stories tall at the shoulder. He was nettled and he was hungry. The Air Force took him out with a cruise missle, but not before he cleared the beaches. Some tourists ran; others were consumed. Paco still considered himself Man’s best friend, but he didn’t regard these little sausages on legs as men, or women either.

That was six months ago. When I dressed this morning, my trousers seemed a little tight.

[100-Word Challenge for Grownups]

“One-Celled Pets, Inc.”

“Hello. I wanna buy one of them new Ally pets.”

“Amy the Amoeba? Yes, Sir.”

“It’s for my daughter’s birthday. Is it safe? You read all this stuff in the papers.”

“First of all, it’s great that somebody is still reading the papers. Second of all, this is the only state in the union with no speed limit. The only state where you can carry a gun without a permit. The only state where you can get married at fourteen without your parents permission. And, last but not least, this is the only state where you can buy Amy the Amoeba. So no, Amy is not safe. But neither is a derned chainsaw. You’ve got to follow the instructions. Understand?”

“I can follow instructions, most of the time.”

“Fine, then. I think you’ll love her, and your daughter will, too. Do you have homeowner’s insurance?”

“Sure. I mean, I guess so.”

“The law requires that to take delivery of this pet, you’ve got to have insurance and it can’t have any riders on it limiting benefits in case of the presence of primitive life forms. Have you got that covered, Sir?”

“Sure. I mean, my daughter has her heart set on this thing. Her birthday party is on Sunday.”

“Naturally I’ll take your word on the insurance. We’ll have Amy there by Sunday, gift-wrapped.”

Day 5

“Welcome to Pet World. Can I help you, Sir?”

“Yeah. Do you sell pet food for those amoebas? My daughter’s got one and we’re already out of the stuff the company sent with it.”

“We do have amoeba food. It comes in these ten-pound bags. Be sure to use as directed.”

“Lord, there’s a lot of writing on this bag. Why does it have to be so complicated?”

“Because you need to inhibit growth and cell division in your pet, while at the same time providing necessary nutrients. Your amoeba will live forever if you treat it right. Check out our amoeba toys over here. Look at this colorful rubber paramecium.”

Day 10

“Can I help you, Sir?”

“Yes, Doctor. I’ve brought in my daughter’s pet, Amy. Do you treat amoebas?”

“I sure do, as long as they’re bigger than a bullfrog. Let’s get her out of that carrier and onto the table, and have a look at her… Whoa… She’s a big one! Have you been following your instructions for her care and feeding?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s see. Amoebas are great because their skin is transparent… Is that buckshot in there? And a pit bull?”

“Yessir. My neighbor tried to assassinate her.”

“When you bought Amy, didn’t you sign an agreement that you would strictly limit her diet, and her access to other pets and to wild animals?”

“Well, yeah. But my daughter wanted to take care of that.”

“How old is your daughter?”

“Six.”

“Mercy.”

“Amy was out in the back yard. We had no idea she could just ooze through a knothole in the fence like that.”

“Please do not let Amy go around eating pit bulls, Mr. Pittney. She is going to grow a lot larger now. Then she’s going to divide herself in two. Are you prepared to take proper care of two very large amoebas?”

“No way Jose!”

“Then bring in one of them to be put down. Do not try to do it yourself.”

“What’s that going to run me?”

“Several hundred dollars.”

“Geez. Can’t I just back the car over the thing, or something like that?”

“If you want the do-gooders demonstrating on your front lawn, and if you have an amoeba more docile than most. From the look of this one, I wouldn’t try anything fishy. Just bring the extra one in here. It’ll be worth it.”

“How will I know which one is Amy?”

“They’ll both be Amy. It doesn’t matter which one you bring in.”

Day 15

“Animal control. Can I help you?”

“I’ve got six or eight of those big amoebas running around in my house. They’re out of control.”

“Are they yours, Sir?”

“Well, I just had the one, but it split in two after it ate a pit bull. Then I tried to chop up one of it with an ax, but by the time I was done, I had them crawling every which way.”

“We are not equipped to deal with one-celled animalcues, Sir. A pet must consist of at least ten billion cells before we’ll come out. Have you tried the zoo?”

“They won’t touch these things unless they’re wild. They say mine are domesticated. They don’t seem very tame to me.”

“Have you tried Pets in Need?”

“They’re out of business. There aren’t any stray dogs or cats anymore. They all got ate.”

“Then all I can suggest is that you buy a flamethrower down at the surplus store.”

“What the… How can I use a flamethrower in the house? My wife will kill me.”

“That’s a good point, Sir. Perhaps you could just close all the doors and windows and then burn the house down? Probably be the safest strategy. Is your house weatherproofed.”

“Why, for pity’s sake?

“Because if it isn’t, those little buggers will slither out under the doors.”

Day 20

“911. What is your emergency?”

“I’m in danger of being ate by one of my pets!”

“What type of pet is it, Sir?”

“They call her Amy. She’s one of those amoebas.”

“I’m sorry, Sir. We do not respond to amoeba problems. Do you own a flamethrower?”

“Yeah, but I can’t get to it.”

“Can you lock yourself in an airtight container?”

“I think I’m blub in one now. Are amoebas airtight?”

What we do know is that reaction to the fly varied among officials, from a strong desire to swat it, to a demand that we nurture and study the insect. A call for manure went out and many small farmers responded.

Government officials googled “housefly experts” and called in the nation’s top extermination professionals. The State Department reached out to a number of sub-Saharan African counties where fly knowledge is both broad and deep.

A complete media circus geared up. Entomologists identified the fly as a “him” (or a “he”). Someone on the Internet named him Buzzy and the name stuck. A line of Buzzy apparel appeared. The Macy’s parade included a Buzzy balloon, which some young children misidentified as the real thing. Intellectual property and copyright struggles broke out.

The celebrity kerfluffle masked a true human, or [I]Musca domestica[/I], or human/[I]Musca[/I] drama. Dr. Lizbeth Pile, placed in charge of the bug, postponed her wedding to get a new lab and dunghill set up.

“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to choose between insects and humans,” said her fiancee, Dr. Lumbert Stuck, an expert on ants.

“You should talk,” said Dr. Pile. “If a giant [I]Eciton burchellii[/I] showed up today, you’d be building an ant farm and our nuptials could go hang.”

“Just the same, I’m warning you,” Dr. Stuck said.

Dr. Pile referred to Buzzy as her “baby.” Military talk of strikes on the bug drove her to distraction. In her view, insects represented the future of the planet. Many of her best friends, now including Buzzy, were bugs.

Buzzy’s special status was challenged by the appearance of two more flies. Both were huge, although only half the size of Buzzy. One of these flies, dubbed Hank, belonged to a farmer in Iowa, who discovered him out standing in his field. The other, Betty, was owned by the city of Tallahatchie, as she lived at the town dump. Quick book, magazine, and TV movies deals were done. However, the Hollywood careers of the pests were cut short when studios discovered that mocap animated versions of the duo were cheaper and easier to use, with regular houseflies wired up for the motion capture process. The regular houseflies did not have annoying managers. Rumors circulated, suggesting that the two new giant flies were actually from south of the border. Of course, neither of them had papers.

There was talk of setting up some sort of cage match between Hank and Betty, or perhaps a reality date. Plans were thrown into confusion by the advent of Grouchy, Arnold, and Iris, three flies almost as large as Buzzy. Jealousies began to develop between regions of the country.

“I warned you,” Dr. Stuck said to his potential bride. “Folks don’t realize it yet, but if something isn’t done, humanity will be wiped out within a year or two.”

Lizbeth stared at him.

“Do you mean what I think you mean?” she said.

“That’s right. There is only one person with enough knowledge of houseflies to develop a poison that can affect these gigantic specimens.”

“Poison the bugs that I love?”

“You have to choose, Lizbeth, between me (and the rest of humanity), and Buzzy. Otherwise, soon, nobody will be able to use the bathroom in peace, ever again.”

Dr. Pile dithered. She procrastinated. Perhaps her fiancee was wrong. Perhaps these humongous bugs were a passing fad, like the Kardashians.

Then, Buzzy died, apparently of old age. The nation was thrown into a state of shock and mourning. Dr. Pile sat out on Buzzy’s dungpile for hours, inconsolable.

Distraction arrived in the form of twenty giant bottle flies. However, interest in these iridescent critters wore off in less than twenty-four hours.

The nation was prepared to move on. The appearance of hundreds of new “big” flies caused talk of a mass-extermination program. Handheld spray cans were useless. Green advocates began a search for giant frogs and lizards – anything to control the giant-fly population. Flypaper companies long moribund stirred and returned to production.

The first giant horsefly diverted folks for a while, but after it bit and killed the beloved racehorse stud Diva Pleaser, a mob tarred and feathered it. They would have lynched it but horseflies don’t have necks.

“This is it,” Dr. Stuck said. “I have a lab up above the snow line. You can work there in peace, Darling. Or we can turn the world over to your precious [I]Muscas[/I]. Fly with me to Vegas tonight. We’ll buzz over and marry, and then zig zag back to the lab. After you wash off that dung, of course.”

Dr. Pile stood with tears running down her face, little baby flies walking to and fro over the exposed areas of her dermis.

“It’s [I]Sophie’s Choice[/I] all over again,” she said. “What kind of a world do we live in, where you have to choose between your beloved man and your beloved houseflies?”

Samsa lived with his mother, father, and sister. He worked like a dog to support them. Samson lived with two slacker roommates. He worked at Blockbuster but the store was about to close and he didn’t care. Watching movies cut into his gaming time, which he resented, and he had copied every Blockbuster game he cared anything about long since.

Samsa’s family members were shocked, to say the least, when they saw him after he had changed. (He wasn’t actually a cockroach. He was an [I]Ungeziefer[/I] – you could look it up – whereas Samson was the real deal: 180 pounds of [I]Periplaneta americana[/I].) When Samson’s roommates saw him at ten in the morning, saw a big bug stuck on his back in bed, they were both already tweaked. They took the sight of this cockroach in stride. Both had seen a lot worse before when high.

“Dude, did you see Mimic?” said Josh to Micah. “These things eat human flesh.”

“That movie blew, Dude,” Micah said. “Cockroaches aren’t what you call carnivores. If we’re lucky, this thing will get rid of all our garbage for us.”

“I say we waste him. Go get the bug spray.”

In the Kafka story, Gregor has trouble speaking and ends up just listening throughout the tale. Not Greg. Greg was, like, screw that.

“I’m stuck on my back,” he said. “Roll me over.”

“No way,” Micah said. “You’ve already ate Greg. You aren’t gonna eat us.”

“I am Greg, moron,” Greg said. “Didn’t you ever read the Kafka story?”

“Huh? I played Bug Quest.”

“You totally sucked at Bug Quest,” Josh said. “No wonder you want to waste this thing.”

“Shut up,” Greg said. “Turn me over and then call Blockbuster and tell them I’ve turned into a cockroach, and then bring in the garbage. I’m starving.”

The roommates turned Greg over, so that his legs weren’t waving around in the air. He scuttled across the floor, clacking his mandibles.

“Dude,” said Micah. Josh hurried out to the dumpster and brought back two Hefty bags full of garbage.

Greg poked his proboscis into one of the bags.

“Mmmm. Cockroaches are a hungry bug,” he said, “and a horny bug.”

“You want me to go find a female under the sink in the kitchen?”

“Listen,” said Greg. “Gregor moped around the house and ended up dead at the end of the story. That is bull-twangus. If I’ve got to be a big bug, I’m going to be a damned alpha bug. I’m a playah. I need to find a cockroach babe who runs 150 lbs minimum. You know me. The bigger the better.”

“Where are we going to find somebody, I mean something, like that?”

“First of all, I don’t like light. I’m crawling under the bed until dark. Come get me then. Let me figure this thing out.”

The roommates left the bedroom and closed the door behind them. They wondered if this would all seem funny when the weed wore off but then decided that they didn’t want to find out, and opened a bag of rock they had scored that weekend. They also finished three bottles of Jagermeister they found on a shelf.

When darkness fell, they heard a scrabbling at the bedroom door. They opened the door. Greg scuttled out, feelers waving.

“Open the front door and follow me,” he said.

The roommates opened the front door and staggered out into the night behind their friend, the roach. Out on the street, Greg instructed them to lift the manhole cover (personnel access cover), and slide it aside. It was too heavy, with no place to get a grip. Micah retrieved a tire iron from his car and pried up the cover. They got a grip on it and dragged it off the hole.

“Phew,” Micah said.

“It’s a sewer,” Greg said. “What did you expect? Roses?”

“You going down there?”

“I’m a roach with big appetites,” Greg said. “I’m not sitting around in a bar all night, watching pole dancers. Just pray I don’t meet one of those gators you always hear about. Replace the lid and then come back at dawn and pull it off again.”

Greg disappeared down the hole.

The boys slid the cover back on, returned to the house, and passed out. When they woke up, the sun had been up for an hour.

They took a couple of minutes to splash water in their faces and smoke a joint and then they went back out to the street. There was traffic. Josh bent down by the gutter grate at the curb.

“Greg!” he called. “You down there?”

He heard the raspy sounds of chitin on brick.

“Hey,” Greg said.

“You ok? You ready to come out?”

“No, Dude. Truth to tell, it’s heaven down here. The best thing you can do for me is go use the bathroom and flush twice. [I]Vaya con Dios[/I], Dude.”

My wife asked me to twist off the lid of a jar because she couldn’t. I couldn’t either. We fished out the lid-opener tool and used that.

What if my wife had been strong enough – or at least didn’t have arthritis in her hands – to just open the jar? What if I had been strong enough? Later I got mad at a guy in the fast lane and totalled our car.

Conclusion: strong is good.

My wife asked me to “squeeze her as hard as I could.” She said, laughingly, that I could probably crack her ribs if I tried hard enough. I gave her a good squeeze. She frowned. “Is that all you’ve got?” she said. “My personal trainer could squeeze me so hard my shorts would fall off.”

Conclusion: strong would be good for me, but not so much for the personal trainer.

At the company Christmas party, I had one or two nogs too many and when the CEO’s executive assistant strayed under the mistletoe, I gave her a big smooch. She was not strong enough to resist. On the other hand, my wife put a hammerlock on me that left my arm numb for a week.

Conclusion (times two); strong is not good.

My wife and I took a test that appeared in Parade Magazine. The results indicated that she had the strength of her convictions, whereas I was a boob. I told her that if she didn’t increase my allowance, based upon the fact that I needed more money to keep me going  since I wasn’t too bright, I would divorce her. She was able to call my bluff and as punishment, refused to give me a cent for two weeks. I had to run a tab at the bar and without a dollar bill in my hand, the pole dancers wouldn’t come near me.

Conclusion: strong is not good.

Final conclusion: strong is good. My wife told me to write that.

He will become big as a house. He is getting larger, right now. In the end, he shall have grown huge. He has been growing the whole time. He shall grow and grow. He would have been larger by now but I only saw him for the first time two weeks ago.

I had wanted a friend. I had been wanting a friend for a long time. I would have been wanting one even longer if I had known that wanting one would get me one.

Loris is my friend. He is evil. He hurts me. No he doesn’t. He never did. He’s not my friend. He hates me. He loved me from the start. He has been loving me all the time. He will hate me someday but he has loved me so far. No he has not. He will always be, he should always be and has always been a good loris.

The first thing Loris did was go out. I could see him through the bars. There are  trees. I think they are trees.  Loris is sitting in the trees. Until he grows too big, he will be sitting in the trees most of the time. He has been. He was when I looked a minute ago. Then I will look and he should be in the trees. He would be in the trees if he weren’t too big, but he will be, so he won’t.

He hates me. No, he loves me. When I would get tired of looking out through the bars and lie down, he would come sit on my chest. He looks into my eyes. He makes a sound, like a word. I think at first he was saying “God.” I thought at first he is saying “God.” Now I think it is “Frost.” He has spoken. At least I think that he will speak. When he is too big for the trees, then he will say his first word. I predict.

Loris is my son, my child, my baby. When he has become the size of a mountain and sits on my chest and on the straps, it will not be black and dark. I will see into space. He sits on me and I see inside myself. He is in there. In the trees in there. There is nothing in there. Nobody. In my chest or my head. No I am in there. No I am not. Yes I am. Loris sat on me. I was here, lying on the metal.

Who is his mother? Was she tiny like Loris was? Was she huge like Loris will be? Is she everything? The night? Was I my mother, before? I have been my mother. Never. I had never been her before this. Is Loris my father? Is Loris my arms or my guts? Loris will be larger than the Earth and then after he has been growing for two more weeks and two more days, he will be larger than everything. He will be everything. Then he will be evil and the light will disappear. For two years I lay in the dark, before he came. I have been lying in the dark for that long.

Before Loris came, I was alone. I had been alone a long time. I have often been alone. I had hoped for a friend. I have often hoped for a friend. At that time, I was hoping that someone somehow would come. With Loris here, I am not alone. I am looking at him now. I have been speaking to him. If he were my friend, he would speak. He would be speaking to me. He would have spoken to me by now. He would have been speaking even as I was speaking.

If Loris leaves, I will be alone. When Loris grows large, he will leave. He is going to leave. He will be leaving before I can know. He will have been leaving before I will know. He will have left before I should know.

Once I sent Loris away. He came back. I did not send him, I could not, I cannot, he is my mind swelling out through the bars caught by the wind. I can go with him. I sit in the trees. I have been sitting in the trees since Loris was little. Now as I sit in the trees, Loris, a mountain, the world, the night, is watching over me. Or watching me. The trees are in with Loris now, strapped down. I saw them, was seeing them through the bars. Loris would have been sitting in them, but now I am free.