Where I Shop for Fish Street merchants with carts packed with ice and fish shout commandments at each other over the bustle of the crowd channel God in the most scandalous of ways. Via conversation, they strip away each other’s damaged pasts—secret love affairs, attempted suicides— until no one in the marketplace is truly naked. I pull my sleeves down to cover the tiny “x”s meant to stop my breath, too long ago to count past the happy-faces made with rusted cigarette lighter tops past the circle of blue dots made with safety pins and India ink in an attempt to hide my own past from the fishmonger priests. The newspapers the fish come wrapped in prophesy either war or salvation, feast or obliteration depending on which vender you buy the fish from depending of what type of fish you buy. The small, flat sunfish I pick out are handed to me, collectively wrapped, in pages from the Book of John a picture of a small, pale boy with bat ears and vampire fangs on top.
The Spider in the Windowsill It’s tempting to just squish it outright but you should first pull off a leg, then another. First an arachnid then an arthropod then a quadruped then a biped. Does the level of intelligence and/sophistication increase or decrease with each removed limb? How about if you put a hat on the tiny, flailing insect, give it a cane, make it dance on its two remaining legs as it fumbles its way to death? What happens if you remove all the legs from one side, but leave the other intact? does it run around and around in a circle like a cartoon character, a teeny tiny motorcar? Now what happens when you give it a hat, a cane, from the first exercise?
FIND HOLLY DAY here.