Cherries in the bowl are screaming. The bowl is on the table. The words, vulgar words, heinous accusations, are reverberating and bloodying the air. They are not my cherries and I did not do anything wrong but it is impossible to be certain. “Let us try to be civil,” I plead, but their anger only intensifies, their stems twitching, their complaints transforming into worryingly articulate threats.
Count the electrical outlets. Start over, and over. Is electricity contagious? Is it viral? If I Google “electricity”, am I influencing the results? Am I changing the questions? There are fifteen in this room alone, and if you count the buttons, microwave buttons, shirt buttons, button noses, you will be here all day. Soon you will be screaming the numbers, straining your vocal cords, like pulling the cat’s tail as hard as possible.
Ancestors, if there ever were any, earned muscles, built them out of necessity. No skin-tight, brand-name athleisure wear, no laces, no neons, just grunts and pure Newtonian physics and ignorance. Ignorance built the pyramids, monuments to cats whose tails no one dared pull, tributes to the powerful, who drank victory from chalices and sliced cherries with sand-worn incisors, spitting the pits into golden bowls adorned with lifetimes.
Zoom in on an ordinary glass, half water, half optimism, calm as death, and see the hurricane that supplies the stillness, orderly and unpredictable. The storm electrifies your hair, the cat, dozing, lifts its head, only slightly, energized with potential. Same weather for millennia, same sirens and manufactured terror, same quiet. Same bowl, but the cherries have fallen silent, motionless, shameful, remembering their ancestors. My body tenses as I remember too, with awe, with reverence, memories foggy and inscrutable, entombed in cigar boxes that open only from the inside. The air, heavy with so many moments, collapses, and the paramedics arrive moments too late.
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