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Now that it is gone, does it matter whether a cow ate it or not?
—proverb

If you can’t bow, you’re dead meat.
You’ll break like uncooked spaghetti.
Listen to the gods.
They’re shouting in your ear
every second.
—Jim Harrison

Esteemed Reader of our Magazine:

The air is so hot and laden with moisture I can’t quite locate the boundaries of my skin. It invokes a sleepy lassitude. Almost torpor. An incessant craving for siesta. In this heat thoughts arise sluggishly. Humidity on the brain reaches an homogenous 86 percent. The day’s in a haze of conditioned air and harsh strokes by insistent fingers of sun.
But what is this?! An urge, a calling to connote. From here, where I am, to you there, in your chair. Slavishly, I succumb to a prior motive and begin adding flesh to the skeletal remains of a missive. Catching up with a missed boat, a lost opportunity found like a twinkling light at the outer edge of Cassiopeia, that semaphoric constellation shaped uncannily like the letter W.

We gather on this thin raft, floating refugees on the surface of a bubble, burst. Where will the tides lead? To rescue? To some new world replete with vegetable, animal, human, angelic comforts? We pool our resources and begin the long return home. To the unknown. Foregoing all delight to arrive in the light. We cast about for fish of a different color.
Rehashing images from the edge of night I scour the mindscape for signs of sprouting, for the seeds I planted then, which landed on rock, on earth, on barren and fertile places. Have they gained a foothold, sent fragile shoots into the soil and sky? This is the question I pose now, as I look forward to another day of arising, being born again with the sun, only to die again, relaxing even for the last time into the wooly folds of sleep.

There is nothing left for me to think, do, suffer or say. Which is why my last days shall be spent working. I am going to hoe a row. Till some soil for future plantings. Though I will be gone by then and will taste none of the harvest, I labor now wresting calorific satisfaction from fulfillment of duty. That takes nerve, someone said. Or at least daring.

“Are you worried about aging?” she asked.

“No, I’m more concerned with dying,” I replied.

“Really? Why?”

“Because I sense there is something I am here to do. Or be. I hope it happens before I die.”

“What are you waiting for?”

Now a storm is moving in. The air becomes electric. Sky darkens. Mind, body, awakes. The lights go out, come back. Lightning flashes. And with a great gasp, the rain pours.

May your life go well.

—Jason Stern