everything. But you already know that. What you might not
know is—that time we ate mushrooms and hiked from school
into the woods and then into town—the vines really were red
with jam and really could speak Farsi competently, if not
with a native flourish. The beetles wrote a decent,
never dazzling screenplay about a poet. That stand of dolphin-
shaped trees really was fucking one of our girlfriends. Low
blow. Lower still was the hour after, alone
on my bed, thinking about now, the inevitable: Now we
appear on TV regularly to talk about our famous expertness
and, necessarily, each other, though we only really
want to talk about jam and fucking. Time itself has hiked down from
the woods to set the houses on fire for naming everything.
