Kate Beall
Chicken and Egg Story
She lived in a squat rectangle and got up each morning from a firm rectangle, the imprint of a smaller soft rectangle still rectangular on her cheek. She walked into the rectangle at the back of her rectangle and poured tiny rectangles from a rectangle which she topped with milk from another rectangle. She cooked her coffee on the hot, black rectangle and poked idly at the flat glass of a slim rectangle with an index finger while she waited. She sat at her rectangle for hours, pushing small rectangles and squinting into the blue-lit rectangle until her eyes blurred, the little digital rectangles mushing together into the big gray idea of a rectangle. She ran the hot water and sat, naked and silent, in a gleaming rectangle until the water was cool and her toes were pale shriveled little rectangles. She patted the droplets of water off her chest with a rectangle and wrapped herself in its soft rectangleness. She removed a glass rectangle from the icy hum of the rectangle and popped it in the overhead rectangle where she watched it buzz and crackle and spin in a rectangle of light. When the rectangle beeped its rectangular beep, she took the rectangle out of the rectangle, removed the rectangle from the top, and ate from the rectangle while sitting on a purple velvet rectangle, watching other people walk in and out of rectangles on a flat, wall-mounted rectangle. She pressed a rectangle and the rectangle on the wall went black. She picked up a rectangle and turned its creamy rectangles, letting the story unspool into her eyes, rectangle by rectangle. Through the plate glass rectangle, she watched the sun slip behind the tall rectangle beyond her rectangle. She slipped her feet into rectangles and tied them. She walked out the front rectangle of her rectangle and down the concrete rectangles and there on the rectangle of green, among the crisp blades of slim rectangles, right there, she came face to face with the fattest squirrel she had ever seen and her own belly plumped and her face bowled and her spine curled as her hands ringed the twin globes of her bent knees and from the wide red circle of her lips she let out one large, round “Ha!”
Kate Beall (she/her) lives and writes in Colorado, nestled between the mountains and the plains. Her work has been published in FERAL: A Journal of Poetry & Art, HAD and elsewhere. Find her on Bluesky and Twitter at @katebbeall.
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