OFFSHOOT: 1

For once, let me be the angry one. I do not care if you assign me the shade of vermillion or burnt sienna, nor if the window breaks at the right point of impact. Plenty of things, lately, have happened without reason. So what if the arrow hits and the cracks jag upwards? So what if your mouth becomes my mouth? Caterpillars turn and morph into robins. I hit the floor often enough to leave a mark. Nobody can answer my questions and nobody wants to look me in the eye. I keep imagining these bloodless futures, where everybody turns away at the degree of our DNA, revolving and revolving until everything becomes this one damned helix, each of our futures stacked on the other until I can feel the force of your throat as you scream, the wave of it undulating and braiding through my hair. The future is a machine operating on a quantum system and the worst part of it is not the sound of you in pain swirling through my ears. It is that I know we both exist—or should I say survive—in every possible universe that harms us. How is it that we are never spared? How must it be, being unaware that your memory is stapled into the keratin of my nails and hair, found in the shellac of a beetle crushed underfoot? I am waiting for the marble of the floor to become the high tide. You flicker in and out of a cathedral of seafoam. Please. Just feed me the color of rust, of end-of-war, of poppies before opium extraction. Send me a bag full of papercuts, bring your lips to the sting. Everything else has been blued into midnight and warped, cold stars, and I want singularity: a mark without the bruise. The last leaf before winter. Give me any individual thing, all in one time, one place, with only one sunshot, unrefracted future.