We raced circles. Boxes of them at a time, no thought about cruelty or free will or macroeconomics. We were bored and lonely and hungry. We had a box of circles and very little else, so what else to do? Try to scare each other like sheetless ghosts? The small ones teamed up against the big circles as our toenails grew more brittle, hair started breaking before the ends could have irreconcilable differences. No one won, no one had a stopwatch or even a calendar to box those os in. Someone would get us eventually, we knew, someone would come for us. The circles raced and raced and we counted their laps on our ribs until we ran out of false finish-lines.

Every time a squirrel asks me, with that smug chirpy tone of theirs, what the fuck we humans are learning from our past, I just smile, pack my cheeks. Rhetoric never works on those furry bastards, but they get that winter comes. Our verbal promises mean swamp snot to fast-lived mammals, but I get it. Their skepticism is warranted.

The snowman in my front yard melted and refroze in a peculiar shape: bulbous and jagged—fully immobile—grotesque and dangerous. This only emboldened him. He ran for office and won—it was a bloodbath. Now, I can't leave my front door because national security precludes my desires to go outside. But it's ok, we voted for this.